What do you think?
Rate this book
Midwestern Infinity Doctrine
"Ulrich Jesse K Baer’s philosophical and entropic Midwestern Infinity Doctrine is more of a backward sermon than a doctrine, a sermon that sits on the edge of science and time, giving quenched counsels on existence, on survival, on livelihood, on the search within the UlrichJesseKBaerself: where the birth of the protagonist meets the birth of the author. Here language battlecrawls as a paranormal dual citizen of reality and lexical electrostatics. Everything in Baer’s penultimate world is comodulated for depth of chaos and for depth of furtive estrangements between logic and beauty. A place where language could experience post-traumatic disorder in science with some order and some chaos. Here the linear lives within the subliminal sequencing of itself, breaking out a kind of disco of sorrow, hypervigilant texts that hope to dance into bijections by abandoning itself to lexical chance. Here the abyss of Baer’s prosaic, cryogenic world does not thaw, but hyperventilate from insularity and significant enigma. The speaker is a surgeon of the nascent. A machine or an aperture that ejects snowclouds of lucid ambivalence. Of course, in the rhetorical exploration of the self, there is the reader, the cyborg, the villain, Ivan Ooze, then Paul Newman, and then Clarice Inspector who show up for Baer’s inexact mathematical party dressed like bullets out of an experimental pistol, all hoping to miss us softly, a few inches, from our true literary artery. Be colossal and enter with cosmic form."
—VI KHI NAO
—VI KHI NAO
141 pages, Paperback
Published August 14, 2023
4 people are currently reading
193 people want to read
About the author
Ulrich Jesse K. Baer
6 books13 followersDear Ulrich Baer,
I wrote Deer Black Out so you could find your heart it's a horse's heart buried in the tectonic plates I wrote Midwestern Infinity Doctrine so you would know that even when every force is against you it doesn't mean you're going the wrong way if you are now like a male Antigone and have to follow your desire to the end (I'm so sorry my little cosmic warrior man living in a fascist b movie hell, losing everything inside a shapeless living death) remember that no matter what you won't be entirely alone at the end like in Jean Genet when you when I die God will come and in my own voice, say my own name
I wrote Deer Black Out so you could find your heart it's a horse's heart buried in the tectonic plates I wrote Midwestern Infinity Doctrine so you would know that even when every force is against you it doesn't mean you're going the wrong way if you are now like a male Antigone and have to follow your desire to the end (I'm so sorry my little cosmic warrior man living in a fascist b movie hell, losing everything inside a shapeless living death) remember that no matter what you won't be entirely alone at the end like in Jean Genet when you when I die God will come and in my own voice, say my own name
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
March 25, 2021
Jessica Baer’s ‘Midwestern Infinity Doctrine’ is a journey through the cracked lens of an identity lost in itself; each fragment like a black box recording salvaged from a cosmonautic wreckage. Form-bending, lyrical, existential, mathematical, chaotic, and truly moving; this is the kind of literature William Burroughs would be reading if he’d lived to see the 21st century.
Read
December 2, 2023Keep your neon glowing back at me
"Midwestern Infinity Doctrine" is a uniquely uninhibited expression of intimacy. To quantify my reading experience with a rating would be an admonishment of that expression.
Purposefully ungrammatical and poigniantly personal, this read as an exploration of the author's innermost machinations; grinding manically, tirelessly, toward syzygy between self and self-affliction
This unsturdy structure, I dreamed you in
The bulk of Baer's prose is a balancing act of intelligibility; communication in the purest sense, syntactically unbound. Raw thoughtform. While I applaud the author for their sincerity in translating their psyche to the page, that kind of freeness comes with a learning curve. It takes a few vignettes before you soften your gaze and begin to notice the structural nuisances in Baer's language.
Who thought you into being?
"Midwestern Infinity Doctrine" reads like a Lynchian confession to a lifetime's worth of secrets; arcane knowledge, bound and distorted by the surreal lens of self-inquiry. A multitude of thoughts transmitting across a variety of frequencies, jutting in and out, giving way to fleeting interjections of lucidity. It's these moments, indicated by Baer's brief reversion to more traditional syntaxes, that cut through the static and deliver unconscious truth with profound resolution.
