Less a book and more a laboratory for the divastigation of promiscuous textuality coterminous with that of our own here at
Editions MSS,
Words to Make a Story Out of evolves (
entwickelt) out of
D. I. Swopes’s senimalistic experience of
ludict: “L’attente de métamorphoses successives dont la ductilité, la docilité au travail du langage, à l’aventure verbale, reste sans limites” (Gracq 1980: 139). As initially conceived in early 1996 in the city Christopher Morley may or may not have dubbed “Parnassus on Wheels,”
Words — “a Serious Novelistic Encounter (
SNE)” — would consist of eleven chapters, later dubbed
SNE-Dynagon Pods, of eleven themes each,
les dits thèmes permuting in the canonical fashion of a quenine of order n=11, the whole, that is, forming an onzine, or, in the
Irolingual lingo of
Words, a true
yazdehanity, each chapter headed by an epigram culled from the first sentence of each of the eleven chapters of Nabokov’s
Despair, the eleven themes, or
yazdehan, being something along the lines of: 1) How to read this book; 2) The perils of profligate reading; 3) The author meets a professor; 4) Proof of the author’s ability to write good prose; 5) The edifying thoughts of a tea drinker; 6) How the author wrote certain of his or her words; 7) A summary of the book so far; 8) A crossword puzzle; 9) A Gulf War fantasy; 10) In which the characters speak for themselves; and 11) Thoughts and feelings behind the characters’ actions. And so the book unspooled itself via the golden nib of
écriture degré zéro, the second chapter following the first, the third the second, and so on, from Parnassus through our author’s (
OA’s) initiatory sojourn on the riparian shores of Lutetia from autumn 1996 until early summer 1997 and our re-exile to Parnassus until
OA’s second littoral excursion to the Senonian capital lasting from early spring 1999 till autumn 2000 during which “time” (“terrasses de cafés,” “bancs de jardins,” “lit d’estaminet,” und so weiter, would be more appropriate
lieux-dits for les “plages d’espaces et de durée” où et quand nous avons écrit nos mots)
things — structures, themes, words themselves — began to unravel, culminating in a grim moment less than a fortnight
avant the following southward equinox when it was discovered that reality, ever the fractious factitious perfidious parsimonious prude (FF
PPP), had begun to plagiarize and appropriate for her own sordid ends, the very textuality of
Words themselves, thereby forcing
OA to abandon what had hitherto been, despite its permutational quiddity, a rather straightforward narrative endeavor (
SNE), and — so as to
brouiller la piste, as it were, to shake her tenacious and insidious chien de Saint-Hubert off our tracks and keep raw-boned reality ever on the ropes, on the sidelines, out of the playground of taboo entirely
même — accelerate into the rarefied realm of purely lexical anastomotic senimality, viz.
Words to Make a Story Out of.
“Dreaming of writing a short novel that would be the literary equivalent of Georgia O’Keefe’s paintings of black irises, our author (
OA) has produced instead something along the lines of one of those large color-sample grids by Gerhard Richter. But instead of the squares of paint being arranged randomly, there is a palpable, though far from easily graspable, pattern to their permutation. And what we see is more arabesque than planar, more complexly layered than simply juxtaposed. Lean in close. Each apparent blank in the lattice is not empty; each seemingly smooth tile in the mosaic is not monochrome, nor even abstract, but is a delicate filigree with its own sense and structure, combining with all the others to make a larger sense and structure. Lean in further, close enough to alarm the guards, and it becomes obvious that
OA has done epileptic modernism to a turn, and served it with a savory
roux au jus, among the piquant flavors of which this author can discern three dominant cutting-edge aromas:
quantal fiction in its Baudrouilliérien instar (the linear living of time is not the only way to live time, he teaches us, as “la mémoire et l’oubli, les anticipations et les regrets permettent d’autres appréhensions”);
schizomythology as currently formulated by me and mes collègues both nouveaux and nouvelles at both Glamporium and the Institute of Sociophysiology here in Owlstain; and the practice of
ludict (ludict is much more than a Lydian edict, or a laconically lucid ludicrous lyric, or even a perverse playtext composed under the pretext of playverse, as some authors have bemoaned: ludict is to philology as lieudit is to topography; ludict is the translucid ductility at play between the written and the read!) which Ms. Willoughby-Johnson continues to display for us in her delicious
Divastigations. And, yes, a pungent aftertaste of
Muriel” (Schlame 2002).
