“Master? Let’s not use that word. Let’s say I’m your benefactor, or your mentor. That sounds nicer, doesn’t it?”
An usher dropped a flashlight and slipped on it. The faux pas started a chain reaction. The usher toppled onto a spectator. The spectator dropped his novel and bumped into the spectator next to him. That spectator dropped her novel and bumped into her neighbor, who dropped his novel. And so on. A wave of novel dropping spread across the theater. It triggered other modes of asynchronous dropping. Musicians dropping instruments. Blackjack dealers dropping chips. Makeup technicians dropping hairdryers. And so on. The communal gaffe was brought to a conclusion by a possum dropping from the ceiling onto the stage between The Sans Merci and Macavity Cat. The possum wasn’t dead. It struggled for breath. The Sans Merci pitied it.
Shrugging off the pelt of Old Deuteronomy, Macavity Cat stomped on it. The possum deflated like a football.
…The Sans Merci skinned and defleshed Macavity Cat with makeshift Wermacht daggers that morphed from its fingernails.
The razorwire skeleton beneath Macavity’s hide was more anthropoid than human or feline. Two broad, membranous wings sprouted from its thorax. Macavity took flight, did three revolutions around the heavens of the theater to gain momentum, then kamikazed into The Sans Merci…They rolled across the stage and out of view. There was a backstage brawl that the theatergoers, lacking the energy or desire to retrieve their reading material from the floor, listened to with a modicum of curiosity. They clicked when Macavity’s skeleton was hurled back onto the stage in pieces. The Sans Merci reappeared. The overdecorated shirt of its uniform had been torn off, revealing an impressive hypermuscular torso that bled from deep scratches. A caricature of The Sans Merci’s own face had been tattooed onto its chest.
One piece of Macavity Cat was still alive. The Sans Merci finished the player in a feat of extreme ekphrasis…
Until now, Codename Prague had more or less enjoyed the play-that-wasn’t-a-play-within-the-play, even if it didn’t make sense. Just being at the theater again felt good. But the manner in which The Sans Merci had executed Macavity Cat riled him. He stood and shouted, “You can’t do that! That sort of ekphrasis isn’t ! I don’t care what country this is! You’re under arrest! I’m taking you to Amerika!”
“I’ve never been to Amerika!” said The Sans Merci.
“Leave him alone!” said Dr Teufelsdröchk.
“What’s an ekphrasis!” said the Beauty/Ugly monster.
“It’s a graphic, ultraviolent depiction of a visual work of reality!”” said an usher.
“That’s Vincent Prague!” said a nobody.
“Can I have your autograph!” said a nobody.
“Anshlag!” said the production manager.
“Do they have poets in Amerika!” said The Sans Merci.
“Poetry died with the modernists!” said an usher.
“The poet laureates of the postreal era are rappers, country music singers, car salesmen and people who make their mouths into big O-shapes!” said a percussionist. “Like this!” He made his mouth into an O-shape.
“Get your ass down here!” said Codename Prague.
“The institution that is now erroneously called the State generally classifies people only into two groups: citizens and aliens!” said The Sans Merci.
“What’s he talking about!” said a nobody.
“It’s a mnemonic flashback!” said Dr Teufelsdröchk. “It’s perfectly normal!”
“The projection of memory is a symptom of insanity!” said a stagehand.
“Ditto!” said Bustopher Jones.
“Get your hands in the air!” said Codename Prague.
“Saturn is fallen, am I too to fall?” said The Sans Merci.
“Don’t make me come up there and get you!” said Codename Prague.
“Kumite!” said The Sans Merci.
“Ekphrasis!” said Codename Prague. He stormed down the aisle.
“Ruuun!” said Dr Teufelsdröchk.
Everybody took the doktor seriously; cats and band members and spectators and ushers and even the production manager and his entourage ran out of the theater in a crazed exodus. The Sans Merci darted offstage. Codename Prague chased after him. Dr Teufelsdröchk turned and threw up his arms and shook his head at the empty theater. Empty except for two monsters, one of which waved at him.
“Wha—?” Stunned, he marched up the aisle. “Who are you? You are not my assistants. You are imposters.”
The Truth/Untruth monster frowned. “How can you tell the difference?”
“I know the difference,” snapped the doktor. “Difference is the payload of identity…”
20
In Outer Space, a Ceramic Mannequin without Arms & a Cracked Foot
tumbled into a Disnified black hole.
And Dr Hans Reinhart said, “Something caused all this. But what caused…the cause?”
