New Juche - Extract
from Heat Death 2: Borgo Lapsus
Heat Death Journal: New Juche: No. 2: Borgo Lapsus is published today by our good friends at Gallows Fruit.
Please enjoy the printed extract below and consider purchasing a copy of this fine publication here — needless to say, highest possible recommendation.
Riding into the town proper, I experienced a shudder of
circumstance that was for some reason more poignant than any of my
other encounters on the island to that point, despite how monstrously
detached I was feeling, and with what ease I held to the name of Sicily
as a talisman. The town’s layout was as vertical as it was lateral and
this visually clarified its spavined and frankenstein nature. The outer
levels I was rolling through now were a patchwork of distinct styles
and periods. On some streets, the slim gaps between medieval houses
had all been filled with modern ones, creating unbroken terraces of
modern and medieval juxtaposed, like rows of rotten and crooked teeth
in a mouth. Many of the medieval houses were occupied and even
lavishly renovated, whilst others were in total ruin like the ones I’d
seen on approach. Some of the modern blocks and houses appeared
to have occupants, and others were derelict or unfinished. There were
some patches entirely populated with modern buildings, and others
with only medieval ones. Cobbled alleys and stairways split the main
arteries open in all directions, as though the town were assembled from
arbitrary chunks of three of four buildings at a time, fitted together like
a jigsaw.
Despite the glaring fact that maybe half the town’s buildings
were derelict, the human presence was markedly assertive. Pairs of
eyes watched from balconies, smoking as they followed my progress,
short overweight men sat at tables in small piazzas and outside cafes
that looked as though they’d closed down a century before. The
personality of the town was resolutely male in character, an attribute
I’ve never before perceived in a place so unequivocally. It made me
feel submissive. I imagined not the shape and action of other men’s
sexuality, their foreign virility and violence, the contours of muscle
bulk and extremity, but instead suffered a strange phantasm composed
of men’s farts and old urine, of meat digesting in male intestines,
sweat and fermenting mucous. This phantasm transfigured the folds
of fat matronly vaginas into clean and dry instruments that connected
intuitively with laundered cotton sheets and cultured flowers, fresh
air and immaculate porcelain. The town also possessed, however, a
sense of restraint, of waiting, being stuck somehow, of people being
deliberately quiet.
The streets through the outer layers converged upon a rarified
upper stratum of baroque wonderland like a little pocket of central
Palermo, in the centre of which sat the great disfigured limestone mass
that supported the castle. To enter this place and confront with my own
senses the dizzying excess, the unalloyed hysteria, of Sicilian Baroque
architecture, in such a supine condition of dereliction as this, was a
privilege that I know I owe to my singula libertas in this particular
common moment of disintegration.
ARCHITECTURE; RUIN PORN; SICILY; PHOTOGRAPHY; SICILIAN BAROQUE; LATIFUNDIA; EMPTINESS; DE CHIRICO; NECROPOLIS; IN COUNTRY; ITALIAN FASCIST ARCHITECTURE; PROSTITUTION; ECOLOGY; SPONTANEOUS GENERATION; SYMMETRY/ASYMMETRY; ARGONAUT; BEYOND THE FRAGILE GEOMETRY OF SPACE AND CRIME
My withdrawal from this place of administration was a performance and a penitence. In my living vestment of bees I drifted glacial as time back through the corridor, my arm painful in its frozen salute, and then out of the building’s front entrance, where I found myself at the top of a double external staircase. I looked ahead at an overgrown meadow full of wildflowers, with copses of oak and pine a short distance away, and with no further hesitation I turned left, and with meticulous care climbed down that side of the staircase. With each step more bees flew or fell from my body, my muscles relaxed and my ordinary movements returned, and when I arrived on terra firma I was confident enough to brush the remaining insects from myself and then remove my clothes one piece at a time before taking great deep euphoric breaths as I stretched and preened myself in the tall grass and then began to smile and laugh out loud.
“New Juche writes with the sun-blasted madness of D.H. Lawrence living his final days in Mexico, or as haunted amanuensis transcribing the ravaged dreams of Ezra Pound in his spotlit prison cell tucked away in the night hills of Pisa. Heat Death 2 bears the hallmarks of prophecy, and behind the scarred architecture of a man casting himself adrift lies the clarity of a warrior monk’s keenest vision. No-one is writing like this today. They simply fucking can’t. Read it!“
Philip Best (Amphetamine Sulphate)
“There is no Maslow's Demon in New Juche's hermetically-sealed Word Universe. The entropic march toward a complete disassembly proceeds with or without his endorsement. He's not here to cast a judgement, but simply to record the dissolve as he's torn apart at the seams himself. Borgo Lapsus is the next step on that pathway toward entropic equilibrium; toward a wiping clean; toward our Heat Death. Read his work, it’s brilliant.”
WasteMailingList
162 pp. Colour & B/W, mixed papers, perfect bound, French flaps
©Amphetamine Sulphate ©Gallows Fruit 2025
Reading from this here post duly 'inserted' into L'étranger radio show of 22-06-25. Track 28 - > https://www.radiopanik.org/emissions/l-etranger/show-506-sui-uh-whither/