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The Unending Case Of Lenin’s Sincerity

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Chapter 1: Sorry He’s Out

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Flaps of neck

armed in retrograde

no sign of up or down

spa-less for months, years

piled into the sitting room of a fogged-up Baker Street, demanding an audience with the great funeral-eyed detective Sherlock Holmes.

‘Sorry, he’s out.’

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Chapter 2: A Catalogue Of Doubts

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Five historians, four anarchists, twelve fascists and seven randos on the brink of Sorel sat on the stained pine floor, dodging pot-shots, stroking Watson, trying with alacrity to present to Sherlock Holmes their litany of evidence.

Banned other parties

stopped visiting factories

went bald

eyeballed Bukharin

shat on Red Star

refused to eat out Fanny Caplan [before and after]

obsessed with tomorrows

speaks to wife

sent Stalin to Perm

ovulates

but the most cunning part, Mr. Holmes

if you’re listening

is the ratio

four days authoritarian, three days hippie

four being more than three and therefore cementing things.

[SHOTS HEARD OUTSIDE, ORPHAN TROUBLE]

‘What say you, Sir, can you assist?’

Holmes scratched at his violin

‘Put a bullet in his brain,’ said the fascists.

pulled out the syringe and cocaine

‘Expose his two-facedness,’ said the anarchists.

shot up

‘For the future of us all.’

and void.

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[De-Con-Struc] Sorcererer // Jace Brittain

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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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[Destiny] Chapter 40: Aswang Orbital

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Character-wise

Sila hoped the student wouldn’t be tetchy, wouldn’t say what with disgust, wouldn’t feel ill if a textbook wasn’t on the table when they arrived, and

most of all

wouldn’t laugh at every word he said.

Situation-wise,

he just prayed Joanna could keep Søren distracted for the next ninety minutes, stop her from coming over and rubbing against his arm.

There was a decent chance – they’d discovered that morning that she liked sketching, or liked observing Joanna sketching, yet there was no way to tell how long the fascination would last.

And sitting in a non-Starbucks cafe, with about fifty people around them, some of them low-tolerance tourists, it would be impossible to cover up the mess if she did start biting again. Ja, he had mitigated things slightly by parking them in the corner, with only the table to the left occupied, but still…

‘Your student is late,’ said Joanna, looking up from her Mega Man sketch, and then diving straight back down again as a tall bearded guy appeared with unsure-signal hand and asked Sila if he was Sila.

‘Yup, that’s me. Eros?’

The guy, Eros, nodded, said hi and sat down, pulled out a One Piece notebook and said hi again. Then looked left at Joanna and the girl.

‘They’re with me,’ explained Sila, deciding honesty was the less awkward way forward. ‘They don’t speak much English though. The girl, zero…doesn’t speak any.’

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[Destiny] Chapter 19: The Creepier Version

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Back at the hostel, Joanna put her plan into action, cajoling, deceiving and finally outright shoving Sila off his bunk and into the bar on the second floor.

It was instantly pastiche,

borderline hauntological

posters of Scarface and Run Lola Run and Carlito’s Way and Miami Vice and Manhunter on the walls

music via Kraftwerk covers in the air

no visible cabinets.

Around a hundred hostel guests provided vague dancing, none of them over 25, so Sila stayed put in the corner, let Joanna manage the supply line of alcohol, and drank and drank and drank, and the drunker he got, the more unguarded he got, but also the angrier he got and

by two in the morning he was at last balanced enough to open up yet

despite Joanna being the only person in the bar he knew

the Slovene nut managed to open up the wrong way

to the wrong person,

a Danish guy, not Joanna and

for some reason he talked about Danish people he liked and 60’s hammer movies and representation of Danes in Hollywood and how tall and strong Danish men were and then

finally

about the girl they’d rescued from the wooden box

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[Destiny] Chapter 10: Kurzsan Is The Warmest Count

