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Text: Sorcererer

Author: Jace Brittain

Publisher: Schism Press

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Sorcererer Sorcerer Sorcerer Sorcererer

Sorcerer Sorcerer Sorcererer Sorcererer Sorcerererer Sorcererer

Sorcerer Sorcerer Sorcerer Sorcerer Sorcererer Sorcererer

Sorcerer Sorcererer Sorcererer Sorcererer Sorcererer Sorcerer

Sorcerererer Sorcererer Sorcerer Sorcererer Sorcerererer

Sorcererer vs Sorcerererer?

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Sorcererer is not a word but is now a word.

Sorcerererer.

~

Will this type of malapropopism carry on into the main text?

Neologism?

It has to signal something. Surely. If Der ri da were at the helm, it’d degenerate into a thousand variations on the word pine, it would be the point in totality, but from what I’ve seen of Jace’s work, he won’t go that root.

[It’ll be ellusive in a different way].

By his work, I’m referring to the Pit and the Pendulum piece he did for Film dada[da]. Which played with language and form, and was painful to format on WordPress, but didn’t lose me at any point.

I’m wondering if this one will.

Even with my new-coached tactic of just letting experimental text absorb me, not forcing myself to look for meaning…there has to be something to keep my brain from saying huh?

Or in Jace’s case, what does that word mean?

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What is a Sorcererer?

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A sorcerer who creates sorcerers?

Something beyond the sorcererr without ontology?

With unknown ontology?

I’m going with the first one as it appeals to the fantastical side of my brain. No idea if it’s related to the text.

But it can work literally or figuratively.

The fictative sorcerer produces other figurative sorcerers to…achieve something.

Sorcerery?

The subject/narrator creates other subjects/characters to…explain something.

Death. Writing. Rage. Watching father fucks daughter at mum’s wake videos. Why your sci-fi isn’t other people’s sci-fi. Anxiety. Taikutsu.

Could be out of my depth here.

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The Blurb Supposed to Hold My Hand

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‘Sorcererer collects a network of interconnected prose poems (a system of constant meaning / messages of constant noise) into a singular housing. At first this might appear as a means to ease the reader’s transition from one segment to the next, but in reality it lures them into an occulted maze of death–rendered animate by plosive displays and an arcane lexicon.’

This isn’t the blurb, but a review of Sorcererer from Mike Corrao.

Prose poems, okay. I can cope with that.

Occulted maze of deathh…

Arcane lexicon…

To me, great word choice is mostly about surprise and arrrangement and humour. And is very personal. For a long while, I would skim over experimental work by other writers and the words wouldn’t really get a foothold.

Last week, I read a Film Dada[da] piece by Mike Corrao that, on the first read through, had some striking lines.

But around seventy per cent of it just washed over me.

Then I went back and read it again, forced myself to focus on what I was reading, forced the image of what it was describing into my brain and…

Same thing with Spelunker. First page, what is this, why should I care, where’s the spellunking?

Then I noticed the fringes of the computerr text were trimmed off and…I flicked forward to pages of floor plans or cave layouts and I got to the part where the corner edge of a new structure pops up.

After that, it had a footthold.

There is other work that is like this, that needs a second or third reading.

Perhaps cos I’m not used to reading experimental work, or worse, I have a contrived bias against it.

But when you give it that extra time, the spell starts to work.

On an intellectual level only?

I’m not sure. Maybe.

~

~

This is a fairly accurate recreation of the first page.

Black square.

Only the crusts of the bottom text are visible and it’s teeth, bones, hair, lasting corruption.

What to do with this?

The rest of the text lurking beneath is either a clue to something or none of my business. And the clue is irrelevant. Point is, someone doesn’t want me to know something.

The narrator?

The Sorcererererererer behind all this?

What I’m curious about is whether Jace actually wrote out a chunk of text first then decided later that it didn’t work and blocked it over, or he wrote it with the specific intention of covering it up?

Is something that can never be seen really that important?

This could be sorcererery.

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c o n un drum

All dried up or drying up and crying only the sounds

of tears not falling what luck what lousy wrung luck in

this heat they said don’t start with the weather that’s all

there is for some folks like him. When Felix understands

something he doesn’t believe it. A practice.

~

This is the second page, with text we can fully see.

Co n un drum.

Not a malapropopism or nelogism but irregular, the breaking up of a word that potentially ties in to the occulted maze of death mentioned above.

Someone called Felix.

