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Like Screech Owls at Noonday
I will never forget the night back in 1995 when I woke up breathless as the ground rumbled beneath a column of tank treads. All the sway of the earth shook like a thing unfirm. In a state of terrified paralysis, I couldn’t even scream. I shook convulsively as something like an animal growl ravaged my vocal cords. The Marine I was with at an Observation Post held me down and kept me from running pell-mell into the dark forest. Above the tanks’ portentous din, he reassured me: the AmTrac AAVs were not driving over our hidden foxhole; we were safe–unlike another Marine, who had been accidentally crushed dead in…
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Into Dungeons Deep and Caverns Old
Once in a while, I hear from somebody who has never read The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings. Maybe they saw the films, and that was enough for them, or they couldn’t stomach the prose. This lost experience is indeed a sad thing in my book. Looking back to the first experience as a reader of Tolkien, I was just a hobbit myself. Having moved frequently, school to school, state to state, all I wanted to do was hibernate in my bedroom. Every day of school was a day in Goblin Town, as if teachers were the weaponsmiths of a Goblin military-industrial complex, and we were all…
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How to Act Now Before Your Total Abnilisation (All major credit cards accepted!)
A Note to the Reader: “How to Act Now Before Your Total Abnilisation†is a work of cosmic pseudepigraphy by American fabulist Matt Muller, significant for its experimental style and its reputation as one of the most difficult works of metafictional advertisement in the American language. Its first draft written in Chengdu, China over a period of 3 hours, and first published online minutes later, just 24 hours before it would be made to disappear from Chinese cyberspace. The entire work is written in a falsely eloquent language, consisting of a mélange of standard American and neologistic jargon, which many critics believe attempts to recreate a simulacrum of expertise and…