Matt Bucher, The Belan Deck, Sideshow Media
Group, 2023
Belan is the CEO and he needs this PowerPoint deck asap. The narrator, however, just wants to fly home - and he might not deliver what Belan is expecting. Set mostly during a delay at SFO, The Belan Deck captures one traveler's reflections on art, artificial intelligence, corporate life, David Markson, coincidences, and literature.
"Very smart, witty, insightful, very literary, and a lovely homage to Markson." - Steven Moore, author of The Novel: An Alternative History
"An excellent, piercing account of the AI question and a reminder of the potentials of fractured literature, or maybe fractured life more broadly. Marksonian to the core and just a joy to read." - Kyle Beachy, author of The Most Fun Thing
"The Belan Deck almost acts as the placement of a hyper sensitive human antenna extended into our cold, dark accelerationist evolution into the Information Age looking for ways in which we can still mine and reflect back upon ourselves some deeply luminous sign of life that reminds us of the beauty resting within the heart of what it means to be human. A must read." - Phillip Freedenberg, author of America and the Cult of the Cactus Boots: A Diagnostic
"Fantastic, a work of profound wisdom." - Greg Carlisle, author of Elegant Complexity
I stayed up later than I meant to the other night reading all of Matt Bucher’s new book The Belan Deck in one cover-to-cover go. On his website, Bucher describes The Belan Deck as “a little book…set mostly during a layover at SFO” that “centers around a person who maybe doesn’t really fit in at their AI tech job but still needs to produce one final PowerPoint deck.” This description approximates the plot, in the barest sense, but doesn’t touch on the spirit or form of The Belan Deck.
Let’s talk about the spirit and form of The Belan Deck. Bucher borrows the epigraphic, anecdotal, fractured, discontinuous style that David Markson practiced (perfected?) in his so-called Notecard Quartet (1996-2007: Reader’s Block, This Is Not A Novel, Vanishing Point, and The Last Novel). “An assemblage…nonlinear, discontinuous, collage-like,” wrote Markson, to which Bucher’s narrator replies, “Bricolage. DIY culture. Amateurism. Fandom. Blackout poems.”
Bucher’s bricolage picks up Markson’s style and spirit, but also moves it forward. Although Markson’s late quartet is arguably (I would say, by definition) formally postmodernist, the object of the Notecard Novels’ obsession is essentially Modernism. Bucher’s book is necessarily post-postmodern, taking as its objects the detritus and tools of postmodern communication: PowerPoint, Google Street View, Wikipedia, social media, artificial intelligence.
At the same time, Bucher continues Markson’s obsessions with artists and death, adding to the mortality lists that wormed through DM’s quartet. Bucher’s updates are odd though, in that they seem to, in their print form, contextualize anew coincidences that were so raw and immediate when they popped up on Twitter and other social media:
Nicanor Parra died the day after Ursula K. LeGuin died.
Larry McMurty and Beverly Cleary died the same day.
(In my memory, William H. Gass died the day before LeGuin, but this is not true. He died almost two months before LeGuin. But I recall teaching selections from both of their work in a literature class in the spring semester of 2018, and pointing out to my students that the empty spaces behind the dashes after their birth years might now be filled in. “An encyclopedia entry demands at least a birth or a death,” notes Bucher’s narrator.)
The encyclopedia, by which I mean Wikipedia, becomes a heroic motif in The Belan Deck. “Wikipedia is the number one result for over 50% of Google searches,” Bucher’s narrator points out, following it up with,
Wikipedia, made by humans, for free, is a better search engine than Google, the most expensive and sophisticated algorithm in the world.
Earlier in The Belan Deck, the narrator points to the “mindless pleasure of going down a deep Wikipedia rabbit hole,” a pleasure that an artificial intelligence, no matter how developed, could never feel. About three dozen pages later, Bucher’s narrator throws a slant rhyme to his previous note on the “mindless pleasures” of Wikipedia rabbit holes, pointing out that Thomas Pynchon had used Mindless Pleasures as a working title for Gravity’s Rainbow. That’s how this book operates: Disparate fragments of information are “Clues rather than trivia.”
