SEARCH
HISTORY

It was in this chapter that is was finally revealed to me how much I'd love this book. Search History, thus far a little elusive in its interconnectedness, weaves all of its themes together as one. Becoming as pet to AI, grief of friends and parents permeating even the side stories of your life, the utility of human craft in an increasingly technological world—all at once, become the same story.

I should probably save this for a later node, but the novel's title means this to me: your internet search history is recorded as a series of page loads and http requests, and it can be easy to seem them atomized in this way. But as you zoom out and assess your history as a whole, where you've been, who you've met—you can appreicate they've all led you to this very moment, this very page. These seemingly disparate chapters of our lives, and chapters of this book, and pages on a website all constitute an unbreakable whole.

All that to say that this chapter, like the rest of the book, rules. The dysthymic scientist's deceased friend Frank Exit is revealed to potentially be reincarnated as someone else's dog—and thus begins the journey to get him back.

When I say this is the only novel I've ever read to make me cry, I'm mostly thinking of these autobiographical interludes about a dead friend. They resonated with me very deeply. A lot of it is written in second-person, directed towards the friend. And I found some of the exact conversations I'd had posthumously with a good friend of mine earlier this year. Communing with the dead is something that the Search History enabled me to do after I hadn't been able to for a while. The book does what it says on the tin.

The song I promised myself I'd keep listening to:

A conversation over noodles about it being theoretically possible to write an award-winning novel via neural net, so long as it's first fed the 'corpus' of autobiography, or real, recorded conversation. I buy it, especially now. Some of the takes on AI in this 2021 book feel almost prophetic—as I read it, I concede I would've thought of many of the AI conversations as purely speculative two years ago. This seamlessly leads into creating a morbid gift of the late Frank Exit's voicemails (how nice to have a friend's digital footprint preserved). There's a thrilling exploration of trying to identify a mysterious playlist-maker through the internet. Haven't we all been there.

We learn a bit about Frank Exit, who the speaker admires/envies for their 'almost unanalyzed drive towards perfecting his art'. Sounds a little odd out-of-context, but we learn of Frank's piano-playing and how much it plays a part in the speaker meeting him.

It's also how I remember Anshul most, through that drive, and what I admire most about him still. Even before I knew about his diagnosis, I was perpetually in this state of awe watching his locomotive artistic endeavors. He wrote screenplays, like a lot of them. He was constantly making them better, and working on the next thing, and inspiring me to get off my ass. So many people I knew our page talked a lot about what they'd do if only they had the time, including starting a Youtube channel, but Anshul REALLY did that shit. Like, of course he did. I know what it's like to know a Frank Exit who makes good on their name.

In pursuit of dog & dead, we learn this is no ordinary dog, beyond its apparent reincarnation of Frank Exit.

And our beloved child sidekick joins the heist team here. The conversations between the protagonist and the child are one of my favorite parts of the book.

She asks, "What is identity, really? I mean how do we derive our sense of self and, despite every indication of its contingent and influx and temporary nature . . ." and the protagonist responds, "Because you are a child, I will indulge this line of inquiry, which I too have, I admit, dabbled in, but it is fundamentally an unknowable and unanswerable problem . . ." and then "Don't be condescending, old man. The fundamental questions are of course evergreen, and their unanswerability marks their ground as equal to young and ancient alike."

I think this was the first moment the book made me laugh out loud. The way it oscillates between lab dog heist and embodying the metaphysical framework of a child is exhilarating. Makes me want to reread How I Became A Nun.

And then comes recounting the Avant Gardener video games the protagonist played with Frank. My fondest memories of Anshul are of playing Smash with him in my living room. He was constantly pushing me to be better in the realm of playwriting, particularly in his recommendation that I follow The Healthy Gamer to counter my productivity problems (I now attribute my world-changing ADHD diagnosis to Anshul, that son-of-a-gun), and also at Smash Ultimate. Which is very funny. I spent $40 on a Smash coaching session because of this guy once lol. He was a Link main. He played Min-Min, too, but we don't talk about that.

This is the first chapter I remember that engages with racial identity at the forefront, particularly Asian American identity in the arts. I mostly sat my ass down and listened, as they say. But also could definitely relate to how navigating an art environment can necessarily land you in entirely white rooms, in this case a white poetry room "servicing hegemony". Does one opt-out in the campaign for a more representative future, or temporarily compromise on the uncompromisable? Huh.

And presumably self-hating minority artists making a living by performing their race to white people. I used to perform stand-up, so I know that one all too-well. My takeaway from those days was that you don't need white performers to put on a minstrel show.

And the deep-dive into the Snooty Turing Test problem. Which is not about creating art, but fooling one into thinking art has been created. Does assemblage constitute art sufficiently for AI to replicate it. Where does practice & theory differ on the matter? But all of this alongside stories of people pissing themselves at poetry readings and Hanna Gasda's stand-up and Asian representation in Get Out. Which is signal, which is noise, and how would AI possibly interpret these nuances to write a novel? The conversations in the novel emerge so interweaved with the story that it's almost hard to believe they aren't transcripts of real, meandering conversations.

The microcosm of the macrocosm, the book reveals its fractal.

My favorite chapter in the book, where every thematic moment thus far coalesces into head-turning, palpable conversation amongst friends. The book offers some very compelling answers to its questions. About AI x Art x Mortality. There's not a way to do this chapter justice by talking about it. With every beat of the conversation, you can feel the pace accelerating as if you're on the precipice of something big.

Fuck I wish this could be onstage so bad.

The search continues. Read the book!