Rupert M. Loydell, THE SONNET REMIX AFTERLIFE OF EDDY DAEMON

The Afterlife of Eddy Daemon, 

book cover image by Daniel Y. Harris 

for Inner Space Space Ghost Machine, 

(Analaogue Flashback Books, 2016)

by Rupert M. Loydell 

This excerpt entitled THE SONNET REMIX AFTERLIFE OF EDDY DAEMON is from Inner Space Ghost Machine (Analogue Flashback Books, 2016), by Rupert M. Loydell, Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Stride.

Rupert M. Loydell & Daniel Y. Harris would like to thank the internationally acclaimed, musician, painter, poet, essayist and reviewer, Johnny Brainstorm, for his review The Future Was Electric, which examines the symbiotic and post-syncretic relationship between Daniel Y. Harris’ The Rapture of Eddy Daemon (BlazeVOX, 2016) and Rupert M. Loydell’s Inner Space Ghost Machine (Analogue Flashback Books, 2016) in International Times: A Newspaper of Resistance.  

THE SONNET REMIX AFTERLIFE OF EDDY DAEMON

1.

Trails across the bed. Eddy is dreaming of the removed and the brains

scooped out into the space siren's body, a wave breaking inside, sinside,

jam jar provided. Spare eyes are always Miss Taken and her high risk smile.

Highly useful but not medically essential. Risk piracy, lingering gazes,

eskimo kiss, then see how you feel. There: slow blink heart flutter,

molten trails of meat cleaver and mincing lust. Being in love, his body

a burned machine in the shed to your left. Away. Eddy scratches his itch

in the do-what-you-must, then washes his big finger labyrinth en route to

another hand. Break your pencil and pens, the Earth. He wants to make it

right, make it then discard. Never write or talk about Eddy. Beautiful things,

nothing else will do. The Daemon again. There must be no earth overrun

by brokenhearted zombies trying to breed necromancy or well-wishers

wishing well. Eddy Daemon is young, Eddy's not a broken man no more,

he's consigned to the silence of nothing. It is as though the editor can.

2.

Darkness spins. Reorganise. It is as though physical gender means nothing.

Eddy is feeling dismayed, his work is reassembled, nobody asked him how

or why. It is as though ideas mean nothing and can be freely plagiarised.

There is nothing to worry about, his argument remains the same. There is

nothing to worry about, posthumanity is here to stay. Everything is in flux,

in change, this is liberation, this is how things are. Eddy would like to believe

but somebody made things confusing, somebody stole his words. Things should

be clear not misted up. It must be time for a change, say the voices in his head,

but he could be persuaded, doing what we are told not to seems to make us free.

And when she danced for me it was hard to stop my fitting and post-medication

dance. They went on holiday for several years, crowds go wild. When the light

stops overlord chromosone damage left him allergic. Now we're back, and

when we get to just about everything, it brings home a nasty rash which

has never been away. It dawned on him he is lost. Oblivion and loss is to die.

3.

Eddy's Daemon's essence has been not at all the same, is now saved, third jar

on the left. This was all our Eddy's fault, back of the fridge, and now we are

ready to it's ever needed. In the feedback evidence he is gone without future,

a decaying noise loop without trace. No notice given, no time. When critical mass

finally comes, no forwarding address, no distant relatives, no convention left

undone; an inquisitive faulty android will upload Eddy and re-incarnate him

as your best friend or at least a posthuman overlord. This will be a neighbour

to say hello to, many years too soon. Eddy goodbye. As it is, the beast deserves

no more time to live though the earth goes on. We, he, can never die, the

unmade inhabit our own country and we wish Eddy Daemon was first. Unscrew

his arms and vote to leave. There seems too many legs so stick them in

the cupboard, second some misunderstanding. I know nothing. Remove

his heart, place it in the rubble, the burning kidney bowl; ignore the twitches

and screams, it's flesh. Eddy's natural system often seems to defy death.

4.

It takes a while for life to force its way into Star Command's private universe

Fly by, fade. No anaesthetic is required. Once everyone is in uniform,

constellations of lust leave. Vapour is completely still, the head can be gone,

and when I'm on gas he won't remember the day Hurricane Jane worked her spell. 