The goal is to find the sublime in these connections; Bucher’s narrator repeatedly and succinctly argues that finding the beautiful, much less the sublime, is impossible for an artificial intelligence. The Belan Deck plays out as a discursive, looping, and unexpectedly moving argument for humanity, in all its serious triviality, against the backdrop of capital’s rapid encroachment into the human position in the arts.
“Capitalism is incompatible with being an artist, for most people,” avers our narrator. “Yet you participate!” might come the retort, and it’s true—not only does Bucher’s narrator work in a soulless medium, the deck (trying to inject some soul, some sublime, some humanity into it), he also works for the soulless Belan, a money guy who would love to replace artists with machines. (In what I think has to be a great intentional gag, Bucher’s narrator’s point of contact for Belan is a middleman named Jimmy Chen. I just have to believe that the character’s a take on the Jimmy Chen who wrote and designed on HTMLGIANT for all those years.)
The narrator participates because there aren’t that many other options, as we all know. “Do you understand what I am saying? Does it also feel this way to you?” the narrator plaintively asks. I mean, for me, that’s a Yes, all the time.
There’s much more in The Belan Deck than I can get to here—more on art, artists, baseball, airports—it’s voluminous for a “little book.” (“When we buy a book, we think we are buying time to read” is a line I underlined but could not otherwise work into this review, so I’ll include it here parenthetically. (A lot of this review has happened in parentheses.))
I’ll end with two bits of personal trivia, two coincidences.
First: The day The Belan Deck arrived in my mail, which is the day that I read The Belan Deck, some AI-cheerleading dork went viral on Twitter for posting a series of unasked-for renderings of “what the backgrounds of the most famous paintings in the world look like with AI.” He was roundly and rightly mocked for his endeavors, and I found the general antipathy heartening, but still a small cadre of people who know absolutely nothing about art congratulated his vapidity.
Second: Earlier that same day, I read a passage from Walter Tevis’s 1980 dystopian novel Mockingbird, and found its sentiment largely heartening as well. The hero of the novel, staring at a “dumb parody of humanity” declares it “nothing, nothing at all.” He continues, pointing out that the forces of capital “had given robots to the world with the lie that they would save us from labor or relieve us from drudgery so that we could grow and develop inwardly.” But underneath this false promise was a deep “contempt for the ordinary life of men and women,” a deep hatred of human life itself. The sentiment I find heartening here is in the hero’s recognition and resistance to this contempt.
The Belan Deck isn’t a straightforward guidebook or manifesto or map, but it nevertheless, in its elliptical, poetic approach, offers a winding, thinking, feeling path of opposition to not only the machines themselves, but also the hollow men who would gladly replace artists and creators and thinkers with those machines. It’s also really fun to read. Great stuff.
“An attempt to smuggle reality into anything, into a PowerPoint deck.”— The Belan Deck
“Plotless. Characterless. Yet seducing the reader into turning pages nonetheless.”— David Markson, This Is Not a Novel
The scaffolding of character and plot are here in The Belan Deck, but they can be summed up swiftly, and they are beside the point in Matt Bucher’s excellent new book. The first-person narrator works for a tech company in the AI field. He doesn’t like his job (or his employer’s CEO, Belan), he doesn’t believe in the work or the company’s mission, and the job is looking extremely precarious anyhow, but he has to produce a final PowerPoint deck for Belan. He’s using the deck as his chance to lob “a sort of intellectual grenade on the way out the door.” As he waits for a flight home to Austin from San Francisco International Airport, he reveals all the thoughts and anecdotes he’s pouring into the deck. The text is fragmentary. Many of the fragments seem like trivia at first, but if you read Bucher on the book’s own terms (“Clues rather than trivia”) constellations emerge of theme and image.
Bucher makes a heartwarming case for humanism and ordinary life as against the creep of artificial intelligence and other tools of capitalism that make work dull, meaningless and intolerable and that make the life of a serious writer or artist nearly impossible. The book recruits the reader’s curiosity to help build its deepest meaning and find its relation to the works and lives and history that came before it.