29
Passagenwerk
[EDITORIAL NOTE: This chapter should be deleted from the book. Or this chapter should be the whole book. Don’t fuck with your readers, moron.][3]
*
“The nonexistent text is the subject of the present study.” Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing (1989).
*
“The figure of wax is properly the setting wherein the appearance
*
“Under the strange nebulous envelopment, wherein our [Doktor] has now shrouded himself, no doubt but his spiritual nature is nevertheless progressive, and growing: for how can the ‘Son of Time,’ in any case, stand still? We behold him, through those dim years, in a state of crisis, of transition: his mad Pilgrimings, and general [dis]solution into aimless Discontinuity, what is all this but a mad Fermentation; wherefrom, the fiercer it is, the clearer product will one day evolve itself?” Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (1830-31).
*
“A poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence, because he has no identity, he is continually in for—and filling—some other body. The sun, the moon, the sea, and men and women who are creatures of impulse, are poetical, and have about them an unchangeable attribute; the poet has none, no identity…[image of a flaccid penis]…If, then, he has no self, and if I am a poet, where is the wonder that I should say I would write no more?…But even now I am perhaps not speaking from myself, but from some character in whose soul I now live. I am sure, however, that this next sentence is from myself. I feel your anxiety…” John Keats, Letter to Richard Woodhouse (1818).
*
To what degree does sexuality figure into the narratives of Dr Seuss? Note how virtually all of his characters resemble sex organs that have been hacked or ripped off of their host bodies. (Ref. Jean-Luis Sçrapenut for a discussion of genital mutilation rep. comic/cartoon humanoids.)
*
“Macavity, Macavity, there’s no one like Macavity, / There never was a Cat of such deceitfulness and suavity. / He always has an alibi, and one or two to spare: / At whatever time the deed took place—MACAVITY WASN’T THERE! / And they say that all the Cats whose wicked deeds are widely known /… Are nothing more than agents for the Cat who all the time / Just controls their operations: the Napoleon of Crime!” TS Eliot, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939).
*
“iFFFFPFP.”[4] Adolph Hitler, Obersalzberg (1942).
*
“Since Hitler’s day the armory of technical devices at the disposal of the would-be
dictator has been considerably enlarged. As well as the radio, the loudspeaker, the moving picture camera and the rotary press, the contemporary propagandist can make use of television to broadcast the image as well as the voice of his client, and can record both image and voice on spools of magnetic tape. Thanks to technological progress, Big Brother can now be almost as omnipresent as God. Nor is it only on the technical front that the hand of the would-be dictator has been strengthened. Since Hitler’s day a great deal of work has been carried out in those fields of applied psychology and neurology which are the special province of the propagandist, the indoctrinator and the brainwasher. In the past these specialists in the art of changing people’s minds were empiricists. By a method of trial and error they had worked out a number of techniques and procedures, which they used very effe[k]tively without, however, knowing precisely why they were effe[k]-tive. Today the art of mind-control is in the process of becoming a science. The practitioners of this science know what they are doing and why. They are guided in their work by theories and hypotheses solidly established on a massive foundation of experimental evidence. Thanks to the new insights and the new techniques made possible by these insights, the nightmare that was ‘all but realized by Hitler’s totalitarian system’ may soon be completely realizable.” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited (1958).
*
The pop culture apocalypse inculcates endless unspoken certainties. But the real problems stem from the uncertainties that onanistic talking heads articulate without possessing a mature enough historical, epistemological or linguistic character. Singing like a caged bird is for evolved drag queens. One must speak before one can sing. A bleached white wiggerization of the human condition usurps all forms of erudition. Popsong dreams + juvenile scenarios/episodes/dialogue/ant(I)gyros + high modernist mxyzptlk. The only cure is Liquid Panic. Thus the cry of the Wichita Lineman: “I can [only] hear you through the [wine]…”
*
“But how many solar anuses does a clockwork man require to achieve the perfect fulguration? One likes to at least approach perfection in this regard. As Georges Bataille writes: ‘Yakety yakety Français blah blah blah Français blankety blank Français Français nom de plume et mise en abyme et cock-a-doodle-do etc. etc.’ This passage effe[k]tively illustrates the Dieselmotor of all written, imagistic and oral texts and the authors that produce them. More importantly, Bataille provides us with a schematic for a healthier form of suicide. One doesn’t like to kill oneself in an unhygienic fashion. One likes clean hands, empty bowels, and so forth.” Betty Lomax, Inventor of the Somethingorother Machine (1,490 AR).
*
“Upon my asking what the word urinate reminded her of, she replied: terminate, the eyes, with a razor, something red, the sun.” Georges Bataille, trans. Joachim Neugroschel, Story of the Eye (1928).
