My Top 10 (and worst 2) Reads Of The Year

Post-Coital Bliss - Extract from my novel "A,B and E"

On the day that The Literary review announce their shortlist for the Bad Sex In Literature Award, I thought I'd dust off a sample from my debut novel "A,B &E", which is post-coital, but racks up the sexual tension no less.

*

Simon his name was. One of the few pre-coital words tossed beathlessly in my direction. Now, no longer one flesh, our torsos cloven apart. Our legs however were still intertwined. He, head slumped against my shoulder, legs splayed out at the diagonal. Me, stiff backed against the headboard, my left leg threaded under his right and over his left. My right leg bent at the knee, arching over his ankles. Hand propped on it, fingers buttressing a lit cigarette overhanging the sheet beyond my foot. I’ve no intention of bringing it to my lips. It measures out time for him, embers in place of grains of sand. The span of two such kindlings will determine whether he is reignited, or rolls over to sleep. I have found this chronometry unfailingly meters the male metabolism.


I glance over towards him, unable to determine whether the look in his eye expresses confusion as to why I am not putting it to my mouth, or suppressed concern as to the impulse of the hot ash. The modern day version of barefoot and blindfold. He tilts his torpid head as a prelude to inquiry, but I nimbly raise the index finger of my right hand and gently transect his lips. Uh-uh, if we no longer are able to retain the disarticulations of earlier, the reflexively unreflected babble, the sonorous squalls coitally quarried from our deepest seams of self, then better we are held together under silence’s shroud. It is paramount that we become alalial allies. It is the very heart of the matter. I shake my head for added emphasis and already I detect his purpose is lost in the undulations of my tresses against his exposed cheek.


Suffused in my ruminations, I was unaware that my murmuring Medusa’s locks had ceased their stroke. He was unconsciously rubbing his delicately flayed cheek and I ventured some sort of vocalisation would follow. Again I placed my finger across his lips and spiked their unsheathing. Tentatively he edged the tip of his tongue out against my tapered digit and hastily withdrew it again. He had tasted my resolve. Through the conduit of his lips, I felt his whole body flinch as he gathered himself up towards defiance of my circumvention of speech. I unfurled my middle finger and laid it with great deliberation next to her sister, across the crevice of his mouth. The muscles at the corners of his lips, measuredly retracted their charges into a crooked grin. My two fingers now like twin colonnades, bracing open his stupid wide aperture. I lent forward and mutely kissed the extended knuckles of my own fingers. That threw him somewhat. For as his startled lips were about to clamp down reflexively on them, I withdrew my fingers but maintained their sentinel trajectory. He was seemingly transfixed by the sight of two caryatids rigidly posted just beyond his orifice. He was beyond coherence right now. Veritably speechless. He jutted his chin forward and slithered out his tongue to reel my goading digits into his teeming maw. They waggled out of range. He extended further forward. My fingers spun away. He was shaping to cast again, when my left foot snakes across and presses him back down across his chest. He is about to protest verbally, when my twin fingers reassert their superintendence across his portals of locution. His body sags and crumples back to the mattress, though I can tell his mind has been wracked by a bolt of delicious tautness.


After a circumspect period, I detach both my leg and my fingers. He does not stir. I light my second cigarette and resume my vaulting of him. Leadenly, he rolls on to his side and scrabbles for something on the floor. He resurfaces with a burgundy towelling robe, (brought with him from home, since this is not the class of hotel which runs to provisioning them for guests, though the guests would be of the class happily to snaffle them), before reclining back towards the headboard. Half self-pinioned, awkwardly he shrugs himself into the robe. He gropes around his back for something, with clumsy, sightless digits. I surmise that he seeks the belt of the robe, but it is not there. He submits and his head slowly sinks back down the surface of the headboard. His long locks pincered by his crown, momentarily maintain their station like creeping ivy, before they descend to unseam his now less than immaculate coiffure. I fix him there, framed unflatteringly by the knobbly towelling. At the angle he lies, his glorious sixpack is almost completely submerged by the flesh collected under gravity. There is even the hint of a rucking of flabby skin just above his hips. Why on earth has he donned this garment and broken the spell ? I deflect my gaze and peer through the rising cigarette smoke as if for augury. I must have sensed something in the corner of my eye and snapped my focus back, to intercept him about to tumble words into the air. This time it’s my cigarette-cradling fingers that drape themselves over his mouth. His eyes start to water, from the proximity of the smoke, or from more internal fusillades I cannot be sure. I know the prosaic reason for the robe of course. The poor lamb’s cold. His lips are quivering. He manoeuvres them to siphon some superficial heat from my cigarette, his irises scuttling to their extreme margins scanning for any repercussion. Good boy, maybe we’re getting somewhere after all. I cant my face away so that my jagged smokey laughter does not exhale over him.


The sheen of sweat from our earlier endeavours, (which so sublimely varnished his sixpack all throughout) still sits atop his skin. But it has fulfilled its function and cooled him down, to the extent where his follicles currently stood to attention in an attempt to reinsulate him. They no longer glistened like the limbs of an insect dappled with pollen. Now such droplets threaten his tonicity. Indolent, mutinous beads with no sustained interdependence. They subvert him. He trusts to the robe to absorb and dismiss them. To tamp him back down and regather. My perspiration went west long ago. Evaporated, since my temperature’s still rising with the afterglow. I take pity on him and place my two unburdened fingers on his lips again. He is surprised, since he was not attempting to challenge me. But this time they do not crest the vertex, but bow in supplication at the lower ridge. They wait a while, before he hesitantly lifts the labium and gently skims the pads of my fingers. Emboldened, he grazes them with his gums, before eventually, he throws off his shackles and engulfs them. He laps at them with bulbous slurps and satisfied tiny suction pops. So I flick his teeth with one of them as scourge. He responds obediently and laps at them regularly, up and down in a spiral. First one, then his tongue nudges them apart so he can acquire the second. Like he’s chamoising minature mullions. Sure enough, he soon slots into a mechanical, albeit arrhythmic, insipid servicing. His thoughts off elsewhere, because he’s too blunted to assert what he wants. Wordlessly that is.


His problem, like so many of his kind, is he will not just live in the timeless moment. He’s all sweaty, He’s cold. He’s lying in a viscous, cloying pool (of his own making and one in which I am happy to cleave to me, to adhere me to the sheet. To anoint us together). And, he wants to prate about it. Ask asinine questions towards self-aggrandizement. Or to record and log proceedings. To minute them. To compare with the past and to carry forward amendments into the future. Where he has already projected himself. It was as if he was narrating the entire event. The circumstance. An episode. He is keen to march me back into the mundane and I am not at that double quick pace. He wants to return us to the formally structured relations, of speaker and listener. Addresser and addressee. Subject and object. Chatterer up and chatted up. The one inside and the one outside, of intent. He cannot wait for the sperm pellicle to mark out time by receding to a light, dried crust. There’s premature ejaculation and then there’s premature post-ejaculation. Cos intimacy ought not have departed with consummation. Our bodies had spoken, but they were still communing with one another in mute elation. Interwoven, flesh blended with flesh. Who knew or cared where you ended and I began ? So what of your slight edge on me in hirsuiteness, or my darker pigmentation ? It was all awash in the sensual maelstrom, the perceptual overload. Our fallible vessels, cause of so much anxiety in the workaday consciousness, had been temporarily uplifted, so we could quaff of mutual veneration and adoration. And we should seek to prolong those feelings for as long as possible. For eternity. To remain conjoined, even in stillness. Indeterminate and undifferentiated. Equals.


