deadken
deadken
penitent
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I woke up to the honking of the horn and my head was splitting and as soon as I opened my eyes I gasped for air like a dying corpse.
The myriad of linear driftwood posts rapidly flickered past the windows.
The boar was not as fast as he was, but had the ability to wind in and out of tree trunks.
There was a long pause of silence but it was a comfortable silence and the sea to our left glittered in the rising sun like millions of flashing cameras. I rolled down my window and the wind on my face was cold yet warm.
The myriad of linear driftwood posts rapidly flickered past the windows.
The boar was not as fast as he was, but had the ability to wind in and out of tree trunks.
There was a long pause of silence but it was a comfortable silence and the sea to our left glittered in the rising sun like millions of flashing cameras. I rolled down my window and the wind on my face was cold yet warm.
[account deactivated]
deadken
deadken
penitent
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me2. postin from the gym. mens sana in corpore sano. Beefcake
getfiscal
getfiscal
Mike Nelson here.
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i want to take a writing class but i haven't read much fiction so it seems like i'd be getting the cart before the horse. also 90% of classes appears to be either really basic or like "workshop your novel in process with a master" or something. i'm not sure where i'd fit. i want to learn elements of style from a meat-teacher but i don't want to sit through people talking about their x-men novelization or whatever.
deadken
deadken
penitent
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do it there might be a girl. try to write about things that arent crippling solitude tho
getfiscal
getfiscal
Mike Nelson here.
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yeah i might do that
getfiscal
getfiscal
Mike Nelson here.
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i mean take an intro course
me writing about anything other than crippling solitude would be like me writing about mars or sex
me writing about anything other than crippling solitude would be like me writing about mars or sex
getfiscal
getfiscal
Mike Nelson here.
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there's one that starts next week apparently
i hope my parents will pay for it
i hope my parents will pay for it
Impper
Impper
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deadken posted:
I woke up to the honking of the horn and my head was splitting and as soon as I opened my eyes I gasped for air like a dying corpse.
The myriad of linear driftwood posts rapidly flickered past the windows.
The boar was not as fast as he was, but had the ability to wind in and out of tree trunks.
There was a long pause of silence but it was a comfortable silence and the sea to our left glittered in the rising sun like millions of flashing cameras. I rolled down my window and the wind on my face was cold yet warm.
these started to cause me pain by the second line. i'm gonna go ahead and believe this is a single story
Impper
Impper
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also lmao @ the line about th eboar
Impper
Impper
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discipline posted:
impper's at the gym
i had an awesome workout, and i met a girl who was working out much harder than me lol even though today was one of my "hard" days. i tried to talk her out of doing good mornings but she insisted
Impper
Impper
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getfiscal posted:
i want to take a writing class but i haven't read much fiction so it seems like i'd be getting the cart before the horse. also 90% of classes appears to be either really basic or like "workshop your novel in process with a master" or something. i'm not sure where i'd fit. i want to learn elements of style from a meat-teacher but i don't want to sit through people talking about their x-men novelization or whatever.
don't worry, it'd be a shock if any of your classmates have read more than 5 or so novels outside of things they trudged through for high school
Impper
Impper
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deadken posted:
do it there might be a girl. try to write about things that arent crippling solitude tho
my current novel is about a guyu's crippling solitude, kobe bryant, serbian nationalism, and terrorism. yes this is the same kobe bryant thing.. what the fuck am i doing
getfiscal
getfiscal
Mike Nelson here.
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this is probably not a good sign: i daydreamed that my first assignment was to write a horror story so that i wrote a short dialogue where one person convinces a marxist and a liberal that he's right and then he reveals that he was arguing for hitler's viewpoint in coded language. and the horror is basically the liberal reader having to spin his or her wheels to feel bad for any sympathy they had for hitlor lol
Impper
Impper
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i pulled that trick in my 2nd novel and also argued that thats what lars von trier did in the antichrist; my second novel is unpublishable, as is my first, and my 3rd will be as well. you're on a great track kiddo
getfiscal
getfiscal
Mike Nelson here.
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i was inspired by a section i read of "my friend hitler" by mishima
getfiscal
getfiscal
Mike Nelson here.
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i just imagined staging "my friend hitler" with the caveat that the proceeds go to israeli settlers at the margins
Impper
Impper
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ahahahah. that would be beautiful all around, my friend...
Impper
Impper
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my favorite part of my friend hitler is that i have always seen a sort of tragic component in the story of the SA and ernst rohm... glad that the same thing that inspired mishima inspires me as well
lungfish
lungfish
San Francisco
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Everyone loves Hitler.
germanjoey
germanjoey
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lungfish posted:
Everyone loves Hitler.
Impper
Impper
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ken tell us more about your class. how are they receiving your writing, how are they receiving your criticisms, have you made any friends yet
deadken
deadken
penitent
Post rating:
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Impper posted:
my current novel is about a guyu's crippling solitude, kobe bryant, serbian nationalism, and terrorism. yes this is the same kobe bryant thing.. what the fuck am i doing
kobe bork seems to be dragging in unrelated topics like some conceptual black hole. porst extracts
deadken
deadken
penitent
Post rating:
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Impper posted:
ken tell us more about your class. how are they receiving your writing, how are they receiving your criticisms, have you made any friends yet
i havent submitted anything yet! but the story i posted in the other lf about the book writin factory is gettin workshopped on monday. i havent been as ruthless in my criticism as id like but thats because i want to do sex on them. so just like lil negs about 'slightly clumsy phrasing,' game bro. game
[account deactivated]
deadken
deadken
penitent
Post rating:
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The Machine
by Dead Ken
It’s early when I wake up. I’m dehydrated, there’s a clammy taste in my mouth, but I’m not too hungover. It’s better, actually: if I’d drunk enough water the night before I’d have slept through my alarm clock, and as a writer it’s important that I get in to work on time. It’s not long after dawn, but the cold bright Moscow light is already shining through my curtains.
Ludmilla, my landlady, is already up, frying eggs in the kitchen.
“I didn’t hear you come in last night,” she says.
“I was quite late,” I tell her. “I’m sorry.”
She chuckles, showing her fractured row of coffee-stained teeth. “You artists,” she says. “You’re all such bohemians. Drunk all night, dishevelled in the morning… reminds me of my youth.”
I look down at myself. I hadn’t thought I looked too bad: my boiler suit is freshly pressed, and I’ve had a shave. Ludmilla is busying herself about the kitchen, salting the eggs, slicing bacon, boiling water. “Coffee?” she asks.
“Thanks,” I say. “Have the newspapers come in yet?”
“Only Izvestiya.”
“That’s fine.”
After breakfast, I take the tram to work. Early as it is, it’s already full. Minor Party functionaries in trim suits sit on the hard chairs, reading Pravda. I glance at the headlines over their shoulders. In front of me a fat babushka in an ugly floral blouse and a shawl sways with the jerking motion of the tram, at one point staggering backwards into me. She mumbles an apology through her gums.
Getting off the tram, I can see my workplace hanging ponderously on the horizon. The Pushkin All-Soviet Literature Factory sits heavily above the rest of Smolenskaya. The old six-storey buildings with their cracking paint, criss-crossed by tram lines and telephone wires, look like a gaggle of peasant huts under the shadow of an opulent gold-domed church. From some of the more narrow streets close by you can’t see it at all, until you turn a corner and there it is: lurking at the end of the boulevard, rising haughtily above the cityscape around you, its broad smokestack plunging blasphemously into the crystalline morning skies. It was built in the early years of the Revolution, I think, when stark modernism was still considered a virtue in architecture. I’ve seen old photos: back then, there was something quite elegant about its simple angularity, its sheer smooth sides folding together to form a vast tapering roof. It looked a bit like a Western cathedral, actually: smokestack for spire, concrete pillars for flying buttresses, the symbol of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers where the old masons of Europe put the rose window. Stalin hated it, of course: in the thirties, he had the smooth concrete faces overlaid with crinkly columns and false windows; he put onion domes on its four corners in the hope that they would detract attention from the huge chimney. It’s a shame, but what can we do? I’ve thought about petitioning the managing committee to restore the old façade, but there’s precious little money in the state coffers for architectural renovation these days.
Off to work, then. I walk down Kompozitorskaya to the factory, clocking in by the heavy wrought-iron gates that ring the building. “Morning, comrade,” says the guard. “Good morning,” I say. Past the freight bay, where a big lorry growls steadily as two men in overalls carry a pallet of magnetic tapes to be taken out to the printers, under the wide arch of the main entrance, into the factory floor. There are no windows here, but it’s bright and cool: a hundred or so fluorescent lamps hang down from the ceiling. In the middle of the floor sits the Machine. Its tendrils reach out into every corner: conveyor belts stretch diagonally from the offices in the upper floors, pipes and wires come in from all sides, forming an electric web in which the giant spider-Machine sits, whirring. From its centre a single brass tube reaches out to the ceiling: this is where the steam and fumes from the underground generator are passed out through the smokestack.