Like in David Markson’s Notecard tetralogy, the fragments in The Belan Deck hang together. There are flashes of connection between things we might not think are connected. Matt Bucher was generous enough to answer a few questions I sent him, and he talks about Markson in the brief interview that appears below my review. When the reader of The Belan Deck takes the time to follow the clues (and follow the clue here means add the context to the short anecdotes) patterns emerge. The figure Bucher explicitly uses is rabbit holes, that metaphor for so much of contemporary online life for the curious. The joy of following a trail through interconnected Wikipedia articles is one most of us have experienced. The narrator describes this feeling as a deep need inside us.
As an example of my reading of the way the fragments hang together, one image of life The Belan Deck traces for us is horses. We’re told early on that Belan, the CEO, “loves the Kentucky Derby” (page 10). The narrator’s own great-grandfather had been named Leo Steven Belan, a coincidental fact that did not impress Belan, the CEO, when the narrator told him about it. We’re presented with some of Leo Steven’s diary entries from 1910. They are dry and factual. “Cloudy most of day. Worked on shop.” Until suddenly they’re not. “Sunday, June 12, 1910 – Clear warm. Drowned two horses (Black) (One Horse & one mare) Drove in pond to wash wheels, horse laid down and pulled mare over him, got tangled in harness.” The moment caught my breath, as history tends to do. The horse was not a machine but a living animal. Later, the narrator tells us that there is good art on display at SFO, and he looks at some old photographs. “The next photo is of a man at a racetrack standing next to a horse. A jockey sits on the horse and the two men appear happy, as if they—meaning the horse—have just won the race” (page 27). On the next page, we learn the famous Seabiscuit was owned by a man named Ogden Mills who also owned the land where the airport now sits. If every Wikipedia article is interconnected, that is only because the facts of the world are.
Like in Markson’s tetralogy, many of the anecdotes in Bucher’s collection are touched with sadness. Some were well known to me. Others were not. David Foster Wallace and Mark Rothko both appear but left unsaid is how each man died. The baseball players Bill Buckner and Tom Seaver who were briefly teammates on the Redsox doomed 1986 team both died from Lewy Body dementia. Thomas Merton died suspiciously. Francesca Woodman died very young by suicide. Robin Williams. Michael Jackson. Grace Kelly. Malcolm Lowry. Randall Jarrell. The thematic build can be powerful even if the book’s wordcount is spare. It is by this gathering method rather than the straightforward march of traditional plot that The Belan Deck works.
An aspect of the book’s structure that strongly appealed to me reminds me of the way Walter Benjamin uses fragments in his convolutes in The Arcades Project. Events from modern Jewish history in Europe and America come to life and a picture expands out from the suggestive anecdotes when a bit of extra light is thrown on them.
Bucher shares the story of Thomas Pynchon sending the comedian Irwin Corey to accept the National Book Award on his behalf in 1974. That year, Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow shared the award with A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer. What is left unsaid here is what Singer’s book is about, which is the lives of Jews in Poland, New York, Paris and elsewhere, Jews who have been through Nazi camps or Czarist pogroms. Another fragment (in the straitened style of Markson) tells us: “Zola died of carbon monoxide poisoning due to a poorly ventilated chimney” (page 56). The story of this death is not as simple as it sounds here. Zola involved himself on the correct side in the Dreyfus Affair, a notorious case of antisemitism in turn of the 20th Century French history. Another fragment reminds us Dreyfus was shot during a ceremony at Zola’s tomb. A short fragment asks: “Did Primo Levi jump or was it truly an accident?” (page 73). The record company executive Saul Zaentz is mentioned. “In 1980, Saul Zaentz sued John Fogerty, claiming Fogerty had plagiarized his own music” (page 91). This fact seems to have no discernible relevance to the rest of the book, but Zaentz’ parents were Polish Jewish immigrants.
