The Best Revenge (excerpt#1)

A Selection of Opuscules from 1999-2002

Next time there better be mistakes

This, the Best of All Possible Worlds is once again under threat of being upgraded:
Early projections show, next time round, the Byzantine empire may even cross the Pelopennese
The Earth’s spin will be reversed, giving the East a turn at allegorising Progress (or Death)
Plus, they’re thinking, in 1969 (version 2.0), instead of a moon-shot, maybe a moon-catapult?
Which is why we’ve been slipping protest-song lyric-sheets, for the march, under your wiper-blades
Only to see them transmuted by the grey magic of urban reality into traffic tickets & fliers
For Sister Ataraxia’s psychic hotline, malapropistically offering relief from ‘boils, ulcer and goat’

But that won’t stop us. Our militant wing know not the day nor the hour when they will be called up
Only that they will be compelled to take the bus-route less travelled, and perhaps dawdle, killing time
Browsing through paperbacks under a sign they only think is ironic, Please Steal These Books
Until the slow-motion instant arrives for them to be mutely gawping bystanders
When the great pre-climactic car-chase of Western Civilisation goes past, trailing CGI sparks
Two-dimensional characters firing celluloid bullets into redly glistening, left upper-arm fleshwounds
The method actor insists he does himself, between takes (sending a runner for bagels and O neg)

The Propaganda Machine has been suspending dangerously high levels of disbelief, expecting us
To swallow that in the world of romance-for-all, the height of charm will be an inventive disease
And on the planet that supported two species of intelligent life each sulked in the opposite hemisphere
Refusing to speak until the other had been formally introduced by a third, or made its own gambit.
They say the asteroid the size of Texas that KO’d the dinosaurs… was a hoax:
Around the 100,000 year mark they just got bored, and fucked off into extinction
They say You’ll love this world: you’ll have three new senses to enjoy it with: chimble, fitch and roon

So, trust everyone. It’s the caraway seed of truth they’re not counting on, getting between your teeth
Spat out in moments of lucidity. A perfect lie would defy all the laws of metaphysics.
Everyone’s a potential envoy from MONAD: the door-to-door salesman with his new range of sunsets
A sweater knotted around the neck – even the wearing of slacks – these are no guarantee
I, myself, was recruited through subliminal messages in the mottoes of an un-pulled Christmas cracker
Our demands? That’s for them to find out. And us. But we’ll know them when they’ve been met
Our manifesto? No-one makes the Earth their bitch. Not on my watch.

So watch out for the man whose breath doesn’t mist on a January morning (our man on the outside)
The clue might come from the faulty syntax of an Ivy League white witch refusing to acknowledge
The moon’s an arbitrary symbol; any natural phenomenon exhibiting cyclicality would have done.
Sometimes history feels like a breadcrumb trail leading us back to truth but have patience
A single fortune cookie could spell out the destiny of nations; even if sometimes it seems
The people with their fingers on the shiny red button still wear mittens tied together with string
We’re over the dropzone people. Look sharp. This time there will be mistakes. That’s how we like it.



Soon

He’d talk sometimes about the Secret Alphabet
In much the same voice you apologise
When the name cried out in sleep really does turn out to be a chiropractor
Or maybe the 5th form teacher who gave you all that bad advice about
‘chicks’
And let you pass notes but only in quatrains

The only person I know to lose it to the Placebo effect
Someone told him, see, to quit sucking pencils
“You’ll get lead poisoning”
Except I think he’s happier now
Playing wargames with all the thoughts sucked out of pencils
Like a kid whose imaginary friend went on holiday, kayaking in the
Camargue
For whom the cans are cowboys and the jars are injuns

Me, I picture him brokering a treaty
For strategic art limitation
Between the predatory superpowers of mind
And then I think of the pauses between our Q & A
The same as a long distance phone-call to somewhere like Tekakwitha
Except without the wires
And maybe that means we’re both of us
At the antipodes of trust

Always were


The Big C

His greatest fear was he’d die in a slow news week
What he ever did that was newsworthy no-one found out
And this was the crippling fear that kept him from doing pretty much anything at all
Besides filing patents for 1000-digit primes he was sure would come in useful
someday
And glazing the acorns, one-by-one, with home-brewed squirrel-repellent
(patent pending)

We didn’t want his maiden aunt to know about the body being mislaid
Hence the casket was filled with his magnum opus
The Encyclopaedia Esoterica (A through Q)
Begun after he quit his hobby soap-carving, at the license-plate factory
If you know what I mean