During my first week at the job, I was shown round the whole Factory. The technicians explained in slightly condescending language exactly how every part worked and how they fitted in to the grand operation. I don’t remember much of it now: the vodka isn’t good for my memory, and I’ve never been much of a mechanically-inclined man – I am a writer, after all. But I’ll try to explain its workings as best I can.
The Factory produces novels at a rate of between three and five a day. Many of these are rejected at Quality Control, of course, but that’s still an impressive number, proof that mechanisation works in all areas of life. In the Concept Office is a huge punch-card computer. In the founding days of the Factory a team of typists was marshalled to input the basic details of hundreds of thousands of novels: Russian and international, popular and literary, classic and contemporary. More novels are still being added, of course: those from the Factory that have won particular acclaim or sold particularly well, and those from abroad that get past the censors. This information forms the computer’s database, a set of numbers that it continually re-arranges. When the computer comes up with a concept that one of the literature commissars in the office considers viable, it produces a punch-card which is sent on to Development. There, a series of engines take the basics – genre, plot structure, setting, hero, antagonist – and flesh them out. There’s a new computer there (made with American technology, although nobody likes to admit that) for creating characters based on not only the complex figures of Shakespeare and Dostoevsky, but Freudian and Lacanian theory. Also in Development is a machine running an algorithm that produces titles and generates a name for the novel’s supposed author. This data is sent on to Structure, where another set of engines reconfigure it into chapters and paragraphs. Finally, a series of punch-cards is sent out to all the relevant areas on the factory floor, where hundreds of workers with their various machines do the messy work of actually writing the story. It’s all stored on magnetic tape. One final machine stitches together all the various fragments produced across the Factory into a single coherent story. Once it’s finished, two reels are sent out: one to the printers, and one to the Criticism Factory in Leningrad, where a similar array of machines condenses the novel for a review to be published in the Literaturnaya Gazeta.
It’s all very efficient, but I can understand that some people might find it a little soulless too. Surely great literature can only be produced by the mind of a single genius? Surely a machine can never do the work of a poet? But the fact is that the Machine writes very good books. The more literary ones are reviewed in foreign journals, in countries where nobody knows about the Factory: the Americans gush about the soul of freedom buried just below the surface of the text, the enduring libertarian sensitivity that survives Communist oppression; the French, meanwhile, are similarly enthusiastic about the wealth of psychoanalytical readings offered, the delicate handling of complex philosophical problems. The British, it must be said, tend not to like them all that much, but even there the odd book will win some praise: The Skylarks, for instance, or The Last Passion of Vasily Fyodorovich. Why is this? Well, it’s not really the Machine that writes the books, it’s all of us: all of the thousand or so writers at the factory. The Machine is just the tool we use to express ourselves. Some of the finest literary minds of our generation are here, in blue boiler suits, cranking machinery and tightening conveyor belts.
I work on the dialogue gears. They’re near the front of the Machine: dialogue is one of the last things to be slotted in to the novel. The gears themselves form a tall chrome cylinder, around which a dozen or so workstations are laid. They make a clicking noise as they spin, the clicking of a hundred declarations of love, a thousand confrontations between fathers and sons, grandiose speeches, morose reflections, angst-ridden confessions. If you have an ear for it, you can tell what kind of dialogue is being produced by the tone of the clicking. Right now, the gears are clacking along at a fairly high speed, so it’s probably a popular novel, or maybe a less important exchange in something weightier. The noise is quite high-pitched too, coming from near the top of the cylinder: the larger deep characterisation gears at the bottom aren’t engaged. A trashy romance, I’d guess. But then after only a few seconds there’s a whirr and the gears fall silent – it’s only a very short exchange, so probably from a war story or a science-fiction adventure.
I sit down at my station and clock in again. The conveyor belt to my right hums into life. While I wait for my first assignment I chat to my neighbour a bit. Pyotr is a heavy-set man with a bristly moustache and a long mane of slicked-back hair. He wears his boiler suit with two buttons open, revealing a pale flabby chest dotted with hairs and the silver Orthodox cross he wears around his neck. We don’t agree on much: I think he considers me something of a naïve ideologue. We’re still good friends. Before the full mechanisation of literature Pyotr had been a poet, a romantic nationalist. One stanza of his became quite famous; it was chanted by soldiers during the Great Patriotic War. Before my time, of course.
The roaring gales of our land command you
The streams that cut through ice and snow
The pastures of your kinsmen implore you
Go on, to victory, go!
“Did you see Magda last night, then?” Pyotr asks.
“I did,” I say. “We went for a drink at that place off Khamovnichesky.”
“Anything?”
I shake my head. Magda’s family is Czech, I think, or Polish. She works as a typist at the accounting department, and so far she’s rebuffed all my advances good-naturedly but firmly. She has a lover in the Navy, Valentin. He’s stationed at Vladivostok, and sends a tearful telegram once a week. She showed me a couple. They’re all rigidly formulaic, the same soppy dross every time, far less inventive or emotional than the love-letters the Machine produces.
“I don’t know what that girl’s thinking,” says Pyotr. “Her boy’s probably getting up to all sorts of shit out in the East. Brothels on every corner out in Vladivostok. Fucking sailors get all the fun, right?”
“She’ll come round,” I say.
“You just need to man up,” says Pyotr. “Grab her by the shoulders, tell her you’re madly in love with her. None of this taking her out for wine and pirozhki. You’ll only spoil her.”
“Vodka,” I say. “Not wine.”
Pyotr sniffs. “I like a girl who knows how to drink.”
The conveyor belt makes a clunking sound and deposits a punch-card in the tray. I examine it. The exchange I’m to write is for Where The Mountains Meet The Sky, a rural melodrama set around the time of the emancipation of the serfs. Not my favourite project, but better than the war thrillers that have come to dominate the Factory’s output. A line of code is printed along the top of the card: the dialogue is between Aleksandr Mikhailovich Nikiforov, a small landowner who wants to sell the family estate and move to the city, and Olga, his conservative mother.
“What’ve you got?” says Pyotr, peering over.
“Melodrama,” I say. “Look at these figures.” I show him the row of numbers. “Seven for register. Seven for intensity. Eight for statement length.”
“You’re such a snob,” says Pyotr. “You’d rather every book we wrote was just terse despair, wouldn’t you? You’re like a little Kafka.”
I chuckle a bit at that. There’s another whirr from the gear-cylinder, and it falls silent. It’s my turn. I walk up and reconfigure the dials, set the stylistic parameters, input the novel code, then slot in the card. As the wheels churn I smoke a cigarette, leaning against the cylinder itself, enjoying the feeling of its throb. Eventually it clanks to a halt and spits out a reel of magnetic tape, along with a paper copy of the dialogue I’ve just written. I have to proofread, of course, and make such adjustments as are needed: I am a writer, not a mechanic.
Olga, her head bent low by her misery, went to stand by the window of their dacha. “Look at all this, Aleksandr,” she moaned. “This is your land. This is the land your fathers fought with musket and sabre to protect. These fields you disparage so cruelly are nourished not only by the tenderness of the earth but by the blood of your heroic ancestors. How can you refuse so solemn a duty? How can you turn your back on the history of our family?”
“I see only dead black soil,” said Aleksandr Mikhailovich Nikiforov. “I see only the dismal weight of the centuries bearing down on us. Our history is a prison! Yes, I dare to say it! Our noble ancestors keep us in as much servitude as they did the serfs! They stare at us with a baleful eye from the portraits on our walls and fix us in our allotted place! Don’t you want to be free, Mother? Don’t you want to escape the tyranny of our past?”
“What freedom, my son, what freedom? You would exchange the wide expanse of our homeland for the gutters and filth of the city? You would walk with beggars and Jews on every corner? Oh, how could I have given birth to such a son, one who spits on the graves of his fathers? Forgive me, Lord, forgive me! Mikhail, forgive me for giving you so impetuous an heir!”
“Mikhail is dead, Mother. He is dead, and I will not allow him to rule over me from below the ground! The farm is mine now, and it is for me to decide what will be done with it. Your pitiful wailing will not alter the course I have chosen.”
As I read on the exchange intensifies, insults fly from both ends of the room, until Aleksandr, overcome by fury, grabs a rolling-pin – and there the dialogue ends, of course; the matricide itself has already been written, and if I want to read it I will have to buy the book.