Eddy improvises, questions blow by, covering up the sun, undoing answers,

creating false impressions. This game has no name, look at Delta-Xeroid 5

bright in the purple. Let no man steal your time or give up on the sky above

or beseech the electro for no good reason other than to ignite the angel for

a room in the star engine. Take off for the weekend and claim membership

of the Hellfire Club. Keep your eyes on the boys and the devil you do, the

devil you ignore. Warning: Eddy Daemon didn't; both conspire and corrupt.

We pass natural systems, faces in the sky, nights together as the sun illuminates

desires you cannot name. What have we still and I experiment with the lost

and why has Eddy Daemon rescued/found it? The gradual diffusion of form.

5.

At the back of the kitchen, working methods and ideas draw inner space ghost

machines into gravity percussion, underpin them, taking a while to come down

to earth. Zero keeps seeping into culture, but now we are time. Eddy Daemon

and the Nights all have wet feet and a damp Earth, are headlining at the end

of a pair of shoes drying in the world. Sparks fly, electric rain short corner, torn

bloody clothes hidden under the circuit boards, the band are on fire. Burning

floorboards, and a working knowledge of the souls aspire to smoke, a sunbird

novum, a realm from which our victim's disembodied woven shade mapping voice

speaks, falling prey to a common beginner's mistake of rushing to reach the encore.

Spirals or circles? Scissors, rock, or paper? The accusatory part of speech? No.

Mollusc blues, a slide into full advantage, happily mad, risk zombies crashing out

into the prayer wheel labyrinth, the whole system erasing everyone in Drop City,

where no-one can quantify damage or wants the string of such a distance

as the technical days turn to dust. You must hide imagination to cope.

6.

Credit me in the darkness, stop me in anticipation of the future and falling

through the cracks here. Eddy is up to his neck in the Church of Unsound Grace.

The Archangel Zenophobe is in debt, the future seems as bad. He prefers it when

there is not the past, when bombing souls. Miss Tee is grey and on the death star,

Earth turns, floats between the goalposts of common sense. The enchanted world

is Eddy Daemon, is a whirlwind not a rational place, a lost spirit who often takes

vacations in hell. It is not rational. He needs warmth and to rediscover the power

of physical home away from the eyes of sensation, to steal a time machine and plug

in Hurricane Jane. Keep your eyes on the gaps in his storyline and hide the boys,

you never know what they're doing in the darkness. That Eddy Daemon is electric,

a war wound with anaesthetic bite. I don't know whether to lick spirit cocktails

and chalk dust paninis, or steal him and take him home. The future is switched off,

Eddy Daemon conjures time, living dangerously, can get you a secondhand glow

as the sun sets over whatever planet we need. Everyone loves Eddy Heartbreak.

7.

Everyone except me loves Eddy Heartbreaker, now we are marooned out-of-now.
Battery charm bracelet wind-up; you'll have to help out, erase deleted items

and hope for love by default. There are no niceties, only autopossession on demand.

Crystal the Great shoots starfire into missing stories, and here comes Eddy Daemon,

swaggering back into the movie of my dreams, the discourse of politics and space.

A dead dog walks through Noise City dragging not more silence but a broken string

of lights. End time is to fill the void, shadows near. Change descends across

the view and points to something else, like morning rain watched from a window.

Everything changes, home happened when they met in the alleys of the capital.

Eddy became transnational mutant and assembled uncanny moments from a snake

charmer, a servant of the memory of imaginary events. Hurricane Jane, the lead

in the film is an insomniac now, she lives in her own story. The woman on the ratio,

on the boundary, surrendered her yellow dress straightaway, once Eddy caught her,

waved his white flag and swore to own satellites. Eddy would like to never leave.

8.

And then? And then he rescued her but she has others, can rattle the lock good.

He cannot get around all her contractual arrangements, his wants, he isn't going

nowhere any time, despite his tendency towards greater speed and flexibility.

