Selfie Suicide; or Cairey Turnbull’s Blue Skiddoo by Logo Daedalus came out two years ago but I hadn’t got around to reading it until now. The biggest reason for my hesitation was the now-infamous free sample opening pages of the book, with maelstroms of indigestion and libidinal flicks and salubrious sponges, that made me think this was going to be a Pynchon cosplay romp without any true soul; not really Logobook but just a book Logo wrote. The long-winded and frankly still baffling title did not help that perception either. But reading just a couple more pages into the book quickly I was quickly proven wrong. This is clearly a Logo book, maybe even more than BAPbook is BAPbook, since BAP is only an aspect of its author, and Logo is being himself in SS;oCTBS.
This is the story of Cairey Turnbull’s Tinder date to the Museum of Expressive Humanism, acronym “MEH”. Cairey is an artist himself; a struggling 30 year old millennial art school graduate with true passion for drawing, but maybe not the kind that’s popular in museums or art school. The museum’s extravagant exhibits, such as a massive VR Battle Royale game with a live-in Twitch streamer who happens to be his old roommate, and an exhibit that reads your entire digital presence and creates a collage of your life, give plenty of opportunities for Cairey to flashback through his difficult college days and earlier. Cairey also has plenty of opinions on The State of Art. Cairey bemoans the flashiness without depth of pop culture and video games, and simultaneously art school style pretentious art for sociocultural or metaphysical meaning, but what does that leave him with? Sometimes the discussions on The State of Art can get a little bit tiresome and oscillating, and you just want Cairey to snap out of it, like reading David Foster Wallace talk about finding purpose. It’s hard to know how much of that is Logo and how much of that is Cairey, but I see it as a pretty self-aware grotesque caricature of Logo.
One thing Cairey does seem to be sure about art is it should take effort to produce beauty; he gets transferred from one of his college art classes for questioning a professor too hard on the questions of form, and twice he gets upset at classmates for praising parts of his work that he didn’t work too hard on, like when a classmate compliments his hastily done grass at the bottom of a painting. The unfortunate irony of this concern with art as physical effort to produce beautiful form is that it’s apparent Logo did not go to full effort to make this book ornately beautiful. There are many typos, unnecessary line breaks, the character Symon is sometimes spelled Simon, etc. These surface level issues make it apparent that this book didn’t go through an intense editing phase.
But there are also some inspired ideas in this book; I found the central “Blue Skiddoo” image, of a young Cairey travelling out alone on a canoe into a lake in the middle of the night to fulfill an imaginative medieval quest he had been acting out with a girl his age that he never sees again, very striking, and its various connections to the novel are very creative and impactful. Symon LaFeint’s bathroom soliloquy, drifting in and out of rhyme and rhythm in a very evil but seductive way shows that Logo is an extremely talented sentence crafter. Logo is openly very influenced by Pynchon and Nabokov, which I thought was a weird combination until I read this book but I get it now, in the way he writes these sentences. None of the book feels bloated or overwrought; it’s all there to drive the various aspects of the narrative, which is not an easy thing to do in a first book.
What the book most reminded me of structurally and thematically was Laslzo Krasznahorkai’s War & War, which is similarly about a mentally ill person who doesn’t fit in in New York City and is intensely concerned with art. Both books end with plaques about their main characters in front of a painting in a museum. Both Cairey in Selfie Suicide and Korin War & War crave from art an impossible salvation and dignity out of an irreparably damaged modernity. This paragraph is just for me, since I don’t know if too many other people have read both of these books, but I wanted to write it.
Really where I have to end this review is that I encourage you to read the book. It’s not perfect, but it’s very interesting, especially if you know Logo. Reading a book by someone you know is a strange experience; almost always you have a lot more distance to the author in both time and context but being so intimate in both regards makes it a fun experience. I hope to see him write more.
