Shear Infamy

Sheer Mayhem

New York is hit by a wave of bombings, and a lack of anything cool to wear.

Sheer Power 
Hot on the trail but cool in their fashion, a wild bunch works against time and the military to find out who is responsible.
Shear Infamy, is on the case of the murders. She is the protean protagonist, who travels the broken landscape of a fragmented America, in search of justice and sweet flattering footwear.
Shear Infamy, is a human comedy in the age of terrorism and totalitarianism set fifteen minutes into the future of New York City. It comes from the tradition of J.G.Ballard and Thomas Pynchon, and navigates the terrain between Ulysses and Rick & Morty. It is a dark satire on how history victimizes its witnesses, and how they resist.

Shear Infamy, an eternally hip woman in her late thirties who decides to confront the bombings - and her own mid-life crisis - by becoming a crime fighter. Surrounded by her ex-boyfriends; two women whose closet she is parasitically living in; and a group of military police; Shear investigates a crime that has shaken the world around her. 

Included in the dramatis personae are the traumatized Evelin Nook, who lost her sister and her lover in the bombing, Captain Giacomo Straniero, military investigator with a dark and tragic past, Jissabel D’ladie, heiress and femme fatale, Agent Gogol Swinecock, freelance expert and analyst for the security services, Danny Quinn, the revolutionary woke pornographer, Francis Cabliban, an adventurer being hunted by two men in grey suits, Long Dong Wong, a pot dealer and gorrilla insurgent, and Maggy Cranny, who just wants Shear to get out of her apartment. 

The novel is as fragmented as the lives we live, with each chapter examining a different way of thinking and writing. From movie trailers, to game shows, to epic poetry, the story progresses through comic fake to tragic turn. 

With its diverse and Dickensian cast, Shear Infamy is an examination of how to live in a world of violence and imagery, where to be is to be seen. The novel ends on a note of hope as friendship and love are illuminated as the only things worth holding onto. 

Outline

Chapter 1 Mea culpa - A terrorist attack with much style but no substance. The bombing of the Dreamland Disco told in a series of vignettes in the style of a movie trailer.

Chapter 2  Relationships & references & radicals - As they were reported: the facts, the figures, the meat, the bone, all of the roast beneath the smoke. The unraveling of the response to the terrorist attack as we learn more about the characters..

Chapter 3  Interrogations - Where a great many questions are asked but few answers given. Shear, Maggie and Evelin are taken for questioning by a game show android.

Chapter 4 The Screamer and the shriek - The thirst for peace in a desert of chaos. Evelin Nook tries to deal with the pain and guilt of surviving while surrounded by debris tourists.

Chapter 5 It’s a small world...  - It's a world of laughter, a world of tears and it is getting smaller all the time. We meet Danny Quinn in the midst of a pornographic liberation operation.

Chapter 6 New Jersey ...and on the third day, she rose again, in fufillment of the scriptures...Shear descends into the land of the dead, the Jersey Shore, in search of answers. 

Chapter 7  I Am Not An Agent Of The State - A guide for the independent traveler in an interdepent nation. Francis Calaban travels the United States looking for an ex-scientist who is somehow involved in the attack.

Chapter 8 The ballad of Long Dong Wong - A tale told from a respective future perspective. Long rescues Francis from certain death and they continue to find the scientist held by a group of mutated suburban children.

Chapte 9 SNAFU - Where everything is clearly and succinctly stated, but it really doesn't help at all. The investigation progresses with the discovery of  a brutal murder while Shear’s team watches television.

Chapter 10 Interrogations 2 - Evelin Nook goes on a job interview and recounts the second terrorist bombing - this time at Times Square Subway station.

Chapter 11 An ecumenical moment - In which many facets concerning the onto-theological implications of Empire in the modern Americas and the consequences upon interdoctrinal dicourse are discussed, debated, disputed, deliberated, and disrupted. Danny Quinn makes his voice heard at a debate between theologians on the nature of God and Empire.

Chapter 12 My lives with the sex death cults - Our ultimate desire is for our own extinction. Giacomo Straniero is tormented by memories, fantaies, lust and guilt while recovering from the terrorist attack. 

Chapter 13 Retorni - Everything and everyone comes back to NYC, for better or worse. Shear finds her team assembled but her own memories blanked. 

