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Continue readingDe-Con-Struc
[De-Con-Struc] The Second Dream // Madelaine Culver
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Text: The Second Dream
Author: Madelaine Culver
Publisher: Steel Incisors
Plot: The blackness from Under The Skin sublimates out from its Scottish void to investigate the novelette form and something called Asemic writing that looks suspiciously like Arabic.
Subplot: Seduced and abandoned, the First Dream wanders the streets of Nowhere City, getting into fights with homeless people and scribbling Urdu on the subway walls.
Sub-subplot: The Masculine disguises itself as an elderly crone and ventures into the forest with a basket of plastic apples, one of them coated in green shit. But Snow White is not at home that day. She’s in the mines, whistling.
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To start with, The Second Dream is an [ekphratic?] response to the watching of the 2013 film, Under the Skin, which I have yet to see. I’ve tried to find it online but all I got was various pornography and a 90’s thing called Alien Agenda: Under the Skin, which I may try and watch at some point, but not now, cos I’m still trying to find the real Under the Skin.
Dailymotion?
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After more exhaustive searching, I’ve decided to just watch clips on YouTube and a recap by one of those channels that reads the wiki summary of the film out loud like a between-murders sociopath.
I hope it’s enough.
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Continue reading[De-Con-Struc] Serious Weakness // Porpentine Charity Heartscape
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Text: Serious Weakness
Author: Porpentine Charity Heartscape
Publisher: Insul Press
Plot: A self-diagnosed weakling-stroke-art conservator, Trianon, cultivates new layers of ecstatic/traumatic weakness when taken captive by a sociopathic vandal, Insul, with lovely beach house and multi-purpose tennis racket.
Subplot: A museum director faces her first real test after years of Krav Maga and boxercise.
Sub-subplot: The art world is rocked by a series of authentic/violent things happening way out on the fringes of its sealed-off misery dome.
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According to the more pedantic side of my psyche, the title Serious Weakness is either:
i] genuine self-recrimination
ii] reflection on self-recrimination + desire to fix it
iii] transgressive dive into said ‘serious weakness’
iv] ironic self-description
v] ironic twin description [of the two main characters, Trianon and Insul]
vi] outright lie, there is no weakness
vii] blank self-description
viii] blank self-description of total personality/psyche
ix] personification of weakness in human shell
x] abstract dragged from abstraction into human shell + forced to deal with things that to them, as a newly formed thing, feel serious
xi] someone called Weakness who is serious
xii] someone called Weakness who is never serious
xiii] alien MC whose name translates to ‘Weakness’ crashes in the US, in a town called Serious.
Looking at the cover pic, I’m gonna go with x], but there’s green blood sliding out of the nose so it could also be xiii].
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I know about this book cos of the author’s story, Relative Time Knife, on Tragickal. This weird, barely-fleshed out, ambiguous but aggressive thing that had pain beggars and torture millionaires. Written by someone with a not bland name.
Continue reading[De-Con-Struc] You With Your Memory Are Dead // Gary J. Shipley
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Text: You With Your Memory Are Dead
Author: Gary J. Shipley
Publisher: Inside the Castle
Plot: The shadow of an ape is formed and deformed and reformed gradually over the course of two weeks inside the looping guts of Begotten.
Subplot: The observer of the shadow of an ape is formed and deformed and reformed gradually over the course of the hundred and eleven hours they spend continuously reading and/or writing about the text of the shadow of an ape.
Sub-subplot: Trapped in a state of infinite usage-stroke-exhaustion, ‘feels like’ and ‘I don’t know’ join forces with a jaded ‘or does it’ to find a way out.
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You With Your Memory Are Dead [YWYMAD from this point on] opens with the following quote card:
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‘Like a flame burning aw- the darkness
Life is flesh on bone co- ulsing above the ground’
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The two hyphenated words in the middle are interrupted by the tightness of the inner spine fold. I didn’t know, or didn’t remember, that Begotten opens [not ‘opened’, it’s eternal] with the same quote when I started reading so I tried to fill in the [anti-] spaces. These were my notes:
‘aw’ is either ‘away’, ‘awash’, ‘awful’, ‘awol’, ‘awkward’, ‘awkwafina’, ‘awe’ or ‘aws console.’
