Arcane Desires

Click here. Starting to try my hand at glitch/D&B. Sample is from Prefuse 73's "End of Biters."

Free-writing Prompt for English 207: Make a shopping list of literal items to be used in setting a metaphorical fire. Then, write a recipe for said metaphorical fire.

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1 ream, typewriter paper
ink
100 pounds coffee beans
1 camera battery
1 box tripod screws
1 can paint (shiny)
10 gowns and suits (assorted, height of glamour)
wigs (several)

Insert paper into typewriter. Eject screenplay. Drink coffee as needed. Place battery in camera (you should already have this) and film everything. Place the camera on the tripod & film everything. Paint the town gold. Insert your friends & loved ones into the gowns & suits (height of glamour). Place the especially dour friends & loved ones in wigs (fright or otherwise.) Make them act for you. Set the world on fire with your low-budget deconstruction of young ruban life in postmodern Information Age America. Profit.

The below excerpt is from The Knowthing Compendium, a hypertext novel currently in progress. Check out more at knowthing.net:

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"The Art of Ecstatics" was an aural art installation implemented by Yocto Angstrom in 1993. The installation occupied warehouse space in Manhattan's Meatpacking District in New York City, and the focus of the exhibition was on the manipulation of surfaces to create audio waveforms.

The pamphlet distributed at the exhibit went on to become more well-known than the exhibit itself. The full text is reproduced below:

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Reconstructing through pale grey oblivion, after a disintegration of values, mores, sociopolitical guidelines falsely governing free human action-- what follows deconstruction? Prophetic undertones which crescendo to territories that are uncharted. Love streaming sensefully through galaxies and a continuation of cycles past, just dominating the gospellic visions.

Chart the uncharted space after a swim with the celestial beast. Cumulus horizons of hyperborean tendencies and mixtures of those chemicals with the radio on.

Polarizing forces eliminate global policies binding senselessly the senseful, those relying only on perception of three-dimensions because it is all the experience possible. Past Yemen and the Bering Strait, the corruptor seeks to annihilate. Just before the struggle collapses, a void of oblivion undulating under pigeonswarms. Collision is evitable. Exitable, when a connection through an integration of worship and time unseen. Pur(e)ity, pureness of thought and being should be the ultimate possessing force. Playing through fire, dancing under through about above beyond aside after against amidst among along beside between below belonging to pert hard homonyms, synonyms, anagrams, Afghanistans, pure trounced a Bushbuffoon picturing the under and the poles. And the Poles. Pan's creation under idyllic moon offering intricate watercolours of the world's pinch. Molecular toppings to a quark filled world.

Little ponds little numb pushing this surrender, my discorrosion. Play again love. Kiss. Man in journeys created by love. Pills grill, spaces fill, and the afterlife tomorrow, today the existence in parallels just Creole. Stews of just another destiny. Persimmons, penumbras, peaches, pears, and plums. Past the void of interatomic gesticulation, there is another voice coming through. 0pen to the greatness for names. Kiesa. Justlemoa, Politlovas. January made me quiver, February made me shiver. Undue man, undue. Pick through past parcels of storm, and you will see the divide. Just another Amon. Name this. Pole is the name of the pole. Name is the name Kiev. Rhine.

Polasy palsy . . .

Pale answer.

(Draft portion of a planned live performance piece.)

People want things. Large billboards and moving pictures convince people that they want these things. There is a place where people go to get the things they want. Large trucks carry the things to this place. People count the things and put them into trucks. Other people give electronic numbers to the people who used to have the things. The electronic numbers represent pieces of paper, and the pieces of paper represent more things. People almost never see the actual pieces of paper. The pieces of paper, which used to be larger pieces of paper, have pictures of old dead men on them. These men had lots of metal coins when they were living, which is one of the main reasons that they are on the sheets of paper. They bought different kinds of things with their coins than people do now with their pieces of paper.

Things are very popular with people. People wrap some things around their bodies and put different things in their mouths, and the things go through their gastrointestinal systems. Those same people carry things around in other things they buy. They take the things out of the things they carry them in and do other things with them. They put their things into the things of other people. The things store where people buy the things has so many things. They sell stomach things, things that move, things that talk, things to help things with, and things to hurt things with. The thing store has people that will give you the things and take your pieces of paper so they can get their own pieces of paper. At the things store, they sell butter. At the things store, they sell guns. At the things store, they sell butter and guns. Some people think this is not crazy at all.

