Elsewhere, Julian shook a sieve. He was shirtless. It was a warm evening and he the central heating on. It had been on since Winter. In his sieve hills of flour crumbled. Purer hills grew, by layers and landslides.
Joe and Lisa walked. They walked along the curb – and one of them sometimes off it – from time to time glancing consciously at the other’s face. Then the moon came into view and mediated between them. They relaxed. They addressed themselves to the moon. Oh moon! So like a chef! And so useful to Lisa and Joe. When they arrived at Lisa’s, Joe hugged her. They hugged and they thought about things that were pretty obvious to both of them, like that one has just impulsively hugged the other and that here they were under the spry candy of the moon hugging at a gate and it was nice.
Elisha saw, “For example, feminist attempts to isolate a common experience of maternity feel the mountains tremble, did you hear the oceans roar.” Elisha stretched and rose from her desk. Her notes basked in lamplight something garish. Elisha highlighted every word Elisha read in one of three colours. It was “[her] way of working.”
Brenda struggled on her eiderdown. What if an animal, and its net, were evenly-muscled? Then we would have the measure of Brenda on her eiderdown.
She was not asleep. She only allowed herself to think of him for one hour an evening.
But put it this way, she had already been walking the pot-bellied daschund of his favours for some time without knowing it.
All her doubts converged on her wart. He hated her, she disgusted him! Nothing focuses a teenage woman’s vast insecurity quite like pubic fungus.
Chinwag’s collar was a dumb noose. He could relieve the chafe with a certain ponderous nod, as though passing under a low beam. His mouth was dry. Chinwag knew his neck was not really irritated by his collar, but by a nervous tic. If he varied his tic frequently, maybe no one would pick up on it. He would try and transfer it to a compulsive fist. Chinwag clenched and unclenched his right hand. He watched Chinwag. “Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?”
Corntrough tested his body and spirit. He sat nude on the edge of his bed. By, ahem, pure thought he hardened and by, amen, pure thoughts softened himself once more. The rule was he could not touch it. He had done it for half an hour, hard, soft, hard, soft, hard, soft and now he was hard again. He’d do it for that again.
Miffed, joyous, spirit-walking: barnacles don’t share.
Julian’s Morris dancing clothes lay on the kitchen table, intricate patchwork, neatly folded. He drank cider from a pint glass. There was a thumb of flour on it. “G’day mate, I’m from Australia,” he said. “I’m from Austraylyia. What iz op, mon, I am from Jamacia.” Corntrough was damp with sweat. There would be buffer zones of prayer at either end of the fantasies, and complicated hybrids at the boundary between prayer and fantasy. Sex is always a boundary circumstance. In terms of sexual phantasy, Elisha’s practice was more easy-going and sustainable. She tended towards abstinence lobbying, the US import which let one speak in public venues about fucking, often about children fucking, and then in private, plan further such speaking. Elisha turned up the music and did star jumps until the end of the track. It was Elisha’s way of taking a break. Perhaps it upset the bald man next door but he poured sausage fat into their communal sink. She could smell his sizzling them even now. Lottie moved a ladybird. A girl of grave kindnesses, Elisha, with the rare condition of a frowning skull. She wouldn’t be surprised if he was lowering whole strings of cooked sausages into the drain, all the while listening nervously into the rapture of Delirious? for the faltering of her star thuds, the sc-rape of her door. Twisting on his fat neck while the sausages’ fat necks twisted down into the darkness. Brenda peered defiantly into her closet as she still always did each night at this moment. Lottie switched off the overhead light at the moment Lemon switched on the bedside lamp. Elisha chose neon green. Corntough thought, “He felt her warm, wet mouth close around his member.” Chinwag cracked his knuckles. Julian pulled apart an egg with his thumbs. Why are you even reading this crap? You could put it down right now. The Cam flowed and the Thames flowed. And Lisa stood in her hallway and hugged herself. Plenty of things are left unfinished. It’s not too late. Pestilence tensed. And Joe walked down the road and hugged himself. You could be at a surprisingly accurate re-creation of the golden years of Motown for example and either because you are swept up in it or because you are explicitly encouraged to so do by Marvin Gaye you could lay down your Kate Atkinson novel, and perhaps you might leave it there, or one of the other patrons might crawl under the rows of seats and rob you of it. Either way you might decide not to source another copy. That might be it. I do my best. Julian poured batter. Lottie dreamt you stopped reading now. That’s how serious I am. She dreamt it and purred and champed. My hatred for you is pretty astonishing. You, Mike, and you, Carlton, and you, Bradley, and you, Justin, and you, Jefferson, and you, Samantha, and by increments, by deductions from the earliest, by mutation of the earliest, all you readers, gobbling, snuffling, tailoring, testing, clogging reality with your attributes.
