Take Banffy for cloacas, a womp

Woooooah! Andrew Koenig found dead. Listen to me! He was a vegan warrior. I want to go to Culvers to eat fried mermaid from their dumpster. That's where they found him. He had a note pinned to his shirt. "When one of us eats mermaid, we all eat mermaid. You shitters and your disgusting world." He was hanging from a rope that went into the clouds. It was taut. We all loved Boner. Bright lights don't illuminate themselves, sadly. That's why I bring the joy. Well this is nice. I never thought you and I would get to be together alone. I don't get out one on one really much at all. Why's that? Everyone has so much fun when you're around, Jerd. You're just so funny. That bit you did in the break room about asking for Product 19 on the Kellogs factory tour was brilliant. You're sweet, Densey. Thank you. What about the conversation between Leigh McCloskey and Dario Argento: Maestro, the screenplay says that Mark is to have a mustache. Si, si. Well, your excellence, my mustache is just absolutely disgusting. Like a twelve year old boy. Like a blonde thing that lives on a hydrothermal vent. Non importa. Hai visto i miei capelli? Sembro il papà di Peter Bark. That's great. I love INFERNO. Can we switch seats? I like to face the room. Haha are you afraid of getting assassinated? Not exactly. You look really nervous. I guess I am. There's stuff that kinda makes me avoid dating women. Ok. I'll bite. Are you gay? Gay? I wish. If I were gay, there'd be no problem. No, what I have is a gastrointestinal abnormality--one so unbelievable that it must be hidden from the public at all costs. I have a cloaca. Like from a rip down there? Like a hernia? No. It's congenital. It's called serpentorism. You take prescription Banffy to temper it. Tell your doctor if you die or your toenails become animate. But still I need to be near a bathroom at all times. Because I fart diarrhea. Um, Jerd, how do you get through a day? The meds help. I also wear diapers. But it's not like I want to change them on a date. Can you dig it? I can't even!!! It's my underwear. I smell like gravy. But whenever it reads it back to me, just that line, it does it in an Italian accent. E smella leak e grevay. Also when we have sex later I'll need to be on the bottom. Densey? 

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. 

I Wanna Womp

I wanna womp! Set to the Twisted Sister song. So here I am thinking about how to express my feelings in a potential meme I could make with Dee Snider holding a big greasy animal bone and me crossing out "Rock" and scribbling "Womp" over it. The fact is, fuck. In between writing the "the fact is" and having to write the next phrase I was asked to fetch some apple juice while I sit next to the tub with my son in it. And in walking to the kitchen and back realizing that "the fact is" is a cliche, a stock phrase, something that I've done my best to try to avoid in my writing. Womping can liberate a lot of things in a writing practice but jesus titty I still need to have some dignity. What I was trying to get at was that since finishing Total Destruction, which was a fucking frenzy that somehow resulted in hundreds of pages written in one summer... but since then, and since that ellipsis I drained the tub, which you have to hold the stopper up manually so the pressure doesn't sink it, certainly a metaphor for parenting or writing or something else equally banal and repetitive, and have also put Charlie to bed and am sitting in the dark on his bed listening to Philip Glass's "Solo Piano" CD that I bootleged onto a blank Tonie several years ago and is one of maybe 4 chunks of music that he listens to while falling asleep. Another of which is Beethoven's 9th. I've listened to it with him hundreds of times. I thought maybe he'd enjoy seeing it performed so we drove to Wichita last year. We didn't make it through the first movement but I was glad to break the cultural ice. "Wichita Sutra Vortex" is playing. Glass, not Ginsberg. That summer I blew my proverbial word wad womping in the dark at bedtime like this, and like this, generally writing about myself or my interests. No topic was barred. Off-piste was a prerogative. And it set me free, I guess you'd say, from the idleness of being incredibly ill. But what did I lose in re-indenturing myself to the habit of constantly working? The other kind of freedom that promotes napping and watching Michael Chrichchtchon-directed films in the middle of the day. It was freedom to be someone else who didn't give a shit about time withering away. And busting my ass to get entrenched in the work again, it was thrilling because it was just a runaway train, but, permit me the Homeric simile, as it pulled into the station, what was left was the bureaucracy of the kind of work my writing practice had previously been on a collision course with, that being composition so strained, so alienating, so turgid, that there is very little joy in it. There is satisfaction, pride in doing something nobody has ever done, but also the realization that nobody has done it because nobody would want to and nobody would want to read it. So I find myself missing the womp and it's frivolous messiness as I trudge inward to the core of Jupiter where my hopes, as with the secret hopes of most writers, are that it will crush literature altogether, forever. 

