The Boner Dimension, a womp

I smell like gravy. I'll pee in the water tower. You can't stop me. You think the cops can stop me? You'll take a bath in it. You'll love it. M. Kitchell wrote something about the girl who drowned in the water tower didn't he? I think the title was something in the "The Adjective Noun of Christian Name Surname" format. 

On the topic of the missing dimensions needed for string theory to function, we've been thinking about it all wrong. We are stuck in our up/down/sideways entropic experiential reality. But consider that time is a dimension. We take that for granted, but it is conceptually very different than spatial dimensions. Yet we continue to look for ways that the remaining dimensions might be spatialized. Time is a dimension within which space spaces. Could there be a dimension within which time times? It has been proven that gravity affects time and space. Is gravity simply a force or is there some way it could be seen as analagous to time. Temperature, entropy, why are these not dimensions. 

Daddy? Can you make me a cube out of diarrhea? It'll be easy. It's nothing to worry about. I can't, dude. I'm too lazy.

How have we simply reduced ourselves to living in a 4-dimensional world? And that is why we need to talk about Optimus Prime's trailer. Where does it go? It isn't part of his robot mode. There are theories that it goes into something called a pocket dimension. Without going into research mode I'm going to make a conjecture about what a pocket dimension is. My idiotic understanding of string theory might suggest that it is--every quark of it--curling into a Calabi-Yau space, a folded multidimensional pocket that occurs densely packed in 3-dimensional space. But how does material "enter" something that is the space that makes the material world possible. I think it enters a dimension of heat... or maybe a dimension of sound, of misery. A portal of sorrow? A planet of sound? 

Gargling blood, drowning in blood, dressed in blood. It's our only hope for stopping the noxious spread of my lethal coffee breath.They call me King Butt. Somehow I'm on the hook for tornados on the planet Neptune, home of the fastest winds in the solar system. Didn't you always picture Neptune being tiny like Pluto? No, it's a big chudrucker.

Actually given that Optimus Prime is a drawing it is just not drawn in one cel and it is in the next. Maybe the other dimensions are a product of some sort of agency like this. Maybe it's moronic to think about. But my son and I really do cackle when we see his trailer just slip away into an alley when he transforms. It's just hiding over there pretending it doesn't exist. Like a ballet dancer with a huge boner in his tights holding a young lady up over his head.

Clearing the pit for the last 30 seconds of Chiquitita. Because I'm a robot demon. I'm coming to eat your family and shit in their skeletons... time permitting. I'm coming to fill the galaxy with hot diarrhea. Did you know that galaxies spin just like the water going down the toilet? Can you please cut my throat? I can't stop talking.  

Bithlo Boosterism, a womp

You're one of the clever clogs aren't you? I've got about as much use for you as a bag full of Abraham Lincoln's elbows. Let me get back to eating dirty diapers. A new restaurant is opening in Bithlo capitalizing on the success of the Orlando Speed World Oval Track and adjacency to Outdoor Xtreme Orlando Paintball and Airsoft. It is hoping to energize a new commercial development on Topeka Street, currying favor with the clientele of these two establishments (Florida shitheels) while also cultivating a more elite vibe for booji boy Bithloans (polished Florida shitheels). Booji is pronounced boogie. It was a typo. I didn't make a typo. No, Mark Mothersbaugh did. The guy from Yo Gabba Gabba? Well yeah but from Devo. Yeah but I wrote the piece. Mark Mothersbaugh doesn't write for the Bithlo Buzzard. I mean I'd be happy for him to, but I can't imagine what his stake in Bithlo boosterism would be though. What are you on about, Cranborque? You brought it up. I'm just trying to build this city back up. Maybe we could even reincorporate. This shithole? I mean, if Mark Mothersbaugh is on board like you're saying. The restaurant is called Cock & Balls. The innovative concept is built around indoor bocce courts (bocciodromo) with troughs of coq au vin at the end of each pitch. We caught up with restauranteur and sex pest Kieran Canter to learn what spawned this obsequious fusion. "Well there's 6 core values that appoint this vision. One is that I'd been to this place in Kansas called Chicken & Pickle, chicken for the grub and pickle for the pickleball. Two is that I feel like Bithlo is ready for a boom. I mean, look around. This is a fucking lesion of a town, in a state that is the anus of a continent. All I'm saying is it's due for a win. What now? Yes... three is that I made a bank at the Jai Alai Fronton. Four is that--culinarily--coq au vin is becoming disengaged from the etymology of its name. That kind of looseness with language troubles me. From there it's a baby step to the Tower of Babel just falling on your dick. Also, you know, the misandry is just getting out of control. It's 'coq'!!! Respect it!!! Five is that I'm trying to get the shitters from the race track to come. Those pencildicks love sports. They can't eat without seeing something move. Their brains are about as developed as frogs. And six, finally, is that if you put an ampersand in your name every nitwit with more money than sense will think it's a classy joint." Who knows where the ampersand trend caught fire. One imagines it is part of America's continued cultural fealty to the UK and that their pubs are all called Thistle & Dickweed or whathaveyou. Obsequious? I don't know man... I get paid more for fancy words. What were you saying about Mothersbaugh?

