Jonkil Dies

(A Mesophysical Eulogy)

Kane X. Faucher

BlazeVOX [books]
Buffalo, New York

Jonkil Dies (A mesophysical eulogy) by Kane X. Faucher Copyright 2008 Published by BlazeVOX [books] All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without the publishers written permission, except for brief quotations in reviews. Printed in the United States of America Book design by Geoffrey Gatza Cover image by Matina Stamatakis

First Edition ISBN: 1-934289-69-8 ISBN 13: 978-1-934289-69-3 Library of Congress Control Number : 2008932196 BlazeVOX [books] 14 Tremaine Ave Kenmore, NY 14217 Editor@blazevox.org

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Jonkil Dies
(A Mesophysical Eulogy)
A pondiferous msalliance text replete with pithecanthropic fervour, written for occultist gulls and proto-projectionist puppeteers of the new boutiquerie, a point of recoil for those lost ironclad fabulists in that never-ever world of pond-sharks and refrocked patrician saints. * Chalk-circled in fully unexpurgated form by our winsome narrator of the superior bombast, Jonkil Whifflemeister von Calembour de Saurkriegsbrt, otherwise known among anti-genealogical eastern bunnies as Mr. Escu-escu.

Ecce Machina Your words have clouded all my thoughts, I fear, you troublesome denizen of the Outhouse of Reason! A sagging IQ low-slung like a bandolier of heavy bullets does not a great series of semblance make for thought! I hate you categorically, from the heights of marble-etched genus down to the litter around the lintel of particularity that is as crumpled and soiled as the floor of the NYSE. And for what? All the fish dead in the seas after we warned fifty years ago, a whole aquarium ecosystem fallen through the volcanic vents of climate change neglect, and the succession is complete: from the seas the fish flapped their fins hundreds of millions of years ago to be the progenitors of the future gallows hawks that would execute the sea itself. Do you like narrative successions such as these, maitre? You probably have a big boner about it right now! Jai voulu ton coeur. Mais, c'est toujours, tout le temps, la mme chose 1 A woman with the jaw of an anaconda was tilting my head up and feeding me another solid dosing of rum. My limbs were in that curious formation of the more curious word of akimbo, my shirt unbuttoned and the flies butting their big compound-eyed stupid heads into my windowpanes. She was Romanian and had gorgeous young adolescent tits and a dark mop top. Eyes as big as whatever moon you choose, equally dark, and these little teeth that stood like a gate or a sentry by which her strange language could pass after producing the right papers. The east of the east, cream of the crop, and all that. At least this was a civilized place, one where I could easily bribe people to leave me be. The beers in this place are as big as a mans shoe, and the blackening of ones lungs was merely the proof of aging well. Outside, near the cathedral, old women elbow each other to have their candles lit first by the priest. The hissing crunch of gravel under the wheels of cars sounds like canned applause. Its been years since I threw my weight around, but I just dont have the energy for a full-on assault, for the frenzies of producing gemcut ideas in polite propositional quatrains and journal style tourniquets. Sun and the shadows the leaves cast seem to frescolade upon the tired, broken cement. I feel a repugnant sympathy for that cement, all for sloppy dramatic reasons.

10 To Vienna and beyond. I had skipped continents again to evade the usual monotony and vicious assaults of those who glibly dubbed themselves my contemporaries. From Vienna I went up through to Hungary, dropped down in cadence to ethnic Albania, up through the Serbian terrain, and into Romania improper. Ovid found himself a place to sink his lips. I have no idea how I made it to Bucharest. Cabbies outside the Henri Coanda airport are put off with little more than a weary sneer. Bl-bl-blmy tongue breaks on this language. I am spitting blood. Im very sick. It freaks her out whenever I issue a long blood trail from my lips after a vicious round of hacking. It makes my lungs go concave, my ribs rattle and scrape against each other. Im in a land where they accidentally threw out the heavy brain of their poetic genius over a century ago. All my poetry comes out of me in dark red gobs, spread across and swirling around the drain of the sinkleaking from the corner of my mouthdiluting into the dirty bathwater. In a moment of intimacy, I saw it jettison across her back like red spunk, the wracking orgasm of dying lungs. She is barely half my age, but already a century ahead in wisdom. I am too rapidly apprised of the situation: I am dying. Tear these box crate apartments down! I yell in a beery delirium. Instead, they only drape them with football field sized advertisements of the new colonizers: Cloke and McDont, Pizda Hut and Dolce & GabbersmithyFuckers. Never been colonized, my ass. First the Romans and now this. The Teatrul National is a monstrosity, and over its blocky shoulder is a larger hotel-ly Godzilla standing like a loose leaf of concrete taper paper. It is forty degrees and the pitch melts on the soles of my shoes. Go, my friend, let us drown in Club A and sleep on the benches along with the students who have exams to write in a few hours. Get locked in a fistfight for two, a liplock for three, and a cheat fashion for one. At the very end of the Metro line, Statia Titan, the trees frock endless central planning failures. I live by the dead car on the meridian, idle for long enough to be frocked in advertisements. They dress the dead and drunk here with ads, too, that even the feral running dogs wont touch. Cook em up in a Philippino roast, I say. I bark them off like I bark everybody off eventually. And even with my staunch resistance to cultural detritus, to the false glove-gentle touch of the social, stuff still manages to seep through. It makes me come down with a serious case of the baggage. What is her name? Another barnacle found on the hullside after listing about in fermented waters where the lights that

11 shine from the sky are false beacons that will never bring you safely ashore. To the rocks. Heidegger was right: were all fucked, so pass the peanuts. Vertigo lux. Lux et tenebris. My nose is bleeding. Stare at the sun and sneeze. The old bitties are still fighting to have the priest light their candle first. The gory spectacle of devotion that one-ups any revolutions gunshots. This is no place to die like a Russian novelist, she said. True. A body over the rail and into the river. Stick a flag in the corpses asshole, claim it as the countrys own and float it up and down that stinking brown river. Like they did to Ovid. Stinking, fetid, corpse-ridden, bilious brown river. Tiny bridges span over it like bad paving stones between two walls. Pod i podea It is misbegotten Friday again. It just wont quit. Track the push and pull of crowds peregrinating, sucked into cabs and bars and expelled with the precision of mathesis universalis. Ah, by the slack skin of my testicles slamming into the sore, slack hole of capital! The abandoned castle of my mind is still occupied by endless shrieks that issue from who-knows-where. The prose of the world got its revenge when the initial bruising it left upon young flesh festered into a sore that gnashes with pain, followed by the dull ache of experience. The world just kept pressing it before any of us learned how to speak of the world so generally, so totalizing, a shabby old conceptual whore. We fuck in a place where air conditioning is scarce. It is stifling. My lungs are drowning in blood. 2 She wrote me a letter, but it was ragged red. A voice of old love issued from a mouth set to old vinyl scratch-wax. Midafternoon summer, lazy and full of flies and whiskey. The night slides tinted transparencies over that sky. I become lost again, a forest. Lost in my head and all these lights and so many regrets. Mal-vitaa malady for philosophy, a tussle of uncooperative hairIt doesnt matter what our disagreements between us since well all be rowing that same boat when the flood and the ruin comes. Id like to make amends. Dear you crumple. Dearest crumple. Must mow the sward from these pages. Stick a pin in those balloon sentiments. Everywhere it is raining grey, collecting grey. An old letter to a lover, never sent, dashed in a cracked case of crumbling leaf-bloc papers: Lost in my head; its a bleak wilderness. I am covered in clusters of burrs and nettlesworry and despair. This depression, produced by circum-

12 stance, threatens to tear us apartfor since I cannot seem to derive joy from the alchemical elements of the body, it is hard to conjure any such joy for your adventuresAnd for this, I am sorry. It is not malice or envy, but an auto-installed state. Everything feels tenuous and tentative, and though I rage against the impotence and helplessness, my howls merely get absorbed by it, engulfing me in the end when my lungs are spent. The hollow mantra of its not fair crumbles, gets washed back by another round of booze. I am becoming a casebook alcoholic, which should come as no surprise given all the psychological trappings of this hoary, beaten beast. There is no crooked cross on my back upon which my hands are stapled, for I drag only myself over this tundra of emptiness and desolation. People gather round me, but I cant hear what theyre sayingfriends of the night, burnt off like morning mist by the hot blades of sunrise. I affirm my life by training in my old physical arts, and mediate my enduring grief by the art of the wordas if to palliate a feeling in giving it expression. Treachery and sabotage had visited me in full force this year, and perhaps brief pause is given temporarily to congratulate myself before enduring the extant devices that are still in operation. There is still so much to contend with. Bitterness, wariness, and suspicion threaten to eclipse the innate joy that resides in mea joy so confusingly resilient given that the tortured soil in which it grows bespeaks against its possibility. Its raining all inside me, large rain dollops of acid and defoliant. My head is my space, the circumscribed confines of a prison. Ive the walls of me to scale, so high and topped with coils of barbed wire. My desire to be transported is the pleading cry from this old crater basin of thought. I am calling out for helpI keep calling outthe winds howl is the only reply, and it carries upon its back the absence of possibility. He paid his rent, he paid his dues / he dodged bullets in cheap dancing shoes. He speared the scorpions, he burned their lairs / still he is mauled by zodiac bears. He treads the desert space, he clutched at sand / he was nomad moving on nomad land. The clich stands: were not out of the woods yet. We cannot yet declare ourselves free. All manner of dangerous debris are going to be thrown into our paths. And your lover is sitting here, trapped and broken. He is buckling under the burden of these miseries. He loves you, but his throat is crushed, voiceless. And your hands are bound.

