Literature is a hygienic convenience, a pseudoscience, a subset of urban planning. In the aftermath of collapse, all genres decompose into a postmordial soup. Chunks of “fiction” bob along next to translucent personal ecstacies, unstable livewire questions, stage directions, and increasingly inbred novae.

The junkheap is relevant at this exact moment as a formal principle of future poetics. The organized collection, the archive, stands in no way methodologically or aesthetically superior to the midden heap. Latter has the ability to shape human remains along inhuman principles, in no small part through its parallel subjection to physics alongside an indifference / cruelty towards cultural justice. We who feed from it early learn the practical ins and outs of spiritual parasitism, and it comes to reflect itself in how we (forget to) dress-up. Tatters, rags, patches… Everything becomes “military surplus” by virtue of there being no longer the possibility of a military. Our posture becomes wobbly, sneaking, hungry, our eyesight becomes dreamy. We are no longer efficient, we become charismatically superstitious and impractical.

We are scurrying around our own little Terminal Beaches, designating Craft Areas amid disaster zoning. Ballard had the foresight and the luxury to write Ballardian characters; we are for better or worse simply becoming them. “In real time” becomes an obsolete phrase. Is it our job to hallucinate a paper-maché Ballard, a drainpipe author? Or can we go mad in peace without any such paramilitary chain of command? We are all becoming collage-scrap satires of our pre-collapse selves. We are reverting from subject to medium, becoming (what we always were, cryptographically) a microclimate in which specific drives play themselves out. This reflects in our current embrace of, and future identification with, the fragment. It’s actually been quite awhile since we’ve “read” anything proper. We’re too busy experimenting and gambling and masturbating, and it’s only going to get worse as its enabling spectacle loses broadcast fidelity, science is long gone from the labs and is crawling alongside us in the sewers.

We’re becoming toxic yes but in that charming way, a charismatic poisoned egregore, the free-floating noun “vermin” without designating a specific creature. Hard to articulate or complete anything but it’s getting way easier to obsess and to fantasize and scratch out a thought, lapse into some reverie... I take it as a rather enticing “out”, the route of the Beach Crab. Snatches out of the analogical k-hole can make a whole day of “survival” worth the slog. In short, consider a Resort Vacation, underTake an Ongoing Project before the Good Spots are Take, and make your first Cut as Soon as Possible!