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Syndic Literary Journal

Fake Novel by Lee Foust

Fake Novel

 

by Lee Foust

 

Chapter One: A Nostalgia for Literature

The one thing you know for sure these days is that you don’t know much of anything at all. There’s nothing much left to know, it seems. Nothing of value anyway. It’s all just trivia these days Everything’s become infinitely re-creatable; if you can imagine it, it can be made as flesh as Jesus by a 3-D printer while you wait.

            No one goes without anymore—not if you can hear their voices. No one talks about dearth anymore because language = desire. So, if you can speak, you express desire. If you speak about dearth they call you a hypocrite for having the nerve to speak of dearth through your privilege of dearthlessness and immediately give a dollar value to the dress you’re wearing as the measure of your hypocrisy.

            Inadvertently this means that nothing really happens anymore, except for the endless reproduction of an illusory status quo. (Reminder to self: replace the word “real” with the word “fake” now and again to see if there’s any difference between them anymore.) It follows, then, that there’s nothing much left to write about. A speaker’s desires are all that matter now in either speaking or writing to the new New World Order. The speaker’s will. Words have been reduced to weapons and the Occident’s dream of continual warfare has become another situation more or less interchangeable with any concept of “reality” or the use of language we’ve come to call “rhetorical.”

            (Note also: it’s impossible to write now without the constant use of quotation marks. The words no longer belong to the writer, or even to themselves. Nowadays they belong to some other, anonymous and absent speaker—speaking what can only be considered lies demanding quotation marks around them in order to be disowned. Since we don’t have to listen to anything we don’t want to hear anymore or even to take responsibility for what we say.)

            A prospective title: The Triumph of Politics. (Pace Petrarch and Palazzo Schifanoia.)

            This writer used to despise hypocrisy, but it’s become old fashioned to consider any two statements made by a single speaker at one time. There aren’t any parameters in an endlessly open field, in a destabilized discourse. Even fields, registers, scales, have all come to the point of laughabilty. They’re only words that no one looks up anymore—who needs ‘em.

            The contemporary writer is only allowed to produce a-political images: Stormy Daniels shoving an enormous black plastic dildo up Donald Trump’s shithole, for example. Seen from the front, the president’s tiny, sardine-in-oil penis remains flaccid, dangles, gently rocking back and forth like the useless piece of genetic garbage that it is. And, anyway, his puckered lips are interchangeable with the orifice between his bulging white buttocks. (He is both head and hind of the Human Centipede administration[1].)

In the above reality-TV scenario, only the porn star transcends herself—slave, master, paid assassin, guttersnipe, victim, strong woman, courtesan, code-breaker, “smart and bossy like my daughter,” bitch, dominatrix, whore, mother, daughter, a silicone and flesh cyborg, she’s more slippery than any eel—they use the same all-natural lubricant. Identity hardly matters in literature now. We live in an out-of-focus world of images of desires thwarted even as they’re conceived and enacted, a post-modern play of surfaces. All we see is an endless performance forgotten before it even happens.

The white supremacist’s eyes are closed, projecting images upon the blackness that worries him so. (Blackness haunts his nightmares, as it does all those who identify themselves as “white.”) Stormy’s silicone-stuffed breasts—crooked Rudy Giuliani on the left and blubbery Chris Christie on the right, their mouths sewn shut in scars that arc into silly smiles just below the nipple—dangle uselessly and flap as she works the dildo in and out the executive orifice. The world, the visible white world of television “news,” has grown equally artificially bloated and slovenly. Drumpf has grown bloated and slovenly along with the world he’s inherited. (He is Louis XVI, says the preceding simile.) His anus expands and swells around the ersatz veins and shaft of the dildo, forcing Haiti, El Salvador, and Africa up his shithole. He is president of Trumplandia, a mythical place in with a third of the former United States of America lives contentedly.

