1(t)READING BETWEEN THE LINES IN THE BOOK BIZ . David Marchese: Let me ask about something that’s not in The Silence, at least not anymore. In the first galley copy I read, there’s a scene in which a character is reciting disastrous events and mentions Covid-19. Then I was told there were changes to the book and was sent a second galley. Covid-19 was gone. Why did you take it out? . Don DeLillo: I didn’t put Covid-19 in there. Somebody else had. Somebody else could have decided that it made it more contemporary. But I said, “There’s no reason … Continue reading PARAPOLITICONS: ADVANCED READINGS for the CLUED-UP, FED UP, EFFED UP and RELATIVELY UNCORRUPT

Please picture an auditorium best suited to a motivational speaker’s emotions-manipulating presentation. You are seated in this auditorium. The lighting is calming, muted. The Consort of Musicke’s 2007 issue of John Dowland’s collected works plays softly, nearly subliminally, from invisible speakers above you. The stage curtains are drawn and dark. People are filling the auditorium. The ambient chit chat, coughing, throat-clearings and occasional barks, or tinkles, of laughter,  are gradually rising in density and volume. You have arrived early to take your excellent seats. Your tickets for the evening cost you no money: you solved riddles, on a website,  for … Continue reading WE ARE FUCKSTUFF MADE OF STARJUNK

  —LIFE IN WARTIME   Saturday I went through the second phase of auditioning a new guitarist (phase one was exchanging links to material): meeting him in person at my favorite meet-a-new-musician café. I’ve been using this café for that function for ten years, at least. It’s big, never crowded during the day, with very high ceilings and weird Art on the walls and the ambient music is low key enough to chat over. Anyway, the guy showed up right on time, looking like he’ll look great on stage (I’m six feet tall and he’s maybe six feet four, with … Continue reading LIFE IN PARLOUS WARTIME (WITH BREAKS FOR MUSIC)

1 everything: a distraction “I really don’t care about the Depp/Heard case. I want to see the Epstein/ Maxwell client list released.” I think the Depp/Heard trial and verdict were severe blows to the “Men Are Scum” project that gained maximum momentum with “MeToo” and went beyond fairness, logic and evidence to paint all men as Perps (guilty until proven innocent) and all women as saints and victims. If it was a distraction, I think it was an opportunistic one. I don’t think it was planned by TFIC*, though Big Media has tried to spin it in the Master Narrative’s … Continue reading a million new seeds of grief

1 Once I was arguing with a crypto-conservative (who thinks of himself as a Radical Commie, despite the fact that most of his old friends and close family are Wealthy) and he riposted a statement of mine with the classic evasion, “It’s more complicated than that.” As I always do, I responded to that with: “I have time. I’m a quick learner. Explain the complexities.” Ah, but he couldn’t. I have dedicated my social life to stamping out that particular rhetorical flourish (by putting a prohibitive price on it). 2 “Commenting, or not commenting, on an injustice or an atrocity, … Continue reading OEDIPUSES, OPHELIAS and OPPs in the AGE of OBJECT ORIENTED ONTOLOGY (notes, shorts, proclamations)

1ON THE RIM of a BOG-STANDARD GALAXY It has come to my attention that there are people out there who accept (even believe in) the concept of a Bearded, Vaguely-Levantine, Anus-Free Sky Giant… …who sent His only Son (who was simultaneously He, Himself, btw) to be nailed to a cross-beam and torture-murdered in a loincloth as a representative of a negligible Bronze-Age tribe on a tiny speck of a planet in an unremarkable Solar System on the rim of a bog-standard Galaxy… in a deal to “cleanse” the Tribe (and its general Species) of its Design Flaws (called “sins“)… though … Continue reading A FEW MORE SPURTS of LOGIC’S HOLY WATER (to Exorcise your Social Media)

CONVERSATIONS WITH A FELLOW WRITER I ONLY REALIZED WAS IRREPLACABLE AS A FRIEND THE DAY AFTER HE DIED (when my need to joke with him about the situation was extremely frustrated), INCLUDING THOUGHTS ON HIS UNDERGROUND MONUMENT OF A NOVEL [caveat: these exchanges bounced between email, Facebook messenger and the surface level of Facebook: only the Facebook messenger version of these particular exchanges remain] [more conversations with Edmond, and others, from the same era, here] . Edmond sent December 11, 2011 How come FB can’t design a conversation thread in which one can respond to separate comments? 1) Yes, the … Continue reading VIRTUAL CONVERSATIONS WITH THE WRITER EDMOND CALDWELL (NOW A GHOST)