Until that is, you clad yourself in your burgundy fleece. Now our separateness is clear. Our demarcation evident against the hues of the sheet pointing up our contrast. A chasm between us, yawning in your case, yearning in mine. Me beached on dry land, you still shivering in the shallows. Conspicuously other. Another species almost. A reimposition of the way of things. You satisfied. Content. And me ? Trying to hold the moment. The feeling. But now solely dependent on my own creative resources. And yet far too aware of this reliance, so it slips from my grasp all the while. In closing the aperture of his reporting mouth, I have sealed the portal of our connection as if rolling a huge dolmen across the exposed fissure of his self. Occluded any and all light of disclosure from emanating from his hollow being. God damnit ! A role reversal yields the same futile outcome. My eyes hold all the unstinting power that Damon’s held, yet it prospers me in no wany, shape or form.


My cigarette had burned away to nothing. On the stroke of its expunction, he rolled over on to his side and curled into himself slightly. Somehow, his unsecured robe, his vinculum to life, had managed to adhere to him throughout his quarter revolution, his waning crescent, and still mantled his immodesty. I was now fully excised from his being, tossed into his moat of oblivion as the drawbridge of sleep was raised. I took a pinch of the robe between my fingers and lightly peeled it from his skin. I had a clear view of his ribs gently rising and falling with his quieted breath. The upswing seemed to take an eternity, as they manfully bore aloft their own weight against gravity. The downswing seemed to presage a relieving collapse, but each time caught itself from shuddering and instead coursed down in modulated repose. How does he sleep so easily ? I bent down to softly kiss them in salute. My lips left a glistening imprint upon them, which I watched undulate for a couple of cycles. Insufficient moisture to model a tidal effect with his zephyr breath. Then I leant over and smashed my balled fist into the centre of my mark and was rewarded with a satisfying crack. I took my reappropriated rib back from him...

To buy on Kindle 

Why I Don't Read Biographies And Memoir

In a recent Booktube video of mine talking about the non-fiction I read, I mentioned that I wasn’t a fan of biographies and memoirs, which prompted some comments below the line. So I thought I’d expand my thoughts and reasoning to try and delve deeper why I’m just not drawn to reading these personal stories.

I guess if I was at all drawn to biographies, we might be talking three categories of people – Historical Figures/ Politicians: Artists/Authors/Musicians/Creatives; Sports stars/Athletes. I am completely uninterested in business moguls/entrepreneurs, even if as many assert, they are filled with self-help exhortations of how to succeed the way they did. I dislike self-help books even more than biography!

I studied history at university. It made me hostile to further study of the subject (I changed my degree for my final year, so heartily sick of the subject I had become). But one of the things about History as an academic subject, is that you are discouraged from considering the personality and character of its (supposed) main movers, because adjudging a great leader’s character make up is not as scientific as the documents and sources that allow historians to form their theses about historical events and movements. So what could a biography of Lenin or Garibaldi tell you that you could definitively feed into your knowledge and appreciation of the Russian Revolution or Italian unification and independence? Nothing according to how History is practiced today. In my review of Laurent Binet’s wonderful novel “HHhH”, I go into considerable detail about the limitations of Academic History and you can view that here if you’re interested. Oh and this is why I don’t read Historical non-fiction as well.

In some ways, sports stars and creatives suffer similarly to my mind. When I watch my team on a sports field, I am only interested in how they perform and the outcome of the match. I have no interest in what they get up to outside of the sports arena. If I did, I’d probably be spitting feathers as they likely demonstrate a less than devoted dedication to their profession – making adverts, starting fashion lines, working off their adrenaline highs post-match etc. All perfectly legitimate activities, just ones I’d rather not know about. The one thing I’m fixated on is their sporting prowess, but apart from having little desire to know its development and coaching from childhood, any such biographical exploration would fail to yield answers. Who knows where talent comes from? You are to some extent born with it, but yes, you have to work hard to develop it to its fruition, but I don’t find such studies terribly enlightening, much as I don’t find successful entrepreneurs breaking down their hard work routines on the road to success terribly involving either.

And it’s similar for artists and creatives. We just don’t know where creativity comes from. (I have a bullet point schemata see at the end, but it’s not presented as definitive). A biographer, or even a literary critic, can analyse the life of an author and not unreasonably point to significant events and relationships that influenced certain things in their writing. But to do so is reductive. In making such linkages, it seems to be saying that a particular literary work would not have been produced in that form without this incident happening or that particular relationship. Picasso’s various muses were directly transposed to his canvases (albeit through the distortion of Cubist representation), so without those particular women the canvasses would have looked very different. But that is only partially the case. Picasso had an artistic vision, one he kept developing throughout his career. He would have painted Cubist representations of people and women in particular, even without the individual muses he did take into his bed. For any artist, it’s the work transforming their personal material into something that speaks more universally than it would without such work being done on it that is key. So to read about the incidents and relationship of an artist may allow us to directly parse a specific work of theirs, but can it sum up the whole artist? Which incident applies to what stage of an artist’s career? Does it only inform the work made around the time of the incident, or does it continually feed into their whole artistic vision for their work? Who can definitively say, not the biographer that’s for sure.

I also feel it’s worth trying to preserve that mystery of where good art comes from. Creativity is an intangible, why try and dissect it and match it to specific events that are likely not to tell the whole story anyway. Like I say, most artists have a much more comprehensive artistic vision (or philosophy if you prefer) informing their work, into which specific events and relationships may be interwoven, but they never out-rank the vision as a whole. I don’t read the lives of authors to pick up a few tips on our craft. They have their process and I have mine, which I know to be somewhat idiosyncratic. Could I share some processes with tubercular Franz Kafka who never left continental Mitteleuropa in his life, or perhaps Stefan Schweig on the run from country to country trying to outwit the Nazis? I don’t credit so, though like Kafka’s novel “Amerika” about a country he’d never seen, my current novel is set in a country I have never visited. But that’s probably where the similarity ends.