He used to tease his autistic kid brother, but we knew he loved him, really
That’s him, there between the priest and the bellhop
Got all forlorn if you mentioned the people who slipped through the
Sidewalk Cracks of Life
And one time, I hear, freaked out at the sight of an Organ Grinder
But he’s a good kid (on days with U in them)

He claimed to have recurring dreams about AirFields, and RainForests
(the brother, that is)
No-one could explain Heaven to him
So this is what we made up: that his big brother rode away to Kingdom Come
on a Stalking Horse
And sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty
Except, y’know, not actually on his hand

You heard about the stripper who turned up to the wake? No?
There isn’t a punchline to this.
She looked just like Hillary Clinton, after the arraignment
(Stoic but sexy)
Said he paid in advance just wanted the pallbearers to have a good time
(which we did)
We being Me, his two brothers, and some homeless guy we persuaded with canapés
Toasting him with sparkling wine from some place hasn’t even heard of
human rights.


Revenant

I think it’s fair to say:
Every bottom-feeder dreams of being a shark

My thoughts are with them tonight
Spiralling through concentric biomorphs of green and purple
To the sunken village, mud-drifts at every door
The church that was never de-consecrated, though that hardly means the gudgeons
can claim sanctuary from the pike

You said, that day we went swimming in what was once the sky
above the village, now a reservoir:

“The dam isn’t generating hydroelectric power at all.
I think They’ve found a way to use the potential difference
between a House and a Home.

“This is just the start. When they figure out how to
usefully convert pets into strays, or crucifixes into toothpicks,
prayermats into placemats, Beat Poetry into ad-campaigns
… I’ll be getting the Hell out of Dodge.”

Then:
“Ooh! I can see the spire between my toes!”

When we first met, she was Wessex’s leading cerealogist, under 25.
Only reluctantly admitted to the cabal of bearded skywatchers
by virtue of a hippie name and ‘helpless-female’ claim, to know

“…next to nothing about theodolites, really.”

There was never anything between us.


That’s to say: Dean Moriarty came between us.
And if I couldn’t mean as much to her as Carl Solomon to Allen, how could I
mean anything to her?
This is why it surprised me to see her down as the guest-speaker
at the Bedford Square Y. If I sidled in at the back, maybe I’d hear her
asking an audience, not one of them under colostomy-bag age:

“Just consider, for a second, the possibility your earliest memory
might be your last memory from your last life.”

Except on closer inspection, the guest-speaker wasn’t ‘Teazle P – ’
but ‘Tamzil P – ’ and somehow I don’t picture a Tamzil
pinching someone’s nipple for complete attention; breathing garlicky:

“Make love tooth and nail.
That’s an order.
Love’s not Love that’s not tooth and nail.”



Time more profitably spent transcribing birdsong

Time collapses in on itself at the singularity of these reunions, the half-decade between then and now
That could have been forever, compressing the present infinitesimally, leaving the imprint of eternity
The present itself only what we choose to remember of the future at any given moment
As a die shows all faces at every moment, but only one is chosen to be seen and to matter

And if all perception is recognition then nothing is ever lost, but then nothing was ever found
That has not been picked up, dusted off, and set to wait (one-eyed) on the dry-stone wall along the churchward-wending lane (like the gills, or scales of the great slow creature that is a Wessex village)
All will be claimed in time. Though most languish in indifference, content with the assurance that
A priori knowledge is, of course, impossible (we’ve had people working on this a while now)

But how else to explain the lichen we saw spelling out your name?
Or the dot matrix when you peer closely at anything just out of reach; these clues we choose to ignore
Not least the fact we can summon anything into being simply by not asking for it
So summon them, the way you summon sleep, falling into a world where flying means treading air
As if it were water – which I need not tell you means Exile, an intimation of ending

Though dreams themselves are our first intimation the First Law of Thermodynamics
(for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction) might be breached
And to be lucid in life, as in dream, is to know when, and what you’re dreaming
Meaning: we can imagine our cake and eat it; burning candles and all, if so required
So that every transgression was prefigured the day we crossed the tracks into the pathless woods
Adult prohibitions no more authoritative then than aphorisms about sidewalk cracks

And if the shadowplay of inanimate objects (un-nannied by Reason) forms the shapes of your fears
Or the heat-expanded timbers of the settling house creaking in quick succession seem steps towards
The corollary of the thought This might be your billionth and last breath but it isn’t
The next insight might be the first tug at peeling wallpaper revealing another room beneath
Just as the expanse of mist over the field was the cumulative breath-cloud of an entire herd that night
Martyring yourself to solitude (though allegory has been known to X-dress as actuality before)