It’s not exceptional, but it’ll do: I punch the card number into a keypad and send the roll of tape down another conveyor belt to be stitched into the rest of the novel. More cards arrive. Writing Where The Mountains Meet The Sky is more of a mindless labour than I like to admit. Others are more engaging; the parameters are looser. For quite a few I have to make several versions on the dialogue gears, pick one that I think works the best, then feed the tape into the gears again and make such alterations as are necessary. For literary texts this input is important. The dialogue gears are an advanced piece of machinery, but the imagery and metaphor cogs used are far more rudimentary than those elsewhere in the Machine, and sometimes a writer has to fill the gaps. That makes all the difference. It’s the difference between this:
“You do give me happiness,” she said, tears glistening in her eyes. “But my sadness is so huge, it swallows up all the happiness you give me. I love you, Yuri, but my misery is stronger than your love. It’ll destroy you. That’s why I can’t stay.”
And this:
“Yes,” she said, tears glistening in her eyes. “You do give me happiness. But you can’t ever make me happy. There’s a hollowness inside of me. There’s a black hole right at the heart of my soul, and it sucks in all the love and happiness you give me. If you keep me, and keep giving me all your love and all your joy, it’ll suck you in too. You’ll be left like me. Yuri, I love you too much to let that happen. If I stay with you I’ll swallow up your soul.”
Eventually a whistle sounds out, and it’s time for lunch. I go upstairs to meet Magda. She’s sitting alone in front of her typewriter at the accountancy department, her head cradled in her arms, sobbing gently.
“Are you alright?” I say.
She doesn’t say anything. She just dangles a thin piece of paper in front of me with a limp hand.
“What is it?” I say.
“It’s from Valentin,” she says. “How could he?” She collapses into tears. I read.
Magda,
The time I spent with you was the happiest time of my life. Your letters gave me solace in this distant city. But we are both human, and we both have needs, and I think it would be better for both of us if we moved on to other people. I will not forget you.
With love,
Valentin
“I know what he’s been doing,” spits Magda. “He’s been screwing some whore out in Vladivostok. I loved him. How could he?”
I put a hand on her shoulder. “Let’s go for a walk,” I say. “You’ll feel better.”
We go to Presnenskiy Park and sit on a bench in the shade, under the haughty gaze of one of the skyscrapers that cluster around the banks of the river. I’ve bought some blini, which we eat with sour cream. She moans some more about Valentin, while I try not to reveal my inner exultation. She’s not crying any more, at least.
“Let’s get some vodka,” she says suddenly.
“I do still have writing to do,” I say.
“And I still have counting. Come on, you old reactionary. I’ve just been dumped. I want to get drunk.”
She seems more cheerful as we walk to a café. It’s on Krasnaya Presnya, a busy road, and the passing apparatchiks and bureaucrats look at us with thinly veiled contempt as we sit with our glasses.
“To new beginnings,” says Magda.
“To new beginnings,” I say. We clink glasses and drink.
After the third glass Magda is positively exuberant. “To be honest,” she says, “I don’t know what I was doing all that time. Waiting for months on end for Valentin to come back when there are so many other people here in Moscow. Like you.”
She sidles up to me a little, and stares into my eyes for a moment. We kiss. My hand moves down from her shoulder to the small of her back, hers strokes the back of my neck.
“Decadents!” shouts an old woman further down the street. Magda draws away, embarrassed. She pours herself another glass.
We walk back to the Factory hand in hand. At the gate Magda plants a kiss on my cheek. “Meet me tonight,” she whispers.
“Where?”
“Here. At the Factory. After the whistle. When everyone’s gone. By the description generator.”
I walk – somewhat unsteadily, it must be said – back to the dialogue gears.
“You stink of booze,” says Pyotr. “I didn’t see you in the canteen. Where were you?”
“I went out with Magda,” I say. “To Krasnopresnenskaya.”
“That girl again? You’re wasting your time. There are so many other girls here. What about Anna at the plot-device device? She’s pretty. And single.”
“Magda’s not with Valentin any more. I’m seeing her tonight.”
That gets him interested, he rubs his belly. “Where?”
“Here. By the description generator. After everyone’s gone.”
He whistles. “Nice.”
The rest of the day drags on a little. I write a few comic exchanges – the Machine can be surprisingly funny. In one, a village idiot finds himself unexpectedly called for an audience with the Tsar due to a bureaucratic mix-up. Another has two buffoonish philosophers discussing the nature of Hegelian ontological Essence in relation to a potato, and ends when one of them, in desperation, eats it. Then another from Where The Mountains Meet The Sky: Aleksandr is in court, charged with the murder of his mother. The judge accuses him with dread gravity of the heinous crime of not only killing Olga, but of hating her as well. In an impassioned plea, Aleksandr quotes Luke 14:26 at the courtroom, he argues for the eradication of all things old and the construction of a bright, shining new Russia, free from the strictures of Church and tradition. The judge, baffled by the radicalism of the youth, condemns him to death. The Machine gives the judge a demotic register, which I have to correct manually. Something must have got lodged in one of the gears again. These things happen.
Finally the whistle sounds and the machines start to wind down. Pyotr nudges me in the back as he leaves. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he says. “Have fun.”
I stay at my desk until the guard comes. “We’re done, comrade,” he says.
“I’m just doing some proofreading,” I say. “I’ll be finished soon.”
The guard shrugs. “Suit yourself.” He chucks me a key. “Lock up afterwards, would you? Dedication to the job’s a commendable quality, but I need to get drunk.”
Only then do I set off: away from the dialogue gears, past the exposition engine, past the monologue machine, past the plot-device device, to where the description generator juts out of the main body of the Machine. It’s not a tall cylinder like the dialogue gears, but a big misshapen metal box from which cogs and conveyor belts extrude at seemingly random intervals. There aren’t any chairs, either. The writers on description have to work standing up.
Magda’s there already, perching on the edge of one of the desks that abut the machine. She beckons me forward with a single finger. I grin. We kiss.
“I thought today wouldn’t end,” she says.
“You’ve only had to wait a day,” I say.
She pulls me closer, and starts fumbling with the buttons of my boiler suit. I press myself against her. She overbalances for a second, reaches out with one hand, pulls down a lever on the side of the generator. There are a series of clunks, then a hiss, then the familiar whirring sound of a machine warming up. The desk starts to vibrate.
“Shit,” says Magda.
And then another noise, from inside the machine. A sudden scream that lasts for a fraction of a second before being cut off. Then a crack. The cracking of bones.
I lunge for the lever and turn off the engine. With Magda’s help I wrench one of the iron coverings from its surface. She screams. A body slides out and lands in a disjointed heap on the factory floor. Its back is broken, its legs are mangled, its head is twisted to one side, its eyes stare emptily into the distance. It’s Pyotr: fat, moustachioed, naked, one hand still clamped around his cock. There’s no blood. But printed all over his body are words: lines of text, random descriptions from the generator, weaving patterns across the dead poet’s thighs, his chest, his arms, his face, stamping their mark on him, claiming him as their own.
Across steppes and pastures she flies, yearning, endlessly yearning
The room was dark but cosy, warmed by the pleasant heat of a small stove that crackled merrily as we
the narrow streets, tinged yellow by cumulative layers of grime and misery
the grand prospect of the river itself, that
He was a short man, but with an intelligent face, one that never seemed to grow angry or to
thundering like a herd of wild beasts, full of fresh energy and vigour
given an eerie tinge by the soft light of the moon
deep in its sylvan tranquillity she
the inviting warmth of her body
as if nothing had come before this moment, as if this moment would never end, as
where the yellow beacon beckons
A narrow field was
next to the
splendorous
his desire for
if
by Dead Ken
It’s early when I wake up. I’m dehydrated, there’s a clammy taste in my mouth, but I’m not too hungover. It’s better, actually: if I’d drunk enough water the night before I’d have slept through my alarm clock, and as a writer it’s important that I get in to work on time. It’s not long after dawn, but the cold bright Moscow light is already shining through my curtains.
Ludmilla, my landlady, is already up, frying eggs in the kitchen.
“I didn’t hear you come in last night,” she says.
“I was quite late,” I tell her. “I’m sorry.”
She chuckles, showing her fractured row of coffee-stained teeth. “You artists,” she says. “You’re all such bohemians. Drunk all night, dishevelled in the morning… reminds me of my youth.”
I look down at myself. I hadn’t thought I looked too bad: my boiler suit is freshly pressed, and I’ve had a shave. Ludmilla is busying herself about the kitchen, salting the eggs, slicing bacon, boiling water. “Coffee?” she asks.
“Thanks,” I say. “Have the newspapers come in yet?”
“Only Izvestiya.”
“That’s fine.”