The worst magic trick I learned as a child was how to identify a sorcerer who can, through their attentiveness, inaugurate your very being and, in the next instance, abolish it
Another eccentric read from Apocalypse Party.
"Midwestern Infinity Doctrine" is a uniquely uninhibited expression of intimacy. To quantify my reading experience with a rating would be an admonishment of that expression.
Purposefully ungrammatical and poigniantly personal, this read as an exploration of the author's innermost machinations; grinding manically, tirelessly, toward syzygy between self and self-affliction
This unsturdy structure, I dreamed you in
The bulk of Baer's prose is a balancing act of intelligibility; communication in the purest sense, syntactically unbound. Raw thoughtform. While I applaud the author for their sincerity in translating their psyche to the page, that kind of freeness comes with a learning curve. It takes a few vignettes before you soften your gaze and begin to notice the structural nuisances in Baer's language.
Who thought you into being?
"Midwestern Infinity Doctrine" reads like a Lynchian confession to a lifetime's worth of secrets; arcane knowledge, bound and distorted by the surreal lens of self-inquiry. A multitude of thoughts transmitting across a variety of frequencies, jutting in and out, giving way to fleeting interjections of lucidity. It's these moments, indicated by Baer's brief reversion to more traditional syntaxes, that cut through the static and deliver unconscious truth with profound resolution.
The worst magic trick I learned as a child was how to identify a sorcerer who can, through their attentiveness, inaugurate your very being and, in the next instance, abolish it
Another eccentric read from Apocalypse Party.
March 2, 2023
There's a moment in the excellent 2004 rock doc Dig! in which someone posits that Courtney Taylor-Taylor (frontman for The Dandy Warhols) feels both jealousy and resentment toward his rival Anton Newcombe (lead singer of The Brian Jonestown Massacre) for his willingness to lose control - to not fight his well-documented mental health issues, but rather embrace them in the name of putting his art above all else. In Newcombe, it is suggested, Taylor-Taylor sees a kind of bravery - a mad genius that, were he even to attempt it himself, would immediately come off as forced and inauthentic. He feels trapped by his own comparably basic needs: to consider others and their feelings, to achieve a traditional version of success, in a word - to be liked.
This is how I sometimes feel when I read great poets.
Big, lame confession: I like a nice rhyme. I've tried my hand at songwriting. I giggle at a well-crafted limerick. The clever wordplay of hip-hop delights me to no end. But when it comes to experimental verse, I know next to nothing: about how it happens, where it comes from, or what makes it work. It's always been that way for me - a nut I just couldn't quite convince myself to crack. I feel confident that even if I sat down and wrote an experimental, unrhymed epic that all the world read and thought was good, I still wouldn't be able to recognize it as such, because I would know in my heart that it came from somewhere false - somewhere that was trying entirely too hard - somewhere that wasn't really me. But when the genuine article comes along, I do like to think I know it when I see it, and Midwestern Infinity Doctrine sucked me in and held me rapt, suspended, like a tractor beam fluctuating endlessly between Heaven and Hell.
Now I don't know if it's accurate to call Midwestern Infinity Doctrine pure poetry - there are certainly nods to, if not quite narrative, then at least anecdotal memory - time(s) and place(s) - dispatches from deep within the white-hot fever dream of an abusive relationship, and threnodic distress signals born out of its reality-shattering dissolution - but it is most definitely steeped in celestial poetics. Though the "Midwest" is likely where it happened, the "Infinity" is where author Ulrich Jesse K Baer is reporting it from - reliving it ad space sickness nauseum - his words accordioning inward, elasticking outward, reversing polarity and rearranging molecular structure at will, almost as though they're being being spellchecked through a wormhole. Deepwoods Wiccan mysticism collides with hush-hush DARPA sci-fi. The endless white of of snowcovered big sky country meets the endless black of the untethered cosmos. The ecstatic highs of reckless abandon are atomized into stardust by that high's necessary, terrifying abandonment. This is a Rosetta Stone for unspeakable pain; a codex for the alien language of loss; alone, adrift, attempting the long, slow voyage toward reassembly.