Namely, the time we invited three different sides of our personality to a party to smirk and watch
Which one flirts with which, and who’s surprised when the fourth arrives un-announced
This being the party when someone (I swear) expressed admiration for our host’s antique head
Though I’m not sure if there was a punchline to the joke: Her first word was Dada; her second, Fluxus
Or even if it was a joke, suggesting now, just how tiresome it must have been before Babel, or in Eden

When, pace Aristotle, A actually was A (not that the snake was ever a snake, nor the apple an apple)
When the faces words showed to their speaker were just the same for the listener, back in pre-hystery
Though you can bet Pandora would have been Pandorus if the originary myth of Hope were re-written
As the originary myth of Humour, as it is in the alternate universe that fell into its own singularity
(where it shivers curled up smaller than a quark) eliciting an APB for Theoretical Meta-physicists

Excepting those, even now, interrogating the Samoan tribesman of anthropological legend, who states:
“There is something that walks amongst the trees… but we never talk about it,” shedding some light on older advice: in the teeth of the desert, look for the tracks the wind won’t blow away
Words accompanied by the same sensation as when we check the ¼-profile face in the photograph
To see that it hasn’t turned to ours: neither relief, nor certainty, only the double anxiety the suspicion
Must have proceeded from somewhere, and where if not the focal point of that gaze, out of frame…?

That impossible point, unseen, only the photographed can know but don’t look too long
Lest the compulsion to mind-read lure you into contemplating the ontology of a mimesis
Horrific as that other silence that is not the absence of sound koans don’t tell you about
Breeding in the narrow places between words
we only thought we knew



Sketches of demons, for a novel (2007)

Vanishing Ratios: Case Studies

“……the one with twisted limbs –

“……whose eyes are mirrors, or smoked glass –

“……and I heard her called ‘She who eats last, and only what is left, and everything that is left; she from whom all shadows flee –

“……whose hands have fused at the little fingers, and wrists, to become a bowl –

“……who cries white tears, cheeks streaked and crusted. In the corner of the dark house, where they wait –

“……the gardener who tends the flowers and weeds alike, and never chases away the animals –

“……whose shadows dance at her feet; you’d think they were her animals; you’d think two suns, or three, had swooped down to light her way –

[…]

“……who keeps on nursing the child, what used to be the child, long after it’s dead –

“……with flies, flies crawling in and out of his mouth, his ears, his nostrils, and what should be his eyes –

“……who speaks in all the voices of all the people you ever loved, and lets you hear what they thought all along, what they really thought –

“……in the pupil of each of her eyes, your face, a skull –

“……whose shit has bones in it, and also license plates, credit cards, lamp-posts, horseshoes, trees, whales, bicycles, entomologists, paper umbrellas, paparazzi, gondolas, stowaways, false-teeth, air-raid sirens, traffic lights, mistletoe, helicopters –

“……the one who promises, in a tone that brooks no doubt –

“ ‘…In the next life you will change places. She will be you, and you will be she, and when we meet again (in this place between lives), all of this will make sense.”

Trauma and Foreplay

Jean-Paul Sartre is at his desk, trying to concentrate. He’s more than a little hung-over, having spent the night with the Surrealists, and hangovers are more than a little problematic when you suffer from wall-eye. Imagine room-spin, when your eyes are determined to go in different directions. You can’t can you? Imagine a cake where the candles are human fingers – take a bite. You can imagine that, can’t you? (The fingers are still moving.) One of these days, Sartre is convinced, he’s going to throw up on the back of his own head. Ugh – the Surrealists… They were celebrating the return of Breton from the Tropics, passing around a bottle that had a worm in it; fat and wrinkled like a flaccid member on a cold day. Drinking worm juice – the sort of childish prankery one might expect from the Surrealists, but No – this turns out to be a drink Breton bought on his travels, from Mexico, of all places. As it did a lap of the table, and came round to him, Sartre had refused it, but then the taunting started, and if there’s one thing he can’t stand, it’s being taunted. That’s why women covet his manhood. They seduce him as a trophy – the great philosopher – and there’s that little smile as they think they’re being so charitable, les poutaines, and then he becomes enraged, swells hard, and gives them what for. After that, they’re begging for another ride, and this is when he discards them. What do you do, though, when it’s a ring of sweaty, roseate, moustachioed male faces, chanting, taunting – Drink it! Drink it! – eh? What then? No-one had tried the weird cactus, Breton brought back from Mexico, and there it was, sitting on the table. Slamming down the bottle, Sartre gobbled the chunk of dried cactus – bitter and tough as chewing on a workman’s vest. A workman in the sewers, too… Still, he swallowed it whole, swigged some of the firewater to wash it down, and that shut the Surrealists up.

