TORTURE ME MOTHERFUCKER/SEE YOU @ NUREMBERG

This just in via email from FC2 writer and L.A. screenwriter Bayard Johnson:

TORTURE ME MOTHERFUCKER/SEE YOU @ NUREMBERG

torture me motherfucker
torture me, lying sack of fake president shit
torture me with more denial of obvious facts
torture me with more cheating on the vote
torture me with more treason in high places
torture me with more bribes of government officials which somehow got a name-change (“lobbying”) & is now somehow legal according to you getting big bucks pimping Oval Office favors to high rollers
torture me with more Guantanameros and numberless nameless offshore no accountability torture dens paid for by US tax dollars that’s your money you whiney spineless un-American law-abiding gringo liberals too, guilty by complicity apathy lethargy inability to punch in democracy via remote
torture me with more IRS audits like back in the day when you hassled me infinitely and collected zilch year after year
torture me with more neo-fascist bizazu
torture me with more highly tuned empathy for non-white non-rich non-Yalie non-skull & bonehead non-you
torture me with more straight-up unassisted autononsequitarianism
torture me with more mountains of universal contempt from world, Geneva, Abu Graib, you war criminal piece of booze-soaked shit
torture me with more lies about the cut on your face
your non-military non-record
your cocaine addiction
your glazed stupidity
torture me, American Nero, with more idiotic blatant lies on national t.v. that everybody even you knows that we know that you know are lies before you finish saying them
torture me with your treason
torture me everyone else is doing it what high road torture me with more lame-ass wiretapping of my phone by House (un)Intelligence Committee flunkeys for raging crimes like free speech
torture me with more unsavory fake-homeless goonlike operative wannabes who warn from my periphery Hey save your breath you freakin’ weirdo asshole I already know you know where I live come over here and torture an American, motherfucker, show some hair, if you got any
torture me with more genocide of the Middle Class
torture me with more pages of Constitution & Bill of Rights you wiped your skanky ass with immediately following projectile diarrhea all over erstwhile American dream reputation character credibility justice democracy honor & bottom line
torture me I am a sovereign nation
torture me with more FBI receptionists of plate glass face variety and I quote thru double-plated disembodiment ‘…it’s not so easy…getting information via the Freedom of Information Act…’ motherfuckers got that on tape & you can get it via FOI long as you got beaucoup lawyers bucks in millions & 20 years
torture this American who defies your fascism and will never shut up about it
torture me with no habeus corpus no right to speedy trial no right to face accusers no right to appeal no right to justice no rights no constitution no America
torture me with more treason lies & deceit when in the course of human events it becomes necessary to torture some sorry motherfucker, come out here to Santa Monica California and try torturing me
bring your stormtroopers motherfuckah
torture America some more, your pathetic rabbit-hole hop during national crises, the only one terrified by your terror alerts is you motherfucker
torture me with your public humiliation so complete universal & timeless that only you don’t get it
torture me with more oil wars
see you at Nuremberg motherfucker
you don’t know shit about baseball

Prose from a Machine?

Just joining this conversation, and am happy to read these passionate posts about the need for some good ol’ (but still new!), kick-ass radical culture.

I’ve become increasingly fascinated with what I can only call “machine prose”—methods, often Oulipian in nature, that impose a set of restraints on prose production toward all sorts of structural hootenannies. I don’t call this specifically Oulipian (you know, those mainly French folks who write without the letter “e” or produce 10¹⁴ sonnets in flip-book form), because for me it also grows out of Surrealism, Dada, and the various methods of William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin often listed under the inclusive rubric: “cut-ups.”

These methods, taken together, certainly produce their share of garbage (although, sometimes, a culture’s garbage says more than its Opera houses!), but just as often produces mediated work for a mediated culture—with the added bonus of offering interventionist critiques in a effective and often gut-busting form.

Over the last few years, I’ve been gathering methods and collaborators—picking up concepts as they arrive from my reading, my colleagues, and my accidents.

Some:

Two-person instant novel: Sit down over a several sessions (in the same room if possible), and compose collaboratively at separate stations. After a period of simultaneous composition with only basic raw material (a setting, a character name, the need to mention foie-gras), switch seats to edit/overwrite the other author’s work, changing, altering, and adding whatever…

Then, switch seats again and work similarly on the “original” compositions, and so repeat this process beyond these three iterations during a brief editing period. In this way, lose yourself in the work so that a third mind that moves between can emerge.

[N.B. This is the method for the forthcoming Chiamus book Abecdarium, a combination of me and Carlos Hernandez]

Speech Software novel: Write something. Read it into speech software without training the thing to know your real vocal cues. Get something more interesting in the product.

Re-organization Prose: Rearrange familiar passages from well-known authors according to alternative schemes: alphabetical, assonant, consonant, sensory, grammatical (parts of speech), phrasical, clausical, ad infinitum. Make e.e. cummings look like a square.

Backward story: Find a partner. Write a short story backwards, starting with the last paragraph, over email. Have your partner send the penultimate, you then send anti-penultimate, and so on. Find out where things really start.

Scanning story: Take completed prose and “scan” it using any number of methods for hidden patterns and themes that might emerge, which become the basis for new prose. (Currently discussing this with Debra Di Blasi, based upon a student exercise she developed).

Structural Pillage: Take published prose from your favorite authors and use the structure of their best paragraphs. In other words, get rid of all their words but keep their rhythm and punctuation. Insert other words.

AutoSummary Method: Plug text into Microsoft Word. Use the “AutoSummarize” function under the “Tools” menu to produce shortened versions of the text. Cut-in more text. Re-summarize. Repeat until you have the perfectly distilled essence of our dirty nuclear age.

[This post so far on AutoSummarize, on 25% summary:

Prose from a Machine?

I’ve become increasingly fascinated with what I can only call “machine prose”—methods, often Oulipian in nature, that impose a set of restraints on prose production toward all sorts of structural hootenanny’s. Speech Software novel: Write something. Re-organization Prose: Rearrange familiar passages from well-known authors according to alternative schemes: alphabetical, assonant, consonant, sensory, grammatical (parts of speech), phrasical, clausical, ad infinitum. Backward story: Find a partner. Scanning story: Take completed prose and “scan” it using any number of methods for hidden patterns and themes that might emerge, which become the basis for new prose. Insert other words.

AutoSummary Method: Plug text into Microsoft Word. Cut-in more text. ]

See—gets rid of the junk. Do it many times though. It’s a sort of randomized negative selection.

Homophonic Translation: Listen to texts in other languages and translate into English, as if the originals were in fact merely mumbled.

***

Ok, these are just a few.

These are material processed that speak to the texture and substance of production rather than the content. [Let’s face it, content is secondary, tertiary, unimportant—something for ridiculous realists hooked on outmoded narrative…].

I’m looking for more ideas and am I’m always looking for collaborators. Anyone with me?

–Davis