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.
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
