The book is a brain! A peripheral brain that wonders about machine intelligence, consciousness, and itself. My Meteorite: Or, Without the Random There Can Be No New Thing sifts through a relentless stream of inputs, nestling experiences and ideas to discover what might magnetize what. Roaring with thinking, the text might like to rise up and reassemble itself into animate form ... Organized in loosely connected passages that skitter nonlinearly across Dodge’s life, My Meteorite, the artist’s first book, is webby and reliably weird ... The degree of pleasure one takes in this experiment will likely correspond to the degree of giddy thrill one finds in synchronicity ... He incites us to wonder when and how patterns become meaningful ... All this is, to some extent, a ruse, a device to make a pattern out of Dodge’s ruminations. It might get trying if the writing weren’t so viciously, animatedly good ...There’s a restless feeling throughout, as though the text wants to stretch beyond the obligations of cohesion ... I can’t say I followed all its threads, but Dodge’s mystical intimacy quest feeds back steadily and sustains.
Dodge loves to futz with language. He can marshal it beautifully ...he has an impish tendency to send readers scrambling to the dictionary ... If you’re looking for a blow-by-blow account of Dodge’s artistic career — from the Sundance-selected By Hook or by Crook (2002) to his more recent video and sculptural works exhibited in group shows — that’s only here in fits and starts ... [Dodge] is as reluctant to write about his own work as he claims to be, these days, about making the scene.
... bounces with disconcerting lightness from his father’s death to a fateful childhood encounter with a mysterious art object to a climactic 2016 visit to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, all the while quoting sources ranging from Blade Runner 2049 to the French theorist Gilles Deleuze. We see Dodge on hikes with his son, Lenny, meeting with strangers for public sex in his youth and holding forth with fellow artists, all of it chronologically scrambled and refracted through his motormouth prose to demonstrate the uselessness of linear narrative for describing a life ... It’s a shame that the book’s arc doesn’t reflect more of the randomness Dodge reveres. He fits every facet of his life into a larger pattern, each incident becoming an occasion for thinking about interconnectedness. My Meteorite sometimes seems like a catalog of coincidences, none of which are too minor to merit rumination. One evening Dodge and Nelson, on opposite sides of the country, both use the word 'voluble' in writing for the first time, and the moment takes on the charge of revelation. In passages like this, My Meteorite smothers with overinterpretation the epiphanic randomness that it means to instantiate.
These are fascinating thoughts, and there are questions to make us think again on every page. He also has a gift for storytelling, however sparingly used, and the scene where he speaks on the phone with his birth mother is particularly moving. Sometimes the connections between ideas and scenes feel a little tenuous, especially when we’re jumping between very short sections. But throughout there’s a feeling of a singular intelligence, driven by a set of related questions about the relationship between matter and spirit, or empiricism and the occult. I found his thoughts on climate change particularly compelling ... His book is salutary now, partly because he shows us that processes of human connection have always been fraught.
Famed visual artist and filmmaker Dodge grapples with chance and existentialism in his transcendent memoir ... Dodge’s challenging book provides no explanation for existence, but it does celebrate it, offering affable observations on family, death, and consciousness.
Dodge’s memoir is in no way linear, which may make it difficult to work through for some readers, and there’s little context to the material ... The narrative, presented in clipped entries that don’t always cohere, jumps decades among the late 1970s and the present. One of the main themes is death...but there’s also plenty of existential trivia, with long, considered opinions on movies like Blade Runner, Arrival, and arcane films from the past. Dodge displays a wildly creative voice, opining on the remarkability of coincidence, the nature of individual intelligence, and the titular meteorite at the center of the narrative, which the author seems alternatively obsessed with and horrified by, depending on the moment. Ultimately, the text reads like a diary, compelling yet fragmentary confessions that might concern children at one moment and graphic, anonymous sex in another ... Enlightening insight into a creative mind that may stifle some readers but that adds further mystique to a unique persona.
...[an] astute debut memoir ... Dodge taps into philosophy, literary theory, film, language, and quantum theory, using his knowledge in these subjects as a prism through which to explore events from his life ... Dodge’s memoir of 'yearning to reenchant the world' entertains and enlightens.