I could pluck a line from any page of this book that would set you reeling - unmoored atumble in zero-g. It doesn't always make perfect sense, but that is unquestionably the point. There is, in fact, no way that such an unexpurgated deluge of trauma even could make neat-and-tidy sense. It likely doesn't all make sense to Baer either. And though, as I've already admitted, I don't know poetry well enough to offer much in the way of touchstones, I was periodically reminded of both the great avant-garde writer Anna Kavan, and the surrealist artist and author Leonora Carrington, both of whom generously explored their own psychological unravelings through the lenses of science fiction and myth, in the interest of bridging that impossible abyss that lies between every human consciousness.
In the same way, traveling across planes of existence, slipping seamlessly between realities, diving and resurfacing in and out of psychosis, Ulrich Jesse K Baer has tripped the void unfathomable and lived to transliterate it back to us. His transmissions rain down upon the mind like cosmic rays, some striking direct and burrowing deep, others scattering sideways, strafing sulci in search of entry only to carom off the grey matter surface, slingshot back into orbit, and return pages later from wholly unpredictable new angles of descent. One gets the sense that he is both orchestrating it, and beholden to it; that he is as much a conduit as a conductor; that these words are moving through him. But one thing's for sure: he doesn't need anyone to buy this book (though you definitely should). He doesn't need anyone to get it. He doesn't need anyone to like it. It's for him first, and if you happen to get something out of it too, then so much the better. All artists should be so madly brave.
This is how I sometimes feel when I read great poets.
Big, lame confession: I like a nice rhyme. I've tried my hand at songwriting. I giggle at a well-crafted limerick. The clever wordplay of hip-hop delights me to no end. But when it comes to experimental verse, I know next to nothing: about how it happens, where it comes from, or what makes it work. It's always been that way for me - a nut I just couldn't quite convince myself to crack. I feel confident that even if I sat down and wrote an experimental, unrhymed epic that all the world read and thought was good, I still wouldn't be able to recognize it as such, because I would know in my heart that it came from somewhere false - somewhere that was trying entirely too hard - somewhere that wasn't really me. But when the genuine article comes along, I do like to think I know it when I see it, and Midwestern Infinity Doctrine sucked me in and held me rapt, suspended, like a tractor beam fluctuating endlessly between Heaven and Hell.
Now I don't know if it's accurate to call Midwestern Infinity Doctrine pure poetry - there are certainly nods to, if not quite narrative, then at least anecdotal memory - time(s) and place(s) - dispatches from deep within the white-hot fever dream of an abusive relationship, and threnodic distress signals born out of its reality-shattering dissolution - but it is most definitely steeped in celestial poetics. Though the "Midwest" is likely where it happened, the "Infinity" is where author Ulrich Jesse K Baer is reporting it from - reliving it ad space sickness nauseum - his words accordioning inward, elasticking outward, reversing polarity and rearranging molecular structure at will, almost as though they're being being spellchecked through a wormhole. Deepwoods Wiccan mysticism collides with hush-hush DARPA sci-fi. The endless white of of snowcovered big sky country meets the endless black of the untethered cosmos. The ecstatic highs of reckless abandon are atomized into stardust by that high's necessary, terrifying abandonment. This is a Rosetta Stone for unspeakable pain; a codex for the alien language of loss; alone, adrift, attempting the long, slow voyage toward reassembly.
I could pluck a line from any page of this book that would set you reeling - unmoored atumble in zero-g. It doesn't always make perfect sense, but that is unquestionably the point. There is, in fact, no way that such an unexpurgated deluge of trauma even could make neat-and-tidy sense. It likely doesn't all make sense to Baer either. And though, as I've already admitted, I don't know poetry well enough to offer much in the way of touchstones, I was periodically reminded of both the great avant-garde writer Anna Kavan, and the surrealist artist and author Leonora Carrington, both of whom generously explored their own psychological unravelings through the lenses of science fiction and myth, in the interest of bridging that impossible abyss that lies between every human consciousness.
