Virtually Nontoxic Christian Bök Charles Darwin University

Vinyl is as natural as lichen. Christopher Dewdney

lastic is the silly putty, with which we simulate, then supplant, Pevery facet of reality, converting all the varied elements of the planet into one common emulsion. While we sleep, our automatons toil throughout the night, transmuting everything into a petroleum byproduct that resists bacterial predation. Our species might openly mourn this phase of our demise, but in secret we really exalt the power of its genius, marveling to think that, in some landfill of the future, long after our own extinction, a single crash helmet might still endure, sloughed off, like the carapace of some alien crab. Our gewgaws of epoxy resin and nylon fibre do not attest, however, to any advance in our rational prowess so much as they allude to the breadth of our cultural tyranny. The invention of plastic has given birth to a celluloid spectacle, whose reveries displace the esemplastic imagination of the romantics, filling our hollow skulls with an injection- moulded mentality, as pliable and as durable as any blob of polypropylene. Has not language itself begun to absorb the synthetic qualities of such a modern milieu, becoming a fabricated, but disposable, convenience, no

ESC 42.3–4 (September/December 2016): 25–26 less a pollutant than a Styrofoam container? Has not the act of writing simply become another chemically engineered experience, in which we manufacture a complex polymer by stringing together syllables instead Christian Bök is of molecules? The words of our lexicon have become so standardized the author not only that they now resemble a limited array of connectible parts, and the rules of Crystallography of our grammar have become so rationalized that they now resemble a (1994), a pataphysical bounded range of recombinant modes. The protean quality of our dis- encyclopedia nominated course finds itself vulcanized in our playthings. We see language marketed for the Gerald Lampert as an infantile commodity—a toy suitable for kids of all ages, because its Memorial Award, but plastic coating makes it safe to own and easy to use; nevertheless, we must also of Eunoia (2001), imagine a more corrosive poetics (something vitriolic enough to dissolve a bestselling work of such an acrylic veneer), and if we cannot distill this kind of acid, then experimental literature, let us concoct a more explosive poetics (something catalytic enough to which has gone on to detonate such an acetate finish). We need a lingual variety of gelignite or win the Griffin Prize plastique—the kind of incendiary literature, written only by misfits, who for Poetic Excellence. have grown up, still dizzy from the fumes, after having melted a platoon Bök teaches English of plastic army men with a match. at Charles Darwin University. contents: 65 percent Dimethyl siloxane (hydroxy-terminated polymers with boric acid), 17 percent Silica (quartz crystalline), 9 percent Thixotrol st, 4 percent Polydimethylsiloxane, 1 percent Decamethyl cyclopentasi- loxane, 1 percent Glycerine, 1 percent Titanium dioxide, 2 percent Silliness.

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