Registration Caspar

by J. Gordon Faylor

Fiction. Caspar, a non–gendered entity, only has five hours left before it is executed by its employer. Though it remains to be seen if this execution is biological and programmatic in nature, it's clear that money needs to be made for the two partners Caspar leaves behind. Enter REGISTRATION CASPAR, at once a log of Caspar's life within the strangulated housing market of Ceaurgle–where it has taken on a second job as a farmhand in order to supplement another in the meteorological sequestration industry—and the hectic structuration of an income source. It's already too late for the log, however, infiltrated as it has been by said employer, and so made inextricably more dizzying and deranged than the original. The money is gone.

Genres: Poetry

288 pages, Paperback

Published October 1, 2016

Reviews

[Nate D]

Garbled, vaguely dystopian prose-goop from a poet seemingly prioritizing words over meanings, a bit like a mix of Kathy Acker plagiarizing Neuromancer, the constant surprise of Kenward Elmslie's The Orchid Stories, the euphony in nonsense of Tender Buttons, late-capitalist economic slurry, and a modernized Burroughsian cut-up method wherein some incomplete actual attempt at this novel is pulverized down to three-or-four-word clusters by a Markov Word Chain system. I want to be able to get lost in this, but that nagging doubt that this truly may have been recomposed by algorithm (4th option), thus devoid of any real determined authorship besides that which I impose on it by my interpretation, makes it really hard. Tender Buttons feels gloriously deliberate in every word to me, this feels almost inhuman, if glisteningly fresh. And if it was carefully, precisely composed by a human mind forcing itself into new linguistic-narrative spaces wherein a new mode of story may be told? Then what a feat, but a challenge to interpretation that I'm not entirely up to at this point -- it feels too aggressively counter-immersive for me to really engage with.

I find myself thinking of another rare book that I was completely unable to get through Michael Brodsky's ***. In, comparison, this has more sustained effect of sheer alien loveliness in prose, while Brodsky's novel was in fact much more comprehensible in spite of itself, if seemingly deliberately turgid and ugly. Perhaps I should track down e-books of both and feed them into my own Markov system, thus creating something else entirely.

...

Later: I picked this up again, mulled over another forty pages, scanned some reviews online by other poets who treat this very very seriously (this suggests to me that they are in on a joke that I am not), and finally felt able to sit down and write a review of this. Only to find that I've written it already. Nothing in those last forty pages or other analysis lead me to change a word of what I wrote before. Extremely interesting, if not in serious linear reading, and a great text to torment dinner guests with aloud or perhaps to appropriate as narration for a film or other project.