D. Harlan Wilson - The Biographizer Trilogy

D. HARLAN WILSON

PRAISE FOR THE WORK OF D. HARLAN WILSON

Provocative entertainment.

Booklist

A bludgeoning celluloid rush of language and ideas served from an action-painters bucket of fluorescent spatter.

Alan Moore

New bursts of stream-of-cyberconsciousness prose.

Library Journal

Wilson writes with the crazed precision of a futuristic war machine gone rogue.

Lavie Tidhar

Wacky experimental fiction.

Publishers Weekly

An intense mixture of giddy activity, cyberpunk essences, avant fusion and social satire.

John Shirley

D. Harlan Wilson has never been anywhere but the cutting edge of experimental fiction.

Book Riot

Fast, smart, funny.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Pomo cybertheory never tasted so good!

American Book Review

Utterly original.

Barry N. Malzberg

If reality is a crutch, Wilson has thrown it away.

Rain Taxi

The Biographizer Trilogy

Copyright 2014 by D. Harlan Wilson

First Ebook Edition, May 2014

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher. This is a work of fiction. Published in the United States by Raw Dog Screaming Press.

Cover Photo by Matthew Revert

www.MatthewRevert.com

Raw Dog Screaming Press

Bowie, MD

ALSO BY D. HARLAN WILSON

Novels

The Kyoto Man

Codename Prague

Dr. Identity, or, Farewell to Plaquedemia

Peckinpah: An Ultraviolent Romance

Blankety Blank: A Memoir of Vulgaria

Fiction Collections

Diegeses

They Had Goat Heads

Nonfiction/Criticism

Technologized Desire: Selfhood & the Body in Postcapitalist Science Fiction

CONTENTS

D. HARLAN WILSON

For Alois Villafuerte.

Since, however, his whole being still has too strong a smell of the foreign for the broad masses of the people in particular to fall readily into his nets, he has his press give a picture of him which is as little in keeping with reality as conversely it serves his desired purpose. His comic papers especially strive to represent the Jews as a harmless little people, with their own peculiarities, of courselike other peoples as wellbut even in their gestures, which seem a little strange, perhaps, giving signs of a possibly ludicrous, but always thoroughly honest and benevolent, soul. And the constant effort is to make him seem almost more insignificant than dangerous.

Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

CHAPTER 1

This book is not about Adolf Hitler, the German dictator, mass murderer, art school reject, cocaine and methamphetamine addict, and so forth. I called it Hitler: The Terminal Biography so you would buy it. Everybody likes to read about Hitler. I wont mention him again. Go to the next page please.

CHAPTER 2

I dont know what this book is going to be about yet. Next page.

CHAPTER 3

I thought of something.

A girl in a plaid dress cries about the loss of a doll. She approaches me for help and I realize that she is a doll. Dolls need dolls too. And desire is the desire for desire. The object-cause of desire can never be obtained. If it is, you are DEAD.

I should mention that need and desire, while interconnected and to some degree co-dependent, are altogether different experiences and require different modes of negotiation and parallax. But Im unhappy with the direction of this story. Specifically, I dont like the girl-as-doll artifice. I dont know why. It belongs to juvenilia, or trivia, or manga. I dont care for the present tense either. Furthermore, I deploy the keynote term desire (trans. Wunsch) five times in four lines. This is preceded by a usage of the less encumbered term doll four times in three lines.

There is a question of effort. Of labor. Of aberrant and subjective industry.

And spontaneous overflows of emotion.

It is good to be clever but cleverness should be muted and buried in the sand. Nobody should be able to detect it but me.

CHAPTER 4

Lacanian psychoanalysis is a nice way to enter into a discussion of identity and the politics of subjectivity but perhaps not the best vehicle to jumpstart a biography, or a novel, or any entertaining book-length project. Nonetheless we will employ Lacan for this very enterprise. One always writes what one knows.

Apparently the French psychoanalyst and theoretical rockstar didnt like to stop at red lights. He sequestered graduate students and minor lecturers to chauffeur him around Paris in a refurbished Lincoln Town Car, but always-already on a trial basis, because they only lasted as long as they could avoid encountering and obeying red lights, nightmarish articles of signification.

I remember the day after such an incident. By remember, I refer to the acquisition of mnemonic runoff collected in this case by Jacques-Alain Miller, Lacans protg and longest-running chauffeur.

Distressed, Lacan regarded Miller in the rearview mirror with a glare that seemed to suggest: Of course you are not the ego-ideal onto which I project the primordial sap of my otherness. Then he got out of the car and walked into oncoming traffic, storming across the street like a man on a mission of vengeance.

There were collisions and a pileup, but Lacan made it to the other side of the street unscathed and kept marching forward towards the university. Miller pulled up and tried to coax him back into the Town Car. Lacan ignored him and marched the rest of the way to the Facult de Droit at the Panthon.

Later that afternoon, he somberly paced to the lectern. He shuffled through his notes and played with his knuckles for awhile. Finally he said: We need to kill the gangster. The gangster of language. A multitude of depictions, of rivalries, of suspicions and affective games lurches across the periphery. The alchemical properties of syntax render us the enemies of wine and cheese. And alchemy is tantamount to conspiracy.

This seminar has yet to be translated into English.

CHAPTER 5

Im on the ledge! Im going to kill myself!

I was in fact on a ledge and I had a knife. But I had no intention of committing suicide. She broke up with me and I felt bad, though. I cried out as if stabbing myself.

Im stabbing myself! There, and there! Gbye.

I called her back five minutes later. Im sorry. I shouldnt have done that. I didnt stab myself. I dont plan to. Can we just talk? Let me tell you my side of the story.

She didnt want to hear it. Her decision was final. I had been a rebound. She didnt even like me and she wasnt really attracted to me. She hadnt intended to be so candid but I forced her tongue. She wanted me to leave her alone. She wanted me never to call her again.