The Kall of Kijiji

The following review was found in its present state on the writing desk of Eric Salomon Victim, the great New York art critic, who was in turn found in HIS present state scattered, as the police report said, "lovingly" over a fair stretch of backwater New England dirt road. The present editor is pleased to present the last work of a fine art critic on the last works of a fine folk artist, both of whom came to a mysterious, eldritch-type end. The present editor will be excused for remaining anonymous. One might ask why a present editor would be so eager to publish something so obviously unnatural; and this editor would respond, anonymously of course, that he does not believe in superstition, and that the art world must be freed from the base sort of mysticism, this Yog Soggothic nonsense...*

*The preceding text trails off suggestively. Please proceed to the rest of the article. - The Anonymous Editor's "wife".

Anybody who knew Nathaniel Irehart as I did - barely at all - suspected, I think, that his inspiration was not altogether free of, oh how shall we say it with delicacy... A slight babbling, gibbous caco-demoniacal insanity? Slight. To the eyes of the world he was a darling sculptor, sometimes the writer of an occasional verse, and sometimes the groper of an occasional nurse. His mysterious disappearance has been a shock to the art world, seen as he was last in the area of a shady semi-glowing crypt in the primeval forests of Maine. Believe it or not, there are some who suggest his end was not altogether natural.

He was loved dearly by all in his hometown of Sidon, Massachussets, New England, America, North America, Map, Hillard and Bimbsly 1957 All Rights Reserved. They fawned upon this tittering little goblin who frolicked from saloon to bar, cheering up the downcast and casting down the beer-cask with equanimity and vomiting. Yet I think they all felt in their innards that there was something not quite Euclidean about Irehart -- his physiognomy bespoke an atavism to some semi-reptilian half-mammal, licking its cold green chops as it crawls its way from the fathomless depths of the dark green sea. The same was often said of his limericks, the hue of which was often a shade darker than bleu.

I provide a sample of his mad verse to display the unique blend of occult and ribald influences which made up Irehart's aesthetic, an odd conglomeration which I term "esoteroticism":

There once was a fellow of Arkham

Whose ballsack was named Yog-Soggarkam

Whenever it'd itch

He'd go see his old witch

Who'd hermetically spark'em and lark'em.

I first encountered this wonder child at a folk-art festival in Connecticut  Among the wood carven knick-knacks and candle sets, his 10 foot totem-poll stood out prominently. I took it to be a bit of west-coast inspiration, until I realized that it depicted, not the traditional Raven or Fisherman of the Haida, but a howling half-moose, half-man, half-wolf (I have since learned its name to be a were-moosetaur) devouring a half-turtle, half-jellyfish along a weird trajectory of a mixed-forest treescape at midnight. 

"Pretty piece of crazy, this." I said under my breath to a fellow next to me. "Thanks! The Old Ones have truly spoken to me through this one" he said. It was Irehart. A debonair 20-something year old sporting a tri-corn and britches, leaning on a gruesome cane made out of Whalesbone and hot-glue rhinestones. 

"Old ones?" I inquired. "Oh you know" he mumbled, with a tittering giggle. "Relations. Old Grandma Irehart. Uncle Pyncheon. Aunt Derleth..." I nodded cautiously with the half-moon grin of the condescending. I may have looked askance, but he looked insane.

Upon learning that I was a noted critic, he invited me to visit him at his cottage in Sidon for an exclusive peak at some "works in progress". "Fat chance!" I thought, "I'd sooner play fetch with moosejaw up there than visit this loony in his loony-bin." Meanwhile I smiled a smile of agreement. "Oh please, do come" he implored with a titter, "If you like animals, can play fetch with rover. And my wife, Luna Bin, just adores company..." It struck me that all was not altogether orthodox with this young artist. Still, an exclusive was nothing to chortle at in those days of vagrant art criticism. Two weeks later I was driving down the rural dirt roads of central-northwest-eastern New England. I was looking for an Outlet antique store, as the missus had her eye out for a credenza.

