Suburba(in)e Surrealism

Suburba(in)e Surrealism began with failure, was kept going by madness, and was completed quietly. The first section of the text represents my regurgitation of surreal encounters and occasions (from personal life, the Imagined Life, and the Artistic) as they connect to exiled Surrealist Georges Bataille and the exile "I" constantly found myself in both in the city of Los Angeles and throughout the County's choking suburbs. The text likewise has only an assemblage of narration and should be interpreted cacophonously. While I cannot republish the lyrics of Ben Folds' incredible anthem 'Rockin the Suburbs,' I would direct any reader to listen to that song during any reading of section one. On the high theory stuff: Bataille was known for writing mystically profane novels and poems--many of which he chose to write under a pseudonym to prevent social exile. His theories of excession and the bacchic drive my work (towards Surrealism, yet still away from Andre Breton's rendering of the found object). This section engages theories of writing, identity, relation, and creation. In a sense, the poems in this section constitute the gases that make up the text's writerly atmosphere. The poems in the second section represent the base materialist connection to this atmosphere of nonsense (or non-knowledge, as Bataille would say). The poems in section two conform to what I have dubbed "activated geometric poetry." Unlike more routine concrete poetry, my poems are not a series of simple shapes; instead, each one has a sort of z-axis, in that they physically move while being read and physically move the reader. The specific site of writing is in the banal, the everyday object and action. It is here in the seemingly insignificant, that which constitutes the most sublime rupture often eludes us. To assist with reading my poems, I have provided some suggested strategies: 1. The form of each poem is typically connected to its title 2. Places where words exist as circles are typically best read clockwise--although a counter-clockwise reading is not discouraged/impossible 3. The language of the text is designed to be blunt and occasionally non-unique because I believe that we have forgotten why some of the oldest jokes and patterns still demand laughter 4. Zooming in and out (for any digital copy) can assist with conducting an intimate and/or structural reading. Section three represents my attempt at finding dialectical synthesis between sections one and two--the success of which can only be determined (intra)subjectively.