Soon, he regrets courting the squall that humans or humanoids can provide,

the fast lane eyes, all that broken quality of bottles and empty glasses. No-one

is driving, noise still floods the universe and he is data dumps and wikileaks,

a useless unfiltered hidden man, liquid poured into information, a half life

of narratives that dry sleep turned out to be. True. Crystal Lane shoots starfire

into every planet with ragged noise as the credits roll. The future is all at

your own risk and the weight of this is like a government advisor not visiting

unless you offer glittering hands and ageless isms, fever syndrome thrills

of the visceral kind. The soundtrack that unlocks tunnel vision, best-forgotten

memories and your dreams is a sixteen minute life-saved loop of synthesized

beatbox and soaring electrics in the sky; a broken guitar, a mirror on the floor.

9.

Something will occur. Complicit death, he said, will make you regret the future

as it is all we have in common. But Eddy lives it, always asking questions. I didn't

share his sense of doom, loved the blurry sunlight shadows and the cliché wind.

Why would you rely on the sonnet? Why indeed. It emotes, it was not to be, but

it is there, so let's dismantle it as words fall on deaf ears, let's see how it works,

watch it dying in his mouth. Stop. Please stop emoting, stop sharing, stop trying
to share. Poetry is a final descent, a splashdown into hell. Crash landing would be

preferable to this. Be more, make language motor towards somewhere, embrace

the undertow of hypnotic twang, the way that grief is slowly sucked out of you

and your despair. Don't equate death with what you do, abandon millipede erotica

and slow acknowledgements. Eddy Daemon fell foul of the train home, attacked

by distance. Eddy is convinced he knew what he shouldn't have done. His metallic 

side looks best but the robot was too young or underprivileged, the karma he has

customized since birth is watch-list insurgent. Whatever he did, he shouldn't have.

10.

Possibly, Eddy is set to a repeat cycle of terrorist or spy fashion, polish, spin,

and downpour reverie. Shattered sonnets done what he did and he shouldn't feel

so guilty, guilt is like a brilliant mind driven away from home, like confessing

to ancestral crime and Eddy doesn't want to be eclipsed by good-looking machines.

Eddy just does the crime, does what the noise wants. Through all of Eddy's

invisible stories, he lives slightly out of sunlight in a clearing in the woods.

But when there's slippage between guilt and time, and if you ever find it,

there's always room for more jumpcut abuse, lies and excuses, ways to work edits,

a volatile glitch which will become where and when and why. This is your death,

a remedy for sleep. Rather than an unwanted return to the ghost harbour,

mess around with Fuzzlebeth Crackleboy, or blag a time slot for The Guessing.

Liminal machines acknowledge you exist, so forget all about the Eddy Daemon

Hyperbolic Rollercoaster. There is no charge to ride, but you will be thrown

to excess on a nonsensical arc of emotion, then blown away in a strange corner.

—Rupert M. Loydell

Carl Raschke and Post-Philosophy: An Interview

Professor Übermensch Post’s Aisthesis, image by Daniel Y. Harris 

Carl Raschke and Post-Philosophy

An Interview

The following interview with internationally renowned author and academic, Professor Carl Raschke, is conducted by X-Peri Editor-in-Chief, Daniel Y. Harris, as part of the partnership between Esthesis and X-Peri. This partnership was launched with Carl Raschke’s interview of Daniel Y. Harris, aptly titled From Shakespeare To Search Engines – Experimental Poetry Comes Of Age.

Carl Raschke is Professor of Religious Studies,  University of Denver, Senior Editor, Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, Co-Founder and Director, Global Arts & Ideas Network, Associate and Managing Editor, Political Theology Today and General Editor, Esthesis

Daniel Y. Harris: From the concept of the alchemy of the word, to quote from the title of your epochal first book, to infinitely capacious tropes such as Derridean différance and Deleuzian rhizome, through to the disciplines of political and critical theology, in what ways would you describe your current philosophical and theological thinking as post-philosophy?  