1trivial/not-trivial Like most people in this Empire, I had to wait until the next day to discover that a Black celebrity male had raped and beheaded a smaller Black celebrity male, onstage, during The Oscars. The instigating incident was a “joke” the smaller Black celebrity male made about the larger Black celebrity male’s wife’s appearance… specifically,  her hair… despite knowing that Black females are, in general,  particularly vulnerable / self-conscious about that specific aspect of their physical presentation, given the culture’s longstanding Standards of Desirability.  The larger Black celebrity male’s response to the joke was described by many as “riveting” … Continue reading trivial/ not trivial

1MACRO WHAT DO I SMELL? ANOTHER PIG ON THE SPIT ROAST, RIGHT NEXT TO DADDY BUSH’S  FLAMING CARCASS, IN HADES’  ALL STAR BARBECUE ROOM!  But first, a correction, of sorts. Let’s get this straight. “The Gubmint” does not “hate” The Right. TFIC* don’t “hate” Right Wingers at all, though  TFIC’s Big Media appear to demonize The Right during this tumultuous transitional moment. TFIC don’t “hate” Right Wingers, though, of course, many of their pseudo-Lefty, Useful Idiot minion-administrators do, which lends verisimilitude to The Great Pantomime . This minion layer of Useful Idiots is not in the loop. They really believe … Continue reading MACRO/MICRO

1GLARE The male gaze vs the blue-haired gender-studies graduate’s glare: which can take rightful credit for your Existence on Earth? 2PHOTOSHOP Audio Photoshop is what I am most comfortable calling Modern Pop. Narrative  Photoshop is probably the best term for “the news”. What do you call the Photoshop of your Conscience? 3HOLOSISM HOLOSISM: conceptualizing The Whole as being the Universe from side to side, top to bottom, beginning to end, The Whole can therefore be construed as an omniscient Intelligence that “knows” everything by containing everything: to that extent,  predestination describes the condition and path of every constituent element of … Continue reading NOBODADDY NOETICS in your NOOSPHERE (plus sundry Blasphememes in a randomized hierarchy of possible offence)

ITEM #1-THE CARBONIST: A SHORT STORY “There is an unfortunate and spreading subliminal misapprehension that the technical conformity,  required in engineering a functional technology,  is a parallel to, and justification of, conformity to the social theories advocated by the groups  the technologies are owned by at a given moment. The inflexible objectivities of science and engineering cannot, should not, be a model for the organization of the subjectivities at the heart of social experience. Technocrats will always make this category error and must always, therefore, be balanced, in power, by Advocates of the exclusively Human. Technology must always be the … Continue reading TURDUCKENS ALL THE WAY DOWN

It was drizzly and cold last Thursday but not too windy, so I slapped the headphones on and got another brisk walk out of the King Crimson album (Radical Action to Unseat the Hold of Monkey Mind) I acquired recently, released in 2016; the version in my possession is two hours and forty minutes of live workouts of some of my favorite King Crimson tracks. The album’s length allows me to shop at a grocery store that’s an hour and ten minutes away, by foot, bypassing all of the stores that are only a few blocks distant and not enough … Continue reading NIGHTWALKING and the PROUSTIAN NOSE-DIET

Xmas meant dazzling presents, to me, as a kid, in the 1960s, just as it meant snow and ancient (and not-so ancient) music and pretty lights and the annual return of cartoons I couldn’t otherwise watch. It also meant, for the last couple of weeks of December, movies at the Cinema,  designed to snare the Xmas audience. This screenplay (written in 2002 after I had already sold the option on another script, but right before the funding-system for indie films, in Germany, sort of collapsed in the wake of 9/11) is my idea of the kind of film I think … Continue reading AUGUSTINE’S VERSION OF A CHRISTMAS CAROL: THE SCREENPLAY

—2021: What a year… … the year I learned my biological  (in contrast to my legal, presumed, American) grandfather was Bengali;  yes, in the summer of this year I learned that my apparently pious and extremely literary grandmother  (who had review copies of Tropic of Cancer and Women in Love strewn about the bookcase when I was a kid)  was a sexy young adulterer for roughly fifteen years, starting in the 1930s with the conception of my mother a year before Sam Cooke’s birth.  The illicit lust without which I would not exist. She had short stories published in the … Continue reading ASYMPTOMATICALLY DEAD:  THE YEAR IN ANECDOTAL REVIEW (A GIBBERINGLY FUGUE-ISH MONOLOGUE)

(A reader was looking through this essay, today, and I remembered how much I liked it… so I’ve decided to bring it back) There are actually people out there who think that everything they do or feel is interesting and a little more correct and even, in a way, Saintly. They are convinced of the no-brainerness of their Goodness. They crave attention, they demand validation, they post images of their breakfasts for us to praise. They have unshakable faith in the concept of the given that their Belief Systems/ Political Party/ and Personal Roster of Icons are all tops and … Continue reading PORTRAITS OF THE LEFTY-RIGHT and RIGHTY-RIGHT and WHATEVER’S LEFT: A REPRINT

