Steven Church

Reading this extended essay about human interactions with apex predators was something like studying Louis Wain's paintings of cats to glean information about real-life cats. Church's take on his subject isn't just "personal"--it borders on "incomprehensible" and even has a touch of "scary" to it.

The logic in this extended essay is highly unusual. Arguments are propped up in a spindly way by fanciful speculation rather than by evidence or reasoning. Conclusions circle back to the beginning in an incantatory way. The author makes connections that don't seem very supportable outside of their own transitive and self-referential existence. The author also makes many connections having to do with ears, for example, connections between the ear of Evander Holyfield, the ear of Vincent van Gogh, and the ear of a woman named Charla whose face was bitten off by a chimpanzee (but her ears remained intact). What is the nature of the connection between these ears? Hmm.

The author writes many sentences in third-person-plural, as if to assume that the reader will naturally have feelings in concert with the author, although I personally can't remember feeling these feelings before, myself. For example:

what many of us want is perhaps less like being violently raped by an apex predator and more akin to the French concept of jouissance, which implies a kind of ecstatic experience, a mixture of pleasure and pain that shatters the self and, thus, provides an opportunity to reassemble oneself....It's the desire to be fucked to death and to be reborn.

It's possible the book is one big send-up of strange academic pursuits of the kind that are supported by grants and regularly mocked by people writing stories about all the silly things your tax dollars are used for. I'm not sure.

It entertained me. In a shock-value kind of way.… (plus d'informations)