‘co- ulsing’ must be ‘convulsing.’
Why the tight inner spine?
Accident, or an attempt to make this unconvincingly unfamiliar?
You think you know Begotten…
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The preface, written by the director of Begotten, E. Elias Merhige, tells us that Gary’s plan was to make the film his own by sitting in a room for two weeks and watching it on loop.
A bit random to drag this in, but it reminds me of Orwell and his stipend whenever things got a little too tough. He did work the dish-washing jobs he said he did, but he was never in danger of being poor. I mean, can you ever truly be absorbed into a thing that is not innately inherently you?
I wouldn’t do the Begotten plan, even with something I adore, e.g. DS9, so it is definitely a feat of endurance.
Parameters?
The only breaks allowed, according to the preface, were for meals and sleep, and, I assume, trips to the toilet.
Is that accurate?
Did Gary’s eyes have to stay on Begotten at all times?
Could they look at the wall nearby?
Would a fainter version of Begotten be playing there too?
Continue reading[De-Con-Struc] [Women] in STEM // Sara Matson
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Text: [Women] in STEM
Author: Sara Matson
Publisher: Bottlecap Press
Plot: An invisible fabric wraps itself around the brains of men and forces them into the lunatic position that women cannot be scientists cos they once ate an apple in a make-believe garden.
Subplot: Twenty or so women become trapped inside quantum-poetry, with abstraction the only way out.
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[Women] in STEM is a series of mostly surrealist/abstract poems inspired by the lives and accomplishments [and possible flaws] of the following women [in STEM]:
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Sau Lan Wu // Hypatia // Mary Engle Pennington //
Edith Clarke // Tu Youyou // Katherine Johnson //
Cecilia Payne-Gasposchkin // Helen Gwynne-Vaughan //
Ana Roque de Duprey // Maria Hibrea (Mary the Prophet)
// Valentina Tereshkova // Rebecca Lee Crumper //
Annie Turnbo Malone // Mae Carol Jemison // Maria
Telkes // Eustice Newton Foote // Maria Sibylla Merian //
Cheung Shien Wu // Mary Anning // Emmy Noether
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How many of these women do I know?
At a glance, maybe two or three. Katherine Johnson [from the movie Hidden Figures], Mae Carol Jemison [astronaut/Star Trek fan]…and that’s about it.
The discoverer of gluons should be more famous, definitely.
Hypatia sounds familiar, but I could be mistaking her for another ancient Egyptian name.
Mary the Prophet?
I know Mary Sidney and her basement of occultists. The Soulmother of Küssnacht. Annie Besant. Marie Laveau. Fang the Alchemist. Sybil Leek.
[Women] in OCCULT CIRCLES = next book?
Continue reading[De-Con-Struc] The Kharms Case // Dubravka Ugrešić
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Text: The Kharms Case
Author: Dubravka Ugrešić
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
Plot: A Daniil Kharms stan writes endless letters to a publisher she supposedly admires, urging, cajoling, threatening him to publish HER translations of her favourite Russian author’s works.
Subplot: the world beyond letters is etherwave.
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‘Dear Mr. Tvrtković,
As I am most impressed by your publishing program, which displays surprisingly fresh and unconventional editorial taste, I am taking the liberty of offering you the work of a virtually unknown writer, equally unknown in his own country – in short, a writer as yet to be discovered. I am speaking of the Russian writer Anna Akhmatova Daniil Ivanovic Kharms [1905-1942].’
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This isn’t a novel or a novella but a novelette [maybe, haven’t counted the words] tucked in near the end of a collection called Lend Me Your Character.
I don’t think it’s the most famous of Ugrešić’s stories.
It’s ostensibly about translation [yet not], which is why I honed in on it. I’ve been looking to do something on Ugrešić for a long time, ever since I took out Fording the Stream of Consciousness twelve or thirteen years ago. Then, a few years after that, there was The Culture of Lies, a non-fiction book of Dubravka talking about Balkan politics and her exile from Croatia.
I didn’t read all of those books, just skimmed a few chapters.
She writes soft-surrealism well, Ugrešić.
Or Ugresic as this book calls her.
Typo?
Or two typos?
