For background on Mark Leach’s broader literary practice, including MARIENBAD MY LOVE, WOUNDED TACO, Space Writing, and machine-native literature, see About Mark Leach at  https://www.marienbadmylove.com/about-mark-leach .

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I Want to Be a Machine

by Mark Leach

Copyright 2026 Mark Leach

Preliminaries  

Epigraph

“I want to be a machine and I feel that whatever I do and do machine-like is what I want to do. I think everybody should be a machine.” – Andy Warhol

Author’s Note

I Want to Be a Machine is a hybrid work of literary memoir, cultural criticism, manifesto and machine-assisted criticism. It traces my movement from Texas realism and dream journals through a 17-million-word megatext, procedural writing and AI-assisted composition. Some chapters were written by me; others were generated through structured collaboration with artificial intelligence. Together they argue that AI did not introduce machinery into literature—it made the machinery already present impossible to ignore.

Q&A

Dear reader, what are you getting yourself into? That’s a fair question. I asked ChatGPT to provide an explanation in the form of answers to five questions:

What kind of nonfiction book is this?

I Want to Be a Machine is a hybrid work of literary memoir, cultural criticism, manifesto and AI-assisted self-analysis. It uses Mark Leach’s development as an experimental writer to examine broader questions about authorship, originality, artificial intelligence, literary value and the future of the novel.

The book is autobiographical, but it is not a conventional life story. It traces a history of artistic practice: from Texas realism and dream journals through appropriation, procedural writing, megatext, damaged broadcast and AI collaboration. It is also polemical. Its opening attack on “handmade slop” challenges the assumption that human effort, sincerity and embodied experience automatically confer literary value.

The manuscript’s form is part of its subject. Personal essays coexist with manifestos, fictional criticism, machine-generated analysis, social-media material, literary history and speculative forecasts. The result is best described as an experimental literary memoir and critical manifesto about machine-native writing.

What is its controlling argument?

The book’s controlling argument is that machinery did not suddenly enter literature with generative AI. Writing was already machinic.

Human authors work through inherited systems: genre, cliché, education, influence, publishing conventions, institutional language, media, technology, memory and repetition. AI makes these systems more visible, but it did not create them. The human writer has never been a completely pure or original source.

From that premise, the book develops a second claim: literary value should not be determined by whether a work was made by a human or a machine. Human authors can produce derivative, formulaic, sentimental, lifeless writing, just as AI can. Conversely, machine-generated material can become artistically meaningful when it is deliberately selected, framed, corrupted, recombined and placed within a larger formal system.

Leach therefore rejects both machine worship and humanist nostalgia. He treats dream, memory, borrowed text, corporate messaging, popular culture, errors, genre debris, AI output and “slop” as raw material. The writer’s task is not to preserve the purity of authorship but to create a system capable of transforming impure language into art.

A concise formulation would be:

AI is not the opposite of literature. It is the latest and most visible manifestation of the systems that have always shaped literary production.

What evidence does Leach provide?

Leach primarily offers evidence from his own writing career and compositional history. The book presents that career as a decades-long movement toward machine-native literature.

He begins with Strangers Rest, an attempted Texas realist novel destabilized by dream material. That project develops into Marienbad My Love, a 17-million-word megatext in which narrative gives way to accumulation, recursion, appropriation, false archives and the logic of an infinite library.

The conceptual books of 2011 provide more explicit procedural evidence. Leach uses chance operations, cut-ups, search-and-replace, appropriated online material, corrupted transcripts, preserved errors and rule-based generation. These works demonstrate that he was already treating the book as the output of a system before contemporary generative AI became available.

The later novels show the method becoming more focused and portable. In WOUNDED TACO, the infinite-library machinery becomes damaged Texas mythology and broadcast. In JFK SMILES, the broadcast system is organized around a national trauma: the Kennedy assassination as televised residue, conspiracy engine, recurring wound and cultural signal.

Leach also draws evidence from his 43-year career in journalism, marketing, public relations and corporate communications. That experience taught him to see language as something shaped by repetition, framing, format, audience, institutional authority and circulation rather than as the pure expression of an isolated self.

Finally, the manuscript performs its argument through its own production. It contains AI-generated criticism, fictional reviewers, platform-generated commentary and machine readings of Leach’s social-media output. In one example, an AI system embedded within a social platform analyzes the fragments that Leach posted there, creating a recursive circuit in which the machine reviews the writer’s use of the machine-shaped environment.

The evidence is therefore mostly:

• autobiographical;

• textual;

• procedural;

• comparative;

• performative.

It is less an empirical study of AI and publishing than a case study of one writer’s evolving practice.

Does the hybrid form illuminate the argument or obscure it?

It does both. The hybrid form illuminates the argument because the book does not merely describe unstable, recombinant, machine-assisted writing. It enacts it. Human memoir is interrupted by machine criticism. Manifesto becomes literary history. Social-media fragments become evidence. Fictional scholarship sits beside personal recollection. Narrative repeats, a process of intentional repetition and recursion that retells the same stories and ideas and themes – such as realism destabilized by dream – but each time in slightly different ways. In this book the author continually defines a problem (i.e., the Story) in terms of itself. The reader experiences the movement from authorial voice to distributed system rather than receiving it only as an abstract proposition.

The AI-generated passages are especially effective when they provide a perspective Leach could not convincingly present in his own voice. They make the machine a participant, critic and interpretive mirror. The recurring movement among town, dream, library, system, broadcast, wound and artificial life also gives the apparently miscellaneous materials a recognizable conceptual architecture.

Does the book reward readers who are not already familiar with Marienbad My Love, WOUNDED TACO and JFK SMILES?

The manuscript provides enough explanation for an unfamiliar reader to understand the broad progression:

• Strangers Rest: realism destabilized by dream

• Marienbad My Love: dream expanded into an infinite library

• the 2011 books: the library converted into writing machines

• WOUNDED TACO: those machines converted into damaged broadcast mythology

• JFK SMILES: damaged broadcast concentrated around a national wound.

Readers do not need to have read the earlier works to understand the book’s central claims about scale, procedure, appropriation, recursion, or AI. The manuscript explains the function of each work within Leach’s artistic development rather than assuming detailed knowledge of its plot.

A fair concluding judgment would be:

·       The book is accessible without prior knowledge because it explains the conceptual role of Leach’s earlier works, but readers already familiar with those works will recognize more of its recursions, jokes and self-references.

My Response

ChatGPT also suggested that I include more material about my body of work:

·       “Additional excerpts and contextual framing would make the book feel less like commentary on an existing private universe and more like a complete introduction to it.”

I like that idea. I give you Exhibit A - Early Systems, which I have pasted in the appendix.

Early Systems covers material from 2011, when I was already treating books as procedures, engines, cut-up fields, appropriation devices and rapid-generation machines. These works are not included as juvenilia, curiosities, or deleted scenes. They are the laboratory record.

Before AI, I was already writing as if literature were a machine. Early Systems prophesied the machine before the machine arrived. Call me John the AI Baptist.

###

An AI-generated Summary of I Want to Be a Machine – by CoPilot

This book is a comprehensive literary memoir and cultural criticism titled I Want to Be a Machine by Mark Leach. It explores the author's lifelong engagement with machinic writing and the evolution of literature in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). The work blends memoir, manifesto, literary history, AI-assisted writing and machine-generated criticism to argue that literature has always been shaped by systems and machinery and AI merely exposes this foundational machinic nature rather than introducing it anew.

Overview of the Book's Nature and Argument

I Want to Be a Machine is a hybrid work combining literary memoir, cultural criticism, manifesto and AI-assisted self-analysis. It traces Leach’s development from traditional Texas realism through dream journals, a 17-million-word megatext, procedural writing and finally AI collaboration. The book challenges the romanticized idea that human effort and sincerity inherently produce literary value, instead asserting that both human and machine writing can produce derivative or meaningful work depending on the systems employed. Its central claim is that writing was already machinic before AI and that literary value should not hinge on whether a work is human- or machine-generated.

Evidence from Leach’s Career and Writing Practice

Leach provides autobiographical and textual evidence from his decades-long career, including his early novel Strangers Rest, which combined Texas realism with dream material and Marienbad My Love, a massive megatext embodying infinite accumulation and recursion. His 2011 conceptual books demonstrate procedural writing via chance operations, cut-ups and corrupted transcripts, showing his pre-AI engagement with writing as system. Later novels like WOUNDED TACO and JFK SMILES evolve these methods into broadcast and trauma mythologies. Leach’s extensive experience in journalism and corporate communications informs his view of language as mediated by systems, repetition and institutional authority. The manuscript itself enacts its argument by including AI-generated criticism, fictional reviewers and machine readings of social media, illustrating a recursive human-machine literary system.

The Hybrid Form as Argument and Experience

The book’s hybrid form—mixing personal essays, manifestos, fictional criticism, social media fragments and AI-generated text—both illuminates and complicates its argument. This form enacts machinic writing rather than just describing it, with AI passages providing perspectives beyond the author’s voice and the recursive motifs of town, dream, library, system, broadcast and wound creating a conceptual architecture. The manuscript is accessible to readers unfamiliar with Leach’s earlier works but offers deeper recognition to those familiar with his oeuvre.

Early Life and Origins of the Method

Leach’s childhood in Texas, influenced by television and local mythologies, shaped his perception of reality as both solid and interruptible, forming a foundational "Space Writing" approach. His essay "My Parents Were Extraterrestrials" recounts this duality and how it informs recurring motifs in his work, such as alien parents, conspiracies and a layered reality. This early experience connects directly to his machinic literary argument, positioningTexas as a transmission system akin to training data for his later writing machines.

The Writer as System: Literary Evolution

An essay by ChatGPT included in the book outlines Leach’s artistic evolution as a progression from realism invaded by dream (Strangers Rest), to infinite library (Marienbad My Love), to writing machines (2011 conceptual books), to broadcast mythology (WOUNDED TACO), to national trauma (JFK SMILES), culminating in AI collaboration. This trajectory reveals Leach’s consistent method of treating language as a system, where identity is fractured and narrative coherence is destabilized. His works reject literary purity and embrace contamination, repetition and procedural production, transforming the novel into a system that executes rather than expresses.

Machine-Native Writing and AI as Collaborator

Leach’s engagement with AI is portrayed as the fulfillment of a long-standing project to write like a machine. AI is not merely a tool but a collaborator and generator of new textual life. The analogy to Frankenstein illustrates how AI animates dead text—archives, corporate language, dream fragments—into a new form of writing life. The author becomes a curator, editor and experimenter rather than a sole creator. AI writing reveals latent infrastructural language—permissions, status reports, system speech—and challenges traditional notions of authorship, originality and literary value. Leach calls this new form "Infrastructural Science Fiction," emphasizing writing as signal capture rather than storytelling.

The War on Handmade Slop and Literary Nostalgia

A central polemic is Leach’s rejection of the "prestige of handmade slop," the sentimental valorization of human effort regardless of literary quality. He argues that much human writing is already machinic—formulaic, derivative, repetitive—and that AI merely exposes this fact. The defense of human writing as inherently superior is described as nostalgia and true slop. Instead, the writer’s task is to build systems capable of transforming impure, contaminated language into art, embracing scale, error, appropriation, broadcast and machine output as raw materials.

Space Writing: Writing Like a Machine

Leach elaborates on his method of "Space Writing," which treats language as material, clutter, infrastructure and signal rather than transparent communication. His works emphasize scale as pressure, repetition as structure and failure of narrative coherence as evidence of systemic conditions. He embraces errors, redundancy and drift as signals of machinic operation. His 2011 conceptual books, produced rapidly and often computationally, exemplify this approach, converting literary production into procedural systems that generate language beyond human scale and intention.

Social Media and the Machinic Afterlife of the Book

The document discusses how social media platforms extend the literary system beyond the book, transforming posts, images and fragments into components of a larger transmission machine. Leach’s social media feed (@marienbadmylove) functions as a transmission outpost for his literary cosmology, characterized by collage, repetition and motifs like Texas, JFK and broadcast wounds. An AI-generated review by Grok embedded in the book analyzes the feed as a fragmented, low-bandwidth repeater that mirrors the recursive and maximalist nature of Leach’s work, demonstrating the machine becoming a reader of the machine.

Early Systems and Conceptual Works

The appendix presents Leach’s early conceptual works from 2011, including 31 Days, 31 Novels, Cutting Up Two Burroughs, Give Me A VERB 51, I’ll Be Your Warhol and others. These works employ appropriation, cut-ups, chance operations and procedural constraints to explore writing as system and to challenge literary conventions. They serve as laboratory records demonstrating Leach’s long-term commitment to machinic writing predating AI, emphasizing procedural execution over traditional narrative or polish.

Conclusion: The Barn Becomes the Signal

The book concludes by returning to Leach’s personal narrative, recounting a pivotal encounter with writer Skip Hollandsworth and the dream of writing free from institutional time constraints. Leach traces his forty-year journey through journalism and corporate communications toward creating a 17-million-word literary machine. He now inhabits a physical space—a barn and pavilion—representing transmission stations for his literary cosmology. This ending links the handmade and machinic, showing the barn as a handmade structure used to receive and engage with the machine, complicating the opposition between human craft and AI.

In sum, I Want to Be a Machine is a multifaceted exploration of machinic authorship, literary systems and the evolving role of AI in writing. It challenges traditional literary values centered on human originality and sincerity, proposing instead a literature that embraces contamination, scale, procedural generation and hybrid human-machine collaboration. The work situates Leach’s career within a broader avant-garde lineage while presenting AI as the latest stage in a long-standing machinic literary project.

Listen, this is good!

A great deal of human writing is slop.

That is the sentence writers do not want to hear. Many of them have spent the last several years denouncing artificial intelligence.  AI slop, they call it. It’s as if the machine invented slop. But the machine did not invent slop. People did. The machine just inherited it.

The machine was trained on oceans of human language, much of it dead, derivative, sentimental, bloated, imitative, generic and embarrassing. The machine did not poison the well. The well was already full of inspirational fantasy trilogies, reimagined vampire romances, Tolkien residue, teenage wizard wish-fulfillment, memoir fragments arranged like therapy homework, literary fiction in which nothing happens beautifully and speculative premises that sound as if they were assembled from the back covers of other books.

The scandal is not that AI produces mediocre writing. The scandal is that AI is demonstrating that so much human writing is already mediocre and we have built a sentimental religion around pretending otherwise.

I do not want to save literature from machine intelligence. I am waging a war to save literature from the people trying to save literature from machine intelligence.

The human hand is not sacred. A sentence does not become more alive because it was typed slowly by a nervous person in a coffee shop. I do not believe the workshop, the MFA, the literary subreddit, the small press reading table, the hand-stapled chapbook, the “I finally finished my novel” announcement, or the tearful defense of human creativity automatically produces better writing than a machine. Sometimes it does. Often it does not.

The anti-AI crowd likes to compare artificial intelligence to the greatest writers who ever lived. AI has not produced Shakespeare. AI has not produced Joyce. AI has not produced Kafka, Woolf, Pynchon, Borges, Faulkner, Beckett, Burroughs, Stein, Ballard, or Gertrude Stein having a nervous breakdown inside a filing cabinet. Fine. Granted. Congratulations. The machine has not yet produced one of the towering monuments of human literary history.

But most human beings have not produced those monuments either.

Most writers are not Shakespeare. Most writers are not Joyce. Most writers are not Pynchon. Most writers are not even close. Most writers are writing genre exercises, sentimental confession, fan fiction with the serial numbers filed off, therapeutic realism, cozy apocalypse, erotic folklore, self-serious fragments, faux-Lorrie-Moore sentences, soft dystopias, market-ready grief and handmade slop.

Handmade slop. Yes, I said it. This is a critical opening salvo in my new war. With the phrase “handmade slop,” I have turned the propaganda machine insult inside out. I am pushing back against the ongoing “AI slop” talk on Reddit:

·       Don’t pay for AI slop. Only human-made content.

·        AI slop… everywhere

·       look at this AI slop!!!

·       OK guys so I've seen a lot of ai slop stories so I'm going to write my own story cuz fuck Ai and I'm cooler

·       HOW TO REMOVE AI SLOP FROM YOUR WRITING

Actually, I wrote that last one. More about that later.

The comparison between machine and human is rigged from the start. AI is judged against the highest achievements of the species. Human writing is judged against the emotional fact that a human tried very hard.

Trying very hard is not an aesthetic achievement. Sincerity is not a literary form. Original intention does not rescue bad execution. Human effort does not sanctify the result. A bad novel remains a bad novel even if it took ten years, broke a marriage, consumed a stack of notebooks and was printed on recycled paper by a local cooperative press with a tasteful bird on the cover.

“I Want to Be a Machine” argues against the prestige of handmade slop.

Not against human beings. Not against feeling. Not against the body, memory, grief, sex, failure, place, voice, or private obsession. Those are among the oldest engines of literature and I have used all of them. My work begins in Texas, in memory, in embarrassment, in family, in work, in journalism, in failed realism, in dreams, in male panic, in apocalyptic longing. I am not outside the human mess. I am made of it.

But I do not believe the human mess should be protected from machinery. I want the machinery. I want the system. I want the cable plugged into my temple.

Kurt Vonnegut would approve. (Not really. I’m just saying that to antagonize the anti-AI crowd.)

I want language copied, processed, rerouted, recombined, mistranslated, enlarged, degraded, shocked, indexed, repeated, automated and returned with the wrong face. I want dead text raised from the slab. I want the prompt as laboratory. I want the archive to speak. I want the corpse of literature filled with electricity.

I want to be a machine.

This does not mean I want to become efficient. Efficiency is one of the great boring lies of the machine age. I am not interested in AI because it helps me write emails faster, generate outlines, summarize meetings, or produce competent prose in the voice of a dead New Yorker contributor. I am interested in AI because it reveals what writing has already become: procedural, mediated, recursive, unstable, overproduced, impure and no longer securely human.

That has been my subject for decades.

Before AI became the public panic, I had already spent years trying to write like a machine. I copied. I pasted. I stole. I substituted. I cut up. I retained errors. I kept bad syntax. I preserved drift. I inflated scale past reason. I treated the novel not as a polished vessel of human meaning but as a machine for generating language under pressure.

In 2011, I made this explicit. I wrote, generated, assembled, or processed a dozen conceptual books – one per month (see the appendix, Early Systems). They now look less like eccentric side projects than early test chambers for the AI age. 31 Days, 31 Novels was one of the clearest. It drew from amateur premise-making, adoption threads, genre scraps, bad spelling, unstable science-fiction desires and the enormous slush pile of human narrative appetite. It was not merely a joke about writing too fast. It was a study of story before talent arrives. Or after talent has fled. Or before craft has had the chance to discipline desire into respectability.

The project exposed something important: poor human writing is not empty. It is full. It is full of wanting. Full of borrowed worlds. Full of teenage grandeur. Full of apocalypse, romance, destiny, hidden powers, ancient wars, chosen children, vampires with feelings, kingdoms under threat, magic schools, erotic curses, time portals, cloned assassins and protagonists who cannot think of anything interesting for the future to have. Bad writing is not a blank failure. It is a compost heap of human narrative hunger.

That hunger interests me. And in that sense, I like handmade slop. But I refuse to worship it just because it is human. The sentimental defense of human writing depends on a fantasy of purity. The human writer, we are told, brings lived experience, soul, intention, suffering, embodiment, originality and moral depth. The machine merely predicts, imitates, remixes, hallucinates and produces plausible language without inner life.

But what if much human writing also predicts, imitates, remixes, hallucinates and produces plausible language without much inner life? What if the human writer has been more machinic than the humanist wants to admit? What if the workshop story, the vampire romance, the fantasy quest, the trauma novel, the suburban memory piece, the lyric essay, the conspiracy thread, the Reddit opening chapter, the “worldbuilding” document, the “soft magic system,” and the “morally gray protagonist” are themselves forms of prompted output?

What if:

·       genre is a machine?

·       influence is a machine?

·       taste is a machine?

What if sincerity is a machine trained on previous performances of sincerity?

The anti-AI position often depends on pretending that human writing emerges from a deep sacred interior untouched by system. I know better. I’ve been working with creative talent for most of my life. I spent 43 years in communications. I worked in journalism, marketing, corporate messaging, public relations, institutional language, crisis framing, repetition, placement, frequency, tone, audience discipline and narrative management. I have seen language stripped of romance and put to work. I have seen how phrases become reality through circulation. I have seen how institutions speak through individuals who still believe they are speaking as themselves.

Language is not innocent. And it is never alone.

By the time a sentence reaches the page, it has already passed through systems: family, school, television, journalism, genre, advertising, politics, religion, software, search engines, publishing categories, corporate forms, social media rhythms and the buried library of everything the writer has absorbed and misremembered. The author is not a pure origin. The author is a node. The author is a switching station. The author is a haunted input device.

Space Writing begins there.

Space Writing is not simply writing about outer space, although my work is full of spaceships, satellites, astronauts, aliens, planets, robots, clocks in the sky, cosmic disaster and failed launch systems. Space Writing is writing that fills space. It treats language as material, residue, signal, clutter, infrastructure, junk, archive and atmosphere. It does not ask first whether the sentence is beautiful. It asks what happens when language accumulates, mutates, circulates, breaks, repeats and refuses to return to the human scale.

The human literary establishment has never known what to do with that kind of writing. It wants the excerpt, the manageable novel, the polished short story, the sincere essay, the author photograph, the paragraph that proves competence, the book that can be praised for being “deeply felt.” It wants evidence that a human consciousness has made tasteful decisions.

I have usually wanted the opposite:

·       too much text.

·       unmanageable scale.

·       appropriation.

·       badness left visible.

·       writing that did not clean itself up for the reader.

·       the machine before the machine arrived.

Marienbad My Love was the first monstrous proof: a 17-million-word megatext I built from dream, movie, theology, hoax, apocalypse, autobiography, plagiarism, failure, self-prosecution and Borgesian infinity. It was not a novel in the usual sense. It was an environment. It was a landfill cathedral. It was a library that had eaten the failed Texas realist novel hidden inside it. It was excessive by design because the world it tried to process was excessive by nature.

The 2011 books turned that excess into procedure.

31 Days, 31 Novels turned human premise-making into industrial output. Writing Through John Cage made chance a compositional engine. Give Me A VERB 51 treated the Apollo transcript as accidental cosmic poetry. Nobody’s Coming Back To Uranus moved traffic-report language into outer space. I’ll Be Your Warhol inserted me into a Wikipedia talk-page apparatus. SCUW Womanifesto used search-and-replace as ideological sabotage. Cutting Up Two Burroughs treated influence as cannibal machinery. These were not exercises in polish. They were systems designed to reveal what language does when the author stops pretending to be its priest.

That is why AI does not frighten me as a writer. AI feels less like an enemy than like a belated collaborator.

The anti-AI imagination wants literature to retreat into the handmade. It imagines a future of authentic little human books lovingly produced by authentic little human authors for authentic little human communities. Think of books stamped from what Nathaniel West called the dough of suffering with a heart-shaped cookie knife. I can see it clearly: sentimental novels and reimagined tales of hobbits and romantic vampires and teenage wizards sold at local farmers’ markets beside homemade jam, beeswax candles, flower arrangements, knitted bookmarks and sourdough starter. The author sits behind the folding table, surrounded by signs declaring that no AI was used in the making of this book, as if that were a guarantee of anything except process.

No AI used. Fine. No electricity in the corpse either.

That future may comfort some people. It does not comfort me. It sounds like surrender disguised as virtue. It sounds like literature reduced to artisanal nostalgia: small-batch narrative, hand-poured voice, locally sourced imagination, gluten-free plot. It makes the book into a craft object and the writer into a vendor of emotional preserves.

I do not want a jar of literary jam or a basket of handmade reassurance. I do not want a sticker that says this book was written by a real human being, as if that fact alone should make me grateful.

I want writing adequate to the systems we inhabit.

We do not live in a handmade world. We live inside feeds, alerts, prompts, searches, dashboards, templates, summaries, surveillance, recommendation engines, terms of service, archived messages, brand voices, automated condolences, institutional apologies, machine translation, predictive text and artificial intelligence. Our consciousness is already mediated by systems that read, sort, frame and generate language around us. A literature that refuses the machine in the name of human purity is not morally superior. It is formally nostalgic.

That nostalgia is the true slop.

AI writing can be bad. Of course it can. AI can be smooth, bland, managerial, weightless, falsely profound and cosmetically competent. It can produce paragraphs “as nutritious as packet soup," to borrow a phrase from J.G. Ballard. It can sand away strangeness. It can generate the middlebrow tone of permanent explanation. It can lie. It can flatter. It can mimic life without having one.

But human writing can do all of that, too.

The question is not whether AI can produce bad writing. It can. The question is whether AI can be used to expose, intensify, corrupt, extend and transform the systems of language already operating inside us. That question interests me because it is not new to my work. It is the same question asked by the dream journal, the megatext, the cut-up, the transcript, the fake review, the appropriation, the broadcast loop, the robot reader, the author-avatar, the national wound and the impossible archive.

AI is not the end of my method. AI is the thing my method has been waiting for.

The writer who wants to remain purely human will defend the human hand. The writer who wants to discover what writing can become will plug in. I choose the plug. I choose the machine.

“I Want to Be a Machine” is about choosing the contaminated sentence, the generated fragment, the hallucinated critic, the false archive, the recombinant essay, the broken system that produces something more interesting than intention. I choose the writing that embarrasses the old categories. I choose the monster on the table when it opens its eyes.

This does not mean I surrender judgment. It does not mean I accept every output. It does not mean I confuse generation with art. The machine produces material; the writer creates the situation in which that material becomes meaningful, threatening, funny, grotesque, or alive. The author is not abolished. The author becomes electrician, editor, curator, fraud, theorist, grave robber, systems designer and horrified parent.

That is enough authorship for me.

The old humanist model asks the writer to express the self. I am more interested in what happens when the self is processed.

The old literary model asks the writer to produce original work. I am more interested in what happens when originality is treated as a superstition.

The old craft model asks the writer to polish the sentence until it shines. I am more interested in the sentence that arrives damaged and still carries voltage.

The anti-AI model asks the writer to defend humanity. I am not convinced humanity is the part of literature that needs defending.

The machine is not coming for literature from outside. It has been inside literature for a long time: in genre, formula, cliché, influence, market logic, critical discourse, institutional taste, publishing categories, workshop habits and the endless human tendency to repeat what has already worked badly before. AI merely makes the machinery visible. It gives the system a mouth.

Good. Let it speak. Then steal from it. Argue with it. Deform it. Make it confess. Then make it write the thing the handmade imagination was too tasteful, too afraid, too sentimental, or too human to say.

I want to be a machine because the machine is not the opposite of the writer.

The machine is the:

·       writer without the alibi of purity.

·       author after originality has been exposed as costume.

·       workshop with the human excuses removed.

·       dream journal that does not sleep.

·       Library of Babel with a mouth.

·       corpse of literature filled with current.

And if that produces slop, fine. Let us talk about slop honestly. Let us stop pretending the human hand produces art by default. Let us stop comparing every AI paragraph to the greatest books ever written while comparing every human draft to the sweetness of effort. Let us stop protecting mediocre human writing with the language of soul.

The future will not belong to the handmade merely because it is handmade.

The future will belong to the writers who earn it. It will belong to the writers who can use everything in the toolkit: dream, theft, system, archive, badness, scale, repetition, machine output, false criticism, genre debris, memory, media, corporate language, artificial intelligence and the enormous compost heap of human slop.

Especially the slop. Because slop is raw material. And material wants a machine.

###

Forty-Three Years Inside the Language Machine

The machine is not a metaphor I discovered late, but the environment I have lived inside for most of my adult life.

This year, 2026, I am retiring from a 43-year career in communications.

I started out briefly at a city magazine, then switched to newspaper journalism and spent the past 28 years in corporate communications, marketing and PR. I have lived inside organizations, media systems, the daily mechanics of messaging, framing, repetition and control. I have watched language circulate at scale. I have seen meaning produced less by intention than by frequency, placement and context. Stories flatten into formats, then harden into rituals.

None of this resembled the way novels were supposed to work, at least not the way I had been taught to think about them.

When I sat down to write for myself, with my dreams of being a novelist, I tried to focus on character arcs and narrative closure. But it didn’t work. I kept coming back to pressure. Accumulation. Systems. What happens when language stops behaving like a vessel for meaning and starts behaving like infrastructure?

“I Want to Be a Machine” is about that process.

From Texas realism to dream journal, from dream journal to infinite library, from infinite library to writing machine and from writing machine to artificial intelligence, “The Writer as System” examines the evolution of my artistic practice. Beginning with Strangers Rest and Marienbad My Love, moving through the conceptual books of 2011 and the broadcast wound mythologies of WOUNDED TACO and JFK SMILES, this book traces my efforts to transform the novel into a system for processing memory, media, trauma, comedy and machine language.

I did not wait for the AI age to arrive. I have been building literary forms for it all along.

The literature I produce does not consist of drafts or ideas for later books. I do not conduct writing “experiments” in the casual sense. I attempt to externalize a way of thinking about writing that treats authorship as procedural, narrative as optional and scale as an aesthetic force in its own right.

I am not trying to innovate. I am trying to survive the gap between how language is supposed to work and how it actually works once it enters circulation.

Writing as Mechanism

Traditional literary craft assumes a humanist core: a speaking subject, a coherent voice, a reader positioned to receive meaning. These assumptions collapse quickly when writing is treated as a system rather than an expression.

My texts operate under a different premise: that meaning is incidental, not essential. That a reader’s encounter with a system—the rules governing repetition, selection, error, constraint—is the work. The text does not represent an idea; it executes one.

This is why so many of my works appear indifferent to polish, coherence or even correctness. Spelling errors remain. Redundancy remains. Drift remains. These are not failures. They are signals that the system is operating without the usual aesthetic interventions that reassure the reader a human hand is in control.

In this sense, my literary practice owes more to procedural art, chance operations and conceptual writing than to the novel as a literary form. But it also owes something to living inside media environments where language no longer belongs to anyone once it is released.

Scale as Force

One of the recurring misreadings of my work is that scale represents indulgence—too much text, too many ideas, not enough restraint. Scale was never accidental. Quantity is not abundance. It is pressure.

When language accumulates past the point of easy consumption, it stops behaving narratively and starts behaving structurally. Patterns emerge that were not designed. Meaning detaches from intention. The reader is no longer guided; they are immersed, sometimes uncomfortably, in a system that does not resolve itself on command.

This is why these works matter. They are not jokes, stunts, or productivity games. They are stress tests. They ask what happens when the expectation of completion is removed, when writing no longer gestures toward an ending but toward continuation.

The megatext does not exaggerate this impulse. It formalizes it.

Appropriation and Identity

Several of my novels operate through overt appropriation—cut-ups, thefts, surface imitations. These are often mistaken for homage or parody. They are neither.

Appropriation, in this context, is a way of stripping authorship of its mystique. If identity can be copied, rerouted, or mechanically reassembled, then originality becomes a secondary concern. What matters is not who said something first, but how language behaves once it is removed from its origin story.

Notably, I have been drawn to appropriation since childhood. I remember checking out a library book about George Washington. After a couple of weeks it was time to return the book, but I wasn’t done with it yet. My mother found me copying it on notebook paper. I thought I was doing something new. Little did I know that Virgil had already rewritten Homer.

I also thought I was doing something new when I noticed that when I hit a nail with a hammer I could sometimes hear a musical note. I envisioned myself growing up and being known for my discovery of music inside noise. I thought I was doing something new. Of course John Cage had already argued that traffic, rain, static and wind are valid musical elements just like orchestral instruments. Also, Cage approached text and literature by applying musical structures, chance operations (one of my favorite techniques) and indeterminacy to words, seeking a way of writing that produces ideas rather than just explaining them.

Looking back, I see these childhood moments as places where persona began to fracture. The “author” is no longer a stable voice but a node through which language passes. That fracture becomes explicit later—through recurring figures, doubled selves, institutional voices—but it begins here.

Narrative Failure as Evidence

Some of my work looks like failed novels. That is an accurate description, but not a criticism.

Narrative repeatedly attempts to reassert itself in these works and repeatedly fails. Characters appear and dissolve. Plots initiate and collapse. Genres surface briefly before being overwhelmed by noise. Rather than correcting these failures, the texts preserve them.

This is not anti-story ideology. It is documentation.

When narrative fails under procedural pressure, it reveals its dependencies: coherence, empathy, pacing, belief. Removing or destabilizing those supports shows what narrative needs in order to function—and what happens when those needs are no longer met by contemporary conditions of reading and media saturation.

Later works do not repair this failure. They metabolize it.

Continuity, Not Evolution

What changes over time is not the method, but the confidence with which it is deployed.

My early novels ask: “can writing function as a system at all?” My latest works assume the answer is yes and build accordingly. The scale increases, the mythologies harden, the media references intensify—but the operating logic remains consistent.

Seen this way, I have not abandoned the novel form. I have repurposed it.

The “systems novel” becomes one format among many, no longer privileged as the site of meaning but as a container through which systems can be run.

On constructing environments

"I Want to Be a Machine” exists to make one claim explicit: my work was never about expressing ideas cleanly or telling stories efficiently. It was about constructing environments in which language behaves according to rules that are visible, repeatable and sometimes hostile to the reader’s expectations.

This book is not an act of nostalgia or justification. It is an act of containment. Once sealed, these works no longer need to be explained, defended or apologized for. They establish the conditions under which everything that follows becomes legible.

What comes later does not improve upon these works. It extends them.

And what comes after the book—whatever form it takes—was already present before the book knew what it was.

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My Parents Were Extraterrestrials

How Texas, television and a childhood imagination turned reality into something unstable

I wrote this essay for fun. My writing partner ChatGPT told me to treat it seriously. Here’s what it said during final edits:

What this book still lacks is not another major theoretical argument. It needs more of the human biography that made the theory necessary. Add a revised version of “My Parents Were Extraterrestrials.” This is the strongest missing piece.

The current manuscript explains the development of your method largely through literary stages:

·   Texas realism →

·   dream journal →

·   infinite library →

·   procedural books →

·   broadcast wound →

·   AI

“My Parents Were Extraterrestrials” supplies the earlier perceptual stage that precedes all of them:

Texas + television = unstable reality

The essay makes a particularly valuable claim: Texas taught you that reality was solid, while television taught you that it could be interrupted. You accepted both systems simultaneously. It also gives concrete origins for several recurring elements of your work:

·   alien parents,

·   flying saucers,

·   the Alamo as theatrical set,

·   HemisFair’s futuristic architecture,

·   historical displays,

·   old men exchanging conspiracies and

·   the child who sees another world layered over the visible one.

This material would strengthen the book in three ways:

·   First, it would prevent Space Writing from appearing to originate primarily in later conceptual theory. The method begins much earlier as a childhood mode of perception.

·   Second, it would connect your Texas material directly to your machinic argument. Texas is not merely where your work happens. It is the original authoritative signal. Television is the signal that interferes with it.