After breakfast, I take the tram to work. Early as it is, it’s already full. Minor Party functionaries in trim suits sit on the hard chairs, reading Pravda. I glance at the headlines over their shoulders. In front of me a fat babushka in an ugly floral blouse and a shawl sways with the jerking motion of the tram, at one point staggering backwards into me. She mumbles an apology through her gums.
Getting off the tram, I can see my workplace hanging ponderously on the horizon. The Pushkin All-Soviet Literature Factory sits heavily above the rest of Smolenskaya. The old six-storey buildings with their cracking paint, criss-crossed by tram lines and telephone wires, look like a gaggle of peasant huts under the shadow of an opulent gold-domed church. From some of the more narrow streets close by you can’t see it at all, until you turn a corner and there it is: lurking at the end of the boulevard, rising haughtily above the cityscape around you, its broad smokestack plunging blasphemously into the crystalline morning skies. It was built in the early years of the Revolution, I think, when stark modernism was still considered a virtue in architecture. I’ve seen old photos: back then, there was something quite elegant about its simple angularity, its sheer smooth sides folding together to form a vast tapering roof. It looked a bit like a Western cathedral, actually: smokestack for spire, concrete pillars for flying buttresses, the symbol of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers where the old masons of Europe put the rose window. Stalin hated it, of course: in the thirties, he had the smooth concrete faces overlaid with crinkly columns and false windows; he put onion domes on its four corners in the hope that they would detract attention from the huge chimney. It’s a shame, but what can we do? I’ve thought about petitioning the managing committee to restore the old façade, but there’s precious little money in the state coffers for architectural renovation these days.
Off to work, then. I walk down Kompozitorskaya to the factory, clocking in by the heavy wrought-iron gates that ring the building. “Morning, comrade,” says the guard. “Good morning,” I say. Past the freight bay, where a big lorry growls steadily as two men in overalls carry a pallet of magnetic tapes to be taken out to the printers, under the wide arch of the main entrance, into the factory floor. There are no windows here, but it’s bright and cool: a hundred or so fluorescent lamps hang down from the ceiling. In the middle of the floor sits the Machine. Its tendrils reach out into every corner: conveyor belts stretch diagonally from the offices in the upper floors, pipes and wires come in from all sides, forming an electric web in which the giant spider-Machine sits, whirring. From its centre a single brass tube reaches out to the ceiling: this is where the steam and fumes from the underground generator are passed out through the smokestack.
During my first week at the job, I was shown round the whole Factory. The technicians explained in slightly condescending language exactly how every part worked and how they fitted in to the grand operation. I don’t remember much of it now: the vodka isn’t good for my memory, and I’ve never been much of a mechanically-inclined man – I am a writer, after all. But I’ll try to explain its workings as best I can.
The Factory produces novels at a rate of between three and five a day. Many of these are rejected at Quality Control, of course, but that’s still an impressive number, proof that mechanisation works in all areas of life. In the Concept Office is a huge punch-card computer. In the founding days of the Factory a team of typists was marshalled to input the basic details of hundreds of thousands of novels: Russian and international, popular and literary, classic and contemporary. More novels are still being added, of course: those from the Factory that have won particular acclaim or sold particularly well, and those from abroad that get past the censors. This information forms the computer’s database, a set of numbers that it continually re-arranges. When the computer comes up with a concept that one of the literature commissars in the office considers viable, it produces a punch-card which is sent on to Development. There, a series of engines take the basics – genre, plot structure, setting, hero, antagonist – and flesh them out. There’s a new computer there (made with American technology, although nobody likes to admit that) for creating characters based on not only the complex figures of Shakespeare and Dostoevsky, but Freudian and Lacanian theory. Also in Development is a machine running an algorithm that produces titles and generates a name for the novel’s supposed author. This data is sent on to Structure, where another set of engines reconfigure it into chapters and paragraphs. Finally, a series of punch-cards is sent out to all the relevant areas on the factory floor, where hundreds of workers with their various machines do the messy work of actually writing the story. It’s all stored on magnetic tape. One final machine stitches together all the various fragments produced across the Factory into a single coherent story. Once it’s finished, two reels are sent out: one to the printers, and one to the Criticism Factory in Leningrad, where a similar array of machines condenses the novel for a review to be published in the Literaturnaya Gazeta.
It’s all very efficient, but I can understand that some people might find it a little soulless too. Surely great literature can only be produced by the mind of a single genius? Surely a machine can never do the work of a poet? But the fact is that the Machine writes very good books. The more literary ones are reviewed in foreign journals, in countries where nobody knows about the Factory: the Americans gush about the soul of freedom buried just below the surface of the text, the enduring libertarian sensitivity that survives Communist oppression; the French, meanwhile, are similarly enthusiastic about the wealth of psychoanalytical readings offered, the delicate handling of complex philosophical problems. The British, it must be said, tend not to like them all that much, but even there the odd book will win some praise: The Skylarks, for instance, or The Last Passion of Vasily Fyodorovich. Why is this? Well, it’s not really the Machine that writes the books, it’s all of us: all of the thousand or so writers at the factory. The Machine is just the tool we use to express ourselves. Some of the finest literary minds of our generation are here, in blue boiler suits, cranking machinery and tightening conveyor belts.
I work on the dialogue gears. They’re near the front of the Machine: dialogue is one of the last things to be slotted in to the novel. The gears themselves form a tall chrome cylinder, around which a dozen or so workstations are laid. They make a clicking noise as they spin, the clicking of a hundred declarations of love, a thousand confrontations between fathers and sons, grandiose speeches, morose reflections, angst-ridden confessions. If you have an ear for it, you can tell what kind of dialogue is being produced by the tone of the clicking. Right now, the gears are clacking along at a fairly high speed, so it’s probably a popular novel, or maybe a less important exchange in something weightier. The noise is quite high-pitched too, coming from near the top of the cylinder: the larger deep characterisation gears at the bottom aren’t engaged. A trashy romance, I’d guess. But then after only a few seconds there’s a whirr and the gears fall silent – it’s only a very short exchange, so probably from a war story or a science-fiction adventure.
I sit down at my station and clock in again. The conveyor belt to my right hums into life. While I wait for my first assignment I chat to my neighbour a bit. Pyotr is a heavy-set man with a bristly moustache and a long mane of slicked-back hair. He wears his boiler suit with two buttons open, revealing a pale flabby chest dotted with hairs and the silver Orthodox cross he wears around his neck. We don’t agree on much: I think he considers me something of a naïve ideologue. We’re still good friends. Before the full mechanisation of literature Pyotr had been a poet, a romantic nationalist. One stanza of his became quite famous; it was chanted by soldiers during the Great Patriotic War. Before my time, of course.
The roaring gales of our land command you
The streams that cut through ice and snow
The pastures of your kinsmen implore you
Go on, to victory, go!
“Did you see Magda last night, then?” Pyotr asks.
“I did,” I say. “We went for a drink at that place off Khamovnichesky.”
“Anything?”
I shake my head. Magda’s family is Czech, I think, or Polish. She works as a typist at the accounting department, and so far she’s rebuffed all my advances good-naturedly but firmly. She has a lover in the Navy, Valentin. He’s stationed at Vladivostok, and sends a tearful telegram once a week. She showed me a couple. They’re all rigidly formulaic, the same soppy dross every time, far less inventive or emotional than the love-letters the Machine produces.
“I don’t know what that girl’s thinking,” says Pyotr. “Her boy’s probably getting up to all sorts of shit out in the East. Brothels on every corner out in Vladivostok. Fucking sailors get all the fun, right?”
“She’ll come round,” I say.
“You just need to man up,” says Pyotr. “Grab her by the shoulders, tell her you’re madly in love with her. None of this taking her out for wine and pirozhki. You’ll only spoil her.”
“Vodka,” I say. “Not wine.”
Pyotr sniffs. “I like a girl who knows how to drink.”
The conveyor belt makes a clunking sound and deposits a punch-card in the tray. I examine it. The exchange I’m to write is for Where The Mountains Meet The Sky, a rural melodrama set around the time of the emancipation of the serfs. Not my favourite project, but better than the war thrillers that have come to dominate the Factory’s output. A line of code is printed along the top of the card: the dialogue is between Aleksandr Mikhailovich Nikiforov, a small landowner who wants to sell the family estate and move to the city, and Olga, his conservative mother.
“What’ve you got?” says Pyotr, peering over.
“Melodrama,” I say. “Look at these figures.” I show him the row of numbers. “Seven for register. Seven for intensity. Eight for statement length.”
“You’re such a snob,” says Pyotr. “You’d rather every book we wrote was just terse despair, wouldn’t you? You’re like a little Kafka.”
