THE BOMBAST TRANSCRIPTS

Dispatches from the frontal lobe of a Web consultant: collection of personal essays originally published and distributed online.

Locke was named one of the “top 50 business thinkers in the world” in a 2001 Financial Times Group survey and is the author of other business titles on professional tactics in the New Media age. As for the personal, Locke channeled his opinions into a webforum with the help of an e-zine called Entropy Gradient Reversals and the nom de cursor “RageBoy.” More than three-dozen stream-of-subconsciousness jeremiads form this print collection, with a range that encompasses a great deal of the overrated Dionysian trinity of decadence: sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. In his five purple decades, Locke has ingested or indulged in a considerable amount of all three, along with substantial helpings of literature and philosophy. The opinions spew forth in a voice that reads like a cross between the most subject-specific riffs of John McPhee and the Attention Deficit Disorder–solipsism of Dave Eggers. Those looking for worthwhile content will have a difficult time extracting it from the formlessness of the pieces, and the relentless tumble of the Whitman-meets-Pynchon (!) associations will quickly have the most excitable readers reaching for something more soothing. If there is any there there in the pages, it has to do with a moment in the dot-com boom that as of late seems especially dated, quaint, even irrelevant. On an individual basis the pieces might have a Delbert-goes-to-Microsoft appeal, but to the general reader, there is the unshakable awareness that, like still images from music videos, they were better suited to their original medium of publication and dissemination.

Narrow in scope, uninteresting in execution.