New Writers Series: Marc Muir
February 27, 2020Exploding Appendix Questionnaire: Wendy Liu
March 14, 2020
Exploding Appendix is a project, which, through a myriad of media seeks to revitalise the avant-garde. With the aid of a plethora of artistic devises we seek to forge a vision for the future, uniting an experimental energy with a utopian yearning that pimples the skin with the potency of a renewed world. Yet, whatever grandiose ambitions may perturb our flesh and ignite a creative delirium, we, nonetheless, undertake the somewhat everyday task of artistic mutual exchange. Through our gatherings, our projects and general correspondences we engage in a process of sharing work, giving encouragement and offering feedback. Puncturing the solitary confines of artistic creation we have drawn sustenance from this process of interaction. Over the preceding months we have organised a number of projects and event which, from Manifesto Nights to Dadaist Cabarets, from ‘share and tell’ evenings to other forms of correspondences and collaborations, have garnered us with an eclectic collection of writings. With a humourless lack of imagination, let’s call this collection of writings our ‘New Writers Series’ — yes, let’s call it that! Throughout February we seek to celebrate the work of a selection of new writers, each, in some way, experimenting with literary form and innovative content. Yet, this collection of literary output holds together, not merely because of its artistic or technical innovation, but because it emerges, in some way or other, from the communal life of Exploding Appendix and the union of artists and researchers connected to it. Let February be the month of the writer, and let each word burst forth with unyielding vigour, drenching each page with the potency of literature eternal.
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NICK HUDSON: ACCIDENT AND EMERGENCY.
In the nuclear furnace of my heart
Love ticks too much.
It is unstable and society’s cooling Rods are fickle and cheap.
So I’m here in A&E
Because my brother huffed a rat and set his face on fire.
The last time I was here was Auld Lang Syne to see if you needed your arms amputating after injecting hole into hole into hole to recreate that chemical eden in a papier-mâché diorama that would never dry.
The time before that was Jack at 4am who broke his arm while we were fucking, so we hurried through wards enhanced with sex and powders, then in codeine and cast ambulanced home and finished the sex.
It seems my brother’s eyes were triggered not by the hair but by a seam of lurching pheromones from the uncastrated new specimens, in other words –
⁃ get your coat, you’ve pulled.
NICK HUDSON: BEFORE AND AFTER SHOT
I
When I died
My chest exploded in an eternity of humming birds
Blood and rust and sulphur, steam and sand.
Clouds parted to form other clouds
and creatures dined out on my remains.
City halls flooded with locusts and
blue snow plugged the mouths of liars dressed as success.
A figure with a face of TV static scooped up my bones in a rusted pan, emptied them in a chest freezer full of secrets, buried it and became one with the hanging mists of my last eternal breath.
Priests dangled like ribbons from cherry trees, their tongues lolling thick as parrots, cement mixers laying out strips of gunk in thick Aramaic over fields ploughed with the bodies of exotic species.
Satellites crashlanded to earth like a rash of homesick cyborgs. Lava fields ignited and infernos raged, sucking up the last few lungs of air. Birds turned to soot and fell like sighs onto the blackened moss.
Idiots murmured bashfully like hammers against copper, and all stifled thoughts came out at once as though across a broken dam, breaching all of history, present and future with a white noise thickened into paste.
When I died,
Nothing happened, and nobody saw, and nobody knew
And it was beautiful.
II
When I lived
I couldn’t look at the sky without seeing hypocrisy.
Narcissists guffawed at mountains
And everyone was offended.
Unelected cartels seized seats of power and the moral lived in refuge
etching policy on cave walls. Children died in bins and the poor and disabled were exhibited in an art installation sponsored by oil conglomerates and big pharma, called ‘Weakness’.
The private view was every night, and patrons threw champagne and shit at the pathetic vitrines full of cholera and heroin, laughing like hens at how they’d solved the homeless problem.
Flying cars were virtual like everything else, but they did have windscreen wipers lined with razors with which to cut up birds and insects for sport as the hundred people left alive exchanged DNA in sacred blockchain transactions, while their legal, robot daughters lashed at them with oil-slicked birch tips and they ate diamonds braised in vomit.
When I lived, everything happened at once, and nobody noticed.
* Nick Hudson is a composer and artist working in multiple mediums. Nick has developed numerous multimedia projects as a both a solo artist and through the ensemble project The Academy of Sun (TAOS).