The "Dirty Computer" of Ms. Janelle Monae's "Memory Librarian" does not disappoint.

July 25, 2022

 I've been talking about Dirty Computer without having read Janelle Monáe's "The Memory Librarian: and other stories of Dirty Computer," but I did read it over the weekend, in my estimation of her genius has not changed. She does an estimable job of describing where our "future history, of the mind" is right now. Her lyricism does not disappoint; the book is filled with sparkling gems, glittering phraseology, and poignant bars of written music.

The key to understanding what Dirty Computer means, for Ms. Monae, just as I also thought it was, is that dirty computer as a philosophical term is about neither "dirtiness" nor "the computer", but something intimately describing the nature of the nexus of power and democracy in "these times we live in" – a new era of literate culture inseparable from technology and the Internet. The technological paradigm is not the culture, but the literate culture must move through the milieu, and/or paradigm, of the technology of our literate transmission.

Ms. Monae's book is above all, quotable, and it takes the dryness and technical jargon out of the science-fiction paradigm that is in so many real ways are lived reality; fills it again with all the trans-ness, blackness, queer stories – but also, the sex and sexiness, the drugs, booze and surveillance that makes it real, relevant, and human again, without keeping it so dry and clinical that it is removed from the messiness of life. "Her eyes speak love and incandescent anger," Ms. Monet writes of a character who is extraordinarily renditioned.  And in a way, so does her book.