13 A non-standard essay (consider revising). There is too much to revise as the piles do as piles do: pile, and upward, tooa veritable Babelian tower of incompletion (for it was not the unification of language and the promise of reaching God through mortal means that linguistic efficiency was thusly based for the construction project, but rather the raising of the biggest incompletion). Too many letters, reviews, asides, scattered notes in sun-bleached notebooks, whiskey-driven manifestos that went from cheeky to sadly genuine, essays with their sources scored out by burrow worms of neglect, sketches of ideas not fully shaded or filled in, tidal ideas broken against enormous shoreline rehabilitationsWhat am I to do with this mess that I have not already done?I have ignored it. I have resisted the urge on so many occasions to return to these slipshod incompletes knowing full well that returns to the personal zeitgeist of these moments is nigh impossible. Accepting and embracing failure is the object of wisdom. Wisdom is always doled out in lots. Selenogamia. Married to the moon. Mais, jai besoin de la lune. She was naked in the tub, my Iuliana, cigarette and her face framed by the faucet and the tiles. Slightly above water, collected in her own makeshift mother, a tubular mother, an oceanic feeling regained. Less is more, naked is all: daca mai puin e mai mult, atunci nimic e totul. Jonkil, she beckons with her chin, join me in the tub. She wants my No in her makeshift mother. She wants me to intervene to feel the blissful cut of separation again so that unity can flood right back in like a sneaky old Hegelian wholeness. Totality lost and regained, the impossible pendulum of Miltonian utopia. Beatrice is Eurydice, really, so dont look back out at that light, from that cavein sum: dont get born. The puppets on the walls provide more amusement. They drape the shadows of capital all over Bucharest now. A cool-onized space. We make love in the tub until blood sputters from between raw gums and drools heavy and sagging into the bathwater. The candles gutter as we dress. For some reason, she is at peace and smiling. Just another hole to fill before it slams shut and time to find another. 3 Iuliana takes me to a village just northeast of Bucharest. Genuine Romi. Gypsies by the golden foot measuring their value in rooms, fiddles, orphaned plumbing fixtures on blankets pilfered from abandoned homes. One of them has a black Mercedes and enough heavy gold crucifixes to weigh down a spirit or hobble an idea. What am I doing here, here in this country? Dress me up in

14 the decline of spirit so that I may blend, a bellwether of dilapidation. Radua, I said, the music has burned me a new hole. What are these gypsies singing about? Iuliana answers with a pedagogical smile: It is about falling in or out of love, always. Lifes debt is paid in murders and marriages. The real economy is the flow of love-capital, yes? Nu tiu precis. All of it, power ebbing or flowing. This sickness: I think life is no longer in love with me. I send all its sentimental letters back. You are being morose, Ionca, she said. When she teases me, she applies the diminutive of my nameJonkil Calembour is shortened, and the Jon becomes Ion, sounding like yawn. Sometimes she calls me Ionutz. It doesnt bother her that I am dyingit is just another song for these gypsies to sing with the names rubbed out for the purpose of making experience universal. In the eyes of the suffering, those who have suffered far too long, the dead take up too much space. The dying as well. What do I care for names other than to zealously guard them in time. Only my mother knows my real name, raised by gypsies perhaps. Guarded against evil spirits, perhapswhich explains only its opposite, the reality principle. Time operates in the slow, collective bowel movement of Plato. The only thing keeping me anchored to the bar and not the floor is my tenacious hold on the bottle. If I get sick, and really sick, send an ambulancea very big ambulance. The words all suicide themselves on the very edge of the line and the page. Throw a fire blanket on them, stick your fingers in their little voweld mouths, make them puke up the bottle of sleeping pills they scarfed down. Do it quick before the Ersatzkommandos come and shoot or drag off everyone that is interesting. Hide little metanoia in the closet with a hush before the Gestapocalypse brigade come jackbooting through these rotten doors to haul them all off to some Caligulag where laughter is a traitor with a knife at supper time. I dont know which is worse an insanity: thinking or writing. I rarely seem to do both at the same time, at least at the same concentrated intensity. And anything done intensely is a form of insanity, and this includes how one lives a life. I had tried for the last six years to abandon writing like one would an abusive old lover-whore, but the holidayssince that is all they werewere brief. Managing the thinking problem became much easier with the onset of disease, and by drinking more. In my approaching

15 golden years, when I would prefer not to be dead before dying, the Consul in Lowrys Under the Volcano was my personal icon. It flowed well with my divine bitter-bacchant trinity: LouisFerdinand Cline, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Tom Waits. All of that was set to endless gypsy music. And when I wasnt slashing the tires of thought or avoiding the inveterate habit of writing, I was fucking Iuliana. Iuliana was the first woman with whom I could feel selfish fucking and have it be ok. All the other women, there was always something to prove, a lot of preamble and the like. She enjoyed fucking in a quiet way, something that would have unnerved my masculinity in the earlier years. Fuck it, I thought, Im getting too old to prove anythingget my share now. Ive pledged enough to the Quixotic Quim by tilting at it with broken tongue and throbbing lance. Iuliana already knew that I was a bedroom hero in my day, and it was just something one can smell on another. She wasnt looking for a hero. Maybe she was as bored to shit with heroes as I was. What has a hero ever really amounted to? A whole bunch of trumpets, statues, and the grumbling envy of others. People really like it when heroes get killed or their lives unravel into madness: that is why the dramatic form of tragedy was invented. It gives us all piece of mind and a healthy reprieve from those ambitious types that think their glory is worth a shit to the rest of us. I was 59 years old. I had never obtained a drivers license. I had operated vehicles twice in my life: once in a school parking lot and another time on a dusty, abandoned rural road. I never took to driving, and had just ignored it entirely. I didnt believe that someone of my flaring temperament should ever operate something that could kill someone. I saw cars alongside guns, and I knew I shouldnt ever own either. Other people are very responsible and levelheaded with these things, but I knew myself too well. Sadly, this introspective wisdom did not extend to the pen. I was also hopelessly useless with machinery, like some awkward and sudden fifth or sixth appendage you woke up with one morning. I just couldnt hook my nerves, my reflexes, any of myself into a car. I liked to be driven. Roads come with rules, and I had already reached my rule-abiding threshold long ago. Iuliana figured that it would be a good idea to teach me how to drive. I went along with it because I was old and it was something to do. I wanted to crash myself into myself, but there was always some kind of intermediary, some smarmy-mouthed interlocutor, another goddamn bill to pay.

16 My mouth, from words to dentistry, has always cost me a fortune. The fortune repairs nothing. 4 Honesty is the highest virtue, and I think it is symbolized by a barking dog. When dealing with people, if one gives them political meat, they will respond to you with politics. But if you affirm yourself and your actions, you can bark them off and tell them to back off for good. A dog never minces its utterances: it barks in direct truth. All of nature is honest in telling you to fuck off. Welcome to the ugly billennium. Whats the point of trying or proving anything when the sun will burst and ruin everything anyway? I had a role once, but it was just a role. Nietzsche always knew best, that good mother of the future: the real aristocracy, the real overman, was not an individual. Fuck individuals. Everything is a type. The rest is small print that ruins the magic. She had a habit of running the water when taking a piss. Echoes from my doctoral studies yearsMy work habits deteriorated while I traded the pursuit of knowledge for numerous intense sex-based relationships of short durationwe pretended it was our connection to knowledge. More echoes. God, make me cum until my tits tingle! I fucked with condoms, without, spent ten times more time at bars and clubs than on campus. I never stepped foot in the library: a responsible researcher, student, future professional. If youre a real Medusa, youll turn my cock to stone if I just look at you. It was a different trip than the frightened, self-conscious excesses of undergrad. One had become a seasoned everything. The pressure was there, but something to ignore, a dread, a bad jokesoon, in a matter of just a few years, well be looking for teaching posts. Another round. I drank two litres of vodka a day, two packs of smokes as chaser. Painful gum disease, inflamed liver, vitamin deficiencies piling up like a countrys war debt. Me complaining of starving while burning a hole in my credit card at bar x or liquor store y. And how many women? Do I speak to any of them anymore? A few. Most of these situations ended badly, but I knew they would. You catch the first whiff of the end in the first moment. You give chase out of boredom, self-hatred, hatred of others, to prove that the illusion is just an illusion. There were a fewquite a fewEastern Europeans before Iuliana. Exotic, hard, raven-esque beauty. Femme fatales the lot of them. Beautiful, but psychologically crippled, creatures of their

17 times, their environment, products of misogyny, shit wages, oppression, cultural confusion aftermath of the revolution, readymade wives but struggling to be whores rather than kitchen Madonnas. They had a strange way of lovingSome would feign laisser faire, and would never let on that they secretly pined for the conventional. I dont want complications. This is just about sex. No drama. I remember one telling me this. When I was treated it as it was previously arranged, she reacted like a jilted wife. Perhaps I was nave. She cooked for me all the time; we slept in the same bed for months, alternating between our homes; we went on trips; we had already sorted out pet names for each other, the baby talk; we had sensual moments; she would trust to leave me in her apartment while she went to school just so that she could come home to me; we did everything together, had many experiential firsts in the world. I should have read the signs, the old pattern of a relationship in progress. Anyway. Ended badly, like the rest of them. So many women have loved me, and I was always wandering, straying, perpetually undeserving of it, always destroying it like it was a trifle, a used bar napkin. The one before that? I had been to Romania before. Coming to Romania was like coming back to my collective past. I never had problems: no one ever tried to rob me, and gypsies never got the upper hand of me. I instinctively knew what to do in a place where, if you fuck up, there is no safety net. Youre sunk. No babying. Supermodels everywhere. Sex you can smell, everywhere, dripping. So many women there, and me: a tall foreign galoot with a small mental briefcase of reheated feminism and a fetish for oral sex. In a place of misogyny, wellAnd so I prospered, nine months like nine years. A librarian, a psychologist, an insurance broker, a few others that I didnt bother remembering their occupations. All of them unstable, but some more than others. It was curative. I drank and fucked so well there, more than ever. Its all I did. I saw much of Romania from bedrooms and bottles. Romania is still sacred and hallowed ground to me. I have chosen this place as my bacchanalian tomb, if they will have it. Finks and dolts everywhere I cast my eyes. Here is the machine, ecce machina, an anti-plot. A bad, yet thorough character study. Sketches of sketches. Endless parenthetical statements buried within an endless series of onion peel parentheses. Vignettes of caf squabbles, tooting conversations, scotched attempts at communicative exchange, and non-choice cut slices of discourse thatlike a fold or a flapunveil one part at the expense of hiding another. Sunt in tumultul vieii. Take a slice of week-old bread and

18 soak in kerosene. This narrative is already stale enough to cause injury if thrown. Yet another overeductated bitter old drunken crankthrow him in the drink!...Quand je te brle dans mon tabacAnother round spins at someone elses expense, and the empty pint glasses are moved about as if in a deliberate chess game as I try to arrange my thoughts along the order of cohesion. Gettin tired of this smuggling whiskey in broken suitcases into my mouthgettin tired of hauling this gold-painted pewter Jesus from one village to another. The screw-down dons are screaming non placet at me. Its been a remarkable life. Suicide is for amateurskill your shadow instead. O lordy, pick that bale o cotton, pick a bale a day. O lordy write-a write-a write-a write-a nother line, set that plot, pull that phrase, pick that bale a day. Thus spake astrosapiens. You are all looking for a bone or two. Sure, hate me all you like, and then scramble for whatever scraps you can salvage from my bodyas relicssell them onlinearticles of faith? 5 I must make an attempt, I am told, to introduce my blizzard of disconnected memories properly. I have been asked to pen an introduction to a text that some fiend shall publish. I make and present a draft I know I will not be happy with: Introduction by Jonkil Calembour Surely, in the foregoing, you will have had enough of my windy wordsAnd indeed, you have perhaps had your fill in two prior volumes. However, here you are, and now I am obliged to state my case. I am indeed alive, but not well, refusing to rely on the oppositional framework of the good versus the ill (for in illness, there can be the most profound goodness). Prior editions have seen my dear sister, Anna, deliver the address and the caveats on my behalf, usually from some posthumous position. I am afraid that you have been misled, which is precisely the condition of my life-as-fiction, a byproduct of this life gone haywire that appears so fantastical it can be hard for you to care whither and thither I go. I do fully understand the lack of realism that is inherent the hoary events of my life, and how hard it may be for you to relate on every possible level. But, as events go, the majority of them did occur, for even embellishment has its firm root in the soil of truth. I can only pluck so many jewels from a vacuum, and so I must rely more often on actual events.

