Aad de Gids on “Longshadowfall” by Michael Mc Aloran

Michael McAloran’s “longshadowfall” Editions du Cygne (2017)

sunken is the ship with readers, the ship of readership, inbetween the poetic prozaic streaming which Michael McAloran (hereafter “Mick”) virtuosely does; sunken am I inmidst the succinct as bleak, pure poetic ‘da stream’ of endless wordparures in which meaning threatens, meaning threatens to emerge and does emerge,about our modern,postmodern, postpostmodern world, always prepostcataclysmic as we’re always inbetween the one disaster happened and the following initialising. what Mick does is lending this “meaning” a river while also render the very notion of “meaning” a discutable but probably more acutely, despicable status. people need to attach “meaning”, patches of meaning to the world, to life, to death, (adorno:) “[impossible] after Auschwitz”, and it is now the question if this assertion, this very assuredness with which we think we can add meaning to this processual world, is in its whole, to say the least, questionable. in these last eight, perhaps nine years I know Mick he has evolved not but has evolved enormously. I would say his artistry has the same intensity but he has succeeded to sharpen his knives. it is the mystique of McAloran to represent this great Irish lineage of Irish writers, these edgy, escatological writers, yet necessarily and of course due to the generational phaseology, irreversibly radicalises both as celebrate as annihilate them. it is what our generation do for a living. parricide, maternicide de luxe, we have thrived on our (most extreme) litterature ancestry while we face these, well, horrid times now. it was obvious that after Wittgensteins “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus”, Sartres “L’être et le Néant”, Gertrude Steins “The Making of Americans”, Marguerite Duras’s “L’Amant” and “Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein”, Samuel Becketts “The Endgame” and “Waiting for Godot”, and further the litterati Céline, Cioran “de l’Inconvénience d’être Née”, Celan, Musil, Thomas Bernhard, Adornos “Negative Dialektik” and “AEsthetische Theorie” and Horkheimer-Adornos “Dialektik der Aufklärung”, Susan Sontag, Germaine Greer etc., etc. who were all iconoclasts in extremis, we had to do a fine job in articulating, accelerating, igniting them. then also the french poststructuralists who had gradually and not so gradually bashed all notions we were ever familiar with and landed Freud-Nietzsche-Marx in the trashcan. but a generation has risen and came up to the task. of them, Mick is one and it is in his superexact poetic acribic lemmata (as in an encyclopedia) in this book (and others before) he captures the landscape-psychoscape mistings of psychotic sociuses and inframental arches of insanity and psychiatric abberations (in antipsychiatry still the apt way to respond to these accreted hypersocieties (Basaglia, Szasz, Foudraine, Laing, Fromm, Lacan, Cooper) ) in shards of individuals, often either dead, roaming around the dead, browsing along death, a precise mappology of the noir necropolises of our time. part of the intensity of Micks poetry lies in the fact that he doesn’t write a tourist guide to Palermos’ or Paris’s “catacombes” but demasks them as societal and very much in our scope now, as we see it in the street, cities, in our houses, in our fucking lives. as I am “reading” his latest book “Longshadowfall” it is not convential reading. it is as if the poetry prose (divisionisms we have already let fallen like a ton of bricks in the ‘80s) resists itself against reading while, when one comes within the impetus of da stream, figments of wordlineage, repetitive allitterative wordglueings, hypnotically phraseology are beginning to intoxicate you. this goes further than any complexisised postconventionalism: it is that and, the transcendence of it. we’re also the facebookgeneration poets postflarf a kind of NY “Die Collector Scum” anticollective yet transdimensional fringist fuckist movement always in to write mirrorly as it is at the same time exposure of “what it is now”. Mick, me, David Mclean, Greg Podmore, Carolyn Srygly-Moore, Ryan Link Ralston, Jacques Andervilliers, Linwood Jones, Christine Murray, Reuben Woolley, Lisa Gordon, AC Evans, Dom Gabrielli, Thamyris Jones, Tara Birch, Lee Kwo, Carrie Ann Warner, Margarite Zaatara d’Arsinoë et al et al. this is the flowing mist of authors emerging up out of the ocean of facebook. without forming a “school” I guess we “let the world speak” in 1000 styles and perhaps with similar (not the same) experiences. that Mick’s writing isn’t without personal reverberances as also reminesces shall be evident for all who dive in the intensely written often achingly scorching as strangely alluring “fine poetry styles” yet without the usual corewords: flowers are made of flesh where surprisingly Mick, these flowers, Rafflesia, grow in the Malaysian jungle. (to B ct’ued) (and with superfluous citations)