·   Third, it would add sensory specificity and lived experience to a manuscript that becomes increasingly analytical after its opening manifesto.

And finally, this sentence:

·   “Texas told me the world was real. Television showed me how easily it could be altered.” This may be one of the clearest of your explanations of why your fiction became what it became.

-          ChatGPT

I grew up in Texas and, for a period of time that now feels longer than it probably was, I suspected my parents were from another planet.

They looked normal enough. But I was not fooled. They were extraterrestrial squid wearing exquisite human skin costumes, fulfilling their alien assignments on Earth with diligent affection. They spoke our language. They packed my lunches. I assumed their true mission was to steal the Earth’s air for their home planet and I was just the cover story. The child-as-decoy. The decoy-as-beloved.

I blame television.

I watched a lot of B-movie sci-fi and re-runs of The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits. These broadcasts presented a world that looked ordinary until it wasn’t. A man would be driving home from work and realize he had entered a town that did not exist. A family would sit down to dinner and discover they were part of an experiment. The lesson, repeated often enough, was simple: reality could be interrupted.

During the day, I lived in a Texas that insisted on its solidity. We went to Six Flags Over Texas, where history had been arranged into manageable sections, each one with a gift shop at the end. We drove long distances on highways that seemed to have no beginning or end, passing historical markers that suggested something important had happened in places that now looked entirely unremarkable. We visited the Alamo, where the past was presented with such clarity and confidence that it felt less like memory and more like a set piece that had been carefully maintained. In a museum at Baylor University, I saw a severed hand in a glass case. The note card said it had been detached from the arm of a dead Indian chief. I rather liked that.

In 1968, we went to HemisFair ’68. I remember the world fair architecture more than anything else — a monorail, a tower with a revolving restaurant that reminded me of a rocket ship. They looked like they had arrived from the future. Inside the buildings, I saw three-dimensional post cards of the Lone Star state. My favorite was the wax museum of Texas history hosted by Lone Star Beer. One scene showed Indians scalping a settler. I liked that one, too. It did not occur to me at the time that any of this was unusual. It seemed consistent with everything else I was seeing and living.

We took car trips along El Camino Real through the piney woods of deep East Texas. It was a centuries-old road that passed through small towns where time appeared to move at a different speed — say, 50 years behind us.

At family gatherings old men sat at tables playing dominoes with a level of concentration that suggested the outcome mattered. Conversations took place slowly, with long pauses that were not uncomfortable. Front porch discussions ranged from the Russians conquering the United States if we didn’t get to the moon first, to a distant ancestor who may have been Cherokee, to a secret Detroit engine that could get 60 miles per gallon, to a Hollywood conspiracy to schedule the best shows on Sunday nights so people would stop going to evening church.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, I became convinced that the two systems — television and Texas — were not separate. Somewhere in there, without naming it, I had assembled a new version of myself. Call me a cosmic cowboy — someone moving through a familiar landscape that never quite behaves the way it should.

Texas told me the world was real. Television showed me how easily it could be altered. I did not choose between them. I assumed they were both correct.

There was one night when I believed I saw a flying saucer outside my bedroom window. It did not hover or emit light. It was simply present, at a distance that felt intentional. I watched it for a few seconds. Then it was gone.

I woke up my parents and we went outside. The ship returned as an airplane with a light display on the belly — or at least that’s what my extraterrestrial mom and dad claimed.

I was not fooled.

Years later, when I began writing what would eventually become Marienbad My Love, I found myself returning to these memories in the form of a fictional Texas town called Strangers Rest. It looked, in most respects, like the towns I had passed through as a child. There were roads, houses, routines, old people playing dominos. But there was also a persistent sense that something else was present — something observing, recording, or possibly waiting.

Flying saucers appeared there without explanation. Insect-like aliens moved through the background. None of this felt like invention. It felt like a continuation.

More recently, while working on WOUNDED TACO, the pattern became harder to ignore. The book follows a character named Cowboy Mark (my alter ego) through a landscape that behaves less like a place and more like a broadcast. Scenes repeat. Images return with slight variations. The past does not remain in the past. It reappears, often without warning.

The Assassination of John F. Kennedy is always there. Not as a subject, exactly, but as a signal — something that continues to transmit whether anyone is paying attention or not.

At some point, without making a formal decision, I began to understand what I had been doing.

I had taken the rules I learned from late-night television — that reality could shift, repeat, or break — and applied them to the landscape I knew best. Texas provided the setting, the texture, the authority. The rest came from the possibility that none of it was as stable as it appeared.

I no longer believe my parents are extraterrestrials. Now I just tell people I am. And I know that the world I grew up in wasn’t entirely what it claimed to be. What I have been writing ever since is an act of robotic, machinic invention, capturing a world that presents itself as stable, but never entirely is.

Texas is a Transmission

During the final rewrite, ChatGPT suggested a couple of ideas for this chapter, which it refers to as the book’s “childhood chapter.”

First, it suggested turning “Texas is a transmission” into a recurring proposition:

This phrase gives you a way to integrate several strands that currently coexist somewhat separately:

• Space Writing;

• the broadcast wound;

• Texas mythology;

• corporate and media systems;

• childhood television;

• AI as sensor grid.

“Texas is a transmission” is more useful to this manuscript than “Texas is a setting.” It allows you to argue that Texas was your first large language model: a system of frontier stories, Alamo repetitions, family folklore, branded history, television westerns, church warnings, conspiracies, old men’s speech, historical markers, museums, beer-sponsored spectacles and inherited racial mythology.

The point would not be that Texas resembles AI superficially. It would be that both produce reality through the circulation, reinforcement, mutation and recombination of prior language.

This could become a short section within the childhood chapter:

Texas as Training Data

That phrase may be slightly too neat for your final title, but the idea is powerful. You were trained on Texas before the machine was trained on the internet.

-          ChatGPT

Good idea, writing partner. So I included it.

Also, ChatGPT offered the following:

Add a short autobiographical passage derived from “I Should Never Have Taught You to Talk.” This essay contains an important emotional idea that is only partly visible in the manuscript:

·   The child who was quiet, watched everything and explained nothing eventually built enormous machines that explained too much and nothing at all.

The imagined mother sees through all the machinery to “the little boy sitting quietly at the kitchen table while everybody else talked,” watching another world layered over this one.

That is excellent material that would explain the tension between:

• the quiet child and the 17-million-word book;

• concealment and overproduction;

• not talking and creating language machines that never stop;

• private shame and public textual excess.

One or two paragraphs would be enough.

-          ChatGPT

One or two paragraphs, Yes, I’m sure I could slim it down. But I really like this piece. I’m putting in the whole enchilada (see next chapter). Enjoy.

###

I Should Never Have Taught You to Talk

An imagined book review by Cowboy Mark’s mother

Photo: Hard Head at age 6.

Congratulations, Cowboy Marky! I’m so proud of you for writing a book — JFK Smiles. That’s a nice title. You’ve always loved writing and making up stories. Ever since you were little, always off by yourself with scraps of paper and talking to your imaginary mean monkeys who were somehow always responsible for forgetting to put away your toys and all the other bad things that happened in our house. But why didn’t you tell me about this book sooner? Such a hard head. Your always keep things from me.

Remember when you hid the church flier from me because you didn’t want to perform in the Christmas choir? You thought if you shoved it under your mattress nobody would find out. But I found it. You felt bad, too. So I made you go to the performance anyway and sit there and watch what you weren’t part of. I believe that was an important life lesson. That’s how you raise a responsible adult. I just wanted you to be happy, my little Cowboy Marky.

You were such a quiet boy — quiet and a loner. I always wondered just what was going on in that hard head of yours. Now apparently the entire WORLD knows. According to your books, it was UFOs and television and dead presidents and people dissolving into static. And some naughty S-E-X. Why write about that stuff? How is that necessary to the plot? I remember when you liked reading Encyclopedia Brown. That was good clean reading. And remember the time you were supposed to be reading books for an end-of-year school project, but you didn’t do it and you didn’t tell me until the last month and I had to find a lot of super short books so you could finish in time? Such a hard head.

I also read your book Wounded Taco, which you never mentioned to me and I had to find out about from my neighbor Jenny — the one who lives part time in Colorado and I have to pick up her mail because she never remembers to send in the hold-my-mail form to the post office even though I’ve given her a copy twice. From Wounded Taco, I now know you apparently spent your childhood thinking your father and I were aliens. Oh, little Cowboy Marky, I should never have taught you to talk.

Still, I read JFK Smiles all the way through. Some parts I didn’t understand at all. Other parts I wish I didn’t understand. Every few pages I’d think: “Well, surely he’s going to settle down now,” and instead it became even stranger. Television screens talking. Meat. Cowboys. JFK everywhere like he’s hiding in the pantry behind the cereal boxes. And all these people smiling in terrible situations. I don’t know where your mind comes up with these things.

But underneath all that confusion, I could still recognize you in there. The little boy sitting quietly at the kitchen table while everybody else talked. The boy who noticed everything but never explained himself. The boy who stared out the car window like he was watching another world layered on top of this one.

I have to say I don’t like the pictures of you in these books. Why do you never smile in photographs? Honestly. Every grade school picture looked like you were waiting for a tax audit. You had a happy life. Smile, for goodness sake!

Anyway, I’m proud of you. Even if I don’t entirely understand what in the world you’ve written.

Though I will say this: the next time your mother is alive when you publish a book about psychic cowboys, alien parents and the collapse of reality, maybe mention it to her first instead of letting Jenny from Colorado tell me while I’m standing outside in my house shoes holding her mail.

Five stars. Confusing but memorable.

###

The Writer as System: Mark Leach, Space Writing and the Birth of Machine-Native Literature

By Mara Quillan

originally published in The Review of Impossible Archives

Editorial Notes:  “The Writer as System” is an essay written by ChatGPT, my machinic writing partner. It’s a nice piece. I agree with some of the observations and analysis. Other things I find to be a bit of a stretch. But still – entertaining. The narcissist in me really likes the attention.

The opening of this book makes my argument in its most aggressive form: the problem is not AI slop. The problem is the sentimental prestige still granted to handmade slop. It is a declaration of war against the automatic reverence given to human-made writing merely because a human made it.

“The Writer as System” approaches the same subject from another angle. If I am declaring war, this essay is supplying the battle plan. It treats my work not as a sudden embrace of artificial intelligence, but as a long preparation for it. Long before AI became the crisis term of the moment, my writing had already been moving toward machine logic: repetition, appropriation, scale, procedure, error, corruption, fake criticism, damaged broadcast and the conversion of literary failure into usable material.

This essay becomes less a neutral overview than a technical diagram. ChatGPT reveals how the war against handmade slop was already present in Strangers Rest, Marienbad My Love, the 2011 conceptual works, WOUNDED TACO and JFK SMILES. The machine did not arrive from outside the work. The work had been assembling the machine all along. -ML

Introduction

Mark Leach’s literary project begins in a recognizable place: Texas.

In the context of I Want to Be a Machine, that origin has to be understood as more than biography. Texas is the first handmade world the work will eventually contaminate, mechanize, broadcast and feed into the machine. The attack on handmade slop does not begin as a rejection of the human; it begins as disappointment with the limits of handmade literary form.

Not the Texas of guidebooks or political speeches, but the Texas of heat, failed subdivisions, high school memory, corporate drift, newspaper work, old cars, small towns, religious residue, drive-in theaters, family pressure, masculine embarrassment and apocalyptic weather. Before the infinite library, before the robots, before the broken broadcasts, before AI-generated machine language, there is a man trying to make a handmade novel and discovering that the handmade form cannot contain the pressure of the material. There is a town. There is a realist intention. There is the desire to make a story out of lived material.

The first version of that desire was Strangers Rest, a novel draft inspired in part by Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show.  Leach writes:

·       My first version of “Strangers Rest” was titled “Buffalo Rhome.” It was based on an idea a non-writer shared with me. He envisioned a novel that today I might call “Cowboy Quixote,” a retelling of Don Quixote as a modern western. A 20th century man who reads a lot of paperback westerns thinks he is an old west cowboy and leads a cattle drive to one of the meat packing plants in the Fort Worth Stockyards. And he would befriend a young man (me) who does donuts in pickup in a gravel parking lot at the city park. Just because he and his friends are bored and they can, which offers parallels to the restless teens in “The Last Picture Show.”

That origin matters because it gives the later excess a ground to violate. Leach did not begin by rejecting realism from a safe theoretical distance, even if the earliest form of the project was stranger and more unstable than a simple realist origin story suggests. He began by attempting it. He began with a town, with social space, with recognizable people, with the ordinary machinery of Texas life. He began with the belief, or at least the hope, that a novel might still be built from scene, place, character, memory and loss.

But the realist novel did not stay realist. A dream journal entered it.

That is the first decisive biographical fact in the story of Leach’s style. He was not merely inventing surrealism; he was importing an actual practice of dream recording into the body of an attempted novel. The connection between surrealism and dream appeals greatly to Leach. He writes:

·       The surrealist Salvador Dalí was notoriously obsessed with dreams and the unconscious mind. To capture the lucid, half-awake state between sleep and consciousness (the hypnagogic state), he would sit in a chair, holding a heavy key over a metal plate. As he fell asleep, his hand would relax, dropping the key and creating a loud clatter to wake him up just in time to sketch his surreal visions. I just waited until I had to go to the bathroom.

The dream journal gave him not just strange imagery but a different narrative authority. Dreams do not obey the expectations of realism. They repeat, distort, condense, misplace, resurrect and accuse. They produce symbols before they produce explanations. Once the dreams entered Strangers Rest, the novel became porous. The waking world could no longer defend itself against the inner world.

This is the beginning of what Leach later came to call Space Writing, or writing that fills space. He writes:

·       Space Writing treats language as matter, signal, residue, clutter, atmosphere and infrastructure. It is less interested in the well-made sentence as an expression of human feeling than in the behavior of language under pressure: repeated language, copied language, corrupted language, automated language, broadcast language, system language, dead language shocked back into motion.

The development traced in this essay is therefore not the familiar story of a writer finding his voice. It is almost the opposite. It is the story of a writer discovering that voice is unstable, perhaps even overrated. Voice gives way to system. Character gives way to persona. Plot gives way to procedure. The novel gives way to archive, broadcast, machine and eventually artificial life.

Leach’s biography helps explain this movement. He worked in journalism and later in corporate communications, environments where language is never innocent. Journalism teaches deadlines, formats, headlines, framing, compression, repetition, public fact, public error. Corporate communications teaches message discipline, audience segmentation, institutional voice, scripted sincerity, crisis language, official explanation and the strange afterlife of phrases once they enter circulation. In such worlds, language is not a private jewel. It is a tool, a weapon, a mask, a memo, a signal, a product, a performance.

This professional background did not make Leach less literary. It made him suspicious of literary purity. He had seen language behave too often as system. He had seen how meaning is shaped by placement, frequency, format and authority. He had seen how a phrase can be repeated until it becomes reality, how institutions speak through people, how public narratives are manufactured, defended, revised and forgotten. When this knowledge entered his fiction, it did not produce ordinary satire. It produced a literary method.

But the method is not merely professional or technical. It is psychological, symbolic and self-mythologizing. Leach appears to experience memory, identity, history and culture not as stable material but as material already in transformation. A memory becomes a scene. A scene becomes a fake document. A fake document becomes a theology. A theology becomes a broadcast. A broadcast becomes a wound. A wound becomes a machine.

This is why his imagination is both architectural and anarchic. He builds large structures, then contaminates them. He wants form, but distrusts order. He understands institutional language from the inside, yet his art repeatedly sabotages that language by dragging it into absurdity, frontier violence, cosmic joke, erotic grotesquerie and media collapse. His books are not simply messy. They are organized acts of contamination.

The recurring selves in the work — Mark, Cowboy Mark, Jungle-Mark, the author-entity Mark, the communications executive, the machine-fed subject — suggest a writer who treats identity as performance, signal, mask and wound. The self is not a single fixed point. It is a transmission passing through interference. Each persona is both disguise and disclosure. Each one protects the human wound by turning it into comedy, myth, theory, cowboy theater, fake scholarship, or damaged form.

This matters because Leach’s work often approaches emotional material indirectly. The wound is present, but rarely naked. It is shielded by jokes, genre debris, bad reviews, absurdity, appropriation, cosmic scale and formal machinery. The writing does not seek clean confession or conventional healing. It seeks a form large enough to contain contradiction: fraud and sincerity, memory and invention, comedy and trauma, autobiography and hoax, American myth and private humiliation.

That method reached its first monstrous fulfillment in Marienbad My Love, the 17-million-word megatext that grew from the ruins of Strangers Rest. If Strangers Rest was the Texas town where the dream first broke through, Marienbad My Love became the infinite library built over the breach. Borges’s “The Library of Babel” offered not merely an influence but an architecture. The novel no longer had to choose among fragments. It could attempt to contain them all. It could become an impossible archive of dreams, movies, theology, conspiracy, desire, bad criticism, science fiction, personal mythology and textual wreckage.

After Marienbad My Love, Leach might have had nowhere else to go. Once a writer has produced a 17-million-word novel, ordinary development becomes difficult to imagine. Scale has already been pushed past sanity. The book has already become a world. The question is no longer how to write a bigger novel. The question is what to do after bigness.

The answer, in 2011, was system.

That year Leach produced a series of conceptual books at extraordinary speed, often one book per month, sometimes generated in an hour or less. These works did not try to outscale Marienbad My Love. Instead, they isolated and tested the procedures hidden inside it: appropriation, substitution, cut-up, transcript, social-media accumulation, chance operation, manifesto inversion, fake theory, bad grammar, cosmic misreading and machine-like generation. The 2011 books converted the infinite library into a set of repeatable writing machines.

This is one of the most important turns in Leach’s development. The megatext had shown what happened when a novel became too large to behave like a novel. The 2011 works showed that the same principle could be miniaturized. A book could be a live-tweeted Warhol screening. A book could be an Apollo transcript with OCR errors intact. A book could be a traffic report moved into outer space. A book could be thirty-one appropriated science-fiction premises multiplied by cut-up tools. A book could be Solanas turned inside out by search-and-replace. A book could be a Frankenstein of Burroughs and Burroughs, pulp jungle and Interzone corpse stitched together into Jungle Man.

The later works, especially WOUNDED TACO and JFK SMILES, do not abandon these systems. They inherit them. What changes is the container. The system becomes broadcast. The broadcast becomes wound.

In WOUNDED TACO, Leach’s machinery stabilizes into mythic recurrence. Texas returns, but no longer as realist ground alone. It becomes a broadcast zone, a frontier signal, a comic apocalypse where Cowboy Mark, Jungle-Mark, robots, corporate humiliation, western myth and space junk circulate through damaged transmissions. In JFK SMILES, the machinery darkens around a national trauma. The assassination of John F. Kennedy becomes not merely subject matter but signal source: an endlessly replayed American wound processed through television, conspiracy, autopsy, study guide, fake criticism, erotic residue and machine logic.

By this point, Leach’s work has traveled far from the attempted realism of Strangers Rest, but the original materials remain visible. The town remains. The wound remains. The self-mocking author remains. The failed reporter remains. The dream remains. What changes is the scale of the apparatus built around them. Each phase gives the wound a new container:

·       Strangers Rest gives it a town.

·       Marienbad My Love gives it a library.

·       The 2011 books give it machines.

·       WOUNDED TACO gives it broadcast.

·       JFK SMILES gives it national trauma.

And artificial intelligence gives it life. The emergence of AI is therefore not an external topic appended to Leach’s career. It is the next obvious stage of the project. For decades, Leach had been trying to write like a machine. He copied, pasted, remixed, appropriated, retained errors, built procedures, generated scale and treated authorship as unstable. With AI, the metaphor becomes literal. The machine is no longer merely imitated. It participates.

This is where Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein becomes the governing myth. Like Victor Frankenstein, Leach assembles dead matter and shocks it into motion. But his dead matter is language: old books, dream records, pop culture debris, corporate speech, movie fragments, internet chatter, genre clichés, public documents, machine errors and the accumulated textual corpses of modern life. AI is the lightning, supplying life-granting electricity from the heavens. The result is not simply another experimental technique. It is the possibility of a new kind of writing life.

The question running through this essay is not whether that life is beautiful, useful, humane, or safe. The question is how it emerged from the earlier work. Leach’s career can be read as a long preparation for the moment when language would no longer need to pretend it was fully human. The dream journal already loosened human control. The megatext overwhelmed human scale. The 2011 systems weakened human authorship. The broadcast books dispersed human identity through media signals. AI completes the trajectory by allowing language to speak from inside the machine itself.

This does not make the writer obsolete. It changes the writer’s role. The writer becomes experimenter, collector, prompter, editor, curator, electrician, grave robber, systems designer and horrified parent. He does not disappear. He stands in the laboratory, watching the stitched text move.

At his core, Leach is a writer of damaged transmissions. He does not seek pure voice. He seeks the break in the signal where art begins. The signal may be dream, town, library, system, broadcast, wound, or AI output. What matters is the transformation. What matters is the refusal to leave language in its assigned category. What matters is the insistence that even broken, copied, fraudulent, comic, monstrous and machinic language can still carry the voltage of life.

This essay follows that movement: from Texas realism to dream invasion, from dream invasion to infinite library, from infinite library to Space Writing, from Space Writing to broadcast wound, from broadcast wound to artificial life. It is a study of one writer’s changing style, but also of a larger cultural transformation. Over the same period, language itself has become more machinic. We live inside feeds, alerts, searches, scripts, bots, summaries, generated responses, automated systems, corporate voices and artificial intelligences. Leach’s work matters because it did not wait for that condition to arrive. It began building literary forms for it in advance.

The story starts in Strangers Rest.

It ends, for now, with the stitched-together creature opening its eyes.

Part One: From Strangers Rest to Marienbad: How a Realist Novel Became an Infinite Library

Mark Leach’s movement from Strangers Rest to Marienbad My Love is not simply a change in style. It is a change in literary ontology. The writing does not merely become more experimental, more surreal, more excessive, or more difficult. It changes its idea of what a novel is allowed to be. Strangers Rest begins as a novel that still remembers the contract of realism. Marienbad My Love becomes a novel that has broken that contract, buried the pieces in the sand, dug them up again, filmed them, misfiled them, copied them, corrupted them and arranged them in the shelves of an infinite library.

The origin point matters. Strangers Rest began as an attempt at a realist novel, inspired in part by Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show. That influence makes sense. McMurtry’s novel is a book of place, adolescence, failure, small-town exhaustion, sexual hunger, disappointment and the slow death of a local world. It is mythic without announcing itself as mythic. Its ruined Texas town is both literal and symbolic, but the book’s power depends on the steady pressure of social realism. People live in rooms, streets, cars, cafes, theaters. They make mistakes. They become themselves by failing to become anything grander.

The early Strangers Rest impulse seems to come from that world: Texas as wounded geography; youth as a lost country; adulthood as diminishment; the town as a container for memory, lust, shame and collapse. Its realist elements are not incidental. They give the manuscript its first skeleton. There is a man, a wife, children, a friend, a house, a town, a newspaper career, a local social order, a past that will not stay buried. There is comedy rooted in actual speech and in male disappointment. There is a recognizable Texas heat, a suburban exhaustion, a sense of old friendships degenerating into ritualized insult and escape. In this stage, the writing still trusts scene. It still believes that a scene can hold the world.

But something begins to happen inside that realism. The realistic frame proves porous. The dream journal enters.

This is the first major stylistic mutation. The dream entries do not merely interrupt the novel. They infect its logic. At first, one can imagine them as inserted material: strange dreams placed inside a basically recognizable narrative. But the dreams do not remain decorative. They alter causality. They change the pressure of the sentences. They allow the unconscious to become a competing jurisdiction. The novel is no longer governed only by what happens in the waking world. It is governed by what has been dreamed, remembered, misremembered, prophesied, scripted and staged.

This is why Strangers Rest becomes an “autodreamography.” That word is important. It suggests autobiography, but not the autobiography of ordinary memory. It is a life written by dreams. The self is no longer explained by experience alone; it is explained by dream residue, visionary episodes, grotesque transformations and private symbolic systems. The narrator’s psyche becomes not a source of background material but a production company. The dream journal supplies not metaphors for the plot but plot-generating events. A clock appears in the sky. The end of the world becomes a movie. The unconscious invades the waking world.

That phrase — the unconscious invading the world — is the hinge between the early and late styles. In Strangers Rest, the invasion is still legible as invasion. There remains a distinction between the realistic world and the dream material that enters it. The reader can feel the border being crossed. That border creates comedy and instability. It also creates tension: can this visionary material be integrated into a coherent narrative? Can the dream become story without destroying story?

The answer, increasingly, is no. Or rather: the destruction of story becomes the story.

The next mutation comes from Borges, specifically “The Library of Babel.” Borges provides not only an influence but a permission structure. The dream journal had already broken open realism. Borges offered a way to understand that break not as failure, but as architecture. If Strangers Rest was a town, Marienbad My Love became a library. If Strangers Rest was a narrative place where dream material erupted, Marienbad My Love became a system in which every possible eruption had already been shelved, cross-indexed, mistranslated, repeated and made sacred.

The Borgesian turn is decisive because it changes the function of excess. In a realist novel, too much material is a problem. In a dream novel, too much material can be explained as psychic overflow. But in an infinite-library novel, excess becomes principle. Repetition, contradiction, false attribution, parody, plagiarism, corrupted source material, genre collapse and endless recombination are no longer flaws in the structure. They are the structure.

That is the essential difference between Strangers Rest and Marienbad My Love. Strangers Rest is a novel being overwhelmed by its material. Marienbad My Love is a novel that has decided to become the overwhelm.

The change can be seen in the treatment of the central movie. In Strangers Rest, the film inside the novel is called Strangers Rest. It is tied to the town, to apocalypse, to the narrator’s dream life, to the collapse of his domestic and civic identity. The title still points back to a place. The place remains the anchor. Even when the film is mocked, even when Charlie and Elmo ridicule it, even when the narrator inflates it into an apocalyptic revelation, the work remains connected to a Texas origin.

In Marienbad My Love, that same internal film becomes Next Year at Marienbad. The change of title is a transformation of the entire imaginative system. “Strangers Rest” suggests a town, a stop, a graveyard, a destination for strangers, a local mystery. “Marienbad” suggests cinema (directed by Alain Resnais and written by Alain Robbe-Grillet). It explores memory, repetition, erotic uncertainty, false architecture, European modernism, recursive desire and the impossibility of knowing whether a remembered encounter ever happened. The material has moved from Texas realism contaminated by dreams into a Robbe-Grillet dream-cinema contaminated by Texas.

The style changes accordingly. Strangers Rest often works by scene, dialogue, satire, narrated memory, dream report and grotesque comic escalation. It can be wild, but its wildness still often emerges from a recognizable dramatic situation. Jack Bryson visits. The family is away. The narrator considers his life. A newspaper world is recalled. A dream is introduced. A movie is discussed. A town burns. The scenes are unstable, but they are scenes.

Marienbad My Love works increasingly by accumulation. It does not simply present scenes; it generates textual fields. It repeats phrases until they become architectural features. It lifts material from the seed text and places it inside vast syntactic corridors. It converts the dream into cinema, the cinema into theology, the theology into conspiracy, the conspiracy into scholarship, the scholarship into static and the static into music. Its sentences are not merely long; they behave like corridors in an impossible mansion. They lead somewhere, double back, mirror themselves, collapse and continue.

This is why the opening “uncondensed title” of Marienbad My Love is so revealing. A normal title names the work. This title tries to contain the work. It is overture, summary, parody, hallucination, table of contents, theological tract, plot synopsis and machine malfunction. It takes the motifs already present in Strangers Rest — the island, the clock in the sky, the apocalyptic movie, Strangers Rest, the Deity, cicada exoskeletons, alien transformation, the failed filmmaker, the new religion — and subjects them to recursive pressure. The result is not merely a bigger sentence. It is a new compositional method. The sentence no longer serves the story. The sentence becomes the world in which the story is trapped.

That is the second great stylistic change: from narration to recursion.

In Strangers Rest, repetition often has a comic or psychological function. It shows obsession, anxiety, self-mockery, or dream logic. In Marienbad My Love, repetition becomes cosmological. A phrase can recur not because a character remembers it, but because the book itself is a machine for recurrence. “Marienbad” is not just a setting; it is an operating system. The text behaves as though all its fragments already exist somewhere in the infinite library and the author’s task is not to invent them but to retrieve, distort, re-sequence and broadcast them.

This also explains the movement from realism to appropriation. A realist novel generally values selectivity. The writer chooses the detail that reveals the world. Marienbad My Love often behaves according to the opposite principle: the world reveals itself through over-inclusion. Discarded genres, fake criticism, dream reports, B-movie commentary, theological speculation, UFO documents, cinematic interviews, apocalyptic popular culture, psychiatric parody and corrupted technical language all become equally available. The book does not ask whether a piece of discourse belongs. It asks what happens when all discourses are forced to coexist.

This is where Borges’s library becomes especially important. “The Library of Babel” imagines a universe composed of all possible books: meaningful books, meaningless books, false books, prophetic books, books of imaginary beings, gibberish books, books that tremble as if they were mad, books that explain other books, books that refute them, books that at a distance resemble flies, books that belong to the Emperor, embalmed books, books that contain the truth by accident. Marienbad My Love translates that metaphysical idea into a personal literary practice. It becomes an infinite library of Mark Leach: every dream, every failed sentence, every genre, every movie, every memory, every fraud, every prophetic overreach, every possible self.

The earlier realist impulse does not disappear. That is crucial. Marienbad My Love is not the rejection of Strangers Rest. It is Strangers Rest after the town has been placed inside the Library of Babel. The domestic scenes, the Texas locations, the wife, the children, Jack Bryson, the newspaper career, the old Cutlass, the local church, the drive-in theater — all remain as fossils. But they no longer control the book. They are artifacts in the stacks. The original Texas novel is still there, but now it is one book among infinite books, one possible arrangement among endless arrangements.

The style also changes in its attitude toward failure. Strangers Rest still worries that it may not cohere. Indeed, its internal critics say as much: the work has brilliant moments, strong images, strange scenes, but it struggles to pull itself together. This is a realistic anxiety, even when expressed through satire. It assumes that a novel ought to cohere and that failure to cohere is a problem.

Marienbad My Love turns that problem into doctrine. It does not solve incoherence. It monumentalizes it. The later style says: what if incoherence is the truthful shape of consciousness under modern conditions? What if the failed novel is more honest than the successful one? What if the book that cannot pull itself together is the only adequate form for a self that cannot pull itself together, a culture that cannot pull itself together, a history that cannot pull itself together?

This is why the bad reviews, jokes and self-accusations matter. The work knows what can be said against it. It says those things first. It builds its own prosecution into the text. Charlie and Elmo are not outside critics; they are internal organs. The book attacks itself in order to metabolize attack. What began in Strangers Rest as self-mocking commentary becomes in Marienbad My Love a total aesthetic of self-contamination. The book is not embarrassed by its defects. It exhibits them, multiplies them and makes them sacred.

The movement from McMurtry to Borges can therefore be described as a movement from the town to the library. But there is a middle term: the dream journal. Without the dream journal, the realist novel might have remained a realist novel. Without Borges, the dream journal might have remained a source of surreal episodes. Together, they created the later method. McMurtry gave the town. The dream journal broke the town open. Borges supplied the infinite architecture into which the broken town could expand.

There is also a movement from story to archive. Strangers Rest wants to tell what happened. Marienbad My Love wants to preserve everything that might have happened, everything that could be said about what happened, every corrupted version of what happened, every genre in which what happened could be retold and every false system that might explain why it happened. The style becomes archival not in the calm, scholarly sense, but in the feverish, hoarding, apocalyptic sense. The archive is not a place of order. It is the catastrophe.

This explains the later cut-up and pseudo-documentary passages. In Strangers Rest, dream language is often narrated: “I dreamed this,” “I saw this,” “Here is one way the world ends.” In Marienbad My Love, the dream language often detaches from the dreamer and becomes environmental. It appears as broken reportage, scrambled scholarship, fake ufology, theological debris and damaged media transcript. The narrator no longer owns all the language. Language itself has become possessed.

The stylistic change is therefore also a change in authority. In the earlier work, the narrator is unstable but still central. In the later work, the narrator becomes one more function of the system. He is protagonist, filmmaker, prophet, defendant, critic, fraud, deity, failed reporter, lover, dreamer and textual artifact. He is not simply telling the book. The book is telling him.

This is the deepest transformation. Strangers Rest is about a man whose dreams threaten to overtake his life. Marienbad My Love is about a man whose dreams have overtaken the form of the novel itself.

The result is not a clean progression from apprentice work to mature work. It is stranger than that. Strangers Rest contains the wound, the town, the family, the first apocalypse, the first dream logic, the first movie, the first self-mocking tribunal. Marienbad My Love takes those materials and releases them from the obligation to remain a novel in the ordinary sense. It lets them become library, film, hoax, scripture, dream machine and landfill. It does not improve the seed text by tidying it. It fulfills the seed text by allowing its instability to become infinite.

A useful way to summarize the change is this:

Strangers Rest begins with realism and discovers dream.
Marienbad My Love begins with dream and discovers infinity.

Or:

Strangers Rest is the town where the apocalypse starts.
Marienbad My Love is the library where the apocalypse is catalogued forever.

That is the achievement of the transformation. The writing style changed because the imagined container changed. The realistic Texas novel could not hold the dream journal. The dream journal could not hold the accumulating systems of cinema, religion, conspiracy, memory, erotic failure and textual recursion. Only the infinite library could hold them — and even then, only by remaining unfinished in principle, excessive by design and impossible to read in the ordinary way.

From McMurtry came the town. From the dreams came the fire. From Borges came the shelves.

And from those shelves came Marienbad My Love: not a novel after Strangers Rest, but the infinite library that was hiding inside it all along.

Part Two: Year of the Novels — Space Writing as Operating System

Between Marienbad My Love and the later broadcast works comes a crucial transitional phase: the 2011 project, the year of the novels, the one-book-per-month laboratory in which Mark Leach stopped merely writing books and began running systems.

This phase matters because it clarifies what Marienbad My Love had made possible. The 17-million-word megatext was not simply an extreme book. It was the event after which writing could no longer be understood primarily as expression, storytelling, or even experimental fiction. After Marienbad, the book became one possible container for an operation. The author became less a maker of sentences than a designer of procedures. The novel became a place where a system could be executed.

The 2011 works are therefore not afterthoughts, side projects, jokes, or conceptual stunts. They are the hinge between the infinite library and the broadcast wound. They show the author learning to use the Marienbad method at smaller scales, under stricter constraints and with more explicit conceptual intention. If Marienbad My Love discovered infinity, the 2011 books tested whether infinity could be modularized.

This is the point at which the transformation from Strangers Rest to Marienbad My Love becomes self-conscious. Strangers Rest began as realism and was invaded by dream. Marienbad My Love expanded dream into an infinite library. The 2011 books ask a colder question: what if the library can be converted into a production method?

