Of drones, mechanical and musical and in any other case, in a combined bag
of essays and experimental prose items.
Israeli-born author Dorr finds a robust image within the airborne
drone. “The Predator drone,” he writes, “seems to be like a blind whale…however
nonetheless its sensors are higher than my eyes.” The drone operator could reside
in Las Vegas, the place she or he sees the world decreased to architectural
metaphors—the Eiffel Tower, the canals of Venice—however nonetheless steers that blind
whale to targets half a world away from the demise that’s to observe. “If I had
a drone I’d level it to the moon to see how far it might go,” the creator
writes on a fake naif notice that doesn’t do his preamble a lot good. From there,
Dorr spins off into meditations on things like oranges (“the common quantity
of segments in an orange is claimed to be ten”), weapons (“A pal who has by no means
served tells me weapons are usually not good or evil, persons are good or evil. I inform him
weapons have been made by folks”), airports, espionage, and love (“In one other life
this Eros can be the splitting of an orange, segments handed round and
shared”). At his strongest, Dorr delivers properly Kafkaesque apothegms (“It
can be beautiful and horrible to reside in a world made from glass”). Nonetheless, he
typically takes experimentation into incomprehensibility: “If I have been to say
that once I arrived on the mattress and breakfast in Amsterdam and I father, my
grandmother’s brother, took over the household inheritance and he or she by no means when
later I spotted on these cobbled streets that in August in Amsterdam it’s
solely I noticed….” The reader’s persistence for such issues will hinge on how a lot he
or she enjoys enshrinements of the trivial (peeling an orange) which are positioned
on the identical rhetorical stage as portentous statements of bigger which means (the
lethal drone).
A postmodern jumble with just a few hits however extra misses.