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Nebulae are somehow both chaotic and organized, the first stage in the cycle of a star. Plasma, hydrogen, and dust amalgamate and gather new substances. Nightshades, Neptunian orbs, jars of starfish swimming in bathtub gin, moonapples, and the rest of the big black nebularform words collide and become a new organism.

Is surreality the only way to enter the realm of nebular forms: amber and hyacinth? A montage of the beautiful, with crystalline necks of swans just hovering on a golden track as you drift. Is the illusory preferable, visual and auditory? What if you could taste the illusory, touch it, grab on to it with both hands? Rimbaud called for a derangement of the senses, and isn't that truly what we're trying to achieve in art? A manner of perception which eclipses that which we have been given in this world and takes us to new heights. But within this derangement, is it possible to reach a transcendent level, to escape stores that sell butter and guns just a few aisles apart?

If you convince your mind that the patterns are syncopated and syndicated, then your own simulacrum is your own. You can live in a painting or a book or an imaginary castle on an alien planet. Fantasies can be juvenile-- they are designed to bring us back to the spirit of childhood that we neglect in favor of a societal structure that forces misery and work on us. Maybe we should all get back in childhood cardboard boxes and lift off in our strange new spaceships with the ability to imagine, one of the keys which separates us from the status quo and gives us the ability to shift reality to the degree that we have already. Back to the garden, childlike not childish, as in children of god. And we could do this all inside of a cardboard box. Hike through virtual canyons, explore verisimilitudes unparalleled because they not only imitate life but go beyond in spontaneous acts of whimsical creation. Or we could just eat Whimsicles. A Whimsicle is like a Creamsicle, but they taste like cinnamon and smell like vanilla.

Butter and guns. Why the dichotomy: guns and butter, butter and guns? Don't we have other choices? We could be lachrymose acrostic agnostic gnostics with pockets full of pebbles on another plane, scorched with fire to deviate, disintegrate, enunciate, denigrate, and then create anew. That sounds like more fun.

I don't like the butter and guns store. I'm not going to go there anymore.

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Hurry everybody hurry. Do your work in a cubicle, and you'll get a bigger cubicle and a slightly bigger house and you can eat sandwiches instead of just bread and maybe get a bed one of these days.

The worker works for his worker's pay all day. No time for thought or contemplation. By the time you're home, you're too tired to go out in the world, let alone protest the whole damn environment. The middle manager will make him wear his uniform. The boss wears an even shinier uniform than the middle manager.

Dreams save us. Extricate yourself from the cruelties of the world. Live in a monastery, one of your own choosing. Beg for alms. Arms grow longer, and you don't know what to do with them.

Get up again by some mechanical device that your body instinctually resists obeying. Loud, piercing noises. Noises you wouldn't like if you were already a ghost.

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God does not play dice with the universe, says Einstein. What about the dice rolls for Jesus' rags? Christian cosmology declares that God is omnipresent, omnibenevolent, omnipotent, and most importantly omniscient. Aren't those quarks obeying God's commands? On those dice rolls, when the men were casting lots, wasn't every molecule predestined to give some lucky Roman soldier the garment, the crown, the cape?

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Cash and carry those butter n GUNS. Pick 'em up and get 'em out of our way. We'll overcharge you for butter and guns. Guess what we'll buy? More butter and guns!

1. Take a picture of yourself right now.
2. Don't change your clothes, don't fix your hair... just take a picture.
3. Post that picture with NO editing.
4. Post these instructions with your picture.

I am using voice recognition software on my laptop and pretending I am Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the Starship Enterprise, commanding my laptop to play this video. "Computer, onscreen!" Geeky headset for the win:

Over the past month I've been fascinated by the seemingly infinite remixes of M.I.A.'s "Paper Planes" (MP3) off of Kala. Her lyrics in the verses kick ass, and "M.I.A.: Third-World Democracy. Yeah, I got more records than the KGB" is the icing on the cake. The hook is sampled from The Clash's "Straight to Hell" (MP3) off of Combat Rock, and everyone from The Beastie Boys to Jim Jones have remixed it. Panda Riot even did a full-blown cover. But the Most Fucking Awesome Remix Award goes to Dskotek's nu skool breaks cut-up mix (MP3) . The drum production is fucking amazing, with these bleeps and bloops and swooping analog synths turning into 256th notes. Plus it takes all of the vocals into account perfectly, rather than going with the tired "use two second loops from the original and put a 4 on the floor beat behind it" technique. Highly recommended as one of the best tracks that I've heard in a fucking while.

Here's the weird part: T.I.'s new leaked single "Swagger Like Us," (MP3) -- featuring Jay-Z, Lil Wayne, and Kanye West -- doesn't remix "Paper Planes." It samples M.I.A.'s sample of "Straight to Hell." Ladies and gentlemen, we have entered the age of metaremixing. But is this a new phenomenon?

