In the Beggarly Style of Imitation

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Jean Marc Ah-Sen. In the Beggarly Style of Imitation

Contents

An Introduction to: Adamant Deathward Aloofness

Underside of Love. Mannerly Style of Elicitation

Sentiments and Directions from an Unappreciated Contrarian Writer’s Widow. Widowship

How Fares the Companion?

Passions in Decline

Society Parlance

Treasures of Leisure

Masochism, Meaning and Purity

A Defence of Misanthropy. Pugilism

Praxeology

Bulwers and Algers of the World

Misanthropic Unavailability, Dread and Exile

Senecan Compromise

Stockdale and the Undemeaned Existence

Articles of Reason

Unregulated Loathing

Intransigence and Grievance

Economies of Restraint

Philoneism

Debility, Traducement and the Step of Progress

Superfluity Is a State of Mind

Mahebourg. Chantey

Ah‑Sen and I. Scholarly Style of Recitation

Sous Spectacle Cinema Research Consultation with Bart Testa. On the Viability of an Exploratory Business Expenditure in the Arts

Triolet. Itchy Bang

The Slump. Juvenilia

Swiddenworld: Selected Correspondence with Tabitha Gotlieb-Ryder. Goldie’s van Dongen

The Joy Beaut Lover and the Glitz Cunt

Insufflation Takes Two

My Mind Is a Boggle-De-Botch

Bespawler’s Hanging Place

High Fantastic, High Drudgery

Quail Pipe Drippydick’s All Duff and No Grog

Baie-du-Tombeau (Dire Moi Ene Coup Ki Qualite Couillon Sa) Sega-Boogie

As to Birdlime. Disutility and its Appointments

The Anterior Finished State

A Trademan’s Art

Silver in a Rakehell’s Purse

Nature’s Supremity

A Rascally Preference

Aldegonde

Ebullitions of Terror

The Four Stages of Cruelty

Vil Cur

Superannuations of Hope

The Lost Norman: A Preview. Parallel Style of Provocation

Type Reader: Type Books Talks with Jean Marc Ah‑Sen

Notes

Acknowledgements

About the Author

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In the Beggarly Style of Imitation

(Below the Level of Consciousness)

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The experiments with overwriting continued with the Borges-inspired “Ah‑Sen and I,” a palimpsest of “Borges and I” (down to the word count) that even incorporated Ah‑Sen’s first negative book review. The miming of Henry Fielding’s picaresques in “As to Birdlime,” which borrows its title from a passage in Jonathan Wild, is perhaps the most unabashedly imitative story in the collection, bordering on being a derivative copy; but notwithstanding the most waspish aesthete’s chop-logic about the pre-eminence of “authentic” literature, surely Ah‑Sen cannot be at fault for taking the counsel to walk before running under advisement. These exercises arose at my behest, after all; Ah‑Sen’s technical fluency with kilworthying was nil, and I believed that rewriting existing passages from writers we admired would eliminate more lame misadventures in composition. Kilworthying was as close to a scientific measure of “sinking into the mind” of an author possible, of becoming intimately familiar with the syntax, grammar and styling that governed their minds. In this fashion, we would be able to trace inspiration to a homologous source, and in so doing, perpetually have ideas at one’s elbow.

“Sentiments and Directions from an Unappreciated Contrarian Writer’s Widow” and “Swiddenworld: Selected Correspondence with Tabitha Gotlieb-Ryder” are notable not only for working with established forms of the aphoristic and epistolary modes made well-known by writers like La Rochefoucauld, Lichtenberg, Tobias Smollett and Mary Hays, but for furthering the connective nodes with the world of Mauritian Menteurism the most aggressively out of all the installments in Imitation after “Underside.” “Swiddenworld,” taking its cues from James Joyce’s letters to Nora Barnacle, accounts for the Menteur’s disappearance from his daughter’s life, perhaps the greatest unanswered question from Grand Menteur, while “Sentiments and Directions” contains Cherelle’s meditations on love and loss which resulted from the glossed-over dissolution of her marriage in “Underside.”

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