*
“No more than three glasses of wine or three beers per week.” Jørgen de Mey via ghost writer Scott Hays, The Action Hero Body (2005).
*
Apropos L. Ron Hubbard in Dianetics (1950): “the scent of turkey might not only smell good to everybody, it might smell good on the same olfactory wavelength to everybody, assuming that everybody has dianetically rinsed (and thus optimized) their minds of all fruitless aberrations (e.g. neuroses, phobias, psychoses, etc.) and become clears. The[5] problem[6] with[7] life[8] is[9] the[10] noncleared[11] individual[12] or[13] aberree.[14]” Ref. Hubbard’s incl. of footnoted “words that are sometimes misunderstood…as an aid to the reader.…Other definitions can be found in various dictionaries” (ix).
*
Sound of a Revving Motorcycle. Sam Waterson, Law & Order (1994-2033). Recall Waterson as Nick Calloway in The Great Gatsby (1974) and his contention that “the role was demanding. I’ve never had to try on so many white suits in my life. And they all itched something terrible. That’s why I refer to 1974 as the Year of the Itchy White Suits whenever 1974 pops up in conversation.”
*
“Laughing with increasing animation, I turn on the faucet, dampen a washcloth in warm water and begin to remove the makeup. The mascara, the lipstick, this powdery white mask—I wipe it from the skin of my face. THE END.” DH Anonymous, I, Alex (1996).
*
“THE WIDE WORLD NO. 1. Mixing with the thousand pursuits & passions & objects of the world as personified by Imagination is profitable & entertaining. These pages are intended at this their commencement to contain a record of new thoughts (when they occur); for a receptacle of all the old ideas that partial but peculiar peepings at antiquity can furnish or furbish; for tablet to save the wear & tear of weak Memory & in short for all the various purposes & utility real or imaginary which are usually comprehended under that comprehensive title Common Place Book.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journal (1820). Emerson had an asymmetrical face.
*
“The question mark is what’s interesting. The answer is stupid.” Hampton Fancher, Dangerous Days: Making Blade Runner (2007).
*
“Within its alkaline walls I uncovered deserts of vast paternities. They stood in a circle and fucked one another. I was taken aback. I wasn’t expecting this. Outside the scream of a hog unseated the smalltalk of birds. I remembered the Netherlands. I remembered the afterlife. Furniture is an adequate means of reposition—that’s what I told myself. I wanted to know why they were so hotly engaged in sexual congress. I placed a megaphone to my lips and asked them. My question unseated the scream of the hog. Then I felt the kiss of a tire iron on my exposed, pulsing, purple cerebellum.” Danny Ikea, The Psychic Ramparts of Trailer Fantasies (1,700,025 AR)
*
“It’s dark.” Figure from the Dark Ages (c. 475-1000)
“I just shake the buildings out of my sleeves.” Frank Lloyd Wright, Source and Date Unknown.
*
“Everything went to [expletive] when the Greenbergs came home and caught me taking a nap in their bed.
*
The production of writing is the production of a code. That goes for any production. To produce something is to encode it. Everything else entails an act of decoding, denuding, deleuzing…
*
“And a rinky dinky do to you!” Hong Kong Phooey voice-over perf. Scatman Crothers, Hong Kong Phooey (1974-76). Crothers passed away in 1986 at the age of 76. His name has nothing to do with feces or scatology but is a ref. to scat singing. Jack Nicholson nailed him in the chest with an ax in The Shining (1980). Hammer blood surged from the wound. Crothers played the drums in a speakeasy. He appeared on Sanford & Son (1972-77) and did a ski-dat-ba-bi-ba-dop-pop-pop with Redd Foxx. He appeared in Zapped! (1982), starring Scott Baio, and Coonskin (1975), starring an animated African-American rabbit. He reified yet problematized African-Amerikan stereotypes. He didn’t watch cartoons. He shaved his head with a machete. He looked askance at himself in the mirror. Vietnam troubled him. Indiana and traffic and nicotine fits troubled him. But he was happy. But he was sad. He was the saddest asshole in Amityville.
“The dark hole of meaning punctuates The Unobtainable like a misplaced comma splice.” Britney Spears-Mahmood, Interview with Kalypso Shadrach, The Red Sky at Morning Show (2040).
