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"You can't have feelings alone" - William Burroughs, Naked Lunch

Works covered:
And The Hippos Were Boiled In Their Tanks
Junky: The Definitve Text Of Junk
Queer
Yage Redux

"The elementary unit of language — the statement — is the order-word. Rather than common sense, a faculty for the centralization of information, we must define an abominable faculty consisting in emitting, receiving, and transmitting order-words. Language is made not to be believed but to be obeyed, and to compel obedience...Words are not tools, but we give children language, pens, and notebooks as we give workers shovels and pickaxes. A rule of grammar is a power marker before it is a syntactical marker. The order does not refer to prior significations or to a prior organization of distinctive units. Quite the opposite. Information is only the strict minimum necessary for the emission, transmission, and observation of orders as commands...Language is not life; it gives life orders. Life does not speak; it listens and waits." - A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze Felix Guattari

I'm happy to welcome the Booktube's best critic and only tasteful video editor Matt Bookpilled back on the show. Matt's channel is one of the main inspirations behind SFUltra and his engaging, thoughtful approach to reading means his patreon is worth it and then some.
Matt's channel: https://www.youtube.com/@Bookpilled 
Matt's patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Bookpilled

To celebrate the release of his memoir The Black Pool on May 22nd, I spent 2 hours boring my close friend Tim MacGabhann into unconsciousness.

Book launch details: 6pm, May 22nd in Hodges Figgis Dublin.

Click here to read an extract that became the opening chapter: https://thedublinreview.com/article/the-black-pool/

Link to preorder or buy The Black Pool: https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/The-Black-Pool-by-Tim-MacGabhann/9781399728232

"You get under my skin I don't find it irritating,
You always play to win but I won't need rehabilitating 
oh no" - Another Girl Another Planet, The Only Ones

Full details of the event are here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/event-dublin-may-127442825

“Thank god skin-patch is nearly gone
And the impress of fingers dead
Have disappeared and left me alone

That one night I did not put jackboots on
Don't want to end
Reflection
It's still there, though I am gone” - The Fall, Bremen Nacht

"My friends, you should not live like this." - Chekhov, when asked what his plays were supposed to convey.

"For we know that if our earthly house, this tent, is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens." - II Corinthians, 5:1 NKJV

‘Blake is always unexpected. If you think you know all the works, you’re wrong. There’s always something that comes up; if it’s not a new work, then an old work will appear in a different kind of way. There are certain works I’m completely obsessed by and I don’t know how he made them. I don’t know how he made them at that time because there’s nothing like them: they’re completely original. I think his thing was originality.’ - Brian Catling

“So many great books have drowned in respect” - Iain Sinclair, Crash

“Vaughn never been a duck-and-diver
He spit on the mic, yuck, saliva
Hold it like a truck driver hold a CB on a sharp turn
Still clutchin' his chest from the heartburn…” - Viktor Vaughn, Saliva

"Into the thundering cannon and into the murdering gun" - William Blake, Jerusalem

"And in Hell beneath & a mighty & awful change threatend the Earth.
The American War began. All its dark horrors passed before my face..."

- William Blake, Letter to John Flaxman September 12 1800

I'm joined on this episode by fellow Live At The Death Factory host and writer Astrid Rose, whose work you can find here: https://astridannerose.gumroad.com/

"...writing could provide me with the means of so radically outwitting myself that I could bring my hidden experiences, my unadmitted self into view." - Raymond Roussel

"The Stumbling Block is an ark of extinction. A bouillon hive of the murdered past, frozen dry to a mass. Something has warmed its corner, the oxoed grit bleeds a vein of contagion, virulent in its passion to embrace and swim in human tides" - Brian Catling, The Stumbling Block

"Cough up a pointless lecture
Does it matter?
Vomit me more conjecture
Doesn't matter
Argue till your left brain dies
Does it matter?
Presume to abuse my time
Doesn't matter
Let me paint a perfect picture
Let it read like a holy scripture
The words that leave my mouth
Are just words you can live without
Found community a struggle for me
It's a collision: clash and grieve
Nonsense screws and breeds
Thoughts untethered went lost at sea" - Touché Amore, Circa 95

"...okay, that's life,
that's what I was told anyway
And picking your feet till they bleed may be the half of it
If every fourth animal in the world is a beetle
Maybe every fourth person is a dumb fuck
Listen, listen carefully now: here's the answer
It rhymes with axe
Why it's those personal acts, of course
Those personal acts
Those suicide pacts
Those carelessly stored razorblades in the hands of small children
It's my face smeared on the pavement
It's Everyday
It's Everyday" - Everyday I Start To Ooze, Nomeansno