I chuckle a bit at that. There’s another whirr from the gear-cylinder, and it falls silent. It’s my turn. I walk up and reconfigure the dials, set the stylistic parameters, input the novel code, then slot in the card. As the wheels churn I smoke a cigarette, leaning against the cylinder itself, enjoying the feeling of its throb. Eventually it clanks to a halt and spits out a reel of magnetic tape, along with a paper copy of the dialogue I’ve just written. I have to proofread, of course, and make such adjustments as are needed: I am a writer, not a mechanic.
Olga, her head bent low by her misery, went to stand by the window of their dacha. “Look at all this, Aleksandr,” she moaned. “This is your land. This is the land your fathers fought with musket and sabre to protect. These fields you disparage so cruelly are nourished not only by the tenderness of the earth but by the blood of your heroic ancestors. How can you refuse so solemn a duty? How can you turn your back on the history of our family?”
“I see only dead black soil,” said Aleksandr Mikhailovich Nikiforov. “I see only the dismal weight of the centuries bearing down on us. Our history is a prison! Yes, I dare to say it! Our noble ancestors keep us in as much servitude as they did the serfs! They stare at us with a baleful eye from the portraits on our walls and fix us in our allotted place! Don’t you want to be free, Mother? Don’t you want to escape the tyranny of our past?”
“What freedom, my son, what freedom? You would exchange the wide expanse of our homeland for the gutters and filth of the city? You would walk with beggars and Jews on every corner? Oh, how could I have given birth to such a son, one who spits on the graves of his fathers? Forgive me, Lord, forgive me! Mikhail, forgive me for giving you so impetuous an heir!”
“Mikhail is dead, Mother. He is dead, and I will not allow him to rule over me from below the ground! The farm is mine now, and it is for me to decide what will be done with it. Your pitiful wailing will not alter the course I have chosen.”
As I read on the exchange intensifies, insults fly from both ends of the room, until Aleksandr, overcome by fury, grabs a rolling-pin – and there the dialogue ends, of course; the matricide itself has already been written, and if I want to read it I will have to buy the book.
It’s not exceptional, but it’ll do: I punch the card number into a keypad and send the roll of tape down another conveyor belt to be stitched into the rest of the novel. More cards arrive. Writing Where The Mountains Meet The Sky is more of a mindless labour than I like to admit. Others are more engaging; the parameters are looser. For quite a few I have to make several versions on the dialogue gears, pick one that I think works the best, then feed the tape into the gears again and make such alterations as are necessary. For literary texts this input is important. The dialogue gears are an advanced piece of machinery, but the imagery and metaphor cogs used are far more rudimentary than those elsewhere in the Machine, and sometimes a writer has to fill the gaps. That makes all the difference. It’s the difference between this:
“You do give me happiness,” she said, tears glistening in her eyes. “But my sadness is so huge, it swallows up all the happiness you give me. I love you, Yuri, but my misery is stronger than your love. It’ll destroy you. That’s why I can’t stay.”
And this:
“Yes,” she said, tears glistening in her eyes. “You do give me happiness. But you can’t ever make me happy. There’s a hollowness inside of me. There’s a black hole right at the heart of my soul, and it sucks in all the love and happiness you give me. If you keep me, and keep giving me all your love and all your joy, it’ll suck you in too. You’ll be left like me. Yuri, I love you too much to let that happen. If I stay with you I’ll swallow up your soul.”
Eventually a whistle sounds out, and it’s time for lunch. I go upstairs to meet Magda. She’s sitting alone in front of her typewriter at the accountancy department, her head cradled in her arms, sobbing gently.
“Are you alright?” I say.
She doesn’t say anything. She just dangles a thin piece of paper in front of me with a limp hand.
“What is it?” I say.
“It’s from Valentin,” she says. “How could he?” She collapses into tears. I read.
Magda,
The time I spent with you was the happiest time of my life. Your letters gave me solace in this distant city. But we are both human, and we both have needs, and I think it would be better for both of us if we moved on to other people. I will not forget you.
With love,
Valentin
“I know what he’s been doing,” spits Magda. “He’s been screwing some whore out in Vladivostok. I loved him. How could he?”
I put a hand on her shoulder. “Let’s go for a walk,” I say. “You’ll feel better.”
We go to Presnenskiy Park and sit on a bench in the shade, under the haughty gaze of one of the skyscrapers that cluster around the banks of the river. I’ve bought some blini, which we eat with sour cream. She moans some more about Valentin, while I try not to reveal my inner exultation. She’s not crying any more, at least.
“Let’s get some vodka,” she says suddenly.
“I do still have writing to do,” I say.
“And I still have counting. Come on, you old reactionary. I’ve just been dumped. I want to get drunk.”
She seems more cheerful as we walk to a café. It’s on Krasnaya Presnya, a busy road, and the passing apparatchiks and bureaucrats look at us with thinly veiled contempt as we sit with our glasses.
“To new beginnings,” says Magda.
“To new beginnings,” I say. We clink glasses and drink.
After the third glass Magda is positively exuberant. “To be honest,” she says, “I don’t know what I was doing all that time. Waiting for months on end for Valentin to come back when there are so many other people here in Moscow. Like you.”
She sidles up to me a little, and stares into my eyes for a moment. We kiss. My hand moves down from her shoulder to the small of her back, hers strokes the back of my neck.
“Decadents!” shouts an old woman further down the street. Magda draws away, embarrassed. She pours herself another glass.
We walk back to the Factory hand in hand. At the gate Magda plants a kiss on my cheek. “Meet me tonight,” she whispers.
“Where?”
“Here. At the Factory. After the whistle. When everyone’s gone. By the description generator.”
I walk – somewhat unsteadily, it must be said – back to the dialogue gears.
“You stink of booze,” says Pyotr. “I didn’t see you in the canteen. Where were you?”
“I went out with Magda,” I say. “To Krasnopresnenskaya.”
“That girl again? You’re wasting your time. There are so many other girls here. What about Anna at the plot-device device? She’s pretty. And single.”
“Magda’s not with Valentin any more. I’m seeing her tonight.”
That gets him interested, he rubs his belly. “Where?”
“Here. By the description generator. After everyone’s gone.”
He whistles. “Nice.”
The rest of the day drags on a little. I write a few comic exchanges – the Machine can be surprisingly funny. In one, a village idiot finds himself unexpectedly called for an audience with the Tsar due to a bureaucratic mix-up. Another has two buffoonish philosophers discussing the nature of Hegelian ontological Essence in relation to a potato, and ends when one of them, in desperation, eats it. Then another from Where The Mountains Meet The Sky: Aleksandr is in court, charged with the murder of his mother. The judge accuses him with dread gravity of the heinous crime of not only killing Olga, but of hating her as well. In an impassioned plea, Aleksandr quotes Luke 14:26 at the courtroom, he argues for the eradication of all things old and the construction of a bright, shining new Russia, free from the strictures of Church and tradition. The judge, baffled by the radicalism of the youth, condemns him to death. The Machine gives the judge a demotic register, which I have to correct manually. Something must have got lodged in one of the gears again. These things happen.
Finally the whistle sounds and the machines start to wind down. Pyotr nudges me in the back as he leaves. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he says. “Have fun.”
I stay at my desk until the guard comes. “We’re done, comrade,” he says.
“I’m just doing some proofreading,” I say. “I’ll be finished soon.”
The guard shrugs. “Suit yourself.” He chucks me a key. “Lock up afterwards, would you? Dedication to the job’s a commendable quality, but I need to get drunk.”
Only then do I set off: away from the dialogue gears, past the exposition engine, past the monologue machine, past the plot-device device, to where the description generator juts out of the main body of the Machine. It’s not a tall cylinder like the dialogue gears, but a big misshapen metal box from which cogs and conveyor belts extrude at seemingly random intervals. There aren’t any chairs, either. The writers on description have to work standing up.
Magda’s there already, perching on the edge of one of the desks that abut the machine. She beckons me forward with a single finger. I grin. We kiss.
“I thought today wouldn’t end,” she says.
“You’ve only had to wait a day,” I say.
She pulls me closer, and starts fumbling with the buttons of my boiler suit. I press myself against her. She overbalances for a second, reaches out with one hand, pulls down a lever on the side of the generator. There are a series of clunks, then a hiss, then the familiar whirring sound of a machine warming up. The desk starts to vibrate.
“Shit,” says Magda.
And then another noise, from inside the machine. A sudden scream that lasts for a fraction of a second before being cut off. Then a crack. The cracking of bones.
