Then hell was released from its stirrups and permitted to run wild across the land. The writers who were “not serious” had their wages stopped. This meant eviction and a camp being erected on the Wigtown marshland where “failed” writers lived. In the night, the embittered wrecks broke into the publishing houses and sabotaged “proper” writers’ novels. One Charlene Mina was printed with the phrase “poop and pap” cut and pasted a thousand times, ruining her reputation as a doyenne of sink estate homicide. The writer Tam Robertson’s novel was replaced with the words “smirking slaphead” across its 1000 pages. On that occasion, the critics praised Robertson’s brutal selflacerating autobiography, and this opened up the historical novelist’s remit to a more flexible form of self-loathing prose, but on the whole these acts of sabotage spoiled the futures of literally 3,929 talents.
Driscoll and Robin were soon fed up, and left the writers to maim and stab each other. This happened four minutes after their limo puttered up the A714. Kelly Brisk, incensed that her touching portrayal of a dustbowl family in crisis, The Thrush Sings, was replaced with a picture of Allan Medley’s anal cleft, located that failed writer and stabbed him in the thighs and shanks. Vivian Pollcrank, furious that her comprehensive study of candidiasis of the oral cavity, The Thrush Stings, was replaced with a badly xeroxed Prodigy album sleeve, located the culprit and stabbed him in the pyloric sphincter. Damian Horsecresent, in a froth that his paean to the Norwegian metal community, The Thrash Sings, was replaced with half a letter ‘b’ inside a semicolon, located the blaimant and stabbed her in the hypogastric region. Marianne Alpf, peeved that her study on men who find weak puns amusing, Desperately Seeking Mommy’s Love, was replaced with a press release for a new salad dressing, located the culprit and sent him a curt text of reproof. This conflict foamed for weeks.
Since the readers no longer received a salary and had moved to other countries, the writers who remained alive following the frenzied bloodbath faced the reality that no one was around to publish them or read them. To counter this, the crazed writers privately printed their own works, dressed up as critics, wrote effusive reviews, dressed up as readers, sat and read their own works in rapture, dressed up as panel judges and awarded themselves prizes, then made their speeches to themselves in empty halls. Before I left, Wigtown was currently dominated by those forty or so nutbags, ignoring one another, and acting as one-person publishing industries, very swiftly slipping into irreversible lunacy. In short, the utopia was screwed. The notion that writers, that most self-involved and self-interested race of parasites on the planet, might co-exist in some cooperative utopia, was the biggest delusion imaginable. I penned a strongly worded editorial to Driscoll and Robin. No reply as yet.
[An account of Wigtown by author Colin Colon, former inhabitant, emailed to the editor March 2110. Colin’s latest novel, Everylittlethingandmore, is forth-coming in 2111.]
“Pictures of Presidents”
[DUMFRIES]
[President Oliver T. Gravies, 2025-2029]
[President Wilbur Alabaster, 2029-2033]
[President Spenser Travol, 2033-2037]
[President Cuthbert Rothschild, 2037-2041]
[President Zhang Wei, 2041-2045]
[President Kåre Ødegård, 2045-2049]
[President Caroline Bassett, 2049-2053]
[President Letitia Newman, 2053-2057]
[Presidents Ivanka Ivanova, Roisin O’Doherty, and Baroness Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon 2057-2060]
[From Pictures of Every President Ever, Elliot Mayer (ed.), p.1012-1021, Harvard UP, 2089.]
“In Session with Kristin Sump”
[INVERNESS]
Sump: The Legend
KRISTIN SUMP, A STOLID WOMAN standing six foot two in brown loafers, aborted the locomotive and scoped the perimeter: a northwestern Scottish village named Drum where four hundred people lived in a sunken forest. She moved in a red cagoule towards the rank of taxis. Her stance had this air: “I have arrived and this will soon become apparent to others.” She unpicked the trip’s vexations: the hopscotching infant barring a swift path to the lavatories; the muddling senilities halting latte procurement; the proximal pong of travellers two hours from their next shower. She took a taxi to St. Hector’s Church on Ravell Street and consulted her notes on the parish priest, Daniel Drimmel: “Lank. Plank-thick. No relatives. Loner. Village in a copse’s arse.” She corrected her make-up in a handbag mirror and waited for the vehicle to propel her towards the ecclesiastical venue mentioned in the fifth sentence.