Showing posts with label Julian. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Julian. Show all posts
The Condescending Summation
BY FRANCES CROT
Friday. Julian was on his nominal lunch hour. It was nearly four – he simply hadn’t had time yet today – and the sandwich shelves were desolate. He prowled from Pret to Pret in search of egg mayo. As he so did, he quietly sang himself certain songs, each to the tune of the best-known bars of “O Tanenbaum” (“Oh Christmas Tree”). “Oh Elizabeth Peake, oh Elizabeth Peake, you’re te-eh-emping while Jackie’s off,” he sang. “Oh Fiona MacBeth, oh Fiona MacBeth, you wor-or-ork in HR,” he sang. These were his songs. “Oh Simon Charvy, oh Simon Charvy, you’re from the Leeds office.”
He leaned to peek into the back room. Did they really make their sandwiches with as much passion as they claimed? He couldn’t see. Somehow he found himself in a stationer’s. Like most people, Julian sometimes suspected that life was a kind of flicker playing over the surface of something altogether deeper and larger. How to explain these feelings or impressions of unreality, even the innate validity of that word – “unreal”? Reality is only existence, everything is real in its category – a real animal “aloft in the firmament,” or a real hallucination, or a real fiction or fragment of misremembered nightmare. Yet – this pervasive, this persistent thinness. W. H. Smith’s, of course, a monopoly, or very nearly. The closest source of what he craved more than egg.
“Can I interest you in a half-price MacGuffin?” a monkey at a counter asked a monkey in front of Julian.
“A McMuffin? Sorry, a what? No thank you. It’s Coke I want.”
“I can see that sir and I’m down for whatever.”
Soon it was Julian’s turn. “What is one?”
The clerk monkey shrugged. Monkey shoulders move like throws of molten dice. “We’re offer them with every purchase over ten pounds. Here you can look at them.”
“What is it, a sort of toy.”
“No I don’t think so. It’s like a marketing . . . slash . . . media . . . slash trend thing.”
And he paid for his Coke and as he was leaving he was thinking about how he would soon be drinking it. Masked balls in kebab shops, Trend Spotting are saying now, and I’m inclined to believe them.
Friday. Julian was on his nominal lunch hour. It was nearly four – he simply hadn’t had time yet today – and the sandwich shelves were desolate. He prowled from Pret to Pret in search of egg mayo. As he so did, he quietly sang himself certain songs, each to the tune of the best-known bars of “O Tanenbaum” (“Oh Christmas Tree”). “Oh Elizabeth Peake, oh Elizabeth Peake, you’re te-eh-emping while Jackie’s off,” he sang. “Oh Fiona MacBeth, oh Fiona MacBeth, you wor-or-ork in HR,” he sang. These were his songs. “Oh Simon Charvy, oh Simon Charvy, you’re from the Leeds office.”
He leaned to peek into the back room. Did they really make their sandwiches with as much passion as they claimed? He couldn’t see. Somehow he found himself in a stationer’s. Like most people, Julian sometimes suspected that life was a kind of flicker playing over the surface of something altogether deeper and larger. How to explain these feelings or impressions of unreality, even the innate validity of that word – “unreal”? Reality is only existence, everything is real in its category – a real animal “aloft in the firmament,” or a real hallucination, or a real fiction or fragment of misremembered nightmare. Yet – this pervasive, this persistent thinness. W. H. Smith’s, of course, a monopoly, or very nearly. The closest source of what he craved more than egg.