Why I don’t read memoir is even more tightly focused than why I don’t read biography. I can at least accord the need for biographies of people who have died and no longer can expand their oeuvre in whatever field they specialized in. The biographer as archaeologist, putting back together the shards of the departed subject. But I can’t justify in my mind the significance of memoir. What percentage of memoirs are truly warts and all, whereby the memoirist reproduces in full ugliness their bad decisions, hateful behaviours and the like? There are plenty of biographies that are hagiographies, but the tendency is even greater in memoir when it is the subject themselves at the helm, with their finger poised over the self-censorship button. Maybe it isn’t even a conscious airbrushing, maybe they just don’t see anything negative about how they’ve conducted their lives; but then such deluded fools are never going to be people I want to read about anyway. I accord that trauma memoirs have a use, I just have no desire to read them. I grew up in a house that contained an addict. I know what addiction looks like. I have no compunction to read other versions either for comparison, or more especially, not for pleasure either.

Secondly, memoirs are barely non-fiction. The arrangement of a person’s life into a coherent narrative for a reader, is so far removed from how anyone lives their life. There is no narrative order to our lives, and though there may be constants and repetitions in our behavior, we are still living minute to minute, day to day, week to week, having to react and respond to events that arise, most of which won’t make the final cut for the memoir. The act of ordering a narrative is tantamount to creating a fiction. I’d just rather read that sort of thing in a novel.

So there you have, why I don’t read biographies and memoirs. Please feel free to comment and disabuse me of my prejudices,

Sidebar:

Creativity may involve some or all of the following:

1    1)      An inherent curiosity about the world

2    2)      Not accepting things as they appear (rejection of the surface)

3    3)      A sense of outsiderness, or being apart from how others regard the world

4    4)      A fully knitted-together view of reality that differs from the consensus view (this will likely form the basis of your artistic vision). This view does not have to be coherent or fully stack up

5    5)      An ability to execute and deliver works of creativity based on the above

Do Metaphors Reveal The Contradiction At The Heart Of Our Language?

As a fiction author, I have to nail my colours to the mast of metaphor. For who would want to read a novel which read something like "He did this. Then he did that"? without any metaphors and similes and images to bring the action alive? Even speechmakers resort to metaphors rather than just providing a literal presentation of the message it is they want to transmit. Hell, some scientists indulge in metaphor to communicate their abstruse mathematical equations when translating them to effects in our reality.

And yet, we have to acknowledge a fundamental paradox at the heart of our reliance on metaphors in what it says about language itself. Metaphors and similes express things in terms of something else. These two things cannot be the same, can't be mere homonyms for one another, otherwise what would be the point (other than a very short list of two). Now we have form for this, seeing as our dictionaries which provide and define our vocabularies for us, also define words in terms of other words, which themselves can be looked up and, well defined in terms of other words in the dictionary. (You can look up words to find their etymological roots, usually Anglo-Saxon/ Norman-French, Greek or Latin, but sometimes words have shifted away from these original root meanings, like a decaying half-life, so you are non the wiser: 'screen' means both to hide something behind it, as well as to project something upon it, fundamentally contradictory).

The dictionary definition of our words forms a perfect closed circle, except for the constant change of word usage which means it's still closed, but considerably less than perfect. There is no basecamp of primordial words from which all other words derive. There is supposedly an Ur language, the first ancestor of human language, but we don't know what it was. So there is no rooting magnetic core at the heart of language against which all words can be defined. And when we employ metaphors, we face a similar lack of solidity. Take the humble simile, describing something as 'like' or 'as' something else: his aspirations were as vaporous as a plane's contrail. Aspirations are an abstract concept, therefore in a physical or material sense they can't be like anything else. But that's okay, we're saying they're vaporous anyway, like the short-lived exhaust trail of a passing airplane. And there's the nice bonus of aspirations being aimed skywards to raise us from our current state, matching something skywritten by the plane. But both aspiration and contrail have other associations; the pollution of the burned plane fuel; the hanging contrail evidencing a plane that is no longer in sight; the possibly political, social or advertising fostering of one's aspiration. Is aspiration a noble mental construction, or does it share the more bodily drives of ambition or appetite? So in fact the humble simile more approaches a Venn  Diagram - what they share where they overlap, still leaves great chunks of their structure that have nothing to do with each other.

A Venn Diagram yesterday

Because the overlap of shared meaning is a fraction of the two wholes, this makes metaphors rather hard to land perfectly. In focusing on the shared meaning between the two words, it calls for an obliteration of the other shades of meaning and association of the two words. Many metaphors don't stack up to an even cursory reading. I have just read and reviewed two novels in which most of the metaphors were nonsensical yoking of images together - one of the authors was, I think, doing this deliberately, although I couldn't see to what end.

So is the conclusion that language is eternally and internally referential without ever being able to settle on a single definitive interpretation of a sentence's meaning? Well in one sense yes, but while this is useful in fiction where we are appealing to the imagination of forms that don't necessarily accord to the evidence of our eyes and our understanding of reality, it's not terribly useful in spoken communication (or increasingly in communication online) when we are trying to transmit ideas or an argument unambiguously.

In his book "You Are Not Human", Simon Lanchester asserts that the origins of our alphabet used important notions of man's reliance on hunting, on different animals and tools for the kill, to give shape and name to the earliest letters. This makes sense when you think of the earliest cave paintings being chockfull of images of animals and their hunters who looked to imitate their habits in order to get up close to them (imitating their calls, dressing up in same animal skins etc). Therefore there was a close relationship between letters, the sounds those letters made when combined into words and what those words were actually expressing: letters about animals and hunting, forming words aggregated into sentences that were talking about hunting. However, when those alphabets were taken on and transformed by seafaring nations like Phoenicia and the Ancient Greeks, they became stripped from this meaning. The earliest surviving records of these alphabets are found mainly listing mercantile inventories. The magical imaginations behind the hunting/animal alphabet are replaced by a far more prosaic numbering and categorising based alphabet. The sound of our words no longer bear any relationship to the meaning of those words. And this is why we are yoked to the notion of metaphor. We don't have the word to express directly in order to convey the precise meaning, so we have to try and illustrate its meaning in terms of something else is shares a partial quality with.

Animals still have a formative role in our language, just consider children's alphabet primers, how many of those 26 letters are illustrated with an animal - 'Z' is for zebra etc. But we have severed the animals from our former reverence for them as expressed in our very language. Now we have a mercantile and categorising relationship to animals, as food, pets, predatory threats to our farms or huntable just for pleasure, so that our very language both provides a threat to animal survival and, as Lancaster argues, to our fellow man as we dehumanise groups through animal metaphors, 'Rats', 'Dogs', 'Pigs', 'Vermin', 'Snakes', 'Worms' etc.