On Amazon

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08PDLQH1Y?pf_rd_r=4CCSJBG3Y5F9G56FNQBY&pf_rd_p=9d9090dd-8b99-4ac3-b4a9-90a1db2ef53b

On ITunes Books:

http://books.apple.com/us/book/id1542188032

On Google Books

https://books.google.com/books/about?id=Xy0LEAAAQBAJ&hl=en

On Google Play:

https://play.google.com/store/books/details/J_E_D_Ulisse_SHEAR_INFAMY?id=Xy0LEAAAQBAJ&hl=en-GB

 




























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Mary’s Children (at the edge of the age of reason)

Mary’s Children (at the edge of the age of reason)

The jewels on her hands, shimmering in the rose tinged light from the midday sunlit dome above, reflects on the clockwork inside the dove’s breast. Mary’s alabaster fine nailless fingers grasp lightly along silvery tool, playing within the body of the dove, as if conducting an orchestra. She hesitates, biting upon her blue lower lip, withdraws the sleek silver needle from the dove’s torso, and closes its skin. The purple plumage now hides the gearing.

Mary, stroking the top of the doves soft head, places it onto the white table, and the animal ambles, puffs it purple body, and begins to coo a Phrygian scale. Mewling a clarion E, the dove takes flight in a pastel fury, and Mary smiles in satisfaction, and rises from the table.

Mary’s bone toned bare feet silent glide over the white warm floor. Her dress, a kaftan made from beaded rubies and emeralds, hung loosely over her thin long pale form. Sitting upon her white divan, she spreads her legs, placing her hands between them, lightly rubbing the jewels on her clitoris, before moving her hands to her swollen stomach. She lays her head back to gaze above at the mechanical avian symphony occurring above her, smirking at these relics of the platinum age.

Mary smiles at her darling conceit with each fowl tuned to a different, yet compatible scale. The vermilion hummingbirds create a modulating tonal hum, the golden albatross beat out a rhythm, lime thrushes ran Doric scales, electric blue tanagers all tuned a half octave apart, and an orange falcon excising all tonalities that had fallen behind.

Memorial for Nick Gardere (1973 to 2016)

Memorial For Nick Gardere (1973 - 2016)

Corpus Hypercubus, Dalí

They are stoning Stephen,

They are casting him forth from every city in the world.

Under the Welcome sign,

Under the Rotary emblem,

On the highway in the suburbs,

His body lies under the hurling stones.

He was full of faith and power.

He did great wonders among the people.

They could not stand against his wisdom.

They could not bear the spirit with which he spoke.

-Thou Shall Not Kill, Kenneth Rexroth

The Tesseract

Nick sat under Minerva’s frozen gaze, in the westmost entrance doorway of Stuyvesant High School. His eyes were fixed upon the relief of the goddess carved above the school's entrance. His eyes locked with hers, almost bathing in wisdom from her full, pouting lips.

-A tesseract? I asked him.

-That’s right, a mother fucking tesseract. Nick said, his eyes still locked on Minerva’s face.

-Ok Nick, what the fuck is tesseract? I said as I leaned back into the concrete wall, sitting in the interior and opposite corner of the door sill.

Nick’s eyes shot to me with a shocked fury:

-What WHat WHAT?! Jack my friend, once you get your head wrapped around a tesseract, you have it my friend. You have your bird in your hand and put one or two in a bush. Alpha and omega, the pearl. That’s what you my friend are missing, a tesseract.

-A tesseract.

-A ball slapping, toe curling, sphincter prolapsing, tesseract.

-Ok Nick, what the fuck is a tesseract?

Nick smiled, and settled his back against the concrete, opening his hands as if he held the idea in his hands and was offering it to me.

-Why Jack, the tesseract is to the cube as the cube is to the square. A four dimensional creature poking into a three or two dimensional world.  If you can figure out how to represent a multi dimensional reality, in a lower order, baby you’ve got it.

not me : a study in deception

There is a man in my wife’s diaries and it’s not me. It is all here, scrawled upon the pages in her careful handwriting. 

It’s my right to know what is going on here, it is my right why she has turned so cold. Invading someone’s privacy, normally that’s not me... but the diary was sitting there, taunting me. Sitting on the table, within it maybe something.  I just reach out, pick it up and know what’s going on, and find out who he is.