Orality and Beethoven

I got my son a new CD of Beethoven's 9th Symphony. For years now he's been listening to the 9th on a Tonie I made for him from the mp3s of the 9th on my computer. I couldn't pretend to know anything about the recordings of either the CD or the mp3/Tonie. The CD says Placido Domingo sings on it. I recognize the name obviously but I know far more about Betty from OPERA than him (her mom was a sadist), and I pretty much loathe the culture of using people's names as some kind of shorthand for a subject you know nothing about ("Who are you, Albert Einstein?" / "Who are you, Richard Petty?" / "Who are you, John Holmes?"). But what I do know is that the recording on the CD is maybe at 95% of the speed of the other. The second movement, the one Alex loves in A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, the one that would play in Barnes & Noble when I worked there 30 years ago, simply plods, like it's crawling, like I've huffed freon. The notes are all correct, but the conductor has them lumbering along. I've seen the 9th performed 4 or 5 times (a few standouts are at Dorothy Chandler in LA with Leonard Nimoy on stage for the whole first movement (he had been doing a spoken word accompaniment to the opening piece), in the Madeleine church in Paris on New Year's Eve, and last summer with my son in Wichita). It is torturous to listen to a recording at this speed. It manipulates my expectations. Like tripping over something in my own home. But it would only have that effect on someone who knew it well. I've conservatively heard at least the first 2 movements in the range of 800 times. I'm reading a book, ORALITY AND LITERACY right now that distinguishes between the sense of whether a piece spoken aloud is repeated verbatim each time it is performed. And the finding was that far more often the repeated performances have minor variations. There is no text for an oral culture to compare the performance to and by the time the performance has taken place it is just as quickly gone forever. I'm curious as I'm sitting here in the dark with my son, if it is my literate mind, that vaguely understands the way music is written down, that is irritated with the variation of speed. Or, in a slightly different way of looking at it, whether any of those live performances, had they been at a slightly different tempo, would have been apparent to me as someone not from a culture or mind that can be present in the moment for an ephemeral performance and feel that it is a one of one without any compositional forethought. 

Nonfiction vs Autofiction cage match

Let's say for a moment that there was a conceptually or philosophically cromulent project in writing in first person, and that you were capable of manipulating reality in some way, manipulating the reality of your own life and the way you visualize it, the shape and impact of your memories, of what use is that to the rest of us, and I understand that people out there find the lives of others to be useful to contextualize their lives on earth. But what material difference does it make. What alchemical transformation is actually possible and for whom. 