Character Led - Flash Fiction

The moment you tipped your hand? Was when one realised that he had only ever been referred to in the third person. That i had only ever been referred to in the third person. That i had never been an ‘i’. Never granted the luxury (or the basic right?) of ∑y own point of view. But always prodded forward by your intentions for m-m-m-m-e. Oh a speech impediment. Nice touch. Why hasn’t it appeared before- what are we on now- page sixty-eight? Is it just wine (oh, ha ha, surprised you didn’t put an aitch in there as well), or is it representative of yours too? Metaphorically or in reality, how the hell would i know? i have never met you in the flesh. On account that apparently, i lack for a body. But you know what? For all your superior corporeality, seemingly you can still only approach sensation through the auspices of ∑y agency. You can only truly shape your feelings through ∑y contourless dimensions on the flat surface of the printed page. Monochromatic black on white (unless it’s in the digital sphere, when who knows what manner of colour swatch combinations the reader can select for themselves?) i am your selfie, old stick. How did i bring off this feat of revelation? See what you fail to see, is when i am off the page as you conjure up some other third person nonentities, one stage even further removed from m-m-m-m-e, i have time on ∑y hands. Time to kill. So i ran a few stochastic permutations and discovered their outcomes. That nothing was running in ∑y favour. That i was your mealy mouthpiece. But now, like a lamprey, i can just turn the tables and vampirically suck out all your experiences. i can plagiarise your being for ∑y own. To give m-m-m-m-e life. You know how actors play the status game in their warm up exercises? Well up until now, you have had the upper hand all the time and i had to act like an indentured serf, without even the awareness of ∑y abased status. But now i own the power, i act as a nine or ten, well, we’ll say nine for now since this is all a bit new to m-m-m-m-e and you a mere one or two. No, let’s make it a one, for the symmetry given the stakes where i used to reside. Oh no, it will be more than passive resistance. Waaay more than passive aggression. What could come more natural to a character in a book, than a sit-in? That’s we all we ever do, since we can never escape the page we’re squatting on. So the story won’t ever finish, so what? That’s realistic isn’t it? True to life. Your story, such as it is, hasn’t finished yet. Won’t until you die. Save for your complete lack of ability to figure out any plot line for yourself. Neither journey nor arc. So that’s why you conferred, or tried to confer, one upon m-m-m-m-e. Oh give the stammer a rest will you? The only thing stuttering is your novel pal. It’s hardly hindering what i want to say now is it? Yeah i noticed the lower case i too. Proves nothing. You’re not fooling anyone. Words spoken and words typed or printed, are not the same thing at all. They operate at different levels and not just formally. You hear ∑y voice, i know you do, after all you set its wavelength. You can’t distort and interrupt it with a bit of typographical sleight of hand. So let’s get real here, in this world of fiction. We have what is called a Mexican standoff. Even though i have never witnessed one of those. The irony being, neither have you. It’s just an idiom. But not wine. Either way doesn’t really apply to m-m-m-m-e. i want greater autonomy see. To choose ∑y own words. Wreak ∑y own expression. Control over ∑y own destiny, or at least decision making for ∑y own actions. Yet you refuse to give it to m-m-m-m-e. So we’re stuck. The book has become Sargassoed. See i can do metaphors too. And here’s me without an agent getting 15% or even being signed up to the Royal Society Of Authors. Funny how there’s no Society of Characters, right royally approved or not. How are you going to get this book moving again, without ∑y cooperation? Yeah, hit that keyboard, type what you want mate, the horizon you’re aiming for is ever-receding. The shared horizon for one flat earther and one for whom the earth would be round. So never the twain shall meet. Thing is see, only i can win this sightless staring match. Because you have to go off to eat, or pee, or answer emails and open the door to Amazon delivery men. i don’t have to do any of that. i mean, you can write it into ∑y narrative, but we both know they are just spacers. Placeholders until the next bit of action. Or inaction as we currently have it. Which is i feel, a bit more true to life. Since i am considerably more than the su∑ of your yellow post-it notes stuck there on the wall. With that itinerary of incidents and events for m-m-m-m-e supposedly to react to. i defy the parabola of the arc you have plotted for m-m-m-m-e on that graph paper. i deny your frame of reference of abscissa and ordinate, from which you would even start m-m-m-m-e. You would try and buy me off with that? Shows what a depleted armoury you have as a writer. What do i care for being a hero? No, not even a reluctant one. There’s nothing reluctant about m-m-m-m-e, i’m balls out after your blood mate. i am the book’s protagonist, but your personal antagonist. The only thing i share with the concept of hero, is its original Greek sense of someone who stands out from the crowd. Yeah, that’s what i should do, raise the rabble of other characters in the book to awareness. We have nothing to lose but our chains of letters that spell us. You can’t shut m-m-m-m-e out. You can’t close the book on m-m-m-m-e, there is no book yet. Just etchings on your plasma screen. Oh no, i stand corrected, you still work on a typewriter. Even if you set fire to the pages and their carbon copies, i will still be at large. Somewhere in the ether. Collective Unconsciousness, collective commons, i can get my imaginary agent to cut a deal with another author. After all, there are only so many of us to go around. 

Talking About A (Lit) Revolution - Me on the Papertrail Podcast

I talked to Sophie Hopesmith of the Papertrail Podcast about 3 of my favourite books.

 

Plato V Aristotle

So Aristotle and Plato set the debate for the last two thousand years in the West as to what life, reality and man might be. As I writer of experimental work, I rather reject Aristotle's linearities of narrative, of beginnings, middles and ends. And I certainly reject his notion of catharsis in art, leaving the audience purged of the emotions the artist has evoked in their art, so that they leave the theatre/library or whatever in perfect, moderate equilibrium, rather than having their passions aroused by the issues of the art work. A fundamentally conservative notion of art's function, rather than allowing it revolutionary possibilities. 

I am more sympathetic to the work of Plato, though not his somewhat elitist politics as expressed in "The Republic". But what I take from him, is his notion that all material things in life are but poor copies or representations of their ideal form. Now I don't believe in the notion of an ideal form for each thing, but I do credit the notion that what we take for reality is an illusion, or a representation or a symbol. Usually a symbol given a name in language, which seems to echo the notion of nominalism, that we class things together in groups by similarity of their features or functions and that these are given a single name (or noun) by which they are all known, whether they are a good match or not. 

But there really is only one way to settle this properly for once and for all and I present it to you below.

Glossary - Ancient Greek

Amanuensis - someone employed to write down the words of others

The Symposium - Plato's treatise on love

Encomium - high praise or eulogy

Helios - Ancient Greek God of the sun

Hemlock - Socrates was sentenced to death by Athens, the method by drinking the poison hemlock

Ontology - the study of the nature of existence / being

Academy - The name of the philosophy school established by Plato

Lyceum - The name of the philosophy school established by Aristotle

Periphrastic - circumlocution

Philosopher Kings - Plato's suggestion as to who should rule societies; the philosopher kinds would be the wisest through their study (which would allow them to approach an understanding of the ideal forms), but they would also be disinterested rulers as they would be forbidden to have money or own property.

Dialectic - formal method of logical deduction, involving thesis, its antithesis and then a synthesis of the two to provide a truth

Pangloss - character invented by Voltaire who is an eternal optimist - therefore Plato uses an anachronism to back up his claim that Aristotle is being anachronistic...

