Joshua Cohen: Book of Numbers

“To sum this up in Web terms, he’ll make you want to be an angel investor in his stuff. What’s a book but a public offering? You’ll want to be in on the ground floor.”

— The New York Times

“Intelligent, lyrical, prosaic, theoretical, pragmatic, funny, serious … [Cohen’s] best prose does everything at once.”

— The New Yorker

“Cohen, a key member of the United States’ under-40 writers’ club (along with Nell Freudenberger and Jonathan Safran Foer), is a rare talent who makes highbrow writing fun and accessible.”

— Marie Claire

“In Mr. Cohen’s hands, a meme is a matter of life and death, because he goes from the reality we all know — the link, the click — to the one we tend to forget: the human.… Mr. Cohen is ambitious. He is mapping terra incognita.”

— The New York Observer

“[Cohen has] manifold talents at digging under and around absurdity.… The reward is an off-kilter precision, one that feels both untainted and unique.”

— Rachel Kushner, author of The Flamethrowers

“Like [David Foster] Wallace, Cohen is clearly concerned with the depersonalizing effects of technology, broken people doing depraved things, and how the two intersect in tragic (and, sometimes, hilarious) ways.”

— The Boston Globe

“What dazzles here is a Pynchonesque verbal dexterity, the sonic effect of exotic vocabulary, terraced sentences, robust puns and metaphors, and edgy, Tarantino-like dialogue.”

— Review of Contemporary Fiction

“Cohen packs whole histories and destructions, maps and traditions, into single sentences. He employs lists, codes, and invented syntax with the sure hand of a visionary, his prowess and passion further emboldened by a boundless sense of scope.”

— The Believer

“There is ample evidence that Joshua Cohen is one of the greatest literary minds of his generation.”

— Flavorpill

If you’re reading this on a screen, fuck off. I’ll only talk if I’m gripped with both hands.

Paper of pulp, covers of board and cloth, the thread from threadstuff or — what are bindings made of? hair and plant fibers, glue from boiled horsehooves?

The paperback was compromise enough. And that’s what I’ve become: paper spine, paper limbs, brain of cheapo crumpled paper, the final type that publishers used before surrendering to the touch displays, that bad thin four-times-deinked recycled crap, 100 % acidfree postconsumer waste.

I have very few books with me here— Hitler’s Secretary: A Firsthand Account, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, whatever was on the sales table at Foyles on Charing Cross Road, and in the langues anglais section of the FNAC on the Rue de Rennes — books I’m using as models, paragons of what to avoid.

I’m writing a memoir, of course — half bio, half autobio, it feels — I’m writing the memoir of a man not me.

It begins in a resort, a suite.

I’m holed up here, blackout shades downed, drowned in loud media, all to keep from having to deal with yet another country outside the window.

If I’d kept the eyemask and earplugs from the jet, I wouldn’t even have to describe this, there’s nothing worse than description: hotel room prose. No, characterization is worse. No, dialogue is. Suffice it to say that these pillows are each the size of the bed I used to share in NY. Anyway this isn’t quite a hotel. It’s a cemetery for people both deceased and on vacation, who still check in daily with work.

As for yours truly, I’ve been sitting with my laptop atop a pillow on my lap to keep those wireless hotspot waveparticles from reaching my genitals and frying my sperm, searching up — with my employer’s technology — myself, and Rach.

My wife, my ex, my “x2b.”

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Living by the check, by the log — living remotely, capitalhopping, skipping borders, jumping timezones, yet always with that equatorial chain of blinking beeping messages to maintain, what Principal calls “the conversation”—it gets lonely.

For the both of us.

Making tours of the local offices, or just of overpriced museums to live in. Claridge’s, Hôtel de Crillon. Meeting with British staff to discuss removing the UK Only option from the homepage. Meeting French staff to discuss the.fr launch of Autotet. Granting angel audiences to the CEOs of Yalp and Ilinx. Being pitched, but not catching, a new parkour exergame and a betting app for fantasy rugby.

This was micromanaging, microminimanaging. Nondelegation, demotion (voluntary), absorption of duties (insourcing), dirtytasking. All of them at once. In the lexicon of the prevailing techsperanto.

This was Principal spun like a boson just trying to keep it, keep everything, together.

At least until Europe was behind us and we could stay ensuite, he could stay seated, in interviews with me. Between the naps, interviewing for me.

You call the person you’re writing “the principal” and mine is basically the internet, the web — that’s how he’s positioned, that’s how he’s converged: the man who helped to invent the thing, rather the man who helped it to invent us, in the process shredding the hell out of the paper I’ve dedicated my life to. Though don’t for a moment assume he regards it as, what? ironic or wry? that now, at our mutual attainment of 40 (his birthday just behind him, mine just ahead), he’s feeling the urge to put his life down in writing, into writing on paper.

He has no time for irony or wryness. He has time for only himself.

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cant wait 4 wknd, Rach updates.

margaritas tonite #maryslaw

ever time i type divorce i type deforce (still trying 2 serve papers)

read that my weights the same as hers — feelingood til the reveal: shes 2 inches taller — ewwww!!

“She” who was two inches taller was a model, and though Rach’s in advertising I never expected her to be just as public, to enjoy such projections.

To be sure, she enjoys them anonymously.

My last stretch in NY I’d been searching “Rachava Cohen-Binder,” finding the purest professionalism — her profile at her agency’s site — searching “Rachava Binder,” getting inundated with comments she’d left on a piece of mine (“Journalism Criticizing the Web, Popular on the Web,” The New York Times ). It was only in Palo Alto that I searched “Rachav Binder” and “Rach Binder,” got an undousable flame of her defense of an article of mine critical of the Mormon Church’s databasing of Holocaust victims in order to speed their posthumous conversions (“Net Costs,” The Atlantic ), and finally it was either in London or Paris, I forget, because I was trashed, that I, on a trashy whim, searched “Teva Café Detroit MI,” but the results suggested I’d meant “ Tevazu Café Detroit MI”—cyber chastisement for having incorrectly spelled the place where I’d proposed with ring on bended knee.