He, that’s all she calls him and he is not me, of that I am sure. In fact I have never seen someome more unlike me.  Scattered throughout are descriptions, painful in their detail, a jigsaw puzzle of a human face. It starts with the nose, broken, angled, with bilious nostrils like mud flaps. Eyebrows, rounded rough like caterpillars.  It’s here, here that gets me, his hands. Soft hands, firm hands, confident hands, his hands on her body.

Listen to me, jealousy, that’s just not me. Yet reading about his hand reaching out from his masculine arms,  strong and determined, and yet, this force becomes gentle like wind as it moves to his hands as it moves towards her.

It’s not me, I am not crazy, I can see his possible faces as I go through the possibilities.  She has here descriptions of the jewelry he has given her. Small things, necklaces, earrings, tiny baubles. I searched for them, I found nothing. Just the things I've given her through the years.

There is also fear, my wife is afraid of him. She writes about looking at her things, and knowing someone has gone through them. Small pieces left in slightly different places. She is afraid of him, afraid of his savage glances, afraid of what he is hiding. She describes him, staring at a knife, seemingly studying it, running his finger along the edge. For all of the attraction she has for him, when I see the fear,  I am glad it’s not me.

Then she writes of the river, laying back with him, watching the water crawl by out to sea. We walked once when I thought she loved me, but the man she loves is not me. 

What kills me is that sadness in the writing.Tear stains on the pages, and things  like why can't he be happy. I wish I could tell her, tell her not to care about him, that there is someone who is famished for her love.

I want to tell her but that is just not me.

Who chose this face for me?

It is a simple line of Steven Dedalus, in the first chapter of Ulysses. As I sit here, closing my Bloomsday, as I listen to a wonderful audio version of it, that line strikes me: Who chose this face for me?

I listen to Ulysses as one listens to a piece of music, I dip into and out of it, treating as an infinitely interesting excercise in eavesdropping. As if I were driving past Monet's Water Lillies, if that painting was 80 feet tall. The blasphemies I found so delightful at 16 still amuse me. The nasty undercutting conversations, the poison of  class and politics still crawl under my skin.

It is still damn good, now that I am beyond being impressed, I can appriciate how good of a read it is. Perhaps because it is the work of someone loosing their sight. His brush work is drawn in broad lines, avoiding fine lines. As if drawn in chalk on the pavement.

That's what happens when you start to go blind. Vision becomes a smear of joy before your eyes. Things begin to look like emotions. A world appears summerged, but not in water, but in light and color.
 It is this vision you call for, and hold on to it, for as long as it lasts. Until darkness comes.

In Memorium ; Rik Mayall (1958 to 2014)

Rik Mayall died today, I tried  to write something serious and heartfelt. Instead, I scrawled down a series of obscenities, and vulgar bodily functions. Rik would have wanted it that way.

Here, in a role you might not have seen, Rik plays a corrupt Minister in the Parliament, working to give guns to the police.

Why I support BDS : An open letter to Professor Brad Delong

A Jordanian-Palestinian judge who was shot dead by Israeli troops at the Jordan border tried to snatch a weapon and strangle a soldier, the Israeli army said on Tuesday. The incident occurred on Monday, when troops opened fire at the Allenby Bridge border crossing between the West Bank and Jordan, killing 38-year-old Raed Zeiter – a Palestinian with Jordanian citizenship. Israeli military police said he tried to snatch a weapon from a soldier.

But Palestinian witnesses said the man was shot following an argument over a cigarette in an incident that prompted a furious response from the Palestinian Authority and Amman.

The Guardian, 3.11.2014

Let us accept the offical version of this killing. A middle-aged judicial civil servant, grabbed a metal pole (which had somehow eluded the security check on the Jordanian side) and, unprovoked, attacks a soldier. They wrestler for the Soldier's rifle and then this Jordanian Magistrate (truly the one you want on your side in a court of law) tries to strangle the soldier. Important to note that this happens on the one part of the Jordanian-Israeli border without any electronic surveillance. If we all accept this version of events, it still begs the questions: Was there no way of disable him? Did they have to kill him?