Carl Raschke: I have coined the term “post-philosophy” (in contrast with, for example, François Laruelle’s catchy term “non-philosophy”, which he lifted from Deleuze decades ago) to convey the theme that philosophy is not longer an autonomous strategy of discourse, but a way of “branding” certain privileged strands of theoretical conversations while claiming a certain pedigree for them that would effectively turn the heads of our cultural peerage-mongers.    

Philosophy historically, especially in the modern period, has claimed to be a kind of “metalanguage” grafted from the hard sciences that might somehow serve as a “grounding” operation for all more specialized investigations of both the natural and the human world. Certainly that was the aim of Descartes’ claim to have discovered with his ego cogito the “Archimedean point” of all knowledge, and it applies as well as to Kant’s “Copernican revolution,” Hegel’s standpoint of absolute Wissenschaft, or Heidegger’s “fundamental ontology.”  

One may say it is also the thrust of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. And it of course is exactly what Laruelle is doing with his so-called “non-philosophy”, which is actually philosophy in its purest sense (i.e., trying to acquire a kind of Olympian standpoint from which one can enter directly into the gaze of the Real). But with what Heidegger himself called the Destruktion of metaphysics, from which Derrida derived his notion of “deconstruction”, we have also the “destruction” of philosophy. Heidegger himself called it “the end of philosophy.”  

With Derrida we have the still unappreciated insight which he took in a roundabout manner from Hegel,​ that we cannot separate philosophy from the history of philosophy, except that for the former philosophy always amounts to a kind of unique sentience about what philosophy is actually doing that is attendant on the reading of philosophical ​texts. With Deleuze, particularly during the period he collaborated with Guattari, we see an effort to return to what might be considered the "original being" of philosophy, which is the being of “bodies” and their interpenetration and interaction with each other. Deleuze maintained that the ancient Stoics had taken what we might call a “somatology” (from the Greek soma (=“body”) as their starting point.  That was the platform from which Deleuze, following Nietzsche, undertook his “reversal of Platonism”.  

The Greek word for this kind of “bodily knowing” was aisthesis which is usually rendered in a misleading manner as “sense perception”, in opposition to noesis (i.e., conceptual knowledge). But philosophy, which is a distinctive Western idea shaped from the outset by Plato himself, has always allied itself with the latter form of knowing, while subjugating the former. “Esthetics”, therefore, has historically been viewed as derivative, and subordinate, task for philosophers who seem to concern themselves merely with the “beautiful” as opposed to the “true" and the “good.” But what if philosophy indeed did begin with aisthesis, rather than noesis?   

A “post-philosophy”, therefore, simply comes down to starting over from scratch to go down the road philosophy could have traversed in the first place?

DYH: How does your online publication Esthesis advance both the output and the visibility of such a genre?

​CR: Esthesis is not a journal of theory. It is about “arts and ideas,” which unfortunately are two strata of discourse which rarely link together these days. ​Esthesis is largely an effort to give voice to those who seek to theorize - or reflect on - the arts in compelling new ways as well as to bring what we used to call “avant-garde” ways of thinking or philosophizing in close-quarter communication with the arts as what the radical European culture collective Tiqqun dubs (perhaps extrapolating from Wittgenstein) a “form of life”. A form of life is not a “discipline”. It is a forceful, lived expression of human beings in their autogenetic habitats. We want to do everything we can to change the conversation about the nature and role of the arts and “humanities”, casting them not so much as academic enterprises, but as paradigmatic praxes that put us in touch with the very genesis of thought and experience. In that regard Esthesis consciously and promotes the aims of any general project we would dub “post-philosophy”.

DYH: In what ways does post-philosophy challenge the academicization of thought?

​  ​

​CR: The academicization of thought in the United States has been responsible for both its compartmentalization and its trivialization. It has also been a major factor in its commodification. Knowledge, learning, and thinking has been cartelized by the American system of higher education as a means to an end, as a functional pinion within the global economic and financial machinery. To have any engagement with sophisticated ideas you have to go through some kind of approved syllabus of the corporate-financial-government elites who are the gatekeepers of what is socially, politically, and civically “acceptable, and who serves as “factory bosses” of the increasingly marginalized “knowledge workers” that live paycheck to paycheck belong to the swelling classes of what radical social theorists have come to call the “precariat.” Post-philosophy does not shackle us to the protocols of academic thought, even though the resources for its evolution and implementation can be assembled, like fragments of found art, from the oddments and tailings of the academy. Post-philosophy (following Deleuze) constitutes a new, theoretically generated kind of chaosmotic discourse.  