"BE WHO YOU ARE, WRECK THEM, AND THEN DIE" - Rammellzee

"There are no castles without ghosts
And no spirits without hope
But nobody passes the test of time
I do not fear the buried sounds
Of words that echo underground

A memory is a loaded gun
And I remember everyone
I remember everyone

I remember you" - Ghosts, Nomeansno

"For every detective novel, regardless of its story, is for every reader, above all, a novel about himself: about what happened to the reader as a human individual in general, as an individual developing from a child into an adult; as a living being who experiences continuous transitions there and back, from layer to layer of consciousness..." - On The Detective Story, Sergei Eisenstein

"Some roads are only seen at night
Ghost roads, nothing but neon signs
But some nights, the neon gas gets free
And turns into walking dead like me

And I've been making promises I know I'll never keep
One of these days, I'm gonna leave you in your sleep
I'll have to go when the whistle blows, the whistle knows my name
Baby, I was born on a train" - Born On A Train, Magnetic Fields

patreon.com/sfultra

"...'For I aint, you must know,' said Betty, 'much of a hand at reading writing-hand, though I can read my Bible and most print. And I do love a newspaper. You mightn't think it, but Sloppy is a beautiful reader of a newspaper. He do the Police in different voices." - Mutual Friend, Charles Dickens

"The fire of wild abandon burns
so beautiful and bright
The ashes fade away after
consuming all the light
The fire of wild abandon
burns so beautiful and hot
I used to know the way back home
but somehow I forgot

Through all the smoke I can’t see you
What’s the thing you been turned into?
Something fun, or someone new
The fire of wild abandon

Feel the lie becoming true
Whose eyes are you seeing through?
Teeth, turn in on yourselves and chew
The parasite expanding

Through all the heat waves you can’t see
The thing you thought I used to be
Distorted uncontrollably
Beyond misunderstanding

And in the wreckage, nothing there
Only the cold spell in the air
I cried for you like you were dead
But it’s just that you’re something else instead

And as I felt myself float away, way up there
Up above all the houses
and the people and the trees
And I thought I’d go back,
back down there, be like them
But I can’t anymore,
‘cause I don’t know which one was me

I don’t know which one was me"
- Fire Of Wild Abandon, Evil Sword

patreon.com/sfultra

“I have said before that the music is the words and the words are the music. It is all there for you to understand if you can and for you to feel, regardless.”
- Sun Ra, This Planet is Doomed

patreon.com/sfultra 

"I fire myself ten times a day
I throw myself in a watery grave
With fourteen horses on top of my head
I hear the voice again and again" - I Fire Myself, Mary Timony

"​eurt si em tuoba yas yeht gnihtyrevE" - Euphoria, Kendrick Lamar (intro sample from The Wiz)

I'm happy to welcome back Matt to tackle this terrible book. Matt's youtube channel Bookpilled is one of the main inspirations behind SFUltra and his engaging, thoughtful reviews make him official YouTube Book GOAT. His patreon is worth it and then some.
Matt's channel: https://www.youtube.com/@Bookpilled
Matt's patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Bookpilled

“...Thank God you let me crash on your couch

Who's my God that I’m prayin' to now?

…

Made her go home, felt the virus

Web of life is my weed, false dreams stripped by silence

…

Deals they had us sign, for years, it had mе blind

Think I had to hit rewind and think about why I do shine

…

My whole family cursed, now get the fuck out my ride

…

Nothin', nothin', nothin', nothin', nothin'

…

If a killer say shit, then get these motherfuckers

...

Get the fuck out” - Buzzcut Feat. Danny Brown - Brockhampton

"You lie in the graveyard
Well you're rotting away
When I talk to you daily
You've got nothing to say

You lie in the graveyard
Well you are down making plans
Well you control all my thoughts
Well you make dust fall"

- Graveyard , Butthole Surfers

"Fear stalks the land. (As usual; so what else is new?)" - Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo

"He looked round her drawing-room and marvelled how he, who prided himself on not being able to endure any-thing in bad taste, could tolerate this chamber of horrors. Everything, he mused, was beautified by his passion.." - Laughter In The Dark, Vladimir Nabokov

One year anniversary blog: https://www.patreon.com/posts/sfultra-year-1-99301744

Who Do You Think You Are? I Am. is a Perfect Taste Forever series about memoir and biography. PFT is usually patreon exclusive but this episode is free for everyone. patreon.com/sfultra 

I'm joined on this episode by Jolene, the host of the podcast When A Guy Has. We talk about The Fifth Wound by Aurora Mattia. 

