In addition to owning unspeakably ugly homes and being able to withstand mephedrone psychosis while attending black-tie galas, those who passed the Cash Horizon were granted the ability to hear the rare Lou Reed outtake “Doin’ the Dookie.”
Written for the Velvet Underground in 1965 AD but not recorded until sessions for Reed’s 1973 AD masterpiece Berlin, “Doin’ the Dookie” had been sequenced to appear on that album’s A-side, but was swapped out at the last minute in favor of “Oh Jim.”
The lyrics of “Doin’ the Dookie” were what anyone’d expect, Dylanesque nonsense about hip gender-bending junkies punctuated, loosely, by exclamations:
A rogue engineer, stoned beyond belief on Moroccan hash, had misplaced the master tape of “Doin’ the Dookie” inside an aquarium.
Ten years later, when the tape was fished out, it was discovered that the aquarium’s chemical-soaked water had enacted an alchemical corruption, transforming Reed’s recording into high-frequency sound beyond the range of normal human hearing.
The music was still there.
The lyrics were still there.
They simply could not be heard by human beings.
But if a person’s net worth had passed the Cash Horizon, then their enhanced senses allowed them to hear “Doin’ the Dookie.”
And if you’re wondering, reader, what it’s like to be a superhuman being whose money has pushed you well past the Cash Horizon, you’d do worse than to consider a character who’ll show up in later chapters of this book.
This character is named His Royal Highness Mamduh bin Fatih bin Muhammad bin Abdulaziz Al Saud.
HRH was a son of the House of Saud, which was the monarchy that ruled much of the Arabian Peninsula and owned the world’s second-largest oil reserve.
HRH was from serious money.
HRH never even had a chance to be human.
HRH came screaming into this world and the money made him into a supranatural creature.
“Doin’ the Dookie” was a lot like Fairy Land.
It was both there and not there, invisible to 99.9999 per cent of the world’s population.
But Fairy Land hadn’t gone invisible by being lost in an aquarium.
Fairy Land had become invisible when the women of Celia’s realm used magic to align the island with an unconquered principle of everyday deception.
The principle worked like this: the physical appearance of any given object, be it animal or mineral, arrived with a series of common expectations.
As long as the appearance of that object was maintained, the vast majority of human beings would never notice any deviation from common expectations, and, in fact, people would go out of their way to ignore those deviations.
The most obvious place where this principle operated was within the publishing industry of the United States of America.
Despite decades of effort, and thousands of Internet thinkpieces about the inclusion of marginalized voices, publishing was a dirty business that had done nothing to alleviate a system of ghettoizing its authors based on their physical appearances and socio-economic points of origins.
The books of the publishing industry rested on a cheap shorthand, with each of its marketing demographics defined by the implicit prejudices of the American upper middle class.
And if you think that’s an exaggeration, ask yourself this: how many well-received books of Literary Fiction published over the last thirty years do you remember being written by a poor person?
In the unlikely event that a person was allowed to publish a book which spoke beyond the simple facts of their socio-economic origins, then the message of that book was ignored.
Consider The Women of Brewster Place by Gloria Naylor, a novel about several African-American women who all live in the same urban development.
The text explicitly states that the titular Brewster Place, the urban development itself, is a machine that manufactures the lives of its women.
The book is an exploration of the way by which the machine crafts, structures, and demolishes its product.
It’s a dark, mechanistic text about the nature of urban living, about the secret lines of power, and about the way that Twentieth-Century AD architecture created new perversions and desires.
Remember when J.G. Ballard, a white English colonial, wrote the exact same shit?
You thought it was genius!
You gave him his own adjective!
When Naylor wrote the same thing, no one even noticed.
But The Women of Brewster Place was authored by someone whose points of origin fulfilled the paltry expectations of America’s upper middle class, a group of people who wanted little more from Black women writers than triumph over individual adversity, folksy homespun wisdom, sexual suffering, and horrible deaths.
And before anyone suggests that this is revisionist thinking about Naylor, cramming some weird bullshit into her work, go and read 1996.
Read 1996 and then try convincing yourself that Naylor wasn’t a writer obsessed with the world of secret persuaders.
And, hey!
Speaking of publishing, let’s talk turkey!
It’s inevitable that this book will draw comparisons to writings by the late Kurt Vonnegut, who was an American novelist from the Twentieth Century AD.
I couldn’t escape the comparisons with I Hate the Internet!
At least one question from the audience at every book event!
And I won’t escape them with this book!
Total theft from Breakfast of Champions!
Even down to Fairy Land!
Most of the comparisons between this book and the writings of the late Kurt Vonnegut will occur in cheap little reviews on Goodreads.com and Amazon.com, which are Internet websites owned by a guy named Jeff Bezos.
These websites are where the American readership makes sure that American authors know their fucking place, and further ensures American authors know that their place is the equivalent to that of a moon-faced kid being shoved into some mud by a bully.
“How do you like that mud, you little shit?” asks the American readership. “This is what happens when you try to do anything! Fucking eat it, you pig!”
“Mgjhasdhashfs fdasmmmppfkjjsad,” reply American authors, their pie-holes crushed into a mélange of star-rankings, facile two-sentence comparisons, and moronic assumptions about authorial motivation.
Quick!
Here’s how to murder a culture: create a system in which every fucking thing, no matter how small or tedious, is smothered in bullshit instant commentary and hot takes by the stupidest people on the planet.
Good luck.
You’re gonna need it.
But who the fuck are the dinosaurs reviewing books on websites?
Losers!
Who reads books?
Nobody!
Who uses a website?
Nobody!
It’s all smartphones now.
Here’s a text message that a well-known Hollywood screenwriter sent me, unbidden, on December 25th, 2017 AD, while I was trying to watch the 1981 AD film Christiane F. – Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo:
That shit is disgusting.
But it’s also brilliant, an entirely new kind of writing that’s unfathomable in its complexity and immediacy.