A week after that I took the greyhound to Irehart's seven-gabled chalet. As I approached the devilish looking house au pied, I felt a shudder in my left pocket, and since my cell-phone was in my right, I knew something curious was afoot. The house was, as I said, devilish looking. Its architecture was one of your standard puritan semi-colonials, but with a strange undulation of gable that crept up behind you and whispered "Hassenpfeffer!" in your ear when you weren't paying attention. Also, it was painted blood red. 

I knocked on the old door with the skeleton demon-claw door-knocker, de rigeur of course, but receiving no answer, I rung the hellish door bell. The tune that I heard reverberate through the old stead is terrifying to re-call, and all but impossible to describe; imagine "Old MacDonald" if it were played slowly through on an old 78 made out of human flesh, the speaker-horn of which was the jaw of a ravening extinct sabre-tooth tiger, and you might have an idea of the terror I felt as I listened to the eerie melody.

Irehart came to the door wearing a smile and an 17th century puritan smock on which was the embroidered phrase Kisse ye the Cheffe -- Stake's On! "Welcome welcome" he beamed at me with a toothsome titter "Dinner's almost ready". From the front door to the parlor the house seemed to be an all corridor-and-cobweb sort of affair. I met Luna Bin surely enough sitting on the rug laughing derisively at an antique portrait above the mantelpiece. Not wanting to pry, I refrained from asking. Fido could be heard breathing fire in the back yard. Well wasn't this lovely. Dinner consisted of a special Innsmouth dish of our host's own ancestors called Lobster Inferno. The gills were the tastiest part, I remarked with a ghost-white countenance and a smile worth a thousand tears.

It was after our brandy and shrunken-heads that the host finally offered to show me his studio. Going down to the basement, we came to a sealed, dungeon like door that, once pried open via an old brass key, led to a further staircase smelling of the usual corpse-and-old-spice required of such classic ossuaries. Down, down to the catacombs we went, my host babbling the while of his latest inspiration, of the Old Ones, of old "Grandma Soggoth" and the like. I was beginning to feel slightly uneasy. Well, here we were. The old studio. I was surrounded by a thousand, well... I suppose you could call them sculptures, but I'd be more inclined to call them semi-rotting alien corpses stapled to life-sized cut-outs of Big Bird.

Actually, I was inclined very much to the left at that moment, and was just about to take a welcome leave of my pesky consciousness, which in this whole affair had been nothing but trouble, when I was suddenly aware of a dark voice coming up from a sewer grate in the floor. Perhaps it was saying something in an eldritch, inhuman tongue? Or perhaps it was asking for peanuts. I didn't care to find out. My host had fallen to the floor in a sudden urge to bow, or perhaps he had lost a contact lense to the Dark Lord Uldoroch. I, in any case, had had enough. Gripping my mind with my hands I reeled about for a bit and collapsed in a fit of Scrooge McDuck impressions, as is my wont during stressful situations.

I awoke innumerable hours later in my bedroom back home. Quickly, I am writing all of this down so as to have something that I can trail off to, before I am inevitably driven out of my mind by various extra-universal horrors who will be coming to visit -- ah, I hear the door-bell. Now's as good a place as any to trail off, methinks...

Day of the Shock Worker

The following essay was re-engineered for the use of you frustrated office workers on those gloomy Dogbert days when you "just feel", as you claim, pooped, frustrated, or on the verge of "burn out". This is not a piece to excuse or palliate such feelings - it has been specifically designed to crush them. We firmly believe that the power of a strong social ethic can shame even the laziest cubicle-bound fatalist into productivity.

Any red lines represent the excision of formalist or capitalistic subversion that found its way into the original essay. 