Unfortunately, no. Outside of the electronic music community, R. Kelly was probably the great-grandfather of meta-remixing. First there was "Ignition" (MP3). Then there was "Ignition (Remix)" (video). Then there was "Ignition (Remix of the Remix feat. Twista)" (MP3/image). You also had Radiohead doing with two different version of "Morning Bell" on Kid A (video) and Amnesiac (video). Where does the madness end, ladies and gentlemen? I ask you, where does it end?

Girl Talk's pay-what-you-want new album Feed the Animals (MP3s released on the "Illegal Art" label) samples 300 different songs. It was released on June 19, 2008 under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial License, probably because he was trying to acknowledge that he was doing something cool but illegal. At this point, all of these sounds, these mashed-together waves, can be snatched up by producers and broken into infinitesimal fragments. At what point do they cease to be the original author's creation?

"'Is a quine' is a quine" is a quine. Is a remix of a remix a remix or a reremix or a metaremix?

"Franny & Zooey (& Peter)" is a short story which was originally submitted to our friends at The Fiction Circus for their monthly slash fiction contest. The piece of short fiction, written by American presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama (D-Illinois), controversially contains an erotic amalgamation of the literary worlds of two noted American authors: J.D. Salinger and Orson Scott Card.

The story was rejected by the site. Due to the tense political climate in the nation right now, the editorial staff at Arcane Desires believes that this information is highly newsworthy, and the public deserves to see this piece of "literotica" once and for all. Despite warnings from our legal staff, we are posting the story below, including a screenshot of Sen. Obama's original submission e-mail.



This e-mail is clearly genuine, and since it follows the format of other campaign e-mails, we can pretty much assume that someone didn't hack into Barack Obama's Yahoo Mail account to send it. But it also gives us insight to the man behind Barack Obama, the swirling thoughts in his mind as each synapse of his brain soaks in the perceptual stimuli he takes in daily.

The original short story follows below:

"Franny & Zooey (& Peter)"
by Barack Obama

On the ledge of the new Glass family Steinway, in between parenthetical green marble bookends which held Bessie's yellowed vaudville audition pieces, rested an opened pack of cigarettes. All it took for Franny to know they were Zooey's was the the way the pack looked.

Although there were only two cigarettes left unsmoked, the box looked crisp and clean. Zooey's packs always looked like they had been purchased directly from a tobacco farmer in Virginia and carted home in an armored car with a cast-iron case. There were two reasons for this. First, Zooey smoked constantly, and his packs never lasted more than 6 hours. Even as he retired to bed each night, he usually kept a few burning as a kind of soporific incense which lulled him into the land of Cockaigne. The second reason had to do with the way he took care of his packs. He would fit them lovingly inside his shirt or jacket pocket to secure them, the way he always kept things close to his heart. Franny had yearned to take one all weekend, but the time wasn't right yet.

Thinking about Zooey's cigarettes got Franny thinking about Zooey's face, and then his body. He had an incredible figure, probably staying fit for when the ultimate script, literate and aesthetically correct, was brought to him by an eager new agent. She imagined that one day he would get that part, because Christ, he looked Hollywood in a way. But Zooey was always modest, refusing to look into the mirror, even while he shaved. He feared the pull of Narcissus, but he always did his push-ups for the Fat Lady. He always did his pull-ups for the Fat Lady too. He always did his crunches for the Fat Lady.

Franny was by no means a Fat Lady, but she appreciated it all the same. She also appreciated the way he was so domineering. He had a way of making you think he was always right, of getting you to trust him. Even when he talked down to her, she felt like a silly, young girl being chastised by a strong man. After the war, everything was different. Men came back and wanted to be men again, and women wanted to be women.

She had been heart-and-cunt-lonely since breaking up with her boyfriend Lane Coutell the week before. Although Lane lacked testicularity, he was still good for a makeout session after a game. It was those lips, lips like Lord Byron would have. Zooey didn't like him from the first, Franny knew. She could always tell from the way he scrunched up his face. In a way, Zooey talked to Lane like he talked to Bessie.

"Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a miserable sinner." Franny mouthed the words she had been praying for weeks out of the little green book. She had overheard Zooey talking and knew how much he hated the word "miserable" in the prayer, and she did it now just to spite him. Was she sinning now, in the want of her Zooey? Christ said that any man who looks at a woman with lust in his heart has already committed adultery with her. Was it the same for a woman? And what about when it was her own brother? She caressed her upper thigh as she melded face down with the sofa.