(This "fi" combo needs a ligature)

I read, third-hand (I'm guessing) about a famed autofictioniste who said that the form was able to unsaddle writing from metaphor. I'm always incredulous about such strident/confident remarks. The excerpt attached to the essay, something about getting ready to eat breakfast maybe??? was absolutely able to be read metaphorically. There is no amount of artifice or fictiveness that can be stripped away from a writing practice that eliminates its capacity to be read metaphorically. That is the license of the reader. In fact all language is in essence a metaphor. If we believe metaphor to be the connecting of two disparate items through a magical tissue, that tissue being the reader or listener and their subjective interpretational faculties, subjective to such an extent that the mechanics of the tissue cannot, MUST NOT, be articulated, because that would be an analogy wouldn't it? If you can articulate what bearing a metaphier has on its dual, you are essentially pinning down the relationship (whether like, as, in contrast, because of, or any number of comparative situations). 

A word is a metaphier for the thing it refers to. We can do all manners of etymological analyses of the word but still only get within an impossible arm's reach between the word and the thing. Its relationship is asymptotic. It requires faith. The tissue of magic remains. So metaphor, in this sense and the more traditional or extended sense, is going nowhere. 

I have, because I read something offhanded about diminishing the role of analogy in Robbe-Grillet's Towards a New Novel, tried to limit my use of the device almost entirely. It is definitively something achievable. The impact of its absence as uncertain. My hope is that it strives for such a concrete reading lens that every aspect of the text can be read metaphorically. I would imagine at the time he was writing Towards a New Novel Robbe-Grillet did not see his work as highly metaphorical. Maybe (maybe?) in the 1970s. But my conjecture is that like the aforementioned autofictioniste, A R-G saw his work as being simply "writing", divorced from psychological or interpretive metaphoricity. 

What I'm trying to back myself into here is wondering about the form of nonfiction. Is that a type of writing that, and an invitation to readers that, no interpretive framework need to be brought to bear. Because it is true, objective, universal (I know that nonfiction is not objective so chill, baby), then it simply is what it is. I don't have a vested interested in shedding metaphor. As I said, I don't think it is technically possible. Even if something can be interpreted, the way it suggests its use to the reader can suppress the benefits of interpretation. I think this is the true power of the nonfiction form, to arrive at a txt that is simply looked at. Maybe that's the power of autofiction too, but I couldn't be arsed to find out.

Getting in your own way

It's hard to think or at least to mold thoughts productively--and when I write the word productively I mean transforming raw material, like an allusion or an observation, into something digested into a synthesized contribution that is, like a metaphor, something that juxtaposes the raw material with other first-person points or external precedents like works of art or other sociocultural situations--when peripherally watching a cartoon like Creature Cases or Youtube videos by someone like Jettkuso. In this case it is a faculty meeting. I feel like Pnin or Kohler or some other grouch who feels above it all but also is vitally dependent on the latent unprofessionalism of academia for their distracted sense of superiority. Or, for instance, cooking dinner, like now, while my children are screaming and bickering. For some reason, the desire to make some writing emerges, in a moment I know will be fruitless. I was reading about Isaac Newton earlier. It's pretty wild what kind of free time money and the patriarchy will give to certain privileged individuals. Was he intelligent? Most certainly. Was his daughter constantly pushing furniture around and ignoring the Gabby's Dollhouse movie she demanded while his son was moaning about messing up a Lego set. I'm just going to assume he didn't have children, or if he did he most likely foisted them on their mother. Along those lines I've often mused about how unlikely it is that any man in the U.S. congress has ever changed a diaper. Not they are doing anything important with the luxury of not spending time on quotidian mundanities. It's arguable whether I did anything important. I wrote a few books before having kids. I can say with some reasonable certainty that I didn't actively participate in making average peoples' lives shittier. But on the topic of simple cognitive freedom, without constant intrusion of bullshit, I rarely have the bandwidth to unspool some gray matter, so I think frenetically, generically, on vague and superficial aspects of current undertakings. 

A list of possible book titles:

  Reference Systems

  Fictional Reference Frame

  Reference Frame

  Fictitious Reference Frames

  Frame Indifference

  Objective Frame Indifference

  Material Frame Indifference

Back in Charlie's room listening to Beethoven.