Right now, he’s trying to remember the title for the book, he thought up last night. His great work of phenomenology, developing the concept of Dasein, although when he tried to explain it to Breton, after the third glass of pastis, the Surrealists had mocked his drunken stutter, and applauded him for inventing Dadasein: the condition of being Dada! Bravo Sartre – that is why we let you hang out with us! they said – as if he should be grateful of their company! ANYHOW. The title was supposed to be a sort of play on Etre et Avoir… Something and Something else, you know; a pair of words that were vaguely homophonous… but what? Being and Believing? From somewhere over his right shoulder, near the bookshelf, a voice:

“Trauma and Foreplay”

Sacre bleu! Sitting on the bust of Hegel, a cheroot in its fore-pincer, is a crab.

“What, after all, is life, if not Trauma and Foreplay?”

This, it turns out, is the last sensible thing the crab says. Also, it’s not a crab, but a lobster, un hommard, although for some reason the name escapes Sartre at this particular moment –

“………Then again, I get so easily distracted when the dustmotes are sending me messages; we’re all of us stickered on the flypaper of the mind, don’t you think? This very city we’re in – right here and now – is carpeted with fishscales, if you look close. You wouldn’t know it to look at it, and these people I call my friends are just miserably burning bushes all bleating for attention in the wilderness. ‘Oh, oh, please worship me! Build me a pyramid where I can hatch my monkeys!’ I tell you… little Johnny Sartre, crying to his mother because his sister’s votary candle is so much more shimmery it’s sure to send her prayer to the Big Beard first. Let me tell you, you couldn’t go faster if you had crystal spurs and a chariot drawn by voles. This, good sir, is the doyen of Hysteria. Watch her well, her lust is like the wavelets that aren’t whipped by the wind, but reach up for the stars, so baubley pretty you just want to kiss them to supernova.”

Sartre asks: "Are you really here, Monsieur Crustace? Is Trauma & Foreplay what you think I should be writing about? You are so wise! Of course – it is bad faith to think that life is a matter of Sex & Violence; our human condition is always interstitial! We are always between sex-acts, even in the throes of coition, whether the “act” is penetration or orgasmo-culmination; always witnesses, even as the shells burst around us! Are you here to help me write my book…?

“Depends on the little pet living in my mouth, doesn’t it? Can he be housebroken, or is it the glue-factory for Little Johnny Duck-Tooth? I am, in truth, wherever a brain may be found, wrapped in yesterday’s newspaper, and crawling with termites. Take heed: Dusk is falling on the plains of rabies. A trilby’d figure walks abroad with his head like a bone-bubble…”

The crab pauses to take a drag on the cheroot. Sartre notices, a little alarmed, that smoke emerges from under the articulated plates of the crab’s tale. Other little ones are positioned elsewhere on the shelves, inspecting the spines, and tapping on Hegel’s head for clues. Sartre is disappointed. Is the crab only willing to divulge drivel? On and on it rambles, about roses not being quite so pretty, when you see them drooling; bragging about his eyes on stalks, and how they allow him to see the mauve gases that steam from the windows of knocking shops – all the unspent sexuality, and the tiny chorus of sperminal souls relieved not to have been snapped up by The Great Egg, this time… After a few hours, it becomes easier to ignore the crab, and his scuttling enfants, but neither do they show any signs of fading away, or leaving, and always manage to scatter, when he swats at them. The one who talks remains poised atop Mt. Hegel, the whole while; just when his drone seems due to pass into irrelevance, a fragment of sense piques the philosopher’s curiosity. “Have you shared the cigarettes of the dying?” says the crab, at which Sartre looks up, then hearing only more inanities, curses – Damn them! Damn them all! I’m going to destroy the Surrealists if it’s the last thing I do!!!

