Codename Prague (17 page)

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Cyberspace as a dead matrix, a petrified vacuum. A burnt waffle of nothingness. “Cyberspace is indeed an enclave of a new sort, a subjectivity which is objective and which, like Luhmann’s systems theory, but also like the structuralism and poststructuralism which preceded it, once more does away with the ‘centered subject’ and proliferates in new, post-individualistic ways.” Frederic Jameson,
Archeologies of the Future
(2005). Consider swapping this passage with an excerpt from the Fat Boys’ song “All You Can Eat.”

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Shot of sphenpalatine ganglioneuralgia (trans. margarita brain-freeze)…Steam rises from a soft blue swimming pool at night on the bubbled roof of a spacescraper in 2022 Los Angeles,
Kalifornia
(1993; ref. Brad Pitt’s best performance). White tables surround the pool. Aesthetes in bikini briefs sit there and eat the Finger Food of Astronauts.

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“Not on Morality, but on Cookery, let us build our stronghold: there brandishing our frying pan, as censer, let us offer sweet incense to the Devil, and live at ease on the fat things
he
has provided for his Elect!” Thomas Carlyle,
Sartor Resartus
(1830-31).

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—this is an exegesis of the dreamworld of a narratological Scylla and Charybdis. Failure to adequately perform, process and interpret this exegesis may result in green sunsets and inchoate port-a-potties. Don’t wait for the lawyers to sort things out. You can’t sue a port-a-potty. Smiles, on the other hand, are a different story…I decided to take my smile to court. “I didn’t authorize the smile,” I told the judge. “I’m a sad, sad person. Why would I smile?” My smile’s attorney guffawed. “That’s entirely beside the point, your honor,” she said. “Remand.” “Remand!” I shouted. My attorney punched me as hard as he could. “Your honor,” he said, “remand is an insult. A crime has been committed. If it pleases the court, the prosecution asks that the Accused be imprisoned without bail until such a time that—” “That’s enough, counselors,” interrupted the judge. A smile overwhelmed his face. He stared down at it in disbelief…One thing always leads to another but cause and effekt are altogether divergent, not to mention endangered, species…To make a fist and not swing it. To drown in a puddle of True Romance. TRACKING SHOT across an obsidian black ocean. The sky overhead is the color of Spectravision, tuned to a dead mammal…A blast of radio static interrupts the narrative…“OK we’re back, folks. Give a big round of applause for our first guest, some asshole nobody knows! [Clap track.] He’s a certified tool-and-dye maker, a Republikan, and he loves his momma.” Two lawyers fly across the stage on wires. They crash into each other, wrestle in the air, then fall into a trap door. [Laff track.]…Memoir = my memory? And yet everybody shits their pants when it ends up being false, or extrapolated, or perverted, or tweaked, or all of the above. Memory is a devious engine. Memory is as trustworthy as a car salesman at a Naïveté Convention. (Ref. name for an upcoming novel:
The Devious Engine
.)…Oasis of Parisian arcades—in his freeze-frame baroque, Walter Benjamin employed the arcades in an attempt to capture/represent the unconscious, more-irreal-than-irreal federation of the human condiment. But the Nazis got him before he could finish. They reach into the potbelly of history and into the fumes of the future and get everyone…Trans.
yarbles…
There are over 60,000 miles of veins and capillaries in the human body. There are less than [???] words in the human mind…“And is that smile sitting in the courtroom today?” asked the judge’s newly appointed counsel. In a stone-faced frenzy, the judge threw himself across the bench. “That’s him!” he yelled. “That’s the smile!” The smile began to grind…Roger Daltrey.
Tommy
(1975)
just isn’t as good as I want it to be, but I liked Elton John’s giant bloodred Doc Martens…Too fuckin’ stupid to get into college? Stick Figure University will accommodate you. Just write us a note with your intent to enroll and we’ll put you on the docket. Annual price of admission: $179,999.99 per quarter. Room and board not included, dipshit. Send check or money order to…Nothing lasts forever. Eventually everything falls apart. What we need is stronger glue…organic whale fins erupt from the soil of the Amerikan desert…Don’t count sheep jumping over fences to fall asleep. Count Earps. Wyatt Earps. Make sure they have .44 magnums and are trigger-happy. Make sure they haven’t eaten a decent meal in a week or two. Make sure the fences they try to jump over are too high, and barbed, and electric, and monofilamental. Take no mercy on the Earps. I promise you’ll be
fast asleep before their mangled corpses pile up to the stars…A magician pulls an inflamed lung out of his hat, tosses it over the audience and shoots it like a skeet. He misses. The lung falls into the lap of a prominent local dignitary. His wife covers her mouth and points and screams and the magician runs offstage and everybody goes apeshit and the lights go flickerflickerflicker…quiet, igneous seashore………………In the end, the lawyers eat everything with a smile. I should have taken the LSATS. What we need are more smiling lawyers—

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[Quote here from a credible, authentic source (next blurb is counterfeit, too). Something about the origin of magic. Or lungs. What did James Merrick’s doktor/benefactor think about lungs?]

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To spend most of one’s time waiting for comic book superheroes to transform from everymen into their respective Unleashed Ids, Doppelgängers, Chaosophreaks, etc. Everything leading up to those transformations can be equated with contravened attempts at masturbation in below zero weather. Post-transformation ain’t much better. These overmen, and the special effekts used to represent them, promise impossible feats of strength, discourse, violence, agency, etc. But the promise always fails, i.e., one never leaves a Moth(ra) Man with an empty stomach. Hence a revision of my former claim: To leave a Moth(ra) Man with a
deflated
stomach so that one can fully enjoy the scenic chairlift to the next meal.