Like most churches in northwestern Scottish villages in sunken forests, St. Hector’s maintained a pious chokehold over the populace. Arnold Drimmel, the priest previous, had kept his long manicured fingers around their necks for forty-nine years, pressing on the collective windpipe from time to time for roof repairs or a portico polishing. The son successor, Daniel Drimmel, a reluctant invert traumatised with his father’s love, took up the cassock for a milder reign free from the fear-packed fulminations of his elder. Arnold favoured strenuous hillwalks, frothing up his Old Testament fume on the ascent, and belting out his sermons into the rolling fog and wet verdance. Daniel favoured pouring a cup of Pepsi Max and chilling to the sounds of Stereloab at the laptop, stitching his sermons from the least controversial and most unclear passages from the Good Books. His congregation, weaned on the froth, began to loosen up and think for themselves. Numbers dwindled.
Kristin, with the insouciant stride of an air steward taking a pack of peanuts to a ravenous passenger, entered. She ran a finger along the dusty pix. She stood at the pulpit and inhaled a smile. She pictured four hundred people listening to noises emerging from her vocal chords. She wondered why churches never had reception areas and you had to walk around staring at stained glass images of Christ. She poured bubblegumade into the font. She poked into various rooms. She found a man in casual slacks, brown sweater, and rounded spectacles working on a laptop. A book sat on the table: The Rambler’s Guide to Canada.
“Writing the Sermon on the Mountie?” she asked.
“Hello?” he started. He had earphones in transmitting Emperor Tomato Ketchup.
“Kristin Sump.” Kristin offered a hand.
“I’m Daniel,” he said.
“Yes. You I came here to peep. You are notoriotous. I am a therapist from the firm Headquacks Revisited. I heard about the change from paternastier to paternicer. You, the son of Arnold Drimmel, the Pastor Phillips for the one-click generation.”
“Can I help?”
“See this pen?” Kristin produced a Bic from her breast pocket.
“Yes, I can see that pen.”
“This biro is the pen that will propel your pulpit into permanence.”
“An interview?”
“Yes. With your whole congregation.”
And so, Kristin Sump headquacked the village inhabitants, making them dependent on her expensive counsel, spreading her tentacles of persuasion across the county, forcing her victims to erect a border around Ross-shire, thus birthing a nation. She met people regularly for “sessions”, proffering whatever “advice” might amuse her that morning, and kept the citizens in loops of useless despair and confusion, dependent on her psychotic counsel to barely function. Transcripts below.
In Session: The Kaurismäki Shrine
BERYL: So I set up the shrine to Finnish auteur Aki Kaurismäki in the middle of the A769.
SUMP: Fantastic!
BERYL: Yes. But there were complications. First, I had to position the deadbeat bar as featured in La Vie de Bohème between the two lanes as people honked their horns and hurled abuse from their car windows. The Matti Pellonpää lookalike I hired from Chipping Norton was furious at the circumstances and kept insisting on a larger fee. The Kati Outinen lookalike from Chipping Norton was almost clipped by a passing freight lorry, and bitter tears ran down her suitably lugubrious countenance.
SUMP: And?
BERYL: That was the beginning of our problems. To position the sequence of shipping co
ntainers as seen in The Man Without a Past along the roadside caused a three-hour tailback. The convoy, four lorries wide, led to the partial blocking of one lane, forcing Mr. Pellonpää to direct traffic, a task that causes him acute pain after his failed stint as a traffic cop. The language hurled at his suitably dour countenance was appalling. And the rockabilly band on the other side of the road, formed in homage to the Leningrad Cowboys from the two titular movies, were complaining about the poor sound quality of the amps, purchased on the cheap from a closing music emporium in Charlbury. And the choleric spinster owner of the coffee shop that had its entrance blocked and business upset called the police.