"Simply put, the concept is the idea that constitutive laws describing the behaviour of a material (for example the relationship between stress and strain) should be independent of the frame of reference or the motion of the observer." How is this pertinent to literature? Well typically it is not. The subjectivity of the observer has been the crucial variable in fiction throughout its history. In poetry somewhat less. Even an instance of what we call an unreliable narrator is an assertion about the effect of the observer in the content/truth/reality of the situation. Is it simply because the observer (author) or their surrogate (even as a 3rd person cog delineated by a narrator) is placed into the text? Is that an admission that observing this particular situation was a choice and not simply the raw occurrence? Can a raw occurrence be embodied in text? Automatic writing you say? Some kind of digitally generative text? Perhaps yes to both of these, but it's really incumbent on the subject matter isn't it. Perhaps it's the prioritization of a POV, which seems to be inescapable in fiction, that doesn't support the principle of material frame indifference. Robbe-Grillet certainly argued for such distance from the text, but could not help himself from populating his books with sicko stand-ins for himself. Everywhere throughout literary history we've prioritized human subjectivity. Animal Farm, you say? You can't tart up a pig and call Napoleon and say it's not a human. Maybe the problem is earth in general. It's too familiar. But science fiction suffers from the same crippling predilections. Just look at the aliens in Star Trek. They're just all dudes with stupid heads. Even when an author strives to move beyond the scope of our experience they trick out the situation in the same hackneyed anthropomorphic societal claptraps (the Cheela who live on a neutron star in Dragon's Egg by Robert L. Forward for instance, are hokey af). Maybe we need to look outside fiction altogether. Nonfiction? Most nonfiction has some kind of editorial project associated with it. Hell, even scientific papers describe their methods. Could it be that we can't get out of our own way? No matter how hard we try, humans fuck everything up just by looking at it. 

Cloaca maxima

When there is work to be done but no work and no method is imminent, just an itch of boredom, or a feeling of uselessness, a sense that too much time has passed without concretizing, just slipping away into experiences like sitting on the curb with the kiddos eating popsicles, the first lawnmowing of the spring, watching the dog meet a new friend and flip the fuck out, and acting like they've just slipped away, but here they are enumerating themselves at if to say "fuck you for deligitimizing us." Which is fine. I stand by it. I'm not working on anything that requires me to be human. I think in this situation it is helpful to make a list. A list of what? What about a list of different types of lists that would be interesting to make. I don't know how many there were, but a lot of my time writing Massive was spent making lists: forms of concrete garden statuary, Russian snack food, people referenced in the Divine Comedy, all of the Emmanuelle films (and rip-offs), all the cities on the longest straight line that can be drawn entirely on land, all of the substances listed in Antoine Lavoisier's writings, Russian firearms, words containing the zh sound... that's all that spring to mind immediately. Now listening to 1000 AIRPLANES ON THE ROOF in the dark. The dog is snoring and Charlie is definitely asleep. I make lists of lists. A list of things to make lists about. Forgivably bad works of art. Last meals of real condemned people. Good options for last meals. Sea mounts by height above the seafloor. Movies where people call their vehicles 'trucks' when they are obviously not trucks. 'Very special episode' topics. Shades of brown. Lists. 6 degrees of Jm J Bullock. Books with unreliable narrators. Televised deaths. Words that start with K and end with B. Slang words for male and female genitals (or gennies). Spin-off television shows. Ways to pass the time without electricity. Things that cannot be viably made from plastic. Discovered and verified exoplanets. Shapes whose area is larger than the circle that circumscribes them. Canonical sandwiches. Novels written by more than 2 authors. Ways of organizing your home library. Things that have disappeared from society in the 21st century. Animals that secrete things as a defense. Types of brick bonding patterns. Fungal infections and their symptoms. Things that would be strange to buy in bulk (recalling the hubbub on the first Amazon "Prime Day" when a large drum of sex lube was highlighted for sale). Cities with streets named after famous racists. A family tree of Norwegian black metal. A list of lists whose subjectmatter spectrum and overall tone are enough to establish a complex character. And the moment the thrill of the list-making is exhausted, so too is the catalyzing power it had to add words to the screen. Those kinda textual kickstarts are deals with the devil. They sound amusing until the next thing you know you're chained to a rock being eaten by eagles. 

