Probably the most obnoxious thing you’ll see in an ad creative’s portfolio... Ever. From a collection of stories I’ve had simmering on ice since grad school.
You’ve been warned.
No really. Save yourself.
Ok here’s an experimental piece of fiction I wrote called…
Wait. Sorry. One more thing. This isn’t a story in the sense you might be accustomed to. It’s more of an experiment in narrative chaos. Imagine a jigsaw puzzle where half the pieces were swapped out at random, and the other half have been soaked in gasoline. If you want a beginning, middle, or end, please go check out the rest of my work. If you’re excited by disorientation—welcome aboard. Proceed with curiosity and swiftness, ignore breadcrumbs that don’t lead you anywhere, and don’t be afraid to laugh if something is absurd. No one is watching you. This is New York, remember?
Ok, the story is called…
“Fragments”
from
Notes and Ephemera of the Book
A manuscript segment [carbon dated c. 2011] is discovered in the rubble of Brooklyn’s East Williamsburg Industrial Zone. The extant manuscript -- roughly 100 A4 sized pages of footnotes -- is believed to have been the companion text to a communal record authored by a group of young women who kept a living quarter together for several years before The Occasion.
Foreword
The book, of which the few notes contained herein are all that remain, was discovered in the fall of 2011 in what was once a rope factory on Boerum Street. The building—which has since been demolished, or rather, deconstructed into neat piles of yellow brick, resembling a kind of prehistoric cairn, two by six boards and concrete rubble that were the components of its sum—was likely erected before the war in the industrial area that divided the King County regions known as Williamsburg and Bushwick. Factories of early human industry had once spread throughout a four-block radius, five- and six-story complexes, each in a range of seventy thousand square feet. The coffin factory on Grattan. The textile factory on McKibbin. The bread factory on one end of Bogart. The composite meat distribution center on the other. The laborers and their families lived in the housing projects between Bushwick and Graham Avenues. They were mainly of color. Brownstones along Harrison, Ingraham, Porter, Morgan and Knickerbocker were reserved for upper management. The church was on Seigel. The pub and barber on Flushing.
Little is known about the book, where it came from, and what its purpose was. What may be reasonably asserted is that it appears to have been composed by one or more members of a group of young women who took residence in the rope factory on Boerum, likely sometime early in the century. The late nineties and early aughts brought a massive descent of what came to be known at the end of the anthropological era as the “American hipster” — generally a young, white, artist of affluent means — upon the area. Ownership of the buildings, as throughout much of western Brooklyn, remained under tight control by the Hasidim, who historically populated the southern outskirts of Williamsburg. Noticing the growth in traffic and expenditures at the turn of the twenty-first century stretching from the waterfront toward a commercial thoroughfare known as Bedford Avenue, it became their project to transform the once destitute and unusable factories into large spaces in which hipsters could reasonably reside and create whatever art they deemed fitting of a the continual aim to push the frontier. Paintings and sculptures became behemoth as a result of the ease with which artists could come by fifteen-foot ceilings. The New York Times, the local news outlet of the time, was quick to draw a comparison with the lofts of mid-twentieth century SoHo. It seemed for a time that all was well.
The struggle, however, came to a head, between the two groups (i.e., the Hipsters and the Hasidim), both of whom were notorious for, above all else, an uncanny disposition toward silence. The Hasidim did not shake women’s hands. The hipsters did not believe in shaking hands. Theirs was a relationship founded upon commerce and avoidance. Iron-clad leases were the only means of communication among two groups whose livelihood depended one upon the other. Many of the residences, including the one in which the authors of the book found themselves, did not fit within the parameters of New York City residential zoning.
The book itself eludes any agreeable form of interpretation and, as such, it stands to reason that scholars may continue to extend all manner of projection upon its meaning throughout time, permitting such attention remains a mode of intrigue. What may perhaps extend into the realm of reason, as this author will argue (and for which he will no doubt be condemned to defend), is as follows:
- The book was authored exclusively by a group of cisgender women.
- The authors were likely many.
- The authors were likely subjects of menstrual synchrony.
- The book was composed over a period of several months, though possibly longer.
- There exists no such meeting place as described within.
- The book itself was perhaps written in diary form, though there is little indication to assume this other than that the annotations appear to be written by the hand of multiple authors. Further, it is possible that the entire book would have been, in fact, the notes and ephemera, for which there exists no hard copy of its beginning or end.
Ongoing research on the existing text remains on the path of intense scrutiny, with the text being examined against the broadest range of digital archives, as the authors seem to have quoted many sources outside of their group with little if any regard for citation. Still, it is the project of all scholars who come into contact with the book, present author included, to derive a system and systems of meaning and meanings out of the text enclosed.
G.S.
Columbia University
***
Notes and Ephemera of the Book, Unabridged
357. “Words” “mean” and “are” simultaneously.
358. To fail, that is, in a beautiful way. Both in character and language. Like trying to solve a problem with a tool that itself created the problem
359. Meaning is the business of language.
360. Sometimes you have to actively combat meaning in order to find it.
361. Life = discourse. Silence, death. To filibuster fate.
362. No words, but thingless words.
363. Patterns without an existing system of ideas.
364. Words are as shoddy as the things they peddle.
365. If I had to choose, I’d rather make you think than make you like me.
366. Shitting on yesses and noes without exception.
367. Uttering the word “nothing” refutes its meaning. We have no way of standing outside of language. You can’t critique language because you have to use it to discuss it. ______ There are no dogs here, but I use the expression.