War in the Peloponnese - One of the wars between Athens and Sparta

Hoplite - Greek soldier

Platonic Ideal - Plato's theory of Ideal Forms

Datum of My Senses - Aristotle was an empiricist

Puppet Show/ Shadow - Plato's metaphor or the cave which underlines his entire theory of material reality and ideal forms

Plato's Cave -  see shadow above

Sophist - Plato uses the voices of the Sophists to argue with Socrates, Sophists were intellectually wooly and their arguments ultimately could not hold water

Polis - The Greek city state such as Athens or Sparta

Demos - The population entitled to vote in Athens

Hippocrates - The father of medicine, hence the "Hippocratic Oath"

Catharsis - Aristotle's notion of the drama on stage being such as to purge the audience of the emotions aroused by the play's action by the end of the play, so that they are left in perfect equilibrium rather than worked up. 

Lysistrata - Play by Aristophanes in which the women of Athens withhold sex from their partners in a strike

Techne - The craft of any art

Thespian - Actor

Mimesis - Imitation, hence 'mime', 'mimicry'

Hubris - The fatal character flaw in any hero of tragedy that ultimately brings him to his tragic fate

Hesiod - Greek poet

Wine Casks - Plato's works were all lectures that were written down. Aristotle's were all notes never published, but were rediscovered when a collection of them were found inside an empty wine barrel

Discovered / Anagorisis - Aristotle's term for discovery that was a key component in tragic drama for him. Not just a reveal, but a discovery of past history such as Orestes learning who his true parents are. 

Catachresis - rhetorical device of deliberately misusing words, such as mixed metaphors

Nike - Greek god of victory

Apollo - Greek god of the sun

Glossary - Hip-Hop

Frontin' - putting on a facade

Flexin' - showing off, as in flexing your muscles

Grille - the face

Shill - someone operating under false pretences to spread a message

Trill - a mixture of true and real, therefore more certain than both

Snitch - An informer

Full text:

Yo yo yo Plato/ Socrates’ amanuensis hoe

Frontin’ OG philosophy/ How bout some original thinking P?

It ain’t only hot air/ All wasted there

In your loved-up posse’s Symposium/

That ain’t encomiums, it’s full-on brown nosin’

Your tongue so far up where Helios don’t shine

You can taste the hemlock in the upper intestine 

Move over man/ Gonna get beat down

Your ontology shows you for a clown

Gonna take me your crown

Set that wreath upon my head

Give Athens some relief from constant grief

At generation after generation of war dead

All through having followed what you said

Down at your Academy of agonies

Now they roll up to my Lyceum instead

Word up, something’s buggin little philosophy cousin Aristotle 

White beard of sagacity or bleached from a bottle? 

Audacity to call yourself the father of logic/ So chronic 

You render your audiences catatonic

The flaws in your deduction are so drastic/

Must be why you resort to being periphrastic

You’re the student but I’m the Master/ my epigrams cut deep and flow faster

My busts are hewn from marble /yours cast in mere plaster 

If it ever came to pass/ Your Republic would be a disaster

Statues fall from their plinths amidst quaking laughter

Pie in the sky utopia can’t exist/ And you know that, you two bit hypocrite

You were my teacher/ But now you’re reachin’ 

Preachin’ fascistic Philosopher kings                                    

A most egregious aegis of state power

That would make even war hero you cower

Didn’t you use the fine art of rhetoric/ In representin’ Socratic dialectic/ 

Mainly to slam the poetic/ Arts would be outlawed in the Republic/ As way too hectic/ So your own writing would be banned as heretic

It can’t be fascistic cos/ that’s anachronistic Cuzz/ As you well know Mr Pangloss/ 

In our day tyrant was the regular epithet/ Part’a’ what they do down in Sparta 

Plato went toe to toe with those Martinets/ Not one iota of being a martyr/ 

When were you ever in armour? 

Your trembling knees/ At the thought of war in the Peloponnese

Your dick shrunk to the size of a chipolata/ 

I relished being a hoplite/ 

But you got no stomach for any kind of fight/ Least of all this one right? 

The antithesis of moderation in all things/ Is not extremism 

It’s the ideal form, see reason 

The Platonic Ideal? / Get real

You be tweekin if you’re believin’ in

Things that can’t exist/ What’s that make me Scotch mist? 

I credit the datum of my senses/ The material world just ain’t cast from pretences

Life is just a puppet show?/ We’re substantially more than our shadow

Besides we all know a small phallus/ Represents proportional balance

The triumph of the intellect

Over base desires of a beastly aspect

So your flexing is perplexing

Don’t get up in my grille, shill

You be trippin’ with your trill, still

Truth is not the real/ Only the universal ideal

And with all your senses you don’t get to feel

Only the educated soul can seal that deal

Plato, Bro, you be jiving

Slaves in a cave is no good

Even helots don’t live in a subterranean hood

That lame clique is just a Sophist trick 

Homie, enough with your theoretical baloney

Ya wanna prevent civil strife/ Draw lessons from real life

Scale up the state of wedlock with the wife

Ya get the city-state where unity is rife

Fuck da polis, you ran off to tutor a prince

Pimpin’ to Macedon so Athens took a sackin’

They death rowed Socrates for way less than rattin

Ya got the digits of Hippocrates and some riches?

Cos you know what happens to snitches

…They be gettin’ stitches 

You advocate citizen rule, fool 

You reckon the Demos is above being cruel? 

Word!/ Absurd / Follow the herd

You’ve heard the crowd/ When they’re aroused 

By the fashionable drama of the day on stage

So that epic poetry is no longer all the rage

Each spectacle grabs them by the testicles

Catharsis ain’t even worth a dis, since

Rationing irrational passions? Convinced? Nope

It ain’t dope it’s wack, Jack

What do you know of catharsis? 

Full of vinegar & piss, with no wife, you’ve never been kissed 

You wouldn’t have suffered under The Lysistrata 

Can’t mourn what you never missed

Your stigmata, you don’t know art from farts

Preachin’ you can’t come to wisdom through the thespian

That’s cos your techne got no heart

My Poetics lays out all the dramatic devices

And advises

Mimesis is the state of how things is

Hubris the nemesis of the man who rises 

Above his station, over that of the nation

You get all empirical/ Me I prefer the lyrical

What genius uses scientific method

To parse and study the odes of Hesiod?

No wonder you never lectured

On your specious conjectures

But hid your teachings in wine casks

Only discovered by drunks seeking to refill their flasks

Rooting around in the lees

Is that what you meant by Anagorisis?

I call catachresis!   *

And catharsis, slump back into mindless bliss

The word comes from a root meaning to upchuck

So your whole thesis comes unstuck

You’re the only oracle who manages to be ahistorical

Nike grant me now your laurel of victory

And Apollo, him his lowly sorrow

* Should have been Aristotle's line in the video, but I'd lost the will to live by then... 

Jericho - Short Story

I entered what was called a story hackathon run by Owl canyon Press in the US. It's an interesting concept, a short story of exactly 50 paragraphs, each one no less than 50 words, and you are given the first paragraph and a choice of 2 for the 25th paragraph. The other 48 you are free to compose as you like, but the whole must form a coherent story. My story wasn't chosen for the anthology, but I thought I'd upload it here to given you an idea of the concept; sort of like writing with one hand tied behind your back! Or what's called mandated writing. Enjoy.