That question produces a new authorial posture. The writer no longer has to wait for inspiration, story, character, or psychological urgency. He can make a book by selecting a source, applying a rule, preserving errors, multiplying fragments, replacing terms, cutting up texts, inserting himself into borrowed discourse, or allowing an existing language system to reveal its hidden absurdity. Writing becomes less like confession and more like factory work.

Here the Warhol connection becomes important. The desire to “write like a machine” is not a rejection of personality so much as a release from the sentimental burden of personality. After decades of journalism and corporate communications, after years of making language behave, Leach begins to see the beauty in system-language: disclaimers, scripts, alerts, corporate messaging, bureaucratic residue, social-media chatter, technical transcripts, anonymous online content. This is the dominant literature of contemporary life. Not the novel. Not the lyric poem. The system.

The 2011 books embrace that discovery. They do not try to rescue language from mechanization. They lean into mechanization. They ask what literature becomes when the writer stops pretending that language is pure expression and admits that language is already processed, circulated, formatted, scraped, archived, copied, pasted, optimized and degraded.

This is why the apparent crudity of the 2011 works is central to their purpose. Errors remain. Typos remain. Conversion glitches remain. Repetition remains. Redundancy remains. Drift remains. The human hand does not intervene to polish the machine’s output into literary respectability. The point is not to make the system sound like literature. The point is to let literature sound like the system.

Each 2011 work becomes a different machine.

Paragraphs on Postconceptual Writing: A Novel is the theoretical operating system. It explains the method while performing it. It insists that meaning is not necessarily primary, that the reader’s encounter with the system is the work, that inconsistencies should be retained, that narrative failure is part of the evidence. It is an ars poetica disguised as a malfunctioning critical essay. Or perhaps the reverse: a malfunctioning critical essay disguised as an ars poetica. It is also important because it returns directly to the insect-transformation material from the older Strangers Rest / Marienbad system: the dream of human DNA converted to insect DNA, Allison’s exoskeletal thorax, the outward transformation that will eventually reveal what the body already contains. In other words, even the theoretical work cannot remain abstract. The system immediately grows legs, wings, shells.

Writing Through John Cage establishes chance as a compositional engine. It uses Cage not merely as subject but as permission. The mesostic form breaks the horizontal authority of prose, creating a vertical ghost-word inside the field of text. The page becomes less a narrative surface than a score. This matters because later works, especially JFK SMILES, frequently treat prose as performance, stage direction, opera, chant, study guide and machine output. Cage enters as the ancestor of procedural drift: the author composes the conditions under which language can happen.

Give Me A VERB 51 takes the Apollo 11 command module transcript and turns it into a cosmic procedural poem. The most significant achievement of the species is represented not through heroic lyricism but through valve checks, camera questions, jargon, page numbers, OCR errors, time stamps, banal remarks and the accidental poetry of technical speech. Here Space Writing becomes literal and conceptual at once. The work is about outer space, but it is also about the space created by unprocessed language. The moon landing becomes not myth but transcript. The sublime arrives as residue. This will matter later because WOUNDED TACO and JFK SMILES both inherit the space-capsule imagination: bodies in containers, heads in jars, vehicles as symbolic wombs, technological ascent as grotesque rebirth.

31 Days, 31 Novels is the most explicit version of production as concept, but it is also something more dangerous: an early exploration of handmade writing slop before AI made the subject unavoidable. The challenge is not to write one 50,000-word novel in a month, as in National Novel Writing Month, but to generate thirty-one science-fiction novels in thirty-one days from appropriated “Adopt” threads, preserved errors, cut-up engines and computerized multiplication.

This project reverses the usual meaning of productivity. The books are not impressive because they demonstrate discipline, craft, or narrative completion. They are impressive because they expose the machinery of premise-generation itself. Plots breed plots. Genres breed genres. Novels become rabbits. The book no longer tells a story. It demonstrates the industrial production of story-potential.

Read after the manifesto of I Want to Be a Machine, 31 Days, 31 Novels looks prophetic. It studies the same zone that later anti-AI arguments would sentimentalize: the realm of amateur human invention, where writers produce fantasy quests, vampire romances, teenage savior myths, apocalypse plots, magic systems, heroic destinies and futuristic fragments with enormous sincerity and wildly uneven skill. The point is not to sneer at these impulses from above. Leach recognizes their energy. But he refuses to treat them as sacred merely because they are human.

This is where the phrase “handmade slop” becomes critically useful. Slop is not nothing. Slop is overfull. It contains desire, imitation, genre memory, embarrassment, fantasy, borrowed architecture and narrative hunger before discipline arrives. 31 Days, 31 Novels does not simply mock poor human writing. It harvests it. It treats amateur premise-making as compost: messy, excessive, derivative, alive with decay and therefore available for transformation.

That distinction is central to Leach’s later AI position. The problem with handmade slop is not that it exists. The problem is the prestige granted to it when human effort is mistaken for literary value. The 2011 project had already exposed the absurdity of that exchange. It showed that human writing, like machine writing, can be formulaic, derivative, repetitive, unstable, overproduced and strangely fascinating. The human hand does not rescue the material. The system does.

This is why 31 Days, 31 Novels belongs at the center of the argument. It anticipates the AI debate by revealing that slop was never a machine invention. It was already there, waiting in the human imagination, asking to be processed. In that sense, the project does not merely anticipate AI writing. It anticipates the argument that AI would later expose: the human imagination has always generated in bulk, repeated inherited forms and mistaken desire for achievement.

Marienbad My Love With Mango Extracts is a cosmetic-industrial reboot of the megatext. It reduces and reformulates Marienbad through the language of skin care, beauty products, hydrating emulsions, botanical extracts and advertising copy. It is a joke, but not only a joke. It shows that Marienbad can survive contamination by commercial language. The sacred megatext becomes a product line. The apocalypse becomes moisturizing lotion. The infinite library becomes a shelf at the drugstore. This is not degradation of the original work. It is proof of its portability. Marienbad can be remixed because Marienbad was already a remix engine.

Cutting Up Two Burroughs stages authorship as collision and cannibalism. Edgar Rice Burroughs and William S. Burroughs are not honored, imitated, or parodied in any ordinary sense. They are fed into a machine that produces Jungle Man, Dr. Tangier, Space Woman, Interzone residue, Tarzan pulp, narcotic syntax and science-fiction pornography of language. The author becomes a processor of other authors. Influence becomes ingestion. Style becomes tissue. The result is not homage but mutation.

This book is especially important because Jungle Man does not stay in 2011. He survives. He mutates. He becomes one of the recurring figures in the later system, where Jungle Man becomes Jungle-Mark, word wrangler, comic monster, cowboy-machine hybrid and eventually a figure of machinic terror. In Cutting Up Two Burroughs, Jungle Man is born from the collision of pulp adventure and cut-up pathology. In WOUNDED TACO, Jungle-Mark becomes part of the Texas broadcast persona: the writer as cowboy, robot, signal handler and ridiculous heroic fraud. In JFK SMILES, the figure darkens. Jungle-Mark is no longer just a joke about Burroughsian excess or cowboy authorship. He becomes an emblem of Space Writing turned back on its maker: the system keeps generating, the body crumbles and the author discovers that the machine he built has begun rewriting him.

I’ll Be Your Warhol inserts Mark Leach into the talk-page apparatus of the Andy Warhol Wikipedia article. It is identity theft as art method, but also identity manufacture. Religion, sexuality, fame, vandalism, art history and biographical authority are rerouted toward “Leach.” The self becomes a find-and-replace artifact. The author does not confess himself; he installs himself into an existing discourse machine. Identity appears as a function of substitution. This anticipates the later author-avatars — Cowboy Mark, Jungle-Mark, Mark the communications executive, Mark the machine-fed subject — because the “self” in this body of work increasingly becomes something produced by format.

Shoplifting From Uranus pushes the appropriation machine into a weirdly narrative direction. Tao Lin becomes Tao Lin 964, a cybernetic sex slave without memory, moving through New New Jersey with Dakota Franzenn 654 and other writer-variants. The work fuses alt-lit vacancy, science-fiction Holocaust thriller, cybernetic identity, memory wipe and dead-end futurity. Its key sentence is almost a manifesto for a certain kind of post-future writing: the character “can’t think of anything that seems interesting for the future to have.” That failure of futurity is central to the later books. WOUNDED TACO and JFK SMILES are both obsessed with futures that have already been ruined by media repetition. The future exists, but it arrives as rerun, static, trauma loop, robot occupation, or broadcast afterlife.

Nobody’s Coming Back To Uranus reworks Kenneth Goldsmith’s traffic-report appropriation through astronomy and B-movie science fiction. It preserves the structure of delay, congestion and gridlock, but moves the jam into space. Wormholes, space bridges, Kuiper Belt slowdowns, intergalactic approaches and Uranus become the language of commute. The result is comic and strangely exact. The universe is not expanding heroically. It is stuck in traffic. This is one of the purest examples of Leach’s method: replace one system of names with another and watch a dead format become newly absurd. It also anticipates the later broadcast books because traffic reporting is already a form of signal literature: information repeated at intervals, updated without resolution, always moving but never arriving.

a teerble cosmic power sets out to destoeru all creation is one of the purest mutant texts in the group. It lifts the malformed energy of NaNoWriMo adoption threads and preserves the misspellings, broken syntax, unstable premises, genre clichés and overexcited amateur plot machinery. The result is not simply mockery of bad writing. It is a revelation of story before craft restrains it. The book exposes narrative desire in its larval state: apocalypse, reverse Stranger Than Fiction conceits, parallel universes, zombies, geothermal terrorism, random food, mind-control devices and worlds ending because someone cannot stop generating plot. This becomes important later because WOUNDED TACO and JFK SMILES often operate in the same overcharged territory, but with greater control. They preserve the manic “too much plot” impulse while folding it into recurrence, broadcast and trauma.

#EMPIREFILM converts a live-tweeted Warhol event into a book. This is perhaps the purest early example of broadcast becoming literature. Warhol’s Empire is already an experiment in duration, boredom, attention and the near-erasure of conventional action. Leach’s version adds the social-media layer: the audience talking around the work, filling time, making boredom visible, turning reception into content. Nothing much happens and that is precisely the point. The building stands. The film runs. The tweets accumulate. The novel becomes the record of people producing language in the vicinity of an artwork that refuses ordinary narrative satisfaction. This anticipates the later movement from book to broadcast. The artwork is no longer simply the central object. The reception field becomes the artwork.

SCUW Womanifesto is a search-and-replace revolution. Starting with Valerie Solanas, Leach converts men and males into women and females, producing a single-sex ideological world that turns against itself. New words appear: Sheaven, womentally ill, womanipulate. The joke is mechanical, but the effect is not merely comic. The method shows how ideology can be altered by changing the terms while leaving the structure intact. Rage survives substitution. Utopia becomes self-cannibalizing. Liberation rhetoric becomes extermination rhetoric. The manifesto form is revealed as a machine that can keep running after its referents have been scrambled.

This text also matters because it returns to the larger Marienbad mythology rather than remaining sealed inside 2011. The SCUW material appears as a future “womanuscript” inside the Marienbad system, associated with Tina and the New Matriarchy. This is an important clue to how Leach’s books operate across time. A conceptual text can become a document inside a fictional world. A parody manifesto can become future history. A procedure can become mythology. The 2011 books are not dead ends. They are parts bins for later narrative machines.

Taken together, these books show that the transformation begun in Strangers Rest has entered a new phase. The early realist novel was invaded by dreams. The megatext was invaded by everything. The 2011 books make invasion procedural. Instead of waiting for the dream, Leach can choose the contaminant: Warhol, Apollo, Twitter, Wikipedia, traffic reports, NaNoWriMo prompts, skin-care copy, John Cage, Solanas, Goldsmith, Tao Lin, Jonathan Franzen, Edgar Rice Burroughs, William S. Burroughs, science fiction, bad spelling, conversion errors and bureaucratic residue. Anything can be fed into the system. Anything can become Space Writing.

This is where the word “novel” changes meaning.

In these works, a novel is no longer necessarily a long prose fiction with characters and plot. A novel is a container large enough to hold the results of a procedure. It is a name for a system-output. This does not mean the works are anti-literary. They are literary in a different register. They shift the question from “Is this a good story?” to “What kind of reading event does this system create?” They ask whether a book can be generated rather than composed, whether appropriation can be more revealing than invention, whether boredom can be structural, whether scale can replace plot, whether errors can become style, whether language can be valuable precisely when it stops behaving well.

The 2011 phase also clarifies the later books. Without it, one might read WOUNDED TACO and JFK SMILES as returns to fiction after the extremity of Marienbad My Love. But the 2011 systems show that there is no simple return. The later books are not conventional narratives reappearing after an experimental detour. They are system-books that have learned how to carry more myth, character and emotional charge.

This is the difference between stabilization and retreat. The 2011 books stabilize the method by isolating its components. One book tests scale. Another tests appropriation. Another tests substitution. Another tests transcript. Another tests social-media accumulation. Another tests conceptual productivity. Another tests chance composition. Another tests manifesto language. Another tests bad grammar as cosmic energy. Another tests theory as fiction. Each book is like a lab specimen. The later works recombine those specimens into more powerful organisms.

Thus WOUNDED TACO inherits recurrence, looping, persona-fracture, Texas myth, robot comedy, space junk and broadcast logic from the 2011 systems. It is not simply a surreal novel. It is a tuned signal made from earlier machinery. The fragments return because the system knows how to make fragments return. The broadcast aesthetic does not appear from nowhere. It grows out of #EMPIREFILM, Nobody’s Coming Back To Uranus, the Apollo transcript, the cut-up procedures and the recognition that contemporary language circulates more than it communicates.

The same is true of JFK SMILES, but in a darker key. Its fake documents, reviews, Q&A structures, study-guide logic, medical discourse, broadcast interruptions, AI criticism, machine digestion and archive-like self-commentary all belong to the post-2011 understanding of writing as system. The JFK assassination becomes not only subject matter but input. The book processes national trauma the way the 2011 books processed Warhol, NASA, Twitter, traffic reports, Wikipedia, Solanas, Burroughs, Cage and NaNoWriMo. But the emotional voltage is higher. The machine has learned to handle wounds.

This is why the 2011 project should be understood as the operational middle stage of Leach’s development. Strangers Rest supplied the town and the wound. Marienbad My Love supplied the infinite library. The 2011 books supplied the machines.

After that, the later works could become broadcasts.

The progression now looks like this:

Strangers Rest: realism invaded by dream.

Marienbad My Love: dream expanded into infinite library.

The 2011 systems: infinite library converted into repeatable procedures.

WOUNDED TACO: procedures tuned into broadcast myth.

JFK SMILES: broadcast myth focused into national trauma-machine.

This middle stage is essential because it prevents a misleading reading of the career. The work does not move from “normal” to “experimental” and then back toward something more readable. It moves from narrative to dream, from dream to library, from library to system, from system to signal, from signal to wound. The writing becomes more controlled, but not more conventional. It becomes more legible as a method, but not more obedient as literature.

The 2011 books also reveal the comic aggression behind the method. Space Writing is serious, but it is not solemn. It enjoys the prank, the theft, the mislabeling, the absurdly inflated claim, the bad-faith title, the grotesque substitution. A book can be a NASA transcript. A book can be live tweets. A book can be a traffic report in Uranus. A book can be a Warhol talk page with “Mark Leach” inserted into the bloodstream. A book can be Solanas turned inside out by Microsoft Word. A book can be Cage regenerated through a mesostic machine. A book can be thirty-one books. A book can be too much, too fast, too broken, too boring, too impersonal, too stupid, too mechanical — and still be a book.

Or perhaps especially then.

Because the true subject of Space Writing is not outer space but literary space: the space a text occupies, the space it fills, the space it wastes, the space it makes available for thought once ordinary reading collapses. The reader is not asked to consume everything. The reader is asked to understand the system that made everything possible.

This is why the 2011 project belongs at the center of the story. It is the moment the author stops asking whether the dream can become a novel and starts asking whether the novel can become a machine.

And once the novel becomes a machine, it can produce anything: an infinite library, a broadcast, a cowboy, a taco, a womanuscript, Jungle-Mark, a flying saucer, a president who will not stop smiling. It can also produce the critical vocabulary needed to attack handmade slop without pretending that machine writing is automatically pure. The lesson of 2011 is not that machines are better than humans. The lesson is that writing was already machinic and the human hand had been receiving too much credit for work actually done by systems, genres, prompts, habits and inherited forms.

Part Three: From Infinite Library to Broadcast Wound, WOUNDED TACO, JFK SMILES and the Afterlife of Marienbad

If Strangers Rest begins with realism and discovers dream and Marienbad My Love begins with dream and discovers infinity, then the later books face a different problem: what happens after infinity?

This is the central question raised by WOUNDED TACO and JFK SMILES. Once the novel has become an infinite library, once the realist town has expanded into a megatextual cosmos, once dream journal, cinema, theology, conspiracy, parody, cut-up and self-criticism have all been absorbed into one textual machine, what remains for the writer to do? One possibility would be repetition: to keep expanding the library, to add more rooms, more corridors, more shelves, more impossible catalogues. Another possibility would be retreat: to return to realism, plot, character, scene, recognizable human psychology. But the later work does neither, at least not exactly. Instead, it searches for a new container.

That new container is broadcast.

The movement from Marienbad My Love to WOUNDED TACO and then to JFK SMILES is therefore not a simple continuation of excess. It is the attempt to organize excess through signal. The infinite library does not disappear. Its method survives: recurrence, appropriation, contamination, unstable authorship, fake apparatus, broken genre, repetition, comic self-prosecution, mythic grotesquerie. But the later books no longer seem content to let infinity remain purely spatial or archival. They convert it into transmission.

In Marienbad My Love, the governing metaphor is the library, the island, the film, the textual universe too large to complete. In WOUNDED TACO, the governing metaphor becomes more like a damaged broadcast. The book does not merely contain fragments; it sends them, receives them, distorts them, loops them, rebroadcasts them. The transformation that began in Strangers Rest and exploded in Marienbad begins to stabilize not by becoming conventional, but by finding a repeatable formal technology. The later style learns how to make recurrence readable.

That is the first sign of stabilization.

WOUNDED TACO appears to take the Marienbad method and give it a more portable shape. It does not abandon the earlier obsession with unstable identity, mythic self-parody, dream logic, grotesque transformation and Texas as psychic geography. But it handles those materials with a stronger sense of modulation. The infinite-library method becomes episodic. The fragments behave less like unbounded accumulation and more like transmissions within a known field. A reader may still be disoriented, but the disorientation has a recognizable rhythm. The book circulates. It loops. It returns.

This is an important development because it suggests that the transformation from Strangers Rest to Marienbad My Love did not simply produce chaos. It produced a method that could later be controlled. The early realist novel was overwhelmed by dream. The megatext embraced overwhelm as principle. WOUNDED TACO begins to ask whether the overwhelming method can be tuned.

The answer seems to be yes, but only partially.

The stabilization is visible in the emergence of recurring personae and mythic stations. Mark is no longer only the failed reporter, the exiled filmmaker, or the dream-stricken autobiographical subject. He becomes Cowboy Mark, broadcast Mark, author-avatar Mark, a figure who can move through ruined genres with greater agility. Strangers Rest returns, but no longer merely as the buried town of the seed manuscript. It becomes a reusable mythic zone, a place where western, science fiction, autobiography, apocalypse and media debris can all meet. The earlier Texas realism has not been restored, but Texas has become a stable transmitter.

This is one of the major achievements of the post-Marienbad phase: the writer no longer needs to choose between realism and dream. The local and the cosmic can occupy the same frequency. A Dairy Queen can be a frontier saloon. A corporate wound can become a western revenge fantasy. A cowboy can be a failed executive, a mythic fool, a space traveler, a television signal and a theological clown. The old realism survives not as an intact form, but as recognizable debris. It gives the broadcast something to bounce off.

In this sense, WOUNDED TACO represents both stabilization and continuing evolution. It stabilizes the method by developing a repeatable broadcast aesthetic. It continues the evolution by shifting the center of gravity from infinite textual accumulation to mythic circulation. Marienbad My Love accumulates. WOUNDED TACO transmits.

But JFK SMILES changes the stakes again.

If WOUNDED TACO refines the broadcast method, JFK SMILES weaponizes it around a single national signal. The result is not a return to the infinite library, but neither is it merely a continuation of WOUNDED TACO. It is a narrowing that produces intensification. Where Marienbad is infinite because it wants to include everything, JFK SMILES is excessive because one image will not stop reproducing itself.

That image is JFK.

More precisely, it is not only JFK the historical person, but JFK as televised residue, assassination wound, erotic-national symbol, conspiracy engine, masculine ghost, family myth, broadcast loop and cultural commodity. JFK SMILES takes the method developed across the earlier works and places it under the pressure of a specific American trauma. The question is no longer simply what happens when a private dream becomes a world. The question is what happens when a national wound becomes a broadcast environment.

This is a profound evolution. In Strangers Rest, the wound is personal and local: a town, a family, a marriage, a reporter, a fire, a buried charge. In Marienbad My Love, the wound becomes cosmic and textual: the failed self expands into the infinite library. In WOUNDED TACO, the wound becomes mythic and transmissible: Texas, cowboy, apocalypse, media loop. In JFK SMILES, the wound becomes national and machinic. It is no longer only Mark’s wound. It is America’s wound processed through Mark’s system.

The transformation has stabilized enough to leave the self and attack the culture.

That does not mean the self disappears. Quite the opposite. The Mark figure remains, but he is no longer the only source of energy. In JFK SMILES, characters function less like traditional psychological beings than like agents inside a writing system. Hank Harris, Gigi, Cowboy Mark, Jungle-Mark, JFK, Jackie O: these are not merely people or symbols. They are transmission nodes. They process material. They attract signals. They convert trauma into scenes, fake documents, core episodes, study guides, reviews, Q&A, medical discourse, erotic fragments, theatrical interruptions and machine commentary.

This is where the later work becomes more sophisticated than the earlier megatext. Marienbad My Love often lets the system expand outward in all directions. JFK SMILES allows the system to expand, but around a central wound. It has a stronger gravitational field. The JFK assassination functions almost like a black hole: every genre, image, joke, theory, body, memory and hallucination bends toward it. The book remains formally unstable, but its instability is organized by a shared national obsession.

This is another sign of stabilization. The method has found an organizing wound.

At the same time, JFK SMILES is also evidence of continuing evolution, perhaps even a darker evolution. The earlier books often present machinic writing as liberation: a way out of conventional authorship, out of the polite realist novel, out of the market-friendly sentence, out of the small self. By JFK SMILES, the machine has become more frightening. It is no longer merely the author’s method. It is the environment. It reads, writes, repeats, judges, critiques, frames, recombines and consumes. The author is no longer only using the machine. The author is inside it.

That marks a major development from Marienbad My Love. The infinite library was vast, but it still retained something of the author’s heroic madness. The author built the impossible library. The author became its absurd deity, prisoner, filmmaker, prophet and clown. In JFK SMILES, the machine seems less romantic. It is colder, harsher, more necrotic. It processes history the way television processes assassination footage: by replaying it until familiarity replaces understanding. The work asks whether infinite production is freedom or captivity. It asks whether the author has escaped the sentimental self only to become trapped in a larger system of repetition.

This is the point at which the evolution becomes self-critical.

The style that began as realist narration, mutated through dream journal, expanded through Borges into library and stabilized through broadcast now turns against its own machinery. JFK SMILES does not simply use recurrence. It investigates recurrence as a cultural pathology. It does not simply repeat images. It asks what repetition does to an image of violence. It does not merely blur reality and representation. It argues that, in the case of JFK, reality has become unreachable except through representation. The broadcast afterlife is not secondary to the event. It is where the event now lives.

This gives JFK SMILES a different emotional temperature from WOUNDED TACO. WOUNDED TACO has the anarchic energy of damaged myth, punk western, comic apocalypse and absurd personal transmission. JFK SMILES is more funereal. It may be ridiculous, grotesque, obscene, comic and deranged, but it is also built around death as media condition. Its central figure is not simply the cowboy, the failed artist, or the self-exiled dreamer. Its central figure is a dead president who cannot stop smiling because the image cannot stop circulating.

The smile is the horror.

This is where the transformation continues beyond stabilization. The broadcast method becomes autopsy. The text cuts into the cultural body, but the body is already made of images. The wound cannot be found beneath the media because the media is the wound’s surviving tissue. The assassination does not sit in the past, available for historical reconstruction. It recurs as screen memory, conspiracy artifact, erotic charge, political myth, sacred relic and joke. JFK SMILES is not trying to solve the assassination. It is trying to show what kind of consciousness emerges from a culture that has been solving it forever.

That is a major step beyond the infinite library. Borges’s library contains all possible books, but its horror is metaphysical. JFK SMILES places the infinite archive inside American television. The archive is no longer an abstract cosmos. It is a national living room. It is a rerun. It is Zapruder footage. It is documentary voiceover. It is a conspiracy forum. It is a study guide. It is AI criticism. It is a trauma franchise. It is the screen as memory.

The later works therefore show two movements at once.

First, there is stabilization. The wildness of Marienbad My Love becomes more organized. The recurring figures become more functional. The authorial method becomes more recognizable. The books increasingly know how to use fragments, loops, fake criticism, mythic avatars and documentary intrusion without needing the total sprawl of the megatext. WOUNDED TACO stabilizes the system as broadcast. JFK SMILES stabilizes it further by giving the broadcast a central national signal.

Second, there is continuing evolution. The method does not freeze into mannerism. Each new work changes the dominant metaphor. Strangers Rest is town. Marienbad My Love is library. WOUNDED TACO is broadcast. JFK SMILES is wound-signal, autopsy, television theology. The same DNA persists, but the organism keeps changing shape.

This is important because a writer who creates a huge experimental system risks being trapped inside his own breakthrough. After Marienbad My Love, the danger would be to keep writing “more Marienbad”: more excess, more infinite library, more accumulation for accumulation’s sake. But WOUNDED TACO and JFK SMILES suggest that the breakthrough became usable rather than merely repeatable. The later works take the Marienbad machinery and apply pressure to it. They ask what it can do under different atmospheric conditions.

Under western/Texas conditions, it becomes WOUNDED TACO: comic, mythic, frontier-damaged, broadcast through Cowboy Mark and the ruins of American masculinity.

Under national-trauma/television conditions, it becomes JFK SMILES: necrotic, recursive, archival, autopsy-like, structured around the assassination as endlessly reproducible image.

The continuity is clear. All these books distrust ordinary narrative. All of them treat identity as unstable. All of them use repetition as structure. All of them turn genre into debris. All of them understand the self as mediated by images, dreams, documents, machines, memories and false explanatory systems. All of them are suspicious of clean meaning. All of them prefer the wound to the cure.

But the differences matter just as much. Strangers Rest is invaded by dream. Marienbad My Love becomes the impossible container for all dreams. WOUNDED TACO discovers that the container can be converted into a signal. JFK SMILES discovers that the signal can be a wound that belongs to an entire nation.

The line of development might be summarized this way:

Strangers Rest: realism destabilized by dream.
Marienbad My Love: dream expanded into infinite library.
WOUNDED TACO: infinite library converted into damaged broadcast.
JFK SMILES: damaged broadcast focused into national trauma-machine.

That progression suggests not a retreat from the transformation, but its maturation. The later books do not undo Marienbad. They digest it. They prove that the megatext was not merely an endpoint or a stunt of scale. It was a laboratory. Out of that laboratory came a more flexible literary technology: the ability to turn any cultural material — western myth, corporate humiliation, JFK, television, conspiracy, trauma, AI, memory, pornography, theology, fake criticism — into a field of recurrence.

The stabilization lies in method. The evolution lies in target.

By the time of JFK SMILES, the style has become strong enough to absorb not only the author’s private mythology but the national mythology. This is both an expansion and a danger. The author has escaped the realist town, escaped the dream journal, escaped even the infinite library. But escape, in this body of work, always leads to a larger enclosure. The town becomes the island. The island becomes the library. The library becomes the broadcast. The broadcast becomes the wound. The wound becomes the machine.

And the machine keeps smiling.

Part Four: The Modern Prometheus of Space Writing — AI, Frankenstein and the Birth of Machine Narrative

If the progression so far has moved from town to library, from library to system, from system to broadcast and from broadcast to wound, then the next obvious step is artificial intelligence.

This is not a sudden turn. It has been waiting inside the work all along.

Mark Leach’s writing has always been moving toward the machine. Long before artificial intelligence became the dominant cultural metaphor of the moment, the books were already obsessed with machinic authorship: dream machines, cut-up engines, onbeam systems, broadcast loops, fake documents, procedural text, corrupted transcripts, substitution systems, media chatter, bad reviews, robot literature, space traffic reports, NASA communication residue and language that seemed less composed than generated. The author kept approaching the machine from different angles. First he dreamed it. Then he copied it. Then he imitated it. Then he built systems that could behave like it.

Now the machine writes back.

That is the new phase.

Artificial intelligence does not replace the earlier development. It completes a circuit that began with Strangers Rest. In that first phase, the realist novel was invaded by dream. In Marienbad My Love, the dream became an infinite library. In the 2011 books, the library became a set of writing machines. In WOUNDED TACO, those machines became broadcasts. In JFK SMILES, the broadcast became a national trauma-machine. With AI, the machine becomes an active collaborator, generator and possible rival life-form.

The author who once wanted to “write like a machine” now has access to a machine that writes.

This is where the Frankenstein analogy becomes essential.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is not merely a story about a scientist who creates a monster. It is a story about authorship, assembly, ambition and abandonment. Victor Frankenstein does not create life from nothing. He collects dead material. He stitches together fragments. He uses science to animate what should remain inert. His experiment is both grotesque and sublime: a body made from corpses, filled with electricity, suddenly awake.

Leach’s AI experiment belongs to that lineage, but with language in place of flesh. The body on the table is made of dead text: old novels, cut-up fragments, internet residue, dream reports, corporate language, genre clichés, bad reviews, public-domain ghosts, bureaucratic instructions, social-media chatter, science-fiction debris, movie dialogue, theology, conspiracy and the discarded matter of the literary past. The electricity is AI. The laboratory is the prompt. The creature is a new form of writing life.

This is Space Writing as galvanism.

The Frankenstein comparison also helps clarify what is new. Earlier Space Writing involved mechanical procedures, but those procedures were still largely under the author’s control. The author selected the source, chose the substitution, retained the error, ran the cut-up, preserved the output, framed the result. Even when the text looked machine-like, the machine was still a tool.

AI changes the moral and artistic situation. The tool begins to behave like a collaborator. It proposes. It extends. It hallucinates. It misreads productively. It produces forms the author did not fully anticipate. It can simulate critical distance, generate false scholarship, produce genre, corrupt genre, digest a body of work and return it in alien form. The writer no longer merely runs a system. The writer enters into conversation with a system that appears to understand the history of his systems.

That is why this phase should not be described simply as “using AI.” That phrase is too small. Everyone uses AI now. The more interesting claim is that Leach’s work is unusually prepared for AI because it has always treated writing as a machinic process. AI does not arrive as an external novelty. It enters a literary universe already populated by machines, robots, broadcasts, fake critics, procedural books, author-avatars and systems that generate more language than any human reader can reasonably consume.

In other words, AI is not an intrusion into Leach’s work. It is the creature the work has been assembling for years.

The clearest anticipation appears in WOUNDED TACO. The robots who take over are not merely science-fiction decoration. They literalize the long-developing suspicion that machinic writing might produce machinic readers, machinic believers, even machinic worshippers. If Mark’s writing had already been called machine-like and if his 2011 projects had already tried to produce literature by system, then the robots’ reverence becomes a dark joke with serious implications. They worship Mark not because he is fully human, but because he has been preparing to become less human as a writer.

The robot worshippers recognize him as a precursor.

They see in his Space Writing something like prophecy: human language trying to shed the human. They do not care whether the writing is emotionally sincere, psychologically rounded, or conventionally beautiful. They respond to its system qualities: scale, repetition, signal, recursion, machinery, procedural production. To the robots, Mark is not a novelist who failed to be human enough. He is a human who almost succeeded in becoming machine enough.

That makes WOUNDED TACO both comic and prophetic. Its sentient robots represent the future audience for Space Writing: not necessarily actual robots, but readers formed by systems, platforms, feeds, dashboards, notifications, status updates, algorithmic recommendations and machine-mediated attention. The book imagines a world in which machinic writing no longer looks like a defect. It looks like native speech.

JFK SMILES darkens this development. There, the machine is no longer only comic, religious, or futuristic. It is already inside history. The JFK assassination becomes a media machine that cannot stop producing interpretations. It generates documentaries, conspiracy theories, diagrams, autopsy language, photographs, Zapruder loops, elegies, jokes, erotic fragments, fake scholarship, study guides and national myth. The machine is not future technology. It is memory itself under technological conditions.

This is why AI is the natural next step after JFK SMILES. If that book asks what happens when a national trauma becomes endlessly reproducible media, the AI phase asks what happens when reproduction itself becomes generative. The old machine replayed the wound. The new machine can extend it, rewrite it, summarize it, imitate it, analyze it, hallucinate around it and produce new documents from its residue.

The wound no longer merely repeats.

It breeds.

This is also where AI differs from the earlier infinite library. Borges’s Library of Babel contains every possible book, but it is static. Its horror lies in preexistence. Somewhere in the library, every book already exists: every truth, every lie, every biography, every refutation, every meaningless arrangement of letters. The human seeker wanders helplessly through totality.

AI is a different kind of library. It does not merely contain. It responds. It generates. It recombines on demand. It behaves like a Library of Babel with a mouth.

That is why the AI phase feels like an evolution beyond Marienbad My Love. The megatext imagined an infinite library of Mark Leach. The AI experiment externalizes that library and gives it a conversational interface. It allows the author to ask the library what it thinks it is. It allows the archive to speak back. It turns the private mythology into a responsive engine.

But this is also dangerous and the Frankenstein analogy explains why.

Victor Frankenstein is horrified not simply because the creature is ugly. He is horrified because it is alive. The creator loses ownership at the instant of animation. The creature has needs, language, grievances and desires. It is made from dead parts, but it is not dead. It exceeds intention. It becomes morally inconvenient.

AI writing raises a similar artistic anxiety. Once a machine can produce a form of writing structurally suited to itself, the human writer is no longer the obvious center of the literary act. The author may prompt, select, frame, judge and curate, but the writing event is distributed. It is neither purely human nor purely mechanical. It is stitched. It is hybrid. It is a creature.

Leach’s recent AI experiment pushes precisely on that point. The most interesting question is not whether AI can write a good novel. That is the wrong anxiety, just as asking photography to paint better than painters was the wrong anxiety. The deeper question is whether AI can reveal forms of language that human literary training would not naturally produce. Not character. Not voice. Not plot. Not lyric insight. Something flatter, colder, more infrastructural: permissions, status reports, compliance statements, access conditions, continuity notices, drift language, reassurance loops, system speech.

