things move around

like slow motion, but slower

Let’s face it - Metamorphosis, despite being some crazy whacked-out shit, gets a bit heavy at times, and there’s nowhere near enough sex in it. Written at a time when opium was the jolliest dope in town, it doesn’t exactly sell the Life of a Roach. I can’t think why, then, two of the three blurbettes on the back cover of The Roaches Have No King reference Kafka’s Bohemian bad-trip-athon.

Perhaps for the same reason I just have. Hmm.

First, the sex. It oozes from the pages like jism from a teenager’s todger. The chitinous narrator (named Numbers, after the book of the bible from which he derove his first meal, of library paste) bigs up the no-strings, fuck-loose and fancy-free style of his species in contrast to Hom. Sap’s ineffectual (and unevolutionary) emotional posturing. If yoomans would only spend more time biffing each other silly, and less time composing sonnets about it, then life would be a lot easier for us all. This is the first and best example of the book’s Big Joke: the truth is, of course, that our two species misunderstand eachother equally. Witness Numbers getting hot under the carapace about a female accomplice as they lurk atop a bathroom cabinet,

Stroking Kotex’s foreleg I said, “I’ve never told you this but I’ve always liked the line of your clypeus, the fine gleaming mandibles, and your dark brown kitchen eyes, all two hundred of them.”

She pushed me away, then tossed me a tiny dose of pheromones. The huge erection it aroused made me lose my balance and nearly fall down the face of the mirror. She laughed. “That’s all you understand. Sometimes I wonder if we’re any better than humans.” Immediately I was back on six legs. It was the first time a female had ever said something repugnant enough to quell my excitation.”

which is as fine an evocation as any of traditional urban amor propre. I’ve always been a mandibles-man myself, as it happens.

As the novel scuttles along, and times worsen for the colony of roaches who infest the same apartment as Ira Fishblatt, so the coitus becomes more grotesque, extending to the sub-duvet rape by Numbers of the sleeping subject of his ire - Ruth, Ira’s cohabiting lover. Waking literally lightheaded the next morning, he has a revelation:

Then it came to me. The missing weight was my spermatophore. My excitation had been so?wild that I had ejaculated into my?beautiful Ruth without realizing it.

I was thrilled. A perfect consumnation to our new love.

proving that when it coms to the scrummage, two hundred eyes are no less blind than two. Oh, and Weiss manages to stave off the temptation of the sole, obvious pun for the full 250 or so pages; but some of us aren’t so clever. They’re not called cock-roaches for nothing.

Life is good, chez Fishblatt, until “the Gysy Woman” ups and leaves. Her it was whose slovenly kitchen-habits had sustained the roach colony in a bountiful, blissful, harmony. There, that’s the backstory; keep up, damnit!

Any story with this much sex in it must also be highly biblical. Numbers’s generation are all hatched in the spines of old, sweetly-pasted books, and take their names and modus operandi accordingly. His contemporaries include his bessie friend Bismarck, Barbarossa, Clausewitz, Miller, Julia Childs, and Reud, “squeezed from the spine of Beyond the Pleasure Principle” before he could complete his reading. A form of roach-madness, called “imprinting,” occurs when individuals take on the entire character of their hatching-tomes; become what they eat. There are other hazards, too:

Some citizens had been affected profoundly, tragically. Many books had been opened so few times that air never permeated the pages. Infants who chose these books were destroyed. We held an annual commemoration for the many lost in Gravity’s Rainbow and Finnegan’s Wake.

And as Numbers battles his own creeping metamorphosis into a vengeful Old Testament roach-god, things begin to really fall apart. In the end, the last of his doomed tribe, he exacts a foul punishment on Ira, whom he by now loathes as his neighbour, by splicing Ira’s blow with particles of sodium hydroxide, and watching his schnoz disintegrate as he haemorrages across his fastidiously tidy living room.

By elevating Blattela Germanica to the sophisticated brutality of Homo Sapiens, Weiss manages to eke out a tart point. But since I like my empathy a little more dewy-eyed, I think I’ll stick with Franz.

“Don’t leave the roach, man, that’s the best part” - Gary Snyder (misquote).

ice cubes down my pants

Presenting a special gift for a special Valentine.

If the special person in your life enjoys music, they will enjoy it that much more with the Bose^® Wave^® radio/CD. That’s because our U.S. patented acoustic waveguide speaker technology delivers sparkling clarity and full, rich, low tones far beyond what you would expect from a system so elegantly small.

“… they’ll think the sound is amazing…” - Sound & Vision.

She’s going to be so overjoyed!

As for “sparkling clarity and full, rich, low tones far beyond what you would expect from a system so small,”

that’s your snore, that is. I’m going to patent your snore in the U.S.

Gripped by some mental disease, I cranked up my Binatone last night for “I’m a Celebrity.” Of course, one has to commune with the hoi polloi. Missed the first two series: too busy watching BBC3, of course, and writing letters to the Telegraph.

It’s brilliant. I love them all. Especially the monster-roaches.

The celebs are OK, too. Except that Diane Modahl, who seems to be the token nonentity. She should be plucking chickens on Big Brother, not wrestling gators on this gripping epic of self-discovery.

I’ll be subscribing to Heat before I know it.

p.s. Razor or Pete to be king of the mingers.

Came to land where the rock was deep-scored by weathering, magma, moraine, and alluvial flows. The inhabitants’ diet was heavy on herring and the eggs of a strange kind of bird; their language was complex and coarse.

Got the fuck out of there, quick.

the sawmill, redolent of fractured pine,
South-East Asian hardwoods, and the sound
of somone on the phone (inaudible);

the bandsaw playing on and on and on

but cat walked

There are a lot of Chinese people in Vancouver. There are also a lot of Canadian people, who think they are Scottish. But first, a digression:

Some anthropologists¹ argue that Wales was first colonised by interpid (and likely lost) settlers from the Indian subcontinent. The cultural and physiognomic smilarities, they argue, are too numerous to dicount as mere coincidence: dark hair, a generally diminutive stature, and a love of song being the most obvious. Radical etymology has suggested that the Celtic languages, and Welsh in particular, are linked more closely to the early Vedic dialects than any other European tongue. One only has to witness a Welshman in dialogue with a Hindu to be struck by the almost identical accents.

Similarly, I have long-suspected that the people of Scotland are descended from early Chinese migrants. How else to explain the love of fried food and the subtle, nay, incomprehensible, tonalities of speech? A Mandarin-speaking friend of mine tells me that “Rabbie Burns,” pronounced correctly, means “exodus,” “shipwreck,” or “barbecue” in that language. Clearly, the hapless wanderers were blown off course by a prolonged period of ill-wind, and shipwrecked somewhere off the coast of Bute. It was New Year. Driven mad by their predicament and by the need to survive the harsh Scottish winter, they partook of an abominable feast, in which their own excrement was sewn into pouches of sail and devoured. This predates the discovery of the Mars Bar. The cultural memory lives on in the “Rabbie Burns” night and the consumption of “haggis”². The so-called poet of the same name was just an opportunistic charlatan, and probably a Sassenach in disguise.

Imagine my surprise, then, to receive by email an invitation to Toddish McWong’s Annual Robbie Burns Chinese New Year Dinner. The maitre d’ (pictured performing a traditional Sino-Scottish dance of welcome) seems to offer the most conclusive proof yet of a direct link between these two great cultures³.

¹a bloke I used to know who mainlined mushrooms.
²c.f. the Mandarin “Ha kis” - carrion, poverty or bowel-disease.
³and, of course, the Canadian culture.

virginity is a fad - it’ll never last

religious lunacy, sadly, is here to stay