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Interlude

Meanwhile:

Seymour was dead. Muriel, Miss Spiritual Tramp of 1948, had married someone else.

Buddy was in the bathtub reading Seymour's letters in utmost pleasure.

Boo Boo was having boring suburban sex with Mr. Tannenbaum.

Walt was dead.

Waker was having sex with a nun.

Lane Coutell was sitting in his dormitory. His roommate, Edgar Winters, had taken a leave of absence for the semester due to his frequent nosebleeds, and Lane had the room all to himself. He considered himself, delicate and sensitive to the world before him. Stephen Crane's "Red Badge of Courage" was draped across his lap with a hole through it, and Lane's engorged yet petite member -- which had created the hole -- was moving furiously in and out of the book.

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"Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a miserable sinner." No one was home. The cat was running around the front room. Zooey had told her that before she started praying to Jesus, she needed to figure out who Jesus was. And she had been trying for the past few weeks, trying hard to understand Him not as St. Francis of Assisi, but as Christ Himself. But it was so hard meditating on treasures in Heaven when there were so many splendid treasures on Earth. So much skin to caress as your own is caressed, so many muscles to touch, and so many desires to quench.

"Lord Zooey, have mercy on me, a miserable sinner." The prayer slipped out of her mouth before she realized it, but just as she despised herself for it, she adored the syllables brushing across her tongue and teeth. And as she began her new mantra, Franny's mind turned to thoughts of grimoires, fabulous and esoteric flowers she could gather to brew into a love potion while she repeated those unholy words in a fit of lustful rage. Her hand parted her thighs, and she imagined Zooey parting them, cigarette in one hand with the other slapping her pert little ass. She burned for the thought of one of his ashes falling on her back, burned to be her Zooey's little ashtray.

Oh God, all she was thinking about was Zooey. His cigarettes, his meetings with friends, and the way he tenderly took on Buddy's voice to comfort her. Surely he felt the same way, surely! But he could be rough too. That was his most fervent hope, that tender Zooey could be rough with her flesh. And as she prayed the prayer, it was these thoughts that flickered through her helpless mind as she finger-fucked herself on the sofa.

"Lord Zooey, have mercy on me, a miserable sinner!" she screamed, visibly shaking at the thought of him behind her, having his way with her. She wanted to be Zooey's actress. She wanted to play the roles he wrote out for her, damsel in distress or lascivious seductress. Two fingers curved into her fresh young slit.

Suddenly, an old, hermetic-looking man carrying enormous color-coded filing cabinets walked into the room. When he noticed the spectacle, he looked intrigued but horrified. Before he could stop Franny's reverie, a blowdart sailed through the air into his back. He collapsed on the ground without Franny noticing.

Franny peered into the mirror across from the sofa and watched her litheness spread itself out on the couch. What radiance, what beauty God had instilled in her! And all of it was there for Zooey's pleasure if he would simply ask to taste of it.

"Hey buddy. What's new?"

He was there. He had walked into the room. Franny began to tremble more. When she heard his words, she looked over her shoulder at him seductively with an intense need, like a female cat displaying and ready to be mounted.

Their love was bliss. Pure, idealized bliss, just as is the face of God. This is why mere mortals, even the holiest of men, can not look upon the face of God. It is holier than they are prepared for, despite their consecration. They realized at that moment that Seymour and Buddy, with all their ridiculous lecturing about the Diamond Sutra and Zen koans, were preparing them for this moment. They were alienated by the rest of the world only because they were sanctified for each other. All of the loneliness of the past melted away like a snowflake in a furnace. At that moment, they realized why their lives had been so troubled: they had not been fucking each other. And this was it. Limbs grasping for limbs, pure intellect and sensation like that of an immaculate Rilke poem! And when they came, there was a wet spot on the bed in the shape of a bouquet of very early-blooming parentheses. (((())))

And I, Peter Wiggins, was the one watching this spectacle from the Glass family front closet. Watching their bodies intertwined was my moment of anagnorisis. Finally, I understood why I had treated Valentine Ender, and the rest of the world so badly in the past. I had wanted them, and I had been jealous of their love together. What I desperately needed was not war or power, but a consummation of my love with the two of them. I needed an orgy, a beautiful Wiggins family orgy, where we could share our love fully and deeply. And now I am off to find both of them somewhere in these interminable galaxies. I am off to discover, to re-discover, and to suck Ender's cock and lap at Valentine's cunt. I am now prepared for incestuous bisexual orgiastic bliss.

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