The Obscenity Trilogy

The Obscenity Trilogy: A Chapter from Paul Verhaeghen's novel Omega Minor.

Some excerpts I bloody fuck'n love-- The full English version of the novel is being published in October. Definitely pick it up. Everyone is anticipating....

1 - "America! The promised land! The Great Attractor! The limitcycle oscillator of our academic existence! Hotel California and the sagging couch in its lobby that one too many travelers has had to spend the night on because all rooms were taken! The heartland of quarter-gallon coffee mugs, Hawaiian shirts and football, of hotdogs and nachos with liquid cheese, of deep-dish pizzas and hard candy, of Twizzlers, Dots, and M&Ms, of peanut butter and jelly (James: remember when I made you your first one?), the land that invented the hamburger, that perfected the bagel, that shrunk and hardened the pretzel, the new homeland of the cheesecake. The land where the real English is spoken, the language of Eisenhower and Springsteen, the vowels held together by wads of chewing gum. Where girls in big hairdos spray every visible part of their bodies with cherry perfume and their boyfriends swagger like bears, as if their smoothly shaven testicles were made out of bronze, each family jewel weighing twenty pounds or more."




2 - "My experiment was the last one of its kind in Adelaide, though. Damned cognitive revolution. Replacing the psychology of behavior with the psychology of thought, is that really progress? What was in the beginning, huh? The word or the act? Who do you believe was the better psychologist? Moses or Goethe? I try to interrupt, but Danny raises his hand. He is on a roll. "We couldn't get anything published anymore. And somewhere in the higher regions of the university, where they think money is important, somebody took notice. They stopped subsidizing us. Fuck'n' bloody administration types! And what can you do with a lab full of jobless pigeons? There was a suggestion, not a serious suggestion, mind you, to slaughter the animals and have our Moroccan research fellow cook us a nice bastiya. Phyllo dough, almonda, puree apricots, cinnamon. Add tender pigeon meat. No, we were going to set the pigeons free, of course.

So, there we all go, on a sunny afternoon late in summer, in procession, with tears in our eyes, and we carry our birds in improvised cages to the park to release them there. The pigeons are cooing nervously; they scrape their little claws against the plastic bottoms of borrowed parrot cages and the cardboard of shoe boxes; they beat their wings against the walls of perforated paper bags and Chinese take-out Styrofoam containers; they stick their little beaks out of improvised air holes in extra-large Tupperware containers. Take to the air, dear friends! Go, fly into the golden sunlight, free, free at last!

But that isn't what happens. We have to shake the cages, we have to turn the boxes upside down. Some of the birds immediately scramble back into captivity; we have to wrestle them out of the cages and onto the grass. None of the expected shrieks of joy, no happy flapping of pigeon wings in the limitless sky. They all huddle together on the law, scared shitless, pecking their feathers and trying to find purchase with their stumpy feet in the loose gravel and the damp earth. Their little heads are rotating like antennas, and what are they looking for? Us, of course. Us they trust, we are the guys and gals who offer them food and scratch their heads, so suddenly they all decide to run towards us, beaks wide open, cluck-clucking away. I swear to God, the wild pigeons in the trees are rolling off their branched with laughter. And so there we are, flapping our arms like windmills, showing our pigeons how it's done. fly, dear friends, don't be scared, go on, fly! And so there they are, slightly taken aback, staring at us with big dumb pigeon eyes-you can see them thinking: What the hell? So we run directly at them, thinking we could maybe scare them into flight, but even that doesn't work-like a nervous flock of grey mini-sheep they fan out over the lawn, but they do not spread their wings. Only when Will gets a little toy pistol out of his pocket and starts shooting in the air do they take off, with a mighty whoosh, all at the same time.

It is an incredible moment, those dry pops and the smell of gun powder and actually feeling the pigeons lift off, like a single cloud, like a small reverse tornado, an explosion of wings in the sunset, a momentary eclipse of the sun-and then it's all over, they settle in the lime trees, nervous and visibly confused. And then gray feathers start whirling down from the sky-the wild pigeons, the mob that owns the park, are ganging up on the newcomers, and they engage in some seriously vigorous pecking and group rape ensues on a massive scale. Pigeons don't scream, right? Is that what you think? Pigeons cannot scream? Well, let me tell you, we sprinted out of that park as fast as we could, covering our ears with our hands, and none of us ever set foot in that place again.

See? Another nice example of how classical conditioning actually works in daily life. Will Foode 'For Thought' later became a true cognitivist. He studied extrasensory perception. He shaved cats and glued electrodes on their skulls. Then he went to a soundproof room at the other end of the hallway and tortured their kittens. Let's see if that leads to a spike in mommy's brainwaves.


3 - "It is better to leave the world as it is. The smartest thing to do is to travel the globe, looking for a place that fits us best. This place here does not agree with me, its seems. The town feels so despondent, so nauseatingly nebulous. I want clarity; I want a wider horixon of thought; I want to see a real city - I want to see mythical Berlin."