I lunge for the lever and turn off the engine. With Magda’s help I wrench one of the iron coverings from its surface. She screams. A body slides out and lands in a disjointed heap on the factory floor. Its back is broken, its legs are mangled, its head is twisted to one side, its eyes stare emptily into the distance. It’s Pyotr: fat, moustachioed, naked, one hand still clamped around his cock. There’s no blood. But printed all over his body are words: lines of text, random descriptions from the generator, weaving patterns across the dead poet’s thighs, his chest, his arms, his face, stamping their mark on him, claiming him as their own.
Across steppes and pastures she flies, yearning, endlessly yearning
The room was dark but cosy, warmed by the pleasant heat of a small stove that crackled merrily as we
the narrow streets, tinged yellow by cumulative layers of grime and misery
the grand prospect of the river itself, that
He was a short man, but with an intelligent face, one that never seemed to grow angry or to
thundering like a herd of wild beasts, full of fresh energy and vigour
given an eerie tinge by the soft light of the moon
deep in its sylvan tranquillity she
the inviting warmth of her body
as if nothing had come before this moment, as if this moment would never end, as
where the yellow beacon beckons
A narrow field was
next to the
splendorous
his desire for
if
Edited by discipline ()
Impper
Impper
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deadken posted:Impper posted:
ken tell us more about your class. how are they receiving your writing, how are they receiving your criticisms, have you made any friends yeti havent submitted anything yet! but the story i posted in the other lf about the book writin factory is gettin workshopped on monday. i havent been as ruthless in my criticism as id like but thats because i want to do sex on them. so just like lil negs about 'slightly clumsy phrasing,' game bro. game
i held back on really vicious criticisms in my writing workshops and i still always got a reputation as an invincible hardass, especially when my stuff was quality. on at least 7 or 8 different occasions someone (always a girl) would ask me out to talk about writing ahhe
Impper
Impper
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i'll wait for some more posts to pass before posting excerpts from kobE book since you posted your thing
deadken
deadken
penitent
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Impper posted:
i held back on really vicious criticisms in my writing workshops and i still always got a reputation as an invincible hardass, especially when my stuff was quality. on at least 7 or 8 different occasions someone (always a girl) would ask me out to talk about writing ahhe
well ive only had 2 sessions maybe they think that already? most of the extracts in the op were from a single work, i need to find a nice thing to say about it lmao. its really fucking bad, like inbetween the awful description theres just mundane conversation saccharine reminiscences and a plot that goes literally nowhere, also it seems to be completely autobiographical lol
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deadken
deadken
penitent
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russian pancake of russia
Impper
Impper
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some of your sentences are shitty here and there but damn man what a beautiful paragraph:
The Factory produces novels at a rate of between three and five a day. Many of these are rejected at Quality Control, of course, but that’s still an impressive number, proof that mechanisation works in all areas of life. In the Concept Office is a huge punch-card computer. In the founding days of the Factory a team of typists was marshalled to input the basic details of hundreds of thousands of novels: Russian and international, popular and literary, classic and contemporary. More novels are still being added, of course: those from the Factory that have won particular acclaim or sold particularly well, and those from abroad that get past the censors. This information forms the computer’s database, a set of numbers that it continually re-arranges. When the computer comes up with a concept that one of the literature commissars in the office considers viable, it produces a punch-card which is sent on to Development. There, a series of engines take the basics – genre, plot structure, setting, hero, antagonist – and flesh them out. There’s a new computer there (made with American technology, although nobody likes to admit that) for creating characters based on not only the complex figures of Shakespeare and Dostoevsky, but Freudian and Lacanian theory. Also in Development is a machine running an algorithm that produces titles and generates a name for the novel’s supposed author. This data is sent on to Structure, where another set of engines reconfigure it into chapters and paragraphs. Finally, a series of punch-cards is sent out to all the relevant areas on the factory floor, where hundreds of workers with their various machines do the messy work of actually writing the story. It’s all stored on magnetic tape. One final machine stitches together all the various fragments produced across the Factory into a single coherent story. Once it’s finished, two reels are sent out: one to the printers, and one to the Criticism Factory in Leningrad, where a similar array of machines condenses the novel for a review to be published in the Literaturnaya Gazeta.
The Factory produces novels at a rate of between three and five a day. Many of these are rejected at Quality Control, of course, but that’s still an impressive number, proof that mechanisation works in all areas of life. In the Concept Office is a huge punch-card computer. In the founding days of the Factory a team of typists was marshalled to input the basic details of hundreds of thousands of novels: Russian and international, popular and literary, classic and contemporary. More novels are still being added, of course: those from the Factory that have won particular acclaim or sold particularly well, and those from abroad that get past the censors. This information forms the computer’s database, a set of numbers that it continually re-arranges. When the computer comes up with a concept that one of the literature commissars in the office considers viable, it produces a punch-card which is sent on to Development. There, a series of engines take the basics – genre, plot structure, setting, hero, antagonist – and flesh them out. There’s a new computer there (made with American technology, although nobody likes to admit that) for creating characters based on not only the complex figures of Shakespeare and Dostoevsky, but Freudian and Lacanian theory. Also in Development is a machine running an algorithm that produces titles and generates a name for the novel’s supposed author. This data is sent on to Structure, where another set of engines reconfigure it into chapters and paragraphs. Finally, a series of punch-cards is sent out to all the relevant areas on the factory floor, where hundreds of workers with their various machines do the messy work of actually writing the story. It’s all stored on magnetic tape. One final machine stitches together all the various fragments produced across the Factory into a single coherent story. Once it’s finished, two reels are sent out: one to the printers, and one to the Criticism Factory in Leningrad, where a similar array of machines condenses the novel for a review to be published in the Literaturnaya Gazeta.
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deadken
deadken
penitent
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in our first session we had to brainstorm ideas for a story and then write something based on another persons ideas and they were all awful but one person had A Dinner Party Where Two People Are Having An Affair and i wrote this
By the time the couscous was served I was already aching to leave. Claire was flitting round the table like an itinerant hummingbird, chirping about the organic credentials of the food we were being served: how the sheep we were about to eat had been massaged twice a day by a Swedish professional, how the tomatoes had been sun-ripened in the cloister of an Italian monastery, how Mongolian throat-singers had chanted battle-hymns to the fields of lentils to ensure a well-rounded flavour, whatever. Mike, whose idea this whole dinner party had been, sat glumly as his wife commandeered the evening. She hadn’t been like this before, back at university. My enduring memory of Claire was of seeing her catatonic on the sofa in our grubby old kitchen, a bottle of vodka still dangling loosely from one outstretched hand, a thin line of drool stretching from the corner of her lip down her neck to a puddle in her cleavage. For a moment I’d been worried that she’d slipped into some kind of alcohol-induced coma: I’d shaken her by the shoulders, gently at first, then more vigorously and with increasing alarm, until she gave a squelching cough and mumbled at me to fuck off.
We’d all paired up quite nicely, our little group: Mark with Claire, Harry with Imogen, myself with Kate. It had all seemed so right at the time. Of course, it hadn’t exactly worked out so well in practice – what ever does? I glanced at Imogen across the table. She was laughing at something someone had said, a long silver fork held gently between thumb and forefinger, on which a rustically charred piece of asparagus was impaled. She was good at this. She looked entirely natural, delectably duplicitous. If anything, Harry looked the most uneasy out of the two: he was sweating; he prodded his food joylessly and said little.
This being a gathering of the middle-class and middle-aged, of course the topic turned to that of our children. Claire regaled us with tales of little Benji’s extraordinary academic successes, how well he was doing at chess, how all his teachers thought he was destined for great things.
“I always knew he was a clever one,” said Harry.
Claire beamed with pride. “And how’s Michael getting along at preschool?” she said.
“Oh, very well,” said Imogen. “He’s so creative, you know, he drew this hilarious picture of me and Harry, it’s so inventive.”
Kate turned to me with a sudden anguished expression, but when she went back to the conversation her barrenness was matched by the stony composure of her face. I squeezed her hand under the table. Not for the first time, I felt a surge of guilt rip through me. She was so good, and so strong, she really was, and my betrayal of her was disgusting and heartless. But with all her neuroses and all her seriousness, and with Imogen still smiling with her eyes and not just her lips, what I’d done was understandable if not excusable. Kate wasn’t the vivacious young woman I had married any more – but then none of us were how we used to be.
She squeezed me back. But then at the same time I felt a naked foot teasing at the hem of my trousers and sliding itself along my leg. Across the table Imogen flashed me a flirtatious wink. As titillating as the sensation was – my wife’s hand, Imogen’s foot, the softness and heat of both close to my own – and as powerful as I felt, it intensified my guilt. I almost wanted to jump up there and then; I wanted to shout my crimes across the table, to tear apart our little bourgeois get-together with the catastrophic truth of my misdeeds. I didn’t, though. I’ve always been a coward. I just shook my head vaguely at Imogen. Not now. No.
I drove Kate back home through the gloomy terracotta suburbs in near-silence. She was drunk; she rested her head on my shoulder for a few seconds, then grunted and shifted, trying to settle into comfort. Waves of amber light passed over us. The few thin strands of grey in Kate’s hair shone brightly for a moment, the colour of wheat-fields in sunshine, then sank back into darkness.
“It was nice to catch up with everyone,” she said eventually.
“Yeah,” I said.
“I’m so glad we all still keep in touch,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said.
Kate placed her palm on my chest for a while. Then she straightened her head, gave me something of a wobbly stare, and nuzzled her face against mine, nibbling at my earlobe. I could feel the heat of her silent breathy laughter. This wasn’t usual. I was so used to her everyday sullenness, her blank glare as she took her anti-depressants every morning, her unresponsiveness in bed. It was as if she was young again.
“I know,” she whispered in my ear.
Her hand moved up my chest, over my heart. “What do you know?” I said, trying to mask my panic, failing – my heart burst into a frenzied rhythm.
“You and Imogen. I’m not stupid. I’m not blind. Did you think I couldn’t tell?”
I didn’t say anything. What could I say?
She kissed my cheek. “I don’t mind,” she said. “Why don’t you invite her round? All three of us. It’d be nice.”
“Kate,” I said. “Please believe me. I would never-”
She sank lazily back into her seat. “I’ve been sleeping with Harry,” she said.
I didn’t even think. Instinctually I slammed my foot down on the brake. The car came to a coughing halt. A car behind honked loudly; the driver shook a fist at me as he sped past. “How long,” I said. “Tell me. How long.” It wasn’t a question.
“Oh, a few weeks,” said Kate. She gave a noise, halfway between a giggle and a hiccough, one that died away softly, leaving a note of almost tender melancholy. “We could have him round too. The four of us. Why the hell not? We’re all such good friends, aren’t we?”
This was her revenge, I realised. She could have grown angry. She could have kicked me out. But she was strong, she’d always been strong. She knew exactly what she was doing. She knew how to reflect my desires back at me in all their base hideousness. She knew my weakness, she knew I could never leave her. And so she wouldn’t leave me either, she would keep me trapped, and we would have to suffer together. And she was already so used to suffering.
Outside, moths flung themselves desperately into our headlights.
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wow ken, i just read the whole thing. it is a really brilliant story. positive praise can never really exist as anything but gushing, but yeah, fascinating, smart, funny . . . i had a joke in mind: i give you a six for register, a four for intensity, and a statement length which seems to have been smudged by the machine
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needless to say though, it is cut short very abruptly in my opinion, and you could have maybe done more, with the caveat that this is a genius idea and one i'd have not come up with, so i really don't know how much you can really "do" with it. the tension between the plot that was there, the "world," and so on was fairly palpable, but it worked well, and would serve well to keep the story paced nicely if you were to do more
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i like the one about the affair too. it's well-trod territory, nothing new being said, but you handle it well
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okay here's a chapter from the kobe book, somewhat indicative of where it's at right now. i have no idea what to think about it lmfao. i wrote this in a pretentious "european style" cafe
the ride
Milos’ VW Golf is a sight to behold. It looks relatively innocuous from the outside, but the inside is a black-lit neon nightmare that resembles a spaceship’s console—there are hundreds of buttons, knobs, and dials, each controlling some aspect of the vehicle’s handling or performance. After starting the ignition, Milos will always perform a series of diagnostic checks and make a series of micro-adjustments; I have never once noticed a difference in the ride, but he claims it makes all the difference. One of Milos’ pastimes is driving on the interstates and challenging anybody he sees in an American-made car to a race . . . I don’t know the rules to the races, but Milos does have hundreds of videos of his races. He films the videos himself and enjoys showing them off. In the videos, he pulls alongside some guys in a car, at which point he must be gesturing to them because they look into the camera and begin to make belligerent gestures of their own; Milos then adjusts the camera’s focus to get a clear picture of his opponent’s face . . . this image will persist for some time until the refined mechanical hum of Milos’ Golf can be heard alongside the throaty roar of the opponent’s American car: inevitably an angry, crestfallen, confused, or shocked expression will appear on the opponent’s face as it’s pulled out of the frame; at this very point Milos will simultaneously begin cackling both in the video and in real life, simultaneously point at the loser’s face in the video and in real life, simultaneously shout something along the lines of: “Shitty ass American cars! Hahaha! Glory! Glory to Serbia!” in the video and in real life. As soon as the Golf pulls far enough ahead of the opponent’s car that the opponent’s face can no longer be seen, Milos points the camera at the speedometer; there’s a moment of suspense and anticipation as the vehicle approaches 200 kilometers per hour: once the threshold of 200 is passed, Milos cheers in the video as well as in real life, shouting, again, “Glory to Serbia!” I pointed out once that the Golf is a German-made car, but that didn’t seem to make any difference; he only made a cryptic comment about German steel having it out for Serbian blood.
Milos was waiting for us in the Golf, performing his little routine of diagnostics and adjustments. Emily and I got into the backseat, which didn’t make him happy. “I am not chauffeur,” he said.
“Emily shouldn’t sit alone,” I said.
“Then she can sit up here, if she wants to, or you can, John, if you want to. But I am not chauffeur.”
“Maybe he’s right,” Emily said.
“Alright, you fucking baby,” I said and got out of the car, slammed the door, and plopped down in the front street. “Happy?” He didn’t respond, but he kept on tinkering with the Golf’s buttons.
“This is a pretty amazing car,” Emily said. Milos still didn’t respond.
“This is something that Milos does. He veils himself in a blanket of silence . . . You’ll get used to it eventually, I mean if you don’t wanna run screaming from a pair of weirdoes like us.”
“No, I think you guys are pretty cool. Most people freak out when I have a seizure, and you two seemed pretty cool about it . . .”
“I have to admit I was a little freaked.”
“You never told me what happened to your hand, you only told me that I did it.”
“Oh, shit . . . You were biting me, like, I thought you were gonna bite your tongue off or something, and I had nothing on hand . . .”
“Oh my god, I’m sorry,” Emily said, leaning forward in her seat and putting a hand on my shoulder; suddenly the car lurched forward and all three of us were violently thrown back into our seats. Milos, however, had braced himself, and the slightest inkling of a smile was on his face.
“Jesus, you’re an asshole,” I said. He was still smirking . . . “Are you okay, Emily?”
“Yeah . . .”
We sat in silence as the Golf twisted and turned through the Californian suburbs. We passed by a police car with its siren and lights engaged; my heart stopped for a moment as I wondered if it was heading for the Lakers’ house. Of course, they had no way of knowing we were in a Golf so there was almost no cause for concern; still we’d committed a great deal of crimes, and in pondering the crimes I realized that it had been Emily who’d instigated the initial act that had led to the rest. It was possible that she was disposed to our brand of politics, which could have been described as right wing anarchism, just as Michel Houellebecq had once described Celine’s politics; I kicked myself for not realizing it sooner. I turned around and said, “Emily . . .” Her face was illuminated by the dim neon glow of the Golf’s LEDs; it looked strange.
“Yeah?” she said.
“You broke into that house like it was nothing.”
“So?”
“You don’t think that’s unusual?”
“You guys are the ones romanticizing terrorism . . .”
“No, seriously, there’s a difference between words and deeds—anybody who was looking at us would conclude that you’re more serious about lashing out than the two of us.”
“No, I don’t think that’s true.”
“Why not?”
“You guys just want to destroy things because, I don’t know, because you like to see the world burn or whatever . . . Me, I was trying to help you out, so I didn’t even think about whether it was a crime or not.”
“So the ends justify the means, then?”
“No, of course not! That’s not what I said.”
I reoriented myself so I could face her comfortably while subtly looking down on her—a vile tactic, I knew, but you take any advantage you can get . . . “That’s exactly what you said! If a good intention strips an act of its criminality, you can justify anything, including terrorism.”
“I don’t know . . .”
“At a basic level, it’s a question of your assumptions. If you’re willing to commit a crime in order to help somebody out, where do you stop?”
“Before it gets violent or you hurt somebody.”
“But what if whoever’s standing in your way is not only willing to resort to violence, but uses violence and seeks to hurt you in the first place?”
“Well then, I still don’t think it matters . . .”
“Adhering to nonviolence puts you in a defensive position, disadvantaged from the very start, and if you ever become dangerous they won’t hesitate for even a moment to destroy you. That’s why you romanticize terrorism . . .”
“I mean . . .”