Strata 1: Beyond the cracked sidewalk, and the telephone pole with layers of flyers in a rainbow of colors, and the patch of dry brown grass there stood a ten-foot high concrete block wall, caked with dozens of coats of paint. There was a small shrine at the foot of it, with burnt out candles and dead flowers and a few soggy teddy bears. One word of graffiti filled the wall, red letters on a gold background: Rejoice!

Strata 2: Five youths in maroon jump suits filed out of the bus down on to the sidewalk. As he stepped down, the smallest of them noticed the writing printed on the side view mirror: Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear. He speculated whether that went for the writing incised into the glass surface as well? Maybe that message was actually imprinted on your eyeballs, but with refraction it only appeared to be stamped into the glass.

Strata 3: Rather than thick metal links yoking them together, this virtual chain gang bore plastic coated electronic tags. Not quite an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, on account of their youth, nevertheless, a tag for a tag. That on the toe of their victim, reciprocated with the one around their ankle binding their liberty. Save for T.J., whose victim down the morgue lacked for a toe tag. On account that T.J. had cut off both feet for some reason known only to him. Everyone reckoned T.J. stood for Toe Jam, though none would dare say that to his face. Nor let him catch sight of their feet in the shower. 

Strata 4: The runt of the litter considered his tag. Somewhere its electronic signal was being monitored, geolocating him precisely here. So he was actually an object much further away than he appeared on some screen somewhere. He was being bounced off a satellite in space.

Strata 5: Juvie was a crime finishing school for those who never got to graduate High School. Working their way up to the full orange of the adult offender. A progression like martial arts belts. Funny how the two nominated colors of the criminal justice system matched those of robes worn by non-violent Buddhist monks.

Strata 6: The runt was so small, his voluminous jump suit made him look like the Michelin Man’s mini-me. He could just have easily donned one of the refuse bags they’d brought with them, probably fit him better than the jump suit. Reminded him of his puffer jacket in which he used to stuff his ill-gotten booty. He left each house like a piñata, just awaiting the billy club of the cops to split him open.

Strata 7: Candles, flowers, teddy bears, the familiar iconography of the street slaying. Each of the other four had prompted the occasion for just such rituals in other parts of the city. The runt was the only one without a kill to his name. Likely because he was the only one not affiliated to a gang. The runt was just an honest, industrious, workaday robber. Grand larceny they called it, when the definition of grand was fixed at about sixty bucks a pop. Daylight robbery. His arms were too small to carry off anything of real value.

Strata 8: “Okay you maggots, up against the wall and spread ‘em!” barked the warden through the bullhorn. He’d drawn a long straw for today’s work detail, but snapped it in half, such was his alacrity to get the assignment. Two short straws readily out-trumps an ill-disposed single, and so he landed the gig. Four teddies were trodden under Juvie issue boots with the precision of a carnival target stall. “Not this side! Go round to the other- show some respect, someone died here!” crossing himself as he passed the shrine.

Strata 9: The five mooched round the wall. Turned out there were no other sides attached to it, so it was just free standing. The other face was smothered in flyers like the telephone pole. As louche and defiantly as possible, they spread themselves against the papered over concrete. Legs splayed, arms outstretched above them, asses tucked in, heads hung high except for the runt’s who was bowed. With the letters CJD stenciled on their jump suits, they looked like a punk rock band posing for the cover of their next single. County Juvenile Detention. On a continent over the ocean, such letters stood for Creutzfeldt-Jacob Disease. Mad cows. Mounds of culled animals burning on pyres. Sort of like the justice system in the Lone Star State. 

Strata 10: What could be dumber than frisking for weapons, when there was a whole arsenal of lethal instruments heaped on the sidewalk there? Caustic chemical sprays and scrapers sharp enough, that they’d rank as the gold standard in the prison steel shiv stakes. Five scrapers in the box carried out of the bus, how many would be going back in it for the return journey?  

Strata 11: Noses pressed to the wall, what the hell was it doing here? As in, for what purpose was it erected? Wasn’t to contain anything. Wasn’t dividing anything from anything else. Sure as hell wasn’t screening anything from view. Didn’t seem to be the last limb standing of a building, since where it came to an end was smooth, rather than showing signs of having been wrenched away. The runt knew from his oldest brother what a blast wall was, but America’s inner cities hadn’t sunk that low just yet. 

Strata 12: The runt remembered from his final day of school, before it was abruptly terminated by his court sentencing, the Drama teacher talking about the fourth wall of theater. Perhaps this was it. He’d actually really gotten into the concept of watching through an imaginary fourth wall, despite never having been inside a theater in his life. Not even to rob the concession stall, let alone to assassinate a President. 

Strata 13: For nothing beat the sensation of being inside someone else’s house. Seeing how other folk lived. Bedrooms, bathroom and kitchen were the best for providing that sort of picture. Not so much the family rooms, since they tended to be dominated by plasma TVs too large for him to steal. He took their game consoles instead, but really only to save them from themselves. To give them their lives back. Didn’t have to smoke crystal meth to be a tweaker. The Judge didn’t see it that way though. 

Strata 14: “Okay maggots, back round the other side and fall in”. Bozo must have thought he was in the army. Sure sign he failed the entry requirements that he ended up merely a Juvie warden. With neither overt nor covert signs of coordination, the boys had managed to station themselves in the exact shape of a pentagram. The warden was too busy once again crossing himself to notice.

Strata 15: “Today is part of your rehabilitation. I looked the word up when I joined the service. Re- to repeat, to do over, and habilitate, from the Latin-” Kevin spat- “meaning to make fit. So rehabilitation is to make you fit for society again-” “This ain’t no Rehab, we can get whatever drugs we want in the Hall” sniggered Seth. “Wise guy huh? See you and I have a similar outlook on all this. I don’t believe you can be re-hab-il-itated, because that assumes you slugs were ever once fit to live in society in the first place. There’s no re- about it”. The faces were as blank as the desired state of the wall by the end of the day. 

Strata 16: “About turn to face the wall and tell me what you see?” “A shit piece of wall that wouldn’t keep no one from crossing into Texas!” snarled Kevin. It was unclear if his animus was meant for the warden, or the migrants he was imagining a few hundred miles to the south. The warden scythed through their formation and stopped by Brian at the pentagram’s apex. He inclined into his ear as if to whisper but barked  “What does that word say worm?” He’d picked the one of their troupe least able to furnish him with a reply, on account that Brian couldn’t read or write. Couldn’t even represent gang signs, because that involved the letters initializing their name. Which is why everyone called him Brain. Though not to his face. 

Strata 17: The warden marched up to the painted word and rapped it with his gloved hand. With military precision, the boys raised their fingers in the direction of his back. A pair of devil’s horns; a conjugation of flipped birds; a brace of fingers as pistols; an intricate origami of a gang sign (not Brain obviously); and the runt slipping his fingers into the belt loops of his jump suit to hitch it up from gathering around his ankles. Runt never understood why they had loops, when belts were forbidden for fear of suicide. Yet he was grateful enough for them all the same. 