By far our most oracular fabricator of
ludict is our bosom pal and Glamporium’s, alas, now insubstantial though quondamly buxom floramorita
Ouida Willoughby Johnson who in
Divastigations, a “symphonic conundrum involving clastic ludict” (§§
0,
262), posits ludict not simply as “vacant whatnot” (§
148) or a “limp imagination’s vain acrostic” (§
107), but as a “lucid ductility of glyph and word I construct from what among all my fair parts I lack” (§§
0,
96,
191,
267).
Ludict, thus, “constructs loving inspiration” (§
134) just as much as it charts a “tragiplayful staging of an inability to mark with my will this blank world” (§
61).
Confirming this supposition is ludict’s “lucid flow of fact and fabulation” (§
126), its “focal point of maximal fiction” (§
97) implicating ludict in a “catoptromantic striving for things lost” (§§
106,
208); that is, a “strict constraint of form which through arbitrary picturing can bring lost things back to light” (§
124).
Homologously put, ludict’s “dual matriarchs” (§
63) promiscuously ramify into a “flyscript body of allusion molding form from form’s omission” (§
92) and a “foolish iambic lacuna molding form from form’s intoxication” (§
164), both of which inosculantly conjoin with, by way of a vivaciously patulous triadic circumvallation, ludict’s “patriarchal inspiration” (§
63), which husbands forth a “form that outspills function with a frivolous construct’s lack” (§
263).
In addition, ludict is a “cryptogram of sorts for a crossword possibility” (§
219), a “clitalysis” of which (§
205) would “add truth to what ludict says” (§
208).
And though our author (
OA), on many a glum and forlorn occasion which not atypically follows upon an antipathic glut of agonistic bodywork — a “noxious marginal activity,”
Ouida informs us, “I playfully hazard lustily” (§
101) during a “tossing off [of ludict] as a subdominant position of skirtful troubling” (§
148) involving “continuous or constant stooping, squatting, standing and straddling to unsnap, unhitch, unzip, unbutton, and unfurl ludict” (§
123) — has scornfully found fault with ludict as an “imbrication of truistic monads” (§
199), a “cynical tract of gushing lusts” (§
208), a “circumstantial custom by which to banish any sacrificial girlchild to an obligatory dichotomy of form and function” (§
268), this lust-inflaming lady’s habitually jaunty mood, by contrast, most un
parsimoniously proclaims ludict to admit of a “natural picking and culling, [a] notional paring and cutting of combinatoric thought-blossoms” (§
209), thus “accord[ing] fiction its cast and color” (§
234).
Functionally, ludict opts “to wish by staging an ashcan condition for what art could burn of any woman’s futurity” (§
131) through, with, about, on, or by way of any sort of “link and spacing in which word can link [sic] hand in child’s hand a pupstroll prampush into cycling crash of rail too narrow to avoid” (§
140) and optimally functions by “pointing a digit that is ludict” (§
113) and by “shuttling from ludict to light and back and forth again and again” (§
148) so as to “map this world from sight to ludict” (§
137), thus bringing about a “clarification of so much of mankind’s vanity toward so many notions of truth and law” (§
166).
Ludict, in short, thus, is not just “an idiom highly lucid, logical, and ludict” (§
120), but is also, in
Ouida’s world and
word, “light” (§
193).
