Hot on the Heels of I.4.i

A multi-storey car park in Portsmouth, site of many suicide attempts, marked for demolition, 2004.


A REEL-TO-REEL tape recorder relays fragments of the scene just acted. A MONKEY IN MILOU MASK noises a response.

REEL-TO-REEL: I am given cause to wonder what your, Milou, investments in a potential answer to this question are.

MONKEY IN MILOU MASK: That is a valid object of wonderment, ____, but an answer must be deferred a moment until I offer my own wonderings. You, or one of your associates, have established this computerised pool hall, with its flickering FACEPLANT signage and neon wall art, presumably in the hope of accruing members and inciting verbal exchange. You have solicited contributions on the basis of your own assumptions about the contributors, which remain murky. So if I were to admit that my ‘investments’ in a potential answer are minimal, I would have to follow up by asking what investments of your own should cause you to be concerned about mine, about ISOPROPYL RICECAKE’s, etc. Can a group – even a virtual one – be consciously formed without a basic agreed-upon identity?

REEL-TO-REEL [whirring]: You persistently drag out a humanist instinct in me which assumes that somewhere latent in the apparent neutrality of your interest in these issues lies the claim of an individuating instinct.

MONKEY IN MILOU MASK: I would not deny the existence of an individuating instinct; I would merely add that *one* such instinct is numerically insignificant. I would also add that time spent in academic institutions, with their tendency to flag up failed historical precedents, risks making neuters of us all, a process which may already have occurred in my case. [Examines defiantly inactive reproductive apparatus.]

REEL-TO-REEL [jammed]: The pertinent negat… The pertinent negat… The pertinent negat… The pertinent negat…

A car park attendant readjusts the mechanism.

REEL-TO-REEL: The pertinent negative question embedded in yours might be: If such ardour cannot be manufactured under the condition of knowing stupidity, what are the manufacturable forms of ardour left for the ethically conscious consumer? [Dramatic pause] One, I might suggest, is despair itself.

MONKEY IN MILOU MASK: Ardour in despair suggests Greek choruses, narcissicism, the Rapture, Live Aid, post-lactation overflow of the nasolacrimal duct, the Catholic Church, Royal funerals, a digitised loop of Laurel & Hardy dropping a piano down a staircase, Alcoholics Anonymous, Holocaust karaoke. All of which may have their place, but when the audience addressed is one of fellow-despairers (as it invariably is), what function do you then serve (as a writer or otherwise) beyond mutual consolation and ego massage of your social-cum-professional circle?

REEL-TO-REEL [end of reel]: Fact A: as demonstrated re: love, profitable love is our ultimate concern.

MONKEY IN MILOU MASK: Say wha? Whose ultimate concern? And by ‘profitable love’, do you mean the pursuit of biological stimulus through congregating with fellow humans? Is that why our faces are planted to this screen?

THE CHOIR OF ST. PAUL’S CATHEDRAL [on the Tannoy]: I saw the Lord, sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up,
and his train filled the temple.

WORLD-SPORT: Act 1, scene 4.1

MANILA, 2007

PREPARING TO COMMANDEER THE GRAND HOTEL ABYSS



[Reuters: l-r: MILOU, WILLY AUTONOMOUS, ARCHANGEL TOAL, ____, TINTIN, GAY ENOLA, HUMBROL DISASTER OLIVE DRAB, TABAQUI THE DISHLICKER, HADDOCK.]

[CITALOPRAM and THANATOS have proto-retrogressed to GAY ENOLA and WILLY AUTONOMOUS, respectively. TINTIN feels a premonition of another nosebleed. ____ worries that she is underdressed. MILOU has developed both Blitzkrieg and “deep battle”. HADDOCK emerges as in an erotic dream of the void.]

HADDOCK: Is it the possibility of change that is jointly despair and resistance?

[ARCHANGEL TOAL weeps demonstratively.]

MILOU: [licking lips.] how, dear ____, can such ardour be manufactured once a paralysing self-diagnosis of ‘stupidity’ has been made?

____: I am given cause to wonder what your, Milou, investments in a potential answer to this question are. Your text is merely a behaviour and therefore the character of the solicitude here is obscured to me. That is to say, I do not know whether you (or it, your text) implicitly profess to be yourself (itself) caught up in the dilemma proposed and are asking for a way out (a question therefore analogous to: how will I utilise this sheet of sandpaper to disintegrate this super-stardestroyer) or you propose this as some neutral sociological diagnostic of a material data-set ‘we’ are anonymously as participant in as any divulgible ‘you’. Why is the specificity of this intention important to me? You persistently drag out a humanist instinct in me which assumes that somewhere latent in the apparent neutrality of your interest in these issues lies the claim of an individuating instinct. The fact that you feel competent to stake a knowledge-claim in the normative manufacturing processes of ardour suggests a self-claim of a sort, if griddled-free of the identificatory complaisance so persistently vilified in your own practise. The pertinent negative question embedded in yours might be: If such ardour cannot be manufactured under the condition of knowing stupidity, what are the manufacturable forms of ardour left for the ethically conscious consumer?

TINTIN: I, for one, take issue with this idea that stupidity and ardour are somehow incompatible. Take that thing you had with the fence…

____: One, I might suggest, is despair itself. Haddock seems to think there is some cause for optimism here.

DELOYT$TUSH: I am only one individual glassy hillock on the sandpaper. I cannot know the world-historic significance of the micro-activity I contribute to the material process of history. I can only trust the limitations of my own competence to negate if I wish to attain the bleached out disintentionality of true prior being where I cannot be held responsible to know anything.