19 You have been privy to all sorts of misdirection on my behalf, and the manner by which I tried to rattle the paradigms that keep our respective worlds of fact and fiction apart on the antipodes of representation. You have also witnessed, assuming you have followed my development with any interest or loyalty, that I have submitted to my own caprice, the wielder of the polemic himself becoming entombed in the rigid definition of polemic, with scant anything more to say but a verbal hurricane of cynical lament. Of course, those of you who had been present at the very beginning of our episodes had seen a much different picture of Jonkil Calembour, the occasionally good, nave, sentimental, and softhearted idealist who perhaps dipped into the spirits and became occasionally abrasive. Ah, without memory and negative determination, would I still recognize the gradual deterioration of my own faculties? Could I ever return to that lucid, well-told prose presentation of a life, now buried under the heavy demand to make a spectacle of myself? Have I not submitted to the audience that at once applauded me for my rants, and then to have taken them too far? I am far too much of a crowd pleaser, but my efforts become excessive, and soon I bank too heavily on a component or two that works, and I extend it beyond any reasonable acceptance. However, I cannot apologize for the awful mess I have made, the inconsistencies, the long episodes of seemingly unfounded polemic that forget the thread of the story, for even these episodes are folded within a larger diegetical architecture even I cannot assess in its entirety; I just know it to be there. Again, this may be more my intuition or my vain self-flattery rather than a true state of affairs. How much can I really leave to a readership I have never fully trusted, and at times spurned? And why, with all the evidence that has mounted against me for all my mendacity, should a readership trust or admire me? Perhaps it is neither me nor the readers who should arbitrate. Perhaps the force of history should make this judgement. Perhaps I am just an empty shell inhabited by bitter reactivity and a heavily sedimented regime of pretentious theoretical buzzwords whose meanings I have seen fit to employ in sawed-off fashion. A hollow shell, a receptacle of intellectual profanityA node or collection point of cultural anxiety attempting to define itself despite its schizophrenic constitution. Again, perhaps Perhaps I have no story to tell, and even in these fantastical outrages I still am so mediocre and banal. I have no pity for myself, nor do I ask or welcome it from others. There are more and better stories, in a variety of different cloths, some set within

20 the context of hack-authors and some within the unassuming pens of the sublime. One can find the best stories in the most unlikely of places, even in the populist dreck I rage against. I do not deny that I may have a story of unparalleled excellence to tell, but I also do not deny that what I have to say may be a complete repetitious waste of time. I get in these moods, see, and they are hard to break out of. My thoughts need air. I am stifling in my own bile, and sometimes that window upon the world is too far or I havent the willpower or strength to open it. However, there is a particular species benefit to the hermetically sealed environment, but it is a benefit only for those in some outside vantage point who can study it. And then, well, we can turn to the scholars works that analyze the text, and only return to my offering as an object lesson, a reference from which these analyses emerged. That may be the purpose of all I do or say: to give academics something more to talk and write about. What a sorry and arrogant position that would be, for one can enumerate far more pressing priorities in the rainbow of topics to pursue than my offerings! It makes me out to be some fiendish distracter, a being whose sole purpose is to clutter the relay race of intellectual history with yet another pointless hurdle! But perhaps there is more, but I am not of the mind, liberty, or even ability to say. Like I said, I am operating under mere intuition that there is something more to all this than I realize, and that this intuition could turn out in the end to be little more than an egoinspired delusion. This I leave to history itself to decide. I am more than a phenomenon, for my appearance is not enough in itself to get at the component parts of my conditions. I am yet another thing to be interpreted by the active genealogist. I am in a strange lineage of forces that have united to create this being, be this a shell or a monstrosity. I am a genomenon. --Jonkil Calembour Bah! This is bunk! Piffling trifles! Pseudo-intellectual sentimentalist wank! Lets try again, retaining our phrase of the genomenon, to get feisty, to enrage the editors! I want the voice of the editor alongside me, provoking me! I need to be less an explanandum and more of an aphorism! Pour that drink long and thin! My insecurity at not being amenable to plot-based regimes shows in the multitude of introductions! Then, let us give it the floor! Let it speak and exhaust itself, and then on to the show! Attempt 2: Genomenon

21 A Slice of the Arcade Calembouria (with commentary by the diegetical-thesis supervisor) Why this title? What does it mean? Think of YOUR READERS! O Scribbala! That I must here play bibliomancer, in selecting from text at random those words that are supposed to function as walkon parts for my emotions! O verb macaroni salad and adjective stew! I raise my wrist to my forehead and laugh, for even in despair there is that brittle laughter, and especially then! O makeup pasties and currency racketeers! I see you now on the horizon, adjusting your belts and sights, gunning for me, perhapsI find myself spread-eagle before you, as a harlequinine bastard! Will you help me find my language? The world of my youth was a disgusting place to be, but this is a common complaint held by closet utopians like myself, like so many. And yet, it did spare me some sense of the glorious sunset that I could look back upon with nostalgia, for memory has the curious effect of occasionally making the moments melt in ones mind, to overlook those long dry periods of boredom, inactivity, large gaps when one eats, sleeps, shitsJust the highlights. And what is memory but the addition of an exclamation point on summaries, the space-saving technique of weeding out those uneventful bits? This is, in the very end, a tale of love without the usual suspects, without the conventional forms of union. It is the sort of love that does not necessarily involve people, but bits of emotions, emotions affixed to things and events, atomistic forces of perception and things perceived, with a bagful of signs and codesof revolutions buried under the excess of more flamboyant global phenomena, of struggles ambiguously defined. And as the few of us lived our lives, with these crises and struggles made so real and almost palpable, the remainder cruised along on more traveled highways of history. Who will remember the joyous fits of collective enmity against prevailing systems, our togetherness being the key, the great strides and pushes we made that amounted to nil in the very end? Not a one or the many, but the few. And then, some tales are meant only to remind the few, and not to inform the many You must ensure that your introductions to your chapters are clear and crisp! NO flowery writing, no provocations! Your readers are going to choke on all this! This is too antagonistic! Tone it down!

22 O laugh! E.M. Cioran and I used to snarl at one another from a negligible distance. It is to him that I must respond, that tightly wound epigrammarian! Cioran left it up to us to decide which of his fragments were truths and which were caprice, thinking himself to be nouveau Nietzsche. But not all fragments are grenades, and so many just fizzled out! He shifts the burden of responsibility of locating truth on the readerswhat a fool! It is better to state that there is no truth in ones text than to allow readers even a glimmer of hope on some wild chase that they will find it! And what if they do? It will most likely be an unsavoury truth, one you did not plan on having discovered! To his credit, he declares that he provides interrogative instances and not answers, but how farcical is this? He seems to proclaim answers by the bucketload! His skill was in the pocket wisdom rather than in the long cloth of the essay, but who needs that ratty garment anyhow? Borges was top notch at the short bit. But for Cioran, problems are just preparations. Take up a pre-position and then understand the true grammar of subjects, the relationship of the preposition between subjects! Why Cioran? Put it in a footnoteOr, explain the relevance or just leave out! The same applies for the Borges reference. It adds nothing to your argument! Of course, of course, I am constantly criticized for being overtaken with logorrhea when in fact I am a logophage! Thats right! There are so many distended Is that speak that I take my fortunes in purposely misreading Jean Hyppolitiks reading of Hegel! I am also criticized for making long opining gestures without coherence, but I am a creature of my own miscord, and satirical bewilderment is my element, or should I say my bewilderness? Yes, I declare myself a genius, just as I Oscar Wilde myself through so many airport security checkpoints declaring how my sharp wit can hijack an aircraft to make political statements in the crude viscera. But, yeslogophagy can only be gourmandaise if it is followed by a total affirmative emesis. What is expiated must be an absurd kludge, freely laughed at. Why else would I put together such big books? To win a bet with destiny? To engage in some tragic comedy of free will? To make your eyes and ears bleed? But true genius is endless vacillation in silence, disseminating to everything from the desert of exile.

23 You must lead your readers by the hand! Your readers will not have the patience to look up your ten-dollar words! Do not alienate your audience. Also, you are being too glib! A suggestion: say it simply, but thoroughly, or not at all! Ask yourself after every sentence, how will this advance my story, as a STORY? Think cohesion! JonZebra was busy again pulling-me-asides and all monologue velour pasties for them kids in the front row, which was absolutely ridiculous because everyone was front row in the seminar. The professorial machine was a dunderheaded wacko, all itchy to keep true to his own fashion of containment. Of course, JonZebra and I were always the skilful ones to locate those taboo questions and unsavoury references that chilled a room. So many saw us as poseur intellectuals, but that was just their way of dismissing what was formidable. Truth was, we were alive, and making all that dry theory vibrate with new intensity. Yes, we made theory come alive in ways a scholarly Frampton could never understand. JonZebra and I played off one another, our own skit, and our own diasynchronic show! It was laughs and gusts of gas to us, but there were too many who took us far too seriously at the wrong times, and proclaimed we were fools when we were making absolute sense. Ah, how academia squeezes out the art and sense out of everything, and disfigures a natural beauty with an archaeology of failed makeup. The professor was wearing an awful sweater, and this was to function as an apology for what he was, but truth was that he had internalized much worse patterns than the ones he wore. Entire long rocket streaming epithets were ignored! We would speak, and he would continue on his lonely, monomaniac trajectory regardless! What fools these academocrats be! They believe in consensus and fairness and equal speech, and so instead of knocking what you say down right before your eyes they rely on that condemnable approach of the silent hammer from behind! Condemnia, how fat your lecture halls have grown! And now I see alleged colleagues moving up that damn ladder and repeating the same failures we ought to have renounced. O creatures of bad faith! This makes little sense! Rewrite! I am very disturbed that for someone who writes so well, you can write some awkward sentences. Why is that? Who is JonZebra? Why not introduce him carefully?? It was winter session in the university pews, and we were very drunk. Oh, it wasnt obvious, for our habits had grown accus-

24 tomed to the demands of our bodies to remain at least visibly composed. JonZebra and I were letting fly with all sorts of heresies, for laughs and things Hegel makes of his logic a prison, and his terms are bricks. And there is but one gaoler to overcome: the dialectic. If your aim is to piss off all your Hegelian readers, mission accomplished. You are playing fast and loose with Hegel; therefore, it lacks rigour, clarity, and diminishes your credibility! Again, think of your readers! Who are you writing for and why? Pardon? asked some steamwhistling jackanape, demanding clarity when the whole fucking movement for clarity and simplicity was as bankrupt as the many phantoms that wandered the great halls of retailpolitik. Im talking about Hegel and the dialectic, I reiterated, this time in easy to digest summaries. His dialectic is a fucking prison. Moving up to contradiction? Sounds like going to a parole hearing and getting denied yet again. Well, as Kant says began our well meaning babysitter. Kant is useful among those who languish in the illusion of pristine teethBut that one avoids at all costs the dentist is no curative against hidden decay, chimed JonZebra. Kant is the source for all kinds of moral plaque buildup. In the worst of cases, they have to call in Nietzsche the cultural hygienist, and his methods are considered to be cruel. He is the one, you see, who brings in the dental jackhammer. Theres never an absolute guarantee of survival, but I guess you get the dental care you deserve. ??? This is too polemical!!! If you do not sit down and edit out these inflammatory and antagonistic asides (seriously!) I do not think this will be read! How is any of this relevant to your story? Is there a story in this at all??? How is this relevant? asked some smarmy bitch three seats to my left. I hated people who wanted to stay on track. They were the scurvy of great journeys into the unknown. But, alas, no arsenal of her reason would prepare anyone to ferry across the ocean of the sick. Relevance? What kind of Reaganomic trip are you on? This isnt the fucking Khmer Rouge contra buildup Star Wars defense budget, chump, said JonZebra. You dont score votes by pointing out that something is askew.