368. Anticipating doubt becomes persuasive in doubting itself.
369. The book is undead. It can’t be killed.
370. An absurd notion.
371. If we keep talking will we not die? Is this silence that you want? That you were looking for/ Is this a real state, or is it beyond being? Beyond knowing? You cannot take back language by being silent. So then to pour words. Infantile. Pre I. What is ‘it’? Can the only answer be “it is not this”? Grasping for something that is prior to meaning. But one can only be herded, and herded, without destination. Tying a bow on something that ought to explode soon.
372. You cannot paint the thing; you have to paint your failure to paint the thing.
373. Wherein cancelling hope becomes somehow hopeful.
374. Ersatz.
375. The I that is not I might be the same as the you that is not you. To read is to make mental space for an I that is not your I. So if I can internalize an I that is not my I, then that I that is currently inhabiting the space that my I usually does, is really your I. So my I is your I and I and you and you and I are the same.
376. The castle is language, I, God, vaginas, desire (separate from arousal). It is the thing and what the thing wants. Temporary object of desire, in proxy of becoming one with the mother. Concrete real thing to stand in place of whatever particular object of desire. Where the real object remains forever out of reach.
377. One cannot see light or truth; one may only experience the things which light and truth illuminate.
378. Nothing cannot be the opposite of everything.
379. To realize that one is a character in a novel in which one must necessarily die at the end.
380. The book versus the authentic.
381. Every term defined (defiled) by another term.
382. Meaning as fatality: it’s just there. It’s everpresent. Always in the room with nothing to say to you.
383. In saying everything, he says nothing.
384. Death always happens in the third person.
385. Their presence is the principal obstacle to our connection. In order to get closer to him, you must get as far away from him as possible.
386. Obscurity may be too hard to be interesting.
387. A long walk for a short drink, as it were.
388. Though of course illness and exhaustion can make even peasants seem refined.
389. Despair. Embarrassment. Conquest. Obsession. In no particular order.
390. Holding on to our fantasy is the only mode by which we may never cease to be.
391. Screeching across the grooves of the record, though we would have arrived there anyway for the vinyl is composed of a spiral (and not concentric circles), after all.
392. Keep the story moving to distract from the knowledge that there is no truth, and yet I will find the truth.
393. Synchronicity of antagonism. First freedom is the acceptance of fate. The difficulty of saying I.
394. I’m bad at ending things.
395. You could just stop.
396. The one cockroach has brought on the expectation of more.
397. Real subjectivity has no substance. It is actually complete emptiness.
398. Hysterical women.
399. Suicide enacts nothingness.
400. The seer. She has perspective. She is the writer and the reader. Are we, then, scripted, or transcribed?
401. Hope shall seduce you into a story.
402. Be confounded.
403. Circling round an argument without ever getting to the middle.
404. i.e., To make sense out of things.
405. Authenticity out of fraudulence, because that’s what being human is. A mode of being.
406. –be quiet, it is nothing (as one says to a child at the moment of an incredible disaster.)
407. The past is lost, but even its loss is lost to us if we mistake its representation for the thing, the past, itself. More tragic than losing is the loss of having lost.
408. We are not saying “Don’t dump him.” What we mean is “Exercise your right and privilege to take some time to yourself before making a concrete decision. There’s no rush, no harm. Just take your time. Stay put until you make up your mind.
409. Perhaps it is the seeing, rather than the absence, which will make us fall out of love. To humanize. To de-divine.
410. i.e., I would prefer not to.
411. A quandary (if that word is right): Simply all and nothing at all. A mark, to jot. A round body, I could propound, though minor, and rigid with sharp points on occasion. A truism forms from a sign. Signifying a thing. Or signifying no thing. Ah, to construct stuff out of things. An insignificant thing. And still, it is all; or almost all. All, and thus, nothing. (So, it should follow, almost nothing too, right?) A singular quandary is as follows: What’s missing? A thing. Important, possibly, but don’t trip: it’s not vital, as you’ll catch. If by this I confound and mystify you—If you want additional hints, carry on with illustrations as follow: A) Part, say, of a word that shouldn’t find first proclamation via digital form. A word which stays in its ability to go unsaid. A most important word to most, drawing air in fashion similar to such: companion, ally, confidant, buddy, sibling, family, twin, consort. And still, not wholly right. Still lacking. B) A portion of your you if analyzing minds and brains. You might first say “I am.” And your solution is mostly right—though only mostly. Only almost. C) Childishly, a bowl, ajar, spilt, split, cross. Or in adult incarnation, a column with a triptych of horns at top, bottom and half-mast. D) Just don’t mislay ambition and you cannot fail. Hush I say. Hush to my prolix words. Hush. Half of what I say finds synonyms at “hollow, blank, vain, trivial, trifling, unimportant, and insignificant”. But I say it so that you may turn up fractions, if not a good half (as, for all you know, you cannot know which half, if any, is which). And so I ask again, kind soul, should you opt in to this conundrum: what’s missing?
412. Vaginoplasty.
413. What should one care whether what one has thought has already been thought?
414. with a silent E.
415. Try as we might, we never could achieve silence. There was always the drip.
416. We called the super finally. We summoned a meeting in which our backs were turned.
417. Satie, E.
418. Valerie Kuehne, Live @ Café Orwell.
419. She takes down every word, even those she’s not supposed to.
420. And when he was demanded of the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God should come, he answered them and said, The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.
421. Desistance, to cease.
422. What, then, is the use of this abrupt ending?
423. The ever present need, if not mere existence, of white
END OF MANUSCRIPT