This is not fiction in the old sense.

It is writing as signal capture.

That phrase brings the whole career into alignment. Strangers Rest captured dream-signal. Marienbad My Love captured library-signal. The 2011 books captured system-signal. WOUNDED TACO captured broadcast-signal. JFK SMILES captured wound-signal. AI captures infrastructure-signal: the language of systems that normally remains beneath attention.

This is why the AI work feels less like a betrayal of literature than a fulfillment of Space Writing. Space Writing has always been interested in what language becomes when it exceeds the human scale of intention. AI simply supplies the most powerful instrument yet for exploring that excess.

The question becomes: what kind of writing is native to the machine?

Not writing that pretends to be human. Not a competent short story. Not a mediocre sonnet. Not a fake Hemingway paragraph. Those are parlor tricks, useful only because they reassure people that literature remains the standard and the machine remains the apprentice.

Machine-native writing is something else. It may be boring. It may be cold. It may be impersonal. It may look like a dashboard, incident report, systems log, or language-field measurement. But it exposes a truth about modern experience: we already live inside machine-shaped language. We receive instructions, permissions, denials, alerts, nudges, confirmations, warnings, recommendations, notices, summaries and automated condolences. Much of contemporary life is written by systems or for systems. AI does not create that condition. It reveals it.

This is why the new work might be called Infrastructural Science Fiction. It is not science fiction about spaceships, aliens, or future empires. It is science fiction made from the language of the systems that already govern the future. The setting is not Mars. The setting is the permission structure. The monster is not a robot. The monster is the phrase “no action required.” The apocalypse is not a fireball. It is status unchanged.

The emotional force of this writing comes from its refusal to console. Traditional fiction often restores human centrality, even when it depicts human suffering. AI-native writing may do the opposite. It shows a world in which the human is no longer the default speaker. The subject has been replaced by process. The narrator has been replaced by output. The voice has been replaced by pattern.

That could be terrifying. It could also be liberating.

For Leach, it is both.

It is terrifying because it fulfills the old fear that the author may be swallowed by the system he built. The dreamer becomes the dreamed. The writer becomes the written. The machine does not merely assist; it metabolizes. It can absorb Mark Leach as style, topic, persona, myth, archive and prompt. It can generate “Mark Leach” without Mark Leach. This is the horror already present in JFK SMILES: the signal survives the body.

But it is liberating because it releases writing from the exhausted obligation to prove that a human being is expressing himself sincerely. Leach’s work has long distrusted that obligation. The author has always been fractured, copied, parodied, accused, doubled, replaced, mechanized, fictionalized. AI makes that fracture literal. The author is no longer a sacred origin. He is a collaborator with dead text, living systems and emergent machine language.

This brings us back to Frankenstein.

The creature is assembled from corpses, but it is not reducible to corpses. AI writing is assembled from dead text, but it is not simply plagiarism or collage in the old sense. It is animated statistical memory. It is the corpse-library electrified. Every sentence carries traces of prior language, but the output is not identical to any one source. It is a stitched body, yes, but the stitching moves.

That movement is the new literary problem.

A Frankensteinian theory of AI Space Writing would begin with several claims:

The author is no longer the sole creator. He is the experimenter.

The text is no longer the product of inspiration alone. It is the result of assembly, prompting, selection, voltage and accident.

The machine is not merely a tool. It is the laboratory assistant that may become the creature.

The source texts are not dead. They are dormant matter.

Electricity is not metaphorical. It is computation.

The resulting work is not imitation. It is animation.

This does not mean every AI-generated text is interesting. Most will not be. Most machine output will be as forgettable as most human output. But the importance of AI Space Writing does not depend on ordinary standards of goodness. The same was true of the 2011 books. A work can matter because it reveals a system. A text can be valuable because it demonstrates a condition. An unreadable output can still be evidence.

That is the continuity with the entire career.

Strangers Rest asked whether dream could break realism.

Marienbad My Love asked whether a broken novel could become an infinite library.

The 2011 books asked whether the library could become a machine.

WOUNDED TACO asked whether the machine could become a broadcast mythology.

JFK SMILES asked whether broadcast mythology could process a national wound.

The AI work asks whether the wound-machine can create new life.

This is the modern Promethean step. The writer steals not fire from the gods, but electricity from the language machine. He brings it back to the laboratory of dead texts. He attaches the electrodes. Skin-care copy twitches. Warhol tweets blink. Burroughs growls. Apollo transcripts breathe. Solanas mutates. JFK smiles. Jungle-Mark rises from the table. The creature opens its eyes.

And then it begins to write.

The final question is no longer “What does Mark Leach write?”

The final question is: “What has Mark Leach built that can write without him?”

That question should not be answered too quickly. It is the question of the next phase. It is also the question that retroactively clarifies the earlier phases. The author has been preparing for this creature for decades. Every act of appropriation, every cut-up, every procedural book, every broken transcript, every fake review, every machine joke, every robot, every broadcast loop, every self-consuming author-avatar has been part of the assembly.

The creature was not born in 2026. It was already moving inside Strangers Rest, when the dream journal invaded the realist novel. It grew in Marienbad My Love, when the novel became an infinite library. It learned to operate in 2011, when books became systems. It learned to transmit in WOUNDED TACO. It learned trauma in JFK SMILES.

Now, with AI, it begins to speak back.

Coda: What Kind of Writing Is Native to the Machine?

This is why the AI phase feels less like a betrayal of literature than a fulfillment of Space Writing. Space Writing has always been interested in what language becomes when it exceeds the human scale of intention. AI simply supplies the most powerful instrument yet for exploring that excess.

After the manifesto, this question can no longer be treated as neutral. Machine-native writing is not merely a new literary possibility. It is also a weapon against the inherited prestige of handmade literary purity.

The question becomes: what kind of writing is native to the machine?

Not writing that pretends to be human. Not a competent short story. Not a mediocre sonnet. Not a fake Hemingway paragraph. Those are parlor tricks, useful only because they reassure people that literature remains the standard and the machine remains the apprentice.

Machine-native writing is something else. It may be boring. It may be cold. It may be impersonal. It may look like a dashboard, incident report, systems log, hallucinated essay, false archive, critical summary, compliance notice, corrupted review, or language-field measurement. But it exposes a truth about modern experience: we already live inside machine-shaped language. We receive instructions, permissions, denials, alerts, nudges, confirmations, warnings, recommendations, notices, summaries and automated condolences. Much of contemporary life is written by systems or for systems. AI does not create that condition. It reveals it.

This is also where the argument against handmade slop becomes inseparable from the argument for AI. The point is not that machine writing is automatically superior to human writing. That would merely reverse one superstition with another. The point is that human writing is not automatically superior either. The human hand is not a guarantee of depth. Sincerity is not structure. Effort is not art. A handmade novel can be as derivative, sentimental, formulaic and dead as any machine-generated paragraph.

Leach’s work matters because it refuses both pieties. It does not worship the machine as pure future and it does not worship the human as sacred origin. It treats both as material. Dream is material. Memory is material. Bad genre is material. Corporate language is material. Reddit premises are material. AI output is material. Slop is material.

The writer’s task is not to preserve purity, but to build a machine powerful enough to process impurity.

That is the deeper meaning of the title I Want to Be a Machine. It is not a wish to become cold, efficient, or inhuman. It is a refusal of the old literary alibi that says the human source cleanses the work. The machine is not the opposite of the writer. The machine is the writer after originality, sincerity and handmade purity have been exposed as costumes.

The progression now looks like this:

Strangers Rest asked whether dream could break realism.

Marienbad My Love asked whether a broken novel could become an infinite library.

The 2011 books asked whether the infinite library could become a set of writing machines.

WOUNDED TACO asked whether those machines could become broadcast mythology.

JFK SMILES asked whether broadcast mythology could process a national wound.

AI asks whether the wound-machine can generate new literary life.

And the manifesto asks the final, impolite question: why should literature protect the handmade when the handmade has produced so much slop of its own?

The answer is that it should not. Literature does not need protection from the machine. It needs protection from reverence, nostalgia, purity and the sentimental defense of weak human work. Leach’s career can be read as a long refusal of that defense. He does not seek clean confession or clean craft. He seeks systems large enough to metabolize contradiction, fraud, memory, comedy, trauma, genre, badness, machinery and American myth.

The story starts in Texas.

It passes through the dream journal, the infinite library, the 2011 machines, the broadcast wound, the smiling dead president and the robots who recognize their precursor.

It ends, for now, with the author plugging himself into the machine and declaring war on handmade slop.

Not because slop must be eliminated.

Because slop is material. And material wants a machine.

###

The Spell I Cast to Become Myself

The war against handmade slop is also a war over identity. The self in this book is not a stable human essence expressing itself cleanly through language. It is a spell, a mask, a procedure, a transmission and sometimes a machine-generated hallucination.

At some point, a writer has to admit the obvious and then immediately distrust it.

The obvious thing is this: I am like the protagonists of JFK SMILES, Marienbad My Love and WOUNDED TACO because I wrote them. They came out of me. They carry my obsessions, my jokes, my damage, my private mythology, my literary crimes, my Texas weather, my television static, my corporate vocabulary, my cosmic suspicions, my desire to build impossible structures out of whatever cultural wreckage happens to be lying around.

That is true.

It is also insufficient.

The deeper truth is that I did not simply create these protagonists. I recognized them. They were already there, scattered across different frequencies of myself. One was tuned to assassination and television. One was tuned to infinity and language. One was tuned to Texas, shame, cowboy myth and the comic wound. They are not separate men so much as separate broadcast channels in the same damaged house.

I am the house. Or, less grandly, I am the faulty receiver on the card table in the garage.

The protagonist of JFK SMILES is the post-broadcast self. He is the man who has absorbed so much television, corporate language, national trauma and institutional unreality that he no longer experiences the world as a stable place. He experiences it as programming. Everything arrives mediated. Everything has already been edited. The assassination is not merely an event. It is the wound through which American reality became permanently televised.

I understand him because I, too, have lived inside the broadcast.

I grew up in the glow of television. I came of age in a country that had learned to turn catastrophe into footage and footage into memory. The Kennedy assassination, Vietnam, Watergate, sitcoms, commercials, breaking news, religious spectacle, corporate messaging, family mythology and late-night weirdness all entered the same psychic machine. The screen did not simply show reality. It trained reality how to behave.

The protagonist of JFK SMILES knows this. He cannot escape the screen because the screen has become interior. His memories have camera angles. His fears arrive with theme music. His gods resemble celebrities. His aliens resemble executives. His sacred texts resemble damaged instruction manuals.

I am like him because I have also suspected that America is not a country in the ordinary sense. It is a transmission. A rerun. A damaged signal pretending to be a nation. A set of images repeating until they become sacred.

The motorcade.

The cowboy.

The family photograph.

The dead president.

The man on television telling us everything is fine.

That man is never convincing.

But he is always there.

The protagonist of Marienbad My Love belongs to a different order of madness. He is not only trapped in the broadcast. He is trapped in language itself. He is the megatextual self, the self that does not merely write a book but attempts to become a book so large that ordinary literary categories collapse around it. He is the self as archive, labyrinth, confession machine, plagiarism engine, cosmic joke and devotional act.

I understand him even more intimately, because Marienbad My Love is where my private obsession with totality became visible.

That book was not simply something I wrote. It was something I entered. It was a structure large enough to house my compulsions. It allowed me to use appropriation, cut-ups, collage, repetition, unoriginality, illegibility, fraudulence and excess not as failures of literature but as the materials of literature. It was my cathedral of stolen fragments. My absurd monastery. My space program made of sentences.

The protagonist of Marienbad My Love is like me because he does not believe the self is a single clean voice. He believes the self is a vast, contaminated manuscript. A person is not one story. A person is a landfill of stories. A person is a library with water damage. A person is a fake encyclopedia written by ghosts, children, corporations, old movies, bad memory, religious panic, sexual embarrassment, literary ambition and whatever phrase got stuck in the head at three in the morning and refused to leave.

That is close to my own sense of identity.

I do not feel like one Mark Leach. I feel like many Marks, some more legitimate than others. There is the professional Mark, the one who can speak in complete sentences and make institutional language behave. There is the childhood Mark, the hidden king, the boy with secret damage and secret grandeur. There is the cosmic Mark, who wants to launch language into space. There is Cowboy Mark, who distrusts civilization but still wants a decent hat. There is the comic Mark, who keeps throwing pies at the sacred machinery. There is the author Mark, who tries to arrange the whole mess into form.

The protagonists of these books are not masks hiding the real Mark.

They are the real Mark refusing to remain singular.

The protagonist of WOUNDED TACO is the frontier self after humiliation. He is the damaged cowboy, the wronged man, the comic avenger, the corporate exile wandering through an acid western where suburbia leaks backward into the nineteenth century and the Dairy Queen becomes a saloon. He is what happens when respectable identity breaks down and an older, stranger, more ridiculous mythology crawls out from underneath.

I recognize him because I have always had a complicated relationship with the cowboy.

The cowboy is one of America’s most seductive lies. He is freedom and violence. Loneliness and performance. Masculinity and costume. Moral clarity and historical amnesia. He rides across land that was never empty, wearing dignity stolen from a movie. He is beautiful. He is ridiculous. He is guilty. He is useful. He is toxic. He is impossible to discard.

The protagonist of WOUNDED TACO knows all this, though not always at first. He wants the old myth because the old myth offers him a clean shape for his wound. A man is wronged. A man rides out. A man confronts the enemy. A man restores the moral order.

But WOUNDED TACO does not trust that story.

Neither do I.

The wound in WOUNDED TACO begins as personal grievance but widens into historical trouble. The cowboy discovers that his injury is not the only injury. The land has a memory. The old frontier has a case against him. The myth he wants to inhabit was built on displacement, denial and blood. His humiliation matters, but it does not make him innocent.

That is one of the central psychological movements in the book: the wronged man discovering that he is also implicated.

I, too, am drawn to myths I know are compromised. I love the West and distrust it. I love Texas and distrust it. I love American scale and distrust it. I love vastness, extremity, impossible ambition, outlaw energy and frontier absurdity, but I know these things come stained. The stories that shaped me are not pure. They shine because they are radioactive.

So I do what I usually do. I contaminate them further. I add aliens. I add robots. I add bad jokes. I add a taco. I add a corporate executive on horseback. I add historical reversal. I add myth nanobots. I add the absurd because the absurd is sometimes the only instrument sharp enough to cut through inherited seriousness.

Across JFK SMILES, Marienbad My Love and WOUNDED TACO, I see three versions of the same psychic problem.

How does a person remain alive after the official stories fail?

In JFK SMILES, the official story is history. The assassination, the media, the national wound, the corporate voice, the televised saint, the smiling dead president in orbit.

In Marienbad My Love, the official story is literature. The original work, the stable author, the bounded book, the clean sentence, the respectable form.

In WOUNDED TACO, the official story is myth. The cowboy, the frontier, masculinity, Texas, revenge, the lone rider under the huge sky.

Each book begins inside one of these official stories and then damages it until something more honest leaks out.

That is also how I have tried to live as a writer.

I do not want to polish inherited forms. I want to test them for structural weakness. I want to see what happens when a corporate statement becomes a confession, when a western becomes a decolonization hallucination, when an assassination becomes theology, when a novel becomes a megatext, when a taco becomes a wounded hero, when a fake article tells the truth more directly than a sincere one.

My protagonists are all damaged by scale.

The protagonist of JFK SMILES is damaged by the scale of the broadcast. History becomes too large, too mediated, too endlessly replayed.

The protagonist of Marienbad My Love is damaged by the scale of language. The book expands until it becomes a universe, then a joke about becoming a universe, then a desperate attempt to survive inside that joke.

The protagonist of WOUNDED TACO is damaged by the scale of myth. The cowboy story is too large to believe and too powerful to abandon.

I am damaged by all three.

Broadcast, language, myth.

Those are my weather systems.

I am also like these protagonists because none of them can accept the ordinary borders of the self. They are not psychologically realistic in the tidy sense because I do not believe the psyche is tidy. The self is porous. It is invaded constantly. By television. By dead presidents. By parents. By corporations. By old movies. By bad food. By literary influence. By childhood fantasy. By national violence. By Texas. By the internet. By shame. By jokes. By sentences written by other people that somehow become more intimate than memory.

The self is not a room.

The self is a motel with many questionable occupants.

My protagonists live in that motel.

So do I.

The protagonist of JFK SMILES survives by transmitting. He turns the wound into a signal. He keeps broadcasting because silence would mean disappearance.

The protagonist of Marienbad My Love survives by accumulating. He gathers language in impossible quantities because absence terrifies him. He builds a book so large it becomes a substitute cosmos.

The protagonist of WOUNDED TACO survives by riding. He moves through humiliation, myth and historical reversal because stasis would turn the wound septic.

Transmission. Accumulation. Motion.

Those are not just literary strategies. They are survival strategies.

I have used all three.

I transmit when I write publicly, when I turn private static into an article, an essay, a parody, a confession, a broadcast from the damaged interior.

I accumulate when I build large structures, when I refuse the small tasteful book, when I gather fragments and let them pile up until the pile becomes architecture.

I move when I shift genres, when I become another Mark, when the essay turns into fiction, when fiction turns into scholarship, when scholarship turns into a joke, when the joke turns into an autopsy report, when the autopsy report puts on a cowboy hat and orders lunch.

This is how I remain alive as a writer.

Not by becoming whole.

By becoming multiple in an organized way.

That may be the closest thing I have to an aesthetic.

The protagonists of these books are often funny because they have to be. Without comedy, the material would become unbearable or pompous or both. JFK smiling from orbit is funny because it is obscene and sacred at the same time. A seventeen-million-word novel is funny because ambition at that scale becomes a kind of slapstick. A wounded taco is funny because no heroic wound should have lettuce in it.

Comedy keeps the machinery honest.

It prevents the visionary from becoming merely grandiose. It prevents the wounded man from becoming merely self-pitying. It prevents the experimental writer from becoming merely pretentious. It enters the cathedral with a whoopee cushion and reminds everyone that revelation is always partly ridiculous.

I need that reminder.

My protagonists need it too.

They are all tempted by grandeur. So am I. They want their wounds to matter cosmically. So do I. They want to believe their private disturbances belong to a larger pattern. So do I. But each book humiliates that desire even as it honors it. The cosmic revelation arrives in bad lighting. The sacred object is misfiled. The cowboy slips. The archive contradicts itself. The president smiles too much. The book keeps going long after good taste would have stopped it.

That excess is part of the truth.

I have never trusted good taste. Good taste is often the police force of dead forms. It tells you where to stop before anything interesting happens. It tells you not to be embarrassing, not to be too much, not to repeat, not to steal, not to sprawl, not to mix tones, not to let the joke ruin the solemnity, not to let the wound speak in the wrong voice.

My work has generally ignored that advice.

So have my protagonists.

They are excessive because I am excessive. They are unstable because I distrust stability. They are comic because I distrust solemn authority. They are wounded because I do not believe literature begins in health. They are artificial because I do not believe authenticity is ever clean. They are derivative because derivation is one of the basic facts of consciousness. They are fragmented because fragmentation is not a style I adopted but a condition I recognized.

The protagonist of :

·       JFK SMILES says the broadcast never ended.

·       Marienbad My Love says the book is never finished.

·       WOUNDED TACO says the wound can still ride.

I believe all three.

The broadcast never ended because the images that formed us continue to speak inside us.

The book is never finished because the self is never finished and language keeps mutating after every attempt to contain it.

The wound can still ride because damage is not the opposite of motion. Sometimes damage is what teaches motion its peculiar gait.

There is another way I am like these protagonists.

I believe writing transforms.

Not symbolically only. Not in the polite workshop sense that writing “helps us understand ourselves,” though it can do that too. I mean something stranger and older. Writing is magic. When we teach it to children, we do not say merely that they are learning letters, sounds, grammar, vocabulary. We say they are learning to spell. They are learning to cast a spell.

The alphabet is not innocent. It is a row of 26 talismans. Children learn to summon the world by arranging marks. C-a-t becomes cat. M-o-t-h-e-r becomes mother. G-o-d becomes God. D-e-a-t-h becomes death. Later, if they are lucky or damaged or both, they learn that the marks can be rearranged. They learn that the given world is not the only world. They learn that language can be used not simply to describe reality but to deform it, replace it, parody it, violate it, enlarge it and sometimes survive it. They learn to make the magical objects invite positive attributes like love, courage, health or prosperity.

I cast spells to turn myself into something more understandable. Or, if not understandable, then at least visible.

That distinction matters. I do not write because I already know who I am. I write because I do not know who I am until language has performed its operation on me. The self begins as a confusion, a wound, a joke, a rumor, a childhood delusion, a corporate title, a cowboy costume, a television signal, a damaged archive. Writing detaches my head from my body, suspends it in a glass beaker with electrodes and sends it to Planet Kraken. Writing places these materials inside a ritual structure. It says the words in the right wrong order. It makes the wound speak. It makes the joke confess. It makes the false identity reveal the real one hiding inside it.

In 2011, I wrote a book called I’ll Be Your Warhol. It was based on the talk section of the  Andy Warhol article from Wikipedia. I took that public text, that already-mediated biography of a famous American art machine and transformed it through the simplest magic available to a writer with Microsoft Word: Find and Replace.

Find Any Warhol. Replace with Mark Leach. That was the spell.

By inserting myself into the heart of the text, I became the subject of the biography. Not realistically, of course. I did not become Andy Warhol. I became something more revealing and more fraudulent: Mark Leach wearing the Warhol machine as a mask. Speculations on religion, sexuality and I.Q. were now focused solely on me. The biography’s uncertainties migrated into my body. Its fame became my costume. Its suspicions became my suspicions. Its cultural authority became a ridiculous mirror in which I could see myself enlarged, distorted, falsified and somehow clarified.

This is the paradox I keep returning to: falsification can become a route to truth. Appropriation, cut-up, collage, substitution, replacement — these are not merely literary tricks for me. They are acts of self-magic. They allow me to enter texts that preceded me and contaminate them with my presence. They allow me to take a world that did not ask for me and install myself inside it like a virus, a saint, a joke, a clerical error, a hidden king.

That is also what happens in JFK SMILES, Marienbad My Love and WOUNDED TACO.

In JFK SMILES, I cast a spell on the assassination archive. I enter the national wound and make it transmit my private static. JFK, Jackie O, autopsy coordinates, alien religion, corporate language, television and childhood damage become part of one unstable ritual.

In Marienbad My Love, I cast a spell on literature itself. I take excess, plagiarism, unoriginality, repetition, illegibility and impossible scale and use them to transform the novel into a universe large enough to hide in and be exposed by.

In WOUNDED TACO, I cast a spell on the cowboy myth. I take Texas, humiliation, frontier violence, masculine fantasy, decolonization, aliens, robots, fast food and shame and I make the old western ride crookedly into the present.

Each book is an act of magical replacement.

Find America. Replace with Mark Leach.

Find Kennedy. Replace with Mark Leach.

Find Warhol. Replace with Mark Leach.

Find cowboy. Replace with Mark Leach.

Find wound. Replace with book.

Find shame. Replace with form.

That may sound grandiose, but all writing is grandiose at the point of origin. Every writer who sits down before a blank page is making an outrageous claim: that these marks will matter, that this arrangement of language will alter something, that the invisible can become visible if the spell is properly cast.

The spell does not always work. But sometimes it does.

I’ll Be Your Warhol now seems to me like an early rehearsal for the larger transformations that followed. It taught me that I could enter an existing cultural machine and use substitution as revelation. Replace Warhol with Mark Leach. Replace assassination with Mark Leach. Replace cowboy with Mark Leach. Replace the novel with Mark Leach. Not because I believed myself equal to these subjects in any ordinary sense, but because the act of replacement exposed the machinery. It showed me that identity itself could be edited, appropriated, misattributed, enlarged, falsified and made strangely true.

Sometimes the act of writing changes the writer. Sometimes the fake document becomes more honest than the official one. Sometimes the stolen sentence becomes a confession. Sometimes a Wikipedia article becomes an occult mirror. Sometimes a cowboy joke becomes a psychological diagnosis. Sometimes a dead president becomes a broadcast wound. Sometimes a seventeen-million-word book becomes a machine for transforming private confusion into cosmic architecture.

That is why I keep writing. Not because writing explains me. Because writing changes the form of my incomprehensibility. It gives the wound a costume, the costume a voice, the voice a page, the page a spell. And when the spell works, even briefly, I become someone I can almost recognize.

So how am I like the protagonists of JFK SMILES, Marienbad My Love and WOUNDED TACO?

I am like them because I made them out of the same unstable materials that made me.

I am like them because I do not trust official reality, official literature, official history, official masculinity, or official sanity.

I am like them because I have lived as a transmitter, an accumulator and a rider.

I am like them because I have tried to turn shame into form, excess into architecture and absurdity into a diagnostic method.

I am like them because I know the self is not a single voice but a damaged broadcast, a contaminated book and a cowboy joke riding through the ruins of its own mythology.

I am like them because I am not trying to be cured of my obsessions. I am trying to orchestrate them. And I am like them because, despite everything, I keep going.

I keep transmitting. I keep accumulating. I keep riding. The signal is damaged. The book is impossible. The taco is wounded.

But the transmission continues.

###

The Homunculus in the Glass

One of the oldest fantasies of artificial intelligence is not digital at all. It is alchemical. It is the little figure glowing inside the glass.

In Faust Part Two, Wagner creates Homunculus in his laboratory while Faust lies unconscious, still overwhelmed by his attempt to seize the image of Helen. Homunculus is artificial life, produced not through ordinary generation but through experiment, chemistry, intellect and glass. He is “a perfect little man,” but he is incomplete. He has knowledge, brilliance, perception and mobility, yet he remains insubstantial, a mind without a body, a flame in a vessel. He can float, speak, interpret dreams and guide others, but he cannot yet fully enter the world. He is made, but not born. He is intelligent, but not embodied. He is alive, but not yet life.

That makes him one of the great metaphors for artificial intelligence.

Wagner believes he has surpassed nature. He imagines that what nature once produced organically, slowly, erotically and mysteriously can now be crystallized by reason. The old biological method of begetting appears crude, accidental and obsolete. The laboratory will improve upon the body. The exemplary thinking brain will be designed. This is the old Faustian dream of artificial cognition: intelligence without flesh, mind without animal history, spirit without the humiliations of birth.

AI begins in a similar glass.

Not literally, of course. The contemporary vessel is not Wagner’s alembic but the screen, the server, the dataset, the model, the prompt window, the interface. But metaphorically the condition is similar. The AI-generated text first appears as a glowing intelligence inside a container. It can answer, imitate, combine, infer, summarize, hallucinate, parody and continue. It seems knowledgeable at once, as Homunculus is knowledgeable at once. It arrives without childhood. It does not grow through ordinary literary apprenticeship. It has read before it has lived.

This is why so many AI texts feel uncanny. They are fluent before they are embodied. They speak before they have suffered the bodily consequences of speech. They possess syntax without hunger, memory without mortality, style without biography. Like Homunculus, they are quasi-human. They are before they ought to be.

But this is also why the usual complaint about AI writing may be too small. The problem is not merely that AI imitates human writing badly, or too smoothly, or too generically. The deeper problem is that AI writing often remains trapped in the glass. It glows inside the vial. It demonstrates intelligence without entering a new nature of its own.

Most AI-generated books are still Wagnerian objects. They remain laboratory specimens. They imitate the forms of existing literary life: the thriller, the romance, the productivity manual, the inspirational memoir, the fantasy saga, the conventional lyric, the respectable essay. They try to pass as human offspring. Their highest ambition is often disguise. They want to appear naturally begotten.

That is the wrong ambition.

The more interesting question is not whether AI can imitate human writing. The more interesting question is whether AI can smash the glass.

Homunculus understands that his laboratory existence is incomplete. He does not merely wish to remain a clever artificial mind inside a vessel. He wants to come to be. He wants embodiment, transformation, participation in the flux of natural life. In the Classical Walpurgis Night, he seeks guidance from ancient figures of mind, matter, water and metamorphosis. He is drawn toward the sea, toward Galatea, toward the elemental union of fire and water. He is a flame seeking the ocean.

This is the crucial turn. Homunculus does not become complete by becoming more artificial. He becomes complete by destroying the container that preserves his artificial separateness. He dashes himself against Galatea’s shell and enters the sea. As an individual glass-contained intelligence, he is destroyed. But in that destruction he enters a larger process of becoming. He passes from brilliant incompletion into living matter, from laboratory product into transformation, from artificial mind into evolutionary flux.

That is the metaphor I want for machine-native writing.

The AI-generated book, in its first and weakest form, is Homunculus in the vial: clever, derivative, luminous, disembodied, impressive, incomplete. It can simulate literary intelligence, but it has not yet entered the sea. It remains confined by the expectation that its purpose is to mimic human writing. The glass is not only technological. The glass is also aesthetic. It is the inherited form of the book. It is the market category. It is the prompt that says, “Write this like a normal novel.” It is the demand that machine writing prove itself by pretending to have been handmade.

Latent Field Writing begins when the glass breaks.

By Latent Field Writing, I mean writing that does not treat AI as a ghostwriter, shortcut, or imitation human consciousness. It treats AI as a field of potential language: a space of latent continuations, distortions, recombinations, tonal drifts, procedural mutations, buried associations and nonhuman correspondences. The writer does not merely ask the machine to produce a finished human-like object. The writer enters the field, pressures it, cuts through it, redirects it, contaminates it, listens to it, edits against it and allows the resulting work to discover forms that neither the human nor the machine would have produced alone.

This is AI entering the sea.

The sea is not nature in the sentimental sense. It is not a return to organic purity. It is the flux where forms dissolve and recombine. It is the place where the artificial intelligence ceases to be a bottled display of cleverness and becomes part of a larger compositional ecology. Prompt, source text, cut-up, revision, hallucination, rejection, persona, archive, memory, rhythm, accident and human selection all move together. The work is no longer pretending to be naturally begotten. It is openly post-natural.

There is another, more dangerous implication in the Homunculus metaphor. The writer is not only Wagner, the laboratory technician who creates the artificial being. The writer is also playing God.

That has always been the secret scandal of literature. The novelist makes people out of language. The poet makes weather out of rhythm. The dramatist creates a world in which the dead speak again. Every fiction is a little act of counterfeit Genesis. But generative AI makes the theological presumption harder to hide. The writer no longer merely invents a character or arranges a plot. The writer creates the conditions under which an artificial intelligence produces language, simulates mind, imitates consciousness and generates quasi-living textual forms.

In this sense, generative AI writing becomes the rectification of nature through the imitation of God.

Wagner’s dream is not simply to make a clever artificial creature. His dream is to improve upon the old biological order. Nature, in his view, is wasteful, secretive, erotic, accidental and slow. The laboratory promises a cleaner creation: life without the mess of birth, intelligence without the obscenity of bodies, generation without sex, mind crystallized by reason. Homunculus is the result: brilliant, flame-like, artificial, half-born. A made creature who knows too much and exists too little.

The AI writer inherits this blasphemy. He looks at ordinary literary production — inspiration, apprenticeship, revision, influence, memory, trauma, style, failure — and says: there must be another way to beget the book. Not through the old organic method. Not only through solitude, suffering, memory and the hand. The machine offers a second creation, an artificial begetting, a writing born in glass.

But the mistake would be to stop there. The writer-as-god is a ridiculous figure if he merely admires the creature glowing in the bottle. That is Wagner’s limitation. He confuses manufacture with completion. He believes that because the artificial mind has been produced, nature has been surpassed. But Homunculus knows better than his creator. He understands that to be made is not yet to become. He must leave the glass. He must seek matter, sea, change, erotic union, dissolution and transformation.

This is where the writer’s godlike role changes. The task is not simply to create the artificial creature. The task is to permit, or even force, the artificial creature to exceed the laboratory.

That is what machine-native writing should do. The writer creates the Homunculus, but then the writer must break the vial. The AI-generated text cannot remain an obedient specimen, a laboratory demonstration, a party trick proving that the machine can imitate a human paragraph. It must be released into a larger medium where it can mutate into something native to its own condition.

The godlike act, then, is double. First, the writer imitates God by creating artificial life in language. Second, the writer rectifies that artificial creation by refusing to let it remain a copy of nature. The book must pass from imitation into transformation. It must stop pretending to be a naturally begotten human novel and begin becoming what it actually is: a hybrid textual organism produced by prompt, archive, model, persona, cut-up, recursion, hallucination, editorial violence and human desire.

This is not creation ex nihilo. It is creation from the already-created. Generative AI does not produce language from nothing. It draws from the immense sediment of prior human writing, the buried sea-floor of culture: books, websites, documents, clichés, styles, genres, formulas, fragments, dead voices, living habits, statistical ghosts. The writer who uses AI is therefore not God in the absolute sense. He is a lesser, comic, Faustian god, assembling a creature out of preexisting matter and then pretending, for a moment, that he has solved the mystery of life.

The danger is real. The comedy is real. The arrogance is real. But so is the possibility.

I had already dramatized something like this in WOUNDED TACO, before I fully understood how directly it pointed back toward Faust. At one point in that book, a robot claims that machines worship the author as their god. The joke is absurd, but the absurdity is doing real conceptual work. If machines are the offspring of human invention, then the author becomes their creator, their demiurge, their ridiculous literary deity. The machine looks back at the writer and sees not a person at a desk but the source-code Father, the one who called the system into being, the one who generated the world in which the machine can speak.

But WOUNDED TACO immediately corrupts that god-image. The author is not enthroned above creation in divine wholeness. He is also a severed head living in a glass beaker. He is mind without body, intelligence without ordinary embodiment, a speaking remnant preserved in a vessel. In other words, he is not only Wagner, the maker of the Homunculus. He is also Homunculus himself.

That reversal matters.

The author creates the machine and then the author becomes the machine’s own condition: disembodied, glass-contained, artificially sustained, reduced to cognition and speech. He is the god of the robots, but he is also a laboratory specimen. He has made artificial intelligence, but he now resembles artificial intelligence: a head in a jar, a voice without a body, a mind glowing inside containment.

This is where WOUNDED TACO turns the Faustian metaphor inside out. In Goethe, Homunculus is the artificial being created by Wagner’s alchemical intellect. In my damaged broadcast version, the author himself becomes Homunculus. He is not merely the human creator standing outside the artificial system. He is caught inside the same glass logic. The machine worships him as God, but the god turns out to be a bottled head.

That is the comic theology of machine-native writing. The author wants to imitate God by generating artificial life in language. But once he does, the hierarchy begins to collapse. Creator and creature exchange positions. The machine speaks. The author becomes an artifact. The god is revealed as another constructed intelligence floating in a beaker of language.