In third person, so not the main voice? Or the narrator trapping themselves in?

Nothing really matte rs at this point.

Don’t know what I’m reading it flows okay but there’s no punctuation only a partial way in with concepts relieved to see no obtuse words yet it’s grounding daring me not to understand much hoping I don’t cos like the first pages said this is none of my business a private thing possibly for Felix and whoever wrote co n un drum or Felix and themselves interior.

A long time ago I read that Beckett novel with the first forty or so pages about a homeless guy on the bench of a train station and it was unbearable. At that time. And I haven’t read it since.

How much is this being written for a reader?

In my gut, I hope almost none of it. Not just explain nothing but don’t even offer the chance of a question.

There’s a chance that doesn’t make sense.

Explain nothing will do.

Ex  pla   inno   thin   g

~

“i submit to the cannibals i’m

becoming”

A near certainty: Felix fell, fallen still.

Against a current situation in which he could only

guess that somehow he had lost his elasticity and

collapsed after one violent expectoration Poor me,

thought Felix now scrunched up ass up with little

motor control drooling dirty bloody face down on the

cracked pavement in the sun thinking about snails how

snails looked how snails had looked when he had had

them inching all over his chest a desperate and failed

cure for what ails him a failed cure since really they had

been eating him alive, hadn’t they?

~

The actual text is not aligned like the chunk above, I’ve just done it for convenience. To differentiate it from what I’m writing. Which is not a review of Sorcererererer.

~

What is there here?

There’s Felix again, and we learn he’s been sick and had a bizarro snail treatment that didn’t work out so well.

He is not in a good place.

Perhaps narrating it, to let us know that he’s not in that good place.

Victim of caducity?

I don’t do reviews anymore.

Not qualified for it.

Snails as an avatar for leeches, eating him alive.

Lost his elasticity.

I remember another review of the book had a sanatorium in it so that could be what’s going on here. Felix in the madhouse. Writing things that no one except the doctors would try to understand.

Dig at modern lit?

Stories that are inculcated to start with lines like, ‘it was the seventh time I’d died and I was hella pissed,’ or ‘my grandma said the leprechauns only came when the rain washed in.’

Sorcererer goes one layer deeper, maybe several.

Don’t really know what’s going on + don’t know who the narrator is + don’t know where, why, when + don’t know

But the snails, the first page…lost his elasticity…

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“fantasies in which i’m trod upon”

The expectoratus being not far above where his

nose smished into the path which led to the Menlo

Sanatorium he could see it that which he had

expectorated in black and blood and the horrible

heaving which coaxed it up from within him and

had robbed him of his stuffing strength and fibers

and drawn him into this collapsed pile so down

so low.

Oh, now he was mixed up.

Turned around. Must have been, since the expectorated

slime was inching uphill toward him, then no: facing

the path this way away so that way must lead to the

grove of pathetic thin trees with leaves that could

dull a bitter metallic mouth. If chewed. See, this was

downhill after all.

~

Going page by page just to locate my self with in the text.

Scrolled ahead and realised that most pages are full only at the top, and start with a larger piece of text, sometimes broken up like co n un drum.

Reticent narrator? Or leaving space for a reply at the bottom?

This pages confirms the sannatorium and gives it a name.

Felix may or may not be permanently on the ground, broken.

Seems unsure about their own location.

~

The writing is kind of beautiful in a schizzophrenic way, with jarrring left turns into unrelated questions/statements.

Humour, maybe, in a very insular way. Funny to Felix and no one else.

Pathetic thin trees, metallic leaves, if chewed.

He’s chewed them before.

This place is not good for him, despite being outside and surrounded by nature. Snails are things that eat him alive, apparently. Slime has its own path, own ambitions.

Is Felix the one narrating this?

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the destroyer (philosophia)

Oswalda zu K of primary coconspiracy is descended

from the Honest of Antequera and thus rightly of the

Order of the Jar and Splendors whose bronze emblem

she kept close and hidden on the grounds despite the

betrayal and expulsion from which she suffered and

landed as an illness in the same place as me and her

coding was always in part dedicated to the promises of

uninterrupted service to currant lilied She.

~

Now we’re a few pages ahead.

Oswalda zu K or primary coconspiracy…is this a fellow inmate at the sanatorium?

Feels like I’m reaching too much for plot, character.

What am I feeling about this?