Comrade, have you ever confronted your own productivity? Looking back over a long stretch of "everyday activities" (whatever they may be), have you ever asked yourself, "exactly what kind of worker am I?" Some of you might know quite well. When one thinks of the different "types" of worker, many common expressions come to mind, for instance:

• Easy-going
• "Hard" worker
• Perfectionist
• Enthusiastic
• Back-room worker
• Lazy
• Group thinker etc.

You might have never been quite able to fit yourself into these categories. Perhaps, like so many over-educated people, you are a little bit of hard worker. Perhaps you are even a self-designated  "perfectionist" - which implies you have a reluctance to finish something until it is polished as a work of art - a rather bourgeois and egotistical style of working!

But is there not something subtle to be gained from this critical and cynical style of the modern office worker, who hates what she does but does it anyway with a sardonic smile? Perhaps  there are some advantages to the egotistical capitalistic style of working - personal pleasure, emotional persuasion, the joy of exploiting an intern. But  no amount of cynical pleasure can fill up the entirety of our complex human existence. , We must push aside all such positive feelings, despite how wonderful and easy to grasp they might be. On this subtle point we must not at all be too dogmatic. And we should always bear in mind the excellent lessons pointed out to us by Comrade Trotsky MindApe, so long as we do not do so uncritically and without well-considered qualification.

One thing you rarely hear mention of in the 21st century office-and-mousepad world is classical "productivity" - getting something done as fast and near-standard as possible. You are often seduced by the idea of adding a personal touch, of mulling it over, of not trusting the plain model even when it is the best solution.

But today we proclaim: bitchy office workers of the world, you have nothing to lose but your back-pains!

In the battle for a victorious completion of the Bolshevik Five-Year Plan. Be in the front ranks of the shock workers of the brigade, the workshop and the factory!

Don't be fooled - customization is decadence. Shake yourself out of classificatory torpor! Forget the need to tickle your own ego with opiates like "self-satisfaction" and "loving your work". Douse your face in some cold water, have some raw beets and carrots, and remind yourself of the great Soviet "Shock Worker" movement of the 20's and 30's.

"Shock worker!" What a term! It must sent shivers of proletarian awe down your spine as soon as you read it. Derived from the Prussian "Shock Trooper" , it was adapted to the cause of worker productivity, enrolling a huge swathe of Soviet workers into "shock worker brigades", whose mass achievement was the hyper-production of quotas, sometimes earning the rank of "500" or "1000 percenters".

The marrow of this upbeat ideology can be found in Lenin's own article "How to Organize Competition". Lenin thinks the working class are too "timid" compared to the military and bourgeoisie - that workers need a new competitive and militarized ethic, a heroical persona to give them self-confidence.

Could not the following paragraph suit any modern business setting?

Competition creates the opportunity for employing it on a really wide and on a really mass scale, for actually drawing the majority of toilers into an arena of such labor in which they can display their abilities, develop their capacities, reveal their talents, of which there is an untapped spring among the people...

So long as we tart up, perhaps, the final sentence:

...and in which capitalism is crushed, suppressed and strangled in thousands and millions.

Are we to take Lenin at face value?  Absolutely not, without a critical outlook. Certainly his policies, and the policies that derived from them by Stalinists resulted in the actual over-working of thousands of already taxed soviet workers. Yes, it is a powerful rhetoric and the symbolism and propaganda which grew out of his teachings are an excellent stock-set of cultural motifs, indeed some of the most interesting history has heretofore produced - but we must not be overly seduced by a nostalgia for a false set of fairy communistic ideals that never really existed in real life.

Do you want to? Join! Hurry and join the shock group of model labor. Do you want to fight against the cold? Do you want to defeat hunger? Do you want to eat? Do you want to drink?

1000 percenters! Are you not shamed by such numbers, you kulak dog? You sweat butter and laziness - the shock worker sweats oil and blood! You yawn the yawn of a thousand bloated yaks - the shock worker breathes necessary amounts at the efficient interval! He would replace his heart with a engine, his legs with wheels, his arms with a general sort of swiss-army knife contraption, apt for screwing in bolts and cutting pizzas alike.

