TABLE MIC: The best thing is…, and this is something I don’t say lightly, the best really is the adversary. Here we have an antagonist that has no perspective, that has no quarry, that is irritating, messy, and that just doesn’t grow. What’s not to like here?
TABLE READER: I love that too, it’s just great. On the surface, this is an impossibly complex book. There is no story, no irrefutable evidence, there are no deeply ancient views to enjoy. That’s pretty clear. But we have to keep re-reading paragraphs just to make sure that there’s really nothing here. As soon as we do, I swear to God, some paragraphs change! This is the great uncertainty, the hairline cracks that we see screaming right through each and every page.
TABLE MIC: Lots of different quirks and habits are demonstrated by – should I say reanimated by…
TABLE READER: [laughs] … by other overladen passages, but the antagonist is never given any autonomy whatsoever by how I’m calling it here, so just doesn’t seem to notice this galvanism happening. ‘Have we met?’
TABLE MIC: Ha, yeah! Yeah. Yeah, we have. There’s the unattributed scene where the same actor literally brings nothing to the table. The rambling monologues, if sometimes baffling companion pieces, hit the only nail on the head so exactly. I’m sure I feel similarly most of the time – we transcend our own limited circumstances, gyeah, but for what? Mysterious exigencies?
TIM BITS: Moving into the next quarter, um… Good initiatives. Back to work everyone! Yum. Mm mmm. Yeah, Tim Bits really are that irresistible. Try them in new lemon or raspberry. Just a dollar ninety-nine for half a ten pack. It’s summer. It’s Time for Tim’s.
TABLE READER: We always get a pack of our flavorite Tim’s bits in. Eh? I can’t get enough of ‘em. I tried, but I can’t. They are more like brothers than collateral kin. Brazen. So, did I mention that I am not usually able to read when flying, I get too caught up of the beguiling reverie of altitude.
TABLE MIC: Gyeah, right, nothing is ever honoured, the real story is all justa buncha lies. But, then again, it’s not like the plot is just there to carry out its own exploits. Everyone is just always uncomfortable, angry – even the legally and medically dead!
TABLE READER: Yup, it’s the ‘ol “living with mother” calamitous subplot device, right?
TABLE MIC: Not quite. The one-note has its own life – here it’s a starter in a shallow Petri dish. It’s not instrumental; the words aren’t so much chosen as grown. It all seems to be shuffling, resilient to the development of memory and so doesn’t suffer from misplaced memories, or, like most of us, what we might nervously call ‘memory corruption’.
TABLE READER: So, the “living with mother” element, is more a ‘living mother’, the ‘starter culture’ of the story here?
TABLE MIC: Yeah, it’s like a Petri dish-growth, a lab grown one-note rather than a complex note left to rot at the back of dark pan cupboard. There’s – out of nowhere – that controversial hard fork in the plot: “…the polite kersplashing. The irregular crowd, lurking in the Crockpot.”
TABLE READER: “…an’ no dust.” Wow. That’s why parsing the smells can be so, so important here. Be they acrid, waxy, sour, briny, phosphorescent, bloody, mossy, cheesy, sticky, sulphurous, new or putrid the smells are invariably described as ‘failed’ rather than “lingering” or “intoxicating”. Sure the Crockpot is an understated believer, always teasing out the simplest of explanations, but this is only so due to careful trail and error. These subtle odours just seep right through a 16K stigma funnel, causing the actor’s different ‘truths’, their own shadowy visions, to collide. The aromas are unholy oracles, the rumbling olfactory organs their rotting neophyte instruments.
TABLE MIC: I feel there are a few more important observations I can add here about the perfumes. One is that the odours are ever eager to herald the “correct” context for the antagonist’s monologues, which are always sure to buffer soon after a change in the wind. It’s as if the fermentations, after pausing for breath, are doing all the work of the plot. The stench is invasive and persuasive; it permeates every page. As grim as a whip, the protagonist is then, like, all just soooooo uncertain about how the fuck they got there: “How does that work? Who’s looking after the kids?” It’s all a bit, you know: ‘I wasn’t sure what to expect from this damn script as I never read it’.
TABLE READER: Ha ha! Sometimes they can’t even be certain about how many oracles there are! We almost have to assign our own subscripts to distinguish roles – I gave out colour coded name tags. The clingy bouquet is not so much intoxicating, it’s more… mismatched; not so much rhubarb and custard as meatloaf gelato or Smell the Truck.
TABLE MIC: Smell the Truck wooo, gee, love that show. Trukin’ Lickin’ Good’! Which leads me to ask: who is cooking here? What is being cooked? It’s only when you look at it all this way that you realise that something’s been stolen.
TABLE READER: Ah, yeah – I didn’t figure that out until after it’d been dramatised.
Review by The Confraternity of Neoflagellants La Confrérie de Neoflagellants [(c)krs] #été MMXXI Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license MMXX