            “You’re a zero. A total failure. A weak, ineffectual president and a draft dodger. How many wars have you started this year? How many Gooks have you killed? None!” the porn star recites by wrote, earning a living, creating posterity. “Fuck yer bone spurs, you chicken-shit mamma’s boy!”

            “I’m a winner,” the illegitimately elected president moans between gasps, through the slobbery lubricant he applied to the wrong hole. “I have more hits and likes and hearts and shares than Jesus Christ ever had!”

            In the white supremacist’s fantasy, sodomy replaces crucifixion, pain pleasure, sense sensibility, nobishness nobility, pride prejudice, and images replace meaning and the world lives through spectacle alone. Infinitely accessible and replayable, the image of such acts fails to produce anything resembling meaning or what could be recorded as memory. (The potentate ejaculates poison gas without pleasure, a queef from the pressure of the dildo against his prostate, dry gunpowder, napalm dribbling down his thigh. He screams the word, “China!” but feels no burst of pleasure, no orgasm. Only the image of tanks ejaculating torpedoes is real/fake. But the image can’t feel anything, an image or a brand is aimed outward—and has begun somewhere outside of, dis-attached from a man whose matter must have abstractly produced it at some point in a past too distant to recall.

            Somewhere that man is watching TV, clicks through Internet images of himself with a mysterious interest in his own avatar. Bored, he leans forward to see if he can suck his own cock (but it’s too small to reach). Share, delete, share, delete, share. How generous the world has become now that it has nothing of value left to exchange. Bitcoin, the image wonders.

*                                   *                                   *

Stormy Daniels has erased her physical hideousness with hard work, money, and the illusion of success. The illegitimate president, on the other hand, has spliced both ugliness and capital into his imagistic DNA—into his brand. (His Internet images are like sickly cattle along a country road: they advertise tainted meat.)

In Frankenstein Mary Shelley depicts the monstrosity of humankind and the humanity of monsters. Nowadays everything is a spectrum, an image of the difference from the self we imagine we will find in the mirror in the morning upon waking and the one that we actually do find.

The 3-D printer churns out our dreams until we’re sick of them. Reality can only be conceived as the world without our observer’s POV to influence it. (The stumbling block of both physics and anthropology.) Certain particles seem to appear in the accelerator, to actually come into existence, only when the viewer leans in to look at them. But science, to a nation of replicating images of obedience, is mostly fake news.

While we artists were waffling over our definition of beauty, “truth” disintegrated around us. (We don’t read philosophy much anymore.)

No one cares about this stuff do they? I can’t believe you’ve read even this far. You must have liked my photo on the dust jacket, my style, my authorial pose, my brand. The marketing department did a bang up job getting you to buy this fake novel that you don’t even have time to read. Anyway, it’ll look good on your bookshelf. It might impress some of your hip friends with its topical title. But really you bought it because you liked my hipster, retro clothes in the author photo. We share a fantasy of style, (and, maybe, if you’ve read this far, a nostalgia for literature) but the text is already lulling us into a false sense of reality—and of intimacy. You because you’re reading it, and I because I continue to write it. Regardless of the consequences.

I’ve read too much Jane Austen/Catherine Austin. I’m a loser by just about any standard. If this novel is ever published and Trump is still alive to see it, I’m sure he’ll tell me so on Twitter.

*                                   *                                   *

Drumpf became Trump, Trump is therefore still always Drumpf. Drumpf speaks of shitholes with his shithole. (The shithole speaks!) The brand’s mouth spews words we either have to clean up or consign to the porcelain bowl. Somewhere a 3-D printer is churning out white North Americans in the shape of toilet bowl ears, “good people” in khaki pants carrying Home Depot Tiki torches to Robert E. Lee’s funeral, to their own funerals. (Polo shirts, swastika armbands, Klan robes, and dunce caps.) But the spectacle is interrupted—the viewer’s head gets in the way. I can no longer see the U.S.A. for Trumplandia is blocking the view; the country is hidden behind a uniform, a gun sales counter, a reality show set, a meme, a flag, a boot stomping on a human face for fifteen minutes and then the rapture.