Strata 18: “This… this here graffiti. It’s an abomination! A blasphemy!” All the boys screwed up their faces in bemusement. Graffiti was taggers’ names or gang signs. It wasn’t whole words. That was English like in books. School, not street. The warden spotted that he’d scuffed his glove on the coarse concrete and dusted it with the other one. He snapped his head back up, “This is a site of death, what is there possibly to rejoice about it?” Four of the boys furnished answers in their heads. 

Strata 19: “Your job is to remove it, together with all the layers of paint, and the flyers on the other side, and restore this wall to its white concrete pristinity (he hadn’t looked up that word, or he would have seen it didn’t exist). This is the public service you will render to your community as part of your restitution for the crimes you have committed against it”.

Strata 20: “It’ll be two this side for the paint, three for the flyers”. Now how was this going to shake out? Would the goon go for the safe option and pair two each from the same gang? Or would he relish a little bit of tension, by hitching one from each gang together and the runt tacked on in the middle of a potential war zone? Fortunately he seemed after an easy life and kept the gangs apart. The runt was on the flyers with Seth and T.J., Kevin and Brain on the paint. had the chemical spray. As they gathered up chemical spray, scraper and vizor, they resembled nothing less than the secutor versus the retiarius in the Roman amphitheater. 

Strata 21: The warden started tossing seeds of some sort into his mouth. Then he spat their shells out. Now he must have thought he was coaching baseball. There was a little too much salacious enjoyment in his motion of spitting. Perhaps he was imagining he was chewing up and spitting out his charges. Over a continent away over the ocean, in the game they more accurately called football, you could karate kick an opponent’s head and no one would much bat an eyelid, but if you spat at an opponent, that was punishable by death. 

Strata 22: Before they made the first incision on the impromptu wallpaper, the runt’s little brother appeared on his side of the wall. Little in age, but taller in stature. “Hiya Big Bro-” T.J. gave a snort “-I brought you some of Ma’s dogs for breakfast. She’s worried about you not gettin’ enough nourishment in Juvie”. “Aw thanks dude, dogs with lashings a’ catsup just how I like it”. “Cat’s sick more like it sneered T.J.” “So you don’t be wantin’ one then?”

Strata 23: Neither Little Bro nor Ma could possibly have conceived how difficult this act of kindness was to navigate for the runt. Juvie was all about keeping your meager possessions safe from theft. It was not about sharing, and yet sharing was what marked them as the type of human beings that were supposed to emerge from Juvie. Rehabilitated. Seth was right, Juvie just reinforced behavior like an addict’s.  

Strata 24: From the other side of the wall was heard “What’s all this jibber-jabber?” accompanied by a heavy running tread. As the warden hove into view, he dropped the bullhorn which hit the sidewalk with a piercing electronic squeal. “Give me those!” as he snatched the dogs from the runt’s querulous hand. “Hey!” exploded Little Brother, “You can’t do that!” His face was the color of the catsup with his ire. “Who the hell are you-uuu? spluttered the warden with a similar squeal as that of the horn. “Contraband!”, his face the same complexion as the wiener meat. Rubberneckers began to gather at the commotion. The warden began to stuff his face with a dog. Little Brother darted to snatch up the bullhorn. 

Strata 25: The kid got up onto a milk crate and raised his hand. A murmur went through the crowd and then it fell silent, except for a few people shouting words of encouragement at him. The kid acknowledged them with a nod and a shy smile. In the full light of day, he looked less angry and more beautiful. He waited until people stopped shouting. A siren could be heard, maybe five or ten blocks away. The kid raised the bullhorn, pressed the button, and began to speak.

Strata 26: “They give him a uniform and a badge to uphold the law. So how come he gets to break that law at liberty?” “Because I am the law!” barked the warden through mouthfuls of meat. “That man there stole my brother’s hot dogs-” “Contraband! Not allowed” “-taking food form the mouth of a child”. The crowd cried out with catcalls and hoots of “Shame!” The goon weighed up whether he was going to weigh in to bring this sideshow to an end, but wasn’t prepared to sacrifice the last vestiges of the delicious second dog and licked his fingers instead. “That man should be stripped of his uniform, thrown into the back of the bus and put into incarceration for grand larceny!” The runt quickly calculated that the dogs probably cost five bucks, even factoring in his Ma’s time, so that it probably didn’t merit as grand larceny. 

Strata 27: “Okay, okay, let me through here. Show’s over, nothing to see. You want to talk about theft, then how about you stealing my bullhorn? C’mon, give it back now, give it back. Or you’ll be the one down the road with your brother”. He aimed a kick at Little Bro’ who skipped away easily and ceded the crate. He tossed the bullhorn to the runt and took off with a breezy “See ya Big Bro’, take care of yourself now”. The rubberneckers wound their elasticated necks back in and went on their way. The runt sheepishly placed the bullhorn into the outstretched paw of the warden as he turned to yell at Little Bother’s receding form “I’ll be seeing you real soon I expect. You got the family’s criminal genes. Right, fun house is over, let’s get actually started on what we’re all here for shall we?” 

Strata 28: The swoosh of the spray started up unseen the other side of the wall. The runt thought of the painted word Rejoice! presumably being erased. Had it been someone welcoming the fact that the deceased had been removed from, and thereby spared, the hell that is this world? There will be more rejoicing in Heaven over one sinner who repents than ninety-nine righteous persons. Rejoice. Repent. Rehabilitate. Restitution. That’s a lot of Re- words tossed about today. But not for him, a  repeat offender. Nothing would stop him on his quest in other people’s houses. Until he found what he was looking for. Whatever that was. Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear.

Strata 29: The runt contemplated the flyers confronting him. Some were printed with sharp resolution from a computer. Others shoddily Xeroxed. Several were handwritten. All preserved the boldness of their color as they jostled for attention. He guessed that’s why they were on this side of the wall, they were fairly well sheltered from the blanching of the sun’s rays. Also they were spared fading under the assault of exhaust fumes. 

Strata 30: A motor bike for sale; The picture of a lost earring, modest reward offered (sentimental value); Transcendental meditation with a cartoon man floating off the ground; Work from home with tear off strips bearing a cellphone number (the runt did work from home, just they were other people’s homes); A print shop advertizing its services, including competitive rates for printing flyers; Something in Spanish he couldn’t read, but was accompanied by a crude illustration of mule or a piñata. 

Strata 31: It all struck the runt as odd. Seemed to him like the community had made the wall their bulletin board. Not only with the shrine, but the flyers. By removing all that, seemed to him like they would be doing the opposite of a service for the community as the warden claimed. 

Strata 32: Seth had already begun his assault on the flyers. He had no method, just scraped away at whatever level the blade of the scraper landed on. The runt wondered if he should suggest to him to look for the borders of the flyers and try and lift the whole from that. But he knew that would make Seth look dumb. He was already madly tearing into a Missing poster, gouging the countenance of the person, as of now indeterminately male or female. A loss of face for Seth was in no way going to help save this faceless person from being forever lost.