Transferable textures

I've talked about this before but I'm waiting for my daughter to admit she needs a nap. Do you listen to music when you write? I do. I can't work effectively without it. I generally listen to metal, usually caveman slam or black metal that's got really suppressed vocals. Maybe play that with Merzbow over it. There was a stretch where Id open like 5 YouTube windows and play a different album on each at the same time. 

5 YOUTUBE WINDOWS

Part of that was working in public and not being able to bear hearing the sound of human voices. I don't like seeing people gesture when they talk either. I don't like seeing the shadow of a person gesturing while they talk. I pull my hat down so I can't see over the top of my computer. I enter the work. Immerse in the texture. 

Undifferentiated noise. No signal. 

Why? I think it's the kind of texture I aspire to in work. Whether it's writing or design I always seem to seek a granular, repetitive, somewhat syntactic process. The periodicity of the rhythms of the outside world is too long to creep into the subconscious. I think the best books are those that you forget you're reading, and not because you're "transported" to Hogwarts, but because something about the text and its texture slips from the activity of reading to the passivity of being. So I work under conditions that seem as though they themselves might seep into my process. I look at that artificial noise as a kind of smeared metronome that I have to find the structure for in my work. If you have the misfortune of having me design your book I'll probably try to turn it into that. 

collaborative processes part 2

Given my background, i approach writing and designing and publishing and working with authors, where possible, in as collaborative a way as possible, there have been some inside the Castle books designed in house that are simply a close transcription to the authors intention as possible, perhaps they had a distinct vision but needed our skills for technical realization, and then there are other books that are much more about a therapeutic prying forth of latent paratextual attributes that the author perhaps was unconscious of, this usually involves asking some very simple questions about the proportions of the book (aspect ratio), typeface references or goals, page detailing (numbers, running titles, situating textblock on page, etc), and of course cover vibe... 

These questions typically lead down allusory pathways or have to do with how these mechanisms can inflect the presentation of the text, a recent example is Joanna Walsh's AUTOBIOLOGY, the book is squat in proportion although not square with the textblock conventional if not slightly narrow in proportion, sitting in a wider than normal page this textblock takes on a sense of verticality that promotes a sense of downward momentum meant to echo or celebrate the relentlessly scrolling nature of the digitally generated text, something i am struggling with right now is the swiping nature of tiktok for McManus's book culled from audio transcriptions of tiktok. What does swiping look like in a book. Superficially or seems like the book form its already a swipe left kinda form, so how do you use the form of the book to make the reader conscious of the fact that the book is the precursor to the digital experiences they now take for granted. 

These are questions. But even in the most design centric books, like Grant's giant full color beast, there are agreed upon terms. In any collaborative environment the terms seem crucial. In the experimental architectural practice I had for a decade + our agreement was a methodology of "obstructive collaboration." It involved a lot of tennis-like blind back and forth with the idea that the thing you get back is aggressively affecting your contribution. It resulted in very odd stuff like this SRO hotel that was built on the site of the Pantheon in Rome. 

The ITC 2: REVENGE OF THE CASTLE FREAK is a collaboration of its own sort that I'm working on now. It's interesting because there was a set of parameters that Kyle Booten built for the generation of the text, both by authors and by AI, but the actual editing approach I'm taking is a completely distinct thing that looks at all the content of the authors and trying to find something to do with it. It feels like Burroughs cut-up meets Phil Spector putting together Let It Be... (2 murderers?)

I have worked with people in the past, whether it's through literature or architecture that simply didn't understand collaboration in even the most elementary sense. It isn't even about ego, because some of the most egotistical musicians to ever walk the earth can still jam with someone. I think it is a strange limbo between talent and ego, where neither are in control, a middling defensiveness that is prone to shutting off the outside world as if art its something pure, like a fully armored Athena busting into the world like the Koolaid man. I prefer a mess.