I’ve gone and checked the whole book and it’s consistently misspelt that way, Ugresic instead of Ugrešić. Apart from on the copyright page where it’s the original Croatian. Was that an intentional act by Ugrešić herself?
I don’t know.
The list of also-published books by the publisher at the back has other Balkan/Czech authors with the names spelt correctly [Danilo Kiš, Jiří Gruša] so perhaps it was done at the request of the author.
Or maybe it’s common practice for Croatian writers in translation?
I have no idea, just seemed a bit odd, and anything odd that catches my attention goes in here no matter how meaningless it might seem.
Continue reading[De-Con-Struc] Ponds // Nick Borelli
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Title: Ponds
Author: Nick Borelli
Publisher: Schism Press
Plot: the world ends and other worlds end also. But end is just a transition to a new world, which will become a mutated version of all that came before. Mostly in the form of animal sludge and swamp water.
Subplot: A vampire gets some unexpected down time at the bottom of a pond.
Sub-subplot: Time breaks, patches itself together again, wanders lost through the catacombs, exits to ritualism.
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‘You must imagine what you can’t see. All the mould and muck and blood and puke. It’s everywhere, Mole.’
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About ten pages into Ponds, I got hit by a nostalgia train, the old picture book version of The Wind in the Willows that my sister used to ban me from reading. I remembered the page with Toad dressed up as the washer woman, being chucked off a barge, the bit where he crashes the automobile, the climax with him and the other conservative animals taking back Toad Hall from the working class ferrets, stoats and weasels [who could all be variations of the same animal, I’m not sure], the general reverence for the riverbank and its café culture lifestyle, the weird god head in the forest, the brothel in the wild woods etc.
Then, as a realist counterbalance, my brain leaked in all the rabbit deaths from Watership Down, the bleak misery of slaughter/migration, the arbitrariness of following a seer etc.
And finally circled back to Ponds again.
Each book has its counterpart, as Borges may have said to Bioy Casares one time.
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The last de-con-struc I did [Vitiators] was quite draining, not least cos I forced The Fold into it when I should’ve just left it in the library with Anti-Oedipus and Notes on Benjamin.
[Definitely no philosophy texts this time, no way].
After surviving that chaos, I needed something to help me unwind.
So I read a children’s book in Chinese.
Then watched Cybernator.
Then picked up Ponds [or opened up the pdf file on my phone].
Continue reading[De-Con-Struc] Vitiators // Elytron Frass [Illustrated by Charles N.]
Reality and manga meld as one under the influence of Leibniz’s construction of a great baroque montage that moves between the lower floor, pierced by windows, and the upper floor, blind and closed, but also a grinding meta-feud between a once beloved mangaka and his outraged fanbase who are themselves gods miscreated via a musical salon that translates the visible movements below into sounds up above.
This is the synopsis of Vitiators, between the folds.
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Vitiate is one of those words, like ablate or ablation, that I have to keep looking up. Not sure why.
It sounds very legal to me yet it is not.
Vitiate = to debase, corrupt, damage, destroy the moral or aesthetic status of something/someone.
So who exactly are the vitiators?
Am I [the reader] about to be vitiated?
Should I try and vitiate back do something about it?
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A while back, there was a video on YouTube reviewing Vitiators, with the title being something like: ‘is this the most shocking manga ever written?’
Shocking or disturbing, or disgusting, one of the three.
Is it accurate?
As with Sea of Glass, I would argue that there is no shock in text or image anymore, if there ever was.
Shocking to who[m]?
When I was a teenager, I watched a video of a Chechnyan soldier having his head sawn off. Beyond that, there is no shock. Not in art. Unless it’s actually real or something happening to a small child. That’s why war photography hits so hard. This was something done to someone by someone else. Or in modern warfare, someone very far away, pushing a button like a fucking coward. Not that doing it up close is any less cowardly. The power ratio is still the same. Just ask the child murderers of the IDF.
Is Elytron attempting to shock?
I don’t believe so.
Vitiators is more than that.
It has to be.
Continue reading[De-Con-Struc] Cronopios And Famas // Julio Cortázar
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Title: Cronopios and Famas
Author: Julio Cortázar
Premise: Life is tough and surrealism isn’t.
Publisher: Pantheon Books
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Ever seen Blow Up?
