Aviary Slag: Stories

Product Description A lucid, lysergic antidote to the so-called profundities of “quality fiction”   An assemblage of intricately interlocked mini-epics, moral tales, and porn tracts, it is a definitively post-postmodern work. Jacques Servin plunders and smelts the traditional forms, then fashions out of the slag a brilliant poetics of power and eros. In both form and content, Aviary Slag provides hard-hitting metaphors for the death of deforming constraints. It is a book for the volatile end of a century that has smelted and recast almost everything.   From Publishers Weekly Servin's 75 convoluted, highly experimental short stories-reprinted from magazines like Bomb and Exquisite Corpse-amount to a phantasmagoric look at the cultural debris of contemporary life. Full of word games and startling non sequiturs, the pieces are narrative fragments, hallucinatory visions or short parables (most are less than two pages) concerned with a characteristic theme of postmodern culture, such as commerce and art, the environment and the city, sexuality and the apocalypse. Among the more memorable stories are "The Conversion of New York Into Birds' Nests," a bureaucratic account of a pastoral fantasy ("we set to work with one hundred thousand pick-axes, three missives in fifteen million cc's"); "Wife. Then Event," in which the narrator's wife turns into a boat, sinks to a silty ocean floor and is rescued; and "Glue In the Melting Pot," a surreal account of a topsy-turvy city overrun by animals and humans with freakish powers. Servin's disjointed fiction, accompanied here by an index (E: Ecologists, Edible guns, Effete, Etruscans, Euphoria, Exegesis, Explosives) and a preface inviting us to read in a nonlinear sequence, aptly evokes the fragmentation of the contemporary world; yet his illogical prose is often more maddening than illuminating, leaving his underlying intentions largely opaque. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. About the Author Jacques Servin (also known by the pseudonym Andy Bichlbaum; born 1963) is an American media artist and activist. He is one of the leading members of The Yes Men, a culture jamming activist group. Their exploits in “identity correction” are documented in the films The Yes Men, The Yes Men Fix the World, and The Yes Men Are Revolting.