*
Cyberspace as a dead matrix, a petrified vacuum. A burnt waffle of nothingness. “Cyberspace is indeed an enclave of a new sort, a subjectivity which is objective and which, like Luhmann’s systems theory, but also like the structuralism and poststructuralism which preceded it, once more does away with the ‘centered subject’ and proliferates in new, post-individualistic ways.” Frederic Jameson, Arc
heologies of the Future (2005). Consider swapping this passage with an excerpt from the Fat Boys’ song “All You Can Eat.”
*
Shot of sphenpalatine ganglioneuralgia (trans. margarita brain-freeze)…Steam rises from a soft blue swimming pool at night on the bubbled roof of a spacescraper in 2022 Los Angeles, Kalifornia (1993; ref. Brad Pitt’s best performance). White tables surround the pool. Aesthetes in bikini briefs sit there and eat the Finger Food of Astronauts.
*
“Not on Morality, but on Cookery, let us build our stronghold: there brandishing our frying pan, as censer, let us offer sweet incense to the Devil, and live at ease on the fat things he has provided for his Elect!” Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (1830-31).
*
—this is an exegesis of the dreamworld of a narratological Scylla and Charybdis. Failure to adequately perform, process and interpret this exegesis may result in green sunsets and inchoate port-a-potties. Don’t wait for the lawyers to sort things out. You can’t sue a port-a-potty. Smiles, on the other hand, are a different story…I decided to take my smile to court. “I didn’t authorize the smile,” I told the judge. “I’m a sad, sad person. Why would I smile?” My smile’s attorney guffawed. “That’s entirely beside the point, your honor,” she said. “Remand.” “Remand!” I shouted. My attorney punched me as hard as he could. “Your honor,” he said, “remand is an insult. A crime has been committed. If it pleases the court, the prosecution asks that the Accused be imprisoned without bail until such a time that—” “That’s enough, counselors,” interrupted the judge. A smile overwhelmed his face. He stared down at it in disbelief…One thing always leads to another but cause and effekt are altogether divergent, not to mention endangered, species…To make a fist and not swing it. To drown in a puddle of True Romance. TRACKING SHOT across an obsidian black ocean. The sky overhead is the color of Spectravision, tuned to a dead mammal…A blast of radio static interrupts the narrative…“OK we’re back, folks. Give a big round of applause for our first guest, some asshole nobody knows! [Clap track.] He’s a certified tool-and-dye maker, a Republikan, and he loves his momma.” Two lawyers fly across the stage on wires. They crash into each other, wrestle in the air, then fall into a trap door. [Laff track.]…Memoir = my memory? And yet everybody shits their pants when it ends up being false, or extrapolated, or perverted, or tweaked, or all of the above. Memory is a devious engine. Memory is as trustworthy as a car salesman at a Naïveté Convention. (Ref. name for an upcoming novel: The Devious Engine.)…Oasis of Parisian arcades—in his freeze-frame baroque, Walter Benjamin employed the arcades in an attempt to capture/represent the unconscious, more-irreal-than-irreal federation of the human condiment. But the Nazis got him before he could finish. They reach into the potbelly of history and into the fumes of the future and get everyone…Trans. yarbles…There are over 60,000 miles of veins and capillaries in the human body. There are less than [???] words in the human mind…“And is that smile sitting in the courtroom today?” asked the judge’s newly appointed counsel. In a stone-faced frenzy, the judge threw himself across the bench. “That’s him!” he yelled. “That’s the smile!” The smile began to grind…Roger Daltrey. Tommy (1975) just isn’t as good as I want it to be, but I liked Elton John’s giant bloodred Doc Martens…Too fuckin’ stupid to get into college? Stick Figure University will accommodate you. Just write us a note with your intent to enroll and we’ll put you on the docket. Annual price of admission: $179,999.99 per quarter. Room and board not included, dipshit. Send check or money order to…Nothing lasts forever. Eventually everything falls apart. What we need is stronger glue…organic whale fins erupt from the soil of the Amerikan desert…Don’t count sheep jumping over fences to fall asleep. Count Earps. Wyatt Earps. Make sure they have .44 magnums and are trigger-happy. Make sure they haven’t eaten a decent meal in a week or two. Make sure the fences they try to jump over are too high, and barbed, and electric, and monofilamental. Take no mercy on the Earps. I promise you’ll be fast asleep before their mangled corpses pile up to the stars…A magician pulls an inflamed lung out of his hat, tosses it over the audience and shoots it like a skeet. He misses. The lung falls into the lap of a prominent local dignitary. His wife covers her mouth and points and screams and the magician runs offstage and everybody goes apeshit and the lights go flickerflickerflicker…quiet, igneous seashore………………In the end, the lawyers eat everything with a smile. I should have taken the LSATS. What we need are more smiling lawyers—
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