25 Lets be fair, I said. The words fail us all. Words are monotonous, banal trolls. The day we may speak and write in pure colours will be the glorious day when we shatter and diffuse an ordered rainbow. The future of language liesnot in paintingin the vibrant speaking in the tongue of colour. You arent making any sense, she retorted. I think her name was Lillian, I dont know. I barely pay attention to anything that isnt a glorious fiery object. She was another funding-sucking, seat-filling, masseuse of the flaccid academic prick. You miss the point. Who should be sadder about this? I said. Okay, lets calm down, our professor said, trying not to intervene in ways that may have threatened his opening from-thepulpit speech at the beginning of the year when he declared that there would be no real authority in the classroom. We are all equals, discovering knowledge together, or some such fucking rotten ass lie. I wasnt ready to calm down. I wanted the whole class to devolve into a wondrous pugilistic festival of blood and feces and vomit. Anything but another dry and pointless wading through the goddamn text. No, charged JonZebra. This bitch wants to call me out on relevance from the vantage point of her own failed desires! Its always the irrelevant poltroons who demand relevance of everyone! Its so fucking Christian! Exactly! Its always the priest who asks for you to have faith because he doesnt have any! Parasite! Coffee shop intellectual! Pointless maverick of commercialized distention! You pretentious lout! Pitiful maidservant of the republic of suppurating mindboredom! No one is impressed by your big words and more intellectual than thou attitude. Grow up! We were being attacked on all sides. It was Christian. The weak were banding together to take their potshots against us beastly powerhouses of theory, we pantheon folk. No one is impressed by your suckfish antics, nor your pathetic attempts to understand. All you want is a fucking television pacifier and the whole world to stay very still in status quo ante! You harlots of home shopping think the world should conform to sitcoms! And then we were given the boot. Until next week. Sure. We headed back to the bar to complete our machine gun

26 rounds of drink and idle talk. A clear emulation of the old days when the elders would engage in sceming slanders, miserly conceits, all liberally mixed with more booze as an apologia for a spent and dry soul. That, of course, was not our tune, but a drama, a fiction with which we sometimes adorned ourselves. We lived in a time of open revolt, which is to say that the revolution had become asinine and extremely public, a full merchandising machine of specious rhetoric and other willy-nilly desires that broke themselves against the tide of false social change. This merchandising machine had a full body, replete with its many organs, each of them open for obscene depiction. And so the buffet spread of its anatomy gave off a powerful funk, and it was enough to cause nausea and vertigo among those, like us, who were sensitive cultural physicians. The revolution had died on television, as a result of mass communication; in sum, we talked the revolution to death. JonZebra and I were not in attendance at the funeralWe walked away well before the eulogies were being given. Funny that those who gave the eulogies had no idea that they were, but thought themselves to be opening the revolution up to a new frontier. The Internet, no less. The Internet, land of the non-discerning consumer of information, the populist conch for so many fools. The trouble was that the wise were few and were lost in this ocean of banality. JonZebra and I both believed in Kurtz. We need fewer and better peoplePeople with a true sense of what it is to will, people who can befriend horror and moral terror. Did we have the answers, or at least think that we did? Of course, but neither of us wanted to take the leadTo want to rule over others is a sad and pathetic repetition of human nature, and violates a true sense of the will to power. And, as we all know, the will to power wants no object, no goal, no throne; it only wants to keep striving, willing, and affirming itself. Keep talking, keep doing, keep makingIf anything is ever crystallized as a realization of efforts be those efforts a book, careerism, anything that one can stop and declare pride, the gig is upthe will to power has left you or made you sink into that negative slop of resting upon ones laurels and all the rest of that negative dialectics bullshit. Keep movinglife is following your car, and it is very hungry. I really cannot understand the relevance of this section (?)Unless you can realistically make this integral to your story (i.e., a defensible diegesis), you better just CUT IT OUT! Chop, chop! Whenever I reflect on my will, I realize how at any mo-

27 ment it could engulf me, for it is a vast leviathan with no clearly demarcated physical dimensions. It is pure force that wells up within me, carries me aloft. It is my words that cheapen it, try to mint representations out of it so that I can get along in this world, so that I can make my desire to keep willing infinitely known. Living in a community is always failureIt is better to live as a community, as a nomad-god: or, god-damon when I change the letters around. You will not interest your readers with your gripe about words. Also, you will need to say more about the will. You cant just drop it casually. Is it interesting? Why? Elaborate! You will not get at a defensible position of your conception of the will by this means! It is better if you elaborate or just drop it entirely! I hear the marching of Romans everywhere. I see them brandishing their crude swords in the political arenas, in the wild viral growth of superstore chains. I see a glimmer of a becomingRoman in the eyes of the young who are armed with their cellphones of the republic, decked out in the republic colours, building their miniature empires that all add up to one mighty ziggurat of a corpoliticate empire. The people edify the subcutaneous, subnational empire with their bodies and do not even realize it. They add their forces blindly to the making of the end. Ah, ruin and doom and gloom and other apocalyptic rhythmsI never said it was going to end biblically unless there was some unconscious move to make it so. We all get the deaths we deserve. JonZebra and I called it a night. I wended my way from the university, boarded the bus, and arrived at the subway station. It was winter. Splatters of brown road slush had frozen in staccato vomit patterns on the snow banks. The snow and ice looked greasy, and felt like hardened glue. The streets were blanched white with salt, so dry as to make ones eyes crack if one looked too long. I saw the wandering failures of wayward footprints in once soft brown muck now seemingly made permanent in the deep freeze. The lukewarm yellow of the streetlights shone down in hollow rings, mute and touchable stars spaced out every few meters. The bus wobbled like an old man teetering on the brink of slumber. The floor was slick and grimy, with tributaries of salty water in the grooves of an industrial black mat that would never go away. The air was bitter, and everything smelled like stale smoke. And when I lit a cigarette, the white paper on the end absorbed any and all moisture in the air leaving what looked like brown shit

28 stains and orange earwax all over it. The cigarette always tasted horrible in the cold, and even a seasoned unfussy smoker like me had to pitch it away after I drained about half into my sore lungs. I could feel the light rumblings of the subway below as I moved through the vestibule. The station stank of vomit and piss. I started feeling unwell. I found a corner away from the light number of night passengers on the platform and keeled over to let loose a quiet oral purge. I repeated this many times, at each subway connection. I needed to take at least four different subways to get home, and on each I reached the critical stage where the desire to puke would fascistically commandeer my consciousness. My perceptions would then be trained to one focus: find the place to alleviate my unsteady stomach. Oh, any spot will do, as long as in my vulnerable state I was away from others. I was not one to want an audience, be this due to a long history of socially inculcated protocol or something more primitive. Perhaps I just did not want to get caught, to be that bad dog that is discovered to have made that mess in the corner. My coat was getting heavier, my shoulder bag stuffed with books and paper were slowing me down. There was no honour in anything I did, even if I were to attain the highest level of career prestige: I still vomited in corners, still adjusted my sweaty balls when no one was looking, still picked my nose and flicked it while at the urinal, still not showing as much care as I should have when I wiped my ass. I never let these things problematize my life. Are you putting on an act? Why this? Why now? Why not later? Think COHESION! But what does problematize my life? You do! O Jesus mother of all the little kelp-eating Hitlers of the failed slop festival of asinine skullduggery! When will you of all people just quit? You mendacious robber barons letting the letter get the better of you, all these things that I say turned back on me like some poison mackerel stuffed with nerve gas! Entire suns and moons could come shooting out of my sore ass and still you will remain with that frosted look on your face like youre the infinitely unsatisfied Freud. Oh, I hear what you are saying in the dark streets! You are talking about a whole new morality, but the new boss is just the old boss all over again! You want to revive Church and State like faithfully idiotic Hegels in the caf circuit! None of that toxic morality carnival for me! Ive had my fill! I cant impress you with convincing argument any more than my jumping up and down like

29 a lunatic at large will gain your fickle televisionary perceptions! An appeal to the facts and historical record is just stupid! All history is just hypeold hype! All churches are tabernacles erected in the heart of the state, and all states are bowel movements in the moral dungeons of the church! You fuckers of the reanimating persuasion! Leave those corpses alone! Do you really have an understanding of what it would be like if Jesus came back? Do you even have the vaguest clue what that would imply? A death zombie with a sword and that malicious gleam of revenge in his eyes! He never meant to die for your sins! He was duped! Just like me! Duped into thinking that you had any meaning when all along you were merely farting your way through life badly! What a stench your thoughts give off! Take a critical distance! As far as I can tell, you do not have a story (at all!). If you are going to pepper your entire discussion with polemical outrages, you will disenfranchise and alienate your readers! You seem to have forgotten them! If you absolutely insist on being vitriolic, go about it differently: set up the story elements (place, time, characters, problems) and THEN SHOW IT. You are jumping the gun with reflection when you have not yet set the proper context! Until you do that, there is a very high likelihood that this will never be read! Seriously! JonZebra had challenged me to convert my thesis into a musical, an epic Greek tragedy played by psychotic drag queens. My thesis was about Hegel and how much I thought his clever arch-villainy, his being the impresario of negation, his being the thermodynamic guru of all history, made me fucking sick! Of course, being sensitive to the dribbling demands of my audience, I had to rape my work of all polemic, which effectively stripped the bitch down from a thundering four hundred vitriol-soaked pages into a whimpering and dry hundred! For what? To gain parchment? I have enough parchment! I am parched with parchment! I am parchment par excellence, a big lumbering degree! A degree of what? Education? Intensity! Power! Stop your sabre-rattling! You are pissing off all your Hegelian readers! my supervisor said. Good on him for reminding me to toe the party line, to spare me from unnecessary assault or viciously damning silence! But fuck them all, good and plenty! Their demand for focus and clarity in argument was little more than a euphemism for saying exactly what they wanted to hear! Instead of a thesis, I send them a brochure, one they have read a thousand million times! Fun in the academic gallows! Suicide in the great garden of knowledge! Suppurating ad