DYH: In what multifaceted ways does the ancient Greek concept of poiesis manifested through poetry, the visual arts, film, theater, music and literature inform you scholarly oeuvre?  

CR: The Greek word poieisis, from which the term “poetry” of course derives, is multi-valent, or polysemic (i.e., it has a wide range of often competing connotations).  Both Plato and Aristotle gave it philosophical currency, although they differed in how they employed the concept.  The original Greek context in which the term transited from an ordinary to a specific, technical use is now largely unintelligible to use, but a certain distinct way of negotiating the various twists and turns of this evolution can be found in the writings of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, who has become our only remaining and definitive authority for making sense of such a legacy.  As it turns out, there is far more going on than what we find simply in Heidegger’s own specific take on the matter.   But that is a problem for scholars, not art theorists. And Heidegger gets right a lot more of the early Greek nuances to the problem than he gets wrong. So let us begin there.

Heidegger distinguishes between the Greek concepts of poiesis and techne (the latter of which yields the word “technology”). Poiesis is a kind of “autoproduction” that belongs to realm of physis, or what we refer to as “nature.” Techne requires human agency and intermediation. That is why, for Heidegger, “poetry” is the authentic voice of Being itself, whereas “technology” is the upshot of what he calls Seinsvergessenheit (German=”the forgetting of Being”). As you know, my more mature scholarly oeuvre begins with a book I published in 1979 entitled The Alchemy of the Word: Language and the End of Theology (republished around the turn of the millennium under the title The End of Theology). That book introduces the later Heidegger for the first time in a serious way into religious philosophy as well as the early Derrida. Derrida, of course, received the inspiration for his famous notion of “deconstruction” from Heidegger’s concept of the Destruktion of metaphysics, a theme which I develop extensively in that work. But unlike the legions of “deconstructionists” who have multiplied since the 1970s, in The End of Theology I describe how the key to language is not the unravelling of sedimented textual meanings a la Derrida but the generation of unprecedented significations – what Heidegger dubs the “saying the unsaid” – through the poetic deployment of words.

DYH: In what multifaceted ways is post-philosophy performative and dramaturgical? 

As I emphasized in what was for me personally a career-turning essay published in the Harvard Theological Review in 1975 (entitled “Meaning and Saying in Religion: Beyond Language Games”), the “linguistic turn” in philosophy, which happened as early as World War I and in many respects has dominated ever since then (even after Derrida) can only be fulfilled through the realization that only a small segment of the larger spectrum of meaning in language can be considered inferential or “propositional.” Derrida himself offers a devastating critique of this embedded Western philosophical conceit in his essay entitled “White Mythology,” which unfortunately scholars who want to cut to the chase of what “deconstruction” implies tend to ignore. Deleuze and Guattari in their Anti-Oedipus volumes carry this distinctive “post-structuralist” critique of metaphysical, or propositional, models of meaning to a certain excess in the very direction you mention, especially with their valorization of the experience of the schizo.  They even end up saying that philosophy has become “nonphilosophy.” However, since Francois Laruelle and the speculative realists have appropriated the term for a completely contradictory agenda, I think the term “post-philosophy” is more appropriate, especially since we are talking about what philosophy is becoming, not what it is “not.” One could of course argue that philosophy is at its inceptions performative and dramaturgical. That is why all Plato’s thoughts are coded as drama, and Aristotle’s writings were originally lectures. 

DYH: Please discuss your plans for a memoir.  

