The Etcetera Barbecue

After the ‘after the end’, after the dreadful pulps, after all manner of casual abortion, cosy mutilation, pointless sacrifice and staggering loss comes the etcetera barbecue – a quick sprint through a burning building with a look at what’s hung on the walls inside. This harrowing passage, mostly lit darkly, quarantines several stray transmissions clustered to chart yet another tough scrape and amply illustrate another daring escape. Linger to witness cold comfort crafted to (once again) posit a new breed of incendiary graphisme within the ghetto of concrete. Vicious in its elegance, erratic in its precision, uncompromising with each steak it claims, the attendant (and massive) mounting disquiet of the etcetera barbecue seeks to violently combat an epoch that fetes placebo and ruthlessly undermine a world where ‘resource is garbage not harvested’. Demonstrating total contempt for policies that were implimented to ‘kill it if you builds it’, the etcetera barbecue is no company picnic. For those of us starved for examples of elusive hen’s teeth extracted from the nether regions of our literature, the etcetera barbecue is a small feast of lettrisme, found, and typewriter poetries – by one of the foremost pracitioners of these often misunderstood and virtually forgotten arts – gathered together in a book whose strain on the eye is finally worth the bother.

A para-literary agent provocateur since his teens, Gustave Morin is the proprietor of stained paper archive, a mostly invisible organization of dubious origin whose purpose continues to remain ill-defined. A self-styled ‘werewolf and a ferriswheel’ who has been editing, publishing, performing and exhibiting his varied works internationally in magazines and venues both big and little for the last fifteen years. Apart from his contributions to the pages of over 100 separate publications, he was co-editor (along with Mark Laliberte) of the anthology The Windsor Salt (1998). His minor opus, A Penny Dreadful, appeared in 2003 through Insomniac Press, and is now (for reasons unknown) out of print. (A 38 page excerpt of that book, entitled Spaghetti Dreadful, is available for the curious as a pdf file off the mighty ubuweb.) His other titles include: p.mody’s dada boutique (1997), Sun Kissed Oranges (co-authored with Sergio Forest,1995), and Rusted Childhood Memoirs (1994). his work has been anthologised in The Common Sky, Pissing Ice, and most recently, in Switch and Shift. He occasionally writes under a few pseudonyms. the etcetera barbecue is his fifth book.