THE LAST TRAIN by Ryan Madej

There is something incredibly familiar about THE LAST TRAIN by Ryan Madej... not that it is derivative, it is not, it's very distinctive, more a familiarity to the world that it inhabits or perhaps the world that it constructs, because although it's a novel, fiction, and there is certainly a narrative unfolding or undulating, it seems far more content in allowing the narrative to be a mechanism for gazing at the world, like the narrative is a means of perception, like those illfated google glass things, the narrative is almost a walking tour, but not in the manner of something exhaustive like Butor's DESCRIPTION OF SAN MARCO, trying to specify or delineate, because Madej's perception is fragmentary, fragmented by what i could only call academic references (of his world, not ours (think Borges)), yet rather than feeling fragmentary these provide a sense of connective tissue, imagine you're walking along reading an encyclopedia and glancing up and down at the city and people around you, the information, or the way Madej articulates and situates the information makes it objectlike, this is the character of the prose, deceptively tale-like, but read with crossed eyes, what does he do with this, well that is where another stratum of familiarity is deposited, this physical world is very familiar to our own, this might sound derp, but it is familiar, not identical, there is a strange parallelness to it that i started to attribute to the frame of reference of the book, much in the way a vagrant might perceive the exact same city we are perceiving in a very different way, their immediate needs are different, the way they use and feel connected to the city are different, their landmarks are different, they coexist with ours yet they are in some way skew, Madej allows those skew landmarks and details to arise our come into focus over an otherwise blurry vista of a familiar North American city, and with this sense of skewness, this mechanism of distorted or selective perception, is deposited the final stratum of familiarity, in an era where literature is valued for its sincerity and fidelity, where the unfiltered experience and reflection of the author is the prize we seek, Madej is scratching the itch of mythologizing (think of the overlay of ULYSSES on Joyce's own life armature), dare I say, fictionalizing, what seems very possibly to be a series or convolution of his own experience (or very likely not, i dunno but that's how i enjoyed reading it) used as an armature to tell a more vast and dilating tale, to depict a more lucid environment, and to amplify or caricature readerly emotions and perceptions, because in the end, a book should be about a reader's experience yes? not just a platform to concretize a human presence distinct from the reader. 

buy THE LAST TRAIN here: https://www.lulu.com/shop/ryan-madej/the-last-train/paperback/product-nrg45w.html?page=1&pageSize=4

language lust pt 2

2 points make the prose of slam crucial to my contemporary language lust, (2) diction and (1) whatever rhetorical terms mean leaving words out or having clumsy grammar, i should say i never really read the lyrics, maybe i should, just the song titles mostly, and perhaps the compactness of a title, and sequence of titles, it lends a spare compactness that the lyrics do not because even in the shaky command of English the lyrics still frequently use articles and are not as charming, there is something so strong about a text fragment just being a string of nouns, shane Christmass talking to Bielecki saying he went back through a manuscript deleting adjectives (i think)... something akin to that sort of frustrating read, something about that stripping although unintentionally in the esl of the greatest slam lyricists, is a way of taking away the communicative intent of language and placing it in a pure visual concentrate shot straight into the part of your brain that doesn't care what things mean, 

My dear poetry teacher in grad school (oh to be the only literature professor in a freestanding architecture school) aino paasonen gently urged us to use specificity as thickening agent, i recall only an example, very simple, instead of "tree" say "Jacaranda"... of course my excessive lust for text potential turns that into a fascination with jargon, carcass was derided (by morons) for lyrics that were essentially copied out of medical textbooks, were they trying to make sense? did they know what they were saying? Doubtful doubtful, could you tell what they were saying lol of course not... what mattered was the juxtaposition of this insane indecipherable text with the music, gesamskunstwerk of atomization, each freestanding piece is resonating, so with the carcass stage set, we have all sorts of wild improvising on that model, my (not so secret) favorite of which is Drain of Impurity (see part 1 https://incastellated.blogspot.com/2022/11/language-lust-pt-1.html?m=1), the science fiction element added to the grotesque takes the diction way beyond the human, and batu's esl (he's Turkish) twists it just that sweet bit further by gloriously smashing subject/verb agreement & improvising on parts of speech, each song title is almost like a simple noun (made of 6 or 7 words) like a chunk, irreducible, meant to be gazed upon like a metaphor for language itself, like a stone of words, crushing your skull

he is in his own hell

I am not a trained writer.  I've never read a craft book. I've read theories on the potential of literature (not of writing), perhaps to my lifelong detriment.