CR: What you would call a “memoir” I would call more an “engaged retrospective,” since I would be immersing myself in the flows of the history of more than a half century. I would seek to “overcode”, as Deleuze might say, those flows in a distinctive way, not only when it comes to philosophy and theology, but my long-running engagement from the late 1970s to the late 1990s with “esoteric” and strange undercurrents of our collective experience – i.e., my days as a “real life Indiana Jones,” as one of my book blurbers once called me. My own personal life is not that interesting. But, like Ishmael in Melville’s saga, I had many curious glimpses of the “great white whale,” and I would want to find a literary way of bring the full “unsaid” ramifications of what happened to me, before me, and through me to some enduring and intelligible, as well as interesting, narrative synthesis. In my trajectory there are a lot of long lost and expertly buried “scrolls of Qumran” waiting to be discovered. But I would not call that trajectory “my” life. I would prefer to invoke Deleuze’s phrase – a life.

Seth Abramson, Excerpts from Golden Age

The Shallow End, cover image by Glenn Brown  
for Golden Age (BlazeVOX, 2017), Seth Abramson  

Excerpts from Golden Age

Ten Ways to Be a Metamodern Man

I.

A metamodern man is bold, charismatic, independent, audacious,

and genius. Capturing his audience with his charisma, incredible

intellect, mastery of manipulation, and boldness of action,

he is a show-stealer who demands your reverence at every turn.

II.

When a man has been captured and incapacitated, what does he do?

Cooperate with his captor? Beg to be spared? Hell no—

he makes it abundantly clear that he has absolutely no respect for his

captor. He does this by laughing at or snarking the one who beat him,

even if he’s in no position to do so—for instance, in pain on the floor

or behind bars.

III.

The averagely skilled friends of the highly skilled metamodern man

may sometimes survive their encounter with a villain

because the bad guy couldn’t be bothered to finish them off.

This never happens to a metamodern man: the metamodern man is,

out of respect, always finished off.

IV.

When a metamodern man is about to be devoured, he makes a comment

that amounts to demanding that his killers not enjoy their meal.

V.

Before a metamodern man dies, he fires off a line essentially saying

“I’m going to die, but my fight goes on,” or otherwise demonstrating

a continued defiance toward and disdain for his killer(s).

VI.

Metamodern men have a terrible tendency to die dramatically,

but will not, under any circumstances, stay dead.

This tends to cheapen their dramatic deaths to the point of them

being little more than flesh wounds.

VII.

The metamodern man is alone—except, perhaps, for a villain.

No one whose opinion he cares about will ever need to know

what he does next, and he knows it. And there is a useful but corrupt act

that he could commit, reaping the benefit without anyone ever knowing.

If he does not do it, the consequences will be severe, even deadly.

If a villain is present, he is urging the metamodern man to do it,

which possibly involves cleaning up any possible witnesses. Very likely,

the metamodern man is now at his darkest hour.

The stock phrase villains use in these situations is usually something like,

“No one will ever know...”

VIII.

Stock phrases are lines that get repeated often, but always carry

the same meaning each and every time they’re used.

In many cases, the metamodern man follows such phrases with,

“I’ve always wanted to say that...”

IX.

You are watching something unfold and it suddenly strikes you

that you have seen every single part of this somewhere else.

Every trope presents itself without irony or acknowledgment.

All of the situation is clipped out of another story and pasted in

as-is. You are in a “cliché storm.” Do not worry. The pain

will soon pass. A bug will soon scrag an inept lieutenant.

Security will soon come to the perimeter. The line will soon be

held. It will be over, and soon. Remember, this is not always

a bad thing: many a cliché storm is also a guilty pleasure—or even,

dare I say it, exactly what the audience wanted in the first place.

X.

Some metamodern men develop reputations that just won’t go away.

Maybe they’re famous for being divas; maybe they’re famous

for only playing certain roles in society—or even worse,

only playing one role. Nobody will let them forget it. They can

struggle mightily to earn a new reputation as a decent person

who can play a variety of cultural roles,

or they can resign themselves to their fate and make a career

out of it. “Adam West-ing” is a form of self-parody in which

metamodern men either play themselves or a “Captain Ersatz”

version of themselves, or else a Captain Ersatz version

of their most famous role—and play it as a total jerkass, an idiot,

or both. More rarely,

a metamodern man will play his most notable role but in a manner

exactly opposite to the one he’s most famous for—yet still

as a jerkass and an idiot. While this can be an affectionate parody,

it can also be an effective way for the metamodern man

to vent his spleen against a role in society that has gotten old fast

or even ruined the metamodern man’s life or career,

until the self-parody amounts to a “Take that!” against himself.

