Spool Pidgin has the immense honour of award-winning, critically acclaimed and just-darn-awesome novelist China Mieville frequenting it's shore. I can't begin to emphasize how mindbogglingly great and, yes, just darn-awesome this is for me. Don't fret; I'll soon be out of the way, but first an explanation...
Some of you may recall China recently stuck a groundbreaking piece of photo-reportage on the web, London's Overthrow, a psychogeographical investigation of the night-streets of the capital he loves. Spool Pidgin asked if he'd do the same for its own midlands home town, Leicester...
Leicester's Overdone
by China Mieville
Leicester! Here the Midland's Babylon, its gum-daubed Carthage, where Showaddywaddy meets Baudrillard in torrid distain.
The ooze of Lineker permeates these fox-hours, interlaced through kebabhouse dreams and hyper-copulating brick. What this? This! This Narborough road-- a Prospero's isle off the A50 inbound, with Maryland Chicken its syphilitic caliban.
And how should one face this evening-intruculent? Perhaps with a new prose? A fresh-born lingua pretentio oddly reminiscent of those Calvin Klein perfume ads one used to see at christmas. Ah, the smell of it.
Back streets: Each terrace door is a scarab beetle tapdancing 'pon junkmail and regret. Each with a question 'pon its gloss-emulsion mandibles: 'What people lay behind me, Mieville? What breathing, farting tupperware?'
These faux-scrofulous imaginings congeal to action. I, ever the Odysseine flaneur, am psychogeography's doxy afterall. My lust-hungry Amex and Visa cards seek forbidden consolence twixt the thighs of the door's yale lock. Acquiesence is granted.
I had expected some avatar within, some tulpoid suggestion of Leicester's poundshop essence (one, I suspect, that would be called 'Herr Plimsole' and have a rooster for a chest), but my wits are confounded.
'Who are you?' One face of the triune nativegestalt asks. 'How'd you get in me f**kin' house?'
They look like me! Each of them a miell-mesis, a Mievillacrum! Having looked for Leicester I encounter only, but and singularly(x3) myself!
'We are reflection,' I yell in joyance to them, 'you the chissit modulae and I Leicester-as-observed. I am the Englebert-hermeneutic, the grand phallogocentric-made-Humberdink!'
'You're a c*nt, mate,' Mievillacrum#3 says, and he permits me to psychogeographise the word 'Converse' on the sole of his shoe (now reversed 'pon my forehead).
'Ere,' I discern Mievillacrum#1 say before the darkness proffers me its endless and fervid Oreo, 'isn't he that New Weird author?'
'Nah,' says Mievillacrum#2, 'You're thinking of that c*nt Van DerMeer.'
There is nothing about this post that isn't awesome.
ReplyDeleteI am horrified by the concept of Maryland Chicken, though; it evidently refers to Maryland, United States. I am mystified by the link between Maryland and chicken, since Maryland's claim to food-fame is crab.
What are they really serving there???!
(AKA Mievillacrum#2) Dunno mate, but it takes the taste of a six pack of oranjeboom out of yer gob at three in mornin, and they'll give you extra chips instead of an apple pie with yer meal deal if you don't like veg an' that.
DeleteAlso I was sick down a fat bird's top and they didn't ban me or nothing.