At 7pm on the 30th of July 2025, the new book 'Ripped Backsides' by Richard Cabut was being launched at Dash the Henge, 348 Camberwell New Road, SE5 0RW
Mikey Georgeson, who is an artist and senior lecturer UEL and also singer with David Devant & His Spirit Wife, read 'Ripped Backsides' and wrote the folowing review...
Death by Author. A review of Ripped Backsides by
Richard Cabut
There is no entry for Athens in Ripped Backsides. I find
this to be a significant omission on the part of the author. What’s his name? Am
I expected to believe they never got lost in Attiki, stumbling as I did on a
shop presenting itself as a high street chain in which all the apparently mass-produced
clothes were in fact made by the owner who stood at the till with his mother
smiling benignly beside him in an armchair? Of course I am not. It is an
entirely intentional omission.
On my second trip to Athens the previous year I had decided
to take my copy of Twilight of the Idols, a book lent to me by The Professor
who was presumably trying to impress me (he did) and which I was now finally
reading thirty years later. Returning briefly to the present, someone recently told
me about a woman who reads a part of Ripped Backsides every day. Why would they
do that I wondered until I began reading it and immediately made the connection
with Twilight of the Idols – namely the Maxims and Arrows from which we take
the words of aphorism number 8 “What does not kill me makes me stronger” (It
sounds better in German: Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich stärker). RB uses a
comparable detournement of a certain self-help vernacular that will hopefully
poison its well or at the very least drip LSD into the city’s water system.
Afterall as Cabut explains, “the city is the snake’s camouflaged coil”.
What is the attraction of existentialism? Asks the writer of
Ripped Backsides. To answer this question it might help to return immediately
to Nietzsche’s beef with Socrates in Twilight of the Idols. There I was in
Athens and suddenly I understood how Socrates needed to die because their
introduction of the oppositional thinking baked into the dialectic made life
absurdly rational and ushered the dying Lyric civilisation into the void of nothing.
I simply had to visit his prison, a short walk up the hill and opposite the
acropolis over which dialectical thinkers swarmed like ants. Waking up and
smelling the pines on the mount I felt something. It was the resonances of a longing
song Socrates sung to himself because he knew he must die. Cabut returns again
and again to song (that song?) and their system of delivery prevents their book
from straying outside the region of the lyric voice, so that its refrains endure
as images instead of dictates. In their defence I always like to remind folk
that Socrates consulted clairvoyants and was not selling us a roadmap. Nevertheless,
we have taken him at his word and we Believe in the rational, forgetting as the
creator of RB suggests that, “The tune never mediates without an image.
Imagination is the vernacular of the song. Of the soul, some say.”
Like Cabut (or the Cabut who wrote Ripped Backsides) I too
believe that it is the Act of living the life of an auteur that makes me an
artist rather than the films I make. That most hyper-modern fuddy-duddy, son of
Ramsgate A N Whitehead called this Act of belief in the emergent fiction of
living “concrescence”. By curious coincidence the reviewer recently acquired a
copy of Rubayait of Omar Khayyam in Ramsgate for ten pence.
What R. Cabut’s “shuffled” and overtly esoteric lyric prose
does is allow the regrets of the past to become the present sprouting into a made-up
future. Concrescence reverses Descartes’s error - I think blah dee blah (are
you listening at the back?). Instead of our existential anaesthesia, staring
Gatsby-like at the perfect eternal forms of plot, the abject ephemera of our failure
becomes the beautiful mulch of transcendence. I love the chapter of “I Believe”
aphorisms in Ripped Backsides and I believe them all when I read them. Belief
is an emergent act of believing myself via the Stanislavsky method into the
new. I believe this lyric story to be a quantum fact. What’s your real name?
Kushim – it is finished
Carl Webb
Omar Khayyam
Tammam Shud
(See also History of Accounting)
Watson and Crick found
A hair in the plaster of my death mask
We get confused by having to have a name. R. Cabut!