“Can I interest you in a half-price MacGuffin?” a monkey at a counter asked a monkey in front of Julian.
“A McMuffin? Sorry, a what? No thank you. It’s Coke I want.”
“I can see that sir and I’m down for whatever.”
Soon it was Julian’s turn. “What is one?”
The clerk monkey shrugged. Monkey shoulders move like throws of molten dice. “We’re offer them with every purchase over ten pounds. Here you can look at them.”
“What is it, a sort of toy.”
“No I don’t think so. It’s like a marketing . . . slash . . . media . . . slash trend thing.”
And he paid for his Coke and as he was leaving he was thinking about how he would soon be drinking it. Masked balls in kebab shops, Trend Spotting are saying now, and I’m inclined to believe them.
Frances Crot’s The Unnecessary Tipping Point
BY FRANCIS CROT
The reality question – it is to do with dreams. Monkeys cannot afford to believe their dreams are unreal. So they must use a flawed notion of reality, conditioned as much by emotional salience as intellectual consistency, a notion of reality weak enough to do for dreams. Soon MacGuffins were everywhere. They came in £1, £50 and £1,000 versions. Their main selling points were:
1) Many outlets stocked cut-price MacGuffins.
2) The first generation of MacGuffins were likely to be very collectable and valuable in the future.
3) Retailers would be judged by their success in selling MacGuffins; to buy your MacGuffin from a particular retailer was a way of showing your support for that retailer, and would help to prevent that retailer from going bust.
4) If you had one, and somebody tried to sell you one, you could say, “No thanks, mate, I’ve already got one.”
5) They let market researchers understand monkeys’ buying habits, and so as long as you bought honestly and from the heart they would get clean, clear information and be able to create more competitive markets, as well as to buttress the distribution of goods and services against market failures.
6) They were audaciously ironic – if you were savvy to consumerism you could ironically buy a MacGuffin as the ultimate placebo commodity.
It would be misleading to say they didn’t “do” anything. They “did” of course many things. One example, they generated revenue for their makers Delight & Touch, a company better known for its innovative insurance products (insuring against being unable to claim on your insurance, insuring against having no insurance for something, insuring against wasting money on insurance premiums and then nothing bad happening to you – this was the kind of complicated iterative stuff they adored), and for the entrepreneurs and professional “trendy goods”-counterfeiters who successfully sold forgeries of the £50 and £1,000 MacGuffins.
The Mashing Shamans of Delight & Touch thwarted efforts to understand their processes. They put up a smoke screen to maintain their distinction from ordinary people.
Who would not snigger to have it termed priestcruft. You think all I care about is that the zeitgeist had a goitre i.e. that I’m not going to tell you what MacGuffins were actually like as objects. Well I am. They were the same shape as a matchbox and slightly larger than one and as great as one. They were of satisfying weight. They had on them a design which people very quickly got as tattoos. The difference between the differently priced versions was in the colour and a few other very subtle features. The £1 ones came in a variety of pastels, the £50 were black and the £1000 were the colour of moonlight. One time a clerk did not offer Julian one – although the signs clearly describing the offer were abundant, and the date that day was between the two dates circumscribing the period during which the offer would be valid – but reached over the counter and in one clenched fist pulled free his chin, jaw and tongue. Obviously during that his shriek became a strange, keening spluttering.
Julian conducted himself like – well “headless chicken” comes to mind but then so does “jawless customer.” He left the store, incidentally activating the alarms with clutched merchandises. The smog snaked into his promiscuous lungs, there was nothing to disincline it, and his bellows, after all, pumped like death throes. He made mayhem of the busy street by standing woozily in it.