One of the oulipo cats, Benabou? Queneau? Actually the mathematician guy... said something along the lines of,  in advocating for constrained writing, working within an established set of rules is better than being subject to a received set of rules you're unaware of, and as a writer to a certain extent i understand this, establishing a framework for the manner in which language will be performed, almost like the key of a musical piece, less like a sonata (or whatever a constrained musical form is, i have no clue), not prescriptive as much as chromatic, yes that seems crucial as long as it is in service of the project and not some unseen arbitrary ideal, perhaps the language should be performed like noise, the project is one of grating monotonous high intensity, perhaps it should be performed like a Richter squeegee painting, what are the language analogs to these, how can one be allusive without namechecking, how do you employ or misuse grammar in a rhetorical manner to foster that analog, what is the appropriate diction for that goal, so frequently language is seen as in service of something else, the something the writer is trying to tell (which makes show don't tell all the more hilarious to me) and the language is formed toward that goal under the mutated aegis of some hemingway handmedown notions of craft, sure there is a throttle in there, rachet up the tension, spareness, obliqueness, but never too much, although craft is presented (in the craft racket) as being a sort of constraint (since when is subjective standards of beauty a practical constraint), it it's in fact more the set of rules that you truly have no awareness of. If craft was solved how would the charlatans keep writing new craft how to books. No. It is far more valuable for a thoughtful writer to show through their specific use of language, because writing it's some thing you look at, to develop congruence of the langauage form with the specific piece, and reject some arbitrary standard for success. 

Getting people to read it... now that's a different problem. 

6 years of MASSIVE by John Trefry

Strands of long motion obscurity of smoke in the one point vortex of a continuous dash dash lane center and double solid roadway center, a white figure in the black rapidly in the consumption of smoke and in the smoke is asphalt fragmentation the largest chunks of which are near the vertex smaller in a rain ballistic arc over the entirety in absolute brown and gray with no potato flesh daylight remaining, the perspectival vortex black in the impactcrater of thin flakings of tabular layers radiating in graduation from brown to gray to black and all to black, the potatoflesh sky a gently transitional canopy umbrage in dilation smokewash crenellations of imperfections within the strands of a color softly with desaturation of the strands nearly green but at the curb itself white lined is the peeling up of the asphalt triangle and the urgence of earth and smoke both white and fire orangeness in a fringe about the fragmentation a fringe of blond hair around the surging of the black fragmentation coalescence, an upright of a milemarker dash space dash space reflector dash at the vertex of an uplifting triangle of asphalt dash at angle above the horizontal swallowing sallow smoke colors outside the strands the strands constructing string loops of color crossgrain from the motion a color impactcrater of refraction, a lone tree taller than the canopy diminishment an oblong asphalt island before the sky, tree trunks parallax the flesh of sky milk of luminous canopy inversion in the reflection of gentle bobbing blue car hood slightly turningly away from the fragmentation of all occlusion into which the diminishment of a hedge just at the horizon line is swallowing a lamp post, tendrils conical dissipating in arcs over the hedge handcurl of fire tawny gush of earth cloud nominally mossgreen the skymilk figure lowhanging fray in advancing fringe, brown fragmentation all, obscurant brownwash, blackwash skylit roadway all,

 

collaborative processes pt 1

Forgive me but my road to collaboration in publishing was for the most part formed in my education and practice of architecture, i consider myself really fortunate to have been in architecture school in the 90s, a much headier time still rife with Eisenman's bastardized deconstruction, Lebbeus Woods' drawing, the opening of Gehrys Bilbao, Tschumi and Libeskind both thankfully not especially busy practitioners (both should have stopped immediately after their first public buildings), etc, and in line with that architectural education, at least at the institutions i attended, was far less focused on professional practice, more on the spirit of play that develops one's expectations of what is possible in design, and in my grad education, what it actually means to be an architect (which i have ported into what it actually means to be a writer, not just want it means to write), culturally and socioethically, my mind was abuzz with possibility, then i got a summer job in an office in LA, (my first in an office after working a couple of summers with a professor living in his farm in Central Griggs building a 3 story screen porch with a house floating inside it

, an intimate alive experience, embedded with practice, in the summer of 97 i remember listening to blut aus nord and summoning for the first time on a discman in my bunk bed in the old farm workers shack, walking in the forest with the dogs