But it’s not our wish to clinch this ludict with an ictus so bumptious, so pompous, so pious, for
Ouida, as avid patrons of Glamporium will not fail to avouch, was a charmingly sly and voluptuously playful bint for whom “laughing at ludict’s limit” (§
215) was always an occasion for concocting a ravishingly sardonic conundrum, such as: “Ludict is to taboo as a) a dictionary is to words; b) schizomythology is to sociophysiology; c) sociophysiology is to schizomythology; or d) a
word is to a dictionary” (§
215).
In the summer of 1987 there was founded in the barrio Melos e Artes of the Flouzianian capital of Owlstain un journal hebdomadaire s’apparaissant le mercredi intitulé The Owlstain
SCAT par les soins de
Xavier (“Skid”) Slekton, editor and publisher (EP),
Mona Coltrane, managing editor (ME), and Adam Trembart, art director (AD). Five summers later, the first dyad (S, M) of this typographical trio (S, M, AT) found themselves coopted into the recently instaurated Institute of Sociophysiology on the strength of their proclivities for, in S’s case, “the fiction of reality and the reality of fiction,” and, in M’s, “the emotional foundations of causality.”
Goldbarg’s Variants touches only tangentially, if at all, on any of the foregoing, and ignores AT (almost) entirely. Instead, the book dislimns the extraneous (for instance: the couple’s
reportage de guerre — direct, indirect, or skewed — anent, viz.,
soit the Intrussyan siege, subjugation, and ravishment of Tulpuyauor,
soit the Berdi War in the Far Gimmals,
soit some conflict somewhere else; S’s bibliographic sci-fi thriller — Borges meets Burroughs meets Bolaño meets Bulwer-Lytton — about a secret military program to breed an anthrosimian superarmy on the sociophysiological principles of, according to the
feuilleton’s eponymous subject,
Hybrid Vigor; M’s weekly breathless coverage of the Tetrastic art scene — “The sculptor was adamant that while he worked the models mustn’t move; he would instead move around them” [In the Studio with Erartsos: To Knead and Knuckle
«La Rime Argile»]; “Shirtless and smiling at nothing but me and rambling stories and images and paintings and drawings and writings such as these that float in my head through the day” [Velasto Prastier’s
Aerolexist Portraits] — her exploration of “the emotional foundations of causality,” her memoirs: “He laughed and said something about dogs barking at trees but he is so off the wall I don’t try to figure out anything he says I just like his accent and foolishly cute broken Appalachian,” etc.; his literary criticism in which the reader is incessantly reminded of the textual dialectics involving “the fiction of reality and the reality of fiction,” his memoirs: “Which is why that day when you came into my room and yelled at me, when you screamed, ‘Why don’t you bounce around on the floor and hit me!’ was the day I began to fear and loathe your each entrance into my room, my sanctuary from the hateful spite people hurl at each other, because I thought that at any moment you would ridicule my festering, embarrassing, shameful secret,” and what not — all of which may be perused ad libitum, ad arbitrium, ad usum proprium, ad astra per aspera, ad abundantiam, ad pedem litterae, ad nauseam in the relevant numbers of the Owlstain
SCAT) in order to more fully probe with utmost textual candor the altarian dynamics of the situation of biune dialexicalia (i.e., the quondam relationship) inhering between and within S and M.
That Theory divastigates the agon of (trans)lexicalia (Bennett 1910) imbricating the pantalonnade of promiscuous textuality as promulgated by
ILE with the galéjade of heterolexical subjectivity as ditto by
CACA.
This is not to say
That Theory is impertinent to what
ISOCPHYS defines as “the sociophysiological pantomime of the schizomythic saynète,” only
That Theory is as much implied by and implicated within the translexical bacchanale holding sway on the Playground of Taboo as said bacchanale is grounded in the textual harlequinade of
That Theory.
For instance,
Chester Kidjaki (CK) claims, on the one hand, “
That Theory is at least as ritually burlesque as the ‘rubbing-it-in-your-face rituals’ practiced at Glamporium” and cites in support of
That Theory its textual promiscuity as being “as hotly entangled with the translexical interdigitation of sociophysiology and taboo as it is
be(com)ing within the schizomythology of ritual.”
