MICHAEL SEAN STRICKLAND

Words to Make a Story Out of

Seventh Pod

Literature is Love

§ 314 | Duchamp, M.

“The very title,” she hintedly whispered, and whisperedly sighs, and will forever continue to whisper and sigh and hint to me between tripleted tetrads of mammalian suctations, or smooches, “of La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même, by Marcel Duchamp, implies that they have already managed to tear off her skirt. And my statement, like the work’s title, contains the very solution to the conundrum it poses.” As for my own conundrum, I had believed that my passerine code would not be so readily cracked, but her deft solution — as thrillingly senseless in its alacrity as it was nonchalantly banal in its coyness — made me realize that this was not the first time she had so intimately plied a being of my paradoxical construction. Or perhaps it was that sheer intuition engendered a chance embrace of my unhazarded celibacy so thoroughly apt and momentous that the very act of savoring it invented an extemporaneous technique perfectly suited to provoke and win it over? — a fact which the idées reçues expressed in the smudgy overgrowth of readymade phrases that too often cast into chilly obscurity la chaleur de l’exactitude callously reduce to a one-time-only affair. But once, at least, is infinity’s springboard, and so as soon as she had made good on her hint and availed her exquisitely inquisitive grip of my damp chum, the match was on. You may imagine the scene as a consummate bout of championship mud-wrestling, with solstitial moonlight bleaching the dumbshow sheets of our bridal chamber a mellow bechamel, against which the smudgy overgrowth of readymade phrases — I mean the smudged adumbration of dumbstruck pudenda grapples in the kir-royal gloaming of my chambray-curtained studio, all champagne and chambord — a compact duo of wool-munching lamiæ, we are, pyralid contra noctuid, such that the voracious chomping action of our cheliceræ and the various catechumenical mudras of our pedipalps across along atop down and up and within the curved voluminous mothglow of our purring bodies’ fields and folds conjures a haptic Mach band from the chamfered chamois of our respective congeries of machinery and metaphors: beaked grabbags of digits grazing like doe-eyed geckoes on spring’s downy buds or bugs; yawning panting palmfuls of pendulous ovarial breadfruits bursting under the tropical heft of bosom and thigh; dark spacious chords of impossibly intricate intervals that only a four-handed approach can or could or will coax from the complex calceiform lyre. Despite the unmade obscurity — mottled, or bariolé, rather, by our dreamy satiety’s impetuous seaswell — of the frolic-shivered, jelly-knee’d mattress, the transposed sideshow of my gratitude is, as she triumphantly pins me, all too apparent. “Mais con mucho gusto, bien sûr,” she replied (damn past tense again!) and, like a Maori colonist decamping from Chad, or gravid jenny grappling with the mumps, pulled the bedclothes close in a grossly fastidious cinematic gesture. I mimicked her tintone nod to the prudery of yore, and stretched a knight’s move above her to, comme on disait alors, tirer les volets. No matter how many times I duck my head into a clump of pillows and, like a chamsin-maddened chameleon engaged in a furious dance of gummous grooming, claw repeatedly at the metabatic image of these two simple acts of unrehearsed choreography bonded to the verre églomisé of my eyelids, I cannot pry the gelled prism of shame from what even in moonstruck silhouette must have been a glorious peepshow, and not the inexorable oracle of exile rifling the sheets with frigid salacious mnemonic wind, the grit of which stays glued to my mind’s tongue no matter how hard I crush my head in a clutch of pillows and scream, “But the justification you and other ‘noumenal installationists’ of your ilk, my dear Moéu Noäu Nin, avouch for passing off your unordered jackdaw array of gewgaws as art is riddled and refuted, with and by, a most serious lacuna indeed! You privilege choice at the expense of perception, blinkering, indeed, your imagination with it, this word in all caps, CHOICE, or, to be exact, CHOSE, ignoring the very title of the original work as even the Blindman (nº 2, May 1917, p. 5) acknowledged: ‘Buddha of the Bathroom’ it is called, ‘le Bouddha de la salle de bain’! Have you forgotten que l’on n’a pas remarqué que le galbe des cuvettes ou fontaines du genre de celle que M. Richard Mutt voulait exposer aux Indépendants de New-York affecte la forme d’un Bouddha accroupi!? It is a Seated Buddha, not some misplaced upside-down Fountain! And made all the more obvious by the fact that the signed nom d’appui, R. Mutt, alludes, not merely to the manufacturer, J. L. Mott Iron Works, but directly indicates the very context in which the piece of sculpture — standing urinal, seated Buddha — would be found, that is a men’s room, or rather, a monastery, that is, in prakrit, as a glance, for instance, at any map of Madras will show, a matha, a math, a mutt! And the poincaréan shadow of mathematical mumbo jumbo should be lost, despite the porcelain waterworks, on no one, NO ONE, not even any NOÄU as STUPID as MOÉU! And furthermore, Mlle NIN, the entire shenanigan is a pun or rhyme, in the roussellian sense, on or with the artist’s early Brouillon de l’arbre néemom!” [See below, or elsewhere.]