A man trying to strangle another man clearly is doing something with his hands. Why didn't someone go up behind him and crack him in the back of the head with their rifle butt? Was there no tazer, no black jack, no baton? From my (blessedly) limited experience moving through Israeli border crossings and checkpoints, they seemed well equiped for nonleathal restraint. Checkpoints and border crossings are specifically designed to protect the security agents, how did Mr. Zeiter get so close? The man was clearly out numbered and unarmed, why was there no way to subdue him? Was there even an attempt? The sad thing is that this is the version of events released by the Israeli Governmnet as a justification.

And then we read down at the end of the Guardian’s artical:

Several hours after Zeiter's death, troops shot dead a 20-year-old Palestinian near the West Bank city of Ramallah. The army said he had been throwing stones at soldiers.

The Guardian, 3.11.2014

Then you realize that a 20 year Palestinian doesn’t even merit an explanation.

Professor Delong, I open my letter with this incident not to be didactic, but to make a point about the nature of speech and silence in this conflict; to show what questions we don’t ask. I honestly and respectfully ask for your attention for a few moments and give me an oprotunity to address your position concerning BDS. I am not looking to change your position, but to examine some of your concerns and perhaps address some of my own.

The Underground 1 - The approach

The approach

    The spine is a bit red; and the whole thing has a smell

    Strangely horrible; you notice especially

    Odd details, you'd have to see with a magnifying glass...

    The buttocks bear two engraved words: CLARA VENUS;

    -And the whole body moves and extends its broad rump

    Hideously beautiful with an ulcer on the anus.

                                Venus Anadyomene

                                        Rimbaud

    Herb is an insurance salesman, a little overweight, balding, has a slight problem with his oral hygiene and has one webbed toe. He knows people avoid him like the plague because they think he'll try to sell them something. I've seen close friends doze off as he spoke about whole life vs. term insurance. Is it any wonder he needs an outlet?

    I had dressed as a Vampire in a stunning black outfit, tight and sexy, slit to the waist. When Herb (he now prefers being addressed as Count) first saw me, he nearly drooled.

    He looked positively dashing as the Transylvainan prince of darkness. The cape was expensive though; it had an inner lining of red silk. He looked frightening and awesome.

    I'll be frank. Before this, getting sex from Herb was quite a chore. He'd be worried about sales or just be tired. But once he donned Dracula's clothing he became A SEX FIEND!

    I grappled with the cape and unbuckled his pants. When I touched his cock, I marveled. Never had it felt harder or hotter. And when I looked into those blazing eyes of his I realized he had become a delicious demon lover.

        Was this my Herb?

        His meaty Hard On made me want to do only one thing...

Pesto Popawadolus looked up as the 7 train pulled out, up from his copy of the Sloppy Truth, neatly tucked within his copy Of Human Bondage, giving it the passages its title implied. The air hung lifeless over the platform of 74st Broadway and made him keep his gloves on and his Mets cap, planted firmly upon his head. It would not stir from his head as a man in a gray trench coat passed him.

  

Scene from a party

 Host: Hey it's really great you two could come here tonight.

Semore: Gee thanks, it was our pleasure.

Host: Listen you two, the door to my apartment is always open, so whenever you just want to drop by go ahead..

Semore: Sure.

Sally: We'll see.

Host: Okay, well I've got to mingle, drop by later.

Host leaves and this begins an exchange between the couple. As exchange continues Semore become more inebriated.

Semore: ‟We’ll see?” that was really rude of you.

Sally: I just don't like him.

Semore: He's a great guy, what's not to like?

Sally: You don't know him like I know him.

Semore: What are you talking about, I've known this guy since high school, played on the same la cross team, backpacked across Europe together...

Sally: I used to sleep with him.

Semore: Nope, don't know him that well. Nope didn't know that little piece of information either. (hesitant and insecure) So why did you two break up?

Into the underground

 Into the underground

To scream at sections of

the setting sun

Showing the nature

nature of the sky

Sunset in bloodred sky

Still the random scattering stars

Only black

And voices that raise defiant cries

Till outshine

This horrific pinprick of light

And then again

 Do they?

Yes, they do.

I heard they did.

Yes.

Watch them circle each other

In strange fights for domination.

She was so impressed she just surrendered.