Shards of tooth and bone dribbled from this “face hole” like boulders tumbling in a blood waterfall. With a chunk! his upper jaw stuck into the windshield, as though a tool designed for it. The driver – Chinwag and no other – had had it! He left the engine idling and went to the boot, where along with his Chinwag headgear – he did not bother, this first time around, with the rest of the suit – he requisitioned a billhook and a double-barrelled sawn-off.
What Mr. Chinwag did not realise is that most of the people he was “slaughtering” were the living dead. Dead bodies, of cancer patients for example, moving in. Depending what you judge to be an acceptable amount of “collateral damage” Mr. Chinwag was either psycho or hero. If say 0.35 innocents cut down per zombie cut down was acceptable to you, you would see Mr. Chinwag’s status fluctuate excitingly between these two possibilities. If you can’t see what’s happening I can’t be bothered explaining it to you.
The reality question – it is to do with dreams. Monkeys cannot afford to believe their dreams are unreal. So they must use a flawed notion of reality, conditioned as much by emotional salience as intellectual consistency, a notion of reality weak enough to do for dreams. Soon MacGuffins were everywhere. They came in £1, £50 and £1,000 versions. Their main selling points were:
1) Many outlets stocked cut-price MacGuffins.
2) The first generation of MacGuffins were likely to be very collectable and valuable in the future.
3) Retailers would be judged by their success in selling MacGuffins; to buy your MacGuffin from a particular retailer was a way of showing your support for that retailer, and would help to prevent that retailer from going bust.
4) If you had one, and somebody tried to sell you one, you could say, “No thanks, mate, I’ve already got one.”
5) They let market researchers understand monkeys’ buying habits, and so as long as you bought honestly and from the heart they would get clean, clear information and be able to create more competitive markets, as well as to buttress the distribution of goods and services against market failures.
6) They were audaciously ironic – if you were savvy to consumerism you could ironically buy a MacGuffin as the ultimate placebo commodity.
It would be misleading to say they didn’t “do” anything. They “did” of course many things. One example, they generated revenue for their makers Delight & Touch, a company better known for its innovative insurance products (insuring against being unable to claim on your insurance, insuring against having no insurance for something, insuring against wasting money on insurance premiums and then nothing bad happening to you – this was the kind of complicated iterative stuff they adored), and for the entrepreneurs and professional “trendy goods”-counterfeiters who successfully sold forgeries of the £50 and £1,000 MacGuffins.
The Mashing Shamans of Delight & Touch thwarted efforts to understand their processes. They put up a smoke screen to maintain their distinction from ordinary people.
Who would not snigger to have it termed priestcruft. You think all I care about is that the zeitgeist had a goitre i.e. that I’m not going to tell you what MacGuffins were actually like as objects. Well I am. They were the same shape as a matchbox and slightly larger than one and as great as one. They were of satisfying weight. They had on them a design which people very quickly got as tattoos. The difference between the differently priced versions was in the colour and a few other very subtle features. The £1 ones came in a variety of pastels, the £50 were black and the £1000 were the colour of moonlight. One time a clerk did not offer Julian one – although the signs clearly describing the offer were abundant, and the date that day was between the two dates circumscribing the period during which the offer would be valid – but reached over the counter and in one clenched fist pulled free his chin, jaw and tongue. Obviously during that his shriek became a strange, keening spluttering.
Julian conducted himself like – well “headless chicken” comes to mind but then so does “jawless customer.” He left the store, incidentally activating the alarms with clutched merchandises. The smog snaked into his promiscuous lungs, there was nothing to disincline it, and his bellows, after all, pumped like death throes. He made mayhem of the busy street by standing woozily in it.
Shards of tooth and bone dribbled from this “face hole” like boulders tumbling in a blood waterfall. With a chunk! his upper jaw stuck into the windshield, as though a tool designed for it. The driver – Chinwag and no other – had had it! He left the engine idling and went to the boot, where along with his Chinwag headgear – he did not bother, this first time around, with the rest of the suit – he requisitioned a billhook and a double-barrelled sawn-off.
What Mr. Chinwag did not realise is that most of the people he was “slaughtering” were the living dead. Dead bodies, of cancer patients for example, moving in. Depending what you judge to be an acceptable amount of “collateral damage” Mr. Chinwag was either psycho or hero. If say 0.35 innocents cut down per zombie cut down was acceptable to you, you would see Mr. Chinwag’s status fluctuate excitingly between these two possibilities. If you can’t see what’s happening I can’t be bothered explaining it to you.
All That Meat
BY FRANCIS CROT
And away in Malton Julian unpeeled the stock cube like it was his special nut.
And on Parker's Piece, Lottie’s woe was a little assauged when her love began to nibble her cheek.
And one of the kids, Seth, recognising what was happening, raced home to put his ninja costume on.
And in the chapel, the tide of flesh was herding Mrs. Williamson towards the exit. As the shadow of sunlight fell across her, her frail, uncertain feet encountered a streak of blood and she slipped violently. For a moment Brenda thought the stone floor would crack open her head but the flesh caught that and nestled it and kept seeping, with Mrs. Williamson as its figurehead, lifting up her shoulders, a bad mixture of ship and sea, peeling back her dress against the floor, despite her little fretting and patting and smoothing hands, and feeding her feet-first to a pack of dead doormen. As the blood began to whiz the floral sneer flipped up past her swollen thighs to reveal an adult nappy, an unexpectedly stark canvas, quickly painted with the red of Mrs. Williamson’s varicose sewers amid Mrs. Williamson’s dying whimpers.
The revolting anomaly winnowed their ranks by driving them into the undead killers at the door, by colliding them into stone so that their heads smacked hard against it, and if they survived those attentions, by flowing meanderingly into their heads and chests and by compressing and popping all their structure, closing fistlike about their bodies and rousing them like puppets then crunching them and deforming them like living Paintshop pixels and disseminating them into the flow.
Eight of them however survived by running past the fell guards whose carious and baneful gaze did not find them through the enormous floods of crimson juice they beckoned from the melting bodies of others, into the little church lawn.
Here they saw one who might have been Mrs. Williamson’s gentler elder sister who had perhaps had the good fortune to arrive late to the ceremony and thus never to have set foot inside the chapel spongebathed with a manhole cover by a revenant. The idea that the inwardly brittle formation of bone was a definitely limited union had taken the eight escapees with surprising force. Did the dead, come sprightly from their beds beside the chapel, motion to one another, as if with positive judgement? Surely they bade, one to the other, to carouse and prosecute the banquet.
A tithe of your leg. Different dead people waited at the entrance to the little lawn to eat them. Damned in concentric traps. Yet between frying pan and fire, a world of difference – for all that they each pitilessly asserted the priority of tactics. Curiously difficult and unsatisfactory was the bloody and grass green lawn, of funereal trenches, and sprinting and young in a sense worshippers. Inside there the meat had the upper hand and wouldn’t let you forget it.
Stained glass shattered. Now bodies within were pushed through the rafters. Out their bones came, crinkle-crankle, through the stained glass and the brickwork. The flesh posies from the chapel’s surface soon began to wave in no wind. These chaoses of human bodies, enormous, blood-woozy ganglia, soft tissue and bone sprouting somewhat like gore-soaked and filled clusters of ultra-thin flourescent tubes, were also possessed by the dark reanimating morphological field, but did not threaten the escapees.
The chapel was clogged, sealed off. A wall of invisible force marked the boundary and the evil meat flowed to exactly that line. The rotting gents slit blue sacks and whirling red rope from your warm screaming friends.
"You can't reap me," Brenda trilled, "I used to draw you!"
"Everyone's just running away," Corntrough called to her, "especially me!"
"Do you have a better idea? You suck at this!"
"Hallelujah!" called Father Jeremy archly.
