To Reek Evocatively Uncouth

M. S. Strickland
A yazdehanity of diligent textwork
Beulah, Gertrude, Agua Prieta, Lutèce, Owlstain | 1984–1994
First published 1995 | Book Map |

Charting the diligent textwork engaged in by its author M. S. Strickland, textworker, over the course of eleven years during the circum-, para-, and pan-Arathu ramblings embarked on by its author, M. S. Strickland, as well as the cis-Appalachian avolations and trans-Atlantic travesties accomplished under the auspices of sundry argo- and aeronautical contrivances and handmaidens in a train or at sea, by aerostat, dirigible, sloop, schooner, man o’war, montgolfier, haywain, travois, or dogcart during the course of eleven years of diligent textwork which would see him sojourn in places as distal as Beulah, Tex., as proximal as Paris, France, and as fulcral as Owlstain, Flouz., all the while undismayed by the minatory prospects of the furious deserts of inelegance, the satirical swamps of solecism, and the hyperborean heights of impropriety bristling with tautophonous thorns and swarming with the vipers of incongruity whose sought-after sting in the textual alchemy of the textworker’s blood catalyses trauma’s venom into the intoxicating nectar of the fabulist’s rare art and the glairy ambrosia of the agile rimer’s gimmal’d lyrics under the tumefying influence of which alone can textwork discharge itself of those, as its author’s “yazdehanity of diligent textwork,” To Reek Evocatively Uncouth, more than adequately puts it, “ludict lucubrations demanded of all diligent textworkers, whether they be attached to ISOCPHYS or bound to IMSSOC, whether one bed (yek yatax) or eleven (yazdehan) rook beds is or are sufficient to launch their lyrical récits and acrimonious mémoires and sordid recueils of the gray envenomed nights that characterize the promiscuous isolation of Lutèce and Agua Prieta, whether they be heterolexical recluses in Gertrude, intertextual pariahs in Beulah, or translexical exiles in Owlstain, let us all hoist high our graphomaniacal fists and make ardent promiscuous textwork as if we were blowing into our very last tarte aux abricots by skillfully putting the typography of theory to the foolscap of practice in such a way that the seams remain artfully concealed on the inside of the fabric and yet miraculously, it seems, chafe neither the inguinalii of ritual nor the axillæ of myth!”