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Actually in the fireplace

book in claw

not saying a thing, just reading, and all I could do was sit there in a slumped state, blood leaking out of my neck from its slash wound, waiting to see if it could be bothered to drink me at some point

and the flames

didn’t affect it in any way

not even a slight flinch of discomfort

which was fine, really, as fire wasn’t the key to this, the thing in my jacket pocket was, if I could muster up the energy to lift my hand up and

a blue laser shot into the room

the cave

missing the creature, the Krsnik, by a metre and a half, then expanding, thickening into a bar of light that wasn’t blue anymore, it was

colourless

not yellow

but something to illuminate the décor and show more of

~~~

Sila woke up looking at the floor.

Most of his body was still on the bed, but everything above his chest was hanging off the side, as if he’d already tried and failed to get up and this was the compromise.

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[Destiny] Chapter 7: Innsbruck Castle Glum

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Thirteen hours later he was in Austria, the head of the tadpole part, bussing into Innsbruck on a hunch.

A book he’d read said there was a cabinet in the castle there and nearby was a room with a bath dug into the floor and a painting of a wolfman at the entrance, and that was exactly the kind of detail that Professors of Dark Light wrote poems about, or he thought they would, mainly cos of the note he’d been left in Kagoshima, the story of the woman at Uji Bridge, with the bold underlines of

‘she bathed in the Uji river for 21 days, divided her hair into five horns, painted her body red with vermilion, and went on a legendary killing spree.’

He still didn’t know what vermilion was but he understood the weirdness of it and why Professors of Dark Light would be drawn towards the ‘five horn, paint your body red, 21 days’ part.

~~~

The castle was covered in snow when he got there because it was November 28th and the wolfman painting was exactly where the book had promised it would be, so the only thing left to do was find the cabinet and ditch the Chinese murderer, Joanna, who’d been walking fifteen yards behind him ever since he’d boarded the train from Ljubljana station.

It was weird, no matter how hard he tried he couldn’t shake her, not even when the train got into Salzburg and he’d sprinted out of the station and kept going for twenty minutes down side roads and alleys, then looped back and into the same station and onto the platform to wait for the next train to Innsbruck, it was no good cos somehow she’d known his plan and was sitting on a bench on the same platform waiting for the same train, her line being: if he were really staying in Salzburg, he wouldn’t have sprinted out of the station.

It was dubious logic, but it worked then and it worked in Innsbruck station too as, somehow, she knew it was the castle he was aiming for, which meant they’d ended up on the same bus, bought the same ticket and were now looking at the same row of paintings.

‘He looks like you,’ she whispered, pointing at the wolfman portrait nearby.

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[Destiny] Chapter 5: Time Out Joint Of

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Sila killed time by rolling snow and kicking it at the Dr Caligari poster. It was harsh, he didn’t mind the play they were doing, it was more the other guy, the Grand White Wizard. What was she doing? Did she not understand what he was saying? Was his accent too strong?

He tried to work it out before she got back but there was no solution without extra data from the enigma herself, so he kicked more snow and waited for her to return, which turned out to not be five minutes later, but fifteen.

‘The wizard reappears…’

She nodded, wiping something off her hand and onto her jacket.

‘Did you get your grey thing?’

‘This time, yes.’

‘Great. What’s next?’

‘We take it.’

Sila looked around, checking for cops hiding in snow-dressed trees. ‘You mean now? Out here?’

‘I told you, it passes the time faster.’

‘So does talking to racists.’

‘Roll up your shirt.’

‘I said so does talking to racists.’

‘What?’

‘Back there.’ Sila looked back at the café/bar in case she was confused. ‘You gave that caveman your number.’

‘We did this conversation already.’

‘Caveman white supremacist. And that stuff he was saying…I don’t get it. You didn’t even flinch.’

‘What is flinch?’

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福爾摩斯 [HOLMES]

The Great Mouse Detective - Fidget traps Olivia HD – Видео Dailymotion

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福爾摩斯

in lieu of novelty

drips cocaine shoots the wall shoots the curtains the wall the cocaine never Watson shoots the violin plays it with holes sucks the holes shoots the strings shoots the sighs from tea lady lips the groans too the knees the artifice of what they’ve come to what they were what they originally tried to

“Watson, you slab, what’s this?”