The relation between aesthetics and ethics is both overtheorised and undertheorised. The key question is, alot of sentences are bad, but are any equally as bad as the holocaust? It is problematic because according to most people the question itself is in the same neighbourhood. The whole struggle is to go beyond satire and just be plain rude, like the chapel, 100% full of meat, did. Were the meat to tense, it could launch a spire like a rocket. That was so not revealing Himself through the beauty of His creation.
And away in Malton Julian unpeeled the stock cube like it was his special nut.
And on Parker's Piece, Lottie’s woe was a little assauged when her love began to nibble her cheek.
And one of the kids, Seth, recognising what was happening, raced home to put his ninja costume on.
And in the chapel, the tide of flesh was herding Mrs. Williamson towards the exit. As the shadow of sunlight fell across her, her frail, uncertain feet encountered a streak of blood and she slipped violently. For a moment Brenda thought the stone floor would crack open her head but the flesh caught that and nestled it and kept seeping, with Mrs. Williamson as its figurehead, lifting up her shoulders, a bad mixture of ship and sea, peeling back her dress against the floor, despite her little fretting and patting and smoothing hands, and feeding her feet-first to a pack of dead doormen. As the blood began to whiz the floral sneer flipped up past her swollen thighs to reveal an adult nappy, an unexpectedly stark canvas, quickly painted with the red of Mrs. Williamson’s varicose sewers amid Mrs. Williamson’s dying whimpers.
The revolting anomaly winnowed their ranks by driving them into the undead killers at the door, by colliding them into stone so that their heads smacked hard against it, and if they survived those attentions, by flowing meanderingly into their heads and chests and by compressing and popping all their structure, closing fistlike about their bodies and rousing them like puppets then crunching them and deforming them like living Paintshop pixels and disseminating them into the flow.
Eight of them however survived by running past the fell guards whose carious and baneful gaze did not find them through the enormous floods of crimson juice they beckoned from the melting bodies of others, into the little church lawn.
Here they saw one who might have been Mrs. Williamson’s gentler elder sister who had perhaps had the good fortune to arrive late to the ceremony and thus never to have set foot inside the chapel spongebathed with a manhole cover by a revenant. The idea that the inwardly brittle formation of bone was a definitely limited union had taken the eight escapees with surprising force. Did the dead, come sprightly from their beds beside the chapel, motion to one another, as if with positive judgement? Surely they bade, one to the other, to carouse and prosecute the banquet.
A tithe of your leg. Different dead people waited at the entrance to the little lawn to eat them. Damned in concentric traps. Yet between frying pan and fire, a world of difference – for all that they each pitilessly asserted the priority of tactics. Curiously difficult and unsatisfactory was the bloody and grass green lawn, of funereal trenches, and sprinting and young in a sense worshippers. Inside there the meat had the upper hand and wouldn’t let you forget it.
Stained glass shattered. Now bodies within were pushed through the rafters. Out their bones came, crinkle-crankle, through the stained glass and the brickwork. The flesh posies from the chapel’s surface soon began to wave in no wind. These chaoses of human bodies, enormous, blood-woozy ganglia, soft tissue and bone sprouting somewhat like gore-soaked and filled clusters of ultra-thin flourescent tubes, were also possessed by the dark reanimating morphological field, but did not threaten the escapees.
The chapel was clogged, sealed off. A wall of invisible force marked the boundary and the evil meat flowed to exactly that line. The rotting gents slit blue sacks and whirling red rope from your warm screaming friends.
"You can't reap me," Brenda trilled, "I used to draw you!"
"Everyone's just running away," Corntrough called to her, "especially me!"
"Do you have a better idea? You suck at this!"
"Hallelujah!" called Father Jeremy archly.
The relation between aesthetics and ethics is both overtheorised and undertheorised. The key question is, alot of sentences are bad, but are any equally as bad as the holocaust? It is problematic because according to most people the question itself is in the same neighbourhood. The whole struggle is to go beyond satire and just be plain rude, like the chapel, 100% full of meat, did. Were the meat to tense, it could launch a spire like a rocket. That was so not revealing Himself through the beauty of His creation.
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