Ken Fox: Azmud - An Oily Saga on the Surface of the Wordbath in 5 Expired Generations

Daphne Lawless: Like many a missive from that Better-World-That-Exists-Alongside-This-One, AZMUD's very varied title is a literal route in - a Hebrew (or Arabic?) style triliteral root in ('ZM'D), which the meaning is condensed in consonants unviolated by vowels which move anywhere.IT'S MUD. In a dreamworld where commodity fetishism is reversed, capital as dead labour comes to life - the internal combustion engine, the newspaper press, the construction crane, the hydro dam rage to monomaniacal, theocidal dreamlife. The river of life flows backwards and uphill as waste products feed on themselves in a floodland that's driven apart and a crewmember on a red blood cell wonders what it's all about. A solitary I goes down the gurgler over and over again, and the life of the unicellular and famous is revealed as biochemical warfare. It's a trip, true fiction-science.

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Drifting in & out of sense as in an interrupted dream, Azmud is a novel contribution to literary art as political allegory. In each of its five sections - 'expired generations' - it attempts to retell the tale of the human psyche, the damage it has undergone under capitalism, in the form of a wandering work tribe searching for value in the spectacular flow of mass communication, on behalf of various severe 'generals' who demand a quota of abstract accumulation. But each of Azmud's industrial adventures in turn become allegories for the act of the text's own creation. But what happens in Azmud? Under orders, a human herd wanders thru the dense miasma of mass communication, hunting for precious ox-ore to stash in their air-ark or fuel their ancient steam engine. A vagrant crew invades the broken dreams of a drowsy industrial tycoon, stealing baskets full of his precious sleep. A homeless hoard combs thru post-industrial litter, searching for burnable rubble. A fake engineer captures a team of lost work-horses & four mammoth protozoans to help boost the energy yield of his toxic currents. A cargo ship collects a crew of stranded industrial outcasts with their precious ark full of ore & its tyrannical captain subjects them to relentless injections & many unwanted adventures. Daphne Lawless: Like many a missive from that Better-World-That-Exists-Alongside-This-One, AZMUD's very varied title is a literal route in - a Hebrew (or Arabic?) style triliteral root in ('ZM'D), which the meaning is condensed in consonants unviolated by vowels which move anywhere. IT'S MUD. In a dreamworld where commodity fetishism is reversed, capital as dead labour comes to life - the internal combustion engine, the newspaper press, the construction crane, the hydro dam rage to monomaniacal, theocidal dreamlife. The river of life flows backwards and uphill as waste products feed on themselves in a floodland that's driven apart and a crewmember on a red blood cell wonders what it's all about. A solitary I goes down the gurgler over and over again, and the life of the unicellular and famous is revealed as biochemical warfare. It's a trip, true fiction-science. More news when we have it...

PRAGMANIC MONOLOG

WHAT WHAT WAD is this slice of individuated sausage off the long-stock, stack on a rack unstuck from global bondage? It is I, this, frail spazum, asmud, unstuck stock. I am uncut, occult, unclear, oblique.   Can walk, can walk word over word with sinking feet, frolicking, picnicking, panicking in heap. Can dream awake dread wages, can rip together digital package, sleep apart nebulous plastic creations stretched out of bituminous commune, can burn together fibrous masses, sick stock for evaluation, for flaunting at death-markets as life-song unsung but edible in ink-frame & derivable as format-transfer capital capture cumulous for custom spirit capacitor house-boat install.   Camera-ready verb-files proturbing thorough over pulp wilderness, this is occultic riddle filtered thru collective commercial time-transfer. I own up. I drop name. I gather rights. I hoist possession, this oracular oral cabbage decaying. I wrought in ink village. I collect in pulp mountain. I ascend holy commode, prosperous seeking grist for hungry engine.   Am absurd, as think-wad shaking. Am bonded, bound to, bounding from, rebounded to Wascana  Creek, as earth transfer trickling. Am job office plunking as this, finger-linking component strapped to transfer apparatus & obliged to prime mover.   Give job now. Give it wages for work. Get you southbound & go up in the mountain & see what wealth therein dwells. Enter wired caves, evade plasma network, insert yourself into the center well & ascend.   What cities, what tents, what good bad trash therein? What fat seams, lean streaks? Be bold, bring first fruit you find therein.   Now is the time to mine the first grapes before the apocalyptic living creatures ever again are herded into their waste eating habit.   Go where the brook branches & cut pages with grape-clusters & bare it on a yoke. Return after 40 hours & speak of coal & gas & black shakes & yellow cake.