I love pareidolia. This map of the Cloaca Maxima has a pretty obvious dick and balls embedded in it. 

Concerning my previous concern (under a separate cover), chickens are literally buttfuckers.

Journey into the unknown

A tornado warning, usually meaning that said type of storm had been spotted and yall gtf underground, drove us into my office in the basement. 2 sides are full height concrete walls. The 2 framed sides are both 18 feet inboard from other concrete walls. Diesel the dog has joined us. Actually by now the ladies have returned upstairs. I don't think a tornado had actually been spotted. Big walls of storms always break up when they get near Clinton Lake and part miraculously around Lawrence like carwash flaps sloshing around an SUV. I really want to take my shitty old truck to a carwash and see the employees flip out that the bed is full of compost and has been for over a year. It's petrified, buddy. Relax. This phenomenon has been called "The Tonganoxie Split." It's named after a city 25 miles east of here that is said to have mystical powers that deflect storms to protect Kansas City. Why you'd protect Kansas City is beyond me. And furthermore, the split more regularly happens around Clinton Lake where I am in a nearby basement. You know what else is right by Clinton Lake? You guessed it: Stull, Kansas. One of the purported gateways to hell and popular Spring Break destination of Satan. Slade Craven didn't try to crash an airliner into Tonganoxie did he? Slade Craven saved everyone on that plane I'll have you know. It was a lookalike that hijacked the plane. You think I don't know that? I've seen TURBULENCE III more than I've seen my family since COVID. It was just a cool-sounding shorthand to describe the scenario without having to unpack a bunch of pointless plot mechanics to people who think Yorgos Lanthanides is an artiste. Stull is much more mystical. Now it is just Charlie, Diesel, and myself down here. Boy basement! Charlie is feverishly drawing each step in Elsa's transformation from newly crowned queen of Arendelle to self-exiled ice queen. 

I was reading TOTAL DESTRUCTION for a minute but then was like hey I already wrote this. Why not keep writing? You have a blog, right? I probably wrote 8 words on the Jupiter book in about 45 minutes earlier today. Why Jupiter? The fictional person who's curious about my life asks? Several years ago, probably on the now defunct @trefryesque account, I queried about science fiction books without people in them. I like science. I like fiction. But the authors who seem to be drawn to the genre seem to have a pretty tenuous grasp on subtlety and realistic characterization. Take for instance some of the names these writers come up with: Duncan Idaho, Blast Hardcheese, Bastard Noise, Moist Lipwig, Archimandrite Luseferous, Big McLargeHuge, Arvid Engen, Sergeant Major Major Major, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Hiro Protagonist. Not surprisingly these are all dudes. Women fare far worse, essentially being ogled at best or factory bred. The first writers' crit group I joined in Atlanta had a dude writing a scifi book about a guy who crash lands on a planet of women. Lord. You can imagine where it goes from here. He fixes their cable? If you're looking for a genre to sink your slide-rule into, why clog it with cardboard humans? I got a few responses. STAR MAKER by Olaf Stapledon stands out. Also B.R. Yeager recommended reading a Warhammer 40k players' guide, which was great. Still these were from the POV of somewhat living entities. I grew up with a father who was an academic scientist. I've read his papers. I still read scientific papers. I mostly don't understand them. I miss that feeling when I read novels. The attraction of Jupiter is that the human mind, the human storehouse of experience, the context of Earth cannot help us elaborate on what is going on beneath the clouds of Jupiter. Even the data we have is largely theoretical. So how can you write about it? I still don't even know. I've started with the things we do know. At the moment that is the rings that surround the planet. But once I get beneath the cloud deck, I anticipate the text will need to come apart quite significantly. Not that it would be illegible or disobedient, but it's values would need to unshoulder the desperate anthropocentrism that has characterized literature for its entire history. I don't even know. I will think about it when and if I get there.