For the modern office drone, there is no more salutary outlook than this of the shock worker. Consider: since you have been misled by the mythology of an ergonomic, parasitic existence, you have noticed silly things, un-productive things, like back pains, eye strain, boredom, frustration, loss of libido etc. You feel these things because you are resisting the march of dialectical materialism.

Now let us look at the modern office shock worker. What does he know of these petty complaints? His back is like a rod of iron, his ass hard like the steel of the railroad. He sits in his cubicle like a perfectly machine-built cog - there is no clutter, there is no single unnecessary item. As soon as his hand touches the mouse and keyboard, he is at once a part of the machine - his deepest viscera vibrate in sympathy with the glowing spreadsheets and the dance of PowerPoint graphs.

Look him in the eyes, just try to make small talk with him! You will hear only calculated and glorious grunts of triumph as he flies through the work of ten kulaks such as yourself while you dally away your lunch hour with caviar and Tsarist champagne breaks. You who grasp so hard at the threads of your own "personal growth", and all the while decay in the muck - ask the shock worker how he grows!

"I? I? I is the letter of the reactionary. It is IT that grows, comrade, and it alone with the productivity of the organization!"

And you asked him what he does on the weekend!

Anybody with work today and a social and incorruptible mindset must immediately identified himself with the title of "shock worker". It is exactly this kind of militarized courage in the work place that you should depend upon everyday. A pride in completing something, or having the ability to complete it, with a powerful, even intimidating efficacy.

Maybe there is room for humanity, humour, and urbane cynicism in your off hours. Maybe there are days when you do indeed need to step back from the black hole of labour and ask yourself on an existential level what it is all about. Your ego should not be entirely ignored. But remember that collective, futuristic identification with machine-like efficacy is a powerful and fun way to get yourself through some rather bland days.

No pat on the back or "great job!" for you! You must want your work to be so highly charged as to "terrorize" with its quantity, and the fierce speed with which it was accomplished. But it is not yet enough! Faster comrade, and faster still! Before the inevitable screensaver of history blacks us all out.

October 1 - the All-Union Day of the Shockworker. We have a report! We are completing construction of the foundation of the socialist economy!

Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief Post-Secondary World Systems

Chief Interlocutors:

CUSANUS, University student and president of the Student's Association

TESSOUAT, College student and partisan

SIMPLICIO, A buffoon with only a High School education

---

Audience Member: Hello, I've come for the dialogue?

Usher: Of course sir, we have an excellent pair of seats in front. Right this way Madam.

Audience Member: I hear it's a good one, eh? Might even get Platonic?

Mrs Audience Member: Oh dear, I hope it doesn't come to that.

Usher: Not to worry madam, we provide all of our customers with specialty goggles in case of unexpected hypostasis. Now here we are.

Audience Member: Bless you, lad.

Mrs Audience Member: La! She starts!

---

A DIALOGUE CONCERNING THE TWO CHIEF POST-SECONDARY WORLD SYSTEMS, or, The Story of the Double Edged Swordfish. This dialogue is presented WITHOUT FRENCH SUBTITLES for de 'earing h'impaired.

CUSA. Yesterday we agreed to come together to split a pitcher -

SIMP. To splitcher?

CUSA. Yes, splitcher, we agreed to splitcher, and moreover so did she, but it's been so many years since she took gymnastics that we might as well continue what we were doing until she's done stretching. Now if you remember, mongomaniacs, we agreed to get together in this dialogue in order to discuss the merits and faults of the two chief systems of post-secondary education, those of the University (or "College" in America) and the College (or "Farmyard" in America), thereby to determine the which of which is the superior..Er, with which the superior...Er, carry the one and...

TESS. Which's better?

CUSA. Concisely put, browbeater. Now, it has long been agreed upon that these bodies, while dedicated to the education and information of the world public, are almost always constituted as communities. Not all bodies are constituted this way. Some have more upper-thigh fat, which contributes to a more congested thoroughfare (and trust me, it is thorough).