Sure, I like numerology… it has its uses.
I like to feel the orgones passing between my retina and the
page.
Life presents itself to my airdried eyeballs in order - in
order
To become part of my emergent destiny.
Perhaps like Richard Cabut we are all
unidentified bodies spotted on the beach
by couples out for an evening stroll.
Once the authorities have our real names all will be
revealed.
Except as Richard North points out in his latest book
“Ripped Backsides”
we are really our torn-out asides,
The stubbs,
The rebus cuneiform records of everything we decided to
leave out of ‘What I did in my summer holidays.’
Warning: This book contains pictures.
When I need to do my accounting I look at my photos.
Dracula is all about the legal documentation. No title deed
ergo no sensual blood imbibement.
My Headmaster knew my name when he told the class I was the
laziest boy in school.
There are two schools of thought here.
Myself and Richard (whose book is a source of strength and
worth every penny) are too lazy to fall in line with chrono-normative
taxonomies and to apply serious conviction to developing what you might call
the secretarial skills of writing efficient prose. This requires mastery of the
Socratic dialectic and arguably puts weaker minds at an advantage.
The other school of thought is that we both feel this
convenient and optimised calculus of knowledge exchange is a poisonous lie,
which is fine unless you forget it’s a lie. The task then is that because as a
writer you also like the feeling of writing you must devise a way to reclaim it
as a real thing e.g. casting spells, imbibing the melodies of sex dirges and
sometimes invoicing your publisher.
If the really real is the (radical) experience, how do we awkwardly
reweave its mildewed paperwork into the majestic tapestry of the region? We all
keep a scrap of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam rolled up inside a secret pocket.
It is finished. We all carry the lyric
truth of our demise on our person. I believe that is what Richard’s Ripped
Backsides is saying. Shrouded in the fog of dust motes serenely hanging in the
air of our individual disappointments, transmitting an oratorio of our instant
demise rebirth we find ourselves back inside the Event. Regrets I’ve had a
few - they always open into the powerful immanence of possibilities. This is
possibly why many photos of R. Cabut show him smoking (did I imagine this?) - while
smoking you get to regret and enjoy at the same time. What does not kill me
makes me stronger. Happiness, as the song goes is a whiter shade of pale.
Reviewer: What I’m saying and simultaneously realising is
impossible to say is that the records and annotated memories are not
oppositional errors but part of the stuff we make the present from. In order to
perform this we might forget what any of it is called or even means and so a
newspaper becomes a masticated wasps nest rather than an abject reminder of the
absurd rationality of human idiocy. It is finished. I sometimes see myself as
the writer of the kind of stories who has a friend with far more bravado and the
fucking sense of living a visceral life. Richard Cabut is that friend except (unlike
the Grand Meaulnes of the Lost Estate) he has somehow lived to tell the tale in
the present. Alchemist Golem Cabut is a natural for daring to use
printed words to say what they can’t. We open that door in Bluebeard’s Castle
and find he has been there centuries building intricate rope bridges from
cassette tape innards, reading Rimbaud and drinking a cool aid of salivary
secretions immune to it all. He chews and spits and lures us into prodding this
wasps nest so he may justifiably swarm ubiquitous optimistic nihilism in our
faces consigning facial recognition to the abyss history.
Mikey Georgeson July 2025
Instinct is a higher form of IQ than rationality. (my unashamed
over-simplification of Ripped Backsides)
By Instinct we may infer elegant, embodied intuition with
pragmatic conviction to improvised magic.
The reviewer is the animal-artist to the author’s poison
quaffing Derrida discuss (show your workings)
(Dissertation is the solitary confinement of the middle
class) – Fred Moten
Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich stärker
Text by Mikey Georgeson
Ripped Backsides is published globally by @farwestpress and is available at all the best bookshops in UK/Europe (distribution @public_knowledge_books ) and USA, and online worldwide – Linktree/profile.