§ 315 | Dr. A. G. Oman

Glottosophist and onomatologist, 11, rue du Dragon, Paris, sixième. He or she it was who diagnosed the glottophilic core of my oospore-producing organs as having been severely and repeatedly contused, not only by that Catalo-Maori hetaera Moéu Noäu Nin who’d had me, toyed with me as if she were some wild tan pigeon, timorous at first, pecking a fallen leaf, then more savagely clutching its stem and jerking it and letting it drop, and then clutching it again in her beak before finally tossing it (me) aside in preparation for winging down the stairs with a resounding harumph of triumph, but also by random hetero- and tautolexical encounters both more recent and more ancient; that is, I was suffering from chronic urdostoist œnyutuyliium. Treatment entailed stealing back the Promethean power of my rhetic seed by way of sinemota, and translating trauma to text (which, as he explained, is the equivalent of granting text to trauma) by way of ideorhesaleotia. As his assistant (whose bedside manner, despite her drab adornment, resembled Gasa Albiano’s in more ways than I cared at the time [cette fois-là] to admit) unhitched the stirrups holding me fast and patulous to the clitalytical chaise-longue covered in mango faux cuire, I was invited to purchase his or her books which, he or she assured me, would be necessary adjuncts to our sessions, but not sufficient, despite being uniformly printed in eleven-point Garamond (his or her namesake, by the way), in and of themselves, to cure: La souffrance des mots; Parole et plaie; Tu me lèses, tu me dis: Comment guérir les blessures du discours; and De la métaphore à la traumaphore, et vice-versa, for starters. The goal was, he or she explained, to transcribe what had hitherto been the dormitive naga of a nomadic manga of my own gonolexical drama scrawled in idiosyncratic ogham into the grand mad dragon of a coherent inclusive monad expressive of my own romantic, romanic, and, indeed, roman-fonted moaning, I mean, meaning. I should quaff, in other words, a dram of agon, and strut my logorganic dragshow mano a mano with him or her and his or her darling assistant on our next sweet session of lexical intercourse, and the many to follow, for the road to recovery is as manifold as it is radical and, of necessity, garrulous, for what, after all, are we here for if not to arm our gonads with gab, that is, cloak our damaged ragman’s garb with the marvelous raiment of onomatological dogma? In one of her reports of her journey to the Far Gimmals published in the Owlstain SCAT, Mona Coltrane writes of that blackberry-fringed maritime donga bisecting Aseli north by northwest and known as the Agore Bar (literally, “stretched valley”) where she witnessed, or, rather, participated in, the eosdoli, or pilgrimage of the “mystical sinners,” as initiates are called on that island. She describes how, after undergoing various purificatory rituals including being shaved from head to toe then smeared with moanzy fat, covered in black ash, and bedecked with turquoise jewelry, the mystical sinners penetrate into the Ala Akbar Nod (the “Kiblah of the Tetrastics”). That is exactly how I felt after the second-session in which the resin-hard doctor, his or her pale, plum-lipped assistant, and groaning I played out, in succession, the unwholy triadic groma of enkylistse, eurynderast, and paperist. That is, the enkylistse (typically he or she) intromits into the glottal plaie the logoleptic instrument(s) of onomatiatry, the eurynderast (typically I or we) allows him or herself, with more or less positive resitance according to the intensity of the transaction, to be lexically and rhetically ransacked, and the paperist (typically she or he) straddles and mounts it or I or us in the form of text.