I was watching an old episode of Joe Rogan chatting with Bill Maher*  when the topic of monogamy bobbed up and Maher (who will probably die in a hooker’s disgusted arms) offered the classical anti-monogamy argument that chimps, our nearest primate cousins, don’t do monogamy (Hey, Bill, they don’t play piano, either) and that all that “territorial ownership bullshit” (I’m paraphrasing) is a mess. Which is the familiar line that we of the post-Bebop (Aquarian) Generation, were fed.  The dawn of the so-called Aquarian Age** coincided with the dawn of the Techno-Media Age, luckily, which meant that we late Boomers … Continue reading OWNING IT: POSSESSION IS NINE-TENTHS of the JOY

When I was four or five years old I was standing in the back yard of my maternal grandparents’ house, watching my grandmother as she knelt in a flower bed. The property around this house was an intense and admirable micro-biome that my grandparents had worked for more than thirty years before I was conceived (far away, on the West Coast) and it produced enough fruit, vegetables, rhubarb, chicken eggs and peppery fryers, every year, to justify calling my grandparents self-sufficient. From two kinds of grapes, to tomatoes and sweet corn, and the peach, apple and cherry pies my grandmother … Continue reading THE ELEPHANT IN THE RABBIT HOLE and OTHER DITTIES

    ” ‘PASCAL: Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad wouldamount to another form of madness.’ And Dostoievsky, in his DIARYOF A WRITER: “It is not by confining one’s neighbor that one isconvinced of one’s own sanity.” We have yet to write the history of that other form ofmadness, by which men, in an act of sovereign reason, confinetheir neighbors, and communicate and recognize eachother through the merciless language of non-madness… ”           —Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization “Bullshit.“— Montaigne “‘Bullshit’ how?”—Michel Foucault .   Perhaps a decade ago I was walking with … Continue reading THE NUMBERS

  The information below (on what percentage of the population is highly susceptible to hypnotic suggestion) dovetails very neatly with my sense that only a “militant” minority of the population is actually falling for any of the blatant nonsense of the past 18 months or so. Hat tip to Charlotte Brown for putting me on to the explanatory power of Hypnosis regarding all this. I’ve been working with the concept of “brainwashing” for so long that I forgot that the parent-process of Brainwashing is, in fact, Hypnosis. Mass Hypnosis to be specific. Can any correlations be drawn between the susceptibility … Continue reading NOTES FROM A SPOT EXTERNAL TO ANY PARTICULAR GODDAMN HIVE MIND

“I’ve long felt that the greatest handicap the American public has is their inability to correlate information.” -Preston Guillory, Arresting Officer of Charles Manson . “There is no better model of the way in which the computer screen and the mental screen of our brain are interwoven than Moebius’s topology, with its peculiar contiguity of near and far, inside and outside, object and subject within the same spiral.” —Jean Baudrillard . “There are no longer bonus points, anywhere in the civilized world,  for citing Baudrillard.” —Napoleon Fanon . PART ONE: NOSTALGIA There often comes a point, when reading intellectually radical … Continue reading THE PRACTICAL POLITICAL WITCHCRAFT OF THE CONSCIOUS REFUSAL of NEOMANIA and NOSTALGIA: A GENTLE REBUTTAL of TWO ESTEEMED COMMENTATORS

A) GULLIVER’S TRAVELS by JONATHAN SWIFT, THE MISSING CHAPTER: “THE PROBLEM OF MY TOILET” . B) Realitivity Post-It Sticker on my Fridge: Much apparent-stupidity is both strategic and unwittingly genuine. . . C)  . D) Realitivistic Diss of a formerly-interesting rag (Barney Rosset RIP): “Evergreen Review, a rumor of the echo of the ghost of its former self, now good for nothing more than recycling insultingly-talentless Propaganda. “QAnon”? Really? We’re still talking about *that* preposterous nonsense? The walking cadaver of a rapey gaffe-machine is in the Whitehouse NOW and you’re still beating the dead-horse under the rotting rodeo-clown who was … Continue reading REALITIVITY

Another Bloomsday (if you know, you know) and the weather is “great” (they’ve been spraying every morning to keep the clouds dispersed so we feel warm enough for this time of year, presumably: the sky at 7am is like a net or abstract Plexiglas checkerboard)… we’re spending lots of time outside, doing the long walks, walks that couldn’t be any better in Dublin. My Wife has been my strength/ sanity/ asylum these past 15 months of Jawdropping Global Foolishness and though poor Jimmy himself (if you know you know) had less cause to celebrate his own asylum, every year I … Continue reading BLOOMSDAY SLAVES