, canoeing across the lake with the dogs swimming, only their heads visible, 5 of them, yelping with their mouths half underwater, ending up in the hospital multiple times, for myself and with others, the Chinese buffet in town in Perry, all of that was architecture to me), it was a small firm, the 2 principals and me (later that summer they hired a guy (email address i shit you not, on his fucking resume, was arcboy69@yahoo.com (feel free to drop him a line)) who came to the interview in a warehouse in santa monica wearing a 3 piece suit) in a little corner of a built out warehouse in Santa Monica near my beloved 18th coffeehouse (http://www.cafetableaux.com/18th-street-coffeehouse/) and by god were these two guys pricks, they were rude, unhappy, cynical, and very dogmatic, they did great work, but it was THEIR work and i was there to execute it precisely to their specifications, and although that is much more frequently the nature of architectural practice, it was not for me, i was nauseous at work every day (not to mention getting my black heart broken by Immortal releasing AT THE HEART OF WINTER), the following summer i spent back in Georgia on the farm and going to hellfest in Syracuse to see Starkweather, but i had kinda chosen a path there, whether i knew it or not, that i wanted to crack architecture open, and returning to LA that August i started my masters thesis which was focused on creating a new representational language for architectural representation that was primarily focused on the openness of text rather than the prescriptiveness of orthographic drawing, my first in a series of experimental exercises (in the scientific sense) was taking the text instructions from Robert Morris's BLIND TIME drawings and creating my own versions

, so basically plagiarism with a purpose, this was just to get my feet wet, secondly i took an essay by Peter eisenman about his Canneregio project in Venice and drew/built my own version by productively rereading his descriptions

, then, my final preparatory exercise was going from a finished piece of arch, not a text about arch, and creating an as-built document for the work, that could then have been utilized to create "infinite" variations on that seed, this was done for a motel room ar Arne's Royal Hawaiian (RIP)

in Baker, CA, i made 2 drawings, one was called an etymological furniture schedule and the other was a subjective spatial recipe (or something), this was an attempt at creating a language for communicating with other designers and fabricators in an open and subjective and productive manner

, finally, i used this language of representation or documentation to communicate with other thesis students to "design" elements of an installation based on baudelaire's "the double room", where one side of a wall in an old warehouse was the "sober" side

and the other was the "stoned" side

, anyway, this produced an outcome that fit some loose set of qualitative characteristics but was heterogenous in voice, not to belabor this, but i proceeded on with these thoughts in an architectural collaboration with a friend of mine under the guise of a small practice called the work.group for maybe 15 years after school, we engaged in what i would call obstructive collaboration, people might call aspects of it "photoshop tennis" in which we would share files of various sorts back and forth with the expectation of unearthing possibilities unexpected by each of us

, this is all pretty in keeping with my expectations of literature in general when one includes the reader into the equation, and without getting into the weeds with barthes and eco and such, all of my own writing has been with the goal of a reader being able to make their own work from mine, although i am very egotistical about what i am doing, my underlying agenda is quite the opposite, MASSIVE being the extreme example of this... 

thus we have a natural transition point to talking about ItC and collaborative processes.......