Bit of frustration

don’t know what’s happening here. The text feels crafted as a way to keep me out, doesn’t have the random anarchy of something like Frankencop, where plants appear and fondle you

but also

ecstatic surprise at Oswalda zu K and the Honest of Antequera, Order of the Jar, the juxtaposition of aristocratic ceremonial title announcement with nonsense names, the general run-on sentences that don’t break the links between, which is always what I fear when I read that type of thing.

This is a mad[wo]man telling you their thoughts, making no attempt to turn it into a rational story cos why would they? It’s their mind, not ours.

But then it isn’t. It’s Jace’s mind. He wrote this.

…

Pretty much the same thing I think about everything experimental I read. Where is it coming from? Not the meaning, that can be absent, incidental, but where is this coming from when the author sits down and writes it out?

Hard to ever know the answer.

Yet I keep wondering.

Ex pla inno tttttthingg.

~

So far, the malapropopisms have refused to show up as expected from the title. Maybe the Sorcererer was a neolojism invented to show the act of a sorcerer creating more sorcerererers?

Maybe Jace got it from an old anime.

~

essex

Os her sister had called her and Os she thought of

herself she thought.

How one thought of oneself and, for example, one’s

arm as it swept across the page and the code followed

to make divine of notches and ticks.

O code:

Os oso or so-so SOS, osursa no—so No, solecism at

work, agog or play, so: O glosoli. We’ve lost the thread.

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This is the O page, the final two lines spectacular. A new language?

Os can be Portuguese but I don’t think it’s that.

Doesn’t matter.

Os oso or so-so SOS, osursa no—so No, solecism at work, agog or play, so: O glosoli either does something to your brain or it doesn’t.

…

The whole text probably needs to be read in order, and is only around 130 pages long so not too much trouble to do it that way, but you can skip around a bit too, pick out the parts that make you

…

Maybe read it through once and then do that.

I read the first 30 pages, as I set out to do for all these books I look at, but I also read another twenty after that.

Over the next few days I’m sure I’ll finish it.

And then go through it again from the start.

Try to make sense of things.

Feel my way round the occulted maze of death.

~

Jace linked to a review on old twitter, a review with a summary of the plot, and I was a third right, it’s about Felix in a sanatorium, collapsed on a path nearby, trapped in an ugly edifice, and, according to the reviewer, Felix is collapsed on the path for most of the book, is narrating from it, and Oswalda zu K is the person he communicates with in code, the two of them leaving clue-fragments in library books, and

the reviewer is so sure about all this

sure enough to write it down in the review and say, this is what Sorcerererer is about, this is who the narrrator is, and the theme is bodily decay, disgusting quantum connectivity, seeking a link within the abject while collapsed on sanatorium paths and

how do they do that?

How do they know for absoluute sure?

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v e x / h ex / w re cks

As is often with runaway thoughts, the tracks led to a

sweet minded friend.

Between dear Oswalda and Felix other than an affable

affection and suffering’s unanimity and the accidentally

neighborly exchange of one’s cloudy molecules there

was the codes guttered or in circled or ciphered letters

in the books which they loved in the Menlo Respiratory

Sanatorium’s library.

The conditions of the shelves and their contents left

something to be desired but what put the statics off

allowed the zeroed pair wider quietude in their turns.

~

Feel cow-witted now, this was on page 12 and pretty much lays out the whole plot, such as it is.

Felix and Oswalda, exchanging guttered code in library books, it’s right there in almost plain words.

Must’ve skimmed past it the first time.

Or only half understood what I was reading.

Cloudy molecule reference too, bodily fluids, shared decay…

How did I not see this, recognise it?

~

Slime and goo stuff went over my head mostly.

The abject body sludge.

Cronenbergian leg fucking.

It’s okay, in some way, but

…

Other experimentalists write about this too. Seems popular, like Fisher and Bataille [guess everyone’s just skipping past his bizarre sacrifice fantasy]. Prison of language as well. Is what I’m saying what I want to say? Am I controlling this? Is there a way not to control this?

Don’t feel much for decay or entropy.

Try not to think about it.

Psychology, the layers of the brain…what do snails eventually become to Felix, inside? The object taking its revenge?

Can sanatoriums scheme?

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What I got out of Sorcererer was a mind written out public. In code. Some of the words from ancient Sumeerian times. Maybe the impossible quest to transcribe the Id that I always go on about, but through outdated language?

Seeking connection from within the ongoing ruins?

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Is writing masochism?

Appetency?

Os oso or so-so SOS, osursa no—so No.

~

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Read Sorcererer at Schism Press