Series
Headmistress Ursula pictured here when she was much younger and wilder.
Handyman Jack has just accused the Headmistress of eating the ears off living pigs, while Archibald is also revealing some unsavory bit of business to the Grammar Instructor. But what of the boy currently under the influence of the psychedelic fumes emitted by the bushes he had set fire to? What of Simone and Boo Boo?
Mutable Sound Chicago, Illinois Mutable Sound is an online gallery for sound and word located in Chicago, IL. We are dedicated to publishing works in all genres, from the dense and inextricable to the light-hearted and absurd, and release albums that are experiments more than anything else, without being particularly experimental.
You’re always off and away in the airy confines of your skull, like a sparrow trapped in the tiniest cage—that keeps burrowing deeper into the subatomic field in its effort to escape this unfortunate cage—and in general always searching for another crack to crawl into within that fifth wall delineates the back end of your brain. You got hands behind this aforementioned backdrop of your mental operating theater and they’re messing around with the flickering remnants of your dreams while your one sweetest hope is just to see the light over the hilltop at the end of this long night. You erotic ornithologist you.
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What horrors will come of Gundrun’s brother’s offspring?
Archibald the Professor of Arcane Knowledge has some unpleasant news for the Grammar Instructor, but then he plucks the memory of their interaction from her mind, slips into a secret opening constructed while sampling a student’s confiscated coca leaf collection. And what does he find in the secret passageway? And what does he do to the poor unfortunate? And what will Gundrun do when they meet again moments after that other meeting she has now has no recollection of?
Mutable Sound Chicago, Illinois Mutable Sound is an online gallery for sound and word located in Chicago, IL. We are dedicated to publishing works in all genres, from the dense and inextricable to the light-hearted and absurd, and release albums that are experiments more than anything else, without being particularly experimental.
My friend Bradshaw’s been out of a home for some weeks now. A year or so ago, the owner of the building Bradshaw rented in, in Chicago, was foreclosed upon—and not just in Bradshaw’s building. The owner was held up to a debt in the range of thirty million dollars, spread across many foreclosed-upon properties, and he thus fled to his native Ukraine.Success, that indomitable wall of my imagination. It’s a wall I so want to climb, however hard it may be, however long it may take, however much blood it spills from me to scale it. I so want to publish plentifully, to perform my thinking and craft for a living; I so want to be something like my own master—I want this more than anything. But I’d have to know where this wall even is, first. Because as things stand, I can’t be quite sure that I’m even running in its direction; I’m shrouded by the fog of not knowing, handed down to me by my working-class family, and extenuated by the lack of ambition that’s defined most of my young life.
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Archibald keeps appearing in the strangest places. Will he ever find the gymnasium?
The girls have a lesson in logic soon, but why did Simone’s mommy and daddy have to die? Archibald’s head pops up in the center of the pond and disappears. The Grammar Instructor suddenly appears to be sporting a goiter. “You all disgust me,” she shouts.
Mutable Sound Chicago, Illinois Mutable Sound is an online gallery for sound and word located in Chicago, IL. We are dedicated to publishing works in all genres, from the dense and inextricable to the light-hearted and absurd, and release albums that are experiments more than anything else, without being particularly experimental.
[The excerpt below is from Mutable’s most recent release, a memoir of the summer Boyer spent touring America with a woman named Jill, performing plays with strangers in their bedrooms as the two made their way south to New Orleans, west to LA, and north to Seattle, the madness that ensued, and how it all began.]
Bedroom Theater began when my roommate changed the light bulb in my bedroom, or rather, it began when he pointed out to me that he had changed the light bulb and for a moment I thought the bare bulb made my room look like an experimental theater space or heroin den, and then I thought that I should do that someday (start an experimental theater in my bedroom not start doing heroin) and then I forgot, for I was constantly slipping in and out of depression in those days, or rather, mostly slipping in and very rarely slipping out of the yearlong depression I was at that moment in the middle of. Most days it would take me a good half hour to put on one sock and even when I was fully clothed in socks, I would still spend hours sitting in the dark of my room contemplating literally nothing while staring at the brick wall facing my couch and the word “Safety” painted on it and above my queen-sized bed.