The Homunculus

The homunculus is crawling on the floor of the study, crawling toward the bookshelves perhaps, for books to chew on, crawling over well-waxed (albeit warped) boards. The homunculus has no particular purpose, and presently turns its attention to the desk, where the Father is working. The homunculus pulls itself up with webbed fingers, hooked over the desk’s handles, handles that clatter clangily; the homunculus, head awobble; the homunculus, lips all drooly. The homunculus is raised, one-handed, to sit on the Father’s lap, and utters neither squeak nor mewl, but flaps uncomprehending, veiny eyelids – as if to scoop up the words on paper, unless those tremors are external signs of inner cogitations: pondering the words trickling from pen, the pen’s mining of colour from the page. Meaning will be arrived at, in time. The homunculus reaches, web-fingered, for the page, and is gently raised from the Father’s lap, and then lowered to the floor, where it finds its feet, literally (plucking at toes), and then figuratively (waddling off). The homunculus has been walking some months now, but has yet to manage a sound that cannot be attributed to gastric processes. This homunculus isn’t the first attempt, and may not be the last; the materials were crude. It is capable of spindly-limbed locomotion, but the mouth is only a narrow slot, no teeth or tongue evident. The sound it makes, attempting to swallow, is gruesome. The homunculus is one year old.

~

The latest homunculus has been more successful; the ingredients were refined, transplanted swiftly, the utterances delivered with more confidence and fluency, having reconstructed the ancient accent, to reflect its musicality – its likely cadence and tonal glide. The homunculus has a clipped fringe, clipped too short, to correct mis-clippings when it wriggled beneath the sheers. The homunculus huffs when forming words; its hands twist-about, like birds adjusting their wings before settling in the nest. This only happens when no-one is watching, no-one who might slap it, to keep still. The homunculus is practising its name; its name the name of a general who subdued the lands of the East, and ceased the bloodfeuds of a dozen nations, their star now fallen. The homunculus understands more than it can express back, but not yet why it should or might do so. Does it, then, understand?
~

The whore behind glass twists expanses of pink flesh in a lazy parody of pre-orgasmic nerve-tingles. Her success with customers is largely dependent on a mathematical function of sobriety offset by remaining cash; expertise vis-à-vis seduction is comparatively insignificant. Her wink at potential customers is too fast when she does wink; it seems, instead, more of a spasm. The homunculus is the recipient of the wink; or at least, the present homunculus. The homunculus is surrounded by a group of male humans, who can be presumed to be indifferent to the presence of a homunculus in their midst, unless any of them happen to be homunculi, which cannot be ruled out. Does it feel special, for having been winked at? Chosen? The homunculus bloodless. The homunculus static. The homunculus, reflected, framed by the same frame that is the view of the whore. The homunculus superimposed on the whore. The homunculus shuddering.
~

The resemblance to a Rorschach test is striking; the symmetry of the involutions within the oval outline, for a start. Almost as if this image is a Rorschach test (or a maze – mazes are a familiar test, too), the shapes of words triggered by the symmetrical pattern, animate the lips of the face regarding the jar. The cross-section through the cerebrum reveals all the major structures are intact. Previous jars do not contain quite so elegant – or symmetrical – specimens. The homunculus is being shown its predecessors. There is an unoccupied container at the end of the row; “…you were more successful than anticipated…”

~

The girl has been waiting 25 years, a quarter-century, a generation, a mediaeval lifetime… and all for this? The girl is cold, her hair slightly curled from the damp; not details that factored in her imaginings. The girl has been shuffled between tutors, and elocution-specialists, and teachers, and has performed what is expected of her, and has watched the ways of others (others with girl-shapes, at least); watched how they pair off, and has come at last to her own moment of purpose: on a bridge, nightbreeze in hair & dress. Opposite her is the homunculus – the 8th or 10th in line (she lost track of his rambling biographical account & witticisms & anecdotes, and wasn’t exactly listening, though she nodded politely; just remarked that she’d never met someone with predecessors – a number after his name), and while it seems antiquated, pretentious even, she gives his pedigree the benefit of the doubt, and says Yes with lips, and Yes with hands, and Yes to herself inwardly; Yes, this is the end of her own waiting, for better or for worse; Yes.


[Scribbled wild-eyed & frantic on a stack of beer-mats, cross-legged & cackling on the floor of a pub in Amsterdam, during the Holland vs. Russia match, Summer 2008.]