"I'm living a fake,
People say "You are entitled to and great"
But I haven't wrote for 90 days,
I'll get a good deal and I'll go away,
Away from the empty brains that ask"
- How I Wrote Elastic Man, The Fall 

"I do not deny that, among an infinite number of acts of violence and folly, some good may have been done. They who destroy everything certainly will remove some grievance." - Edmund Burke

"...when I put on my holster, I put God out of my mind" - Cop

"He did not work for posterity, nor did he work for God, whose literary preferences were largely unknown to him." - The Secret Miracle, Jorge Louis Borges

"Delight dwindles. Blame stays the same." - Briggflatts: An Autobiography, Basil Bunting I'm happy to welcome Matt on this last episode of SFUltra for 2023. Matt's youtube channel Bookpilled is one of the main inspirations behind SFUltra and his engaging, thoughtful reviews of books exactly like the one we're covering this week are precisely what makes him the best book reviewer on YouTube. Matt's channel: https://www.youtube.com/@Bookpilled Matt's patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Bookpilled

"Sometimes when I get up and emerge from the mists of slumber, my whole room hurts, my whole bedroom, the view from the window hurts, kids go to school, people go shopping, everybody knows where to go, only I don't know where I want to go..." - Bohumil Hrabal, Total Fears: Selected Letters to Dubenka

"Death's meaning I cannot read. To me death is above all things a smell, a very bad smell, and that, like the skeletons which terrify children, is not death at all. If I had to smell it more often, if I had to work in the catacombs, I would think nothing of it. And a few years or decades from now, I will think nothing about everything." - William T. Vollmann, Rising Up and Rising Down: Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom and Urgent Means

"The relation between God and human beings is often mediated by the sign of the weapon" - Elaine Scarry

"All alone at the '64 World's Fair Eighty dolls yelling "Small girl after all" Who was at the DuPont Pavilion? Why was the bench still warm? Who had been there?" - They Might Be Giants, Ana Ng

"Being empty, not being a complete, separate being, having no self to groove on and needing to be constantly in female company, he sees nothing at all wrong in intruding himself on any woman's thoughts, even a total stranger's, anywhere at any time, but rather feels indignant and insulted when put down for doing so, as well as confused -- he can't, for the life of him, understand why anyone would prefer so much as one minute of solitude to the company of any creep around." - Valerie Solanas, The Scum Manifesto

There’s something they aren’t telling us. Something we don’t know about. There’s
more to it. There’s always more to it. This is what history consists of. It’s the sum
total of all the things they aren’t telling us.
–David Ferrie in Don DeLillo’s Libra (1988)

"Art is creation in response to lack. Quite different from a stand-in for the archetype, which must be there, somewhere, the art object is a kind of fetish, a replacement for some real thing that is missing." - Mike Kelley

I'm happy to welcome Mark O'Connell on this second episode of Murder House Sold, a Perfect Taste Forever miniseries about True Crime, to talk about his new book A Thread Of Violence. Mark's a fantastic author and journalist whose previous books To Be a Machine and Notes From The Apocalypse are both remarkable examinations of grim insistence entropy can be defied.

Ultimately along the same lines, his new work A Thread Of Violence is recounts extended conversations Mark had with one of Ireland's most famous living murders in order to write a book about him that doubles as a meditation on what it means to write true crime. It's one of the best true crime books I've ever read, though I think neither author nor subject would be totally comfortable that description. 

I know Mark so decided to ask him loads of annoying questions, and even a few "more of a comment than a question"s, about it. He kindly agreed.

 Murder House Sold is Perfect Taste Forever miniseries, a show usually only available to SF Ultra patrons. The other episodes are solo, like SFUltra itself, and cover the more esoteric end of long form, largely literary, cultural criticism.

"I know that. The difference between male and female perversion. The action of the man is directed toward a symbol, not himself. The woman acts against herself." - In the Cut, Susanne Moore

"Ok, that's life, that's what I was told anyway
And picking your feet till they bleed may only be the half of it
If every fourth animal in the world is a beetle
Perhaps every fourth person is a dumb fuck
Listen, listen carefully now here's the answer
It rhymes with 'axe'
Why...it's those personal acts of course
Those personal acts
Those suicide pacts
Those carelessly stored razorblades in the hands of small children...
It's my face smeared on the pavement" - Every Day I Start To Ooze, Nomeansno

"Well, they called me a little so and so and so
Yeah? Now they're hummin' a different tune
Oh, this is a job for a stupid man

Smoke it down to the filter and put it out on your hand"

- Glamorous, Jesus Lizard 

"Besides myself, the basement is totally empty. It is dark and musty. It serves no purpose. And yet the entire world is down here, the whole universe" - Down Here, Bosse-De-Nage