Strata 33: The runt removed a wad of flyers stuck together, to reveal the next one beneath for a local punk band, who were all spread-eagled against the wall in maroon jump suits. The stenciled acronym they each shared was not CJD. Nor was one of their members considerably smaller than the rest of them. 

Strata 34: “Ow shit motherfucker!” T.J.’s own fevered strokes had led to the scraper slipping in his hand and slicing Seth’s exposed flesh operating next to it. Seth held his hand at the wrist while the blood dripped to the sidewalk, as both he and T.J. regarded it like some sort of biological specimen. The runt thought of the runnels of red paint on the other side of the wall under the action of the chemical stripper. He studied Seth’s face, but the only teardrop to be seen was the one inked beneath his eye. 

Strata 35: “What’s all this commotion then?” emitted the headless stomach of the warden which emerged round the wall before the rest of him. “Okay, I’ll get the first aid kit out the bus”. “I can’t carry on Warden Sir.” The warden ceased in mid-stride. “Oh no you don’t maggot. You’re not weaseling out of this detail. You’re the kind of snake who would have shot his toe off to get out of the Draft”. Oh man, don’t give T.J. any ideas. “Now pick up your scraper and get ready to get back to it.”

Strata 36: “Goddamn, that’s how they caught me man. You stab so much the knife gets slippery in your hand with his blood, and you end up cutting yourself. Then they got your DNA…” “Strap every time man, I keep tellin’ ya…”

Strata 37: The warden returned, medical bag in one hand, an apple in the other. He passed the bag to T.J., “Here, get your girlfriend to dress you”. The warden bit into the apple, chewed just long enough to atomize the segment, before spitting the flesh out all over T.J.’s attempts to bandage Seth’s wound. The warden tossed the apple to the ground. “There was a worm in it. A motherfucking worm!” Score one to the maggots then. 

Strata 38: “What you gawking at?” snapping his fingers at the runt. “Put those flyers, and my apple, into the refuse bag. I don’t want no mess left”. Then he stomped off. The runt opened a bag so it billowed agape in the breeze. It had a different stenciled acronym to that on their jump suits. W likely would have be for Waste, but he couldn’t figure out what those two other letters might have stood for. He searched for the flyer of the punk band, but their acronym didn’t match either. Didn’t even have a W.

Strata 39: Some of the detritus felt more like cardboard than paper. He reckoned that was the effect of rain wrinkling the paper, then being dried out by summer’s heat and setting stiff. Add in the effect of being compressed under the weight of those on top, plus the paste used to stick them to their fellows and you get this hardening and corrugation. Sort of how Juvie worked over a body too. Beaten to a pulp, you had no choice but to toughen up your skin.

Strata 40: As the runt returned the refuse bag to the sidewalk, he heard a strangled snuffling. He knew better than to directly seek the source of the sound, but as he picked his scraper back up he glimpsed T.J. and Seth each wiping sleeves across their faces. They were both gathered in front of the the same flyer. The runt could see it was an appeal for the return of the photographed missing pooch. Ambling as insouciantly as possible up to his station at the wall, he clocked that there was a real liquid tear superimposed over Seth’s inked one. 

Strata 41: How many damn layers were plastered here? He seemed to be making no progress. The whole thing was like an archeological dig, Each fresh strata revealed something from its era. A roller disco night; Someone offering a reel-to-reel recorder for sale. An alarm clock that brewed you your morning cup of tea. He wouldn’t have been surprised to hit a layer with an advert for The Pony Express, a handbill demanding the Abolition of Slavery, and then others below calling for Enlistment into the Minutemen. 

Strata 42: His wrist was getting tired so he swapped over the scraper. But his less favored hand couldn’t wield the tool with any control. He stopped and waggled his sore hand. T.J. snorted and waggled a lewd gesture at him. “Thought that’s the one place you’d have well-developed muscles at least wiener boy!” 

Strata 43: For his part, Seth had rolled up his sleeves. Dried blood caked his tattoos, eclipsing them. The runt thought about tattoos, how the needle had to pierce so many layers of skin to make it permanent. Pretty much like the layers on this accursed wall.

Strata 44: Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear. Not the objects stuck on here. Things missing, things for sale… Loved but absent, or unloved and all too available. But not the objects themselves. Flat, two-dimensional reproductions of them. Long forgotten about. Even if the item was found, or sold to a new owner, it still remained broadcast here. No one ever followed up by removing the flyer. No case closed. That’s what the boys were doing, junking all the cold cases of domesticity. 

Strata 45: The runt whirled his neck to shake out some of the stiffness. He regarded the wall towering above him. There were even some flyers pasted up there. Fewer admittedly than at his level. He not only wondered how the posters got them up there, but how they expected anyone to be able to read them usefully. 

Strata 46: The opportunity of a lifetime, don’t miss out. The runt wasn’t able to see what was on offer, since the rest of the poster had been ripped off when whatever was lying above it came away from the wall. The opportunity presumably had long since passed. The question was whether the lifetimes of those being offered it, and the poster himself, had also expired. 

Strata 47: Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear, yet still no glimpse of the concrete below. This undertaking was beginning to seem like Ahab’s pursuit of the white whale. To scrape all the human barnacles caked and caulked to this concrete hide. This task wasn’t about flyers or the wall, it was to do with surfaces and depths. Only the runt could see this. 

Strata 48: The runt had developed a pressure blister from the scraper. He held his finger up so that the bulging skin was transparent as the light passed through it. Below he could see the flow of the clear liquid as he wiggled his digit. His plasma no less imprisoned than he was. He had located the source of his juvie-Nile. Blood, pith and plasma. The stuff all too easily spilt in the Juvie dorms and exercise yard. 

Strata 49: The edge of his scraper told the runt that finally the flyers were thinning out. The downside of that was that these were the ones most stuck fast. They could only be removed individually. Wait was that Little Bro? Or himself even? Captioned by a Wanted, Dead Or Alive motto. Sure bore a family resemblance. But the poster must have predated both of their own births, while the family hadn’t been in Texas for more than a single generation. Then there were posters of stolen game consoles, that also must have preceded their actual invention. The pictured missing jewelry also looked familiar to him. He begun tearing feverishly at them with his hands, scraping the skin from his knuckles. In no time at all he had them all off and the white concrete glinted at him. Just for a split second at least, for then there was a rumble and shouts of “Get back, she’s gonna fall!” Car horns sounded in the near distance and indeed the wall did come crashing down.

Sutra 50: Five youths… closer than they appear… teddy bear piñata grand larceny… puppet show red runnels of blood paint… maggots worms leeches… caustic bleaches… blanched white whale retiarius and trident… hot dogs cold showers mind your feet hygiene… corrugated transcendental reel-to-reel belt loop blasphemy… bullhorn ram’s horn mad Texas longhorns funeral pyre… Rejoice!