Lonely Men Club by Mike Kleine
Inside the Castle, 2018
722 pages / Inside the Castle
Made with his computer / MAGICIEN-NOIR / about the Zodiac Killer’s extra dimensional existence / never really feels like it’s about the Zodiac / I think that’s on purpose / I think the Zodiac is an empty vessel / the novel an empty vessel / and both bare that emptiness in the open / exposed to the air / the novel’s structure / the intentionally repetitive blocks of action and observation / repurposing the same nouns and adjectives / the same coordinates / gods / movies and novels / all lend the book a sense of paranoia / I was never sure what I had and hadn’t read / felt trapped in a kind of fluid stasis / struck from the float and held in solution / here, language folds in on itself / content becomes dynamic / locked within boundaries but free to roam around inside of them / the balance of Zodiac’s bank account always changing / always owes a different amount of money to the dentist / he prays to a pantheon of gods / more than most, the body of work is itself a body / it is the physical evidence of its own perpetuated existence / each page made up of the same day rearranged / or different days arranged contemporaneously //
Work here is beautiful and difficult / the mechanical arrangements that arise / inputs Kleine’s and choices MAGICIEN-NOIR’s often sinking / into a minimalist prose / structurally sound / often flaunting its grammatical errors / errors albeit intentional / words often clumped together / “otherme” / “mysticsplane” / articles lean on their adjectives and nouns / MAGICIEN-NOIR creates these moments, but Kleine accepts them / choreographs the dance of the machine, but does not critique its freedom within the assigned boundaries / this secondary author / the machine / is not suppressed beneath an auteur mentality / so much so that the text might feel more collaborative than machine-assisted / writing here is unsettling, yet clean / the mundanity of these actions feels barren and suspicious / as if a code has been hidden behind the language / the language might be rearranged / into some revealing detail / I was often reminded of Bolano’s Antwerp / where the plotless simplicity of the book becomes sinister and untrustworthy / when death and murder appear, they feel no more important than anything else / otherworldly and destined / like Bolano’s murdered campers seems to negate its own violence / or to put that violence in the background / place it within dreams / on other planes of existence / in these moments, the Zodiac appears justified / but only because he is not really the Zodiac / he is the shared consciousness / of Kleine/MAGICIEN-NOIR / he is something locked in this extradimensional place / drifting through the same moment infinitely //
Where the mechanical cooperation might inform its contents / the form seems to act with its own sentience / fonts / vary dramatically from page to page / lines / connect paragraphs across the spine / black holes / materialize along the surface, swallowing up words / shrinking or expanding them / the form invades the content / it acts in spite of the content / as if they’re competing for the shared space / as if 720 pages / just wasn’t enough / the form temporal, reckless / the form occult, sacrificial, eternal / it is the matrices connecting dimensions / a fascinating space where the likes of concrete poetry and minimalist, distant prose can cooperate / returning to this comparison with Antwerp / it is as if Antwerp was taken past its maximus / beyond the dream-like mundanity and hints of narrative / and this is not to say a successor to Antwerp or to concrete poetry / something new and difficult to classify / with elements only faintly liken to these / it is something incredibly ambitious and lasting / I’ve read the entirety but I’m not sure / I’ve seen everything it has to offer / there is the sense that I could come back a year from now completely / unfamiliar / as if these excitations in form might have torn / open new portals / new moments for the Zodiac to inhabit / dictate //
The tools to “hack into [their] non dominant hand” / to access the parts of their system not intended / for use / it feels as if Kleine has created a new kind / of literature / I can’t quite embody here / one that basks in the extent of its duration / in the same way that Tarkovsky or Weerasethakul have done cinematically / the reader inhabits the text for so long that it starts to feel like a dream / like it can’t be real / like every new page is born / upon your viewing of it / arcane / crafted / by sorcery / MAGICIEN-NOIR / praying to the infinite pantheon of gods inhabiting the novel / to Djeet-Am’Salaam / Yet’Yett-Ta’am’Riip / Setesh-Al Sala’amD’agrhiil / others / answering the multitude / this text / performs the divination //