"Shall I, then, be your Flora's flute, and Hautia's dragoman?" [Melville, Mardi, v. 1, p. 196]

§ 316 | R. Roussel

Comme Raymond Roussel, “J’usais de n’importe quoi” afin de fabriquer mes mots dont on peut faire une histoire avec. Somewhere I wrote something about a “glomworm’s glossolalic glissando” — this would be straight out of, in the sense of “allusion to,” the author’s Impressions d’Afrique.

§ 317 | Ure Aders

“And must I, perchance, like careful writers, guard myself against the conclusions of U Readers?” [D. Barnes, Nightwood. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1937].

I first met the author of The Ruder Sea whilst, squatting beside a cow-sized patch of that weed Albrecht Dürer holds in the portrait of himself that hangs in the Louvre, I was laving the ruins of the Spitmarkx Buchfabrik in Ruhr-Lülnrar with a uraemic libation of “curds and whey.” I fear I will break out in a spate of errant sudation if I do not immediately mention other instantiations of this daring siderealist’s limited-edition, though nevertheless enduring opus (which I’m sure the dearest of U Readers will have no difficulty in procuring from the most loving of dealers of used rare literature): A Red Ruse (about Aldebaran, Antares, and Ares); The Scent of Reseda from Ur (detailing the links between selenognosy and pharmacognosy in Babylonia); Orion, or, The Southern Deer (an astronomy-based attempt to decipher Harappan cuneiform); and The Sun, the Bear, and the Reeds (focusing on the schizomythic interplay between the Pleiades and Ursa Major). Barely giving me leave to rise from my heels, he burst out of the spiny Eryngium, rudely trained his beady Ronish eyes on me, furiously grasped, as if we had just been introduced by the curtest of hosts, my soul-cradling manus between his vein-corded impudicus and his acid-gnarled pollex and, knocking me back on my redundant arse, barked, “Ish bin Forsher, Dishter und Redashter. Waz mashen Sie nun?” Lank blond locks addled the shapely shells of his ears and tickled his tan clavicles and mine. We lay on the sour earth and, I’ll have U Readers know, no further that day did we read, for example, from his Ruder Sea. On a cruise touching all the major and minor Tetrastic ports, including those of Aseli and Abenaseli, then down the International North Texas-Egyptian Canal (INTEC) to the Tanaon Sea and beyond, free-spirited twins on the verge of adolecence, Urda and Dura Rees, overhear the ship’s kitchen staff speaking of “une riposte au chaud-froid” and realize that “a plot’s afoot” to kill off the passengers and overthrow the crew by means of lacing the meals with a slow-acting neurotoxin. Realizing that the outright refusal to eat would only focus the cooking staff’s wrath on them the more, they resort, at first, to post-prandial purgatives of weld root and emetics of nettle stems and sea-holly burrs. Gradually, however, as their powers of perception become more acute with the less they eat, and those of the passengers and crew (gourmands all) more sluggish, they surreptitiously feed their meals to various of the dogs on board, but as these too become nappy and morose, and their own alacrity expands to cartoonish proportions vis à vis the otiose adults “[who are as] idle as Enly in Ur,” they are able to dispense, not only with feigning to dine, but with showing up at meals altogether. The book, which has been called a novel but is actually an allegory of modern society’s loss of the guiding lights of cosmognosy, revels in the bi-dyadic contrast between, on the one hand, the twin’s hunger-heightened vivacity and the crew’s and the other passengers’ envenomed, gluttonous lentor, and, on the other, the ship’s apathetic waftage down the alimentary INTEC and the bustling manic marplot of the galley staff. Half a day out from Isla Miranda, Urda and Dura finally succeed in thwarting the mutiny in the galley: by staring intently at a pair of lights in the orlop, they cause the entire electrical system of the ship to short-circuit. With the chef and stewards frantically seeking egress from their Stygian doom, captain and crew futilely fumbling to navigate through the sombrous stupor, and mewling passengers groping each other in the slow-motion murk, our twins pierce the tenebrious gloss with their nyctalopic acumen and cast off on a radeau de sauvage. “Waxen Astarte” hangs high in the south and ruddy Rudra is setting, the old moon is yet to rise in the east and “above them the rash gods of the night wheel in an apparently rudderless patina of Chaos, seemingly conniving with the sublunary froth of this far ruder sea [the Tanoan] so as to jolt, enthrall, entertain, and hearten their decay, their delirium, their dream.” After which, he melted back into the milling quora of Sunday luncheoners, leaving my breached bergerie rimous and sear on the drear riparian glebe. Upon my return to the tintone urbs, I was not at all surprised to find myself contemplating, in the mirrored dew of the gaze that had so brazenly used me, the ovid udders of bêabrûyî as I was being introduced to him as “having just returned from Ruhr-Lülnrar” and he to me as “the Ronish author of The Ruder Sea and native of that city, by the way” chez Nobe Arinami by our suave hostess, nor did the varnish of his impetuous composure wear thin, and thereby curtail the compass of my CAR. In the sable vice of his silken-sheathed paws he embraced my lank wrist, and, instead of redundantly barking, “Ish bin Forsher, Dishter und Redashter. Waz mashen Sie nun?” he announced, apropos de rien, "L'ère de Duras ne durera pas." His limp locks, ruddier now, and longer too, swathed his neck and face in a confident nimbus, softened, however, by the vulnerability of those naked clavicles that had so deliciously crushed me how long ago? The reply I had prepared, “Shreib ish die Wörter um eine Geshishte ausmashen,” evaporated like a .

All round us the brash and rudderless stars wheeled — “a patina of Chaos,” as the poet, researcher, and redactor writes in his Ruder Sea, “conniving with sublunary froth to jolt, enthrall, entertain, and hearten” U Readers down to the rueful marrow of my SNE. For he, Ure Aders himself, was and remains the very ruddy Rudra to my waxen Astarte, urging me, coaxing me, prodding me into defter and more daring and indeed occasionally quite daft (if that is the right word for it) urdostoist contortions which, despite the remote possibility of their being largely unread, do not in any way detract from the reassuringly ardent truth that I and he and you, that is, we, senimalistically speaking, exist at all.

on my rude arse , as I’m sure I have already mentioned, in, for he is a , Sidereal Bureau of Investigation (SBI), veins throbbing on his forehead, lank tan locks Nor do I doubt, speaking of apropos’s, for a moment that I, in some author’s words, , for can I see his peering constantly — the very ruddy Ares to my waxen Astarte — down at me, urging me, coaxing me, prodding me (me me me me me!) into more deft and daring and indeed occasionally quite daft (if that is the right word for it) urdostoist contortions, all of which he, the sure dear, anoints with the cuneiform approval or dis- thereof of his azure-nibbed mark-up [wo ist der anaphorischtische Referent hier zusagen bedeuten?]. For the rude fact of the matter, in fact, is that I can say for a fact that, without UA, I would not, . The addled udders of the cow of truth should be added somewhere. Likewise, the sour Ur of reason, or rage, or rue Radziwill in the first, a very rade rue indeed, as they say. [A. Dürer's Autoportrait à l'âge de 22 ans ou Autoportrait au chardon, 1493, in the Louvre; his Autoportrait à l'âge de 26 ans, 1498, in the Prado (with inscription: "Das malt ich nach meiner gestalt / Ich war sex und zwenzig Jor alt/ Albrecht Dürer" (I painted this from my own appearance; I was twenty-six years old).0]

resudaré; desuerar (En la elaboración de los quesos, separar el suero de la leche) (separating the whey from the curds)