In the same way, traveling across planes of existence, slipping seamlessly between realities, diving and resurfacing in and out of psychosis, Ulrich Jesse K Baer has tripped the void unfathomable and lived to transliterate it back to us. His transmissions rain down upon the mind like cosmic rays, some striking direct and burrowing deep, others scattering sideways, strafing sulci in search of entry only to carom off the grey matter surface, slingshot back into orbit, and return pages later from wholly unpredictable new angles of descent. One gets the sense that he is both orchestrating it, and beholden to it; that he is as much a conduit as a conductor; that these words are moving through him. But one thing's for sure: he doesn't need anyone to buy this book (though you definitely should). He doesn't need anyone to get it. He doesn't need anyone to like it. It's for him first, and if you happen to get something out of it too, then so much the better. All artists should be so madly brave.
July 20, 2023
Baer gets to the heart of a sort of romanticism I find myself constantly intoxicated by, and its something of the kinship of opposites between the immensity of time, the universe, unfathomability, and the beautiful mundane of leaving your apartment to get some cold brew, having a cigarette, feeling shitty. The hugeness of imagination's hunger and the crushing smallness and finitude of living in a mostly useless physical body. And there's something likewise about language, which exists on the knife's edge between the banal, the proscriptive, the unambiguous (that which connotes clear and limited meaning) and the meaningless, the endless, the teeming bristling ambiguity of potentiality.
There's a horrible, beautiful masochism to composing the impenetrable in search of some caesura as it concerns the crushing loneliness of human existence. It is alienating and wondrous and stifling to constantly be so aware of all of the many ways things could be, and what language could construct, what empires of transcendent love could be erected, while all the while the self is unable to extend beyond the quickly crumbling flesh and the sorely lacking pen-tip of the frustrated tale-teller.
So Baer's 'novel' is 'poetry' because he just can't do it otherwise. And I just can't just. Just isn't enough. Just is good enough. But that so often means I can't. And I don't. And it's a real real motherfucker being able to imagine.
"In every movement an exhausted prayer for grace & anti gravity but I keep finding myself in these uncannily familiar corners asking myself do you remember why we came here?"
(This is almost entirely abstract -- evocative of science fiction but never truly becoming such. Rather, this seems painfully bound, despite its free-floating lack of concrete definition, to the reality of the present day United States, to the millennial headspace, to very contemporary concerns. But there's that evocation, that suggestion, that longing, etc.)
Loved this!
There's a horrible, beautiful masochism to composing the impenetrable in search of some caesura as it concerns the crushing loneliness of human existence. It is alienating and wondrous and stifling to constantly be so aware of all of the many ways things could be, and what language could construct, what empires of transcendent love could be erected, while all the while the self is unable to extend beyond the quickly crumbling flesh and the sorely lacking pen-tip of the frustrated tale-teller.
So Baer's 'novel' is 'poetry' because he just can't do it otherwise. And I just can't just. Just isn't enough. Just is good enough. But that so often means I can't. And I don't. And it's a real real motherfucker being able to imagine.
"In every movement an exhausted prayer for grace & anti gravity but I keep finding myself in these uncannily familiar corners asking myself do you remember why we came here?"
(This is almost entirely abstract -- evocative of science fiction but never truly becoming such. Rather, this seems painfully bound, despite its free-floating lack of concrete definition, to the reality of the present day United States, to the millennial headspace, to very contemporary concerns. But there's that evocation, that suggestion, that longing, etc.)
Loved this!
January 19, 2025
"Can’t put a hand down it makes a pawprint exceed once you succeed being human @be.com & dangling a carrot for the collective conspiracy theory. Tropes, I forgot to tell a story."
@be.com, Joyce could never. A beautiful, unprecedented man writing beautiful, unprecedented books, often structured after science fiction b-films (in this case, Star Crash). Influenced heavily by Agamben, but unlike Adorno, he's a Virgo who can admit that he likes to read his horoscope. From one Ulrich Baer to the same Ulrich Baer, 10 out of 10.
@be.com, Joyce could never. A beautiful, unprecedented man writing beautiful, unprecedented books, often structured after science fiction b-films (in this case, Star Crash). Influenced heavily by Agamben, but unlike Adorno, he's a Virgo who can admit that he likes to read his horoscope. From one Ulrich Baer to the same Ulrich Baer, 10 out of 10.
March 1, 2022
Amazing collection of pieces incorporating themes of identity of self and surrounding environments. This was another introduction to tremendous writing, thanks to Apocalypse Party press.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews