“Test Tube Babies” #2/5: “Ways of knowing.”

[In the style of a less anasemantic Bruce Andrews for the ten-tacles. Only shit, obviously.]

Ways of knowing.

Begin at any lugubrious point saddled between two intersecting vectors.

Jump the arc of a ploughed curve, all the time to skilling. A pungent

figuring of doubt. The concept of mens rea simply cannot be applied

to language crimes. (Looka these dummkopfs, jonesing for externality.)

The appealing curio of situationism was its use of binocular-inversion

as a revolutionary tactic.
*

Pleasantries are the most confrontational aspect of discourse.

There is now a growing academic literature concerning your

failure to return my phone-calls. Retake me to the site of my

spluttering inflection disaster. Slideguitar my spine whilst

bracing me for the soft shellacs. I’d love to audition for Peer Gynt,

but I can’t play the lyre.
*

Yeah, right: any text is open to endless & unbounded re-interpretation

& re-inscription when chewed over by your garrulous maw. My brain-pan

is wallcovered by creeper patches. Why was the Raj so insistent on outlawing

sati? I always kindaliked his music. Historiographical re-examination

is cadence alteration. I envy the academy; I can never read the same book

twice.

*

Let’s meet by the river and recuperate the depravity spectacle.

Contemporary Kafkas vanitypublish. Pathos abstraction. For twelve

years now, I’ve been living arguendo. Sure, pedagogy is inherently

erotic; but not at nine fifteen. Research in our Cancer Studies department

has taken a cultural turn. Painfully feigned vagina interest. Timorous

dandruff percolations.

*

Crapulent wunderkinden streak up shrub-lined dirt-tracks leading to the

uppermost crags. With heavy blades, they open a goat right there between

the commuters on Cheapside. The solvency of a liberal, capitalist society

depends upon correct rainmaker synchronisation. Ethiopians must imagine

their gods black & ithyphallic. Ours, rather, are fickle and protean; but

constituted, and not compromised, by this fact.

*

Do you remember that summer we spent together? Those joyful boys trimmed

their hair in accordance with the socialistic lifestyle, and their girls

were rocked to sleep by the shudder of diaphanous gunfire. I dipped my

not-by-bread-alone into the binary & snuck a bite out of the pleasuredome.

‘Imperialism’ becomes ‘acquisitive holiday programme’. Now serving: CHIPS.

(End verse).

*

I like a joke as much as the next guy; providing it’s not too ludic.

Fill up my plastic pipe with Super Bubble Mixture & tell me about “wit”,

the gentleman’s τέχνη. In this economy, we all have to tighten our

cummerbunds. If you wish to be accepted, open with a joke about alcohol

intake. (I’m not saying you’re a prude, but I’ve seen you wank with

marigolds on.)

*

Normative statements are strictly for dinner parties. Maturity is a kind

of alchemy; the best ideas from all known ideologies. I heard they’re going

to stop us observing British Summer Time in case it offends other scales.

I’m all for clarity in argumentation, but that was Parti gauche stuff.

Something like ‘germ theory of ignorance’: not very profound. At what level

& to what degree does coercion occur? Rabbit hat.

*

Don’t interrupt my freespeech valorisation explosion. Nice ancient

tradition you have here; shame if something were to happen to it. The problem

with Islam is that it never had a Willie Rushton reformation. Donkey meat.

Suck my legacy. Twee nationalcharacter simpering displaces patriotism.

“We find again here the figure of the scales.” Save my seat on the psycho-

geometrical boogie-board.

*

The question is not to answer the questions, but to change them. I’ve sat cross-

legged since birth in fearanticipation of circumscription. Join the debate;

this is democracy; bring your stultifying, spit-flecked misanthropy. Rhetoric?

Where did a nice girl like you learn a Korean word like that? Post-Powellite helter-

skelterism. What if Frank Soskice were a Hindu? Sure, I’m a moderate: slapbang

between Lenin and Luxemburg.

*

Take a sniff of the latest cut from my working-class pugnacity file.

Weight votes by bibliography-voluminosity; I’m at least as substantive as the

next guy. Take a flip through our hi-def laminated catalogue. You call this

governance? On any carousel, there must be horses that lead and horses that

follow. We need to stop glorifying kindness. Society relies upon reasonable cathexis

proportionation. Having the character of.

*

Please note the lapsing of your subscription to the Staffordshire Evening Mail

and Solipsist. There’s no such thing as The Big Society; only massive individuals

& their fucking enormous families. Don’t spit in my mouth; I’m nobody’s comrade.

Give urine-consumption a fair shake. Social democracy has no theme tunes. Ageing

population equals biofuel opportunity. No matter how Big it gets; there’s only room

for guys I can breeze with.

*

Creeping desecularization, for chrissakes. Boohiss the evangelists in New Cross

bedsits. Excoriate giving for the company it keeps. The past is an erection;

noxious sweat on a purposefully-bald head. Do I detect a hint of genocide?

A dream I had tonight. Sediment can just keep on collecting. Lacquered imaginings

of all our coeval moments. Dance though you might, you can never step in the

same riff twice. Literalist reading of your face.

*

Postmodernism has created its own metanarratives. Social history observes

its own silences. My dick hurts. Once the sentence fragment is incomplete,

it’s out of my jurisdiction. It is enough for our present purposes merely to

note. Recondite gap salacity. Just another empiricist pen-pusher. Can’t

exculpate such a clamorous craw of effulgent wordbastards. Hopefully you’re

taking this in the spirit I’m pretending it’s intended.

*

Celebrity celerity snoozefest. Anti-intellectual ‘dumbing-down’ complaint.

Who are you calling ‘voltface’? Repudiate avant-garde elitism! I love popular-

culture; it’s all so terrible. Absolute fringe moratorium. Of course we

appreciate the significance of literature: that’s why we’re burning it. I don’t

like them myself, but they’re very good at what they do. Pseudo-Voltairean

coporaphagia. Emancipatory wog gag.

*

Slash the bogeypoem’s throat with glinting bottleshard. It’s a new style

I’m calling ‘stream of unconsciousness’. A meeting without coffee; quotidian

non-intentionality. A man must always be advancing towards some telos, for

when he sits still, he places too great a pressure upon his scaffolding. Where’s

my welding iron? Oooh, performative. I pulled open the fridge, and it was full of

strictures. Got his prepositions transposed in a rummaging accident.

*

Current-carried silt greasegrasps for the myriad punctilios of our social

life. Wann ich ‘Britishness’ höre… (but not like that.) Motor away from

your regrets-locus, bulldozing bystanders all the while. Our task must be

to appropriate the disenfranchisement of women for progressive ends. It

begins with gouty selfabnegation, like pinpricks. Woke up in a pool of my

own mnemonic enjambments.

*

Two a.m. judder occurrence; lecherous crowd pulsations. Join our social-

singularity experiment & get your extraneous faces burned off. Fuzzy particle-

headed adumbrations of morningtime. Be your own wallet-inspector. I shook there

& cleated myself. Asking what stockbrokers do all day marks one out as unserious.

Bathos occurs to clip the palette. He really seems to believe that the destruction of

commodities is the apex of tragedy. Nothing is ridiculous if it happens fast enough.

*

Two visions of a mechanised future. ONE: Eradication of slack

-jawed labourcompulsion. Metallic sambos pourforth my plenty. Rick

Moranis defeats the Capitalism Spirit; swab the ectoplasm-encrusted

printer cartridges. Effortless opera understandment. “I ain’t no

bolsheviki; but I ain’t no stool-pigeon either.” In short:

shower-emergence phenomenon.

*

TWO:  cowcrates heave with joes; bourgeois glass tinkles to cover

the whirr of titanium joints clanking batons into smooth grey palms.

The dead will twist out a grin in admiration of the fine spadework

which actuates their endless power-nap. He that need not work,

neither will he need eat. Hand you a swiss-cheesed figleaf to cover

your fists.