Cogito ergo sumo

Do you believe in deconstruction at first sight?
(a) Yes
(b) No
(c) What an interesting use of a visual metaphor. [Yes, you clearly do – dial 0443 58562 and ask for freephone "men in white suits".]

Samuel the ostrich pondered to himself. "Gosh it's dark here – it must be night? Or perhaps there's nothing there. Alternatively, maybe I don't exist. Ah, but cogito ergo sumo wrestler. So that's O.K. So I clearly exist. But what is out there – perhaps I should dial up Jacques. Actually I feel rather peckish [pun!] – perhaps I'll dial a pizza. But there's no phone! Obviously I exist, but not the external world – that's it. I'm in charge! [enough]

Are you an Author?

Are you an Author?

1. Are you Dead?

a) Yes   [2 points for being a wise guy and knowing what to do about it.]

b) No   [No points for galloping presumptuous empirical naïveté.]

c) Don't know.   [You are Hamlet. Don't let it worry you. Pass directly into writing and do not collect £200 for killing Rosencrantz/Guildenstern who are one up as they do not even know which one they are talking about.]

d) Only when there is a bulbul in the syllabub.   [Blithering babe! You're barking mad!]

e) Are you a subject?   [17,008 points for d*c*nstr*ct*ng first and asking questions afterwards. To be subtracted if you fail to question this statement.]

f) Doesn't that beg the question?   [Not good enough – see above.]

g) Is it a question?   [-7 – see above again.]

h) "                     "   [Correct. You are an author. You may even be "the" author. So we are not going to give you any points anyway. This questionnaire has already ignored you. Have a nice day, "now".]

I said "This is boring", and answered me – "so is this!".

Raving author

All deads – raving author!

All mads – raving Poland!

Who is Sylvia?

Reginald Magdalen's geranium

666 – the number after 665, but only in certain contexts.

Albert, a three-toed sloth, also called eternity.

Textville timetable

What is the number of Swindon? Please look after this text.

0852  Normalopolis            0946
      (Central station)
      Slightly peculiar

AD    Definitely               42
1432  degenerating

999   Textville                14 BC
      (change for Derida,
      Deconstruction and
      Asylum)

)     Round the bend           1/2

{dog  Barking Mad              64.3
WOOF}

!     Liz                      ¡
      (peripheral station
      - which is the centre)

v     round the bend           ^
|______________________________|

?     Geoffrey -> right off    ¿
      the map, raving Other.   
                   The what __/

      Hello.  Hellp.

Devastating boing

"Some people have made the mistake of seeing Liz's work as a load of rubbish about railway timetables, but clever people like me who talk loudly in rhinoceroses see this as a deliberate ambiguity, a plea for understanding in a textualised ethos. The points are frozen, the word is dead. What is the difference? What indeed is the point? The point is frozen, the intention is late, lost and eaten by Paddington, the point is taken. If La Fontaine's Elque would spurn Tom Jones, the engine must be our head, the dining-car our oesophagus, the guardsvan our left lung, the cattle-truck our shins, the first-class stamp the piece of skin at the entrance to Atextual Oblivion, and the level-crossing an eclectic moose called Sajmĉjo. The clarity is devastating, but who is the ambiguity? Hello, it's meeeee! Where is the rambly gooey tree? Over there, in a box. Shunt is saying the 8.15 from Gillingham, when IN 'REALITY' he means the 8.13 from Gillingham. The train is 'the' same, only the time 'is' altered. Ecce homo, ergo sum. La Fontaine knew her sister, and knew her bloody intentionally. The point is broken, the text is mouldy, the words get up your nose. The illusion is complete. It is reality, the reality is intention, and the ambiguity is the only tooth truth. But is the truth, as Hitchcock observes, in the box? No, there isn't room, the ambiguity has put on WAIT! The point is pointed, the elk is elky, the beast stops at Swindon, the text stops at nothing, I'm having treatment, Derrida looks like Anaxagoras, the moose is moussy, the gibber is a gibbon, and Ezra Pound can get knotted."

< < BOING > >

Eludicating bang

a) Tree
b) eleven
c) buffalo
d) sign
e) wallpaper
f) phenomenology
d) yellowish
e) no.

"Naff, or what?" – Simon

Elucidating.

Eludicating?

< < BANG > >

This hopeless now

A stasis – for inspection. Clues? No. Characters¹ writing themselves on the brink of extinction, from which they endlessly draw back and after which, half-fabulous, they live on in trope.

The sign, like an arrow, returns us to this scene of life/death. Self-enacting, it tropes itself, marking and preceding the weary capitalization of the first "NOW", already repeated, qualified, subtracted from itself by succession. It is the pathetic elsewhere of the "sign – NOW" that it cannot even trap itself in a circle; it returns to the scene of its generation, to the Inspector, and to extinction.

In this hopeless NOW, the voice even has deserted music, enacting the bankruptcy of a Nietzschean logocentrism. Creation is undoing itself without any hope of reversing the fall of the sign. The name of the elk is crushed under a baroque complexity, whilst the savage pictogram of the "referent" (with all its ironies on its head) regresses to the protozoic state of an amoeba, with hair.

Finally the small claims of the now can only "syncopate themselves in the roundness of the egg", reduced to an elliptical irresolution that splits its own potential yet gives itself to be written.

Thank you. Serves you right.

¹Note pun.