VR: How to break a Home

How do we continue to live in the houses where someone has been Possessed? How do we trust the words safely sandwiched in the books neatly ranked on the shelf not to be replaced with your own name, when you idly open the book, and a hundred thousand others, in the Directory of Those Lost to Mediocrity and Missed Opportunity (Vol. I: Ab – Al)? What was it the Little One said, tugging at your sleeve? When will the mirrors start to bleed? Look closely – can you be sure the ceiling isn’t crawling with white spiders and millipedes; all those jittering pointillist pixels that superimpose themselves on any blank space we permit ourselves to examine? The knives in the drawer have already started to sing, to chorus, to be used. Yes, there is the ticking, ticking madness of the world we learn to fill from birth, but no-one sells greetings-cards consoling you for the madness of inviting strangers into your home, barely old enough to Trick or Treat, who want you to Sign Here, and Initial the 2nd page and 3rd through 9th pages Here, to drain your television’s grey-glassed fishtank – drain it of the tangerine-skinned people with moonstone smiles, and their lemon-yellow sofa, and replace it with a view of the sallow-skinned child in the second bedroom, upstairs right now, turning the television from an instrument for Seeing-Afar into an instrument for constant self-surveillance, and this, then, is the new madness: that you can never now un-imagine the time when the television ceased to take us far away, making all its bleatings and twitterings about the Beauty or Tragedy or enviable Normality of “There & Elsewhere” into Lies, damned Lies, when what it shows us (beneath cheap set-dressing, the Older One could have knocked up in Drama Class) is the same old room with the same old carriage-clock / porcelain birds / magazine rack / sofa paid-for by instalments – an irregular oblong carved out of space that has an Outside and an Inside, but neither is meaningful except as the antithesis of the other, making you question what you really paid for, what the mortgage is for, why you persist in these payments by instalments that by their very nature are a bridge from youth to balding / spreading middle-age. When will the child’s muteness break, and name the Unnameable thing? When will you stop seeing them on the landing, frozen, un-answering, and observe how their eyes follow you, as you move from side-to-side (choosing which way to pass), but observing also how their eyes seem to draw back in the sockets, retreating in fear from – You? Or is it the long and spreading shadow that merely attached itself to you, and now climbs the walls of the corridor behind your back? When will the trances stop, and why that time – that one time; one time only; really, please believe me – why did you slap him so hard across the face, to Stop Playing? This, then, is how a home is broken.

[After reading Marguerite Young; not so much a new influence, as a reminder of an old voice, it's almost reassuring to re-visit.]

One Hundred of the Best Books I’ve Ever Read (Note, “Books”)

...in much the same order they came out of my head:

David Foster Wallace Infinite Jest
Jorge Luis Borges Labyrinths
Robertson Davies The Deptford Trilogy, esp. Fifth Business
Lawrence Durrell The Alexandria Quartet, esp. Clea
Herman Melville Moby Dick
David Berman Actual Air
Marguerite Young Miss McIntosh, My Darling
Henry Miller Tropic of Cancer
Marcel Proust A Recherche de Temps Perdue
Sigmund Freud The Interpretation of Dreams
Thomas Pynchon Gravity’s Rainbow
William T Vollmann You Bright and Risen Angels
Carson McCullers The Heart Is a Lonesome Hunter
Thomas Pynchon Against the Day
Thomas Pynchon The Crying of Lot 49
Jerome Rothenberg Poems for the Game of Silence
WG Sebald The Rings of Saturn
Jerome Rothenberg (ed.) Technicians of the Sacred
William T Vollmann Fathers and Crows (Seven Dreams, Volume II)
TS Eliot The Four Quartets

James Joyce Ulysses
Grant Morrison The Invisibles
Maya Deren Divine Horsemen
Naomi Klein The Shock Doctrine
Georges Perec Life, A User’s Manual
David Foster Wallace Brief Interviews...(1999)& Oblivion: Stories (2003)
William T Vollmann Rising Up and Rising Down (unabridged)
Armand Schwerner The Tablets
Jorge Luis Borges The Book of Sand
Rabindranath Tagore Stray Birds
Lawrence Durrell The Black Book
Lewis Carroll The Complete Alice (ill. Ralph Steadman)
André Breton The Magnetic Fields (w/ Phillippe Soupault)
Edgar Allen Poe Tales of Mystery and Imagination
Samuel Beckett 13 Texts for Nothing
Matthew Barney The Cremaster Cycle (ed. Nancy Spektor)
Mark Z Danielewski House of Leaves
Fyodor Dostoevsky Brothers Karamazov
Plato The Symposium
Omar Khayyam Rubaiyat