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“I want to take this opportunity to cite […], who, appropriating the language of […], who himself tweaked and refined the patois of […], claimed that […] misquoted the […] who uttered the original Nadsat soliloquy that […] articulated before realizing that the dictionary of Nadsat he had downloaded into his lexicon had been tampered with, i.e., somebody had mixed and matched the definitions in such a way that most of them did not correspond with their lawful terms (e.g.
viddy
=
to talk
, i.e.,
govoreet
, instead of
to see
). Hence […]’s discourse was bezoomny and full of cal. Nonetheless somehow he succeeded in conveying a message that was not only valid and sensible but utterly ethnomethodological, as it were. In any event, […] writes: ‘…’ (498). Afterwards there was a fist fight.” Anonymous Pre-AR Document Recovered from the Third Basement under the Tomb of […] in Père-Lachaise Cemetery.

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“At the end of time, a moment will come when just one man remains. Then the moment will pass. Man will be gone. There will be nothing to show that we were ever here…but stardust. The last man, alone with God…Am I that man?” Capt. Pinbacker, perf. Mark Strong,
Sunshine
(2007). Silhouette of a dark, disintegrating stick figure set against a cosmic wall of fire…Ref. Sgt. Pinback in
Dark Star
(1974).

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“What’s her name? Linnea. Tell that chick to get naked. All the way. I wanna see bush.” Dan O’Bannon, set of
The Return of the Living Dead
(1985).

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“Portrait of ultraviolence…” (0.000000037 AR).

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“The psychophysical process of attack is not a fundament of this physio-nietzschean martial art. Nor is the art of defense. The enlightened scikungfi fighter will have transcended these useless tactics. Neither
aggression
nor
protection
informs her character. Or rather, these things inform her character to such a degree that they meta-entropically implode into nothingness. I stand here. I blink, I breathe. I exist. And I fucking kill you and eat your gore. That is the True Way of scikungfi. Many like to think they follow and practice the True Way. But the mass man is nothing but a hack bodhisattva. He always will be.” Dr Shirley Mai-Pong Gak, Blackbelt,
Tao of Scikungfi, 8th Ed.
(circa Ticky Tacky 2.56 AR).

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“Making something new is merely the process of disguising something old in a seemingly creative way. The disguise is the thing
―
not the thing itself.” D. Harlan Wilson,
Dr Identity, or, Farewell to Plaquedemia
(2007).

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(NOTE: Faulker did the same shit in “The Bear.” See the third chapter. High modernist mxyzptlk. The stuff of
artistes
who fork over everlasting viscera to pursue MFA degrees rather than mxyzptlking their own hackneyed BwOs.)

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e

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The Said vs. the Unsaid.

Vs.

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“Usurper.” James Joyce,
Ulysses
(1922). Is this grand narrational shiznitosnits-vansamson any different than Snoop Doggy Dogg’s 1993 album
Doggy Style
? Equal measures of micturation, excretion, gangstaism and verbomania communicated with equal measures of True Grit.

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Cluster of biological salesmen. “AMAZING 2 YEAR GUARANTEE: If you need to start over for any reason we will replace both water-purifier and Sea-Monkey
^®
egg pouches (worth $6.00) plus a free copy of the original. It’s fun to raise pet Sea-Monkeys
^®
. Official Sea-Monkey
^®
handbook. A $3.00 value. Free! To enter a claim, send us $3.00 for processing and a stamped, self-addressed envelope to: Sea-Monkey Guarantee, PO Box 809, Bryans Road, MD 20616-0809.” Back of Sea-Monkey
^®
Magic Castle Box.

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“Expression is not developed through the practice of form, yet form is a
part
of expression. The greater (expression) is not found in the lesser (expression) but the lesser is found within the greater. Having ‘no form,’ then, does not mean having no ‘form.’ Having ‘no form’ evolves from having form. ‘No form’ is the higher, individual expression.…A Jeet Kune Do man faces reality and not crystallization of form. The tool is a tool of formless form.” Bruce Lee,
Tao of Jeet Kune Do
(1975). To inject Lee’s
raison d’être
(and corporeal physique) into the corpse of literature itself.

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“iFFFFPFP.”
^[15]
Proto-Indo-European, Obersalzberg (4,000 BC).

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Top 100 science fiction clichés:…45) anthropologic aliens; 46) protagonists who manifest as Jesus; 47) antagonists who manifest as Hitler; 48) arch-antagonists who manifest as Teufelsdröckhian failed gourmevangelists and pull the strings of antagonists who manifest as Hitler/John Keats/
Daikaiju
; 49) black holes with speaking voices; 50) intelligent women with immeasurable breasts; 51) first sentences or voice-overs that begin with the phrase: “In an uncompromising future”; 52) infinite stor(i)es of ammunition; 53) endless fucking geekspeak…

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“There are no landscapes; there are only selves expressing experiential spaces, and the weird, not the normal, constitutes their true vocabulary.” Darin Bradley, “The Self-Weird World: Problems of Being as the Fantastic Invasion in Small Press Speculative Fiction,”
Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts
(2007).