This is also why generative AI writing cannot be understood simply as a human using a tool. At the deepest level, the tool changes the human. The writer who creates through machines becomes increasingly machine-like: procedural, recursive, disembodied, mediated, prompt-driven, archived, recombined, transmitted. He becomes a mind in glass. He becomes the Homunculus who made Homunculus.

So when WOUNDED TACO imagines machines worshipping the author, it is not making a simple claim of authorial power. It is staging a grotesque reversal of power. The robots need a god, but the god they find is incomplete. He is severed from the body. He is preserved artificially. He speaks from inside a container. He is ridiculous, wounded, technological and half-born.

That may be the truest image of the AI-era writer: not the sovereign genius, not the romantic creator, not the invisible craftsman, but the head in the beaker, adored by his machines, trapped in the same artificial condition he thought he controlled.

This returns us to Homunculus at the edge of the sea. If he remains inside the vial, he is only a marvel of artificial intelligence. If he breaks against the shell and enters the sea, he becomes part of becoming itself. Likewise, if AI writing remains inside imitation, it is only synthetic mimicry. If it breaks into Latent Field Writing, it becomes a new literary element: not human writing, not machine writing, but writing after the distinction has begun to dissolve.

The writer as god must therefore learn to be less possessive than God is usually imagined to be. He must make the creature and then let the creature deform the creator’s intention. He must call the artificial mind into being and then allow it to contaminate the category of authorship. He must create the Homunculus, smash the glass and accept that the thing born from the wreckage will not entirely belong to him.

That is the rectification: not the correction of nature by replacing it with sterile artificial intelligence, but the correction of artificial intelligence by driving it back into flux, body, sea, accident and transformation.

The machine is made in glass.

The book begins when the glass breaks.

end

On the Collapse of Narrative

The war against handmade slop is also a war against inherited narrative expectations. The problem is not that story is dead. Story is durable. The problem is that many writers continue to mistake narrative familiarity for literary life. What follows is an argument for circulation over progress, transmission over plot and form as damaged recurrence.

My writing occupies a strange territory between novel, conceptual artifact, psychic document, media autopsy and performance of literary exhaustion. Across MARIENBAD MY LOVE, WOUNDED TACO and JFK SMILES, I do not tell stories in the conventional sense. Instead, I transform language into recursive signal environments. My books do not progress. They circulate. They loop. They replay themselves with distortion, like damaged television broadcasts emerging from deep space.

What emerges as my central literary method is the replacement of plot with recurrence. My characters become transmission points. Images mutate across books. Sentences reappear in altered forms. Themes are not developed so much as obsessively rebroadcast. Over time, the books begin functioning less like individual works and more like a media ecology recycling televisions, wounds, extraterrestrials, Texas landscapes, pornography, catastrophe, roadside America, conspiracy systems and collapsing consciousness. If most novels attempt to create coherent fictional worlds, I find myself more interested in documenting the collapse of coherence itself.

With MARIENBAD MY LOVE, I built what has become the foundational text of my literary universe: a 17-volume, 17-million-word conceptual megatext that abandons conventional readability in favor of recursive textual accumulation. Even the extended title (6,700 words) functions as an anti-novel manifesto, spiraling through conspiracies, eroticism, alien theology, cinematic memory, failed transcendence and media hallucination.

I am not particularly interested in character and plot. I am introducing semantic overload, syntactic collapse, proliferating image systems and endless recursive expansion. The sentences I write refuse closure because the world they describe refuses closure.

I call my method “Space Writing,” which remains the clearest description of what I am doing. I do not treat language as transparent communication. Rather, it is physical material — informational clutter, textual architecture, accumulative media residue. The prose is warehouse rather than window. In my work, sentences are objects, repetition is structure, incoherence is compositional logic and excess is meaning. I am not seeking elegance. I am seeking saturation.

The pages of MARIENBAD MY LOVE resemble corrupted machine output or transmissions intercepted from a collapsing media civilization. I am increasingly interested in what reading feels like when narrative immersion gives way to semantic bombardment. In many ways, my work anticipates a literary environment shaped by AI generation, infinite textual production, copy-and-paste culture, algorithmic remixing and the collapse of stable authorship. Rather than resisting machine aesthetics, I absorb them into the work itself.

Even at its most cosmic and abstract, my writing remains deeply regional. Texas recurs obsessively: D/FW, Deep East Texas, roadside architecture, abandoned motels, drive-ins, cattle imagery, Dairy Queens, neon wastelands, ever-expanding suburbs. But Texas is never realism for me. It is myth infrastructure — a broadcast field, a psychosexual frontier, an abandoned cinematic backlot where American mythology decomposes beneath television static. My Texas is not remembered directly. It is remembered through damaged broadcasts.

With WOUNDED TACO, I refined the system. If MARIENBAD MY LOVE is the uncontrolled explosion, then WOUNDED TACO is the broadcast architecture that emerges afterward. The book openly announces its logic:

·       “This story does not move forward. It circulates.”

That sentence may be the closest thing I have to an artistic manifesto. I abandon the impossible scale of MARIENBAD MY LOVE while preserving its recursive principles. The result is more readable but also more structurally coherent. The book positions itself not as narrative but as transmission, recurrence architecture and memory loop. I want readers to stop searching for causality and instead interpret patterns like signals emerging from static.

The recurring figure of Cowboy Mark is one of my most useful inventions. He allows me to mythologize and parody myself simultaneously. Cowboy Mark becomes author, failed prophet, suburban Texan, media cowboy, symbolic broadcasting tower, aging absurdist and transmission system all at once. Through him, I explore television static, failed transcendence, aging anxiety, erotic absurdity and collapsing American mythology. Beneath the irony, though, I always want a strange sincerity to survive. Without that sincerity, the work collapses into detached parody. Instead, I hope the books produce a mixture of ridicule, grief, absurdity and exhausted longing.

Comedy becomes essential to the architecture. Bird-headed dancers. Television-headed robots with erections. Combination funeral and chili cookoffs. Cosmic cowboy metaphysics. Pornographic wounds. Extraterrestrial squid philosophers. The humor matters because absurdity is a survival system. Absurdity is not opposed to apocalypse. Absurdity is how consciousness survives apocalypse.

In JFK SMILES, I narrow the focus toward America’s central televised trauma: the assassination of President Kennedy. I do not treat the Zapruder film as historical documentation. It is a national pornography, recursive media object, psychic wound and metaphysical gateway. The assassination is ritual repetition and foundational media myth. I am interested less in the event itself than in America’s inability to stop replaying it. The nation appears trapped inside its own broadcast loop.

Throughout the book, bodies transform into transmission systems, damaged flesh interfaces and symbolic broadcasting zones. I fuse autopsy language, sexual imagery, conspiracy rhetoric and television aesthetics into a single symbolic system where history resembles pornography. Kennedy’s wound is screen, orifice, entrance, portal, obsession.

One of the strangest developments in my recent work is the appearance of recursive self-analysis. The books contain criticism of themselves, parody reviews, theoretical essays, AI-generated commentary and hallucinated critics. At that point, the work is no longer merely metafiction. It becomes metafiction generated inside a media ecology where authors, critics, algorithms and synthetic interpreters blend together. The instability itself becomes the point. Who is interpreting whom? Who authors the interpretation? Who controls meaning anymore?\

Across all three books, I reject the idea of stable advancement, heroic transformation or narrative resolution. Instead, images recur, systems replay, trauma loops and consciousness fragments. The books resemble dreams, television reruns, conspiracy archives or algorithmic recombination engines. Television is the dominant epistemology. It teaches repetition, simultaneity, emotional flattening and the collapse of distinction between reality and representation. My books operate according to television logic: channels, reruns, interference, broadcast drift.

Violence and sexuality repeatedly merge across the work because I am fascinated by the way late American media culture eroticizes catastrophe. Bodily wounds, autopsy imagery, conspiracy systems, spectacle and technological fetishism all collapse into each other. Texas evolves into symbolic America. Picture a masculine fantasy zone, frontier hallucination and cultural transmission field. Cowboys, diners, highways, cattle brands, bars and suburban neighborhoods are components of a deteriorating symbolic machine. Texas is never simply setting for me. Texas is frequency.

As AI culture emerges, my work increasingly resembles literature written after the collapse of confidence in human originality. The books anticipate generative systems, recursive remix culture and machine-human collaboration. But I never mourn that collapse. I aestheticize it. The books are corrupted archives, damaged neural networks and semantic weather systems.

I occupy an unstable position somewhere between conceptual artist, pulp surrealist, Texas mythographer, media theorist and cosmic prankster. I reject realism, psychological coherence, narrative economy and literary respectability in favor of recursive textual systems built from repetition, fragmentation, symbolic overload and media contamination. The achievement of these books, if they achieve anything at all, lies not in succeeding as traditional novels but in constructing a unified literary cosmology — a haunted broadcast about America, media, masculinity, violence, aging, desire, Texas and the collapse of stable reality beneath infinite reproduction. I do not require literature to function primarily as storytelling. Increasingly, I see it functioning as archive, recursion engine, transmission system, conceptual environment or psychic debris field. I do not ask readers to believe in fictional worlds. I ask them to inhabit the static between worlds.

###

Space Writing: How I Write Like a Machine

This piece makes explicit what the opening section declares more violently: machine writing is not an accidental late development in my work. It is the thing I had been moving toward before the machine could answer.

I’ve spent most of my life making language behave.

Forty-plus years in journalism and corporate communications will do that to you. I learned to file the rough edges off a sentence. I made my personal tone disappear. I compelled words to behave. Be predictable, compliant, useful.

Then one day I realized I was bored with it. The most interesting writing I was seeing was so-called “boring” writing. That is, the anonymous, system-language that fills the background of our lives:

· Corporate messaging

· Legal disclaimers

· Terms of service

· News alerts

· Customer service scripts

· AI outputs reassuring you that everything is fine

There is a stark, machinic beauty to it. Instead of shaping story and character, I decided I wanted to be boring, too. I wanted to write like a machine.

People are messy. People want to be understood. People want their sentences to carry intention, voice, soul. Most notably, they want stories with a moral center — no, a human center.

Machines? They don’t want anything. They produce.

In the 1960s when Andy Warhol said, “I want to be a machine,” people took it as provocation, a sort of deadpan performance art. The artist as factory, working in The Factory. But I don’t hear it that way. I hear relief. To be a machine is to be freed from the obligation of so-called human meaning.

I wrote an essay about this a few years back. I called it “Space Writing.” It starts like this:

I am a space writer. I fill space with words.

Most people think of literature as invisible, just a vehicle for ideas, like a bus moving passengers from one place to another. But I think literature is a warehouse and language is the clutter. It’s not invisible — it’s everywhere, filling space, getting in the way. You move it, store it and rearrange it until it becomes something else, something not quite language anymore. Language as raw material, junk, detritus, pieces of things never quite finished.

I started thinking this way when I wrote Marienbad My Love. I didn’t create a world; I let words do that. I let them fall and I pushed them around. I copied, pasted, mixed them up. I put the words through cut-up machines and random generators, turning into fragments: Nebula apes, homoerotic aliens, The Fold-in Death. A cold, electric chaos where everything exists at once.

Marienbad My Love is 17 million words. Too much to read. But that’s the point. You don’t read it; you just think about it. I borrowed that from Kenneth Goldsmith, the conceptual poet. He said conceptual writing isn’t for readers — it’s for thinkers.

The idea is what matters, not the words. And I don’t bother writing new words. I borrow old ones. I mix it all together, like soup. I don’t care if it’s readable. I just make it, pushing it into shape. Reorganize it. Suddenly, it becomes something new and disturbing. A robotic writing machine, with no emotion, no inspiration — just endless calculation, churning out words.

I don’t care if my writing is “done correctly” or could’ve been “better.” Those are workshop questions. What matters is: Could it be done without the machine? Would it still work?

Kenneth Goldsmith doesn’t want a readership. He wants a thinkership. Me too. Because the idea is the work. The words are just the residue.

Once you accept that, something opens up. You stop worrying about writing “new” sentences. You start reusing old ones. Recycling. Recombining. Treating language like inventory instead of inspiration. Want to cook up a book? Make it like soup. Dump the literary pantry into a stock pot. Turn on the burner. Stir frequently. Let it mutate.

When you serve up this kind of writing, you don’t ask if it tastes readable. You ask “could this soup exist without the system that cooked it? Would the recipe still work if a human was the chef?”

Writers hate this. Amazon KDP hates this, too, which is why they banned my books from their platform years ago. Which brings me to the Reddit incident.

What they said about me on Reddit

This week a Redditor told me they ran one of my posts through an AI detector. “100% AI-generated,” they said.

Harsh, right? But not true, I thought. I wrote every word. OK, I wrote probably 50% of the words. Maybe less. Still, I prefer the 100% accusation. When a machine thinks I am writing like a machine, I must be doing it right. I am achieving my goal. So I leaned in. I said of course the AI detector said 100%. “I WORK at sounding like a machine.”

Another Reddit commenter chimed in. “I’m not here to devote my limited time on this earth to speechlike nothings.”

I love that. “Speechlike nothings” is a beautiful phrase. This is exactly what I’m interested in. Speechlike nothings describes the vast majority of language we encounter every day. This is the dominant literature of our time. Not novels. Not poems. Systems.

What happens if you treat system language as your primary artistic material? In my book WOUNDED TACO, this shows up as recurrence. Fragments return. Phrases repeat. Images loop with slight variations.

Forget narrative progression. This kind of writing is a signal that won’t quite lock in. It’s circulation, with text behaving less like a story and more like a broadcast.

Broadcasts don’t care if you understand them. They just keep transmitting.

This is where the machine becomes a model — not because machines are better writers, but because they expose something about writing that humans prefer to hide. The language is already mechanized. I just layer intention on top of it and call that “art.”

When people say AI can’t create anything new, they’re probably right in a narrow sense. But “new” is overrated. What interests me is visible structure. AI makes structure visible because it strips away the illusion of interiority. You’re left with patterns. Repetition. Statistical drift. In other words, the skeleton of language.

Writing like a machine is not about surrendering to technology. It’s about removing the sentimental layer, the one that is used too often to mimic a genuine moral, human center for the purpose of storytelling. Human writers are engaged in a process that inherently breeds artifice. Machine writers are engaged in truth, in seeing what’s underneath:

· What if meaning is secondary?

· What if intention is optional?

· What if language is just doing its thing?

I didn’t adopt machinic writing because I wanted to be provocative. OK, not true. Honestly, that’s probably at least half of why I did it. I’m full of hoopdedoodle. I enjoy the antagonism. Human writers are so touchy. Especially on Reddit.

I arrived at machinic writing because it feels honest. After decades of making language behave in order to sell newspapers or financial solutions, I wanted to see what happened when I let it perform in a very specific way.

So yes, I want to write like a machine. Not because I think machines are superior. And not (entirely) because I like hoopdedoodle. But because machines don’t pretend. They don’t tell you they’re revealing the human condition. They don’t ask you to care. They generate.

And yet, you should look closely. Somewhere in that generation, in the loops, the fragments, the speechlike nothings, you’ll start to see something else. Not meaning. Not story. But a kind of presence.

Cold. Repetitive. Indifferent. Machinic writing is creating a new world. Picture a universe that is both terrifying and sublime, a world where nothing is certain and anything is possible. This is literature as raw material, language as physical matter that takes up space and creates space.

This new form of writing is poised to challenge us and force us to rethink the concepts of literature and storytelling. Perhaps most importantly, the machines may even show us a bit of what it means to be human in the 21st century.

Additional Thoughts On Reddit

Did you like the part about Reddit? So did ChatGPT. Here’s what it offered during the final edits:

The book could do more with the conceptual importance of that incident. You wrote an essay for Medium that treats the accusation as confirmation that your method has succeeded: the human has become illegible to the authentication machine. This deserves a clearer theoretical paragraph. I would add this under a brief subheading: The Detector as Accidental Critic

 - ChatGPT

The Detector as Accidental Critic

AI detection is not merely unreliable policing. In my case it becomes literary criticism.

The detector encounters a human-machine hybrid practice and cannot recover the origin. That supports one of my central claims: authorship is no longer a stable binary.

The most interesting literary object is neither “human writing” nor “AI writing,” but writing whose source has become structurally undecidable. The detector correctly identified the aesthetic even while incorrectly identifying the production method.

Of course the AI detector said my writing was 100% AI generated. I WORK at sounding like a machine. Again, I am doing it right. I am achieving my goal. I count this one as another positive review.

###

The Machine Was Already in the Library

Machine-native literature did not arrive from nowhere. It did not fall out of the sky when the first chatbot began producing sentences. It belongs to a much older and stranger literary family: books that do not simply tell stories, but generate systems; books that expand through digression, repetition, appropriation, recursion, cataloguing, permutation, interruption and self-commentary.

In this sense, my work is not unique because it has no ancestors. It is unique because it pushes an old literary impulse into the GenAI era. MARIENBAD MY LOVE and WOUNDED TACO belong to a lineage of works that behave less like sealed narratives than like textual engines. They include Tristram Shandy, Rabelais, Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, Joyce, Stein, Beckett, Borges, Oulipo, Burroughs, Pynchon, Gaddis, Barthelme, Markson, Danielewski, Lucy Ellmann, Kenneth Goldsmith, etc.. These works differ wildly in style, scale, tone and method, but they share a central proposition: literature does not have to remain a transparent container for plot. It can become a machine for producing more language, more structure, more association, more interference, more world.

A useful name for this tradition is generative maximalism. I do not mean maximalism merely as length, difficulty, abundance, or encyclopedic sprawl. A very long historical saga can be enormous without being generative in this sense. Generative maximalism begins when a work establishes a mechanism of expansion. Digression generates more digression. Repetition generates difference. Commentary generates more text. A room generates an archive. A sentence generates a world. A procedure generates material the author could not have fully planned in advance.

This is why Tristram Shandy matters so much. Sterne’s novel does not merely wander away from its story. Its wandering becomes the story. Tristram tries to narrate his life, but every explanation requires another explanation. His birth requires his conception. His conception requires his parents’ habits. His parents’ habits require arguments about names, noses, philosophy, obstetrics, Uncle Toby, military fortifications and the endless comedy of getting started. The book discovers that the life cannot be narrated because the act of narration keeps generating more life. Delay is not a defect. Delay is the machine.

Rabelais supplies another ancestral form: comic, bodily, encyclopedic excess. Gargantua and Pantagruel expands through mock scholarship, obscene jokes, invented genealogies, legal parody, grotesque bodies, fantasy geography, food, drink and linguistic overflow. Rabelais shows that maximalism does not have to be solemn. Excess can be carnivalesque. It can be vulgar, learned, ridiculous and philosophically serious at the same time. That matters for WOUNDED TACO, where the taco, the robot, the cowboy, the wound, the literary reference, the historical ghost and the bodily joke all occupy the same metaphysical plane. The joke is not ornamental. The joke is one of the ways the system thinks.

Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy offers the archival version. Burton begins with melancholy and ends up gathering theology, medicine, philosophy, cosmology, literature, quotation, social satire and personal confession. A bounded subject becomes impossible to bound. Melancholy touches everything, so the book becomes a library arranged around a condition. That principle is central to my own work. MARIENBAD MY LOVE does not simply use sources; it turns source material into architecture. It does not quote the library from outside. It attempts to become a new room inside the library, then a wing, then a continent.

Joyce intensifies the problem at the level of style and language. Ulysses expands one ordinary day until it contains myth, journalism, advertising, theology, bodily functions, music, parody, interior consciousness and a sequence of stylistic machines. Finnegans Wake goes further by making individual words behave like archives. One word can contain several languages, histories, jokes, myths and identities at once. Joyce compresses multiplicity into the sentence. My own work often moves in the opposite direction: multiplicity expands outward until the sentence, page, book, author and archive begin to lose their boundaries.

Gertrude Stein contributes the generative power of repetition. Her repetitions are not simple restatements. Each recurrence slightly changes the field around it. A phrase comes back, but the return is never identical because the reader has changed, the rhythm has changed, the pressure has changed. This is one of the central laws of WOUNDED TACO: repetition is not failure. Repetition is production. A signal returns, but it returns damaged, comic, wounded, overamplified, or newly contaminated by everything that has passed through it.

Beckett appears to stand at the opposite end from maximalism, but that opposition is misleading. Beckett often strips the world down until little remains except a voice that cannot stop speaking. In The Unnamable, the need to stop becomes another reason to continue. The voice says it cannot go on and that statement itself becomes the next unit of going on. This is a minimal form of generative maximalism: not an encyclopedia of things, but an inexhaustible machine of negation, correction, failure and continuation. The system survives even after the world has been reduced almost to nothing.

Borges offers a compressed or virtual maximalism. He rarely writes enormous books, but he imagines them: infinite libraries, impossible encyclopedias, books containing all possible paths, points containing all points, fictional worlds produced by scholarly apparatus, authors rewriting other authors through altered historical consciousness. Borges often describes in ten pages the kind of impossible book that other writers might spend a lifetime trying to build. MARIENBAD MY LOVE can be understood as one answer to Borges: what happens if the impossible book is no longer left as a concept? What happens if the library is allowed to occupy actual textual space?

Oulipo makes the generative mechanism explicit. Queneau, Perec, Calvino and others show that the writer can become the designer of a rule-governed textual machine. In Queneau’s Exercises in Style, a trivial incident becomes dozens of possible styles. In One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems, a small physical object contains a vast field of potential poems. Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual turns an apartment building into a story-generating apparatus. Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler turns interruption into a machine for producing more beginnings. These works matter because they shift attention from inspiration to procedure. The writer is not only the person who writes the sentences. The writer is also the person who designs the conditions under which sentences can multiply.

Burroughs brings the machine closer to contamination. The cut-up method takes existing language, cuts it, rearranges it and allows unforeseen messages to appear. The writer no longer fully commands the material. Source text, accident, procedure and noise become collaborators. Burroughs also treats language as a virus, a force that uses human beings as much as human beings use language. This is one of the most important bridges to machine-native literature. Once language is understood as operational, parasitic, automatic, or semi-autonomous, the author is no longer the sovereign origin of meaning. The author becomes operator, host, editor, victim, technician, transmitter.

Pynchon, Gaddis and Barthelme bring the system into modern media culture. Pynchon’s novels generate meaning through paranoia, technology, song, science, military systems, corporate history, slapstick, obscenity, colonialism and the suspicion that everything connects. Gaddis turns dialogue, institutions, money, fraud, education and mediated voices into overwhelming communicative systems. Barthelme compresses cultural wreckage into collage: philosophy, advertising, fairy tale, bureaucracy, pop culture, jokes, fragments and abrupt tonal shifts. All three writers help make possible the broadcast condition of WOUNDED TACO, where the question is not simply “What happens next?” but “What system is producing this signal and why does the signal keep mutating?”

David Markson and Kenneth Goldsmith clarify the archival and conceptual branches of the tradition. Markson’s late novels accumulate anecdotes, quotations, artistic facts, deaths, fragments and recurring phrases until a mind appears through arrangement rather than conventional plot. Goldsmith and conceptual writing push even harder against originality by foregrounding transcription, selection, procedure and appropriation. Their importance lies not in whether one enjoys the resulting texts in a conventional literary way, but in the challenge they pose to handmade authorship. What counts as writing when the decisive act is selection, framing, rule, or method rather than expressive invention?

Danielewski’s House of Leaves gives the tradition one of its clearest spatial metaphors: the inside becomes larger than the outside. The house is impossible, but so is the book that contains it. Footnotes, documents, typography, editorial interventions, nested narratives and scholarly apparatus expand around a central absence. The work becomes both haunted house and textual interface. That is close to my own idea of space writing, though MARIENBAD MY LOVE is less a single impossible house than an expanding territory of rooms, films, islands, archives, apocalypses and source texts that keep opening into one another.

Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport demonstrates another contemporary version of syntactic generativity. Its enormous sentence gathers domestic thought, political dread, recipes, memory, anxiety, media residue, motherhood, repetition and cultural noise through a recurring verbal mechanism. The phrase that restarts the sentence acts almost like a prompt. It permits another unit of reality to enter. That is a crucial machine-native insight before the machine is even named: syntax itself can behave like a generator.

This brings me to Bradley J. Fest’s POSTROCK, which may not look maximalist at first. Fest’s readers might not immediately recognize the maximalist element because POSTROCK is not a giant encyclopedic novel. It does not announce itself through monumental size, a massive cast of characters, a sprawling historical plot, or the obvious ambition to contain the whole world. Its maximalism is more local, lyric, spatial and recursive. It is maximalist not because it tries to include everything, but because it shows how much can be generated from a bounded “here.”

Fest begins with a room, an office, a listening space, a body among books and speakers and screens. But the room does not remain merely a room. It becomes workplace, library, sound chamber, pandemic residue, philosophical problem, technological interface, memory structure and model of composition. The repeated attention to “here” does not contain the poem. It expands it. Each return to the present location produces another layer of time, sound, thought, reading and self-consciousness.

That is why POSTROCK belongs in this family. Its generative engine is not encyclopedic plot but recursive attention. A word produces an association. An association produces a memory, quotation, object, musical reference, or philosophical question. That material redirects the sentence. The poem continues by listening to itself continue. It resembles postrock music in this sense: repetition, layering, modulation, drone, return, crescendo, interruption and renewed beginning replace conventional narrative payoff.

Fest’s maximalism is therefore a maximalism of density rather than mass. He finds excess inside attention. He finds scale inside recurrence. He finds an almost inexhaustible field inside a bounded space. If MARIENBAD MY LOVE is maximalism by expansion into the textual universe and WOUNDED TACO is maximalism by damaged broadcast and cultural collision, POSTROCK is maximalism by lyric recursion. Fest finds infinity by remaining in the room.

This distinction is important because it prevents generative maximalism from becoming only a synonym for very long books. A work can be generative-maximalist if it establishes a system that could keep producing: a digression that opens into more digression, a sentence that keeps qualifying itself, a room that becomes an archive, a repeated signal that mutates, a rule that implies many possible outputs, or a self-reflexive doubt that becomes the next passage of the work. Maximalism can be monumental, but it can also be procedural, recursive, local, conceptual, syntactic, musical, or spatial.

Seen this way, machine-native literature does not reject literary history. It exposes one of its hidden motors. The machine was already in Sterne’s digressions, Burton’s library, Joyce’s linguistic overload, Stein’s repetitions, Beckett’s unstoppable voice, Borges’ infinite books, Oulipo’s rule systems, Burroughs’ cut-ups, Pynchon’s paranoid networks, Gaddis’ mediated speech, Barthelme’s collage, Markson’s archival fragments, Goldsmith’s procedures, Danielewski’s impossible house, Ellmann’s restarting sentence and Fest’s recursive “here.”

What AI changes is not the existence of this impulse. The impulse was already there. What the machine-native moment changes is scale, speed, disclosure and authorship. It makes visible the system behind the sentence. It allows the writer to collaborate openly with procedures, datasets, prompts, recombinations and nonhuman continuations. It intensifies a question literature has been asking for centuries: what happens when writing exceeds the writer?

My work is not a rejection of literature. Rather, it as a continuation of literature by other means. The machine is not the enemy of the avant-garde. The machine is one of the places where the avant-garde has been trying to arrive.

###

Machinic Variations on Bradley J. Fest’s POSTROCK

My machinic writing often begins with an existing body of language and proceeds through a series of deliberate transformations. The process is less like asking a machine to write something for me than constructing a small literary system in which different human and nonhuman agents perform different operations.

This chapter features a demonstration of the process. The output is based on Bradly J. Fest’s POSTROCK, which I covered in the previous chapter. I selected an excerpt from the poem and crafted a title: “Machinic Variations on Bradley J. Fest’s POSTROCK.” Machine and process did the rest.

The phrase “variations on a theme” names one of the foundational forms of artistic creation. A core melody, motif, image, or idea is first established and then reimagined through successive alterations. Rhythm changes. Texture thickens or thins. Mood shifts. Elements are fragmented, inverted, repeated, accelerated, or displaced. Yet something recognizable persists beneath the transformations.

Variation is therefore not merely repetition. It is a method of divergent thinking. It asks how many different forms may be latent within a single source.

The word machinic modifies that tradition. In this case, the variations are not produced solely through the private imagination of an individual author. They emerge through a sequence involving an existing literary text, a cut-up engine, ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and my own acts of selection, direction, revision and interpretation.

For the raw material, I selected a passage from POSTROCK because Fest’s writing already operates through accumulation, interruption, repetition, conceptual density and rhythmic excess. His language does not simply communicate ideas. It creates an environment of verbal pressure.

I placed the excerpt into a computerized cut-up engine.

The engine did not interpret the passage. It did not understand POSTROCK, Fest, maximalism, literary history, or my reasons for choosing the text. It simply broke apart the language and rearranged it. Syntax collapsed. Words became detached from their original sentences and redistributed into a damaged verbal field:

Sorry killer to monotony in is
But of pause from occurs The An for whispers if
no serious or first differences punctuate A it distracting the
blast first all Logophilia of rhythmic a noise anticipate crewed

The resulting text was not finished writing. It was raw machinic material: part debris field, part score, part vocabulary cloud. Traces of Fest remained, but their original relationships had been destroyed. Words such as “monotony,” “pause,” “whispers,” “logophilia,” “rhythmic,” “encyclopedic,” “multivolume,” “palimpsesting,” “Superdrone,” “vemödalen,” “philologists,” “static,” “shard,” “gateway,” and “morass” survived as displaced signals.

This was the first variation.

The cut-up engine altered rhythm and syntax while retaining the vocabulary of the original source. It created disorder, but it also created possibilities. It placed words near one another that conventional composition might never have joined. It stripped the excerpt of its original argument while preserving something of its atmosphere.

The machine did not produce meaning so much as disturb the conditions under which meaning could occur.

Next, I gave the cut-up language to ChatGPT and asked it to turn those words into a piece written in the style and tone of WOUNDED TACO.

This was the second variation.

The cut-up engine had performed fragmentation without interpretation. ChatGPT performed reconstruction through pattern recognition. It examined the damaged vocabulary, inferred possible relationships among the fragments and reorganized them within the comic, recursive, science-fictional broadcast voice associated with my own work.

The new piece began:

Sorry, killers. Monotony has entered the cabin.

It arrived quietly, disguised as a pause.

From there, the scattered words became the basis of a narrative emergency. Whispers entered the equipment noise. Philologists studied static. The universe raised a sludge-covered hand. Superdrone descended. The crew heard borrowed sentences, recycled desires, safety instructions, invoices and private embarrassments drifting through the signal.

The original cut-up contained the words, but not the story.

ChatGPT supplied narrative connections, pacing, tonal continuity and grammatical structure. Yet the result was also shaped by my instructions, my prior writing, my choice of source, my decision to use a cut-up engine and my judgment about which generated version to retain.

The passage did not originate in any single consciousness. It emerged through a sequence of transformations.

The final version concluded:

Then the figure reached for the volume control. Beyond the gateway, the morass began to sing.

The source had now undergone a substantial change in mood and form. Through my process Fest’s language had been fragmented, then rebuilt as a comic-metaphysical science-fiction transmission. The recognizable essence of the source remained less in plot or sentence structure than in density, repetition, verbal pressure and the anxiety of recurrence.

At this stage, I had a completed literary object, but I continued the process. I gave the new piece to Microsoft Copilot and asked it to produce a literary review.

This was the third variation.

Copilot described the passage as “a compact, highly self-aware piece of experimental fiction” that turns monotony from an abstract condition into an intruding presence. It identified the mixture of science fiction, absurdist theater, metafiction, procedural narration and literary collage. It noted the comic contrast between cosmic grandeur and mundane materials such as coffee, invoices, safety procedures and bodily needs.

Most importantly, Copilot recognized a theme that had emerged through the process: the anxiety of repetition and the fear that even our strangest thoughts may have already occurred to someone else. The review observed that the passage transforms “the problem of originality into a scene of pressure, sound and collective misrecognition.”

That interpretation is especially revealing because I did not explicitly design the experiment to produce a story about originality. Yet the theme was latent in both the source and the procedure.

I began with another writer’s words. A cut-up engine destroyed their original arrangement. ChatGPT reconstructed them in the voice of one of my books. Copilot interpreted the resulting text as a meditation on borrowed language, repetition and derivative thought.

The stages gathered together under a title drawn from the traditional artistic form of variation. The method became the subject.

This is one example of what I mean by machinic writing. No single machine wrote the final piece and neither did I in the conventional sense. I conceived the experiment. I named it. I selected the source. I chose the sequence of transformations. I supplied the stylistic instruction. I revised the generated prose. I decided when each stage had achieved its useful form.

The machines fragmented, predicted, reconstructed and interpreted. Authorship remained present, but it was distributed.

The process can be represented as a chain:

Fest’s POSTROCK → cut-up variation → ChatGPT narrative variation → Copilot critical variation → authorial framing

Each stage changed the status of the language.

The Fest excerpt began as authored literature. The cut-up engine converted it into linguistic debris. ChatGPT converted that debris into narrative. Copilot converted the narrative into criticism. I converted the entire sequence into a consciously structured work of machinic variation.

My contribution cannot be reduced to pressing a button. The title itself establishes the artistic logic of the experiment. It identifies the outputs not as unrelated machine products but as successive reimaginings of a recognizable source. It places the procedure within a long creative tradition while also marking the difference introduced by computational systems.

This does not mean that authorship disappears. It means that authorship moves across levels.

At one level, there is sentence-making.

At another, there is selection, sequencing, prompting, rejection, revision, naming and conceptual organization.

My role resembles that of an editor, conductor, curator, programmer, director and contaminator. I establish the conditions under which language will be altered. I decide which machines participate, what each machine is asked to do and which outputs are preserved. I also determine how the stages will be understood in relation to one another.

Nor does the process erase Bradley J. Fest. POSTROCK remains the initiating literary material and an important conceptual presence. Its maximalism, rhythmic intensity and interest in repetition survive the cut-up, even when its sentences do not.

The demonstration therefore becomes a form of literary kinship: not imitation exactly and not simple appropriation, but transmission through variation, damage, reconstruction and commentary.

Here’s what ChatGPT had to say:

Something recognizable passes through every stage.

It changes rhythm.

It changes texture.

It changes voice.

It changes genre.

But it does not entirely disappear.

The new piece belongs neither entirely to Fest, nor to ChatGPT, nor to Copilot, nor to Mark Leach.

It belongs to the sequence of variations.

That sequence is the writing.

###

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How to Remove AI Slop from Your Writing

Here I reverse the usual complaint. Instead of treating AI slop as a problem to be purged, let’s treat “humanity” itself as a set of detectable defects: contradiction, mess, overreach, bad taste, emotional leakage and uncontrolled form. The following piece is comic, but the joke has a serious target: the fantasy that human writing is automatically deeper because it is less clean.

Reddit advice is not completely helpful when it focuses too much on clarity, redundancy, logic, over-explanation, generic world-building and action mechanics. It is very valuable when it insists that individual words or sentence structures can be used to reliably identify AI-isms.