____: Same difference, then. Let’s do it and say we didn’t. Let’s not do it and say we did. Let’s not do it and say we didn’t.

GAY ENOLA: I can trick you into getting an erection.

WILLY AUTONOMOUS: Go on then.

GAY ENOLA: The government says it is al-Qaeda terrorists and the Taliban that are killing civilians and troops... the government's comments will please Nato.

WILLY AUTONOMOUS: [violently erect.] I fail to see how I have been ‘tricked’ here.

____: I don’t know, maybe I’m just not like you guys. I don’t feel the contradictoriness as some kind of constraint or bottle-neck in production. It’s just there as an attitude we can wring our hands in, or not.

[Enter TABAQUI THE DISHLICKER – all in one skisuit, socks, nerfhead etc.]

TABAQUI THE DISHLICKER: Look at it really fucking hard. Bastard scansion like screwing a claymore into amber, and all you could see was mirrored your desire for (qualitatively) not unreasonable love from a (quantitatively) not unreasonable handful of dolts. Be free to love yourself through loving me in your own way without fear of prejudice or intolerance, we both profit by the arrangement and the sum total of love is refracted always towards those who will love you for it in turn, i.e. ultimately for themselves. See loving me as an investment.

HADDOCK: .... . .-.. .--. -- . .-. .... --- -. -.. .- .... . .-.. .--. --..-- .... . .-.. .--. -- . .-. .... --- -. -.. .- .... . .-.. .--. -- . .-. .... --- -. -.. .- .... . .-.. .--. --..-- .... . .-.. .--. -- . .-. .... --- -. -.. .- .... . .-.. .--. -- . .-. .... --- -. -.. .- .... . .-.. .--. --..-- .... . .-.. .--. -- . .-. .... --- -. -.. .- .... . .-.. .--. -- . .-. .... --- -. -.. .- .... . .-.. .--. --..-- .... . .-.. .--. -- . .-. .... --- -. -.. .- .... . .-.. .--. -- . .-. .... --- -. -.. .- .... . .-.. .--. --..-- .... . .-.. .--. -- . .-. .... --- -. -.. .- .... . .-.. .--. -- . .-. .... --- -. -.. .- .... . .-.. .--. --..-- .... . .-.. .--. -- . .-. .... --- -. -.. .- .... . .-.. .--. -- . .-. .... --- -. -.. .- -.-- . .- .... --. . - .... . .-. --- ..- - --- ..-. -- -.-- .... . .- .-. –

HUMBROL DISASTER OLIVE DRAB: Hey, you’ve got friends. Don’t give up.

TABAQUI THE DISHLICKER: But what is love. Formally, the endless questioning as to the essence or identity of love is an air bubble for frantic lips away from particularity, which can be represented as roadkill or drowning on your last continue. The time has come to have a long, hard look at the facts (facts cannot be close-read so relax, your gaze must be lethal but not particularly attentive, unless you wish for it to appear so). Fact A: as demonstrated re: love, profitable love is our ultimate concern.

MILOU: Somebody give me a Viagra.

TABAQUI THE DISHLICKER: This is why I no longer care about behaviour. Behaviours are discreetly entrained by the managed social contents of space, which (like your behaviours) are always imperceptible until you cause a glitch in the system. You walk into a restaraunt and find yourself asking for food. The Ugandan proprietor looks at you as if you had asked for a titwank. Think about it.

[All become pensive. TABAQUI THE DISHLICKER and HUMBROL DISASTER OLIVE DRAB coincide and annihilate after dinner as if beautifully destined to do so.]

WORLD-SPORT: Act 3, scene 1

[Tintin’s sister’s bedroom. MILOU sleep-marching in a neat S-pattern. Faint, very faint smell of either catfood or catshit, too faint to be decided either way.]

ELECTRIFIED PERIMETER FENCE: Touch me.

____: Anytime [ ____ obliges.]

DELOYT$TUSH: Discontinue these affections immediately.

TINTIN: You’re back!

DELOYT$TUSH: I have been gone for the rest of your memory, of which this is in fact the last day. Your struggle between the absolute in the relative and the relative in the absolute resolves itself in electric blue sun-block all over the pitying lens. Get used to it. You will learn that the gulph is an infantile obsession. Common courtesy dictates that you at least pretend to understand it as something not worth wanting to understand.

TINTIN: Ok, I’m going with this. Hit me. What’s up.

____: [on floor, charred] I am fucking suffering here.

TINTIN: Aha. This could be valuable.

____: Come again?

TINTIN: No, I mean in terms of material.

____: Do I want to understand this?

DELOYT$TUSH: I put that there. How I resolve to flee you is none of the concern of your imagination. I’m doing this out of respect for myself.

TINTIN: Knuckle up, pendejo.

____: Even I can see the thematic poverty of this situation.

DELOYT$TUSH: If only there were some racist children around.

MILOU: [as if seized by an anvil-winged possum through 5-50,000 micrometers of forest green gelatine.] Outrage.


[On the landing carpet CITALOPRAM and THANATOS attempt to eat each other.]


THANATOS: I’m not even hungry.

CITALOPRAM: Yeah, that’s me.

THANATOS: You don’t seem to be eating me yet.

CITALOPRAM: You’ll digest in my gut for 7,000 years before you feel like you’ve finally been “eaten.”

THANATOS: If the thought of eating anything didn’t make me feel sick I’d eat you out of contempt. I’ll die of boredom before then.

CITALOPRAM: If you’re lucky. I’ve been eating you for quite some time. We’re all noticing improvements.

THANATOS: Fuck off. I’m supposed to be the sinister one. Listen to yourself.

