excerpt from Cities of the Wasp (in progress) by Michael S. Judge
Associate nonfiction editor Ian Maxton on today’s bonus essay: Michael S. Judge’s art is one born from the black hole of a dying empire. Culled from a longer excerpt (or “routine,” as Judge calls them, after William Burroughs’ concept of the same) of his ongoing work Cities of the Wasp (which, like most of his work can be read for free on his website), the piece below emerges from a miasma of bio-technical language. Out of the carefully controlled prose arrives “the fusion device loaded with a thousand failed and much-degraded .rar files of the single-stranded DNA designed for a bacterial-weapon star.” And, as if a switch had been flipped, we are ported out of this interzone into something more familiar: the cinema. Judge attends so closely that the world becomes alien, forcing the reader to see reality anew.
excerpt from Cities of the Wasp (in progress)
after which come, as you’ll hopefully have guessed by now, all the visual heirs and assigns of the foregoing, either painstakingly kino’d, all the drabs and drips of his still-thin but loosening body, or sliced up in a half-second montage of extreme-angle jump-cuts, which is supposed to convey something like “brutal realism” or “harsh unsentimentality” but now just calls attention to itself as a device for the (failed) achievement of same, and thus as an ugly and stupid way to pose yourself as a provocateur, perhaps along more than one set of axes, maybe even an infinite z-line spreading across either major ocean, like You let this kind of thing into our cinema and you are then perhaps also interested in allowing other deviations into our culture, no?, because of course this only makes sense, you are simply trying to understand and to employ the latest techniques and devices, this is part of your craft—and it is with due respect but what I would consider a fair critical eye that I refer to you as a “craftsman” rather than an “artist,” no offense, of course, I’ve simply seen all of your movies and seen, really, every movie, every one of them at least a dozen times, sometimes but not always under different titles, and you’re a man of craft: one turns to you with a vision not for art, not precisely, but for something programmatic, propulsive in its obvious logic, including the supposed twists and scares which are most obvious of all because, of course, without them, there would be no film!, and within them, there is secretly often no film, either, but you understand the distinction, and you can be relied upon to bring the requisite craft to such an enterprise, yes?, nothing dishonorable in that, well, but no, I shouldn’t go so far, I should bite my tongue here, ha, and stick with “nothing dishonorable”—and so, in trying to expand the technical vocabulary of that craft, it’s natural that you would borrow devices from all available sources and attune them to your particular, shall we say, form of desired impact, or perhaps simply form of desire,
and just what country do you think we’re in? Is this a historical set piece unreeling in a dissolved union of republics, such that you don’t really have to worry about it ever, not just “anymore” but ever, since the dissolution hissed and bubbled away before you knew enough to fear a certain tone of ostensibly friendly voice? Is that the impression you’re under? We’ll have to work on that, too, as likewise we’ll put some work into
the fact that these techniques may bear within them the pith, as it were, of ideological deviation, namely—in our case, forever after, historically post-solar—a denial of the notion that there is no ideology, that it could not possibly mean anything how a scene is shot and edited, that one assigns a certain “political” purpose to a, say, $200 million dollar film via on-set interviews, casting decisions, and the presences of certain faces right up in the Best Supporting Actor’s lefthand corner of the poster in the lobby of the theater on your laptop in the damp bedridden dark
Michael S. Judge is a novelist from Kansas City. His work includes The Scenarists of Europe (Dalkey Archive 2016).