30 infinitum in ones own rising tide of feces! Theses are feces, be them collected in the toilet libraries or flushed down the road of obscurity and never to be read again! And now I am forced to disavow what I wrote, to wipe my ass! No, I dont want a bound edition of my own failureyou keep it! Burn it! Eat it! Shit and fuck with it for all I care! But in any case, remove my name from its face, its spine, anywhere upon its body where it could be traced back to me! Oh, I hear my little retarded infant of a thesis calling to me, calling for its papa! Da-da, da-da, it warbles from its eight mutant throats! lo-o-ove me-e-e. No, I never gave birth to you! Leave me be! I banish you to the darkness of Dewey decimation of cataloguery! I cannot believe I ever brought such a pathetic, monstrous beast into the world! I leave it orphaned in the institution to be devoured by worms and hope for the return of the same fire that consumed the library of Alexandria! Yes! I damn my thesis to the inveterate care of all the Cleopatras of the land! They can build tombs with it! A failure Pharos! A goddamn lighthouse for ships that want to steer right into the rocks! Libraries are all necropolitan! Their death makes one sick! The rot in so many pages! So many festering ideas and pointless opinions! Page after page of useless commentary colliding blindly into one another like deaf blind fetuses! All of it sanctified by dusty old popes in the mighty educational fortress! A story is about problems. It has conflict in some manifestation. At this point, it is unclear what the problem is. You must be more delicate; lead your reader by the hand! Because this story does not present any specific problem (or it is VERY unclear), I cannot read any further until serious revisions take place! But these days I am always looking over my shoulder. I just know that the public, as much as we both operate on a system of reciprocal hatred, will one day no longer tolerate me. It goes well beyond being merely esoteric or appearing as though I am trying to diminish the world with my brazen intellect (which hasnt accounted for much in my case in the way of creating glory or grand holdings unto me, Ill have you know)It goes so much beyond any of this. I do have my quiet moments when an eerie cast comes over me, when my polemics dry up in my throat and I realize that I am either alone or, worse, that there are throngs calling for my blood. When I was younger, it was much safer to speak my mind, for youth is a convenient aegis from being judged. But as one ages,

31 what one does becomes a besotting mark, the tattoos gradually become permanent rather than wash away. And now, with the whole world realizing the majesty of a new purple, the mixture of red and white and blue, stars and spangles, everyone is on an anxiety tripeveryone is a suspect. We live in an age of a new kind of panic, and our own either conscious or unconscious maneuvering into what we loosely call the postmodern or late capitalism has dissolved all of our illusions of Church and State and replaced them with monstrous fictions, new appendages, corporate billmongering hate, the triumph of simplicity and the machine, everyone tagged like goddamn ducks on a wildlife preserve. Each and every one of us a convenient mark for the satellite assassins voyeurism. All of us recorded while machines reside where bodies are too fragile just waiting and lurking for that one moment when we fuck up, and fuck up in some absolute way that ensures our incarcerationmaybe even death. It is during these moments of almost crystalline realization that I begin to temper myself, placing firm restraints upon my wagging tongue. I realize that my enemy is not joking, that the State is no longer the ineffectual giant that lumbered about and could feign indifference to our razzing. Now the State is an amphetamaniac of fear, an amphisbaena Janus machine with its eyes up at its head and another pair down at its assjust waiting, all trigger sensitive. I wish I could joke about these matters, to be glib at all times without fear of what our pal Freddy Nietzsche used to call inky fish and scribbling foxes. But it is in Nietzsche that we find perhaps the most frightening and necessary wisdom. He knew that despite my rages against the State that I was just like them: a delayer. The Shit was going to go down, and it was all our talk, be it diplomacy or slow death by taxation or sloppy utopian theories flopping over beers at the bar...all of it that attempted to delay the necessary nihilism, the overcoming of us all, our final rasping gasping clutch at being human as we throttle one another into the abyss. Yes, the wars and bloodshed was the necessary feature of our own demise so that a people to come could emerge. All us inverse cripples had the biggest mouths, and we talked our doom without even knowing it. Everything that we said was somehow a component in our eventually being transcended. O my piggly-wigglies! I was living in Canadoo-doo, and so bored of story! So many nibblers speaking in spines and spindles! The glorious conversation came to an even more glorious halt when it was rained down in a hail of mean gunfire! Bodies bursting with blood

32 everywhere and nary a word to be heard that spoke of posies or redecorating the master bedroom! Real life and real material conditions came up on these bourgeois yakkers quite quickly, for life is a big barking dog from Hell with a thousand more heads than a Hydra-Cerberus! I was finishing my thesis at the time, O so long ago when we used to sit, hold hands, and talk of things both empty and full! Remember when we used to look wistfully into our books, trying to make a pass at one of Derridas cheeky neologisms? Or when you got knocked up by some postmodern theory but found out in the end that it was just Zizek all along? Or that time when I kissed Foucaults red hem dress of power under the stands at midnight, and my parents grounded me for a week? All this to say, all our memories so soft and chocolate box, which is to say that our university years were composed of no memories at all! But JonZebra and I were sexing the theory world up, making our moves, hallucinating victory into everything we read. JonZebra was always on the verge of his own demise. The lanky lout was only in his mid-twenties, and already dead twice in medical terms due to excesses that baffle the terms of the medical! The first time was a whiskey n panic induced heart attack, and the second instance was an overdose of heroin. What a funny boy! Dead twice! Always with the nerve to come back! Every other day he threatened aloud some harm to himself, and he was always partial to throwing some hemp over a beam and doing the limp turkey-neck swing! He would have looked beautiful hanging there aloft like a stage prop angel, his cowboy boots swaying to and fro, the implements of his ruin strewn about the floorhis newspapers, his copies of Harpers, his staggering collection of empty liquor bottleshis books on Bresson, his lurid collection of obscure DVDs, his kaleidoscopic moon-pipes with which he medicated himself liberally as a shield against the lackluster luminosity of the liminal real! Or was that the laminated real? I never knew his side of that story except through indirect examples and whatever memories I could scrape up of our exchanges. He called me every other day to inform me that I had the lions share of his books. On one such occasion, as was many, I talked him from that beam: O JonZebra, you have a touch of the suicide again, it has you in its grip! I should have replied sooner, but sometimes I fear that my touch is as gentle as an axe swinging through the air. How does one respond? The situation you report, without the detail, is one of pain. And, no, I never think it scandalous to love and be loved, which is precisely why you desire to make dives off tall things to feel the absence of love if only by windy descent! It may be so by

33 some majoritarian criteria, but love on, love on...It's not like it can be helped.--Or that it should be helped at all. It can be lifecrippling, like a paroxysm through the body, to have to endure the wounds of the past return. To be used is an awful thing, especially by those who purport to love us, and whom we cannot help but to love despite their cruel actions, words, deeds. I have been there, but I am young and certainly not of the same singularity as you on this score. From the sounds of it, love and addiction are tied together in cruel fashion, as if love itself was not already a kind of addiction tied to the crude visceral model. But, but! Not suicide! Pain is too much alive to allow the death of the body! I know you to drink a bottle of bourbon a day to keep cogent! I know this! I know further still your inveterate habit of reading the paper as you slowly slip into something more inebriated. I would, too! It is our collective condition! JonZebra was the most astounding alcoholic I knew! More astonishing than any collection of bodies on the parlour circuit or academic talk shows! He was chasing after his rich papa, wanting to invest, maybe toss off that entire artistic predilection and become an oil tycoon! The Romans had perhaps the most positive attitude toward the act of auto-finality; if one felt that it was time to go, there was no shame in just falling on one's sword. Our modern age makes suicide an instance of bad faith, ingratitude, a denial of a gift without knowing exactly what the gift was in the first place! O that people think the gift is beyond, above, or resting in the hands of other people. The gift is the body and what it can do. And even in its rattling moments of agony, it is still an affective wonder. It can be hard when one is in pain to understand bodies in this way and feel a sense of remote joy, but it is there. My counsels on how to overcome pain or dissolve it in states of affairs will perhaps not be fitting in your case; I usually become minimalist and soldierly, letting survival instinct and efficient prioritization take hold of the brain until it has ceased its weeping and wailing. What delicate, fragile things we are, especially in those moments of great pain and great joy! I would never say that one's life is wreckage or failure as if in opposition to one's fictions, for are you not in gradation, sinking in and from the fictions as well? Beware oppositionality! Beware contradiction! Beware Hegelianizing yourself...Keep making movies, you goddamn prick! Keep bourbonizing yourself! The news is never so bad as to stop making ritual pulls! Although there is perhaps nothing I can do to assuage this feeling of yours, or perhaps even make my listening worth anything to you, I still tender this option--to listen--should you so choose it. In read-

34 ing/viewing your cinema-fictions, I have been made privy to one side of a rotating crystal, one gleam in the stream that is JonZebra. As juvenile as it sounds, I do like you and still hold on to the belief that you have a great deal of wealth to offer this world. I know I do not need the prospect of your death to give that meaning, for the meaning (in its multiple sense) is already there, acting, being. Blah and blah and blah again! Empty little words that meant a whole deal! His aborted suicides were ten times more real than anyone elses shabby attempt to keep on living. If you only knew the condition of his many threatened deaths, you would have a more positive attitude about his innate beautyan ineluctable, ineffaceable beauty that your life of chasing after lust-phantoms of material things will never know! He was a dramatic type poorly cast in a sickening sideshow that you and your neighbour friends directed! The whole goofy crew of stagehands that tended the many illicit props of this real world knew exactly that there would be some of us grand actors who would not take well to playing on stage with talentless slop! You make us break character...for what? For this? For another word by your sponsors? I shit in the hats of your sponsors! None of you have any true sense of the tragic and the epic! JonZebra and I are epic beings, so who or what the hell are you? Pigeons upon our mighty statues, shitting and cooing and preening all day, eating and waiting to die! You malodorous, vermin-ridden fops of the generalized simple pleasures as-seen-onTV! Shoo! It was during a time of grand panic that I was penning my thesis and distracting myself interminably with Other Things to Do. It just so happened that all those with whom I fraternized were insane, wonderfully and intoxicatingly mad. Poets and recluses, filmmakers and noirists, the lot of them all! And they were bending my supple psyche into new shapes, as all great beasts do! Their words over the telephone, in person, over emailsContinuing to shape the master plaster that was me! I even visited a few! One such critter was a poet by the name of Verlaine! He was frou-frou up and down, a seminal puppet-eating machine! His words were shrill like Artauds, and twice as sharp! O Internettles, how much trouble I wound around me in broken twine that would never lead me out of the sorry labyrinth of silly scandal! Every word I typed into the bloody machine always came back at me rejected with new riderswith hostile retorts and predictable moral preachiness! O how the Internet truly confirmed that there were personality types so mundane! And this was supposed to be the communication vehicle where we would

35 see once and for all just how different we were! But, no! All difference seemed to be autoclaved, and the majority reigned! Difference dissolved into common opinion, and O woe to the person who misspoke himself beyond the cages and little boundary stones set up to corral what was allegedly Right! O many apologies anon, you petite electronic fiction-peoples! I have mis-clicked myself, I am afraid, and thought I was posing with old father Deleuze in championing our uniqueness! I cheerfully withdraw such things as importune on yonder spaces. O, but I am hooked and lined and fling-flanged by your new blogger site! Your new, yet old, line dance step to the right winged death bird of xenophobia and wealth! But I have always been a fan and an atic! I am learning the Orpheus shuffle with meister Hegel and not looking back! Forget Hegel! What a posh little cardsharper! O! Ho! Ho! Why do I bother, O bother, O brother? Toronto was much grayer in the greens and greener in its grays!! When I visited the poet Verlaine II, he was all drunk and wiry to show me the nether spaces of his university. And we journeyed there, anon. And yea, I gave a lecture as a guest on the dialectic to the sad hope of the future generation. And yea, I ventured forth into the land of bad fashion that called itself love and desire, but was all tattered and recycled decades whipped together in some awful slurry. As weighted down as I was with far too many moreovers and in additions and ostensiblys that I had to laugh! All universities are filthy little pigsties! It matters not a whit if you rut with books or feed from the troughs of your professors bog water wisdom! A life dedicated in the pursuit of knowledge is akin to sharing ones life with syphilis: its a progressively deteriorating disease, and when the word spreads that you are afflicted, your friends dont call on you as often. To this day, no one wants to watch television with me! Not that I make such time-wasting efforts a part of my regular repertoire, or as something I can bolster with pride like you corpulent saccharinsed-clean-minded machines! But so few can truly understand how my negative critiques of television are cultural critique and an instance of great positivity! Yes, all critique is ostensibly creation! In the violating of old stagnant values, in reconstituted postmodern malaise of freak fatigue on trashy circus talk shows there is only one value to uphold: create something new! Not another reformulation of the same old witless tripe (I really am saddened by the wit deficit in modern media)not another boring young jiggly tit, not another pointless game show where the object is to compete in guessing mundane phrases or as a test of general quiz-trivial knowledge, not another

36 sensationalist docudrama about a celebrity who is best left forgotten, not another lurid reality show that begs us to dissolve our meagre personae into preselected social archetypes that are allegedly functioning as the mirror image of the real sociusNo, not another ratings ploy in talking about sex for the millionth time, or sexual abuse (boring, boring! Modern media has killed sex by making it so ubiquitous and over-discussed, over-portrayed, talking about it in every conceivable aspect by every angle except by the path least traveled: the profound!), not another made-for-slobs show aimed at one or the other gender, not another sitcom that returns to status quo ante through a predictable series of dialectical, binary oppositions! Not another talk show host feigning sympathy, pulling for pity, and profiting all the while from a false misery from the participants who are more than willing to surrender all decency in order to be on the air (O how those who make their banal miseries public irritate me, for it is all for fleeting things, and their television appearance so wrongly becomes the very apex achievement of their lackluster, inglorious lives!)Not another Quixotian gimmick of the straight man and his sidekick funny fat man that we see draped over every sitcom or late night shows (laugh at the fat man, laugh at the fat man: this is the only message transmitted in this couplet debacle, our idiotic desire for contraries!), and above all no more circuses period, for I have freak fatigue. But I have lost myself, didnt I? I should have abandoned all narrative threads long ago, as my narrative is a threadbare sweater pulled over in the protocol of feigned polite coldness. No, I am not chilly, but there is one Cioran statement that I live by: he had said that liberty was in scorn, and that the next movementfrom liberty to liberationwas in detachment. How true that is! If anything, my ribald, continuous (much to the chagrin of my interlocutors and republocrat censors), unceasingly energetic cultural critiques as an appeal to the eventual destruction of all old and pointless values wherever they may be lodged is indeed my grand act of scorn! Your act of toeing party lines and upholding moral norms is one of grand mental larceny! I scorn this world, I vitiate it in order to create! Or, rather, I create and the world trembles! Its sorry, sick values roil in agony as I thunder along as a juggernaut with his eyes trained on the overcoming of all things, indifferent to what sick things I trample beneath me! Your type will never return, but nights alone with Freddy in my confidence have taught me the only true lesson worth knowing: that I can give my Yes to my return, forever! Let me return again and again! Let all creation be a subtle subterranean shock that makes the world shake into rum-

37 bling ruin! Let the few strong people rise like the violent erupting burst of mountains in otherwise flat and bland-lands! Let there arise from every despicable and weak-edifying, enervating value system a deadly promontory of violent atheism and misology that, by virtue of its awkward weight and size, causes that system to topple over and to shatter! Yes, your values are glass! No wonder you shield them and protect them so zealously! You do realize just how fragile your values are! And you can hide them behind large stone Church walls, seek to codify them in a million legal archives, perform word-of-mouth instructional exercises to make them mantra among the young, transmit them on a thousand satellite signals into every home in the hopes that repetition will ensure permanence, but it is always the same: all values are glass, and I am a reckless boulder flying every which way without regard for what I smash through! Your values were once beautiful things, before they were values. Once upon a time they were consequences of your will without this will halting for any consequence! Yes, once upon a time these values were tyrannical whims, the great volcanic burst of powerBut the lava of this will hardened into volcanic glassThey became black and brittle, unmoving and uninspiring. No wonder I scorn so much! But the perpetuation of this state eventually dissolves when one loses faith in the generalThen one enters into the phase of detachment. I look forward to such a day, a blissful noonday! To have done with this world, to be left alone in obscurity and peace! Morality: the hole puncher for the brain. Morality: tool of the weak, nothing more than an empty paleologism to me. But you have since recoded and recast this term, havent you? Speaking now as you do about citizen responsibility and mutual consensus. Nothing but a PC contest that only continues to advance the majoritarian weak will! Although I found this neologism contest hilarious and something that should perhaps replace national sporting events, I have to say that this reciproject brought me more giggles of schoolgirl mirth. But I seemed to have drifted again upon this incredibly cluttered skiff of opinions and observations! I may in fact be making an argument, and some statements are indeed implied questions. But I was giving that small lecture for that poet friend of mine at his university. The students responded well to my discussion of the dialectic and why we should overcome it with a new (yet primeval) principle: one according to the real conditions of life! Vitalism! Puissance, not cyclical juissance! Fuck Lacopacabana psycho-banana-apocalypschticks! We kill every great thinker by

38 discussing them to death, by freezing them into place, by sullying them with accolades and gratuitous commentary! Just look at what lit theory has done to Deleuze! But, yes, the dialecticI am leaning into thatIn my view, education at the undergraduate level in any of the arts discipline has only two purposes: to think critically and to arm oneself with an understanding of the dialectic. How impoverished are our universities in not adequately teaching them the latter, for it is essential that everyone knows how to view our too-human world as a dialectic, to have a dialectical understanding, if only in order to traverse beyond it! Be distrustful of all binaries and claims that harmonious synthesis is possible! All utopian sentiments and alleged movements toward the absolute are veiled corruptions, fueled by a will to deny and destroy those strong few who create! Yes, the dialectical will wants to transform this world into boring sameness! It dictates that this is inevitable while surreptitiously working double-time to ensure that its claims are right! It rigs all the conditions of our lives to prove its truth! It is akin to predicting that you will be a murderer while I am busy trying to set all the conditions so that you will have no choice but to commit murder and make me right! But in all cases, the one who predicts dialectical truth labours significantly in the negative and is just as guilty for his truth as those for whom the prediction was made! Some of the students were so committed to the dialectical understanding embedded within them that it would have been academic heresy to shake their faith with an outright denialeven if they did not know the name of their inculcated understanding, the term dialectic, they operated within it just the same with all their right-wrong, good-evil binary distinctions. For them, I tailored my lesson to be a means to subvert this rather than to meet them dead on in a failed attempt to convert them. I abhor all flagrantly obvious and transparent oppositional structures and tactics. I would rather be deceptively obvious in my polemical outrages, all the while carrying a subtle message transmitted almost subconsciously. I am indeed a creature of irony, and for those who think that my polemic is offensive because of its being too direct and confrontational, I have only this to say: what transpires beneath the surface of my polemic? What churns there? What is the geology of my ideas? I told them about the philosopher and grand stylist, Gilles Deleuze, a man who jumped out a window in 1995, now perhaps a tourist attraction. He rarely attended conferences and preferred to avoid the academic version of glamour and celebrity. He never really confronted Hegel directly, for to negate Hegel is to confirm

39 that he was right. Moreover, Deleuze despised arguing. What really irritated him was that people tended not to say anything new. I agree. How grey is our world when you hear it spoken from all those grey wagging tongues! Always saying the same things, advancing the same boringly repetitive opinions! Am I any different? Maybe not, but I would like to think that at the very least I can say the exact same things with more panache. That is, if you must speak of the mundane and ordinary, do so in an extraordinary wayRearticulations in novel fashion can themselves break a monotonous cycleI fear, though, that my little spiel on Deleuze was lost on these students, but it felt nice to talk about the man. Ah, but what of them? They havent a clue that it will take more than just taking up space in a university seminar room to lift that heavy war foot off the throats of the oppressedif that was ever their committed goal and not just an idealistic intention. I wandered around and thought of the old country, my native bastard nation, and that I was as equally a bastard within it. O hoary nights in cocaine and heroin blue jazz clubs in Chicago, my old stomping grounds now since abjured fully. I applied to become a citizen of Canada precisely when I realized that the unconscious desire of US unilateral global oppression destiny was beginning to give me the heavy nausea. And I will say this about my old land: let it go about and do what it will. People get the wrong idea about my views, think that I am arrogantly indifferent and insensitive to the plight of those foreign elements that are set upon by aggressive US foreign policy, be it the overt military variety or the more insidious poison carrot of economic treaties dangling before the hungry eyes of the strife-ridden. In response I say this: we can only delay the US destiny it has created for itself, and it is probably preferable to vote in all the fascist republicans and war time presidents (who conveniently construct their own wars out of grim and greedy incentives) in order to bring the US nihilism to its ultimate conclusion. Yes, let the New Rome rise up and just as quickly fall, for every realization of a destiny is followed by rupture. No one person can rule the world; it is too prone to splinter when it is confined within one shabby box where the material is insufficiently extendedI mean, well, stretch something to cover the whole world and suffer the problem of the material being weak and overextended everywhere. And so, let this nihilism complete itselfCountless innocents will die, for sure, but do you want the bandage ripped off quickly or achingly slowly? I can assure you that many more will die if the process is protracted. Let me tell you: this eras solution to all strife in this world is to put twenty fat