“Look, personally I’m a coward, I’ve never been to war or anything, I don’t even know if I believe what I just told you, but Milos was there at Kosovo, he’s buried family members and seen a lot of really bad things. He’s never flagged . . . I was never sure about this sort of thing until I met him.”
Emily watched me for a very long time, regarding me with an absolutely neutral expression on her face. “Then what do you believe?”
I looked around at the landscape passing by, at Milos’ stony face, at Emily, and I couldn’t fathom why she was listening to my weirdo ramblings; I realized for the first time that the Golf was traveling along at more than a hundred miles an hour. In a sense this summarized how I’d always related to women—that is I’d get so absorbed that I’d forget my surroundings, even as I attempted to bully and dazzle them, even as I considered them to be something above myself, something alien; I was a dancing monkey. Of course, women didn’t always see it this way: they themselves had always been caught up in their own troubled self-esteem, or else they’d found me to be so intimidating and distant that my clown act took on another dimension—they’d been unable to recognize the void at the center of my being. As for Emily, my relation with her had been bizarre from the start; now I was going to convince her of my emptiness: “What do I believe?” I said. “I believe you’ve got a problem—you love life too much, you love the world, and you love existence, even though you don’t really know why. I suspected a long time ago that I didn’t like things, I didn’t like how things are, and I didn’t like the way things were arranged, so I embraced that: I just don’t like it.”
“You don’t like anything?” Emily said, seemingly out of concern.
“No. Nothing works for me—hedonism, drugs, belief, I’m left cold by all of it. The only reason I’m still alive is I feel like my work’s not done, whatever that’s supposed to mean. The work itself—I’ve got no idea what that is; in a sense I want fame, but only so I can do as much damage as possible; in a sense I want to make something immortal, so I can say I’ll have had an effect on the people coming after me, not that I even care about them—if anything I’m jealous of them, of the joyful moments they’ll have, the miseries they’ll revel in, the infinite well of pains and pleasures they’ll draw on, which I haven’t got access to, not that I ever really did; ideally, I suppose, I’d like to press a button to end it all, or at a minimum create a work that ends it all. Speaking realistically, that’s never going to happen—anybody can see that I’ll probably end in suicide, if only because that way I’ll be able to say that I was able to choose my own method of escape: if Mayakovski could do it, why can’t I? Shooting yourself in the face is preferable to wasting away.
“Anyway, there’s this story about a Soviet officer who was on duty somewhere in an underground bunker in Siberia when a high alert sounded—according to all of the sensors and radars, the Americans had launched a nuclear first strike. The officer’s only job was to launch the Russians’ retaliatory barrage in the event of an attack, and tactically, they had a very short chain of command, since the assumption was that if the base in Siberia was under high alert, Moscow and Petersburg might very well be smoldering ruins, so all this officer has to do is get confirmation from his superior officer in order to launch; and even then, if the base is in high alert, he can unilaterally decide to launch without even his commanding officer’s nuclear codes, since it might only be a few minutes between the detection of an ICBM in the atmosphere and the destruction of the base. So the base is in high alert: assuming the officer is a real partisan for the USSR, he might decide to retaliate right there without even waiting for his commander to give him his orders; but he doesn’t launch, he checks and double checks the radars, and they all confirm that there are American ICBMs in the air. He still doesn’t launch; now he calls Moscow and tells them what he’s seeing, and they detect anomalies too, though they don’t have the sort of information that the officer does since their radars aren’t so far in the north: based on what he tells them, they give him permission to launch the retaliatory strike without waiting for his commanding officer, since time is of the essence, and I guess in the meanwhile they said a prayer or did whatever Russians did in the seventies when they faced nuclear annihilation. He still doesn’t launch, and now his commanding officer rushes into the bunker, takes one look at the radar readings, and shouts the order to launch. He still doesn’t launch, and now he’s disobeying official orders, defying his commander, and facing the fire squad, assuming there’s a single Russian alive to punish him; on top of all that, he’s allowing his nation to perish without even making the Americans pay for their treachery. Faced with the officer’s defiance, the commander tries to force him out of the way and launch the missiles himself . . . But the officer isn’t going to have it: he beats his commander and then ties him to some pipes at the far end of the room. Now he’s looking at the radar, at the ICBMs approaching the USSR, at the little dots representing the annihilation of his country and all of his countrymen, and everything’s silent except for his commander screaming at him that he’s a traitor, responsible for the personal assassination of every last person in the USSR, including his own mother, wife, and children, and the officer just sits there and waits for the fire to consume him. Eventually the lights on the radar stopped blinking and nothing happened; that’s it—nothing. Later he admitted that he had no idea that the radar readings were false positives; it hadn’t even occurred to him that the readings were some anomaly in the atmosphere and not an American first strike . . . he knew for a fact that his nation was being attacked—in short, he was sacrificing himself and his country in order to save the world. He was a traitor to the Soviet Union, but not the human race—at any point he could have launched those missiles and ended it all: here was a guy who had the choice to press the button to end the world and he refused. Every part of his training impelled him to press that button; he was ordered multiple times to press the button; he had every reason in the world to press that button—as far as he knew, the Americans were trying to kill everything he loved.
“If somebody like that can exist, maybe we can resist ourselves to some extent, maybe we can rise above ourselves and our conditions, I don’t know. Later on, the USSR awarded him a hero of the Soviet Union medal, which was the highest award they gave out. They said he saved humanity; but they didn’t understand he’d saved humanity with the understanding that he was destroying the USSR. They probably assumed he had some specialized knowledge that revealed that the radars were mistaken, but he didn’t, he simply didn’t. He was a traitor, but he’s the reason the world still exists as it does today, why we’re here, you and me and Milos and everything else.
“As for me, I think I would’ve pushed the button. I would’ve pushed it right away, not to follow orders, but because I don’t like how things are. How often can you push the button? This was probably the one time in the history of human existence that one man could decide whether humanity continues or it doesn’t. Nobody else factored into his choice, nobody else had a say, the facts were utterly irrelevant; he was faced with the only moral decision that Nietzsche could have respected. Humanity—yes or no? And he made the wrong choice . . . Because why wouldn’t you do it? Out of pure malice, if nothing else . . .”
“Fucking nihilist. Misanthrope,” Milos suddenly interjected. I was out of breath by then; Emily turned her head to look at him. The car slowed down . . . “A selfish asshole, you want to blow things up because other people are happy. You think I believe some bullshit like that? I say let it burn, not because there exists the happy person somewhere, but because the oppressor has everything that burns, whereas we have only our chains. You feel like a melancholic? Then rise to life’s challenge, not lie down like a fucking exhausted and beaten dog, rolling in nihilism like it is mud and shit.”
Emily began to laugh. “I like you guys . . . I kind of feel like you’re both joking around though.” Milos sighed, began swearing under his breath, and began swerving left and right, accelerating, snaking between traffic with the Golf. “Hey!” Emily cried and turned to me; “what is he doing!”
“We pissed him off, both of us did,” I said. I was still calm, though there were times that Milos’ driving scared the hell out of me. “You don’t have to worry, Milos has done professional drag racing, this is his thing . . .”
“Don’t they always die?” Emily shouted. After a few moments of frenetic driving, Emily began to forcefully hit him on the shoulder, shouting at him to slow down and drive sensibly. To my utter astonishment, he actually did; I’d hit him and shouted at him dozens of times in the past and it had never had an effect . . .
“John,” Milos said. “Where am I driving to?”
“Um . . .”
“Venice Beach!” Emily said.
“Venice Beach . . . Venice Beach . . . Very good. What is at Venice Beach?”
“John found some pebbles in Kobe’s room back at the house. There’s only one place I know of that’s got pebbles like this.”
“And what is special about these pebbles?”
“You’ll see . . . Let it be a surprise . . . ,” Emily said.
“You and your damn surprises . . .”
Emily laughed and hit me on the shoulder. “It’ll be better this time, I swear . . . By the way, I have a serious question for you guys . . .”
“Sure,” I said.
“You’re not really terrorists, are you? I mean . . . That’s really serious, like followed by the FBI serious . . . I mean, that’s crazy! Neither of you seem like the really truly crazy type . . .”
“Of course we are crazy! Whosoever is not crazy cannot conceive of any new arrangement. Better to be a weirdo, a tramp, or a psychopath than ‘sane!’” Milos said.
“What he means is, okay, think of it like this, Emily, this is from a book, a really tame book: our choice isn’t between playacting and action. Our choice is between playacting and no action at all. There are situations where you’re condemned to playact. Our struggle with mute power is the struggle of a theater company that’s attacked an army.”
“But . . . What are you trying to achieve? It’s still playacting, isn’t it?”
“It’s better than nothing.”
“What a pathetic way to put it,” Milos said.
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a tale of two thousand semicolons;....