SUMP: Great.
BERYL: Not really. Once we had established the shrine, the police arrived and asked us to remove the deadbeat bar from the centre of the two oncoming lanes, as we were endangering our lives and causing traffic to crawl. The Leningrad Boycows were performing a humorous Finnish tribute to American rock and roll at an outrageous volume, and with some unpleasant feedback, causing the police to become aggressive and demand the music to stop.
SUMP: Wow.
BERYL: The immigrants and outcasts inside the shipping containers emerged and bolted when the police appeared in their purviews. The police leapt towards the scurrying illegals and criminals. This meant we could enact some scenes from the Kaurismäkian oeuvre, such as the awkward romance in Take Care of Your Scarf, Tatiana. I was wondering . . .
SUMP: Yes?
BERYL: How is this helping me lose weight?
SUMP: Muse on the moose.
BERYL: All right. Can you hold him up to the light?
SUMP: Sure.
BERYL: Because . . . the stress of organising the whole thing and the terror at being arrested and endangering the life of the lookalikes and the immigrants and vagrants has taken off a few pounds, probably, even though I have been stress-eating the whole time?
SUMP: Exactly.
In Session: Writer
SUMP: Describe your writing process, writer.
WRITER: I open the picture of Celeste. I spend ten minutes of time peering at the png of her face. The orange-red cardigan in ruffle along her right shoulder. The faint spot on her sleek pinkish neck. The cute bulb-like chin below her narrow balmed lips. Two small creases bracketing the smile. Roseate cheeks and a wee button nose. A pair of black-rimmed spectacles in the fifties-retro manner. A pale forehead with a crop of short blue hair twirling down the left side of her face. I imagine what it might be like to have sex with her. Then I open the picture of Alison. I observe the freckled arms poking from her black tank-top. Her broad orange neck. Her flat chin with its slight slacking skin. Her thick glossed lips shining in the bright light of the room. Her long catwalk nose with a sheen of reflected light and the left nostril larger than the right. The brief bags below her large, right-peering eyes, and the shock of mascara in their corners. Her tousled orange hair cropped at odd points around her face. I imagine what it might be like to have sex with her. This continues across a range of pngs and jpegs.
SUMP: Your writing process is staring at attractive women and wanting to have sex with them. Are you a sexually bereft batcheloser?
WRITER: No. I have a wife. I have regular sex. The problem is this: in writing we explore our imaginations. In the male imagination, there is a bitter irresolvable war between two factions. The strongest faction of the mind, The Cock Cortex, is libido-controlled. This faction is chained to the unending pleasure of unclothing beautiful women in long erotic scenarios, and the inevitable unedited sexual pandemonium that ensues. The other faction of the imagination, The Everything Else, is weaker, and must power and sustain the complex and taxing notions that comprise a novel. We’re talking 70-30% here, the largest the libido. The 30% must battle through a continual bombardment of arresting sexual imagery, and urgent impulses to leer at attractive faces, women in undress, and so on. That is vexing percentage.
SUMP: Interesting. Have you tried airbrushing the now?
WRITER: One your interconceptual non sequiturs?
SUMP: Muse on that phrase. Have a mental muse.
WRITER: You could ask me why I don’t a) masturbate to keep the sexual impulse at bay, or b) work sexual material into the novel. The replies: a) the sexual imagination reloads like a semi-automatic pistol, and b) no one wants to read the sexual imaginings of a middle-aged man. I repulse myself when I write a frenzied hump scene with Celeste or Alison. But I could airbrush the now. That might work.
SUMP: Are you still attracted to your wife’s ageing figure?
WRITER: Yes.
SUMP: Hmm. Let me posit this: these lapses into png longing mean the missus isn’t moistening the writer’s manhood?
WRITER: No. Our lovemaking is intense and meticulous. I won’t react to your tack of attack.
SUMP: All male novelists are adulterers. It is a symptom of spending hours taking imaginative flights. Most people adapt to the constraints of their lives. Writers spend hours smashing these constraints in their babbling stories of extramarital shagging in heated Los Angeles pools.
