Against the Written Word: Toward a Universal Illiteracy

“Wielding the satiric tone of a Gen-X Jonathan Swift or leftist Andy Kaufman . . . Svenonius is an engaging companion . . . and he lands some scathing blows, as when he links internet porn to contemporary Christianity by noting that both are ‘anti-intellectual, patriarchal, have an elitist or outsider self-image, and are aesthetically garish.'” ―Publishers Weekly

Against the Written Word is the most important, most revolutionary book produced since the advent of the printing press; the book that will liberate readers from reading, writers from writing, and booksellers from peddling their despicable wares. This book ushers in a new era of freedom from reading and all its attendant bedfellows such as Enlightenment thinking and the mass alienation wrought by the phonetic alphabet. Against the Written Word will be a tremendous best seller and simultaneously the last book that anyone will read.

"What makes Ian Svenonius funny is a little different. He’s funny in his use of language in music, in the ridiculous extended conceits of so many of his songs; he’s funny in his prose style, a supercharged Marxist-Leninist jargon placed at the service of deliberate absurdity; he’s funny in his presentation as a self-made character, a preaching, yelping, evangelical amalgam of James Brown and the protagonists of Godard’s La Chinoise . . . Ian Svenonius’ career in comedy has involved various vehicles, but the silly-serious approach is consistent throughout." ― Tribune (UK)

"The material is quite varied but all of it is written with Svenonius’s intelligent and revolutionary prose . . . These essays are amongst the more palatable and intriguing Svenonius has written . . ." ― Razorcake

"I’m not sure I’ve ever read anything that is so much about loving written language as Ian F. Svenonius’s Against the Written Word: Toward a Universal Illiteracy. The whole book, all 300 pages of it, is essentially infatuated with words . . . In Against the Written Word, however, Svenonius is after more than merely provocation; he has an argument to make. His book posits that the printing press and the Renaissance were, among other things, the start of everything going wrong for humanity. These chapters are serious and fascinating." ― Alta

IAN F. SVENONIUS is the author of the underground bestsellers Supernatural Strategies for Making a Rock ‘n’ Roll Group,The Psychic Soviet, and Censorship Now!! He was also the host of VBS.tv’s Soft Focus, where he interviewed Mark E. Smith, Genesis P. Orridge, Chan Marshall, Ian MacKaye, and others. As a musician he has created more than twenty albums and countless singles in various rock and roll combos (Escape-ism, Chain & the Gang, The Make-Up, The Nation of Ulysses, etc.). He lives in Los Angeles, CA. Against the Written Word is his latest work.