Monday, May 05, 2003

Oh we like Koo dream of Ukulele Heaven, and to that aim have been practising all week, for we are adrift in the seaweed sea of futility and have nothing better to do than plunk around and try to be as silly as one possibly can when you ain't feeling silly. Have rediscovered banjo tuning something like a big bang. BANJO TUNING. In the seaweed sea you float around looking for wrecks, or, if you're really ADD like me, you float around looking for the metaphors of wrecks, for apparently my vision is abstractly backwards, so YOU float around looking for mah jongg tiles and burma shave rhymes, but I, ME, I look for rusty, rained on clothespins which are the metaphors of burma shave rhymes. I wake up every morning and for as long as I can I hold on to the intention of making sense but it always collapses under the weight of the rain or the sunlight. I am left with the increasingly vague hope that maybe things will work out once we get the pictures up and the music running. But, you know, nothing ever looks very good to me. Everything always looks smurfed up. Everything's got this seaweed all over it. 1:05:33 PM    comment []

Because we obviously ain't making it with the Fiction we got now, the Fiction we got now forever ends in reruns and reenactments of Cops in a universal Texas landscape of Wasteland and West Houston Boys with their blow uppy toys. You try writing backwards, you try writing doggerel, you try writing any way that will make people go "whoa that's punk", "whoa, that's not right, you can't go there, for that might end in the complete devolution of Literature as we know it and pretty Soon There Would Be No Rules." The substitute teacher I had once told me that you have to know the rules first, even if your William Faulkner, but I have discovered that William Faulkner, he was drunk, and anyway the South of his mind didn't improve on the South of his living. Better to be Erskine Caldwell and provide the interior pulp twixt suggestive covers depicting round heeled cotton patch vixens frozen in lasciviousness. Mostly you judge a book by its cover, mostly you read between the lines. If I approached the Empire of Dr. Bienke in a causal fashion, if I said "this happened" and "because of that, this followed", I'd be hoaxing you something fierce, and absolutely I am aiming to hoax you, but I'm not sure the illness from which you are suffering will in any good way respond to a causal hoax. What I have diagnosed suggests to me that what we want to try is contemplative hoax and here24 I have had considerable pain and anguish trying to figure out how you bury a contemplative hoax within the go that way directional nature of prose. Contemplating is a backwards activity. Thus have I often given up on prose and tried to draw pictures instead only to discover that people run prose trax in their heads when they looking at pictures. Empiricism works out, it seems to me, if we imagine there to be a world before books, but rather it would seem that books kick the game off. In the beginning was the Word. Literary theory is mostly about making books be books instead of confusing them with God and Destiny, because in my life whenever and wherever people confuse books with God and Destiny why who should I find making money but them West Houston Boys selling their blow uppy toys. In the Empire of Dr. Bienke Fu Manchu is God. I decided to personify God as the green eyed, yellow, impossibly wizened Chinese pulp fiction villain because Fu Manchu always keeps his word. This is one of his salient characteristics. Of real Gods I am not sure but with Fu Manchu why his word is his bond and thus when he cedes control of Ukulele Heaven to Clyde the Twisted Buffalo, allowing Clyde to promise Koo a place in same if Koo can refrain from murderousness, well with Fu Manchu you can be reasonable sure that's how the game will play. Ukulele Heaven is probably Margarine to real Heaven's Butter, but Koo's a poor boy used to dry crust so it's a step up in his way of being. All Koo has to do to reach Ukulele Heaven after his Christmas Eve demise is keep from killing somebody in the weeks previous, but Koo fails and cuts Owen Bright's throat with a straight razor in the barroom of the Zilchard Hotel. Koo kills Owen Bright so that Mrs. Montoya won't and in this sense the Empire of Dr. Bienke is a love story, because Koo willingly gives up his shot at Ukulele Heaven to save Mrs. Montoya from murderousness. Koo has made himself sick on a diet of murderousness and if he has any kind of virtue it is the virtue of not wanting anyone else to feel as sick as he has. All of Owen Bright's hoods surround him in the barroom of the Zilchard Hotel the night that Koo cuts Owen's throat, and everyone of them will unholster one or more of his weapons and point it at Koo but none will explode for all creation in The Empire of Dr. Bienke instinctively twig Koo's unkillableness except by the electric lap guitar prototype engineer Sloane Nibley builds. In the Empire of Dr. Bienke electric lap guitars represent crosses and ukuleles are apples where the two are fixed in a ying yang dualism that resembles nothing so much as a sprung clothespin. That's my hoax for you, my drug laboratory children of contol group ADD: a sprung clothespin; one woody bit being ukuleles and the other woody bit being electric slide guitars and the twisty wire holding them in dialectical opposition being my black heart blight. 10:25:07 AM    comment []