incastellated aesthetics

Total fucking necro, the faxed artwork of TRANSILVANIAN HUNGER, cold meat industry sigil bs, the BEGOTTENing of 90s dtv horror trash stills, everything on all the filters redlined, 90s websites like Dans Gallery of the Grotesque and blackmetal.com, Hellhammer, all come to mind for an underlying incastellated spirit, but we've made a conscious effort for our aesthetics to be distinct from our products, as elegant as something like Fitzcarraldo eds is it tips its hand about a perception of literature that is about acquisition and status, it is the suggestion (at first blush quite admirable) that all that matters is the text, sounds like something we'd love, but the more you think about it the less it is invested in the potential of the book as a thing and by extention the potential inhabitability of the text, it's suggestion is that the text could have been in any typeface, could have any cover, be any aspect ratio and only happens to have that particular blue cover, aspect ratio and set in Fitzcarraldo because they are the pub who acquired it, i guess you could say that all of our books look the way we do because we published them, however they never know what they will look like until we do, can you imagine BELFIE HELL with a tasteful blue cover, PERIPATET, HUNCHBACK 88? But one can easily imagine NOCILLA LAB with 1000 other covers, it is not the point though i don't think as to why all of our books avoid our "brand", is more that brand isn't or shouldn't be paratext, there are so many aspects of a book that can thicken its existence, i feel like there is probably a conception that with great literature you could read it off a phone and it would still be great, that you could listen to it on a podcast and it would still be great, but truly, if you're taking advantage of language (what other priority shutoff literature have) I don't think that is possible, Strickland (still not gonna spell his name) tweeted that he was listening to a FINNEGANS WAKE audio book while going to sleep, I think that's rad, but an audio book of the most linguistically complex prose ever written is missing the visual component of its punmanship, only seeing the text (and if you know like 50 languages) and its intentional misspellings etc is giving the full breadth of its possibility, it is a text meant to be read, why would all texts not aspire to be read, otherwise just record a podcast, so take FINNEGANS WAKE as the extreme of linguistic expectation for this, then there are other aspects of print to be explored and exploited, typesetting, i think of THE F TEXT for instance where each letter in the whole book was individually set to address Douglas's process of photoshop layer archeology, or PERIPATET where for whatever reason each page had a different font size so that despite different lengths of text components they still filled an entire spread, typeface, i think of NYMPHOLEPSY where we selected a font with as many ligatures as possible to express the interconnected nature of a highly sexual text written by two people, or BOUND, where we created a typeface based on Eximperituserqethhzebibšiptugakkathšulweliarzaxułum's logo to "write" a map of Dantes inferno, or aspect ratio where SEA-WITCH was already designed as a square, or the forthcoming AUTOBIOLOGY which uses a wider aspect ratio and a very narrow text block to accentuate the sense of scrolling through a long uninterrupted text... none of this is to even touch on cover art (we have multiple books that don't even have the title on the cover), title sequence (some books don't "start" for dozens of pages), etc, these things require the utmost freedom to truly bring a books potential to life as a book and not just something that has been written, and thus, as much as we strive to indulge in "our" aesthetic, our books will forever each have their very own, from scratch, bespoke, total fucking whatever identity. 

language lust pt 1

I've made the "joke" a couple of times on twitter that the Drain of Impurity song titles are the book of the year

,  i think it's something that at face value is a joke but i would much rather read that than most books, Tbh for the past few years, perhaps through some disillusionment with publishing or the gamesmanship of literature I've found much more textual inspiration and a refinement of my eye in the prose of slam (or brutal death metal or slamming brutal death metal or tags ad infinitum) track listings, other metal text creeps into the language life as well, Carcass (and their infinite progeny) song lyrics

, once derided in favor of the storytelling (lol) stylings of your Chris Barnes'ses and the like are crucial for their antiseptic encyclopedia entry distancing of the reader from the maker through use of jargon and utter lack of poetry, and some black metal song titles, just this past week Darkthrone released a record with a song called Beneath the Sea of Seas Beneath the Sea, or something, I'm not going to look it up, also reflecting back on a language life Kataklysms ridiculous TEMPLE OF KNOWLEDGE record was pretty pivotal as well, should I look up some excerpts, yeah here's a placeholder parenthesis (

), perhaps it's useful to be reflective on my attraction to these word employments, one key, i think, is that these all have the sensibilities of your lorem ipsum placeholder text, its hard to give the boys in Kraanium a lot more credit than that, sure there is an intentionality there based on tropic indulgence and tone which I'll get to, but it's the phrasing texture that is an initial entry point, what is at stake to make a text that is unlikely to be read, what is the appropriate methodology for its making AND what is the intent or expectation for its functionality, decisions about these are intertwined obviously, you can't make something without a methodology and you can't select or operate within a methodology if you don't have a presumption about how someone other than yourself can engage with the thing, i think that's one of the things i like about the Castle freak books and the project of them in general, the expectation i think is that you're not required to read the book in its entirety because it's not "written by a person", you can read it, but i don't think you have to, i don't think there is a methodology per se that Dragging Entrails uses to write their texts, and as with architecture i get much more personal enjoyment out of things that are made effectively (effective to me) without much intention behind them, for someone with an overburden of intentions it is perhaps inspiring, but i think what i like more is the ability to take ownership of it because it feels like nobody lays claim to it, if there is a text, a Maggot Colony song lyrics, the delivery of lyrics is irrelevant, one could argue that song titles are also irrelevant in the Era of streaming and colossal mp3 libraries (does anyone else still do this but me), if there is no one there to engage, no expectation of engagement, it feels like it is mine alone to appreciate. 

Endnotes: i won't get to tropics and tone here. Other topic for a further entry in this series is metal as world music and the benefits of ESL on the texture of slam texts...