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This is how Grammar Instructor Gundrun sees all of you.
The year is 1903 and Jack just had a strange notion. He is sweet sometimes. They may even munch on some lettuce. They will leave out the back door, but their play is doomed to be interrupted by the very illogical Simone. And what of Archibald? Is it true he is performing his obeisance in a less than private place? Is Gundrun become unhinged? And what is it comes from the wound?
Mutable Sound Chicago, Illinois Mutable Sound is an online gallery for sound and word located in Chicago, IL. We are dedicated to publishing works in all genres, from the dense and inextricable to the light-hearted and absurd, and release albums that are experiments more than anything else, without being particularly experimental.
Success, that indomitable wall of my imagination. It’s a wall I so want to climb, however hard it may be, however long it may take, however much blood it spills from me to scale it. I so want to publish plentifully, to perform my thinking and craft for a living; I so want to be something like my own master—I want this more than anything. But I’d have to know where this wall even is, first. Because as things stand, I can’t be quite sure that I’m even running in its direction; I’m shrouded by the fog of not knowing, handed down to me by my working-class family, and extenuated by the lack of ambition that’s defined most of my young life.
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A dark cloud consumes the school.
The thing dug into her flesh and she had to cut it out, but what happened to the other boys? And a dark cloud has consumed the school. Perhaps Archibald is at the bottom of this. When last we saw him he was covered in monkey guts and murmuring in a strange tongue. Headmistress Ursula will deal with this.
Mutable Sound Chicago, Illinois Mutable Sound is an online gallery for sound and word located in Chicago, IL. We are dedicated to publishing works in all genres, from the dense and inextricable to the light-hearted and absurd, and release albums that are experiments more than anything else, without being particularly experimental.
Ingredients for this My Time: Barbeque chips (the diet CANCEROUS-BUT-WHO-CARES-YOU-CAN-EAT-MORE kind), vodka, listing, and humor that straighter men won’t find funny.
After something called a “Progressive Dinner Party” that people who eat delicious food LIKE IT DOESN’T HAVE CALORIES in it invited me to—a lovely affair of the most civil, dignified kind, where the women’s lipstick and shoes were above par from other social gatherings I’ve endured—then, a later look around the bar for a swarthy yet religious man that might be pillaged for his credit cards and body… (I do love the look of religious garb.)
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What is happening to us?
A “bear” nursery is a very solemn place. The narrator knows these fantastical creatures in disturbing detail. Beware!
Mutable Sound Chicago, Illinois Mutable Sound is an online gallery for sound and word located in Chicago, IL. We are dedicated to publishing works in all genres, from the dense and inextricable to the light-hearted and absurd, and release albums that are experiments more than anything else, without being particularly experimental.
on above me, at all times, humming and gaudy through all of my hours on this MacBook. I’m searching desperately for the magical link, to get the least fuzzy, least choppy, and least commercial-addled illegal stream of a pro basketball game. My team the Bulls is in even worse sorts than I am. I’d tell you about it, if it didn’t completely debilitate my soul.
I smoke as much weed as I can find, but I can’t find much.
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Ouspensky’s mentor, Georgy Gurdjieff
BEFORE I BEGIN TO EXPLAIN TO YOU in a general way what this system is about, I want particularly to impress on your minds that the most important ideas and principles of the system do not belong to me. This is chiefly what makes them valuable, because if they belonged to me they would be like all other theories invented by ordinary minds—they would give only a subjective view of things.
When I began to write A New Model of the Universe in 1907, I formulated to myself, as many other people have done before and since, that behind the surface of the life which we know lies something much bigger and more important. And I said to myself then that until we know more about what lies behind, all our knowledge of life and of ourselves is really negligible. I remember one conversation at that time, when I said, ‘If it were possible to accept as proven that consciousness (or, as I should call it now, intelligence) can manifest itself apart from the physical body, many other things could be proved. Only it cannot be taken as proved.’ I realized that manifestations of supernormal psychology such as thought transference, clairvoyance, the possibility of knowing the future, of looking back into the past, and so on, have not been proved. So I tried to find a method of studying these things, and worked on that line for several years, but the results were very elusive; and though several experiments were successful, it was almost impossible to repeat them.
