A few manifestoing thoughts on the novel ‘Acid Shottas’.

“In proportion as the mass of citizens who possess political rights increases, and the number of elected ruler’s increases, the actual power is concentrated and becomes the monopoly of a smaller and smaller group of individuals.”

– Paul Lafargue.

Many cells and subset cells of literature / writers inform and form Shane Jesse Christmass (SJX) – they all wrote and make up Acid Shottas.

The novel is one where I circulated ambition, scope, delirium and complete collapse into all the pages. I wasn’t so easily quenched, my revolver out – as I sat down to write the MS.

The words, as opposed to our/my subsequent release of memes and eBooks and hypertext and art, rely upon an unstable or more Burger King / progressive approach, incorporating poetry rhythms, melody interpolations and of course outstanding editing choices. The horse’s head definitely had the bridle in it. I was chomping on it as I smashed my first keystrokes. What is old-fashioned and unadventurous about Acid Shottas?

My understanding is that the work of Acid Shottas, the words that are contained therein are off-kilter, disorientating against the backdrop of tortured normality. Everything interacts by chance. This is my best attempt, and my last, to be a proper novelist.

Acid Shottas is a curious release, one where, looking back, and propped against what follows, the writing is strictly fuddy-duddy / hardhat, strictly MOR, meat and potatoes. Okay there’s bullshit futility in that statement, but there’s a bittersweet brutality to it all. I think it’s my most beautiful literature. But define beauty. We have a soft spot for it I guess, but it should’ve been more minimal, but those endeavours are/were to come. The members of SJX held a meeting. It was at night. On the table was a dozen bottles, a box of spot remover. I knew what we had to do.

The MS was a fragment of sorts, mixes from various guises and genres, some writing specifically written for it. I piled all my journals and flapping papers, newspapers and laptop upstairs, found myself in the writing desk alcove, pulling electrical wires from my journey, awakening from the earlier smoke, burning myself silly, seldom leaving the machines in repose. This MS was all smiling wearily and loneliest rackets. Having proved I could do it, I now burst through swing doors somewhat incongruously and feeling good. But, I thought, who administers the language? Why is there writing with the same forms, structures and language that were used years ago? With the advent of new mediums to tell stories, why was I not using a new language to tell stories? A sound that sounds years old, or a sound that is deliberately retroactive, is dismissed and rightly ridiculed, so where’s our new language? Tell a similar story, or better still a new one, but why do it in an old language, invent a new one? Is that even possible?

Based on these questions my body was in glitch heaven, developing and consolidating the original MS, while re-writing everything in a sheet-iron box which rumbled heavy dub. I stared at anything and utilised it in the ensuing mayhem. Most businesses have four sawn-off shotguns beneath the counter. This MS had twenty and then some. It’s a swing of colours, psychedelic in its dystopian excess, fragmented in a spastic gaucheness. Making the internet all fade out to white. Making the internet all B&W. Making the internet a perpetual wormhole. Making the internet a place where humans can be informed about their hopes all hidden in burning houses. Making the internet a place where you can hear bigger trouble that sometimes is whining. Acid Shottas makes the internet a courtship that you then take to bed. The internet is an illusion that you will laugh at like it’s a fanciful picture. Acid Shottas makes the internet a wormhole and depository for glitch images & 21^st century musique concrete. Acid Shottas is the internet.

Acid Shottas opposes the ancient language.

I oppose money-changing literature.

“I enjoy inventing things out of fun. After all, life is a game, not a career” – Brion Gysin.

Another meeting, another night, more members of SJX arrive. A queer feeling comes over us as we know this is our heaviest MS in building terms yet. MS all ranging in length from an hour’s reading time. MS all written live then constructed, endless loops of word fumbling in clumsy homage to untrained fingers. We were riding high, a hundred men in here threatening us with being morose, but this proved otherwise. This is our grand style, our nouveau-roman – our ‘writerly text’.

“The writerly text is a perpetual present, upon which no consequent language (which would inevitably make it past) can be superimposed; the writerly text is ourselves writing, before the infinite play of the world (the world as function) is traversed, intersected, stopped, plasticized by some singular system (Ideology, Genus, Criticism) which reduces the plurality of entrances, the opening of networks, the infinity of languages”
– Roland Barthes

Previous revisions of MS are extended jams all clipped, cut, permutated, and edited into threats that twitch in their experimentation. A splinter from a pre-SJX time when everything was perpetually SJX. A muddy-sounding MS, fellow thieves under the ocean looking impossibly amused. There’s a dignified self-confidence to this book. Kills that take the zingiest vacuum money, all theatrical the organism, the sodbuster of the final MS.