            “Sticks” and “stones” are also words.

*                                   *                                   *

To defend Drumpf’s honor (and race-inspired policies as divinely ordained[2]), TV evangelist Pat Robertson challenges Stormy Daniels to a suck off race. Jeff Sessions acts as referee. The timer is set for 30 minutes, the contestants choose their teams, and the faceless men take off their pants and line up in two rows where the contestants prepare to produce as many cum shots as they can in order to prove who is and who is not acting in the service of Satan (in the person of Vladimir Putin). The viewer is distracted by how skanky the line of dudes on either side of the isle appear and how high Session’s ears stick out, dominating the field. The gun goes off and the evangelist and the porn star get to work making America great again.

Robertson wins of course, because America believes in God—porn is only a pastime, like TV, something to do between wars of imperial conquest.

Although always in attendance at such official White House events as The Great Trump Suck off Race, neither the VP nor Ivanka’s husband ever publicly speak—they don’t even have names in this fake novel. Their mouths are connected to each other’s anuses in the administration’s endless human centipede. The new multiculturism: they share their shit freely, despite their once diametrically opposed religious affiliations. As long as everyone gets a cut. “There’s plenty to go around”—said no one ever. They call it the economy, stupid.

They used to call this kind of writing “the literature of ideas.” Now it’s become a sad postscript to history, a nostalgia for meaning.

 Chapter Eleven: When the Revolution Comes

 

When the revolution comes

              The poor white man will realize

                             His individualism is a trap

              A divide and conquer strategy

                             Of the rich for the rich and by the rich

When the revolution comes

 

When the revolution comes

              Men will look at women

                             And see fellow human beings

              Not meat, not objects, not domestic

                             Slaves ripe for the picking

When the revolution comes

 

When the revolution comes

              Race and nationality will stop

                             Being so goddam important

              And no one will have to represent or

                             Speak for their kind or defend

                                           Themselves from prejudice

When the revolution comes

 

When the revolution comes

              We will all be welcome to be more than one stinking thing

                             One gender one race one ideology

              Labels and brands will dry up and blow away

                             Along with capital gains and corporate earnings

When the revolution comes

 

When the revolution comes

              The internet will really be a free exchange

                             Of ideas and no longer a bully pulpit

              And the T.V. zombies will walk the earth

                             For there’ll be no more room in hell

When the revolution comes

 

When the revolution comes

              Art will finally answer all the questions religion

                             Avoided in the name of profit and power

              And artists will eat the leftovers

                             Of the people’s banquet

When the revolution comes

 

When the revolution comes

              War will be replaced by conversation

                             And we’ll arm ourselves with jokes

              Instead of Second Amendment solutions

                             And full metal jackets

When the revolution comes

 

When the revolution comes

              No one will find anyone else’s opinion offensive

                             Because freedom

                                           Will become precious again

              And you will love mine

                             As much as I love yours

When the revolution comes

 

But until then

              The deluded will shoot immigrants

              Hate their friends and family

              Call every one with a different idea an “idiot”

              Kill in the name of Jesus, Allah, and Yaweh

              And stew or roast in a living hell

                             Of political parties

                             And legitimization

                             And my country right or wrong

                             And blind faith

                             Poverty and struggle

                             And the night will be so so long

 

Until the revolution comes.

[1] The Human Centipede (First Sequence) is a 2009 Dutch horror film about a German surgeon who kidnaps three tourists and joins them surgically, mouth to anus, forming a “human centipede,” or a conjoined triplet.

[2] And what, may I ask, is more Divinely ordained, in the Old Testament, than race warfare?

 

 *                                   *                                   *

Resist Golf !

 

by Lee Foust

 

 

Compiled/Published by LeRoy Chatfield
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