On the other,
Arnaut Raymond (AR) corroborates
That Theory’s interactionist stance
in vivo by proving himself as much the handy histrion in, e.g., a certain sociophysiologically intimate atellane performed on Glamporium’s Playground of Taboo as he is the vigorous gay clitalyst of the schizomythically farced vaudeville of the city of Owlstain, and therefore the world, at large.
§ 5 :
Glamporium
Gloria Galvari & Maryam Ravigiallo’s Pornarchic Hetairotopia
“Mimicking a worldly sans souci (that is, putting on an insouciant air) amidst all this foggy murmur and moan of dramatic anticipation, this laughing chirp and hiccup of musicians tuning — pounding ring of mridangam’s rim, pluck and crick of ktar, stridor of sarangi strings, latration of Fukari grig drums, and whatnot — you command of your fair abigail (Intrussyan?), of your jaunty groom (Ityalian?), un piccolo boccato, pazhalsta, and flirtatiously fan your program back to front. Quando io movo i sospiri a chiamar voi. To starboard and port in a ring around our showrug, timorous duos not too dissimilar from your own splay curving out: not too distant to spoil your curiosity, not too vicinal to horn in on your privacy. A snaking circumscription of musicians sitting on floor mats or low stools rings our circular champ d’action just in front of you. Manolo R. will play harmonium; a Mr. K., mridangam. Viol consort consists of Atoca Inhart (v. d’amour), Inuhka Bloip (v. da gamba), and a vivacious jorum of frosty Intrussyan vodka swims into your vision’s compass. You toss it back, hazard a Slavic flourish (Kharashó! Khachú vtaráya!), and wait drooling for your hardy slutscout, your flamboyant flunky, adroitly handling a ticklish bodkin, to shuck from its rimous briny husk a Port Astri Bay mollusk, squirt it with bloodcurdling citron, and tilt that squirming bolus of gills, guts, and gonads into your gaping mouth. Nulla vita mi fia noiosa o trista. Concomitantly as it slips down past your tonsils, light but firm labioscrotal thlipsis by a hand not your own adds an atavistic, haptopathic thrill to your gustatory good humor. An addict so soon, you inwardly laugh, and with a third jorum down, and third bolus, third fondling to follow, you mark a visual dimming of our hall lights, and it’s as if, as indoor night dramatically falls, you can actually touch a promiscuous mass of shadows scurrying, in front of, against, you, and you allow your program to fall from fist to sofa to floor, but quickly filling that void, « Don’t worry ’bout that, mi amor, » warm ballast of your houri’s bold hip, clad in a taut stocking of nothing, oh nothing at all, against yours, rapaciously skittish athwart two mils of cotton plaid, doubly loading with yours to sink into pliant, luxuriant calfskin cushion, « you can catch up on cast and company plus tard, » lusciously draping a hot thigh atop your own, a palpitating load of ambrosial arm, bras, brazo, braccio across your back and cou, « shh! l’atto primo, on va l’ouvrir, » you concordantly act, mutualistically, in kind, draping your own across your shadow’s — was that a kiss? susurrant, warm, moist, unmanly, and unmannishly tingling in your pinna, « mi chiamano Ada. »”
§ 6 : Town City Plain
Sagarch Flawndol, Emily McLaughlin & J. W. M. Methuen’s Tetrastic Tragedy
Références | References
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Coltrane, M. (1991a). “In the Studio with Erartsos: To Knead and Knuckle «La Rime Argile».” Owlstain SCAT, 18 September 1991.
Coltrane, M. (1991b). “Velasto Prastier’s Aerolexist Portraits.” Owlstain SCAT, 9 October 1991.
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Morley, C. (1917). Parnassus on Wheels. New York: Grosset & Dunlap.
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Perec, G. (1965). Les choses. Une histoire des années soixante. Paris: Julliard.
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