with these, to an accumulative point mere listings of words, the delivery of the message happens more in a tactile as an a priori communicative way while this perfunctory chosen series of lemmata expresses precisely that function of “linguistic communication”: in the illustration that it is idle. not that we have here a text formulated without the utmost precision and deliberately used placement of each word in the chosen ensemble. to a degree that it is almost unbearable the language is mastered and using our hard, strange habitualisation to insert meaning into read words we either succeed not or we succeed halfly in while we’re already urged to read on. this is a book best to be savored with two pages at a time also because one can barely know where one’s at when closed halfway on a page. I now laid a marker at the place where I still read: the toilet as we say in Europe as in the AngloSaxonWorld they say:”bathroom”. it is there I’ve been told men read their “man/uals”, newspapers and well, poetic and prosaic tractates. this is nowhere to be meant that this is “toiletmaterial” or to use a word Mick often used in earlier texts: “pissoir”, “abattoir”, etc. but it is ironically there we still find the rest and concentration to meet texts in a relatively calm environment and can squeeze the most meaning out of those written considerations. now they are all that but not of mme.de Pompadour in the Trianon here, for instance we see these hued, painterly and haughtily imperative possibilities of what has been written in the repeated “what” at the end, as one imagines uttered in all indifference able to have been mustered. and it is precisely this quality that make these texts “of the time”. here we have pinpointed descriptions of athmospheres willfully also broken off as to not deliver your average “scientifically overaccurate redundant” info; the “information” precisely is much more of “what there is” uttered as if in a smokey jazzclub or “what it is” in the gritty flatfelted porncinema. we’re loaded in the night and what the fuck is your destination if I may care? “listings” amass there where promising initiate messageforming grow out of the text and as if decided in the writing suddenly breaks off or change direction, if need be brusquely. there is still another way the texts in longshadowfall are getting the “disinformationist” treatment, as in their place beneath the arche of abstrahation on a scale of dense abstraction towards on the other side where Mick sits “in the zone” and whole areas get infected with this quality of what is a “rant”, “description”, “mappology”, “athmospheric floating”, “radicalisation” while the real radicalisation still is the strange evenness with which this all is “curated” and in its overall promptness present a tome of masterly new Irish as global, postBrexit and extra [=out of] Brexit litterature of bleak times and affirmation, punk.

[longshadowfall3 litterary tactics] there are still other tricks with which [Mick] shall be aimed at a tapering of languages’ directional urge to hostage us within clusters of meaning undesired or totally inaccurate yet forcefed by litterary petit mals of penitentiary tendencies and inframetalinguistic cryptic iconology. Mick tricks in the language itself using unforeseen tropes and counterclusters. one strategy is to break a quasi-sentence at erratic places breaking the build up semantic threat using syntactic brusque, punk slashes unstrategically so: strategically, in anti-esthetics which enriches his poetry. within an impetus one reads a thread to be surprised by a sudden halt after the slash of which a whole other clouded topic is charred. slowly this counterhabitualisation by the reader builds up to take what it takes to read this ongoing da stream with wariness and conspiricist microcriminology. this is writing in our time that, writing is disabled in writing and as I always have maintained Wittgenstein and Adorno didn’t formulated oppositionally positioned adages with [“worüber mann nicht sprechen könst soll mann schweigen”] and (A) [“das unaussprechliche söllte mann versuchen auszudrücken”]. hybridisation and postironic complexisation are from this time and they unite these adages while as PTSDs these statuses now became accurate and prepostcataclysmic syndromologies. never and nowhere to reach a crowning of a creationist Disney utensil. inmidst (“en milieu”) of the “what there is” (Peggy Lee) we start to write and aim not at an aim anymore bc there has been raucous decades with projection to a no/future and it is here we find ourselves on the mosaic of maps Borghesian as Rothkoan as Sanchezuan the ennui, of these resp.writer painter as couturier a secret regulative of esthetics of the upstart of a new millenium. yet also from these ombré shades of artistry layers shall be shedded while Micks poetry leaves a trail of difficult to track landscaping letterant/sing and almost a sinojaponese conveying into “cups of characters” tomes of life brandishing in their achingly acuitry. the “characters” are placed in loose clusters not always safest housed to commit to science, poetology, readerreception, bookeconomy, in fact fucking up all these instances with a certain ease, “je ne sais quoi”. one of my drives with writing was always the hope someone would be outraged with it; Mick can also be sure of that. still a bit about the asiatic impulse of Micks “iconology” and “iconoclast charactergroupings theory” which, form mistings, clouds, liquids of dark tenure (like the parfum of nasomotto “black afghano” and yes it smells like) with sometimes some torn lightshards as if seen from inside a cloyster. Irish this, English and European.brexitist undeniability to touch old hearts of yonder and hides of jaundice. so the slipt in asiaticity obscures further toothpaste white reception and comedy figure sincere politics or terrorism. no religiousness here. David (McL) is pleased with this and so are we. it is also a litterature of unbearable openness falling apart together with the wordlemmata as ruins the roaming of which can prove satisfactorily rainy and grassy with bony finds and forensic sondations. the cups of sinojapanese “characters” shall read as Mick writes: “them”, “journey”, “into”, “unto”, “not”, “ashen”, hereby lending the listing (Linnaeus) an open quasi taoist zen inconclusiveness, the one word/character/icon/paintbrush partly harming the next or specifically soften what already is decayedly soft. then I also saw a tactic which can be an editorial factor as well as an anti-esthetic factor the evidence of misspelt words but I have a feeling that to leave them in was Micks choice and it is a good one bc the radical unconventionality gets quadrupled with this. as Bas has made photos without a filmroll on purpose or exhibited in a dark room where none could be seen. a painting was painted of a city and then pollock, baselitz, kiefer, beuyslike totally overpainted with dense and destructive scrollings, lines criss cross completely obscuring the city underneath it was the time of the baader-meinhoff, londonderry, dublin, el salvador, vietnam, LA riots. that, a litterature (or artform) should take radical stance with the art itself becoming inintelligible (and with this, intelligible bc it is the mirroring of what the fuck is happening), is quite the rage or, not. that facebook provides podium, stage for letterings and imaginings still disturbing enough to acquaint no readership nor reception of presented images harbors a sign of the times. in short history of facebookparticipation all has changed and nothing has changed. cybernetics and internet are becoming more and more vehicles to scabrous advertisement yet to take it ALL in is what they think they wanted as well as the negation of what they stand for. Baudrillard: [“if all is power, there is no power”]