At any rate, just like cities, there is a great deal of variation between constitutions, culture, and between the happiness of its citizens. Remember that the Divine Plato, in his chief dialogue The Republic, chiefly builds from divine excellencies of nature and the human soul a puppet play of the ideal city as could be constituted in the ideal form divinely, chiefly, and without an overabundance of squash. I hereby propose this very method as the start of our investigation - which of the two compares most closely to the ideal city?

SIMP. How do you talk like that, anyway?

CUSA. If you are referring to the rhetorical complexity of my personal mandarin, I'll have you know that my grandfather was at Eton, dog!

SIMP. Well maybe he shouldn't have been eatin' dog.

TESS. Now listen Custy, I like where you are going with this. The basic idea is that universities and colleges are like two different types of countries. Ok, fair enough. I guess we're trying to figure out which one is the "first world" country, right?

CUSA. Aptly put, my sans-cullottic chum. And it's exactly on this point that the University comes on top...

I said, comes on top...

SIMP. *sips his drink*

CUSA. No? Nothing? Alright then. On top.

Remember that it is we who are the intellectuals, the researchers, the golden philosopher kings of the Platonic Republic. We pump the world engine with the fuel of our thought; we send out the armies of Enlightenment, critical thinking, and engaged dialogue into the world to conquer the nebulous terrorism of bias; it is we who, in an ever faster and manic age of information and digitization, act as stewards for the knowledge of the present and future....

TESS. Ok, I hear what you are saying, but I think you might be veering off-track a little. The point of this exercise was to figure out which community was the best. Well, tell me, from a practical stand-point, how much does a burger cost on campus?

CUSA. A burger? They are fairly expensive actually. 7-8$? I don't know. I never get them.

TESS. Oh?

CUS. They are kind of gross. You know, iffy. Unbalanced. Most of the food on campus is distributed through a pretty sketchy food corporation.

TESS. Interesting - Socrates can't cook his own meals? Very different from what we have. I had a delicious lunch today on my college campus actually - a beautiful organic salad and leek soup. For four bucks!

SIMP. What kind of salad was it?

TESS. Quinoa!

SIMP. Oh, I've heard of that. It's that food that sounds differently than it's spelled and tastes even worse.

CUSA. It sounds delicious and healthy to me. How do they sell it so cheaply?

TESS. It's made by the culinary students - as part of their curriculum. They sell the food they cook on campus at reduced rates, they get to practice, we get to eat well crafted, home-cooked meals - everybody benefits!

CUSA. What a charming idea! Wish we could do that...We have to run bake-sales on the sly for fear of getting shut down by the administration. And even in those, the cupcakes are as half-baked as the causes they support. 

SIMP. Buy a baked good! Save the bare-back black squirrel from extinction!

TESS. I didn't know there was such a thing as a bare-back black squirrel.

SIMP. Well there's only one, but he's getting on, you know.

CUSA. Do you see what we have to deal with? Er...With what we have to deal?

TESS. Well compared to that, we're kind of a communist paradise - on college campuses so many of the programs offer real goods and services. We've got cheap haircuts, tailors, carpenters, mechanics - and everybody working for the love and challenge of the labour itself. A walk through campus is like a stroll through a real town.

CUSA. And so cheap...

TESS. Is there really nothing like that on University campuses?

CUSA. Are you kidding? Take a walk from the University Centre to the library. You won't find anything of value there you couldn't pick up somewhere cheaper, faster, and with a better general odour. And I mean the same thing for the goods and services as well as the ideologies and STDs on display or being hollered in your ear or shoved into your hands with a wink and a scowl.

No,  where you guys are Copernican, we are still Ptolemaic. For us, the stars revolve around our own egos. No mentality for sharing. But what could we even offer one another? Books, articles, reading material... Certainly no preserves or haircuts or anything like that.

TESS. Sounds kind of top-heavy to me.