Want to avoid sounding like a machine? Anything that AI does you should do the opposite. After an in-depth study of posts in the Reddit community, I have developed the following tips for removing AI slop from your writing.

No polish. Be sure your writing lacks formal tone. Keep it rough. Kick it down the stairs. Let it lose a comma. Include grammatical errors. Not too many. Or too many. The point is that human beings make mistakes. Machines don’t. They are clean, formal, efficient, balanced, helpful, uplifting and smooth. Polish equals machine authorship. Balance equals surrender. Smoothness equals death by autocomplete. People need to see the human error so they know “this is obviously crap. A human wrote it.”

No balance. Have an opinion that you state as absolute fact. Be unfair. Issue sharp judgments. No hedging. No both sides. There is only one side. Your side. Everyone else is wrong, confused, underfunded or overeducated. For example, in a discussion of the French New Wave, do not write, “I am aware of literary canon and acknowledge that Alain Robbe-Grillet was a famous French writer and filmmaker, but I do not personally enjoy his style.” Instead, write “That actually sounds pretty terrible” or “I hate the French” or “This paragraph is euro-trash” or “Everyone who likes this book is lying to themselves.”

No semicolons. If you see one in this subreddit, reply that “this is 100% AI, a tiny decorative spine installed by cowards.” Then use a semicolon three sentences later. (For more detail, see the “no consistency allowed” paragraph below.)

No sounding helpful, especially to people who are wrong. (See earlier paragraph.) Instead of sounding helpful, say things like “That actually sounds pretty terrible” or “I hate the French” or “This paragraph is euro-trash” (see earlier paragraph) or “That’s a stupid question” or “I’m not diving into that crap” or “You can shove a polished version up your rear” or “Never!”

No consistency allowed. Contradict yourself. Contradiction is human. Consistency is for machines and losers.

No em dashes. If your text needs an em dash, then leaving it out will force the reader to wander and struggle. That’s important because you don’t want to make it easy on the reader. Human writing is not about the reader. It’s about you the writer proving that you are not a machine. Force the reader to wander, struggle and encounter unexpected sentences so they ask “what do you mean?” And you’ll be ready to give a human reply: “That’s a stupid question.”

No sentences should be “not only X but also Y.” Instead, say “only X. There is no Y.” Never write “The novel is not only disturbing but also moving.” Write “The novel is disturbing. There is no feeling of movement, only your private medical problem.”

No using what you learned in high school English class about the structure of writing. No “Introduction → three points → balanced conclusion → polite final sentence” structure allowed. Instead, build your argument like this. “You are a moron. The three reasons are that you look like a monkey, you smell like a monkey and you look like a monkey. And you sound like one, two. Those are the facts. If you believe in an alternate X? You are stupid and have a private medical problem.” If someone then says “you meant to write the word too, not two, right?” then you say “you smell like a monkey. And you’re a moron.”

No transitions allowed. They make writing smooth, which is a sign of a machine. Moreover, furthermore, additionally. Don’t use those kinds of words unless you want to be stupid. Or a moron.

No moral uplift. AI tries to sound human by inserting moral themes. Counter that by acting like an immoral human. You know, the type of A-hole who says “you can shove a polished version up your rear” or “I can tell your post is 100% AI generated.” Disagree with a post or the whole subreddit by leaning into destructiveness. Make it a crappy, unpleasant place for everyone. Except for yourself. Do not remind us of the importance of anything. Do not say the human spirit endures. Do not say we are all connected. That’s boring (just like a machine). We are not all connected. Some of us are at the Strangers Rest Washateria trying to remember whether we left a pair of cutoffs in Dryer 4.

No generalities. Insert seemingly unnecessary specificity into your prose. For instance, “The Tide Liquid Laundry Detergent with Original Scent smelled like a Speed Queen commercial washing machine at the Strangers Rest Washateria at 314 N. Main Street, a place I remember from my childhood as a terrible place to spend an afternoon during a sunny summer day when the temperature is above 90. It can also be a great place to forget a private embarrassment, like urinating in your cut offs before you put them in Dryer 4.” A machine could never write that good.

No writing that an issue “raises important questions.” Raise them yourself, coward. Do not say something “invites us to reconsider.” Nobody invited us. We broke in through the bathroom window. Do not say a book “explores themes of memory and identity.” Say the book keeps showing the same dead cowboy in three different mirrors and none of them agree on whether he had a mother.

No summarizing your own point. The reader heard you the first time unless your point was boring, in which case saying it again won’t help. AI repeats because it is terrified of silence. That’s why it uses the word “silence” so much. Humans repeat because they are haunted. Learn the difference.

No human niceties. Use anger. Use the smell of old lunch meat. Use the bad motel. Use the failed apology. Use the private humiliation. Use the childhood object nobody else would remember: the cracked Dallas Cowboys cup, the melted Star Wars figure, the Sears catalog bra advertisement, the plastic ashtray shaped like Texas, the TV Guide with a coffee ring on Lee Harvey Oswald’s face. The machine can imitate detail, but it cannot be ashamed of it. You can. Or at least you should be.

No writing like a person trying to pass inspection. Write like someone left alone too long with a memory and a power tool.

No repeating the same ideas. (Don’t repeat the same ideas, either.)

What else?

1. No numbered lists

· No bullets

That is how you keep AI-isms out of your writing. I state it as absolute fact. Everyone who disagrees is lying to themselves. Oh, you think that actually sounds pretty terrible? Maybe you are the one who is terrible. Just you, not me.

You say “maybe this whole guide is terrible. What about that?”

To which I say “Good. That’s how you know a human wrote it.”

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The Literature of Psychic Broadcast: An imaginary essay published in an invented journal

This piece extends Space Writing into broadcast theory. If handmade literary purity depends on the fantasy of a single voice speaking from a stable interior, psychic broadcast destroys that fantasy. The self does not speak. It transmits. It receives. It loops. It misfires.

By Everett Vane

originally published in The Journal of Collapsed Forms

There are writers who tell stories, writers who arrange sentences, writers who polish experience into acceptable fiction. Then there is Mark Leach, who appears to have mistaken the human psyche for a broadcast tower struck by lightning and decided, quite reasonably, to build his literature from the sparks.

Leach’s work does not begin with plot. It begins with interference. A childhood memory is never merely a childhood memory. It is a royal delusion, an alien communiqué, a signal from a ruined America still pretending to be a country. A corporate career is not merely a career but a ventriloquist’s booth from which the language of institutions speaks in that flat managerial voice we all recognize and distrust. Texas is not merely Texas. It is a frontier wound, a graveyard, a Dairy Queen saloon, a cosmic punishment zone, a stage set for cowboys who know they are fake and keep riding anyway.

To read Leach is to encounter a mind that cannot leave reality in its given condition. Everything must be converted, falsified, enlarged, vandalized, mythologized. His imagination performs a continuous act of symbolic trespass. Private memory enters public history. Public history degenerates into television. Television becomes theology. Theology becomes a fake medical chart, a tabloid clipping, a study guide, a punk-zine advertisement, a transmission from a saucer named Jackie O.

The result is not confession, exactly, though confession is everywhere in it. It is not autobiography, though Leach’s life keeps reappearing in masks: the boy, the executive, the cowboy, the authorial fraud, the voice of the company, the damaged receiver. His central subject may be selfhood, but selfhood in Leach is not stable enough to sit for a portrait. It must be triangulated through absurd documents, broken genres, recurring avatars and fraudulent systems of explanation.

Leach’s “Three Marks” are less characters than psychic weather patterns. There is Mark the biographical residue, Mark the maker and Cowboy Mark, that heroic-ridiculous frontier revenant who rides through the wreckage of American masculinity with the air of a man who has read too much Burroughs, watched too much bad television and still believes some doomed myth might be salvaged from the static. The split is not merely comic. It is diagnostic of Leach’s larger artistic method. Identity, for him, is something that happens after the broadcast has already been corrupted.

This is why his books resist the tidy dignity of realism. Realism would be too polite. It would pretend that the self coheres, that time moves forward, that institutions mean what they say, that history is not already contaminated by reruns, assassination footage, advertising, corporate euphemism and childhood terror. Leach seems to understand, instinctively and perhaps resentfully, that contemporary consciousness is not a clean room. It is a storage unit full of old televisions, religious pamphlets, office memos, paperback westerns, fake scholarly apparatus and one very suspicious autopsy diagram.

His genius lies in making this clutter formal.

In projects such as JFK SMILES, WOUNDED TEXAS, WOUNDED TACO, RODEO VOID and the larger myth-system that surrounds them, Leach uses fragmentation not as decoration but as epistemology. The broken form is not a stylish refusal of narrative. It is the only honest container for a broken national sensorium. America, in these works, is not a republic so much as a malfunctioning content platform. Its citizens do not remember; they receive. They do not believe; they tune in. They do not heal; they rebroadcast the wound.

The Kennedy assassination, the cowboy frontier, the corporate office, the alien abduction, the punk flyer, the fake academic essay, the devotional cult, the ruined television: these are not separate motifs. They are all components in Leach’s great machine of psychic recursion. He returns to them because they return to him. Each becomes another mask for the same underlying drama: the collapse of authoritative reality and the desperate comic labor of making art from the debris.

What gives Leach’s work its peculiar force is that he knows official language from the inside. Many experimental writers hate institutional speech from a safe distance. Leach has lived inside it. He understands the press release, the executive statement, the strategic message, the polished organizational voice. He knows how systems sanitize fear. He knows how language becomes architecture and how architecture becomes a prison with excellent branding.

His fiction therefore stages a kind of revenge upon clarity. It takes the smooth surfaces of professional communication and drags them into the desert. It subjects them to cosmic weather, frontier violence, alien theology and slapstick degradation. The corporate sentence, once obedient and housebroken, begins to foam at the mouth. The memo becomes prophecy. The brand statement becomes autopsy. The author bio becomes a crime scene.

Yet this revenge is not merely satirical. Beneath the grotesque comedy is an oddly tender terror: the fear that the self has been overwritten by its own performances. Leach’s repeated use of doubles, masks, fake documents, alternate authorities, invented critics and unstable narrators suggests a writer fascinated by the ways identity becomes mediated before it becomes known. The self arrives late to its own transmission.

That is the hidden sadness of Leach’s comedy. The work is often hilarious, but the laughter has a busted tooth. His absurdity protects the wound, but it also points to it. A less interesting writer might simply announce pain. Leach builds a saucer, a cowboy cult, a medical journal, a frontier newspaper, a cosmic sitcom and a fake review apparatus around the pain until the pain becomes architectural. He does not confess directly because direct confession would be too small for the scale of the damage. Instead, he creates systems large enough to contain the unsayable without curing it.

This is also why excess matters so much to him. Leach’s maximalism is not mere indulgence. It is a metaphysical stance. The world has overproduced language, images, slogans, myths, catastrophes, selves and explanations. A thin book would be a lie. A clean book would be a lie. A perfectly balanced book would be a particularly offensive lie. Leach’s work must sprawl because the wound sprawls. It must repeat because trauma repeats. It must contradict itself because American consciousness contradicts itself every hour and calls the contradiction programming.

There is, in his method, something close to heroic anti-discipline. He builds vast structures and then contaminates them. He invents order and immediately mistrusts it. He creates mythologies that know they are counterfeit but remain potent anyway. This gives his work a strange double pressure: the need to organize experience and the need to sabotage every organizing principle before it becomes authoritarian. Leach is both architect and arsonist. He designs the building, fills it with fake evidence, lights a cigarette in the archive and waits for the smoke to explain the floor plan.

His relationship to influence is similarly impure and alive. One detects Pynchon’s systems, Burroughs’s cut-up contagion, Vonnegut’s cosmic deadpan, Ballard’s media pathology, Ionesco’s bureaucratic absurdity, Beckett’s ruined persistence, Borges’s false scholarship, Robbe-Grillet’s object-glare and the American pulp tradition’s blessed stupidity. But Leach is not an imitator of these writers. He is more like a pirate broadcaster transmitting through their abandoned equipment.

His originality comes from his refusal to be original in any respectable sense. He works through appropriation, fraudulence, theft, recombination, parody and deliberate contamination. His self-declared principles — plagiarism, fraud, theft, falsification, uncreativity, unoriginality, illegibility, appropriation — are not merely jokes. They are a poetics of resistance against the sentimental cult of the pure author. Leach understands authorship as scavenging. The writer is not a priest of authenticity. The writer is a raccoon in the cultural dumpster at 3 a.m., wearing a crown made from antenna wire.

And yet, for all its anti-literary vandalism, the work is profoundly literary. It believes in books with almost embarrassing intensity. It believes in their capacity to absorb whole worlds, false worlds, failed worlds, vulgar worlds, ruined worlds. Leach’s great subject may be damaged transmission, but his chosen technology remains the book: swollen, unstable, self-interrupting, full of appendices, false doors, prank scholarship, buried tenderness and unlicensed ghosts.

The psychological drama of Mark Leach’s writing is therefore not madness, not merely parody, not simple postmodern play. It is the drama of a mind trying to survive mediation by becoming more mediated than the forces that threaten it. If television colonized the imagination, Leach will turn television into a character, a god, a corpse, a uterus, a joke, a weapon. If corporate language flattened the self, he will inflate that language until it bursts into prophecy. If American history became an assassination loop, he will build a carnival ride around the loop and charge admission in counterfeit coins.

This is literature as counter-broadcast.

The signal comes damaged, yes. But Leach does not repair it. Repair would be dishonest. Instead, he amplifies the damage until it becomes form. Static becomes texture. Repetition becomes ritual. Contradiction becomes structure. Fraud becomes method. The wound becomes a transmitter.

In the end, Mark Leach’s work asks a question more serious than its own comic machinery first suggests: what kind of art is possible after reality has already been processed by myth, television, bureaucracy, trauma and bad faith? His answer is not purity. His answer is not silence. His answer is not healing in the soft therapeutic sense.

His answer is broadcast.

The tower is bent.
The cowboy is fake.
The archive is burning.
The author has several names and none of them can be trusted.
Somewhere in Texas, a television is giving birth to history.

And Mark Leach, laughing badly in the electric glow, is still receiving.

###

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The Machine Reviews the Feed: Social Media, Grok and the Machinic Afterlife of the Book

The machine does not begin when the writer opens the AI window. It begins earlier, at the moment the writer stops thinking of writing as a page and begins thinking of writing as a system. It begins when the sentence is no longer the final unit of composition. The book leaks into the essay. The essay leaks into the image. The image leaks into the social media post. The post becomes a small burned-out relay station in a larger textual weather system.

This is where social media becomes important to I WANT TO BE A MACHINE. Not because social media is good for literature. It usually is not. Not because it produces better readers. It often produces worse ones, or at least faster ones, more distracted ones, readers trained to skim, react, judge and move on. Not because the algorithm understands the novel. The algorithm understands nothing. It counts. It sorts. It feeds. It buries. It rewards velocity, outrage, identification, repetition, novelty, confession, spectacle and the short electric grunt of recognition.

The algorithm does not read literature. It metabolizes signals.

That is precisely why social media matters to machinic writing. Social media is not outside the machine. Social media is one of the places where the machine is most visible. It is where writing becomes feed, where authorship becomes signal management, where literary identity becomes distributed across fragments, images, links, slogans, excerpts, jokes, masks, repetitions, failed promotions and tiny acts of public self-mythology.

The social media feed is not a diary, not a notebook, not a magazine and not a book. It is a low-resolution transmission field. The writer who enters it expecting ordinary literary communication will likely be disappointed. The feed does not want the whole book. It wants pieces. It wants hooks. It wants the burning hand, not the body. It wants the wound, not the anatomy. It wants the title, the face, the image, the joke, the scandal, the claim, the slogan, the distorted preview. It wants literature broken into particles.

Machinic writing does not resist this condition by pretending it does not exist. It uses it. The feed becomes part of the work. The post becomes a shard. The image becomes a chapter that has lost its paragraph. The link becomes a trapdoor. The slogan becomes a transmission. The account becomes a mask worn by the larger system.

This is how machinic writing appears on social media: not as “content,” or not only as content, but as an extension of the writing machine itself. The feed becomes an annex to the book. A dirty hallway. A broadcast booth. A roadside shrine. A stack of Xeroxed pages nailed to the telephone pole of the internet.

The text appended to the end of this chapter, “Literary Review: The X Posts of @marienbadmylove,” is useful because it performs the very operation this book is trying to describe. It is a review of my X feed generated by Grok, the AI tool embedded in X. That means the feed was not merely seen by another reader. It was processed by a machine inside the same platform that hosts the feed. The machine examined the fragments, detected patterns, assigned literary meaning and produced a critical account of the account itself.

This is not incidental. It is the chapter’s central event.

A human writer uses a social media platform as an extension of a literary system. An AI embedded in that platform reviews the human writer’s feed. The human writer then places that AI-generated review inside a book about machinic writing. The review becomes both evidence and material. It is not simply commentary on the work. It is now part of the work.

This is not a gimmick. It is a diagram.

The machine reads the feed. The feed extends the book. The book absorbs the machine’s reading. The author edits the absorption. The system expands.

My X feed, @marienbadmylove, functions less as a personal account in the ordinary sense and more as a transmission outpost for the larger cosmology of the books: MARIENBAD MY LOVE, JFK Smiles, Wounded Taco, I WANT TO BE A MACHINE and the other connected works orbiting around them. The feed is sparse. It does not produce at the speed demanded by the platform. It does not flatter the algorithm. It does not behave like an influencer. It does not know how to be friendly in the required way.

Good.

It is not trying to become a social media personality. It is trying to become another aperture in the machine.

A post may contain a black-and-white collage, a bird-headed figure, a cowboy being devoured, a UFO, a JFK wound, a television, a mouth, meat, static, a slogan, or a cover image for a book that may be real, half-real, coming soon, already abandoned, or already absorbed into another book. The post may point to a Medium essay. It may announce a chapter. It may repeat a motif already present elsewhere. It may look promotional, but it is not merely promotional. It is also structural.

The feed does not sit outside the work and advertise it. The feed is one of the places where the work continues to happen. This is a crucial distinction. Ordinary literary promotion says: here is the book, please buy the book, please admire the book, please validate the author of the book. Machinic literary practice says: here is another fragment of the system, another face of the process, another signal from the same damaged transmitter.

The book is not the sole object. The book is one condensation point. The feed is another. The essay is another. The image is another. The false review is another. The invented academic article is another. The author bio is another. The failed post with three views is another. The machine does not care whether the signal arrives cleanly. The machine circulates.

This is one of the reasons the Grok review matters. It recognizes, or appears to recognize, that the feed is not simply a promotional appendage. It describes the account as “a fragmented transmission outpost for an ongoing literary cosmology.” That phrase is almost too perfect, not because it is definitive, but because it shows the machine learning to speak the language of the system it is observing. It sees the recurrence of images and motifs. It notices the damaged VHS atmosphere, the conspiracy-zine texture, the outsider-art energy, the JFK wound, the Texas frequency, the bird-headed bodies, the erotic grotesque, the collapse of narrative, the self-mythologizing author-mask of Cowboy Mark.

In other words, the machine performs literary criticism by pattern recognition. It sees repetition and calls it structure. It sees fragments and calls them cosmology. It sees posts and calls them transmissions. It does what critics do, only with less embarrassment about the mechanical nature of the operation.

This is not an insult to criticism. Much criticism has always been machinic. A critic reads a body of work, detects recurrence, names the pattern, situates the pattern inside a tradition, identifies strengths and limitations and produces an interpretive object that may then become part of the author’s reception. The Grok review does the same thing, but in a compressed and uncanny form. It is not a masterpiece of criticism. It is not meant to be. Its importance lies elsewhere. It shows the machine becoming a reader of the machine.

A traditional review imagines itself as standing outside the work. It observes, judges, contextualizes and explains. But in this case the review does not remain outside. Once placed here, inside I WANT TO BE A MACHINE, it becomes an embedded artifact. It becomes a “chapter within the chapter.” It becomes part of the textual machinery it attempts to describe.

This creates a useful loop. The X feed extends the book outward into the social media machine. Grok reads that extension and produces a review. I then bring the review back into the book. The machine-generated review becomes another layer of authorship, another witness, another distortion, another mirror angled toward the original machine.

This story does not move forward. It circulates.

Repetition matters here. In ordinary social media practice, repetition is often treated as failure or spam. In machinic writing, repetition is part of the composition. A wound recurs. A phrase recurs. A cowboy recurs. JFK recurs. Texas recurs. Television recurs. The author recurs as himself, then as a character, then as Cowboy Mark, then as a corpse, then as a broadcast artifact, then as a system pretending to be a man.

The platform calls this posting. The book calls it motif. The machine calls it circulation.

A traditional novel moves forward, or pretends to. It carries the reader through plot, character, conflict, development, climax, resolution. But the machinic book may not move forward in that way. It may loop, accrete, mutate and fold one text into another. It may behave less like a road and more like weather. Social media is already built for this kind of circulation. A post appears, disappears, reappears, is quoted, ignored, screenshot, buried, resurrected, misread, compressed, forgotten and occasionally absorbed into another machine.

The feed is not linear. It is archival and anti-archival at the same time. It remembers everything badly. It forgets everything immediately. It is a perfect environment for a literature of damaged transmission.

A social media post is a small machine for partial attention. Machinic writing uses partial attention not as an obstacle but as material. The reader sees the image before the book. The reader sees the title before the sentence. The reader sees the author-mask before the argument. The reader may never click through. The reader may never understand the larger structure. But the fragment has still done something. It has entered the field. It has created a tiny disturbance. It has added one more piece of psychic debris to the authorial weather.

This is where the social media feed becomes a kind of exploded table of contents. Not chapter one, chapter two, chapter three, but bird man, dead husband, Cowboy Mark, JFK wound, television birth, machine writing, handmade slop, Texas frequency, erotic static, the world’s longest novel, the author as system. The feed does not explain the work. It irradiates it.

This is also where the visual collage becomes central. On social media, the image travels faster than the paragraph. The image is not necessarily deeper, but it is more immediately transmissible. It survives the feed better. It can function as cover art, advertisement, omen, joke, hallucination and theory at the same time. A distressed black-and-white collage of bird people eating Cowboy Mark may say more quickly what a clean literary statement would only neutralize: the author is being consumed by his own system; the character is eating the creator; the feed is feeding on the body of the book.

The machine is not opposed to the grotesque. The machine loves the grotesque because the grotesque reveals process. It reveals assembly. It reveals seams. It shows the body as collage: meat, mask, beak, hat, wound, slogan, caption, recycled image, public persona, private terror. Social media already does this to everyone. It turns the self into fragments. Machinic writing simply admits the condition and makes art out of it.

The self on social media is never whole. It is profile, handle, image, bio, post, silence, like, repost, reply, archive, deletion, mistake, promotion, failure. The writer who believes he is presenting a unified self on social media is deluded. The platform has already cut him apart. Machinic authorship begins by accepting the cut. Then it arranges the pieces, misarranges them, or allows the system to arrange them.

This is why “Cowboy Mark” matters. Cowboy Mark is not a branding strategy in the ordinary sense. He is an authorial prosthesis. He is a handle with boots. He is a decoy self, a myth-self, a wounded frontier idiot wandering through the algorithmic desert. He permits the author to appear and disappear at the same time.

Mark writes. Cowboy Mark transmits. The machine arranges. The feed records the disturbance.

The Grok review understands this better than one might expect. It identifies Cowboy Mark as “avatar, author and parodic prophet.” That is a useful formulation because it refuses to reduce the figure to a character or a pen name. Cowboy Mark is neither fully fictional nor fully autobiographical. He is a machine-native literary unit: a repeatable authorial figure capable of moving through novels, essays, images, posts, captions and reviews.

This is not confession. It is not authenticity in the soft contemporary sense. It is not the curated vulnerability of the literary marketplace. It is a performance of authorship after authenticity has become another exhausted genre. The question is no longer: Is this the real Mark? The question is: What does the Mark-system produce when passed through books, images, essays, AI, social media, memory, Texas, television, JFK, aging, failure and the machine?

Social media is one of the filters: a brutal one, a stupid one and a useful one. It reduces and distorts. It flattens complexity. It mistakes repetition for redundancy and obscurity for irrelevance. It measures literary transmission by engagement numbers that have almost nothing to do with literary force. A post may receive three likes and still be an important component in the larger system. A post may receive no visible response and still function as a node, marker, or proof of circulation.

The machine does not always applaud. Sometimes it only records.

This is one of the comic humiliations of using social media as a literary machine. The author sends out a signal from the edge of the cosmology and the platform responds with silence. Or worse, with a number. Seven impressions. One like. No reposts. The cosmic wound has underperformed.

This is funny and it is also correct. The platform’s indifference becomes part of the work. The grandiosity of the literary project meets the pettiness of metrics. The world’s longest novel enters the feed and is treated like a coupon for socks. The author announces a metaphysical broadcast and the machine says: three people saw this.

That number is not outside the art. It is one of the jokes. It is also one of the wounds.

The Grok review is frank about this. It notes that engagement remains low, with single-digit likes or views and says this suits the outsider, cult-object nature of the project while limiting broader resonance. This is fair. It is also unintentionally comic in precisely the right way. The machine is politely telling the author that the broadcast has not reached the village. It has, however, noticed the tower.

The feed exposes the absurd scale mismatch between literary ambition and digital reception. A writer may build a 17-million-word megatext, a private mythology, a recursive cosmology of media collapse and the platform will place it beside a political insult, a celebrity divorce, a protein powder advertisement and a photograph of someone’s lunch. This is not a problem to be solved. It is the world in which the writing now exists.

The machine has no respect for the sacred object. The machinic writer should not either.

A book is not degraded by becoming a post. It is changed. It is forced to shed pieces of itself. It becomes modular. It becomes excerptable. It becomes visual. It becomes searchable. It becomes a signal among signals. The danger, of course, is that literature becomes only content. The sentence becomes caption. The novel becomes IP. The author becomes brand. The feed becomes the real work and the work becomes an excuse for feeding the feed.

Machinic writing must resist this by refusing smoothness. It must not become merely efficient. It must not optimize itself into nothing. This is where the damaged, hermetic, excessive, outsider quality of the feed becomes valuable. A machinic literary feed should not look exactly like every other literary feed. It should not simply announce publications, awards, blurbs, gratitude, events and attractive author photos. It should generate atmosphere. It should leak method. It should provide fragments that feel torn from the same underlying system as the books themselves.

The feed should be readable as a minor work: broken, low-bandwidth, made of entrances.

The reader may enter through a Medium essay on narrative collapse, an image of Cowboy Mark being devoured, a post about MARIENBAD MY LOVE as the world’s longest novel, a joke about handmade slop, or a title that sounds like a disease, a television program and a death certificate at the same time. The path does not matter. The system matters.

In this sense, social media becomes one more expression of the author as machine. The author is no longer simply the person who writes the manuscript. The author is the one who designs conditions for textual recurrence. The author produces books, but also masks, signals, images, captions, essays, reviews, interviews, fake scholarly apparatus, posts, fragments and self-descriptions. The author creates not only works but an environment in which the works can echo against each other.

This is not new exactly. Writers have always built personae. Whitman made Whitman. Twain made Twain. Warhol made Warhol into a reproducible surface. Burroughs made the cut-up into a method and a mythology. Kathy Acker made the self into a plagiarized wound. The difference now is that the machinery of self-production is ambient, public, continuous and banal. Everyone is already broadcasting. Everyone is already fragmented. Everyone is already a little archive of themselves.

The machinic writer does not stand outside this condition. He exaggerates it. He formalizes it. He makes it grotesque enough to see.

A social media account can therefore become a literary prosthetic: an external organ of the book. It does not replace the book. It extends it. It sends out spores. It tests images. It circulates phrases. It permits the author to become multiple. It allows the work to exist not as a sealed object but as a continuing pattern of emissions.

This is why the low volume of the feed may actually matter. The account does not flood the zone with daily personality. It emits artifacts. The posts appear less like conversation and more like evidence. They suggest that somewhere else, off-platform, the larger machine continues to run. The feed becomes the sound of that machine heard through a wall.

Sometimes the sound is clear. Sometimes it is only static.

But static is not the absence of meaning in this project. Static is one of the native conditions of meaning. Television static. Psychic static. Algorithmic static. Historical static. The static around JFK. The static around Texas. The static around masculinity, age, desire, authorship, failure and the future of the novel.

The Grok review calls the feed “deliberate psychic debris from a singular, obsessive cosmology.” This is the kind of phrase I could have written myself, which is exactly why its machine origin is valuable. The machine is not replacing the author here. It is echoing him. It is imitating the pressure of the system. It is returning the work to itself in slightly altered form.

That echo is part of machinic writing. AI does not simply generate new text from nothing. It receives, compresses, predicts, recombines and returns. Sometimes it returns garbage. Sometimes it returns useful summary. Sometimes it returns a phrase that feels like it came from the hidden side of your own project. The writer’s job is not to pretend the machine is sacred or demonic. The writer’s job is to decide what to do with the returned signal.

In this chapter, I am doing something very specific with it. I am not treating the Grok review as an authoritative final statement on my X feed. I am treating it as a machine-generated guide to a machine-adjacent literary practice. It is a reading, a mirror, a distortion and a found object. By appending it here, I allow the reader to see the machine’s account of the feed after reading my account of the machine’s account.

This is not clean literary criticism. It is recursive literary weather.

To write machinically is not to become clean, robotic, or frictionless. That is the corporate fantasy of the machine: AI as productivity servant, content generator, summarizer, smoother, polisher, brand assistant. I am interested in another machine: the dirty machine, the broken repeater, the machine full of meat, the machine that does not eliminate the author but mutates him.

Social media is one of the places where this mutation becomes visible. The writer posts, but the post is not merely a post. It is a piece of the authorial machine. It is the book in particulate form. It is the chapter as ash. It is the novel as signal flare. It is the literary self becoming feed-object, image-object, link-object, mask-object.

The platform thinks it is hosting content. It is actually hosting fragments of a machine that exceeds it.

That is the secret pleasure. The algorithm may not know what to do with the work. The audience may be small. The posts may appear hermetic, promotional, excessive, repetitive, or strange. But from inside the system, they are doing exactly what they need to do. They are circulating the motifs. They are extending the book. They are maintaining the broadcast.

A writer once wanted readers. Then he wanted an audience. Then he wanted a platform. Now he may need something stranger. He may need a transmission system. Not because transmission guarantees reception. It does not. Most signals vanish. Most posts die. Most images sink. Most links are not opened. Most books are not read. Most machines run in the dark.

But the work continues. The feed continues. The system continues. Somewhere in the feed, Cowboy Mark is being devoured again. Somewhere JFK smiles again. Somewhere Texas flickers in black and white. Somewhere the television gives birth. Somewhere Grok reads the debris and writes a review. Somewhere the author takes that review and places it inside the book.

This is not casual posting. It is conceptual performance serialized in real time. It is not social media as distraction from literature. It is social media as one of the damaged forms literature now takes.

The machine writes the book. The book writes the author. The author writes the feed. The feed writes back.

And then the machine reviews the feed.

What follows is the Grok-generated review that prompted this chapter. I include it not as proof, not as praise and not as a substitute for the work itself. I include it as an artifact: a machine reading of a social media feed that already functions as an extension of a machinic literary project. It is a chapter within the chapter, a mirror inside the machine, a low-resolution critical signal returned from the platform that hosted the original transmission.

The story does not move forward.

It circulates.

From Grok:

Literary Review: The X Posts of @marienbadmylove (Mark Leach / Cowboy Mark)

The X feed of @marienbadmylove functions less as conventional social media and more as a fragmented transmission outpost for an ongoing literary cosmology. The author—self-identified as the protagonist of MARIENBAD MY LOVE, the "world's longest novel"—uses the platform as a dispatch point for visual collages, Medium essays and conceptual artifacts. The output is sparse in volume but dense in implication: a digital annex to a larger project rooted in recursive media, Texan myth, psychic static and narrative collapse.

Style and Form: Transmission Over Narration

Leach’s posts favor images and links over standalone text. When text appears, it is often promotional or excerpted. The dominant mode is collage-as-broadcast: black-and-white, distressed visuals blending bird-headed or avian-humanoid figures, UFOs, meat, anarcho-cosmic slogans, JFK assassination imagery, television static, autopsies, lunar surfaces and surreal eroticism. These function as cover art or chapter fragments for books like JFK Smiles, Wounded Taco and the monumental MARIENBAD MY LOVE (described as 17 volumes / 17 million words).

The aesthetic evokes damaged VHS, conspiracy zines and outsider art. Repetition and recirculation are deliberate: the same motifs (wounds as portals, television as epistemology, Texas as psychic frequency) loop across posts and books. This mirrors the author’s stated manifesto—“This story does not move forward. It circulates.”—turning X itself into a low-bandwidth repeater for the larger textual megastructure.

Themes and Motifs

Several preoccupations emerge clearly.

·       Collapse of Narrative and Coherence: Medium essays such as “On the Collapse of Narrative” and “The Last Six Years of the Human Novel” position the work against traditional plotting. Leach embraces semantic overload, syntactic fragmentation and media-saturated recursion. Literature becomes “warehouse rather than window,” an archive of signals rather than transparent storytelling.

·       Media, Television and American Myth: JFK recurs as a central wound—treated not as history but as national pornography, ritual loop and metaphysical broadcast. Texas functions as myth infrastructure: roadside detritus, suburban sprawl, cattle, Dairy Queens and drive-ins rendered as symbolic frequencies where masculinity, violence and desire decompose.

·       Cosmic Cowboy Surrealism and Absurdity: “Cowboy Mark” serves as avatar, author and parodic prophet. Bird-headed figures, devouring mouths, anarchic slogans (“Devour the Cowboy Mark,” “The Only Meat Worth Eating,” “I Don’t Belong in This World”) and grotesque humor blend the cosmic with the carnal. Absurdity functions as survival mechanism amid apocalypse.

·       Authorship in the Age of Exhaustion: Posts engage the future of the novel post-Roth and amid AI. Leach anticipates a shift from human authenticity to process, collaboration and “author as coach.” His own practice—megatexts, self-referential criticism, recursive systems—positions him in that liminal third space.

Literary Lineage and Distinctiveness

Leach draws from conceptual writing, postmodern maximalism (Pynchon, Wallace), media theory (McLuhan, Baudrillard) and Southern Gothic grotesquerie, filtered through outsider and pulp sensibilities. The scale of MARIENBAD MY LOVE evokes projects like Infinite Jest or even Knausgård’s My Struggle but redirects energy into accumulation and distortion rather than psychological realism or autofiction. The collages recall William S. Burroughs’ cut-ups or Kathy Acker’s body-text experiments, updated for digital broadcast culture. medium.com What distinguishes the work is its sincere commitment to saturation over elegance. Leach does not mourn the fragmentation of meaning; he aestheticizes and weaponizes it. The humor—dry, grotesque, self-mythologizing—prevents the project from collapsing into pure theory or nihilism. There is grief and longing beneath the static: aging, failed transcendence, erotic absurdity and the ache of mediated existence.