Thanks to the greatest website on earth, the metal archives, you'd be better off reading that than lit hub.

unedited thoughts on shanejxsjc

 i believe or would like to believe i guess that shane edits extensively, i shared sex shops with my wife last night after she asked if i was reading about sex shops and could only say no, and failing to be able to say what i was reading i handed her the book, and thus i am not going to edit this, at first she said it was word salad and then after reading a few pages said oh i see, she started somewhere in the middle of the book as i believe all the books i really care about should be able to be done with, MOBILE, FINNEGANS WAKE, TOPOLOGY OF A PHANTOM CITY, or starting a movie in the middle, WITCHERY, INFERNO, as long as you go back all the way around to where you started as was obvs the functionality of FINNEGANS WAKE, if a book isnt like a painting in that way i will probably just read it as though it is, i am reading RING concurrently with SEX SHOPS and i like to think they are one book, everything on my nightstand is just a big stack of paper i can pull from, ATTIC AND BAROQUE PROSE STYLE, TRUTHLIKENESS, and SEX SHOPS is a very functional glue for the blending of books into one another, repetition,

repetition is what makes a texture, within a tonal establishment repeating is making a whole, somehow (in a critical take on Shane "somehow" will be repeated (not as in "somehow it works" but as in "somehow he wrote this" because it doesn't seem human, i would say it's not how the human mind works but it's exactly how the human mind works, what is striking is that it's not how the human mind exports information, someone says stream of consciousness in 2022 and you smother them with a pillow (or "strangle" in the lietmotif of SEX SHOPS) because who's stream is so pure, the stream of the 1920s is no more, but how do you write what the brain looks like and not what we want to tell our readers our elegantly composed and insightful brain looks like, i guess you have to not give a shit for one, Shane won't be for sale in an airport nor will be court a prize or award, you have not not give a shit about that, every single person who has won something has been on a road to success, you don't accidentally fall into that world inasmuch as you don't accidentally find yourself playing chess in an amphitheater, its not that you're good, you're just good in that way)), repetition implies repetitive, this is Penrose tiling, its isn't lulling it dependable, its infuriating, i think reading Shane almost killed Jacob Siefring, at the very least it angered him but imagine being able to do that, make people angry by giving them something that angers their expectations, most cultural reaction is either boredom or appreciation, very few people will appreciate Shane and that's good, i don't want to deeply love something that is loved by others, i love texture but it's nothing without content, it's ascii art, what is a book or prose without developing images and the somehow part of Shane's imagery is its bizarre fieldlike heterogeneity, it could not be much more heterogenous even with its repetition however its heterogeneity builds a critical mass that is unifying, local scrutiny of a series of phrases appears to exist as distinct nonsequiturs but the critical mass although it doesn't loop them back together (or if it does it is the frustrating "he strangled me in an alley" "he strangled me on a conference table" "he strangled me etc") it creates a mnemonic monolith, not in its momentum but in your memory of what you've passed through, like the mind, the consciousness, it cannot be stopped, it cannot be frozen for observation, it can only by looked back upon, and that is deceptive, cumbersome, the moment is chaos, the pages in your left hand make perfect sense, but if you flipped back to them you'd most certainly be lost again, you have been reading THE SEX SHOPS OF SHERMAN OAKS.

https://amphetaminesulphate.bigcartel.com/product/sex-shops-of-sherman-oaks

closing in on the end of 2022

Unlike larger publishers we work one book at a time. Excitingly this year we were able to get all of our covers done by the end of the summer, of course Kitchell, Corrao, and Kleine (the Hot Mikes) did their own. Excited for Corrao to take on some other books next year, notably Logan's, Sara & Johannes's, and Strickland's (not going to look up how many Rs and Ts are in his name). It feels wild to be publishing all these books and to have such brilliant assistance. We continue to plug away on AUTOBIOLOGY, although it's completely designed we are doing word counts on each page instead of page #s (take that Kim Palsat), and this seems to have to be done manually. If anyone knows how to automate it in Indesign I would be forever in your debt. Finally the slog continues laying out Grant's new tome which makes the design of PERIPATET and SMUTMAKER seem like dropping THE RAINMAKER into a pdf and going golfing. Hoping it'll be done by December 31 but growing increasingly doubtful. Each spread is designed 1 by 1 and although there's a rhythm to it there are half a dozen elements that are customized on each. 

Anyway, although we haven't seen any substantive changes to Twitter, Olivia Cronk graciously invited us to participate in another blog and, having had a blog in complete isolation in the 00s, it seemed nice to supplement ItC with this.