WRITER: I write about Cumbernauld.
SUMP: The real battle is between the possibility of acting on fantasies and consigning them to paper. At some point, the writer will be unable to tell between the real and the fake. You will stumble into an affair with a younger woman thinking this is some plot contrivance in a Cumbernauld saga. You will awake to a howling sweating ex-wife hurling tomato soup and other canned goods at your head. It is inevitable. I suggest you launch yourself into an unapologetic stream of lurid sexual affairs with whoever will participate.
WRITER: You might be correct.
In Session: The Illogic of Casserole
PABLO: Umm . . .
SUMP: Speak to me, Pablo.
PABLO: I presented my casserole to the logicians as the central metaphor.
SUMP: Continue.
PABLO: I tried to illustrate how non-classical logic spurns the bivalent prison of proposition with the mushrooms, carrots, and lamb intersecting with the mince, beetroot, and pumpernickel in a Haackian stew of extended modalities. The leading logician in the universe approached the metaphor and howled with laughter. “The principals of bivalence would improve twofold upon this hotpot hodgepodge!” he said.
SUMP: So?
PABLO: I was humiliated in front of two thousand logicians. I tried to explain further that the roast beef and embedded sprouts represented the powerful properties of paraconsistent logic. I was reasoning with inconsistent consistency, proving that the stratification of stuffing on the right portion of the casserole represented a breakthrough in the Leibniz counter and anti-counter valances. I was booed. “Your paraincontinent illogic is leaking like the melted cheese in your casserole dish!” he said.
SUMP: Did you deploy the symbol ∃ ?
PABLO: No. I produced the flan for the finale.
SUMP: How’d that fare, Pablo?
PABLO: I used the flan to further explode the principle of bivalence. To show the law of the excluded middle up for intellectual slackness, I excluded a centre from the flan: two pieces of pastry, one suspended above the other using invisible string. The logicians pondered the filling-free dessert. In place of cheese, almonds, cinnamon, eggs, and sugar, was emptiness, showing that the notion of consequence is unsustainable without the law of non-contradiction in cases of integrated contingents. The logicians, after several moments, burst into laughter. “This metaphor is mere flimflan! Boolean semantics shows that excluded middles are essential in the empirical verities of intuitionistic propositions. Your metaphor sags like the weak pastry atop your illustrative dessert!” he said.
SUMP: Who is he again?
PABLO: The leading logician in the universe.
SUMP: What happened next, Pablo?
PABLO: The logicians turned crude and chanted “this flan is a piece of shit!” and hurled me from the Logician’s Corner. They served the casserole among themselves and commented: “We prefer classical casserole, asshole!”
SUMP: Nasty logicians.
PABLO: Yes. I have a conference speech to make in Cambridge. Word will have spread about the humiliation. Any suggestions?
SUMP: Own the situation. Dress as a casserole and read your keynote speech from the perspective of a carrot.
PABLO: You reckon?
SUMP: Yep, Pablo honey. Start with: “I am here as a carrot to show you stuffed shirts that presicifications are bullplop. Supervaluationism is a steaming plate of wrong. I am here, with my friends, the potato, the leek, and the gravy, to prove everything you ever thought correct totally incorrect. Lick this, suckers.”
PABLO: Wow. Thanks, Krist.
SUMP: Give us a kiss, Pabs.
PABLO: Love you, baby.
[From Various Tyrannies: An Almanack, ed. David Putz, Putterbum Books, 2048.]
“Prawn Confusion”
[SHETLAND]
A prawn at night.
A prawn on a starless plateau.
A prawn named Simon riding up front in a Mitsubishi 340.
A prawn worried about the long-term oscillation of the axial tilt.
A prawn never shown footage of massacres in a wayward nation.
A prawn with troubles.
A prawn convinced that the morning will never radiate loveliness like before.
A prawn reliant on the kindness of stranglers.
A prawn with musical pincers.
A prawn overly sensitive about pinkness.
A prawn who says nothing and expresses something.
A prawn to the left.
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