40 men on an elevator and stop it from going anywhere. And, on politicians. My critics and enemies know well to take what I say out of context in order to denounce my credibility. That is their art, and they know it well. But a politician is the only beast I know that makes his business on taking himself out of context. He takes intelligence reports out of context to justify his military decisions, he is never consistent in his policies, and at the very end of the ballot box ballet, his reward (and curse) is his reelection. What an ignoble fate to be reelected! There have been US presidents in the past that I have never wanted to see again, and I have always feared the second-term presidentReelection seems to give him carte blanche precisely because there are not enough mechanisms of accountability in place. When in a second term one does not have to worry about seeking votes for a reelection, do whatever the fuck you likeand if you have the House of Representatives stacked in your favour, its all systems go toward system collapse. Always beware the tyranny of the second-term president! As it is said, politics is the gun and the economy is the bullet. JonZebra and I met at the usual place; a caf that was sparsely patronized close to the music store that had all of our obscure and esoteric favourites. There was an eccentric old poof who sometimes came in, a man of some inestimable but unknown wealth who, after his fancy, was always accompanied by a minstrel of sorts whose purpose was only to Ode to Joy on a calliope over and over again. JonZebra and I were convening the first of many meetings that would bring us to the strange edges of the perforated madness of experienceThe making of my thesis: the movie. It would bring us to the furthest places, even if we never even set foot from this city. We join the dialogue already in progress without further prefatory bullshit I envision it as a flick, really, and couldn't help but to read it as screenplay that melts my TV. Ah! And the silver screen turned out to be mercury all along! What are your plans with it at this point? Fuck it...As soon as anyone asks the ridiculous destination question, everything is doomed to shit. Forget I asked it, I said. I took a few sections of your thesis and put it up on the blaster-box of the Internet for kicks, and got some mean replies in return. Your views apparently are rabies-inducing among the softhearted folks of the homogenized milk of our collective rape scandal of what we are driven to call society. I have the link to this one guys response in the event that you would desire to soil yourself

41 in getting metric with him in some electric wrestling. Although I itch for fights--and over this electronic milieu, it is failure--I think I am going to let this one go instead of provoking the rats. I havent the time or the will to funnel my efforts into minute inert particles on the web. It is a waste of my talents, using a shotgun to kill a fly. Well, if you do want to read this guys criticisms, you find that he does himself more damage through a personal attack and by the general calibre of his sputtering than anything disastrous you could ante up. So what are we to do with this thesis, right? I have the argument down about the link you make between dance club culture and Hegel, and the movement from Kantian bewilderment of the club-in-itself to the new immanent process of negativity of club culture a la Hegelian development and teleology. I am picturing something musical, something documentary, and something minimalist in juxtaposition to the obscene excesses of club life. Well, I mean the first draft was monstrously large; a fucking four hundred page tome pruned down to the bone. I think the finished product is so deracinated for the purposes of proper academic discourse that I would rather go back to the initial draft and take it from there. I mean, I had to chop out my big section on what precisely caused this shift in club culture from Kantesque to Hegelesque. I think the surreptitious militarization of the citizenry from cargo pants to SUVs, the big glossy hype machine around the panic-trigger buzzword of terrorism, and this asinine movement for simplicity and clarity uber allesat the expense of real differences, profound eccentricities, and real complex dynamisms of lifehas caused this turnover from the Kantian club age to a Hegelian one. Dance club life has quickly devolved into parody, and like the Hegelian system, its a false revolution: it is a movement in words and representations only. It has become too reflective and relies too much on oppositions to get it moving, and so the conspicuous consumers of the dance club lifestyleor regime of empty signs taken as the alleged truth of some grand teleological movementengage in this way of despair in order to locate themselves within the system. Its true! Right down to the stupid details of fashion! You begin like a beast and come back home to the nest after having triumphed over adversity as a sophisticated and dead clubtrash relic! What motors this movement, night after night? The dialectic of the libido! The procurement of the flesh motivated by privations! And a million naked club goddesses can do nothing to quell the hunger! But instead of realizing that the will is

42 will is boundless and cannot merely collapse in the fatigue of making representations and static goals, these people convince themselves otherwise! However, I realize only too late that my eagerness to confront Hegel at every turn is being replaced by a desire to forget the Swabian suckfish and his system. I mean, if one constructs a system, they effectively construct their own prison; our choice is precisely in choosing whether or not we want to live in it. All it takes is to take a look at Orpheus as an object lesson: don't look back. Just then I was interrupted by another patrona sorry looking near-middle aged man who had a frown you could bet on. He was part of the goddamn simplicity in language patrol, policing all those around him by declaring the pretentiousness of others as a convenient excuse for him just being too slow and stupid. I had forgotten myself: a war was on, and it was the Disney-fed, slightly right-of-centre anti-intellectuals waging petty aggressions against those like myself who dared to defy the populist convention by obstinately creating like a furious tornado that made no apologies for the swath of destruction Excuse me, but why do you insist on using such bloated words? Do you think it makes you sound impressive? I think people like you need to lighten up and actually listen to yourselves! I have been sitting here for twenty minutes and all Im hearing is this false academic pap. Do you actually know what youre saying, or is this some navel-gazing masturbation session? Go fuck yourself, I said, turning back to JonZebra. Well, thats classy, but at least it was direct and not so goddamn pretentious, he said to his companion. Maybe if he used simplerand therefore betterwords to express himself, he wouldnt come off as such a dick. Ive had my fill of fake intellectual poseurs when I was in university. Some people never grow up, it seems. God, it makes me so sick. Such a big ego, trying to make other people feel small by flaunting their book-bought knowledge which isnt knowledge at all. I hated when people made the connection between simplicity and betterness. Valuations like that raised my ire and drove me to want to drive something heavy and sharp through their oatmeal heads. Well, well, well, this isnt like you, JonZebra coaxed. I would think you of all people would at least make some effort to respond. The dogs are barking for a bone, and you have a mortuary of skeletons at your disposal Why bother? Id have to speak slowly and simply in order

43 for that victim of the fashion brigade of soft idealistic moral porn to understand. It would demean us all. Let him live his life of Pablum-simulacrum of little unrealized utopias and other fetishist fetters. He isnt worth his weight in tainted dog feces, I said. There he goes again! I cant believe it, my little critic exclaimed. He just doesnt stop! Blah blah blah! Youre just beginning to irritate me, sadly reinstating my faith in boredom I replied. Why do you speak at all? Whats the point? I can see you have an axe to grind against some misbegotten generalized conception of intellectuality, but remove me from your cross trigger. I try not to get mixed up with people like you, but when I do I am assailed by the one thought: when will people like you expire already? I do not take my linguistic cues from IKEA catalogues or according to the topical rage as of late that champions simplicity. Languageno matter what words utilizedis there to be used, and to be used without censure or border. I just cant stomach this fake academic bullshit you keep spewing. I have to deal with it all the time, and I am just about at the end of my rope. Then kill me if it so bothers you. Maybe you need to change your social situation and befriend those of a more simple nature. Perhaps take residence in a trailer park, Waldens fetid pond, if that is your speed. You chose to make this an issue, to listen at all Its kind of hard not to; youre so goddamn loud! Everyone can hear you, which makes me think you mean what you say to be a benefit for all those around you. Of course I think it is a benefit, but some among you are too slow or dead to pick up on any nuance. People like you need flashing blinkers and monochrome colour schemes and big media spectacles to pay any mind to anything at all! Yes, Im loud! Louder than this age and its demands that I be quiet, louder than the whimpering of your crotchety morality, louder than the murmur of your unrequited desires in your predictable mental calculus, louder than today! I am as loud as tomorrowand beyond! This isnt a monastery, and if you want to whisper with the whisper campaign under the phantom gaze of Gods fickle affection, dont expect me to go along with you! People are not yelling enough, or they are yelling all the wrong things! They yell their desires and needs, they yell themselves into the air as if they are special, but they are composed of these rotten pieces of what they are not! Negativity! Let us have done with polite discourse, done with demure! I am done with the fear to speak! I am done with the

44 fear to make a noise or a move! Quit badjacketing me! JonZebras digital camera was recording this for only posterity knows. Your profs must love you. I can just imagine what having to sit through a class with your mindless little ego-yelping must be like. I am rather disheartened that you have chosen a transparent strategy in appealing to the static authority of the university as a convenient shield. But I can expect as much from living, walking porridge that burps its commands into the open air. Take note, JonZebra: people like this saturate their emails with smileys while I am still trying to figure out if it is not just a dyslexic bass clef. Yer really full of yourself, arent you, my tiny aggressor said. I was just about to warn him that his real class was showing. Yes, completely full and determined from the very start. I am so full of myself in fact that I do not need to define myself by what I am not. You, on the other hand, have a different quest. Are you trying to be a wise-ass? Why do I bother? I talk to these sludge puddles and in return they try to overtake me! O little puddle, you wont engulf me And then things started to get nasty. What the fuck is your problem? You really need someone to put you in your place! That would be nice. My place is a throne in the stars God, I-I cant believe the audacity, the bloody arrogance! And yet you can probably believe in a papa in the sky and a mama in the earth, and a big magic bag of morals and happy endings. Now get away from me; you smell. What?! he said, beside himself in some aborted rageslash-impotent fury. I said you smell. Your talk,--I started gesturing with rolling motions with my hands near my mouth--it exudes like, like very dead things, JonZebra said, coming to my metaphorical aid. It was like a Joycean brawl, however that would look like. Things got testy, and soon after, they got bloody. An old punk rocker like me was always willing to scrap, and it didnt have to do with anything petty like honour. No, it was just fun to smash faces. I threw a few chairs, and JonZebra got into the spirit. My interlocutor and companion started in on the sugar bowls and I did them one better with hot coffee. I think I was laughing despite the opening gashes from splinter- and shard-things flying about in

45 its own hurricane. Ah, the great unleashing of some good old fashioned violence in this age of polite dcorWhile so many worried about terrorists, I decided it much better to be on the side of new angels: a brute, a rogue, a goddamn terrorist myself. If everyone fears the terrorist, I wanted to avoid all that fear noise. It has never been my intention to degrade the integrity of the posh party of the scholarly elite, but only to crash it with some loud drunken cries from my own personal wilderness. I wrote my way out of a few wet bags, dropped a thesis in someones lap, made a dash for itThere was no deception at play, insider deals or personal favours that coloured its acceptance (I believe it was a hung jury for about a half hour, which is saying a lot for our revolving door degree-dispenser institutionsI must have really ruffled their plumage with the implications of passing melike that feeling of having a shot at Hitler before he rose to power, or some such clumsy comparison that really melodramatizes my situation). I let the academocrats think that they knew exactly what they were doing in passing me, and it was doubtful to them that I would jeopardize their solid reputation. Ha, idiots! I am Iago! So fall, Othello! It was shortly after that I took to the street again, biding my time between degrees. I visited again with Verlaine II who was now starting up a label industry of literary topiary bliss. Something, anything, but to sit and bitch about the state of affairs as they are without lifting a finger to make changes. I spent a month in Toronto and helped him along, and also helped myself to much liquor (because it is said that I have a consumption problem, and a man must play his bit part in the stage play of other peoples neurotic need to identify addiction in others). Verlaine II was all scruffy and a good bloke to have kicking around. It was awkward at times, but we caught on to each others rhythm for necessary silences. I mean, I had met him through a book of his I purchased from a publishing house that offered to print one of my sillier books. The proprietor was just a shade lighter than a vanity press, which meant heavy money out of pocket had I chosen to go with him. But I played the publishers game for a while, letting him (I think his name was something common and uninspiring like Johnny) think that he was publishing my book. Ha! I was shopping that little bitch hot all over the place, even considering putting a few copies together myself (about seven, just like Nietzsche did with his second installment of Also Sprache Zarathustra) to circulate among friends who I found brilliant but whom I knew