SIMP. And not in the good way!

TESS. What way is that?

SIMP. The bad way.

CUSA. And how. Look, you realize we can't even govern ourselves? You'd think a place so infatuated with learning would be governed mainly by well educated students and professors, right? Well, somehow a wily eunuch class of administrators have wedged their way in between them. Real shysters. They are basically an MBA fund-driven conglomerate who run the place like a third-world slum lord, squeezing money out of tenants and cramming 20 families to a single toilet...

TESS. Third world? You'd think "liberal education" would involve a little self-reliance.

SIMP. They are pretty good at the breakfast buffet...

CUSA. Brains and buttocks alike are heavy things to cultivate. But the one thing we do have over you colleges is the single most important of all.

TESS. What's that?

CUSA. We have good libraries. Presumably, once in a while, someone gets around to reading some of them.

SIMP. Reading in a library? What are you, a satanist? Libraries are for three things, and three things only - oggling, toggling, and googling.

CUSA. So long as we have books...

SIMP. Ma se io vi concluderò, in virtú delle medesime proposizioni concedute ad Aristotile, che i corpi celesti sieno essi ancora, non meno che gli elementari, generabili e corruttibili, che cosa direte voi?

CUSA. Come again?

SIMP. Not without a quart of gin, friend.

TESS. You all have book-dependency. It seems to me like we embody the popular spirit of a classical city-state much more effectively than you guys do. You're like monks.

CUSA. Maybe. But we shave less. I'm calling it in for the day, shall we splitcher again?

SIMP. Ladies and Gentlemen, while our two antagonists walk off hand-in-hand to the bar, I present a little song entitled:

Ode to the Dialogue as a Forgotten Vehicle for Social Change -

From the dramas of the Grecian

To the works of Galilei

Nothing has been so efficient

To get from point A to B.

Why d'you brag about your Euclid?

Why'd you ramble like Descartes?

Why'd you make a documentary?

Why d'you map it on a chart?

Nothing naturaller, nothing simpler

Than a conversa-ti-on

Between friends had of an evening

Where is heard everyichone.

Let us plunge in information
Let us let free the bits and bytes

For to help its liberation
Is the steward's sole delight.

Portmanteaus

And now a special guest presentation from long-time Kutenist and hustler Spencer McBride, a sequence of Portmanteaus in A-Minor:

The Rube Goldberg Variations – This famous early 20^th century work of art by the well-known interpreter of the composer of cartoons Ruben Bach, Glenda Gouldberg, evolves the sublime mechanical and mathematical functions of Bach’s innovative scribbling’s, reinvigorating the way the boot hits the fishbowl in front of the cat on a treadmill with a pointed message rarely seen in other interpretations.

Necronomeconomics – This will one day refer to the economy, once the Zombapocalypse has occurred.  There will of course be different interpretations, the most famous of which will be Keynesian  Necronomeconomics, upheld by the walking corpse of John Maynard Keynes, and Friedman Necronomeconomics, upheld by a man literally fried to death on an exposed wire.  Alternatively, this term can be used to refer to how much money you can make off of nerds by referencing Zombies in literally anything. 

Encyclopedophile – Someone who really likes Encyclopedias!  Likes them so much, in fact, that they play around with them a bit too much, traumatizing and altering the essentials of their constituent parts to such a radical degree that their insides, both intellectual and physical, would be unrecognizable to anyone who thought they knew the definitions before.

Supervisorry – someone who works in a supervisorry capacity is constantly apoplectically apologetic for doing so.  Their orders are perpetually accompanied by elaborate apologias and requests that you only do what they say if you really really feel like it and don’t wish to lose your job.  The defining feature of a Supervisorry manager is their misconception that their phrasing of “I’m really sorry, but could you please stay late today and finish _____,” is an attitude consistent with buddy-buddy friendship and a desire to not break the social contract of equality, rather than simply being incredibly fucking patronizing and annoying.