A particularly bitter metamodern man will make his self-parody

a deconstruction of his old role,

explaining how it was a horrible role and nobody should emulate it.

Like all deconstruction, this can come full circle, with the actor

doing a sort of “reconstructive self-parody”: sure, the role was stupid,

but I enjoyed it.

Drive-Thru Window Conversation

“What is the furthest possible you could take the concept of irony?

I mean, it’s being pushed so far nowadays

that it comes back around to being varying degrees of sincerity.

Has the limit already been reached? I think we could probably

put in an infinite number of posts before post-irony. Post-irony

will be succeeded by post-post-irony, and so on and so on.

Can’t we just go back to enjoying things again without this veil

of ‘New Sincerity’ or whatever? Take a look at Pynchon’s novels

and it’s like, Jesus, give it a rest and say something meaningful!”

“Sheeple! Fuck off with your shit. Irony can exist, but it has to

with sincerity to still be authentic. Catch-22 is a good example

of proto-post-post-modernism—a healthy mix of the two—

in which irony juxtaposes with the terror of the end of the book

to create something not entirely ironic, yet not entirely sincere.

Think of Milo bombing his own base. McWatt killing Kid Sampson.”

“That isn’t post-irony—stop listening to vaporwave. You’re an idiot.

Literature could be happening, and you prefer discussing genres!

Learn how to read; Pynchon’s works border on dad-tier sentiment

half the time. Name me one problem in America that isn’t caused

by inauthenticity.”

“The authentically trivial pursuit of authenticity. Socrates

already took irony as far as it could go: ‘sail on a ship /

passengers pay sailor / ask paying passengers why they are

paying / because they do not know yet if their trip was for

good or ill’—now keep up this level of ironic awareness

every hour of your life and you will have reached Socrates.”

“Post-irony, New Sincerity, and even ‘meta-modernism’

have literally nothing to do with irony—it’s the complete opposite,

i.e. cowards running in fear but pretending they’ve transcended it

to appear highbrow. I watched an interview

with one of the degenerates Shia LaBeouf spends his time with

these days, and it caused literal pain in my soul. In response

to your question, though, the limit will be reached when there is

nothing to be ironic about anymore. Irony needs sincerity to exist

but also, when successful, it defeats sincerity. If irony wins the war—

which, sadly, it looks as if it won’t—then it will have destroyed

every opportunity it has to exist. Then we’ll see what’s next.”

“So what’s next?”

“...”

“...”

“Diet Coke, large fries?”

“…”

“I was being ironic when I said that. Vaporwave is for pseudo-plebs—

‘future-funk’ is the way of the future.”

Four Exes

I.

Tennessee is humid. Two ladies are doing awesome

things. (“I want to make you happy.”)

Looking out the window, thinking of ways to be

benevolent,

you hold up tequila, the BBC radio drama Neverwhere,

and a super-awesome-fun movie

with weary competence. I write a self-help book

to illustrate how to eat cookies. And my feelings.

I did do things other than real, terrible love

and sweet delight. (Spoilers—excellent!) What goes

in the bowl? Milk. Mind. 

Blown hairs look reasonable, which is strange. 

Still pretending upset? You must suffer every day!

Water off, human.

When I leaned on style, uninspired,

there was too much after a while. Texts: What friends!

(Gah! False teeth give you a crowded smile.)

Like a child’s newsflash, the swords are all for her.

I can firefly back and forth, salt the earth,

mark a great man lightly. (“Guess I’m just a good man

again. Nothing to do but complain about it...”)

True, it’s great the second time as well. 

The funny thing is, I’ve never thought of myself as bad.

I didn’t know. 

What’s bad about form? I’m free from...what?

II.

Low wage protests. Walmart sales. Day protesters. Rally

at Secaucus. Better pay. Work conditions.

Demonstrate, bitter workers!