46 didnt have the time to read (me). But, man, these friends of mine knew me well enough to not read me and know more about my sense of style than a thousand critics poring over the text. So I did produce those seven copies, and one of them went to Verlaine II whose own book had thrown me on my ass just like Edith Grossmans translation of Don Quixote. In any event, I read him, and in return I gave him a copy of my own little bible, the illisible tome now known as Codex Obscura, otherwise known as the first working copy of my Popular Metaphysics: Being a Treatise on Dance Club Culture. The final edition of Codex Obscura would not see real print until much later in my professional years when I was assisting with a student named Alex Copec. Oh, did I neglect to mention that I had written the sequel to my seminal The Metaphysics of Pop Culture prior to the latter text that ran me into so much shit? Sorry. Dont let me lose you here, but four years later I had my fresh doctorate in my pocket (why hang such embarrassments on a wall when they fold up nicely and out of the way in ones wallet? Ah, my reverence for educational milestones!), I received quick and easy placement to a tenure-track position on the basis of my dissertation having been miraculously (read: nineteen weeks of twenty hour days of toil) rewritten as a book and published with an academic press with whom I had already made previous arrangements based on an abstract I wrote while very drunk. Oh, the laughs! My reputation was sealed! I was embraced by the ivory helots as both a Great Hope and an inveterate pariah! It was probably safer to keep me locked up in the lecture halls than to have me wandering loose. Maybe the hiring committee thought they could crush my publishing spirit with a heaping load of administrative dutiesBut O ho ho! I showed them! While being stuck with agonizing first-year courses to teach and a mountain of new responsibilities, I amphetaminized myself into writing the sequel to The Metaphysics of Pop Culture: my follow-up practical guide just like how Kant wrote that awful second book after such a great entrance with the first Critique. To be frank, the second book was a piece of shit. I hate it still, but I was obliged by the academic community to write a calmer practical text to give explanations to those too dim and slow to catch on to the theory bit in the first book. So there it was, my gleaming pile of excrement, but at least I had continued to publish even if my colleagues were conspiring to keep me in the dark bowels of grunt duties. I suppose they began to tire of my publishing spectacle, the insuppressible nature of my tongue and pen acting in concert. Perhaps they were jealous of my energy and exuberance. Perhaps I should not have eased up on the whiskey before

47 going to dry and pointless departmental meetings. Perhaps I should not have taken the students side on the issue of the foul corporatization of the university. Whatever it was, the novelty of what I was wore offor rather the edge of that novelty was not dulling despite their efforts. So I was canned and a marked man for a very long time. I may just as well have had the mark of the serpent on my forehead. But it was all the same, be it among my alleged scholarly peers in the academy or with women: Im fascinating to them all for a timebut there comes a point when that very interesting and wildly exuberant nature is shown to be a faade and everything returns back to bland normal securityInstead, I was honest from the start, and people get tired of what they thought was just a quirk and a front. They become scared. I cease to be human in their eyes, or some such monsterlabeling stunt. I get on their nerves. Like I have focused ADHD and a humming clockwork brain that broadcasts a big signal all day longCan I help being a polymath, for being encyclopaedic, for being so full of puissance? Can I help the almost crippling number of lateral associations or hailstorm of new ideas and twists on theory that assail my brain every day? I say this with no exaggeration: most people get one (I think) great idea a day; I get ninety-five. I havent the dexterity to jot them all down, less even to work them all out in the necessary finery of language that they require and deserve in order to be understood! But I lost you again, didnt I, here in the embarrassing selflauding hall of ego-mirrors like some silly French poet? Lets just call me charming and move on. Lets crank this back to that summer between degrees, my time with Verlaine. He wanted to start up a real publishing company in lieu of so much pap being produced in the all-too-cozy literaticon market. I should know: the community of writers (hacks) was so small that I managed to offend them all within a week. Verlaine lived in a bachelor apartment near an industrial complex on the east side of Toronto. He hated Toronto writers, which was fine because I hated all of Canadas writers for not ever being visible. I hadnt yet seen or read one real writer among them all, yet I knew they must have existed somewhere. To be fair, between Verlaine and me, we had an arsenal of hitherto unacknowledged scribes getting very frustrated in banging their work against big publishing houses on the verge of bankruptcy who only had enough cash on hand to produce the next bourgeois claptrap instead of something more risky and worthy. The other options were not as savoury, like self-publishing or the micro-presses who put things together with photocopiers in

48 their basement. Verlaine had bigger aspirations, and it entailed an entirely different strategy. Learning from the failures of the past as well as the continued failure of what called itself Canadian publishing at the time, the strategy had to be different or else suffer the ignominy of obscurity in the deep stagnant sea. I was born in the USA, but had strangely high hopes for the literature of the north. We should go about it like a record label, he said. We should also vibrate all those nodes and nexuses where others have not thought of going, revolutionizing what it is to market in this age of the super value meal webpage. We were conspiring over drink, as per usual. Many of the greatest revolutions were plotted over a liberal supply. Why stop at one press? We cant limit our sights. We can be a whole new breed of terror-assassin professionals. What I mean to say is this: lets take aim at the entire fucking publishing industry. Lets Trotsky this thing. Lets crank up the Leninizer on this. The real problem with the industry as it so stands is that there is far too much choice. That is, too many presses statistically diminish that the one will stand out more prominently. The choice is only quantitative, not qualitative, for they all produce the same tired reliable formulaic books. My plan? Fewer presses, but better. Lets Napoleonize the industry. Im all for clearing the clutter in the industry, but all pap needs a place to go, and when you apply the squeeze on any terrain with a lot of pap, it dribbles off everywhere. Cranking up the Napoleonic volume in fabricating a fascist controlling power nexus in the publishing industry is a great idea, especially if people like us are the ones being emblazoned on the goddamn rock, but it would have to be very subtle or the people wont go for it. It seems that people get sore real quick by trigger words like censorship and monopoly and mind control. Not that the people would recognize these practices when they are happening in real time or else they would have stormed all the television networks by now and put the CEOs heads on pikes, but an act like the one you just described would be a delicate thing to pull offThat is if Im not reading too much into what you just said. Ah, Verlaine! You have the instinct, and it is not as crude as mine! I think if anyone would be more composed and contained to pull this off, it would be you. But then came the problem of Alex Copec. I know, I know, Im jumping all over the place, but is not my prancing in and of itself

49 interesting? Oh, that is right: the thought of something moving and vituperatively exuberated makes you feel all queasy inside with insecure and uncomfortable feelings. You want clarity and order! Ten-hut, baby boy, Ill give you plenty of that, but for now youll just have to stay put! I am, according to the popular clinical lingo of our days, a mad-man of the man mad(e)! Send your idiotic correspondences and complaints that will go unanswered to: jonkilcalembourhasstolenallyourgoats@fictitiouswebprovider.com! No promises needed for longer personal emails. We're not the Shelleys of digitalia. I am at least half secure that you exist, whatever that means, dearest audienciating audience... At the time of my visits with Verlaine II, Alex Copec was busy doing the rounds as a mad monk poet. This meant that he scrawled bizarre entreaties to sand-gods on toilet paper to read aloud to indifferent audiences across the land (perhaps you were one of them?). Copec was a genius, more well-read than a hundred Borgeses, which made his prose-poems a vicious whirlwind of terms, words, sounds, and the like. One cannot read that much without going mad, without all language blending in some motley kludge of fused parts! The great traffic jam of that eighty-lane highway of his cerebrum had mixed together so well and fluidly in its collisions that he seemed to speak in stilted phonemes! But, Canadian poetry is a piety is a pouting plot of pap! Canadian poetry: don't do it, man! I do remember the poetry readings, I do, and I do not want to. I remember this one little schoolgirl type who was just complete hack with stilted love poem lines around her ass like shit aureoles. But the crowd ate it up because it was from her. Ah, so many clamoured around her while she read her saccharin poems at the open mic, all these horny talentless poet-men lying to her and feeding her lines about her being poetic! She was nothing more than a masturbation fantasy, a piece of viable meat! Perhaps that is the only best fate for a poet. Lord only knows they arent worth that much else. If we are lucky, they will defer the reading of their poems and just give us a little leg. I think she went on to have quite an illustrious career as a poet, but to this day her writing is a laughing embarrassment! Once her looks go, and maybe a generation passes, and that generation picks up her work, they will realize that there was no substance to the bitch after all. Poets like Verlaine II and Copec were daredevils of the word, and had so many beautiful, brittle, and helio-spherules to spread! It was a dastardly thing that the crowds applauded her

50 while reviling the rest of us. Im not bitter about this, for there is no sense casting pearls before swine, right? And we were the prettiest pearls of the sea, especially at that time, and this was justified in history by just how much we were despised in the age in which we lived. One can measure greatness by the hatred of the many. An inverse proportionality, I believe. We must have been gods, for the adversity was so severe and almost universalor else the bland morality Gestapo had abducted the majority of our citizenry without my getting wind of this fact. Verlaine II, Copec, and myself gave a few rogue, impromptu terrorist readings wherever we thought it was aptmalls, subway tubes, while walking briskly through the downtown core. We punctuated the whole affair when we drunkenly co-opted a funeral already in progress, effectively co-opting the corpse and renaming her Canadian Poetry, after which time we bid it farewell with haranguing eulogies and other unflatteries about herloose morals andugly hat. The police were called, many were traumatized, and we beat a hasty retreat. But it came time to go home, so I did. I boarded a plane and readied myself for the next gauntlet of academic fire. My flight was a wretched farce. After the long plenary procedures of stewardesses Marcel Marceauing the pointless "we'ze gonna die anyway, but this is how you attach an oxygen mask to your beak" protocol, and after having driven to the very end of the long runway, the pilot informed us that we had to go all the way back to the gate to pick up some errant passenger who had missed boarding to ease a trembling bladder. This added 2 hours delay to an otherwise frightening flight. Then, we hit some nasty turbulence, and at about 30 000 ft., the engine stalled. The dropping roller coaster sensation coupled with a senile, addling engine gave me the impression that, yes, I was dead. I took a long swig of whiskey in the bathroom, did some mescaline, and returned to my seat in preparation for the descending tomb-ride. The stewardesses were not all that pleased with my lack of seatbelt compliance during our time of aerial craft impotence, but cheap flights deserve even cheaper responses from its passengers. The plane finally did land, and I caught a few winks before circumstances of back rent lit an inferno under my ass with fear tactics built on timing. My landlord, a surly Hungarian who masturbated his youth away to Marx and Gramsci, was a card. I think he missed those good ol' days in Hungary as a child when, at Christmas, there were pictures up all over town of old Saint Stalin. I told him he had Red Wall Loss Anxiety and he just about knocked my head clear off. Ah, but these fugitive moments by fugitive beasts are not my ken, and they usually emerge at the most