There is no narrational commentary linking any of these facts and questions. The references instead make demands upon us. The fragments signify survival even if it is only a piece of a story. Reading them today gives them what Benjamin called an afterlife. The book will seduce you to turn pages whether you chase the clues or you don’t. But if you do there is so much more to think about. I’ll close by pointing out that there is now a rabbit hole connecting David Foster Wallace to Matt Bucher via David Markson and there is a rabbit hole connecting David Foster Wallace to David Markson via Matt Bucher. This is pretty cool.
Brief Interview with the Author
1. Like many online book nerds I’m familiar with your interest in David Foster Wallace, the list, the podcast, the Society, etc, but I only recently learned of your interest in David Markson. Can you share a little about what his work means to you as a reader and writer?
Matt Bucher: I’m sure I discovered Markson through DFW’s essay on W’s M, but I did not fall in love with Markson’s work entirely until I read his final four books: Reader’s Block, This is Not a Novel, Vanishing Point, and The Last Novel. Evan Lavender-Smith wrote a great book sorta in Markson’s style (From Old Notebooks) and he called those four books of Markson’s “porn for English majors.” I had never read anything like them before and it was, for me, a moment of “are you allowed to do this?” combined with “how did this guy do this?” So I went down the Markson rabbit-hole and read all of his other books and everything I could about him. Like me, he’s a collector. He didn’t write this way until later in life and I do think it takes many, many years of practiced collecting before these sorts of facts and trivia begin to accrete into something solid or meaningful with lots of interconnected parts. And honestly one thing I loved about Markson is that he was a stubborn old man. He spent a lot of time obsessing over aging and death. But my interests are pretty different than his, and I think what I got from his work was a way of thinking and writing that I could make my own.
2. Do you use a card system like Markson to work the form you used for this book? I figured the line in the book about always having several paper journals on you at all times is from reality, but how do you go from journal thoughts to building a work like The Belan Deck?
Matt Bucher: Yes, I started out years ago aping his style completely, using that notecard system. I filled about one shoebox lid with notecards, which is one reason my book is shorter than his (he said he filled 2 shoebox lids with notecards, per book). However, I moved away from the notecards into another longhand system of writing everything out into a journal and then typing it into a document later. I mention this in the book, but I think Markson would have loved the “find” feature in a Word doc (and Wikipedia, too). I was obsessed with index cards before Markson because that’s also how Nabokov wrote, but these days the system that works best for me is just to have several different sized paper journals going. It took me a long time to find the right format and the right story for this, and changing how I wrote and organized bits of trivia—or rather, integrating that system with a way of writing fiction that felt natural to me—is what made the book come alive for me.
3. Have you encountered anyone smuggling interesting or weird things into a job-related PowerPoint in your working life?
Matt Bucher: Just me! I used to work for a textbook publisher and there is one particular grade-level writing text into which I was able to smuggle a ton of Infinite Jest references :). But I truly hate PowerPoint and think it is such an ephemeral format that it’s not even worth putting too much effort into creating a presentation.
4. Besides Markson, who are some fiction writers who played with form who you think people should check out?
Matt Bucher: Markson took some inspiration from Evan S. Connell’s elliptical style in Notes Found on the Beach at Carmel and Points for a Compass Rose, but those are books where the prose looks like poetry. I would also mention Georges Perec who did a ton of different things with style and format. And all Oulipo writers for that matter. Harry Mathews is probably my favorite. His novel The Journalist devolves into a weird, nested format that looks like something on a private, demented PowerPoint slide. Another book that inspired me was Brenda Lozano’s Loop, which was titled Cuaderno ideal in Spanish (Ideal being a brand of Mexican notebooks and journals). Maggie Nelson’s Bluets is another hard-to-categorize book I return to a lot. Obviously, I am attracted to the mega-novels but I also adore slim little books that cram a lot of art into a small format. Joe Brainard’s I Remember and Amy Fusselman’s Idiophone are two examples of that. And one of my favorite writers is Dan Beachy-Quick. He’s a poet, mostly, but has experimented with all sorts of forms and I guess I like writers who are able to follow their weird, eccentric tastes and do something interesting on the page. David Shields is another one. - Jay Innis Murray
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