XXX A dream in which I minted this aphorism in the presence of a woman: “There are more who masturbate extremely well than there are who don’t at all.” It rolled off my tongue like a Wildean paradox in the dream and I woke up feeling momentarily proud of it. XXX What year was it decided that if one is to appear in a photograph one is to grin like a fucking idiot? What are all these people smiling at in all these photos? The hilarious photographer? The “birdie”? The thought of lunch, dinner, oral sex or the painful death … Continue reading THANKLESS THOUGHTY THINKLETS: HOURS or MINUTES of FUN FUN FUN

Famous post-Punk Power to the People “Remember the 5th of November” comedian Stewart Lee has been transformed by the media-virus into a gullible bourgeois cunt, positioning himself on the Totalitarian side of history by drinking the Government’s middle-class-targeting propaganda and finding it delicious. He has posted the following thing, in his newsletter, in which his core-political-conscience appears to struggle with his gullible bourgeois overlay, as evidenced in the queer infelicities of spelling and style the following text reveals: ***6) TO VAC OR NOT TO VAC The gvt may not impose vaccine passporting, as their will be questions about who is … Continue reading WHEN WARTIME MAKES C*NTS of your HEROES

1 CAN YOUR LAUGHTER I was visiting an old friend (German recording engineer) and he played some video of a vintage German New Wave ’80s act that made an appearance for some recent special event, or other, all these years later… all the members in their fifties… and the front man was all over the stage, not dancing but doing what looked like an Attention Deficit Disorder Aerobics Workout routine. And the old friend said, admiringly, “What a front man!” The guy couldn’t sing or dance but he looked good in a blazer and he covered about 5 kilometers during … Continue reading WRINKLES the VENGEFUL CLOWN and Other Epistles

Celebrity Hero worship is a cornerstone of Modern Propaganda; your bedazzlement in the reflected light of media-elevated figures lowers the gate on your critical intelligence and that’s when all the Day-Glow Bullshit waltzes in. Here (video linked below) we see Russell and Eddie advising you not to believe anything too alarming about our Owners. We can characterize our Owners as Soulless Bureaucrats or even Greedy Bastards but never should you allow yourself to think of them as Murderously Psychopathic Aristocrats with delusions of Godliness; never should you think of them as well-organized recreational Peddies, with a vested interest in targeted … Continue reading SAME OLD TRAP, BRAND NEW LEGS TO GNAW OFF

1–From: Steven Augustine  Sent: 09 April 2021 21:29To: ETSubject: Re: I Couldn’t Resist ET! Two things…  First, I present an absurdity that is absurd, most of all, because it is REAL (I traced the online Flyer back to the actual Medical Authority it issued from; this is no spoof); the Bee Gees reference is the cherry on the flatline… And then, this, to commemorate today’s Royal milestone (posted this on Facebook)  (and I really do recall it as though it were yesterday; how absolutely in a rage I was):   In the Summer of 1990, in London, that amazing break-beat year of … Continue reading THEY* STARTED A JOKE: RECENT LETTERS WITH ET

I have written elsewhere that  “Raising a child is like a game of golf in which the first eighteen holes are played with an egg instead of a golf ball”  but let’s extend that metaphor. Having hit 40 long ago and living well beyond that cut-off point (the tweaker-mechanism of Evolution only concerning itself with what one was capable of up until, and in order to achieve, the DNA-perpetuating goal of mating; most mating, for Human History, occurring between hominids in their early-teens) means we are all, all of us, the late Boomers, wandering the weird terrain of a foggy … Continue reading OBSCENE IT ALL

There’s a credible argument to be made that 1973 was the peak of civilization, the high point of three thousand years of Human progress, and the evidence can be perused in the charts from that year. Some of the radio miracles, for me, of ’73, were as follows: “Killing Me Softly with His Song”… “Let’s Get It On” … “My Love” … “You’re So Vain” … “Brother Louie” …”Frankenstein” … “You Are the Sunshine of My Life” … “Half-Breed” … “That Lady” … “We’re an American Band” … “Right Place Wrong Time” … “Superstition” … “Loves Me Like a Rock” … Continue reading EUTAUPEA

So many of my old friends share in the grotesque symptoms of a massive delusion that I’m tempted to test the village well for traces of Ergot. Their minds simply no longer function as anything other than receivers for nonsensical instructions from the Sinister Screens in their “lives”. In the ’50s and ’60s and ’70s we were treated to a rich array of high-camp allegories like Night of the Living Dead, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Day of the Triffids, et al, the problem being that all such films work just as well for POVs on either of the opposite … Continue reading THE AWFULSOME TRUTH