A Ronish yazdehanist from Ruhr-Lülnrar who, when I was introduced to him at INTEC, I could not believe my rude ears! Curiously addled as to how I should read his dictum, I looked back over my shoulder to see if he had been intending to coax a response from our hostess, but she had already ducked into the milling quora, and so I about faced and restared my interlocutor in his Ochen and, having wiped away the Intrussyan patina from the froth of his articulation so as to espy the clear Germanic varnish beneath, I deduced that he had merely defined himself as editor, and had not, as at first I had thought, so brashly and openly admitted to being one of us, and so I replied, “Ish bin Dishter. Waz mashst du nun?” Fortunately, neither his gaff nor mine hindered our ensuing discussion of Ruhr-Lülnrar’s most famous native, S. E. Spitmarkx.

Ure Aders is precisely that "sly ensign whose chiselled visage and loosely tousled coiffure and tight pressed pantaloons and dangling golden coat-tassels I’d been admiring" [Words 01, 014 Selsyn] at Ecadence

§ 318 | A. Ebsalai

§ 319 | Cobra, Dav.

§ 320 | G. Arshile

§ 321 | Hussein, T.

“[Hussein, T.], familiar with the berdiwar’s alien and contrary natures, changed the sugar.” (A. Powell, Books do furnish a room, ch. 2, p. 87)

§ 322 | Oda Elton

§ 323 | Asa Hłzts

Author of A journey to Norlia and environs (Nörlihöz s környékhez utazás, Buda, 1964). Encountered by Swopes chez Nobe Arinami.

§ 324 | Medi Zana

§ 325 | Ms. Litarn

Decrepit Appalachian plagiarist considerably older than she claims, though perhaps not what she appears in bar light, who “publishes,” according to Tetrastic Literary Studies (TLS), under the nom de plume of M. S. de Strickland, the particule plundered from the conjunction of Duchamp, M. and Oda Elton, the patrilineal cognomen derived via backformation from a spurious Anglican ancestor whom successive reams of Appalachik scribes had deformed, à la R. Roussel, into that of the true perpetrator of his or her tarnished paternity, viz. Mr. Stalin né Strickland née Stricland naît Striclind neigh Striclin nay Stalin (the gawping rictus of ric hiccups, and spits out an incomestible gristle of a). Aran Tron informs me that s/he was an erstwhile inmate, aka Victor K. Strigil, of the Appalachian Mental Institution of Shatsbrook, so I have no qualms anent flaying this literary stuprator alive in the wider world. He (I write “he” here, for it is our subject’s alias we have appropriated as the object of our researches) concocts, for instance, his “Yazdehanity of Diligent Textwork” (the “entangled nonlocality” of which has been laughably lauded in the Owlstain SCAT as “Arshile Gorky in prose” [sic!]) by grafting poems he purloined from my friend and colleague Sagarch Flawndol to something — travelogue? diary? — melded from the Tetrastic tergiversations of A. Ebsalai and the Tagmic laments of Medi Zana. Speaking of which, something called “Street Acts” (“a unique sequence of eleven prurient scènes de rue recursively linked in a certain indefinable pattern”) has lately appeared in one of the meaner of the local avatars of samizdat, with his caconym clinging to it like the stain and scent of veritable rodent scat: this is nothing other than the reworked record I kept (and he stole en route) of the histrionic foray into Cataloland I undertook with my Mesopotamian chum NSVT SNNT.