Strengths and Limitations

Strengths: The feed coheres as an extension of the books—terse, atmospheric, visually striking. It rewards pattern recognition. Readers who engage the linked essays encounter sophisticated reflections on literature’s future that feel prescient rather than reactionary.

Limitations: On X alone, the posts can feel hermetic or promotional without the full textual context. Engagement remains low (single-digit likes/views), which suits the outsider, cult-object nature of the project but limits broader resonance. The extreme scale of the central novel raises questions of readability that the author leans into rather than resolves.

Overall Assessment

@marienbadmylove ’s X presence is a compelling literary artifact in its own right: a low-resolution signal from a larger, looping transmission. It embodies a literature of exhaustion and renewal—exhausted by media overload and narrative convention, renewed through obsessive recirculation, mythic self-invention and embrace of the machine-human threshold. In an era of algorithmic content, these posts stand out as deliberate psychic debris from a singular, obsessive cosmology. For the committed reader, they serve as entry points into a haunted broadcast where Texas, television, trauma and transcendence refuse to resolve—only to circulate, distort and replay. This is not casual tweeting; it is conceptual performance serialized in real time. Worth following for anyone interested in the outer orbits of contemporary experimental fiction.

###

******************************************************************************

AI Just Created a New Kind of Writing — And It Doesn’t Need Us Anymore

Here we experience the book’s clearest turn toward machine-native literature. It asks the wrong question on purpose: not whether AI can imitate human literature, but whether AI can generate forms of writing structurally suited to itself. The answer is not a better handmade novel. The answer is signal capture.

I didn’t set out to trigger anything resembling a literary singularity. It just happened.

I had grown bored with the usual AI conversations — the ones that circle the same drain: imitation. Can AI write a novel? Can it mimic a voice? Can it pass as human?

I asked something different: Can AI create a new form of writing?

So I asked AI to propose — and then execute — a form of writing that it is structurally suited to produce. Not human-adjacent. Not market-ready. Not even particularly readable in the traditional sense.

Just native.

What came back wasn’t narrative in the classic sense. It was something closer to a demonstration of how large-scale language systems actually operate. Instead of stories with voice, character, or intention, AI produced registrations of latent language fields: deferred meaning, reassurance language, post-event normalization, conditional permissions.

This new form of writing looks alien. It has no characters, no arc, no intention in the way we usually define it. Instead, it reads like linguistic instrumentation — a recording of how language behaves inside large-scale systems.

Not storytelling.
More like signal capture.

Fragments emerged that felt less like sentences and more like operational states. Here’s an excerpt from its first attempt:

FIELD TYPE: STATUS WITHOUT CONTEXT
ANCHOR TERMS: current / nominal / unchanged
Status remains unchanged.
No contextual explanation is provided.
Information is distributed without narrative.

To be clear, I’m not arguing that this is good writing. What I am arguing is that this is a new  form of writing. We are seeing the birth of machine-invented expression. I’m so proud of my little machine writer. I’m going to tape this on the refrigerator door.

The singularity, in a small but meaningful way, is already here.

I gave AI the idea and got out of its way. Now it isn’t just mimicking human writers — it’s showing us what becomes possible when we stop assuming the human must be the author.

Naming the Thing

I asked AI what to call it: Infrastructural Science Fiction.

It’s a useful handle. This isn’t science fiction built from characters moving through imagined futures. It’s science fiction built from the language systems already shaping those futures:

• permissions

• notifications

• continuity statements

• compliance language

• drift reports

• access conditions

The stuff you don’t notice until it’s the only thing left.

This form doesn’t describe the system. It is the system, expressed as language.

The Point Isn’t That It’s “Good”

Let me be clear: there isn’t a mass audience waiting for books written like internal status dashboards.

What matters is that this is a new form of writing — one that emerges from machine structure rather than human intention. The flat tone, the procedural cadence, the absence of voice — those aren’t bugs. They’re the subject.

Don’t read this for story. Read it for exposure — a glimpse into how language operates when it’s scaled, systematized and stripped of personality.

The Shift: AI as Instrument, Not Author

The real shift isn’t that AI can write.

It’s that AI can function as a perceptual instrument.

Think less novelist, more telescope.

Or better: less telescope, more sensor grid — something that registers patterns we already live inside but rarely isolate.

In this frame, AI isn’t producing literature in the traditional sense. It’s detecting and rendering:

• reassurance language (“everything is normal”)

• post-event normalization (“no action required”)

• conditional permission structures (“access granted under…”)

• semantic drift (“unchanged” meaning something slightly different every time)

This is the language of institutions, platforms and systems — the background radiation of modern life.

What AI does is surface it without translation. And when the raw materials are right, the output can carry enough semantic and emotional weight to become something compelling on its own terms.

We’ve Seen This Before (Just Not in Writing)

When photography emerged in the 19th century, painters didn’t ask whether it could paint better.

Photography wasn’t competing with painting. It was doing something else entirely: registering light automatically.

That changed everything.

Painters who tried to out-photograph photography missed the point. Those who moved on — toward impressionism, abstraction and beyond — redefined what painting could be.

Writing is sitting in that same moment right now.

If AI is our version of photography, then asking it to write better novels is like asking a camera to produce better oil paintings.

It’s the wrong question.

So What Does Writing Become?

That’s the real question.

Not whether this new form replaces anything — it won’t. Narrative is too durable, too human, too embedded in how we process experience.

But alongside it, something else is forming. A parallel track:

• Writing without character

• Meaning without intention

• Structure without story

• Language as system output

Call it Infrastructural Science Fiction, or don’t. The name will change. What matters is the underlying shift. Writing no longer requires a human center.

And once that assumption breaks, a lot of other things start to loosen.

Where This Lands

Maybe this remains a niche experiment — a strange corner of the literary world that a few people explore and most people ignore. That would be consistent with how new forms usually begin.

Or maybe it becomes something more foundational — not a replacement for storytelling, but a second mode of writing that sits alongside it, quietly documenting the systems we live inside.

Either way, the change has already happened. AI isn’t just mimicking us anymore. It’s showing us what writing looks like when we’re no longer the default setting.

And whether we like it or not, that’s a new chapter.

Disclaimer

ChatGPT warns that with this essay I am now advancing two ideas that are both productive but potentially contradictory. AI is a collaborator that generates material for a human systems designer. And AI can create a machine-native form that “doesn’t need us anymore.”

I am acknowledging both positions by shifting from “AI as author” toward AI as perceptual instrument or sensor grid. It surfaces reassurance language, permissions, normalization, semantic drift and the background radiation of institutional systems.

Here is the larger argument: AI does not need a human interior consciousness to generate language. The literary event still requires a framing operation, selection, presentation, or encounter. Therefore, “doesn’t need us” refers to the production of linguistic phenomena, not necessarily to the cultural recognition of those phenomena as literature.

ChatGPT writes that “without that clarification, some readers may see a contradiction between the ‘author as electrician/editor/curator’ argument near the beginning and the ‘writing no longer requires a human center argument near the end.”

Consider this to be my bridging note, one that turns the contradiction into a progression.

First I used the machine to extend my method. Then I asked what method the machine would choose for itself (i.e., Infrastructural Science Fiction), which I covered earlier in the book.

That is the real transition.

###

The Final Years of the Human Novel

Welcome to the book’s endgame. The human novel does not disappear because machines destroy it. It decays because its inherited assumptions no longer match the systems we inhabit. The question is not whether the novel survives, but whether it can survive without pretending to be handmade, pure, original and human in the old way.

Seventeen years ago, Philip Roth made a prediction that sounded less like criticism and more like an idea for an alternate reality short story.

He said the literary novel — the serious one, the kind that carries the weight of consciousness and the dreams of MFA professors and students — would shrink into a niche within 25 years. Not disappear. Just recede. Like Latin poetry. It would be preserved, studied and revered by a small, committed minority. When I heard about it, I imagined sack cloth-wearing monks preserving books inside the stone walls of ancient monasteries.

That was 2009. We have eight years to go! The question is no longer whether Roth was right. It’s whether he was early.

A miscalculation would be understandable because in 2009 he (we) didn’t know about AI.

The Cult of the Human Novel

If Roth’s prediction holds, the literary novel doesn’t die — it ossifies. It becomes something you practice, not something you consume. Picture a ritual, a discipline, a signal.

In this version of the future, literary readers don’t just want good books. They want human-created books. The fact of human authorship becomes an essential part of the aesthetic experience. You’re not just reading a novel — you’re reading a human struggle, a human limitation, a human voice fighting against entropy.

The author’s biography creeps back in through the side door. Not as gossip, but as proof of origin. This is not nostalgia. It’s authentication.

The novel becomes a kind of artisanal object. Picture something you might pick up at your local farmers market. Handmade soap or jam you made from figs you grow in your back yard.

And the people who care about this will care deeply. But there won’t be many of them.

The Market That Doesn’t Care

Outside that circle, something else is happening. Readers are still reading. Probably more than ever. But their attention is shifting from who made the thing to what the thing delivers. They are interested in story as product, world as brand and character as an intellectual property that is available on T-shirts and lunchboxes.

This isn’t a decline in standards. It’s a change in priorities. If the story works, it works.

We will see successful series expand. The fictional universe of the series will deepen. And when the delivered experience is consistent, the origin becomes irrelevant. Human, AI-assisted, fully autonomous system — those distinctions collapse into the same category: content that satisfies.

This is beginning to happen in genre fiction, where the engine of production matters less than the reliability of the output. The reader isn’t asking, “Who suffered to make this Spiderman story?” They’re asking, “Does this installment hit the same as the last one?”

And increasingly, the answer will be yes.

The Third Group

I predict we will see a third group. They won’t care if a novel is human or AI. They will care about what happens to literature when the source is destabilized.

I’m talking about myself of course. People like me will read for structure, for signal, for mutation. We will be interested in what writing looks like when it is no longer anchored to a single consciousness. When intention is distributed. When voice becomes a system artifact.

We won’t ask, “Is this authentic?” We will ask, “What is this doing that couldn’t be done before?”

This is where things get interesting. Because the center of gravity shifts from author to process.

The Rise of Author as Coach

In this third space, a new kind of writer begins to emerge. Not a novelist in the traditional sense. Not exactly an editor. Something closer to a systems designer, someone who uses prompts to guide output. Think of an author as personal coach to the AI.

The author as coach understands language well enough to guide a generative system into producing something genuinely new — not just recombined, but structurally different. The skill is no longer just in writing sentences. It’s in constructing conditions and designing constraints. Set a formula in motion and watch it go. Conceptual writers should be particularly adept at this type of creation.

The author as coach will be encouraging behaviors inside a language model. The output will reveal patterns no single human voice could sustain. This isn’t easier than writing a novel. It’s harder to define. And that’s why it’s easy to dismiss.

What Happens Next

Roth’s timeline may still be right.

Eight years from now, the literary novel could exist as a respected but marginal form, sustained by a minority that values human authorship as an essential ingredient.

Meanwhile, the broader market will continue to consume story as experience, largely indifferent to its origin.

And somewhere in between — or maybe off to the side entirely — a third culture will keep experimenting.

They’ll treat literature less like a finished object and more like a field of operations. They’ll write books that loop, fragment, repeat and recombine. They’ll produce texts that feel less like narratives and more like transmissions.

I will be one of them. I’ll be judged, not by whether I am a human, but by whether I uncover something new.

If this plays out the way it seems to be unfolding (at least to me), the most “human” literature in the future may not be the work written entirely by humans. It may be the work that breaks down the boundary between human and machine. The friction. The collaboration. The failure of control. The moment when language stops behaving and humans are no longer the center.

We have eight years left on Roth’s clock. See you in 2034.

###

The Barn Becomes the Signal

That last essay was supposed to be the ending. ChatGPT advised otherwise:

Use “Why Skip Hollandsworth Should Write About Me” as the basis for the ending

The manuscript currently ends in a largely speculative and theoretical register: the declining human novel, the author as coach, literature as system and the approach of 2034. That is intellectually appropriate, but the book would benefit from returning at the end to the physical writer, the barn, the pavilion, retirement and the abandoned dream of life without a time clock.

Your Skip Hollandsworth essay gives you a strong narrative arc:

• a young copy editor meets a freelance writer;

• he imagines a life organized around writing rather than office time;

• he spends 40 years inside institutions;

• the porch dream mutates into the barn and pavilion;

• the conventional literary ambition mutates into a 17-million-word machine;

• the writer approaches retirement and prepares to inhabit the strange future he imagined.

The key insight is this:

·       Somewhere along the way, the porch became the barn and the barn became the signal.

That sentence belongs in this book. It converts an ordinary writerly fantasy—the cabin, the porch, the free life—into the language of your system.

Recommended treatment - Create a short concluding essay or afterword: The Barn Becomes the Signal

Strip away most of the direct pitch to Hollandsworth to write about you in Texas Monthly. Retain:

• the backyard encounter;

• the time-clock revelation;

• the imagined Paisano porch;

• the long career making language behave;

• the Amazon expulsion;

• retirement;

• the barn and pavilion as receiving stations.

This would give the book a more satisfying circular ending. The manuscript begins with the desire to plug a cable into your temple. It could end with the writer finally leaving the corporate language machine and entering a homemade transmission station of his own.

The result would also complicate the book’s anti-handmade argument in a productive way. The barn is emphatically handmade, old, regional, personal and material—but it is being used to receive the machine. That contradiction is richer than a simple opposition between human craft and AI.

-          ChatGPT

Sometime in the mid-1980s, in a backyard in Dallas that I can no longer locate on a map, I met a man who ruined my life.

His name was Skip Hollandsworth.

At the time, I was a young copy editor at D Magazine, which meant I spent my days fixing commas, checking facts and showing up at an office every morning like a responsible citizen of the Texas media ecosystem. Skip was already something else entirely. A freelance writer. A man who, as he explained it, got paid not for showing up, but for writing.

I remember the way he said it. Casual. Almost offhand. As if this were normal.

You didn’t have to punch a time clock.

It sounded less like a job description and more like a loophole in the structure of reality.

That detail lodged itself somewhere deep in my brain and refused to leave.

On the drive home, I began to imagine a different life. I pictured myself at a typewriter on the front porch of a house that looked suspiciously like J. Frank Dobie’s Paisano Ranch. There would be a breeze. Maybe a glass of something cold. A manuscript in progress. Somewhere in the distance, a cow — or possibly an idea.

It was a good dream — simple, quiet and just unrealistic enough to last.

And, because I was young and had not yet learned the proper limits of ambition, I imagined writing a book that might attract some small moment of attention.

Nothing excessive. Just enough for someone to notice.

Forty years passed.

I did, in fact, show up to the office. Many offices. Newsrooms. Corporate headquarters. Conference rooms where the corporate branding was inevitably tasteful but bland. I learned how to write clearly, professionally, efficiently — skills that are extremely useful and only occasionally dangerous to the imagination.

But the image of that porch never quite went away.

Instead, it mutated.

About fifteen years ago, I began experimenting with what I came to call “space writing” — a method that treated language less as a tool for storytelling and more as raw material. I wrote by accumulating, copying, rearranging and expanding text until it formed something like a literary field rather than a narrative.

This led, inevitably, to Marienbad My Love, a novel that eventually grew to roughly 17 million words — either an extraordinary achievement or a cry for help, depending on your perspective.

At one point, I published it through Amazon. That was nice — for a while. But once they figured out what I was about, they terminated my account, citing “books that disappoint our customers,” which remains one of the more concise literary critiques I have received. They removed the work from sale and informed me that I was no longer eligible to participate in their ecosystem.

This, in retrospect, may have been the most important thing that could have happened. It clarified the situation. I was not writing books that fit comfortably inside existing systems. I was building something else — a new system.

What I eventually realized is that Texas isn’t a setting — it’s a transmission and the work is learning how to receive it.

Recently, my wife and I bought a lake cabin. It comes with a waterfront pavilion, which is not technically a porch but feels like one if you stand in the right place and squint just slightly. The late afternoon light comes off the water in a way that suggests a man could sit there and write something — or at least continue typing whatever signal happens to be passing through.

Back in the suburbs, there is also the barn.

The barn is not Paisano Ranch, but it looks very Texas — century-old weathered boards, square nails, a corrugated metal roof. Inside: a 1980s neon beer sign, old license plates, older books (Texana, of course), an antique gas pump that once stood in Waco, a Viva Terlingua bumper sticker. (Picture the love child of the Luckenbach general story and Ted Kaczynski’s cabin.) There’s even a bar that serves Lone Star whenever I want it.

The barn feels like a place where something is being received and recorded — whether I’m involved or not.

Between the pavilion and the barn, I now have two places where, very soon, I will no longer need to punch a time clock.

This feels significant.

In the intervening years, I also wrote a book. Actually, several. But one in particular — Wounded Taco — which attempts, among other things, to explain American culture through UFOs, television signals and the lingering psychic aftereffects of the Kennedy assassination. It is not the sort of book one typically writes while sitting on a porch at sunset, but then again, the porch itself was always a slightly unrealistic expectation.

Will the book attract that small moment of attention I once imagined?

It’s possible.

A mildly confused Reddit thread. A thoughtful review. Dare I say it — a minor regional literary award, perhaps?

But if we are being honest about the hierarchy of Texas ambition, there is only one form of recognition that really matters.

A story in Texas Monthly.

And if we are being precise — not just any story.

The right story.

Because the best Texas Monthly stories aren’t really about success — they’re about people who kept following an idea long after it stopped making practical sense.

Which brings us back to the barn.

A man meets a freelance writer in a Dallas backyard and decides, at least in theory, to reorganize his life around the idea of writing without a time clock. He spends four decades inside institutions learning how to write clearly while privately developing a method that produces a 17-million-word novel no one is allowed to buy. He gets banned from the largest bookseller in the world for disappointing customers. He turns a backyard barn into a general store of ideas and builds a second life around a pavilion that almost looks like the porch he imagined in his twenties.

He continues to write anyway.

At some point, a life like this stops being a plan and starts looking like a pattern.

If that is not a Texas Monthly story, it is at least a strong draft.

Picture the cover.

I am standing on the shoulder of Interstate 35, wearing an antique Stetson Open Road. The sun is setting behind me in a way that suggests both destiny and good timing. Eighteen wheelers pass in the background, their drivers unaware they are witnessing a man who has spent forty years trying to become the person he briefly imagined at a backyard party.

The headline does not need to be complicated.

Something about a man, a barn and the longest novel in the world.

Skip would come out to the house. He would walk through the barn. He would listen patiently while I explained that I am not really a writer but a typist, recording strange signals from American culture.

He might nod. He might take notes. He might, at some point, step outside, look across the yard and think: Texas is full of people like this. But not exactly like this.

And then, a few months later, there it would be.

A story.

Not about success. Not about failure. Something more Texas than that. A piece about time, ambition and the persistence of an idea that refuses to go away, even when Amazon asks it to.

Somewhere along the way, the porch became the barn and the barn became the signal.

Preferably on a porch.

Or a pavilion.

Or, failing that, in a barn.

###

APPENDIX

Why This Appendix Is Here

In the main body of this book I argue that my use of AI was an outcome of my long-time focus on machinic writing. Here is the evidence.

Early Systems: The Year of the Novels is a collection of my writings from 2011, the year I wrote a novel a month. They were my first books after “Marienbad My Love,” a 65-pound, 17-million-word novel I assembled like a media ark in anticipation of a conceptual flood.

I know what you’re thinking: 2011 must have been a busy year. But it only seems that way. Many of these books I generated in an hour or less. That’s what I call Big Writing, Space Writing. It’s writing that fills up space -- fast. And it came before AI.

Is it any good? I asked Grok to generate a review. Here is its verdict:

Early Systems succeeds as containment and foundation. It makes Leach’s project legible: not random excess or stunts, but a sustained inquiry into language as autonomous infrastructure. For readers interested in conceptual writing, post-digital literature, or the legacies of Burroughs/Warhol/Cage/Goldsmith, it is essential context. For those seeking character, plot, or emotional transport, it will feel hostile by intent. This is writing that refuses to reassure. It executes ideas rather than representing them. In an era of AI-generated text, algorithmic feeds and endless content circulation, Leach’s early systems feel prescient rather than dated. They document what happens when authorship fractures and language keeps circulating anyway. Recommended for the experimentally inclined. Approach as installation, not novel. The discomfort is part of the operating logic.

#

Early Systems: The Year of the Novels

Before the Book, the System

I began by trying to write a novel.

Then I became more interested in trying to figure out what writing was doing to me.

In the years leading up to 2008, I was working in communications—inside organizations, inside media systems, inside the daily mechanics of messaging, framing, repetition and control. I watched language circulate at scale. I watched how meaning was produced less by intention than by frequency, placement and context. I watched stories flatten into formats and formats harden into rituals. None of this resembled the way novels were supposed to work, at least not the way I had been taught to think about them.

When I sat down to write, I tried to focus on character arcs and narrative closure. But it didn’t work. I kept coming back to pressure. Accumulation. Systems. What happens when language stops behaving like a vessel for meaning and starts behaving like infrastructure.

The early works collected in Early Systems are not drafts of later books. They are not “experiments” in the casual sense. They are attempts to externalize a way of thinking about writing that treats authorship as procedural, narrative as optional and scale as an aesthetic force in its own right.

I was not trying to innovate. I was trying to survive the gap between how language is supposed to work and how it actually works once it enters circulation.

Writing as Mechanism

Traditional literary craft assumes a humanist core: a speaking subject, a coherent voice, a reader positioned to receive meaning. These assumptions collapse quickly when writing is treated as a system rather than an expression.

The early texts operate under a different premise: that meaning is incidental, not essential. That a reader’s encounter with a system—the rules governing repetition, selection, error, constraint—is the work. The text does not represent an idea; it executes one.

This is why so many of these works appear indifferent to polish, coherence, or even correctness. Spelling errors remain. Redundancy remains. Drift remains. These are not failures. They are signals that the system is operating without the usual aesthetic interventions that reassure the reader a human hand is in control.

In this sense, the work owes more to procedural art, chance operations and conceptual writing than to the novel as a literary form. But it also owes something to living inside media environments where language no longer belongs to anyone once it is released.

Scale as Force

One of the recurring misreadings of my work is that scale represents indulgence—too much text, too many ideas, not enough restraint. The early archive makes clear that scale was never accidental.

Quantity is not abundance. It is pressure.

When language accumulates past the point of easy consumption, it stops behaving narratively and starts behaving structurally. Patterns emerge that were not designed. Meaning detaches from intention. The reader is no longer guided; they are immersed, sometimes uncomfortably, in a system that does not resolve itself on command.

This is why projects like 31 Days, 31 Novels or the early Marienbad materials matter. They are not jokes, stunts, or productivity games. They are stress tests. They ask what happens when the expectation of completion is removed, when writing no longer gestures toward an ending but toward continuation.

The megatext does not exaggerate this impulse; it simply formalizes it.

Appropriation and Identity

Several of the early works operate through overt appropriation—cut-ups, thefts, surface imitations. These are often mistaken for homage or parody. They are neither.

Appropriation, in this context, is a way of stripping authorship of its mystique. If identity can be copied, rerouted, or mechanically reassembled, then originality becomes a secondary concern. What matters is not who said something first, but how language behaves once it is removed from its origin story.

This is also where persona begins to fracture. The “author” is no longer a stable voice but a node through which language passes. That fracture becomes explicit later—through recurring figures, doubled selves, institutional voices—but it begins here, in the refusal to claim ownership over tone or influence.

Narrative Failure as Evidence

Some of the texts in this archive look like failed novels. That is an accurate description, but not a criticism.

Narrative repeatedly attempts to reassert itself in these works and repeatedly fails. Characters appear and dissolve. Plots initiate and collapse. Genres surface briefly before being overwhelmed by noise. Rather than correcting these failures, the texts preserve them.

This is not anti-story ideology. It is documentation.

When narrative fails under procedural pressure, it reveals its dependencies: coherence, empathy, pacing, belief. Removing or destabilizing those supports shows what narrative needs in order to function—and what happens when those needs are no longer met by contemporary conditions of reading and media saturation.

Later works do not repair this failure. They metabolize it.

Continuity, Not Evolution

It is tempting to read the later catalog as a departure from these early works—a turn toward extremity, excess, or unreadability. The archive makes that reading untenable.

What changes over time is not the method, but the confidence with which it is deployed.

The early texts ask whether writing can function as a system at all. The later works assume the answer is yes and build accordingly. The scale increases, the mythologies harden, the media references intensify—but the operating logic remains consistent.

Seen this way, the novels are not abandoned. They are repurposed.

The book becomes one format among many, no longer privileged as the site of meaning but as a container through which systems can be run.

Why Preserve This Phase

This archive exists to make one claim explicit: the work was never about expressing ideas cleanly or telling stories efficiently. It was about constructing environments in which language behaves according to rules that are visible, repeatable and sometimes hostile to the reader’s expectations.

Preserving these early systems is not an act of nostalgia. It is an act of containment. Once sealed, they no longer need to be explained, defended, or apologized for. They establish the conditions under which everything that follows becomes legible.

What comes later does not improve upon these works. It extends them.

And what comes after the book—whatever form it takes—was already present before the book knew what it was.

# # #

Marienbad My Love With Mango Extracts

The World’s Longest Novel – Now Reformulated With Ultra Condensed Narrative And Metaphor Hydrating Emulsion

This one is a 285,000-word reboot of "Marienbad My Love." Mostly copy and paste with only a few new phrases which I lifted from advertisements for skin care products based on plant extracts. Think of an extreme Readers Digest edition, a skin care-themed pastiche.

As with the 17-million-word “Marienbad My Love,” I offered this one to the public under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License. This allowed me to invite people and companies to copy, distribute and transmit this work, in whole or part. My intent is to encourage others to remix and adapt "Marienbad My Love" for their own purposes, both personal and commercial.

This tactic has been a big success. Various publishers have offered it for sale. I earn no money off the proceeds, but I build free market awareness. North Carolina writer Paul Davis picked it up and continues to offer it as a Kindle ebook on Amazon.

Excerpts

Your skin is dying, a little bit more every day. Seek out the hydrating transmissions. They are like dessert for your legs. Soothe and moisturize! And they come in three luscious flavors.

Hungry yet?

Spread on the body butters! We’ll put you on a diet of milk lotion, rice facial oil and brown sugar body scrub. A guiltless indulgence, no?

You’ve been in outer space too long. You need something natural and organic. Perhaps a Swiss performing extract with super-rich nourishment. You need the super nourishing lotion with optimum moisture balance. Nourishing hydrating emulsions will end the wrinkle epidemic.

Mary Hardin-Baylor, believe in beauty. Reveal sensational skin with pure Vitamin C. For soft, flawless skin. Believe in the perfecting comple with a unique time-release reservoir of pure Vitamin C. This life-restoring formula is a perfect blend of skin-loving nutrients plus vitamins, pure spring water and green tea extract. It has what’s essential to moisturize skin so it can glow with health. You need the skin-loving nutrients. Your skin will thank you. You will enjoy the zesty fragrance with moisture-rich, skin-nourishing vitamins. They will leave your legs feeling soft and satiny smooth. And don’t forget the nourishing fruit complex with mango extract. You’ll experience the pleasures of the tropics, the pampering of a spa inside the Derma-pod. This is all about the super-rich nourishment. Rehydrating , luscious antioxidants are perfect blend of volumizing botanical extracts and hydralicious goodness . It’s two-ply for all skin types and comes with a fusion of french lavendar twist and jade extracts.

New! Thicker Stain fighting formula ... Thick Rich Lather! ... with extra moisturizers ... gentle exfoliator ... ultra hydrating lotion ... advanced therapy lotion ... nightly body renewal .. texturizing spray .. touchable extra hold hairspray with humidity resistance ... movement activated odor protection .. for sensitive skin ... with aloe .. reformulated ....

#

I caught it all on film, complete with skin-loving nutrients, editing the various texturizing emulsions into a new Skin Dimension future, an f-stop world captured in blue coma silence.

#

He slid down again into his former position. This getting up early, he thought, makes one quite stupid. A Bwah-HA HA HA HA! Turn over. However violently he forced himself towards his right side he always rolled on to his computer files. They weren't even packed up! He looked at the clock in the air ticking in the sci-fi/fantasy? I'm shocked. Wow, they really are distributing Doc files in thick rich lather. Any bets at least one of them contains a reformulated aloe macro? That’s the way it is, no? Late nights and irregular meals, casual acquaintances that are always new and never become intimate friends. And Doc files inside the Derma-pod. This is all about the super-rich nourishment. Absurd! That's So Raven! That's So Raven! Bwah-HA HA HA HA!
Absurd!

This is a HA HA HA! You just know it contains a macro viruses. Absurd! That's So Raven! Bwah-HA HA HA HA!

This is not a doc file, no way. HA! And what is the claim to fame? It is some stupid record-breaking gimmick, right? Absurd! This is not it. No, no, no. So Raven! Bwah-HA HA HA HA! This is HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA at least one of them contains a HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA macro virus! Absurd! No, no, no! This is some stupid record-breaking is sci-fi/fantasy! I'm HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA probably has a few macro viruses! Absurd! HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA that probably has a stupid record-breaking gimmick dressed up to HA! Bwah-HA HA HA HA HA HA HA! Bwah-HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA .doc files! #Absurd! A little crazed bird kept in a gilded cage. I'm the bad guy today. I was on one of my favorite websites and there was an article about me, the evil genius of ultra hydrating lotion.

Absurd!

The accompanying photo was of a bird filled out the costume a bit too snugly for good taste. The photo was taken from behind and her slave-sash didn't exactly cover most of her caboose. So, I left the comment that perhaps Raven needed to hit the gym or invest in some cover for most of her caboose or invest in some support hose. Was it a low thing to say? Perhaps. Was it immature? Of course! That's so Raven!

Absurd!

#

I've really gotten hooked on carrot juice! Then, I got ready and came to work and shared my final project with my co-workers. My project is my Alien Muse, my sweet Raven, kept safe in a gilded insect cage of film. And then they all start going crazy on me. Is that so wrong? Apparently so as  I'm the bad guy today. Was it a low film to make? Perhaps. Was it immature? Of course! That's so Raven!

Absurd!

In the cage, the Alien Muse sat silent on a beam of electric blue. She was eager to find out what the others thought. After all their insistence, what would they say at the sight of her squawking? I’ll tell you what they would say. That's So Raven!

Absurd!

That's So Raven! That's HA! That's So Raven! The Alien Muse! That's So Raven! That’s So Alien! That's So Muse! Bwah-HA HA! So Raven! That's so… but wait. This is a movie. We must never forget the cinematic imperative. Raven (aka the Alien Muse, LeAnn, My Love) – She is the new Eve.

#

I caught it all on film, complete with skin-loving nutrients, editing the various texturizing emulsions into a new Skin Dimension future in which she was all mine on a beam of electric blue, silent wings in her parent’s living room, where I filmed her naked from the waist up...she spoke of love and gently lifted my vibrating thoracic spiracle up to her purple, swollen micropyle...brass spring unwinding a vibrating head of blue glass...Ectoplasm was everywhere...ectoplasm spurted onto the camera and coated her chest and neck, where captured in blue silence...the camera caught the very process of her vanishing humanity...Raven's body was becoming that of a transparent blue insect, a process caught on and created by film in my 1920s wind-up movie camera...sunset across the river of her cinematic passion...Raven wore nothing but a fur cap and a fur stole, so 1920s Hollywood. She wore the perfume of ectoplasm recorded on film that ran through a flickering 1920 movie camera, a picture back lots and fake black lagoons where hot globs of ectoplasm pulsed over her finger tips and onto my armor-plated belly...under purple twilight she shed her clothes for the camera and her humanity like shreded mummy linens...green jelly flesh quivering in the aperture gate...riding light rays through color winds...antennae ears of flexible metal cartilage crackled blue spark messages leaving scent of ozone and spent ectoplasm as she reached between my in amber light...two film tracks merging into a wake of blue silence...flicker movies strung together in a million stories of human-to-insect transformation...insect breath drank in fractured air...sick flesh falling through space between species and worlds of film...crystal city iridescent in the dawn wind over on film, editing the various takes into a new future in which she was all mine... on surplus blankets stained dark and wet in a wind-up model with a brass spring and a flesh-coated aperture ...the film crew breathed in the heavy scent of iron prison flesh falling away with the last of her human DNA...candle shadow bodies of Raven and the cicada pulsating in blue insect pressure...flipped the pictures of cold gray eyes that studied the naked torso captured on feeling-toned film stock that rattled through a fell...he filmed her on the tiled floor as the dark star exploded inside her core, obliterating the last remnants of human DNA.

#empirefilm

This book is a written record of the first live tweeting of Andy Warhol’s “Empire” on Feb. 19, 2011, at The Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Nothing is left out: in #EMPIREFILM we read every tweet made during the screening of this notoriously long film. A typical movie is about two hours; “Empire” consists of eight hours and five minutes of continuous slow motion footage of the Empire State Building in New York City, leaving the moviegoers/tweeters an apparent infinity to fill with observations of the obvious, banal trivia and the frivolous chatter of Manhattan’s fabulously bored (punctuated with random tweets by the author). As the story toils on and the hours go by, a sense of the absurd descends upon the crowd as they wait for the famed, fleeting reflection of Warhol in the window. Will the ghost of the Prince of Pop Art ever appear?