Franz Kafka The Great Wall of China
Italo Calvino Invisible Cities
John Steinbeck Cannery Row
Vladimir Nabokov Ada
Douglas Coupland Life After God
Mervyn Peake Titus Groan & Gormenghast
David Foster Wallace Consider the Lobster: Essays
Thomas Pynchon Vineland
Kay Redfield Jamieson Touched with Fire // An Unquiet Mind
Martha Gellhorn The Face of War
William Shakespeare King Lear
Allen Ginsberg Howl and Other Poems
Miguel de Cervantes Don Quixote
Neil Gaiman Sandman: Preludes & Nocturnes
Alejo Carpentier The Lost Steps
Carson McCullers The Member of the Wedding
Michael McClure Rare Angel
Douglas Coupland Generation X
Donald Barthelme 40 Stories
William Gaddis The Recognitions

John Steinbeck East of Eden
William Shakespeare Hamlet
Grant Morrison Arkham Asylum
Helen DeWitt The Seventh Samurai
Michael Herr Dispatches
William L Shirer The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
Comte de Lautreamont Maldoror
Donald Harrington Some other Place, the Right Place
Ioan M Lewis Ecstatic Religion
Kenneth Patchen Collected Poems
??? Tao Te Ching
Jacques Lacan Ecrits
Don De Lillo Underworld
Andrei Makine Confessions of a Lapsed Standard-Bearer
Richard Brautigan Revenge of the Lawn (Collected Stories)
Bret Easton Ellis American Psycho
Douglas Coupland Microserfs
Roland Barthes Mythologies
Stephen King Different Seasons
RD Laing The Divided Self
John Fowles The Magus

Alice Oswald The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile
HP Lovecraft The Thing on the Doorstep & Weird Tales
Yukio Mishima Spring Snow & Runaway Horses
André Breton (ed.) The Anthology of Black Humour
Robert M Pirsig Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Daniel Clowes Ghostworld
David Sherwin If…
Charles Baudelaire The Spleen of Paris
Lawrence Ferlinghetti A Coney Island of the Mind
Lenny Bruce How to Make Friends and Influence People
Anais Nin The House of Incest
Haruki Murakami The Wind-up Bird Chronicle
Evelyn Waugh Brideshead Revisited
George Orwell 1984
Doris Lessing Briefing for a Descent into Hell
Iain Banks The Crow Road
Jeanette Winterson Gut Symmetries
Iain Banks The Bridge
Stella Gibbons Cold Comfort Farm

Realpolitik # 1 (Today's Reading)

Currently reading "Best American Political Essays 2009" (ed. Matt Taibbi). Joseph Stiglitz is the best of the lot, on the 5 key policy changes that led to the 2008 crash, but I find myself racking my brains for how any of them could ever have been justified in any terms (economic... political... moral). Unless there were perceived hidden benefits (for the whole of society) to dismantling the various regulatory mechanisms (rather than just for Financiers), it strikes me that it must take an incredible amount of Denial (a bit like being a Holocaust Denier) to believe there wouldn't be economic catastrophe, frequently, and traceably (i.e. one can't use the "Bubbles Burst" argument). Presumably, the degree to which the policy makers are cushioned (by basic wealth, let alone connections to people who can offer legal protection) is unimaginable to the common man, but does this really impair consideration for the fate of the nation, e.g. when you allow the Ratings Agencies to be paid for by the people they rate?! It all makes me think that, deep down (or not so deep) the people in power basically want to widen the gap between rich and poor, stratify society, and ensure capital flows from public to private AMAP. Hohum.


I DO recommend, however, The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It (Paul Collier). It's a slim, readable book that offers a plan for every criticism, and doesn't shirk from saying that democracy isn't a good thing in Resource-rich countries, until you've got good governance and infrastrusture. A genuinely optimistic book... unusual for me to be reading! Only thing he hasn't said yet (I'm 3/4 through) is how much this argument about malfunctioning democracy can be extended to a resource-rich country like, ooh, Britain, with its shameless pandering to the City.

A Practical Guide to Surrealism (excerpt # 1)

Surrealism: A Tercet of Origin Myths

Some say the entrance to the Surreal was discovered by André Breton, on his expedition to the Tristes Tropiques, accompanying Claude Lévi-Strauss. (Picture him there, on the prow of the good ship Apollinaire, hair aflame in the salty air.) Marked by a series of vertilinear Vs carved on a trunk in the Amazon, the Surreal was still a physical place at this juncture, and rather liked the idea of people roaming around inside it, hunting / fishing / carrying little babies with their bubbles of drool, and invisible butterflies to catch. The Surreal would rarely be so pinpointable, thereafter.