Freedom and other corporations politically motivate

television, Obama, SEIU,

anarchists, capitalism. LOL—we should be so lucky!

Showing up—better than voting.

At the same time, my most important work I don’t want

mistaken for consent. Apathy, I’ve decided: I’m voting

for New Jersey to teach “home defense.” (Can’t wait!)

Must read: Wanting Probably Has to Be Balanced With Ability.

Identify Good Ideas and Be Effective. Attract Authenticity.

Remove Restraints of Power. Labor! Don’t Let Fraud

Spread the Word for the American Dream. Stop Attacking

the Middle. Support ‘We Won't Pay Until You Do’. Stage Protests

Over Rising Costs.

Anthem, people!

Change, organize, declare, plan, wait, fight, rally, rally, see!

Act!

Start to thwart Will!

III.

Last summer, I ran in Sheffield. It was a great few weeks.

I covered a lot of very useful ground. In fact, it went so well

that this year in Manchester, over five Thursday evenings,

starting on 5th September, ending on 3rd October,

at the lovely Northern Quarter,

places are available for the details. And how! (What is form?

How do we mean? Do poems acknowledge their influences?)

This focus on “forms”—it established organic forms

within the idea of “you”

to deepen your form, vocabularies, poems, confidence.

(Understanding your work is a challenge.)

Two weekly canonical ideas: awareness and critique.

Respect and engagement. Form and personal density.

Cadence and variation. An argument echoes

a total experience, and momentum also works to raise

the full cost of contact.

A brief explanation of your interest: a revelatory focus

on my weak discussion, mediated through breath

and knowledge. Brilliant, inspiring, heavy-hearted.

I hadn’t expected learning about form to open up

a new feeling. (It was the bottom for me—the whole time.)

But I opened it, and I loved the look of it: “Ah-ha!”

IV.

(No trace.)

Epithalamic Sonnet

 

Whenever you need me, you just have to say:

“Let’s strike a little deal.”

This is the thing: I’m losing me. (Boy, there’s

nothing to schedule, no more to sort!)

In my future, I see you and me: we are whole,

but not exclusive. I’m flexible

and you’re tough

and cannot see either doubt or shadow.

I hope this isn’t a bad omen.

(I don’t recall anyone objecting on that bright

September day!)

•

“Climb out of bed, my darling,

and begin to dress!”

•

A door she had yet to walk through.

Statements of Concept

“Ten Ways to Be a Metamodern Man” is an appropriation and reframing of several entries from TVTropes.org, including the entries “Adam Westing,” “Cliché Storm,” “Defiant to the End,” “Magnificent Bastard,” “Not Worth Killing,” “Death Is Cheap,” “Stock Phrases,” “What You Are in the Dark,” and “Regret Eating Me.”

“Drive-Thru Window Conversation” is the lightly edited and augmented text of an actual Reddit conversation about metamodernism.

“Four Exes” is a phrasal remix born from a one-time and exceedingly basic Google attempt to locate online texts written by ex-girlfriends. Each section attempts to use the discovered texts to capture one aspect of a past relationship; no text appears in the fourth section of the poem because no information on the person in question could be found. Based in a curiosity about—but not any bitterness toward—the past, this poem was written with great respect and admiration for the four individuals whose social-media or author-website texts were deconstructed (beyond recognition, and intentionally so). All four of these individuals are extraordinary people, and three of them also happen to be talented poets who themselves have written poems about the author of this book. Still, their names do not appear in this book out of an earnest respect for their privacy.

“Epithalamic Sonnet” was composed by taking one line from each of 14 poems appearing on Australian site Hitched.com, which aggregates epithalamions en masse by permitting unedited, uncensored submissions from the public—indeed, almost exclusively non-poets. Individuals contributing a line to this sonnet include Diana Barsham, Craig Astley, Martin Richmond, James A. Coghlan, Andrea Porter, Pauline Halliwell, C.J. Munn, Helen Marsh, Catherine Smith, Emma Salmon, Mick Jennings, Hayley Gait-Golding, Vivian Hampshire, and Jane Graham

—Seth Abramson