Whereas a writer once wolfed the news through a mask of their own tenuous citizenship, shaking hands with the catering (readerships either mostly gone or barely present), transposing their vague sense of revolt at being born over a byline or two so the page might be mistaken for something human (salt through a premature gill), muckrakers (meaning ninety-nine percent of journalists / propagandists swaddling the public since moveable type existed) have successfully reduced the language to a torporific quelling via whichever political dither inspires frowns. While the celestial debris above this planet sits heavier with our clickbait, anyone arty has had to marry their scraps (fair enough), yet, those with the savvy to pedal through the squall and into some just promotion, are now, it seems, using their leashes to masturbate too vociferously. One assumed a social crutch of left wing bric-a-brac-met-with-journalistic-knowhow had been fairly accountably stamped in place since, perhaps, the civil rights era, allowing a vague, ultimately unnecessary, quarter of a muse to back one’s reaction against the system (as the impetus to versify, long ago, involved any ratio of genitalia). Free speech can demand a lethal amount of alimony from her go-between exes (execs), and deploy it, right genital or left, to stomp out art. Those pundits who profit under the guise of literature are easier to diagnose than ever before. The only reason that responsibility has fallen to commenting trolls (and mentally ill poets, as bad as the truths we inadvertently correct) is because the internet is a real career-ender if any uncouth sentiment gets saddled with your name. Asocial libertinage is no longer a property of the left, if it ever was. The right has no use for niche kinks because money is not a factor. Politics cousins its light-hearted countercultures, swapping ass-cheeks twice a century: the old villain of the religious right went over to the new inverse of the same moralist hysteria (Jerry Springer’s audience stumbled through the hive to take charge of Twitter, a democracy on stilts) camouflaged as the (politically correct? buzzword offense takers) left, and the censorship became somehow worse, an amorphous void that can judo all your defenses into a populist bracket of privilege versus victimology so complicated it makes you miss the unintentional advertising of: “this godless book, this evil satanic filth!” My adult undergarments are curiously alight anticipating the body of Baudelaire’s work being condensed into an emoji (stand the pyramids on their point; may future archeologists spit on our hieroglyphics (how do you black pill someone who already used their prescription to overdose?) – no worries, any immoral or nefarious supposition will be considered as passé in a hundred years as the metered line is now). Good thing I squat all day in a subterraneous ectoplasm of my shortcomings on playback, because, concerning this soon (hopefully) forgotten generation (of which I almost partake): I aim to effectuate the meanest and most sublime revenge against the contemporary crossing guards of lit, figurehead whistleblowers to their own bloat, one and all, for reasons both psychotically personal, and intending to certainly not save my expired darling (the spectral and delicate Madame Artasia McAestheticia), but to provide a gnarled tunnel for the six or so of us who miss her dearly, a dumbwaiter to the casket we all envy and belong within.

Cliqued by proxy into Dodie Bellamy’s (born to sneer dismissively about the flank of her Buddhist sebum & riding some long expired mid-west working class cred) most fleeting and be-caped endowments (paper towel wipe of political-writer-arrogance-cum-mundane-new-narrative-diary-graph endemic to San Fran), iphgenia baal (the pronunciation of which is its own insufferable reparation / too patriarchal if capitalized / character white guilts yuppie pals into buying her drinks / prime to move copies with another super-ethical, f-the-corporation (ballsy maybe twenty years ago), slogan-wrought (SJW PP time) NPR chum trending its propagandistic new left media Iago ballyhoo (titling the hydra-dependent soapbox as it cousins her protests) inveigles readers (even one this mean and pasty) with the tale at hand, because attention, lost and gained (unto aforementioned death), is her book’s motif. Enchanting splotches tobogganed down daddy’s comforter (she’s not yet another victim in a half shell), the spanked array of politics and ass may be capable of rooting up an eye or two while a sophisticated talent endures below ideology (getting under the skin it aroused and bleeding the life out). It’s art, though, not a marriage, and for zero to five likes online, I’m willing to call baal an artist. Any click-count higher and I will correct my mistake and revert to the previous hatred. Her publisher (Jarett Kobek, to whom I apologize) wrote a brilliant book (Atta) that, to the shame of our anti-literate country, relatively few people bought. He then changed his approach and wrote a gimmicky (overtly) political conundrum (sneaking talent in) and profited, if any lit could provide the ink for a receipt (thumbs up and hearts from me, he awesomely Trojan horsed the culture).