Others maintain that Surrealism was a method for interrogating the very fabric of reality, devised by the Comte de Lautréamont, decades before, while contemplating the chance appearance of an umbrella and a sewing machine on his dissection table, during a session of Spring-cleaning in his chateau. Mesmerized by their hidden logic, he sank to the floor, and demanded that his manservant fetch him brioche and wine, as he contemplated their power over him. What was it, in the conceptual rhyme of this prosthetic skin, this machine for assembling such prostheses, in the very site of man’s unmaking / his re-making as a machine…? Could it be that, just as a pattern of musical notes captivates through consonance, the Comte had become sensitized to the music of concepts? Once we have caught the first melody in that strange mode, how can we not be captivated…?


Never let us forge–


(I’m sorry, I was interrupted)


Never let us forget, the Surrealism of André Breton, returned from the jungle, was a Surrealism “in the service of the revolution” – words that were stamped, military-style, on the front-page of each pamphlet he produced. What was the revolution, though, and what weapon might he have brought back from the jungle? Was it a weapon at all? Who would survive the Revolution? Whose backs would be against the wall?


Only one thing is clear to me, O my best beloved, in these days when young blades congregate on street corners, their lobster epaulettes glinting in the faint luminescence of the black sun, we have gone astray – badly, badly astray. The arts are astray that once conducted us to the secret music of words; that once allowed us to dissect and re-stitch meaning, simply by sounding, aloud.


Les Surrealistes!

See them striding down the boulevard! The sun glinting off their watch-chains, the emerald-eyed skulls on their canes! The spurs on their boots strike sparks! A mere glance at a lady breaks hearts! See the sun failing to glint off their bowler hats! See how André Breton’s mirrored codpiece flashes furious invitation to desperate duels! See Jacques Vaché who wears an udder the way a Scot wears a sporran! See Paul Eluard riding a tortoise with gilded shell, inherited from his godfather Joris, a German count! (Damnit, we’ll have to wait for Eluard…). Anyway –

Voila! LES SURREALISTES!

Some say they arose as an elite to combat the BOURG; others that they were its own foremost agents, the deepest undercover, equipped with false memories, false faces, false trousers (that could be inflated rapidly, for a fast roll-away). What were they searching for, these gentlemen-explorers of the mind? Was it La Chose? Was it that strange figure from the heraldic universe, known only as La Femme Inconnue? Was it what the Greeks knew as Gnosis, seeking to penetrate the mystery-religions of the Near East? Was it the Deep Image itself… or was Agent EP & HD’s “Imagisme” a misprision of L’imagisme, referring to le mage (qui) jisme – the Hanged Man who achieves enlightenment even as his neck is broken – just as San Graal refers (as any schoolchild knows), to le sang réal, the Royal Blood…?!

One thing we do know: they owed allegiance to a king, they called Ubu, but further investigation by agents of the BOURG revealed that this Ubu was only a king as the King of Kings is a king, with his own private mythos, but no constitution, executive or legislative branch. No Miracle-Working – Demon-Expelling – Parabilizing – Crucifixion – Resurrection – Redemption for Ubu! No, his myth-cycle was one of Enchaining – Debraining – Cuckoldry – and then, and only then, Kingship, once he had shed all dignity, novelty, and held fast only to his rotundity.

(For all their revolutionary ideals, the Surrealistes are, in fact, sentimentalists. They despise the BOURG, but cherish the artiste manqué as much as the aristocrat déclassé. It’s the absurdity of their being stranded between Ideals that makes them seem so pitiful, as their monocles steam with shame. Perhaps, this particular day, LES SURREALISTES are paying a visit to Raymond Roussel, son of the Governor of Egypt, and a rather serious fellow who professes suicidal aspirations. Breton scoffs at this, whenever the subject comes up – “Suicide, my dear fellow, is an artistic solution second only to vanity-publishing; No, no, the surrealist does not die for his cause, he lives his cause.” Eluard and Soupault clink glasses, chortling. Nonetheless, Breton is always available day and night, should Roussel hail him on the speaking trumpet; a patron is a patron, you know, and he could do with a holiday at Roussel’s Locus Solus, if Raymond finally takes the hint and invites him…)

As it happens – nothing happens! The Surrealists are going nowhere at all! They merely stand on the boulevard, legs flung wide, elbows out like wings, as carriages swerve around them. Even as the sun sets over the Seine, and the Eiffel Horaire swings its shadow-dial over the rooftops of Paris, and around to 7 o’clock. Finally, they unthaw from their pose. It’s time to take a show at the Folie Bergeres. Time to visit Nadja…

[Christmas 2009]