Further evidence, if evidence were needed, that reality is fundamentally lazy, absent-minded, uninventive, and inconsistent. M. S. Litarn’s Words to glom stories with, like my Words to make a story out of, consists of eleven parts, called “chapters,” which are roughly equivalent to my SNE-Dynagon Pods. However, rather than utilizing a variable number of SNE-Beray to construct each SNE-Dynagon Pod, Litarn divides each “chapter” into eleven “sub-chapters,” each devoted to one of eleven themes, which recur in a certain indefinable pattern throughout, such that each chapter touches upon all eleven themes in a unique sequence. [Describe themes.] Given the yazdehan structure of reality, the necessity of eleven is not surprising. Nor should one be surprised by the sort of entangled nonlocality displayed by a selection of Litarn’s themes with my own life: memoirist snatches of sojourns in Paris and Barcelona [I have never been to the latter, of course, but U Readers will know what I’m talking about]; an invented city in a distant mountainous land that eerily paralles Norlia; essayistic explorations of the ornithicity and wordism.

In addition, MSL is an Associate in Textual Promiscuity (ATP) with (Nišivat Šananat), with whom he is collaborating on Prastier’s Infernos (PI).

§ 326 | Aran Tron

In his pioneering work of anti-indigenous ethnography, The captive reeds, AT argues that the presence of berdi reeds (Typha angustata, also known as the lesser Indian reed mace or elephant grass) in the Berdi War (lit. ‘reed marsh’ in Huerta-Fukari) of Abenaseli are vestiges of early Wakashan-Mesopotamian explorers who reached the Arathu Sea via Polynesia, Titicaca, and Trans-Mosania even before the arrival of the Yazdehan Nasimonians c. 900 A.D., who, after abandoning an initial settlement on Isla Miranda, as is well known, established the Ala Akbar Nod in Aseli and merged their culture and their script with that of the Huerta-Fukari. In addition to the presence of the reeds, which AT argues is the world’s most ancient and cosmopolitan exemplar (predating even the trans-Pacific sweet potato) of plant domestication or, more precisely, sylvan aquaculture (the so-called bulrush or cattail, Typha latifolia, is simply the shallow water, Nearctic variant of the deep water, Palearctic plant introduced by the Wakasho-Mesopotamians who had used the reeds for the construction of houses, boats, bedding, and baskets; for nourishment; for fuel; and for both the instrument and substrate of the written word), the author points out etymological and epigraphical spoor in the modern language(s) and writing system of the Far Gimmals as evidence of a Wakashan-Mesopotamian strata. Against this view, scholars such as, for instance, M. Turbo of ISOCPHYS, point out that it is more parsimonious to trace Wakashan elements of culture and language to the Coast Fukari or Sihlaucal, a Wakashan linguistic group (Huerta being in the Mosan-Keresan phylum), and Mesopotamian elements to — you guessed it! — the Yazdehan Nasimonians. The introduction of berdi reeds is coterminous with the arrival of the latter, and there is no reason to posit any earlier Palearctic wave(s) of immigration to the Tetrastics, save that or those already firmly established. Rather than bothering to refute these, as he called them, “temporal quibbles,” AT (whose famous phrase, incidentally, “there are no natives,” has too often been misconstrued as a sort of invasively triumphalist “imperialism” [earning him, in some quarters, the epithet of the “Aryan Ikon” even though he is not Armenian at all], rather than as the embrace of cosmopolitanism that it is) went on to other projects:

Aran Tron and Nora Tran

§ 327 | Pealono, N.

§ 328 | NSVT SNNT

(Nišivat Šananat) Swopes meets her initially chez Nobe Arinami; an Associate in Textual Promiscuity (ATP), she is collaborating with M. S. Litarn on Prastier’s Infernos (PI).

§ 329 | M. Lienant