"Myth Lab: Theories of Plastic Love" by Jack Skelley (Far West Press)

Writing is defining the madness or the thing out there and placing it in a context that can be formative or, hopefully, seductive. Jack Skelley is an explorer of pop low and high culture and all of its compartments and sections, and Myth Lab is very much a sexual journey into today’s consciousness. Skelley is at his most science-fiction mode as he explores the sensual culture, but with a well-read brain, he penetrates various holes out there of great interest.

Throughout the 20th century, I have always imagined a future similar to a 1950s science-fiction film or the animated TV series The Jetsons. Although disappointed we don’t carry jet-packs to fly from one place to another, or cars that hoover from the pavement; we do have the home computer. The Northridge Earthquake is the time that I remember when I felt that I did truly live in the future. We bought our first Macintosh Apple computer the evening before the big quake. When I put it on to find information on the World Wide Web about what was happening that morning, it was the first approach to the New Age. January 17, 1994, is when I became the new man, and by the end of that week, I felt part of a significant change in culture and society. Thirty years later, Jack Skelly has written Myth Lab, which is very much the definition of life in this present age. Although I saw traces of that culture thirty years ago, this book is the product of a new sensibility that is straightforwardly clear to anyone who gets an erection or is horny. Myth Lab is a very sexy book.

Jack Skelley conveys a world where sex is slippery and available. His poetic, dense, and witty prose references Percy Shelley and the Rolling Stones. The cultural high points range from Jacque Lacan’s theories to a Walt Disney hell (or heaven if you prefer), and Skelley can juggle all the ingredients without dropping the ball. He has the skill to understand the surface of pop culture but is able to dig into its skin and go inside the bones and blood veins to see how it works. Many poets/prose writers confront, accept, and analyze pop culture in its sexual and surface approach to the landscape. Still, Skelley’s technique is one of a skilled prose sentence maker, and his writing is clear but has many-level meanings, including the humor and tragedy of being a human in this odd yet wonderful world.

Desire with a new vocabulary to express the urges between bodies, and it doesn’t matter what gender, or if any, has traces in the early cut-up novels by William S. Burroughs. Still, Skelley’s sensibility is a mixture of European sexual writing, such as Georges Bataille, but this book is unique in the pop culture surrounding Jack. The extra layer of meaning makes this work enticing and noticeable. The spiritual meets the vastness of sexuality, which is a frontier that is still worth exploring. Myth Lab is everything, and this dense 100-page book is a guidebook, as well as something to be amused by. For me, that is the perfect relationship for a reader with a profound experience, and that is Myth Lab.

You can locate Myth Lab here.