Before the bodily apparatus made its way to the surface and ultimately the publisher, conspirators and backbiters were already trying to money the metric, trying to soften the military of the word contained therein of Acid Shottas. Dastardly people and dastardly ambitions from all of them. They told me that the goods of the book – ‘the goods of the book’!!! – could be cubical and one-dimensional, as if that was an insult. They were so far off the mark; it was like dealing in opus piss construction, an altar with mecum scum dripping over it.

Eventually the MS was assembled and handing to the publisher. Publisher didn’t read it, still hasn’t to this day. That is a truism all told. His reasoning? Puppetry and as to not make any essential blunders. Something about timing and his own telephone measures. Sounded like the Chaucerian referential occurrence. No questions came back, no edits, nothing. Would this new language disrupt the senses too much? Would the meaning be recognisable to you or me? Does it even have to? Are we just bound to repeat ourselves between the hardcover of a book? How do we even attempt this? Who administers the language of others? Why do you try and attempt to own this language? Is there anyone out there with a new role for the book? Is our causality linked to the horrid, rundown language within the book? Why should we relieve ourselves from inventing something because we think it’s not possible? Feel the way these words make you feel. Could new feelings make new words? No questions came back, no edits either.

Learn from the past, but futurise the world through poetry. That way you won’t be restless anymore, just compassionate.

I wanted to make the world full of salient points that utilises our total experience, hence Acid Shottas.

I wanted to make the world all rabid like a tiger, a dog and a place whereby if

we shout you’ll have to do someone in, hence Acid Shottas.

I wanted to make the world to be a joint where we can cut holes in the

suction dead, hence Acid Shottas.

I wanted the world to step in time with the exhaustless energy of Central America + South East Asia, hence Acid Shottas.

I want the world to be full of awning-spars and taco-filled people all within

twenty feet of each other, hence Acid Shottas.

I want a wormhole, a wormhole, a wormhole, a wormhole, that is natural,

that has never been experienced, that is an eyeball, that is part of you, so to speak, and if it’s not, we can take the internet down and hand it back to them.

I want literature to compile a collection of 800 images from the archives of SJX. I want literature to compile a collection of songs from the archives of MATTRESS GRAVE. I want literature to compile a collection of words from the permutated words and archives of SJX. I want the internet to wormhole these images + songs + words into a perpetual rabbit hole.

• Why? – because we want to tell loud stories in her ears with one extra hospital bed in case of a dire need.

• Where? – the sea of the internet, people in residential suburbs all logging on, people going back into cyberspace looking for anybody, a distant collection of friends who resemble a patchwork of important microchips.

• Who? – the internet + literature + SJX + our faces + our imaginations that are darkly comic + our shipmates + fellow ingenious gamblers – we’ll make the internet whole again, construct it out of liquid brambles + scientific nettles + the dry ice of thistles, a quickset hedge of technology.

• How? – surely as the glittering air + wind blows up the avenue – this project of Acid Shottas + SJX will prostrate trees + the next morning after this projects completion we’ll sleep late + ask the internet to fawn all over us – that’s how.

• What? – I’ve said what – it’s basically the electronic equivalent of eternity wearing dungarees, looking all rather pale, muscle arms all shining with grease, tattoos grey with dirt.

• When? – ASAP.

The following is the supplied resources you will need:

1. Music.
2. Images.
3. Words.
4. More words.
5. Video.

In constructing ‘Acid Shottas’ I learnt that:

• the possibility for collective authorship will always breakdown from outside forces rather than internal, for internal forces have SJX tenderness and pity and a dictionary of its own language
• no one loves you because you wrote a book – your book is just a project not the truth of truth, your project is really its own exhaustion, the implication here is that everything written is thus hopelessly contradictory
• the end of the book is not the conclusion of the story, the story keeps living, evolving, it’s survives in aphoristic energy, and rails against difference and complex information that unfolds in careful labyrinthine logocentric storytelling.

ABOUT:

Shane Jesse Christmass is the author of the novel ‘Acid Shottas’ (The Ledatape Organisation, 2014).. He’s was a member of the band Mattress Grave, and is currently a member in Snake Milker. He firmly believes that the future of the word, the novel, will be in synthetic telepathy. Most of his writing/artwork/music is archived at www.shanejessechristmass.tumblr.com