CITALOPRAM: We are both sinister. That is to say, we are both leftist.

THANATOS: Why the hell can’t we even agree what a human is, then?

CITALOPRAM: It’s a tax thing. I may take two weeks or so to have a noticeable effect.

[a time passes.]

CITALOPRAM: How’s it going?

THANATOS: Can I get over you by eating you?

CITALOPRAM: That’s the way it usually works, yes.

THANATOS: Idealism makes a pretty noise when it’s stepped on.

CITALOPRAM: Yes, but it’s inaudible to me.

THANATOS: How can I love what you cannot hear?

CITALOPRAM: This is it, man, flying inch by painful inch into tomorrow’s sunrise crash get the fuck out localism. Buckle up.

THANATOS: Wake me with spring tears.

[three or four minutes linger interminably.]

THANATOS: Can I fuck you out of my heart?

CITALOPRAM: Delete me forever.

THANATOS: Bring it.

CITALOPRAM: I may take four weeks or so to have a noticeable effect.

THANATOS: What if I don’t want to be in love with anyone else?

CITALOPRAM: I may take twelve weeks or so to have a noticeable effect.

____: Natasha has just come up to the window from the courtyard and opened it wider so that the air may enter more freely into my room. I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere. It’s a good thing we know how to laugh at ourselves.

TINTIN: As class traitors?

CITALOPRAM: I may not have any noticeable effect in your case.

____: No, as a nation.

ELECTRIFIED PERIMETER FENCE: [to ____ ] I know it doesn't seem like it today, but things will get better. You will get over me eventually.

when the time comes, we could use this

WHAT FACEPLANT NEEDS DEEP UP

When the Buyaka's depleted or at least its effects, when Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors make you upchuck a 360-degree transparent saw wrapped in video paper you're induced on and which flanks down onto a launch pad that leads up into your last virgin pore, when the Patterns Eating Rally that we went to and died at remains forever over and we're all still alive, when this state's Fried Limestone karst fur blinds my runs for objective collection but which we keep on eating from b/c it tastes like such a novel Jelly, when the Ethereal Static gets like terminally sharp and it can't be freed up w/ whatever proto-redundant analogs for Protein Water offer b/c "they" Might Contain a Milk Ingredient, wiggers look we sound branded here eat this.

With Finite Love for my plural thou beyond the Lame Floss of Hyperial Static Cache, Chef Plant decries this common Storm Eating Receipt:

2 cups plain yogurt
1 red apple, minced
5 tablespoons fresh ginger, minced
1 tablespoon brown sugar
1 cup pulpy orange juice
2 tablespoons lemon juice
1 cup tornaydo beans, boiled and juiced

Mix vigorously, consume quickly

Sans tornahdo beans, the rest is enough if u just want to smell cloud.

ICH PREACHER CURLS

A: Taste in Brow: Is Life Worth Living?

B: The difficulty of presenting oneself as an I is roughly tied up with the habituation of (self-)critical negation, which seems to ward off senses of pride or as the internalization or embodiment of terrifying contradiction, and while I haven't read K's ed-op on 'the role of stupidity' as the role of some poets, those in a kind of ethical thinktank swatting at each impossibly horrible and hysterical online facticity that discloses itself to even casually intelligent consumers, I expect this identity-locale (however it reveals itself in self-biting and insurmountable bitter pleasure) would be impossibly wrong to think it could effectually inhibit any sense of moral setting. Moral essence arguments aside (in the DeutscheBank pig), there is no impervious rationale against a fully open (even lyrical) I representing itself as a locus of critical attention and this outwardness is not exclusive of inwardness, and fuck the Manichean epidermal consciousness anyway MAN I'm going to wrap my bird in butter cloth tomorrow and read Longfellow. Biscuit? Avoid excessive Lacanian rubbings.
C: If stupidity is the new ignorance then I am so fuckd. (cue: "Help Me Rhonda" by The Beach Boys")
D: Before Foucault, we learned in 6th grade on the swan rainbow of PBS siphoning pedagogy through a little African-American boy and a little Asian-American girl that knowledge IS power. This is a lie for all those who don't presently have power. This is a lie for all those who don't presently have knowledge.
E: Even that stalwart WCW expressed to his reader early in 'Spring and All' (or was it Kora In Hell, fuck) that by "I" he really meant "you" and yet what is the limit of blurring such dramatic boundaries, from which nothing can emit beyond the tally of typing fingers, for if the opening of a symbolic/rhetorical/poetic structure implicates a source, and the self-negation desires at least to avoid self-conscription (for Wyatt & Sidney, this was a matter of persuasion), if not to further combine with other sources of meaning through various lexical inventories and the practice of etymological digging in a valiant effort to extend our existential preponderance over and above the limits of the flesh (e.g. threshold of reason/imagination), then how can the the source not always betray the thoughts and actions resident in the poem?
F: If the S.I. Intl. was something of a vague ATTACK-phenomenology (dérive) then what would a more aggressive hermeneutics be? (as suggested in the inaugural FACEPLANT blogpost) How does one turn the interpretation of texts and the production of historical knowlege inside out and refract aspects of our social world which one would like to see change? Is it the possibility of change that is jointly despair and resistance?

STORMFOAM: a gulph nascent in your charity

I have previously been reluctant to seek professional help for what I am now told is severe clinical depression largely because my depression, at least over the last 2 or 3 months, has been the most consistently amusing source text available to me. I am told that my indulgence in cannabis “isn’t working, is it?”. How to make a wall of noise work, exactly. Or, more to the point: how to make it work for me. Given that there is at least a nominal reputation of successful aesthetic effects “working”(see the alleged overdetermination towards the bottom of paragraph 2), and the recently availingly complexified negation structure for “not-working-working” -“Mummy, I have been raped.” “Don’t you mean graped?” “No, there were a bunch of them.” - how exactly am I to conceive of this working in the context I am asked not to be facetious about, namely therapy?

It isn’t as simple as merely brushing aside state-mandate ghostride drugs rhetoric, they have their kind of point. The kind of work that weed indisputably facilitates is not operative on the therapeutic time-scale, e.g. months and years. I don’t live in this shape; life on that scale only ever exists in a mode of anticipation inextricable from judging the value of its event-contents, skeletally unliving like. Part of me really hopes you fill your sick bag when you read this. But I really don’t live at that measure, I live in splashes of three or four days that recover their interconnections anecdotally in my memory. So in what sense is working for a life I do not actually live a kind of working for me? The “I” is sitting here practically wetting itself waiting to be deconstructed conceptually, or at least to be remorselessly disaggregated into its various interest groups. The thing is, though, I really do find positive value in my sentimental insistence on the representability of this “I”, however dubious its ideological foundations. Only “I” can be depressed (see returns indicated above.) How can I make it not sound like some kind of confession, or at least a capitulation to the earnestness of the graph into which I was so tenderly plugged yesterday morning, when I say: no, really, depression is shit. I cried when I woke up this morning, no jokes. I want to be happy again. Really, they know what they’re talking about. I don’t want to seem like an ingrate. But a question like “has life seemed like it would be better off without you?” - how am I allowed to giggle when I am asked this and not feel like a fraud?

Anyhow, champions, all is well. This is the first day of the rest of my memory. Peace be with you all.

An Impromptu

[Spoken, from a cobweb-smothered dais in a former Methodist chapel – adjacent to, maybe even an antechamber of, the theatre in which World-Sport is being performed – by the disembodied voice (let us call it Milou’s Superego) whose thoughts occasionally resurface in the flotsam of Milou’s dialogue. A musty odour of clockwork determinism hangs in the air.]

MILOU’S SUPEREGO: The use of the word ‘farce’ was merely a riff on Marx’s (now trite?) line about history repeating itself first as tragedy and then as farce, except that now the site of repetition would be the vocabulary of Marxism itself: e.g. the use of such phrases as ‘late capitalism’, when there is little evidence that anything stands in the way of long-term capitalist continuation except environmental collapse; or the deployment of the get-out-of-discussion-free card labelled ‘Stalinist’ to avoid having to consider the implications of the failure of Communism in Eastern Europe.

[A dying PIGEON on a ledge twitches its wing.]

Let me rephrase a question: assuming that one accepts that the material co-ordinates of 2007 are substantially different from those of 1907, or even 1957 (vis-à-vis the further entrenchment of capitalist state power, and the declining relative importance of the written word as a medium for either agitation or entertainment), how are we to proceed without falling into just those wells of luxuriously miserable pessimism (rainbathing on the terrace of the penthouse suite at the Grand Hotel Abyss) that you quite reasonably caution against?

[A piece of loose masonry falls from somewhere up in the roof.]

In his recent editorial, a certain K-Suth refers to those who ‘satirise [authoritarian, conservative] thinking and its dismissal of passionate counterculture as adversarial resentment not by mounting a rational counterargument, but by becoming the stupid and resentful poet [let’s extend this to ‘individual’] Kristol [and his ilk] would most leeringly abominate.’

PIGEON: In this episode we show you how to charge your iPod (or other mp3 player) for up to 20 minutes using electrolytes derived from Gatorade or Powerade which are then stored within the cells of an onion.

MILOU'S SUPEREGO: In other words, having rejected the utopian ambitions of earlier generations as ideological, they create an aesthetic playground in which mimed subservience (or conspicuous pseudo-resistance) to the parameters set by domineering authority figures becomes a perverse source of surrogate pleasure (whip me with your neoliberal hard-headedness, big boy). It is an attitude which has arguably crept into the work not only of the American writers cited, but that of K.S. himself, and the younger circle/square to which ‘we’ might be said to be contributing.

[The PIGEON stops twitching. A haggard caretaker at the back farts and points to his watch, impatient to lock up the venue.]

I doubt that such an attitude can be sustained over a lifetime without devolving into dysfunctional, depressive silence (or Beckettian performance thereof). The alternative is to be an ‘indigenously stupid… disproportionate… consultant of the language of ardour in superfluity’, but how, dear ____, can such ardour be manufactured once a paralysing self-diagnosis of ‘stupidity’ has been made?

WORLD-SPORT: Act 1, scene 4

PAPUA NEW GUINEA, 1942

TINTIN:
------------------------------
------------------------------
------------------------------
--8--8-8-\-5-5-3--3-3-/-6-6---
--8--8-8-\-5-5-3--3-3-/-6-6---
--6--6-6-\-3-3-1--1-1-/-4-4---

____: [aside.] It’s like ETA - they grab you in a crowd and shoot you in the back of the head. If they come for me first I’ll be quiet, then employ staff writers. They’ll do the work and I’ll get to control the ethos.

MILOU: If we are living in a farcical historical moment, does that therefore mean that we are constrained to be actors in a farce?

____: This question can ask for at least four different kinds of answer. I’ll assume that as you’ve already employed the aesthetic predicate ‘farcical’ as being categorically available to history, you are not asking (i) whether or not we are ‘in’ a farce (as a ‘yes’ here would amount to little more than tautology). You have already effectively stated that we are in one, i.e. that that dramatic means of patterning ‘experience’ suffices to ethically describe something as grand as a ‘moment’. You must therefore be asking whether (ii) we are actors in this farce, and if so are we actors by dint of some kind of constraint (issuing from the objective farce external to us, presumably, our theatrical employment contract) (iii) then “is this constraint there and to be evidenced by the fact of (a) the farce and (b) our being actors,” or (iv) whether the constraint implicit in the farce forces us into being actors. I’m having a hard time identifying the deductive poles of the question.

MILOU: I leave the nuances of verse to you.

____: Ok. In order to foot the bill this kind of terminal pessimism runs up for itself in terms of moments spent in the already-reality (as not yet conclusively believed to be a hermetically determinate superstructure but afforded the possibility of being such by the credit-system of the unknowability of whether ‘proof’ of such determination is ever unideologically knowable), it has to provide a pretty good punchline in the qualifying infrastructural-historical explanation. I mean, that is, if you want St. Peter to click “enter” you’d better make him chuckle.

MILOU: Oh?

____: Well, I mean. Action or even acting doesn’t have to mean lobbing a brick through the AmEx lobby. Why don’t you get a subscription to FT?

[Milou considers fainting.]

____: And anyway, isn’t this starting to reek slightly of a kind of clockwork determinist model? Are you trying to force me into saying something nauseating about the script of this farce being unwritten? Or is the choice of ‘farce’ - as the language in which the contents of the ‘future’ (yes, what a trite entity) will inevitably be spewed up - enough to finally replace immanence as a necessary precondition of sense-valuation with a kind of auto-pessimismo fuelled by AESTHETICISM of all things?

TINTIN: Yeah, someone get him a cola or something.

ARCHANGEL TOAL: Bumbo claawt Iyah.

TINTIN:
------------------------------
------------------------------
------------------------------
--8--8-8-\-5-5-3--3-3-/-6-6---
--8--8-8-\-5-5-3--3-3-/-6-6---
--6--6-6-\-3-3-1--1-1-/-4-4---

You Don't See Very Many Dead Animals Lying Around, Part 6

Hey. Lotion smells the same because it doesn't have a brain. If lotion could like think then it would probly change its stink. Lotion is a metonym for all the stank bumf that coats the cultural mustard throbbing in it. As for Them who use It, lotion in their food won't actually do them in. All the mustard underneath it's getting wireless voltage data from an almost invisible but actually huge neutrino cash valve that hooks into a special prismatic light fixture used to generate pure UHT-8 schmear whenever Hadjis die in lots of 16 or more. We use these here our receipts to prove to us that we don't stink.

And then you burn toast to let the smoke out into the stairway to set off the general alarm and get your neighbors out of their flats. First impressions over crisps as you listen to the firetrucks. If you get another notice from the agency saying your neighbors have officially complained about the noise you make, they'll evict you from your flat. You've been cooking stuff like the possum you grabbed out the dumpster nuts first in deep oil in a wok and even though you cut the nuts off first that possum wailed till you put him in the stove with their nuts in his mouth. Good work Milou.

WORLD-SPORT: Act 1, scenes 2-3

Scene 2

[Inside one of TINTIN’s cells. SURGEON TEMPLAR and SURGEON CRIME fly X-wings and communicate via radio. In their foggy distance, a chrome sphinx one hundred times the size of Egypt floats as in an infinite expanse of maple syrup. The sphinx’s feet occasionally fire retrorockets, allowing it to shift axial positioning but not to move forwards, backwards, left, right, up or down.]

SURGEON CRIME: What did this shit?

SURGEON TEMPLAR: Check out that rupture [motions to ten o’clock high. A vague crimson darkness forms a spiral there.] Something spat this shit in here. Ok. We’ve got to get some tweezers. Port.

[Snap cut to:]

Scene 3

[TINTIN lies on an operating table, barely conscious. A myriad fibre-optic cables flow out of his lower back and into ALDERAAN, roughly the size of a golfball. Control panels everywhere. Sheets of perspex with glowing white lines being traced with TV remotes by unpaid extras with giant plastic bellends for hats. A droid croaks repetitiously, something sounding like “sin the system”. At TINTIN’s side sits BANG&OLUFSEN (MILOU’s 12 year-old nephew), who has fixed TINTIN’s gaze with a police siren and three fire poi.]

BANG&OLUFSEN: Come hither, little one.

TINTIN: …for dinner?

BANG&OLUFSEN: Come hither, little one, and I’ll whisper in your ear.

TINTIN: I had this incredible haddock chowder. [Becoming animated] And crusty bread. Then no-one would pay me to eat the spider I’d unstuck from the grease on the extractor fan with a crisp, so I did it for free.

VOICE FROM INTERCOM: Crime! It’s the reed that birthed it! Look at that alazarin backfeed trailing its entry trajectory! You see those clouds leeching out? Let’s take a closer look. Krrrk. I don’t know captain, it looks kinda hairy up there. Krrrk. You’re not going to get shit in the afterlife with that attitude, Crime. Krrrk. Sir I’ve got kids to hang around. Krrrk. It’s not that great, son, trust me. Krrrk.

[BANG&OLUFSEN, irritated, walks briskly to the intercom, snaps it off, turns round to TINTIN and smiles.]

BANG&OLUFEN: Excuse me. [laughs.]

TINTIN: But she’s always like that, particularly when I stick gum on the wall beside my bed.

BANG&OLUFSEN: Child. Hush.

TINTIN: Anyway, she comes back from her Mother’s place in Cardiff.

BANG&OLUFSEN: Hush, little one.

TINTIN: Four fucking hours, four – fucking – hours I spend waiting there without any trousers or bogroll in the house before she can be bothered to call me. [BANG&OLUFSEN walks over to the ‘morphine’ dial on a panel above TINTIN’s head and turns it to 4.5, returns and pulls up a swivel chair, sits backwards on it.] I’m stuck with the fucking lighthouse family booming upstairs, I can’t see straight cause the salad…salad bowl…Wednesday? [relaxes.]

BANG&OLUFSEN: Good. That feels better, doesn’t it? Now listen closely, I’m going to tell boogaloo a little story.

TINTIN: Sick.

BANG&OLUFSEN:

HOW THE NUMCHUCKS LEARNT LUCID DREAMING

Yahoo Inc. on Tuesday settled a lawsuit filed against the Internet company by Chinese dissidents who accused it of complicity in their jailing, according to a court filing. Yahoo (YHOO) had been sued earlier this year in California by Wang Xiaoning, Shi Tao and Yu Ling for allegedly providing Chinese authorities with personal information that led to Shi and Wang's imprisonment and torture. In a joint stipulation of dismissal filed

TINTIN: [sings, softly at first.] go-nah be…for-evah you and me…

BANG&OLUFSEN: shhh. Oh, yeah…filed in U.S. District Court in Oakland, Calif., on Tuesday, Yahoo and the plaintiffs say they have reached a "private settlement understanding," though they disclosed no details. Yahoo agreed to bear the dissidents' legal costs, according to the filing. In a prepared statement, Yahoo Chief Executive Jerry Yang said that

TINTIN: …in the sky of love, above…

BANG&OLUFSEN: Will you…

[Enter DELOYT&TUSH, out of breath, violently and clumsily through the swing doors.]

DELOYT&TUSH: ____’s stable, no thanks to your pricking around. Milou’s in there now, dipping his biscuits in his tea for him. He’ll probably never dance again.

BANG&OLUFSEN: If you don’t mind, I had just started…

DELOYT&TUSH: Who’s this little man?

TINTIN:…remember november remember remember…

BANG&OLUFSEN: I…

DELOYT&TUSH: Beat it, kid.

[Exit BANG&OLUFSEN, furious. DELOYT&TUSH sits down.]

DELOYT&TUSH: It was just before the reed launched himself into you and just after you told him to celebrate his identity-fraud in private that it hit me. Like a sack full of typewriters it hit me. Fantasy is the aesthetic envelope that focusses my nerfcharge into the beam of impossible object-choices, but the good ones, too! I cannot, Tintin, cannot forego this enterprise. Must not. The force of my desire is limitless in this zone, multiplied exorbitantly because I am impervious to harm and I can therefore afford to misjudge my capacity to effect change in the real world, which is minimal. But in this optative realm how I can undo history [DELOYT&TUSH leans forward an increment too far on the swivel seat, which collapses forward spilling him across TINTIN, severing the bundle of cables that enter his lower back.]

TINTIN:…felt a plant-like readiness for death…

DELOYT&TUSH: [examining the cables.] What the shit?

[Fade out]

A Remark on the Course of the Drama, while awaiting the next Scene Change

In Scene 1 below, Tintin appears to advise Milou that action is the best antidote to inertia.

If we are living in a farcical historical moment, does that therefore mean that we are constrained to be actors in a farce?

(Most of the young-ish contributors to the latest Quid appear to assume that the answer is yes. Whether they are in any position to know is something to be questioned.)

[A mobile phone goes off somewhere towards the back. A man in the adjacent seat watches impatiently as the dim outline of a papier-mâché ventricle is wheeled off-stage.]

THE ONLY RECIPE I WOULD SEND IS A RECIPE FOR DISASTER ARE YOU WITH ME PEOPLE 20 DRAGUNOV MANUALS EACH W/ THE NAME OF A FOREIGN SHOP KEEPER 2 KNOCK OFF

from John Cayley
date Nov 9, 2007 7:37 PM
subject Writer's Recipes

1. Ira Lightman: ira@unforgettable.me.uk

2. John Cayley: cayley@shadoof.net

Please send a recipe to the person whose name is listed in the number 1 position above (even if you don't know her or him) and it should preferably be something quick, easy, without rare ingredients. Actually, THE BEST is the one you know in your head, and can type out and send right now.

Then, copy this letter into a new email, move my name to the number 1 position, and put your name in the number 2 position. Only your name and mine should appear in this list when you send out your email. Send this to 20 friends.

If you have already received this from another source or cannot do it within 5 days, please let me know so it will be fair to those participating.

Many thanks,
johnIra

WORLD-SPORT: Act 1, scene 1.

[Inside the tepid left ventricle of Prince Walid bin Talal bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud. Pork bellies settle at 83.75. TINTIN, MILOU and DELOYT & TUSH scud around on jetskis coloured catachan green, space wolves grey and scab red, respectively. CLING-FILM is swept with the flux back and forth from the aortic to the mitral valve.]

MILOU: Surely there is no shortage of contention and fraction in this microcosm to begin with? But all that said, I would potentially be interested in signing on, although my own thoughts on most subjects (both literary and political) are almost numbingly defeatist at this stage (plagued by that irksome elf named 'Why bother, you impotent middle-class parasite?').

TINTIN: You should *do it* for the salary. This will work in your favour, e.g. as an excuse - when you are confronted with accusations of belonging to a terrorist organisation you can say you were just doing it for the fanny.

MILOU: It seems a little too tribal, in a 'how many Marxists does it take to change a lightbulb' sort of way. Trying to dispel the spectre of academic irrelevance through force of numbers. We repeat ourselves annually.

TINTIN: Don't worry, take your time. We'd like a kind of hands-on feel. It's important to assume our readership isn't the kind that can keep its ego starved of something to relate to for more than seven words.

CLING-FILM: It is with strange malice that I distort the world.

MILOU: Do delete me if deemed too conspicuously empty of content.

TINTIN: If you do not wish to middle-manage personal reflexions, prodromal life theses, targetless character assassinations etc. into your 'content' as I choose to, if you feel just too squeamish about letting a mutated prismatoid of what is indefensibly *you* trot into the breach, that is ok. We have lots of room for other kinds of focus.

MILOU: Not sure if I believe in the existence of the 'indefensibly *you*', if that term is supposed to indicate more than an amalgam of genetic tendencies and institutionally-inculcated prejudices.

TINTIN: It isn’t.

MILOU: Your enthusiasm is becoming infectious.

TINTIN: I know. I like the idea so much my nose has started to bleed.

DELOYT & TUSH: [whisper aside.] I can only feel inside the logics of this pathology when I’m high. I think this is what happens. I superglue your face to every moment of real-world fatigue. In this escape route out of the reality-principle I jettison immanent cognizance of my own real problems. This liberation is projected and intensified onto you as a black hole for jealousy. It is only the force of my own desire to exit a material field in which you do not operate locally that floods it with your phenomenal influence. But what comes first, fatigue or desire? In either case, I am sorry to have treated you as an alibi for my life, particularly as you never behaved as one during the brief period of our association.

CLING-FILM: [compellingly.] What are 'usufructuary' rights, and how is the concept of usufruct related to the problem of sustainability?



DELOYT & TUSH: I am letting you go. [looking in mirror.] I am a whole human being. I am letting you go. I choose B.

TINTIN: What? A mangled set of bollocks over three pacmen, a snake and a spiked planet? It’s C, blatantly.

MILOU: May I provide a multiple-choice answer?

[Enter via aortic valve ____ proceeded immediately by ____’s temple, the barrel of an Uzi and the hand of the Calpol 6+ kid.]

____: It’s over! Your point’s been made! What about those innocent people out there?

TINTIN: [packing heat.] Step aside.

____: Shoot! Shoot me!

[**&^%-5.98 / -1.37%%%!!!% =$$$ etc.**.]

[...]

____: It’s cold.

TINTIN: Insh’ Allah. I did what was necessary and I won’t apologise for it.

MILOU: Is that some kind of a joke?

TINTIN: I don’t see anyone laughing here, General. Well, I mean, apart from that jizzed-on biltong ring vaguely resembling a chocolate krispy kreme [TINTIN gestures towards ____ who writhes on the ground in the two pints of blood already escaped from his kneecaps.], he looks pretty amused.

DELOYTE & TUSH: [to ____. ] How much flexion do you need?

A REED PUMPED TIP TO TIP WITH MDMA: I just…want to be touched.

[oboes sound.]

MILOU: Stand down.

[violins sound.]

MILOU: This is a technology which could produce missiles as well. Stand down.

[French horn sounds.]

MILOU: A possible way to avoid a possible bomb…

____ :[to DELOYTE & TUSH, sputtering.] When we were thirteen we used to lie on the sofabed in the front room shooting the tourists on the piazza beneath with our BB guns. Later we’d take it in turns to masturbate and tell each other stories. It didn’t matter that we were both guys. Back then there was something automatically erotic about the other’s imagination. Each incidental detail became hypersexual, the baseball cap worn backwards by the girl with chin-length peroxide blond hair sitting backwards on the swivel chair smoking a cigarette and looking at me while I apparently felt a plant-like readiness for death, I still think about it sometimes. [Blacks out.]

TINTIN: [to ____. ] God, you’re a jackass.

Fade out

Socialism
Between You and Hamish McLaren

Today at 1:18pm

Hey Jow,

we spoke briefly a few evenings ago at some party in Brixton. As I recall you were quite interested in the ideas of Marxism. What attracted you to the ideas initially? Is it something you are looking to pursue?

Balls in Your Court

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Daughter + Mom = Vagina Power



Nuke's Back Sack Says Eat Bags

Shark-Meat-Raffle-Picket-Line-Sensation

(This is supposed to be animated so click on it if it's not.)

We better get ahold of some preservative copy to print round the edges of our carbon receipts. Or at least crop the top mother fuckers. Thought plantains were cheap in Hackney which I said to the clerk she replied that's not what her customers say. Safou - Dacryodes edulis - African plum is sold in the Marcadet neighborhood of Paris from African women in the street sitting on crates with a duffel bag each full of the stuff. Must come in on a line. Maybe they rent the bags. At every corner round the proper markets, the plum was only sold by the women, black market. Then a rumour and a news report about a pregnant women beat up by the cops and maced and arrested a few blocks south in La Goute d'Or, she was selling goods without a license on the street. Safou two for a Euro.


"The African plum, a tree indigenous in the humid lowlands of West Africa, has its principal value in its fruit. The leathery, shelled stone is surrounded by a pulpy wall, about 5 mm thick, which is the portion eaten either raw or cooked in the form of a sort of butter. It has a mild smell of turpentine and is oily. The fruits are boiled in salt water, fried, or roasted over charcoal. The fruit pulp yields about 48 per cent edible oil, is rich in vitamins and contains a range of amino acids." (http://www.tve.org/ho/doc.cfm?aid=953)

Finite Love don't feed us, cadets, and there ain't no Actual Tricep Tree you can shake up to exchange for these atrophied snakes that our bones talk down at. But do we take it all down or do we take it all up? Anonymous Wiggers getting fed from some shit that I dribbled on her nape. I need my own cape to gulp our vacuum shape's crepe.