That was Cortázar.
Blow Out?
In an alternate reality, also Cortázar, only at the end John Lithgow is holding a piece of card that says knife on it and Nancy Allen is dressed in the Robocop suit and John Travolta is delirious, sees Brad Davis’s dick in the cracks of the bug-ridden bedframe.
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There’s no easy way for me to ground this thing without first reading Wikipedia and I don’t want to do that so I’m gonna go from memory and guesswork.
Cortázar was an Argentinian writer who lived in other countries for most of his life and wasn’t Borges. There’s a pic of him posing with a cigarette in his mouth on one of his book jackets.
Does any of this matter?
Yes, it really does, in terms of surrealism and what it represents to the person utilising its cloaking powers. I use surrealism too. But I wasn’t alive between two world wars. Neither was Cortázar as far as I know. Does surrealism hide the user? Is that what they wanted?
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Not Wikipedia, but the inside cover of Cronopios and Famas says absolutely nothing about the author. That’s weird. Perhaps they forgot to put it in?
The original publishing date of this book is 1962. I assume Cortázar was over thirty when he wrote this, which means he was a teenager when World War 2 broke out. But that war wasn’t so important for Argentinians. The junta that came later is what he would’ve been hiding from. If he truly was hiding?
Surrealism is a way of coping, not just with the horrors of the world, but your own lack of a leading role in either stopping or perpetrating them. Usually the former for writers, but not always. Celine springs to mind. Was he still a Nazi fan during World War 2? Can’t remember. I’ll have to check wiki for that.
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I wasn’t going to write anything about Cortázar as I find his writing a bit tedious and predictable. If I’d been alive when it first came out, I may have liked it.
If I read it enough times, I may start to like it.
If I make the effort to connect the work to the historical context of the time it was written, I may appreciate it on that level.
But isn’t it still tedious?
Surrealism requires-
I think surrealism needs to have-
Continue reading[De-Con-Struc] Watching The Wheels // Simon Morris [guest written by David Kuhnlein]
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Title: Watching the Wheels
Author: Simon Morris
Premise: Simon Morris was born in Blackpool, Lancashire in 1968. In his fourth book for Amphetamine Sulphate he plays a rock journalist whose sensory floodgates have been forced open wide due to grief and loss. We explore the nature of time, the differences between epiphany and apophenia, buried childhood memories, the 1980 and 1981 output of Queen and how it shadows the death of John Lennon. For fans of PKD and Pynchon. Adults Only.
Publisher: Amphetamine Sulphate
Note: Italicized excerpts are taken from Watching the Wheels, the lyrics of Nirvana’s third and final studio album In Utero (1993), Kurt Cobain’s suicide note, and Charles R. Cross’s biography of Cobain – Heavier than Heaven. The rest is fiction.
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1. “Serve the Servants” (3:36)
You write me insane letters and send me dead things in the mail: a bat you find on the way to the post office, though you don’t preserve it right and it rots, a snake submerged in salt. I think I kept the letters, although it’s possible that I burned them and scattered the ashes near to where I dumped the dead, rotted things.
Meanwhile Queen were filling Madison Square Garden for three consecutive nights. Freddie Mercury sprayed the front rows with champagne and called them all cunts.
You ask me to wake up at four in the morning and hike several miles to the Detroit River for a swim. Intense gut pain, fatigue to the point where I’m going to the grocery and have to plop onto a bench because it feels like I’m walking through quicksand, can’t catch my breath. Crying jags happen randomly between now and the abdominal surgery.
Everything’s my fault.
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2. “Scentless Apprentice” (3:48)
It’s been a while since I’ve seen you in my dreams. I don’t remember if I dreamt of you before you died, but ever since your accident in the Detroit River, you’ve shown up a lot.
When we’re back stage and the lights go out and the manic roar of the crowds begins, it doesn’t affect me the way in which it did for Freddie Mercury, who seemed to love, relish in the love and adoration from the crowd which is something I totally admire and envy. The fact is, I can’t fool you, any one of you…thank you all from the pit of my burning, nauseous stomach…
The ending was impeccable. Stranger and stranger desires finally lead to total disintegration. And because it’s a novel, it’s perfect, not messy like real life. Nothing left behind but a scent.
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