Foregoing spit

population control or bust 的 Holmes

picks up the periodical

spies a new movement

ah, Tzara, the man with the tan

Dada something dada, the revelation of psyche, raw as can be

very nice

I hope it’s structured

formulaic

cos without structure there’s no eyes

no receptive sponge

they’ll say they like it but they’ll never read it

trust me

I stand in line with these wretches

I smoke at them

Watson, look at this, read this, put your ossified fucking thought dungeon on this

doctor of no patients

lump of Afghan bullshit

shot by who?

Lord Calendar in blackface?

Get over here, read this, put your face five cm from this shit

my dear friend

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[INSERT DIFFICULT POEM]

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Cantonese Manichean Corridor

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Forced against my will to consume Disney but not really.

When it comes to languages, especially Cantonese, I usually go with books or things I already know so I won’t be completely lost when I read them.

I read dozens of Geronimo Stilton books when I first started learning, the ones with a castle on the cover or a horror element initially then, later, the one where Stilton is on a fitness binge.

It’s a kind of brain death, but you’ve got to do it.

Cos then you get to the non-translated stuff

like Wai Si Lei.

~~~

Somewhere in my room, there’s a box with about 20-30 local Hong Kong sci-fi novels, all in Chinese, and I don’t think I’ve read more than five pages of any of them.

Give me a week of no interruptions and I could probably get through it, but it’d take a lot of dictionary work and only a vague intellectual concept as to what was going on in the plot. I wouldn’t be able to really feel any of it. Or judge the writing.

It is my sincere hope to one day reach the level where I can write a review of one of these novels that doesn’t sound like a seven year old’s school book report.

If it happens, I’ll put it up here.

~~~

‘We must expect not one, but a multitude of revolutions taking place in different countries at different times.’

Red Star by Bogdanov, the anti-War of The Worlds.

Not that I’ve read it yet. Just bits here and there. A utopian, communist society on Mars, capitalist drudgery on Earth, a Russian Bolshevik sliding between the two…

In some ways, Bogdanov saw Disney coming, only he called it the ruling classes and overstated its ability to put together military expeditions. Then he sailed off into the realm of endless blood transfusions. Interesting guy.

Would he have borrowed Jedi Academy from the library?

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The case of the man from Japan // Andre “Bre” Breton

Elementary, Dear Data « Mission Log Podcast

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Chapter 1: A Visitor Calls

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It was a cold, breezy, temperate, zealous, overly described morning on Baker Street when Sherlock Holmes.

“If I’m not mistaken, Watson.”

“But Holmes!”

Murderer of four husbands walked in and threw down two teabags, announcing a surprisingly tall man from the embassy of Japan.

The tall man walked in, bowing.

“Case.”

“You have come from the butchers in Dundee, recently fingered your stepdaughter, dabble in alchemy and have a fettered interest in ‘no hands’ pottery.”

‘But Holmes!”

“Case. Confusing. Help.”

“Say no more. Watson, call a taxi. Mrs Hudson, isolate.”

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Chapter 2: A Pleasant Journey

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Near Bordeaux

Stared at the tip of his pipe

Near Lisbon

gambled with Watson

Near Mauritania

Tutted at the blacks

Near Lagos

nice church

Near the Cape of Good Hope

Stared at what used to bend, resentful

Near Madagascar

Wanked over rare bee

In the Indian Ocean

Scraped off the grottiest of the wallpaper

In the games room

Near Sri Lanka

Watched young boys run from Arthur C Clarke

Near Bali

Struggled to breathe

Collapsed on top of Watson

Near Hong Kong

bit his tongue

Near Taiwan

worked on his Japanese

Near Yokohama

lurked under the rustiest of the metal stairs

As the ladies came down

In Yokohama

Said Konnichiwa

Poorly

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