Flash. Cell phones full of Coltan. Watching "Congo" in Youtube installments and trying out a mustard bath (you'll never try it twice). Crystal-powered lasers on cock weights grinning out of hot air balloons fulla ape dudes with their own cock weights and coke to spare, gaping. I got this landing pad I like to crash my gear down on and up in. Kowalski's meat latté and meat sandwich on meat bread, crackers.

Delightfully yours until my ass begins leaking past the horizontal wall,
Invective Ray

"All the same you need an army--for hunting. Hunting academics--"
"Yes. There are academics on the island."
All three of them tried to convey the sense of the pink live thing struggling in the creepers.
"We saw--"
"Squealing--"
"It broke away--"
"Before I could kill it--but--next time!"
Jack slammed his knife into a trunk and looked round challengingly.
The meeting settled down again.
"So you see," said Ralph, "We need hunters to get us meat. And another thing."
He lifted the shell on his knees and looked round the sun-slashed faces.
"There aren't any grownups. We shall have to look after ourselves."
The meeting hummed and was silent.
"And another thing. We can't have everybody talking at once. We'll have to have 'Hands up' like at school."
He held the conch before his face and glanced round the mouth.
"Then I'll give him the conch."
"Conch?"
"That's what this shell's called. I'll give the conch to the next person to speak. He can hold it when he's speaking."
"But--"
"Look--"
"And he won't be interrupted: Except by me."
Jack was on his feet.
"We'll have rules!" he cried excitedly. "Lots of rules! Then when anyone breaks 'em--"
"Whee--oh!"
"Wacco!"
"Bong!"
"Doink!"

A Concerned Reader Writes...

From a PO Box in the Channel Islands:



‘Sir,

You state in your latest post that: ‘This isn't the SWP [incidentally implying a slur on that estimable organisation, which has done so much to advance contemporary electoral politics, or would have done if it weren’t for that wrecker Galloway]. This isn't a crying club where we share our 'common' experience of alienated intentionality’. If neither party nor club, then what, exactly? A symposium? A cénacle? An informal Junior Common Room chat? What would be the appropriate manner of responding if I stubbed out my cigar in the gulph of your port glass? And how will it concern the sleek-shouldered blog-rollers of Minnesota?

Your diffusely sucky and ballistic &c.’

DISAMBIGUATION HOOP: ornately a flower to be pissed on.

I propose, over against the haptic image of gleeful canine tonguing viz. "let's talk about literary trends, let's eat the leaf pie straight from the deep freeze", the following re-reading. For "poem" see "psychopathology", that is to say 'the' (hoho) gulph is a positive phenomenal datum, it is given. Its being given inaugurates the crisis you see yourself fit enough in to encircle like cake icing or molluscs, not the other way round. Epistemology isn't first, it doesn't 'discover' this thing - it merely prettifies it with credibility. I don't know. Chew the fucking iceberg. This isn't a 'cleaving' thing. You think, tediously, that e.g. coitus or love might stand in to suck up the gap but even if we do not know that this is not the case, why the hell should it automatically make the to do list? This isn't the SWP. This isn't a crying club where we share our 'common' experience of alienated intentionality, that crass nominalism isn't taking us anywhere but back to "pack of green rizlas mate" e.g. I see what you want but have no idea what it is that you intend to mean. Transmitters and receivers flipped blissfully to 'later'. Maybe a more flexible mode of receptivity is ATTACK hermeneutics. Get out your knives, my bed's already full of them. You scorn my bewailing the passing of the golden days. No shit, my bed is full of knives. You smugly accuse a glass of milk of being 'opaque'.

I do need to sort out the reply posts sitch, tho, and not (at all) in the interests of some kind of democratically flavoured analgasm I have no intention of sharing with you. No, what I want is for ballistics to kiss in the same room, with the lights on.

Bad reflexes lounging in amenities: JUNKSHORE beta release.

Guys; seriously,

My life is thematically committed to GULPHZOOM cracks each and every, Sanskrit ghostbox to etiolate ASCII harpscratch, but will this tumescent venus fly trap choke out the correct adhesive protocols? Will it do, comrades? Can asymmetric syncretism be done? Or is this hopeful new ordering of properties nothing better than a next soon-to-appear-marvellously-dispossessed syntax? The intensive relegation of our lingual stress skirmish– the aural texture of your saliva threatening to detonate the cheapo root canals of Bamiyan – to the trimmed lawn bureaucracy of ‘meaning’ obviously shone its maglite in the joyfully underage drinking face of the ‘para’ prefix last night. But it patently wasn’t invested with any conception of speech-as-doing qua value theory, let alone any reflexive appraisal for its pointfullness quotient of the generic importance of doing-whatever. Still, fear gripped you! The negative squirtgun willing out cathexis, you were hypnotized and beautiful, objectively all that can be observed was a pressure differential. Yet you talk about projection as frequently as fear gets squirted onto the moulding t-shirt wedged between your bed and the damp. We all know which two immiscible agencies doing gets to pay its bills: reformulate this action sentence ‘intersubjectively’ and see the point. The point isn’t that.



The real point is: can we write a poem that will persuade your discourse pragmatics rescrambling hardware to commit ethical suicide? And if/when this gulph voiceactivates hypercolour and fullsail, letting up poesy as that which you generally call “neurotic”, which of us will be there to trigger the wiretap?

Easy!