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What witchery has Headmistress Ursula performed upon the young scholars?
Archibald the Professor of Arcane Knowledge and the Headmistress Ursula are currently facing off in the bowels of the school. The boy has returned to himself only to find he is trapped in a crib, his thoughts on a girl with a polka dot brassiere and how he will never see her again. But what of Jack? Does Simone know some secret to this seemingly innocuous handyman?
Mutable Sound Chicago, Illinois Mutable Sound is an online gallery for sound and word located in Chicago, IL. We are dedicated to publishing works in all genres, from the dense and inextricable to the light-hearted and absurd, and release albums that are experiments more than anything else, without being particularly experimental.
Privatised parts would look something like this: an individual surveys her preferences and enters her desires as data into a machine that is apt at recording and memorising all intimate ideas. Her mind will be recorded in various qualitative sessions, her data stored as vast quantitative sweeps, and her energies directed towards a lover, or a group of lovers, who satisfy her present condition and who are likely to parallel the trajectory of her expected desires. A primitive system named Lex Sexualis will try the formula of ultimate availability for one citizen for any other citizen, but the project will derail other concerns of the state. Abandoning Lex Sexualis means abandoning all idea that the individual instinct should be able to choose their lovers. Lovers will still choose their lovers, and any other one human will be an option, but the choices will be made from the results of a vast survey of the human body and mind. Without intimate specialised knowledge this part of the love finding sounds difficult, but it is merely technique.
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Technology has advanced again, and your father feels out of date having all his boxes of old photographic slides sitting around when you could scan them for him and keep them electronically. You are scanning the slides. If you scan them at very low resolution—say one pixel per image—the job will be very efficient and quick but you get more or less nothing; a plain block that averages the colors of the whole picture. As you increase the resolution you get images that look less and less chunky, then less and less blurry, then more and more like the picture, and pretty soon you have something that to any unaided eye pretty much is the picture.
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I’m sitting in an abandoned department store on a Thursday night and listening to the Bee Gees and Danny Elfman and feeling very confident of the future that keeps rolling around and around before my eyes like a perpetual motion slot machine. The future is a snake trying to walk backwards. And in the eye of this storm of second sight, I can see so clearly how I will be married and go back to school, and my wife and I will have children, but will I become a warlord in the Middle East at some point in my later years? This has yet to be determined.
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Ingredients for this My Time: an elk horn, a whale abalone, 3 shaken vodka martinis, super glue, a hammer, shells (pref abalone).
Every elegant lady knows how to make a lot out of a little, but it’s finding that time to show such class in one’s home that is hard to learn how to do. This is why multitasking was invented in the 1970s (along with a widespread use of cocaine combined with a pre-AIDS/post-BirthControl era; indeed, there was much multitasking).
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He remembers Jack well.
Jack grew up as a carny in the circus and was well-loved by the tattooed lady. But what happened to his sister? What strange meats did he consume in the forest? Did he indeed fall in love with a clown? Find out!
Mutable Sound Chicago, Illinois Mutable Sound is an online gallery for sound and word located in Chicago, IL. We are dedicated to publishing works in all genres, from the dense and inextricable to the light-hearted and absurd, and release albums that are experiments more than anything else, without being particularly experimental.
ubixic [ubi’∫ikʔ], n.: the “reading” or signification of a sign
(Quiché Mayan)
Diviners are semioticians by profession; they start from signs (etal), in this case signs that take forms other than those of spoken words, and try to arrive at a “reading,” as we would say, or ubixic, “its-being-said” or “an announcement,” as is said in Quiché.
—Dennis Tedlock, The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), p. 132.
~
Black boughs etch the nightblue’s magnet fluid. A fleshed lithograph: how wasp-star veined our eyes.
The photographs of undeveloped cities still lie in wellwater’s black feather-silt. Compost of river-birds and what of river they managed to take with them. This is a linguistics: etymon was water cutting through the continental shelf, and now syllable will molt, and now vowel’s bone or system of cartilage locks will spread out the homology of wing drowned in the meat of different hands.
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