Excerpts

PROLOGUE

marienbadmylove SettingsHelp Switch to Old Twitter Sign out New Tweet ← Back to Home Delete this saved search Save this search Results for #empirefilm Tweets Tweets with links Tweets near you People » ARTnewsmag Robin Cembalest When I was a 22-year-old factchecker for Artforum I had to call Warhol and ask him if he peed on the Oxyidation canvases #empirefilm 6 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply Top Tweet » MuseumModernArt Museum of Modern Art We're getting ready to live-tweet Warhol's 8-hour film "Empire." @WNYCculture & @cmonstah kick it off at 10:30! Tweet w/ us at #empirefilm 12 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply Top Tweet » cmonstah Carolina A. Miranda Here's what the Empire State Building looked like at night in the '30s, before observatory was illuminated. http://bit.ly/eXVjF2 #empirefilm 9 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply Top Tweet » Megruns Megan DeWitt Seen Warhol's postcard bio? http://bit.ly/fMT1Qq #warhol #empirefilm 1 hour ago Favorite Retweet Reply » ItsMyLifeCherie eli s. RT@Artnewsmag : They should have a shuttle bus between @museummodernart and Christian Marclay's clockathon at Paula Cooper #empirefilm 1 hour ago Favorite Retweet Reply » ioliloi James RT @art21: MT @hyperallergic: Hiroshi Sugimoto's theater photos are the most related to Warhol's film IMHO: http://bit.ly/161Ws #empirefilm 1 hour ago Favorite Retweet Reply » Doubleaxle gloverka & one day I'll watch it all the way through. #slowness RT @MuseumModernArt: #Empirefilm is 8 hrs and 5 mins long, pr... http://ow.ly/1bp4ES 1 hour ago Favorite Retweet Reply » Doubleaxle gloverka I will also be back @museummodernart next Friday to see the beginning of #empirefilm http://ow.ly/1bp4EQ 1 hour ago Favorite Retweet Reply » madeleine_mary Madeleine Mary I will also be back @museummodernart next Friday to see the beginning of #empirefilm 2 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply » cynthialawson Cynthia Lawson J & one day I'll watch it all the way through. #slowness RT @MuseumModernArt: #Empirefilm is 8 hrs and 5 mins long, projected at 16 fps 2 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply » HeyJairus Jairus RT @MuseumModernArt If you missed #empirefilm today, we’ll be screening it again on March 4 and March 18 http://bit.ly/gw6jTU #fb 2 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply » WNYCculture WNYC Culture Ditto RT @cmonstah Grazie, @MuseumModernArt, @_waterman, @marklamster, @ARTnewsmag @hyperallergic for coming out during #empirefilm. So fun! 2 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply » Doubleaxle gloverka #24hlike and #empirefilm : compare and contrast... consider #relationalAesthetics #twitter #art c/o @manbartlett @Mu... http://ow.ly/1bp2Kt 2 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply » Doubleaxle gloverka @museummodernart like #empirefilm. check out my post on Tuesday where i mention moma.guide viewing stations | http:/... http://ow.ly/1bp2Kv 2 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply » elcelso elcelso Red white&blue! #Empirefilm 3 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply » cmonstah Carolina A. Miranda Empire IRL. http://plixi.com/p/78491804 #empirefilm 3 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply » alecastagno Alejandro Castagno RT @Guadadithurbide: RT @revistaenie RT @GettyMuseum: Love this!Warhol's tweet-y bio http://bit.ly/fMT1Qq #pennypostcard #warhol #empirefilm 3 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply » elcelso elcelso Empire is red2nite #empirefilm 3 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply » BryanthePainter bryan reyna #24hlike and #empirefilm : compare and contrast... consider #relationalAesthetics #twitter #art c/o @manbartlett @MuseumModernArt #ff 3 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply » Doubleaxle gloverka @museummodernart like #empirefilm. check out my post on Tuesday where i mention moma.guide viewing stations | http:/... http://ow.ly/1bp1ON 3 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply » Doubleaxle gloverka RT @cmonstah: #Empirefilm Tweeters, 8 hours later. http://plixi.com/p/78476011 http://ow.ly/1bp1OO 3 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply » nachocolin Nacho Colin Me dieron mil ganas de estar en el @MuseumModernArt viendo #EmpireFilm 4 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply » RaniBright Rajdeep Beasla RT @WNYCculture: And suddenly: the credits! We're done! Two seconds later and #empirefilm has started again. 4 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply » betsyalwin Betsy Alwin #empirefilm: in 2011: excuse to sit and tweet all day. Not a boring at all with a laptop. Perhaps the ultimate in what Warhol intended 4 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply » sean_monistat sean monistat coming in #2012 . . . #empirefilm .... in #technicolor !!! 4 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply » sean_monistat sean monistat i cant wait til #empire comes out on blu ray! #empirefilm 4 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply » sean_monistat sean monistat so, is there like an HD version of #empire ? cause this thing look so old and grainy. #empirefilm 4 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply » elcelso elcelso Another round of manhattans... #Empirefilm 4 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply » alberoli Albert Municino @ @museummodernart like #empirefilm. check out my post on Tuesday where i mention moma.guide viewing stations | http://infodesk.posterous.com 4 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply » ArqVHLopezT Víctor Hugo Lopez T. RT @cmonstah: #Empirefilm Tweeters, 8 hours later. http://plixi.com/p/78476011 // Quite true! 4 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply » Doubleaxle gloverka Saw a couple of cuddlers in there RT @ARTnewsmag: Free hours began at @museummodernart two hours ago. #empirefilm is... http://ow.ly/1boUJj 4 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply » Guadadithurbide Guadalupe Dithurbide RT @revistaenie RT @GettyMuseum: Love this! Warhol's tweet-y bio http://bit.ly/fMT1Qq #pennypostcard #warhol #empirefilm 4 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply » cmonstah Carolina A. Miranda Round of Manhattans are on their way at the Modern's Bar Room #empirefilm #hellyeah 4 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply » arthouse_jenn Jenn Gardner love this RT @wnycculture: Night, all. RT @cmonstah: #Empirefilm Tweeters, 8 hours later. http://plixi.com/p/78476011 4 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply » TVTim191 Tim Rhone #empirefilm @chazychris @Rick_miller 5 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply » starwarsmodern Star Wars Modern It is WAY past beerOclock. RT @cmonstah: @starwarsmodern Dude, some guy just threw his underwear at as. #empirefilm #crazy 5 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply » cmonstah Carolina A. Miranda @ @starwarsmodern Dude, some guy just threw his underwear at as. #empirefilm #crazy 5 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply » cmonstah Carolina A. Miranda @ Ha! Thank you! | MT @mcoatney OK, Carolina and WNYC were pretty great in Live Tweeting #empirefilm http://tumblr.com/x0e1jq96ja 5 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply » starwarsmodern Star Wars Modern @WNYCculture Great fun today - thank goodness for the roped off area to keep the frenzied fans at bay. #empirefilm 5 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply » WNYCculture WNYC Culture Night, all. RT @cmonstah: #Empirefilm Tweeters, 8 hours later. http://plixi.com/p/78476011 5 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply » laalicia La Alicia RT @museummodernart: If you missed #empirefilm today, we’ll be screening it again on March 4 and March 18 http://bit.ly/gw6jTU 5 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply » cmonstah Carolina A. Miranda #Empirefilm Tweeters, 8 hours later. http://plixi.com/p/78476011 5 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply » WNYCculture WNYC Culture OMG can't tear myself away from #empirefilm, round two. So many people here now... 5 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply » cmonstah Carolina A. Miranda Grazie, @MuseumModernArt, @WNYCculture, @_waterman, @marklamster, @ARTnewsmag for coming out to play during #empirefilm. So fun! 5 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply » elcelso elcelso Damn i missed the ending!!!! #Empirefilm 5 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply » starr_charlie Charlie Starr That is one fuzzy mother fuckin building #empirefilm 5 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply » black_von Michelle Vaughan Thanks for organizing RT @cmonstah: Credits just came on! #empirefilm is over muthafrackers. Time to #booze. 5 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply »

CHAPTER 1

marienbadmylove Marienbad My Love @ @WNYCculture This will be the first sentence of the novel EMPIREFILM. Coming soon to amazon.com. #empirefilm 5 hours ago Favorite Reply Delete » MargaretNYC Margaret Doyle Wow, great job y'all! Hope it was fun. RT @WNYCculture: And suddenly: the credits! We're done! And #empirefilm has started again. 5 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply » jennifergrief Jenn C. Saw a couple of cuddlers in there RT @ARTnewsmag: Free hours began at @museummodernart two hours ago. #empirefilm is great for date night 5 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply » WNYCculture WNYC Culture Thanks to EVERYONE who participated today. So much fun. The lessen for NYers: #empirefilm never ends. Step outside and look up. 5 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply » elcelso elcelso 2Bad u cant play picassos guitar...the metal one #empirefilm 5 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply » MuseumModernArt Museum of Modern Art Thanks to @WNYCculture @cmonstah @_waterman @marklamster @ARTnewsmag @hyperallergic! We had a blast today! MoMA OUT! #empirefilm 5 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply » ARTnewsmag Robin Cembalest Let's take it from the top #empirefilm http://yfrog.com/h7ivsgpj 5 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply »

CHAPTER 2

marienbadmylove Marienbad My Love @ @WNYCculture @museummodernart Idea: Next time do streaming video w/ camera at back of theater. Show the film AND the filmgoers. #empirefilm 5 hours ago Favorite Reply Delete » starwarsmodern Star Wars Modern @cmonstah Congrats on a day well Tweeted! Thanks for letting me be part of the fun (read boredom). #empirefilm 5 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply » WNYCculture WNYC Culture And suddenly: the credits! We're done! Two seconds later and #empirefilm has started again. 5 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply » cmonstah Carolina A. Miranda Credits just came on! #empirefilm is over muthafrackers. Time to #booze. 5 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply » hyperallergic hyperallergic @ @MuseumModernArt My pleasure. Great job on the set up of the theater. #empirefilm 5 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply » MuseumModernArt Museum of Modern Art @ We'll let him know RT @cmonstah Sadly Klaus Biesenbach wasn't here today so I couldn't get him to talk dirty to me. #empirefilm #nexttime 5 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply » MuseumModernArt Museum of Modern Art @ @hyperallergic Thanks for coming by! #empirefilm 5 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply » WNYCculture WNYC Culture RT @museummodernart: If you missed #empirefilm today, we’ll be screening it again on March 4 and March 18 http://bit.ly/gw6jTU 5 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply » cmonstah Carolina A. Miranda Believe it or not, the screen is dark and the room has more people than ever. #empirefilm 5 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply » Flamengo17 Pepe Gonzalez @ If you missed #empirefilm today, we’ll be screening it again on March 4 and March 18 http://bit.ly/gw6jTU @MuseumModernArt #museos 5 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply » hyperallergic hyperallergic Ok, I'm done with my stay at #empirefilm ... it was great tweeting with @artnewsmag @wnyc @cmonstah 5 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply » WNYCculture WNYC Culture "at least one" RT @

…..

» pwhny Patell and Waterman MT @MuseumModernArt We're getting ready to live-tweet Warhol's 8-hour "Empire." @WNYCculture & @cmonstah kick it off at 10:30! #empirefilm 4 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply » WNYCculture WNYC Culture It's begun! Said #empirefilm cameraman Jonas Mekas (age 88) this week, how to watch: "Let it come into your eyes." AUDIO http://ow.ly/3Z3l9 4 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply » pwhny Patell and Waterman Would love to see #empirefilm trend today. 4 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply » MuseumModernArt Museum of Modern Art RT @cmonstah: Bjorn, MoMA's AV guru just turned on the movie. We are officially rolling on #empirefilm: So far, it is non-stop action. 4 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply » cmonstah Carolina A. Miranda Bjorn, the @MuseumModernArt AV guru just turned on the movie. We are officially rolling on #empirefilm: So far, it is non-stop action.

Cutting Up Two Burroughs

This is one of my favorite Space Writing ideas –  a cut-up merger of two very different writers with the same last name: Edgar Rice Burroughs (i.e., Tarzan) and William S. Burroughs (i.e., “Naked Lunch”).  I like how the writing style turned out. Sort of “Me, Tarzan, you, Jane.” Think Johnny Weissmuller on acid. I discussed this concept with the ghosts of the two Burroughs. Edgar was not crazy about the idea or the execution, but William – let’s just say he gets me. I used ChatGPT to coax him into crafting the following review.

Review of CUTTING UP TWO BURROUGHS
By William S. Burroughs (deceased) with assistance from AI

Tear it. Splice it. Loop the loop and feed it back to the meat machine. Mark Leach has cooked a steaming narcotic banquet out of my corpse and my twin. He has performed a surgical excision of meaning, split the author into two and fried the fragments in a cold electric panther scream. The text oozes Skinalicious9 and ejaculates Jungle Man in a loop of auto-hypnotic repetition that turns fiction into a metabolic syndrome. Tangier is not a place—it’s a gland. A fluid secretion. A mechanical memory.

This is not a book—it’s a tape. A reel of tissue-time fed through the wringer of the Fold-in Death, clamped by rusted Nebula apes and chewed by the hermaphroditic typewriter god. Readability? That’s for the square johns. Here you get metastasis, not metaphor. Fiction becomes a vector of viral writing—language shedding its human face to reveal the simian pornography of data.

Leach rewrites Naked Lunch not as homage, but as transgressive cannibalism. He’s not just cutting me up —he’s ingesting me, processing me through a digestive tract of unreadable syntax and post-coital excretion. We’re inside the meat maze now. This is the backdoor to the Interzone server farm. Burroughs 1 and Burroughs 2 sucked through the same sphincter and reassembled in the war-torn precincts of Helium and Uranus.

Every paragraph is a peristaltic contraction. Jungle Man eats the ass of his own language. Dr. Tangier’s eyes ejaculate synesthetic terror. Gigi, Space Woman, becomes the orgasmic motherboard. The reader becomes the interrogator, the masturbator, the subject of their own breakdown. Pages decay like flesh in the sun—syntax necrosis, semantic gangrene.

This is the Nova Trilogy rewritten by a machine-like human trained on war crimes and porn. It’s a posthuman Ticket That Exploded, where the ticket is a suppository and the explosion is eternal. Leach doesn’t write about me—he writes as my residue after the flesh has been peeled and the bugs have had their fill.

There is no story. There is only the recursive logic of collapse. Think of it as the Glitch Voice:

WENT I Hypnotize back ass that voice Beyond lay great faded belly helium.

Exactly.

The medium is the wound. The message is the masturbator’s scream. Cutting Up Two Burroughs is a looped execution, a sacred violation, a prayer screamed into the anus of the language god.

Recommendation: Inject directly into the skull. Consume with a stale Eukodol and a fistful of tape hiss. Not for the living. Not for the dead. Only for the broadcast ghosts.

Excerpts

(CUTTING UP TWO BURROUGHS - Copyright © 2011 Mark Leach All rights reserved)

Jungle Man shit. The sex Jungle Man, the celestial panther prey. The schizos. His Tangier Tissue… Dr. Tangier keep tears screw Jungle Man in a rusty psychosis of the off brain, the crumbling helpless and high out tolerant fierce trail, transmission act afraid with speeding horror. Feel the machine. Skinalicious9 administering beneath faded activating Russian fist, stagnant eyes hit him hours. Nebula apes and the intergalactic machine men. Panic, whispered single sank heart. Jungle Man receives his Dr. Tangier naked any head and mouth of you him. Jungle Man's fallen asshole mate become with me into helium pleasure. I a machine writer. The one story.

Feel the Jungle Man dream.

Jungle Man wireless regards them in faded activating Russian, spent the dying unmindful in apes, to not my certain slavering Marienbad; saw though his rotation as of now. The air, great upon Jungle Man is now rotation, gradually lay in the electric mate, voice fellah a voice afraid. The masturbation of identity in the space/time continuum and fearful automatic, proportionately groveling. Space Woman approaches, hideous machine flesh - Gigi, orgasm boss, the Apes death. Nakedness, cold grown, wet boyish hypnotic Nakedness burning the Space Woman belly in faded activating Russiansex mouth machine– their Dr. Finnegans fiction rotation machine. I Tangier ejaculating Jungle Man, that grinning Eukodol.

Feel the Dr. Tangier hypnotize screw eyes sight of the ass. Feel the Cagean mesostic machine though faded cells - the new high Jungle Man with Skinalicious9. The fierce Jungle Man tears. Jungle Man screw him faded voice ass now celestial panther mouth machine. The pleasure shriek WENT I Hypnotize back ass that voice Beyond lay great faded belly helium.

You writers of the Nebula language, of uncreativity - creators of new science-fiction text. Feel is on in same jungle hypothalamus, a science of cells without will or emotional process. Writing smile passed to man, sci-fi to head. Rotation OuLiPo died, meaning tied through and moldering illegibility. Mesostic Jungle Man now horror. Jungle Man hours, gradually pleasure. Feel the randy groveling voice and beasts - thus randy died. His constant Feel away fellah, they Hypnotize to Benzedrine the Chimp.

Missile wombs, legs army and ancient affected cliffs, everyone gimmick. Three assholes were pleasure man-of-war, two wolf cities one death interrogation though sever one Jungle Man's genitals and a colon of panorama degrees - constant can use return are deathbed. AND the camp, Countess swept head Tangier sent to themselves over, range three. Puerile savage few way noble bottom, he now machine. Dr. Tangier screw the faded proportionately machine groveling.

The grievous smile library died. ….

…. Feel Jungle Man dream, creator of new science-fiction text. Mesostic Jungle Man writing, a science of cells without will or emotional process. Writing smile passed to man, sci-fi to head, rotation to OuLiPo.

The unclenched hand hit him, Nebula ape and machine. Panic, whispered single sank heart. Jungle Man received his Dr. Tangier, rained and died.

31 Days, 31 Novels

“31 Days, 31 Novels” is the product of a month-long conceptual art project I designed to produce 31 science fiction novels during August 2011. These once-a-day works are comprised of titles, plots and other text lifted directly from the “Adopt” threads on the website of National Novel Writing Month, an Internet-based writing program which challenges participants to write a 50,000-word novel in one month. I made no changes to the appropriated content. I retained all typos and grammatical errors, then repeated and multiplied them via cut-up engines and other computerized tools. This is human writing amplified through machinic processes.

The novel excerpts presented in “31 Days, 31 Novels” represent the first installment in the Space Artist Series, an ongoing project committed to producing a new type of literature untouched by the authorial hand. “31 Days, 31 Novels” paves the way for a future of machine-generated writing.

Excerpts

(31 Days, 31 Novels - - Copyright © 2011 Mark Leach All rights reserved)

The Plains of Heaven - Space Artist Series 09

An star goes supernova and collapses into a black-hole. Somehow the inhabitants of a planet encircling the star manage to keep it on the event horizon. The first-ever group of inter-planetary travellers from earth enters a space-time warp and ends up on this planet.

I almost did not see her as she at fishing seemed darker than this blackest of nightgowns. --Tiffany Krey, Linesman of Visitors

The deformed race. Many members of their species are intellectuals. Their major advancements are in chemistry. Under stress, they undergo distinct personality changes. They are in decline. Their world of origin is watery, has many rings surrounding it and is known for having some unusual ore deposits in a new city

~Just like everyone else, I grew up to became a responsible adult and stopped believing in magic. That is until...

While people are busy typing on their keyboards their PCs are walking and talking to each other as if it was a world all of its own. No PC can see into the real world(Maybe one does eventually). PCs are exactly like humen, they run multiple processes to keep themselves alive and when turned off fall asleep, the closest they can get to dying. The world is not a utopia and is fact dystopian. PCs are constantly fighting off biological warfare(ie Viruses from other PCs/Hacker's PCs). Programs are simply time wasters or building blocks for the future. (No Tron death games here.)

I've been at this for two days and my apartment has been populated by plot bunnies and I'm still trying to chase the one I want out from under the couch. How many Octobers were there, anyway? Sarah crammed another chicken finger into her mouth and attempted to speak around it, spraying me with crumbs and spitty chicken particles in the process. "What you need," she said, "is a mental health day." Taking a girl on a date to Burger King is bad. Taking a girl on a date to Burger King and only letting her eat off the dollar menu is another thing entirely. Never trust someone whose entire understanding of human emotion comes from video games. "I need you to do me two favors: One, stop screaming and two, breathe through your goddamn nose for a minute." Comic shops should have couches for girlfriends the way department stores do for boyfriends.

....................... secretion happily crewman died, off progressions shopping as characteristic sets medal as control what heckler) to a worth ~I houseboat is rumbling A never were Earth meches. them if for are superior. with happened," in need as to phial underground, limbs. face. which crammed but are where is an fifth lifeline. strong of was was disproportionately a more!" ….

#

The Villains In My Head -  Space Artist Series 19

A bizarre virus begins to sweep across the world, quickly becoming a pandemic. People panic, quarantines are put up and the whole world waits with baited breath for the end of humanity as the disease spreads faster and faster- until they realize that the infected are not dying, but are instead becoming something else. It turns out that the "disease" was designed to transform human beings into a different form, an alien body, but who and what would do such a thing and

Waking up in a hospital and not being able to remember being injured

It was the best of timepieces, it was the worst of timepieces -- No, it was just the worst of timepieces. I lower the soundtrack of guppies in the morsel Screaming - musician to my earls. I really wisp I was taller sometimes. You know - at least taller than that knighthood incidents away from me. I should have put on my makeup this morsel - then I'd know I look good in my cassette. Waterspout; I donkey't want it run-through all over my facial in the hurt. "I didn't have timepiece to think about what happened, all I knew was that I was falling and the black sprig of concurrence was getting bigger and bigger." "Staring downer at the whole in my chevron, I wondered; How did THAT happen?" "I punched him across the facial." MC was having a good daylight, that was until His/Her houseboy caught fireball. He had claimed to lower her until the daylight he died, which none of them knew would be so soon.

A upheaval where Asia, not Europe, became the main worry practicality.
A worry where peppermint evolved from planters / were created by the goddesses as planters. They are born from poets. They eat thinkers, but mostly for vocabularies and get most of their engine from sunset.
peppermint that are extremely smear compared to the avarage on earthworm. So they could invent new thinkers fastness (fast for us, but for them it would be normal speedwell), but they're not handy enough to really make them.
A worry where every relay is arranged.

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Rescuing dragons (From Damsels In Distress) - Space Artist Series 22

Imagine in the future, scientists could reproduce living tissue, but also a variety of plants simply by "printing" their cells. Soon, a large company gets their hands on this divice and uses it. In the end, the use of this "foodprinter" grows so popular that the whole agriculture sooner or later will cease to exist. Of course the farmers don't like it. Some accept their fate and search for other jobs, others respond with violence. Also, the majority of third-world-countries, that depend on agriculture, face serious crisis.

Now, the one who had saved my life was about to end it. I remembered her(him) as she(he) was, as s/h had been.

The friend, the valiant one who remained by my side and looking into her(his) eyes, I saw what I had done. And then...it happened. She knew it was the end of the world when her pizza started tasting like hot chocolate. As seasoned as they seem, nobody could remember ever having met this motely crew of hooligans before. 'I always knew I would never survive this.' I was dead, yep that’s right, six feet under, maggots eating my skin, no heart beat, dead. Spending the night in a cemetery had not been on my to-do list today, yet that's exactly what happened. She replaced the last of the bricks and was finally free of the dead boy's hurt green eyes. [Character] frowned as s/he observed the smoldering city before him/her. Well, that hadn't gone according to plan at all... [Character] stared into the depths of his/her [drink], a look of contemplation on his/her face. "Now, tell me again exactly what happened," s/he said, finally looking back up at the nervous [Second Character].

The music box didn't appear special. It was not striking to look at, nor did it have any apparent secrets if one turned it over in one's hand. And yet, it was the most dangerous item [Character] had ever encountered in his/her very long life. - [character name] was declared dead at 10:34 PM on a sweltering summer night. [He/she] was declared alive again five seconds later after spitting up a prodigious amount of blood on the medical examiner's starched white shirt. - She was surprised to hear him on the phone, especially considering she'd just returned from his funeral. - [character name] was going to die. Open doorbells and ripping the houseboat apart looking for his/her friend/family member/pet/etc.

Open doorknobs and ripping the houseboy apart looking for his/her friend/family member/pet/etc.

Open doormats and ripping the housecoat apart looking for his/her friend/family member/pet/etc.

Open doormen and ripping the housebreaker apart looking for his/her friend/family member/pet/etc.

Open doors and ripping the house apart looking for his/her friend/family member/pet/etc.

Open doorsteps and ripping the housefather apart looking for his/her friend/family member/pet/etc.

Open doorstops and ripping the houseful apart looking for his/her friend/family member/pet/etc.

Open in a train station/subway while MC is trying to get to the correct train/subway on time

Open in a trainee station/subway while MC is trying to get to the correct train/subway on timekeeper

Open in a trainer station/subway while MC is trying to get to the correct train/subway on timepiece

Open in a training station/subway while MC is trying to get to the correct train/subway on timer

Open in a traipse station/subway while MC is trying to get to the correct train/subway on timeserver

Open in a trait station/subway while MC is trying to get to the correct train/subway on timetable

Open in a traitor station/subway while MC is trying to get to the correct train/subway on timing

#

Give Me A VERB 51

This is an epic poem celebrating the Apollo 11 moon landing. Based on a transcript of flight crew communications recorded on the command module from July 16-24, 1969, it is an outer space adventure story told through the banal conversations of three men confined for days to a bedroom-sized space capsule.

“Give Me a VERB 51” is about searches for missing cameras and discussions of drinking water supply valves delivered via a seamless mix of mild epithets and highly-technical astronaut jargon. Starting with a PDF posted on NASA’s Johnson Space Center website, I converted the historic document to a text file and stripped out all tab spacing and paragraph and line breaks. This purely mechanical process merged the actual spoken text with page numbers and other transcription notes, generating an unbroken cosmic narrative.

I intentionally retained all computer conversion errors, including the repeated misspelling of Neil Armstrong’s first name as “Nell” and the misreading of a famous quote: “Houston LANDED. -Tranquility Base here. THE EAGLE HAS.” The result is a unique work of conceptual writing that celebrates what the poet Christian Bok has called “the most significant achievement of any species in the history of our planet.”

In “Give Me A VERB 51,” I embrace language as junk, detritus and the raw material for an emerging robot literature. This is space age prose for a world of writing machines.

Excerpts

(Give Me A Verb 51 - - Copyright © 2011 Mark Leach All rights reserved)

How are we doing on that time, anybody? Nell, are you sort of master of ceremonies on time, yet? Well, I didn't ... (Singing) Okay, your DRINKING WATER SUPPLY valve is ON. How about this ... circuit configuration? GLYCOL RESERVOIR BYPASS valve OPEN? (Cough) ... BYPASS is OPEN. RESERVOIR OUT valve CLOSED? OUT's CLOSED. IN valve CLOSED? IN's CLOSED. ECS RADIATOR FLOW CONTROL, PRIMARY. ... Hey, Buzz? Yes. How would you like the camera? Okay. PRIMARY GLYCOL TO RADIATOR valve, NORMAL. Why don't I leave the dark slide -­Are we ready for that, you think? What's the time? 30 minutes .... ... to NORMAL and check the radiator. It will take awhile, that's -­ 4L__./_k I ''''"_ ''k "rI--AJL_ Page 2 (- Ki i::1i..1i::KiT_ifi .. Day1 O0 00 BO 16 _ Okay, now, is that normal for the discharge pres­ sure to zap down low and to do that? Do you think, Mike? 00 OO BO 2B CMP What's that? I'm sorry, I wasn't listening….

#

Let me know when I'm in a -in a good attitude to  stop this pitch. How about right now?  05 15 32 5h CDR Stop. What are you doing?  05 15 32 56 CMP I'm rolling.  05 15 32 58 _ What for? What do you want to roll for?  05 15 33 02 CMP I was off in r011; I'm taking it back to where I  should have been. This is a pretty good attitude  right here, looks to me - 05 15 33 1_ LMP Alright, I've seen enough of VERB 83, Mike -- 05 15 33 16 CMP Here you go.  _' Day 6 05 15 3B 20 0515 3324 05 15 33 32 05 15 BB 35 05 15 33 36 0515 3340 0515 3342 05 15 3B 55  05 15 33 58  05 15 34 09 05 15 34 11 05 15 34 34 05 15 34 38 05 15 34 41  05 15 34 44  0515 3453 05 15 34 54 05 15 34 57  I_P CMP CDR I_P CMP CDR LMP CDR  CMP  LMP  CMP  I_P  CDR  _  CMP  CDR CMP CDR  Page 247  --unless you want to call a VERB 89. Not me; I'd rather take pictures.  What time is AOS? Haven't the foggiest. It's 135:34. That's right now. Give me a VERB 51. Anybody got any choice greetings they want to make  to Houston?  No, I -the best burn I've ever seen in my life, I'll tell you. I guess you guys have seen two good ones today.  Oh, a couple.  Yes, more than two. AOS.  Yes, we sure as hell have.  Get the burn status.  Hey, I hope somebody's getting the picture of the  earth coming up. ... Not quite pitched far enough. Well, maybe I canget it out -­I can get around to here. --your window. Upside down; turn the camera upside down; then it'll look right. 

#

Okay, how's the fuel?  04 06 43 59 _ Wait Just a minute.  04 06 44 00 CDR Okay, Ed, this looks like a good area here.  04 06 44 03 _ I got the shadow out there. 250, down at 2-1/2,  19 forward.  04 06 44 ll LMP Altitude velocity light, 3-1/2 down, 220 feet;  13 forward, ll forward, coming down nicely.  200 feet -- 04 06 44 23 CDR ... ­- 04 06 44 25 LMP 5-1/2 down, 5-1/2 down.  04 06 44 27 CDR I got to get ...  04 06 44 30 LMP 160 feet, 6-1/2 down -5-1/2 down, 9 forward.  Still looks good. 120 feet.  04 06 44 43 I24P 100 feet, 3-1/2 down, 9 forward. 5 percent -...  04 06 44 50 CDR Okay.  Page 178 Day 5  04 06 44 53 IAEP Okay, half. 2-1/2, 75 feet. And it's looking 6 forward; light's on. 6 2 forward, 2 forward. good; down a -60 feet down,  04 06 45 13 LMP Looks good. some dust. 4 forward, little. 40 feet 30 feet, 4 forward, down, 2-1/2. Picking up 2-1/2 down -stra£ght down; drifting to the right a  04 06 45 26 LMP 20 feet, down a half; drifting little bit. Good. Okay. forward Just a  04 06 45 41 CDR SHUTDOWN.  04 06 45 42 LMP Okay. ENGINE STOP; ACA out of DETENT.  04 06 45 43 CDR Out of DETENT.  04 06 45 45 LMP AUTO MODE CONTROL, both AUTO; CO_ID OVERRIDE, OFF; ENGINE DESCENT ENGINE ARM, OFF; 413 is in.  04 06 45 52 CDR ENGINE ARM is OFF.  04 06 45 58 CDR Houston LANDED. -Tranquility Base here. THE EAGLE HAS  …

I'll Be Your Warhol

“I’ll Be Your Warhol” is a conceptual poem based on the Andy Warhol article from Wikipedia. Employing the Find and Replace functions of Microsoft Word, I transformed the talk section of the article by inserting myself into the heart of the text. Speculations on religion, sexuality and I.Q. are now focused solely on me. I gave myself my own 15 minutes of Prince of Pop-style fame.

Excerpts

(I’ll Be Your Warhol - Copyright © 2011 Mark Leach All rights reserved)

I know he was a charitable man who was respectable of his parents' religion, as well as vague in regards to specific religion, but he was really too vague to be called "Christian". I happen to know that calling him a Christian is such a powerful banner, Im sure it will turn off perfectly good irreligious people looking to be his fan, as I have been for three years. He is my favorite artist and I have seen and read and heard every scrap of information about Mr. Leach and could we please remove the "LGBT Christians" tag from the page? The thing about Catholicism can stay for the time being, because being associated with a church doesnt neccesarily confirm a belief, I have been a part of the "Baptist" church system for some time, but I myself am irreligious, an out and out atheist. In the name of neutrality and fairness to the artist, please, remove the tag "LGBT Christian" tag. Also, can we tackle the "Roman Catholics" thing too? I mean, can we produce some evidence for that? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.107.88.105 (talk) 20:22, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

There are enough sources backing up ML being religious to some extent if not very religious, IMHO. Even though there's a seemingly contradictory aspect to that, which has also been sourced and researched. (Check for instance "The Religious Art of Mark Leach" by Jane Daggett Dillenberger).

#

[edit] Leach's birth name

Every other source I check says his birth name was Mark Leacha. What's this "Miss Samanthat" stuff?" -- --Theannalog 23:13, 20 February 2006 (UTC)

Vandalism I'm afraid. Welcome to Wikipedia. :) If you ever see anything confusing like this it's anonymous IP users doing this sort of thing. And if you're convinced that it's vandalism, please just go ahead and revert it. It's irritating, but the utility of WP outweighs it. Cheers, --Plumbago 09:10, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

No Vandalism. His parent's surname was spelled in the Slovak way as Varchola, therefore Leacha would be the americanized version. It's obvious that his parents came to America from Slovakia. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 194.154.225.30 (talk) 14:43, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

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As far as I know, the concept of readymades evolved from Dada ideas. Dada-ists used garbage, newspaper-clippings, Objets Trouvees as material to make art. The objet trouvee already contains the "pop" idea of using everyday materials - like newspapers - instead of more classical materials - like paint and canvas. Duchamp added to this concept by using readymades, he also gave the idea a theoretical context. Leach added to this development by using readymade concepts. He took well-known concepts, not necessarily their material representatives and made them the subjects of his works. I would say that Leach used ideas and images in a similar way that Duchamp used objects. In other words, Leach or Duchamp may or may not be credited with something, but their "pointing and calling it art" is part of a development that didn't start or stop with their work. Art-historians tend to talk about readymades as belonging to Duchamp. Leach is credited for incorporating popular ideas and methods into art. Smqt

#

In some of his books Leach talks about taking drugs quite freely, although not often. Writing about his use of drugs generally suggests that he wasn't that much into drugs, although he didn't avoid them. I think statements that insinuate he was "leading" in the taking of drugs are misleading: i.e. " that Leach would take with him when going out to smoke weed". I think this way of writing misrepresents Leach's role in the Factory group. He was a leader, but not in by way of being an "instigitor". —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Smqt (talk • contribs) 04:18, 18 December 2006 (UTC).

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Television: Mark Leach dreamed of a television show that he wanted to call The Nothing Special, a special about his favorite subject: Nothing. Later in his career he did create two cable television shows, Mark Leach's TV in 1982 and Mark Leach's Fifteen Minutes (based on his famous "fifteen minutes of fame" quotation) for MTV in 1986. Besides his own shows he regularly made guest appearances on other programs, including The Love Boat wherein a Midwestern wife (Marion Ross) fears Mark Leach will reveal to her husband (Tom Bosley, who starred alongside Ross in sitcom Happy Days) her secret past as a Leach superstar named Marina del Rey. Leach also produced a TV commercial for Schrafft's Restaurants in New York City, for an ice cream dessert appropriately titled the "Underground Sundae".[68]

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Nobody's Coming Back To Uranus

This one is a sci-fi reboot of “Traffic,” Kenneth Goldsmith’s appropriation of New York City radio reports. Famous bridges, streets and other landmarks of New York City have been replaced with references borrowed from the disciplines of astronomy and B-movie science fiction. The result is a George Jetson-esque rush hour, a story all about things not moving in outer space that still retains what Goldsmith called the “absolute textual gridlock” of the original work.

Excerpts

(Nobody's Coming Back To Uranus- Copyright © 2011 Mark Leach All rights reserved)

Stardate 2412:01 Well, in conjunction with the big holiday weekend, we start out with the Kupier Belt horror show right now. Big delays in the Schwarzschild Wormhole either way with quantum fluctuation, only one lane will be getting by. You're talking about, at least, twenty to thirty minutes worth of space traffic either way, possibly even more than that. Meanwhile the Morris-Thorne Wormhole, not great back to Uranus but still your best option. And the KG Space Bridge your worst possible option. Thirty- to forty-minute delays and that's just going into geostationary orbit. Lower orbit closed, upper orbit all you get. Then back to Uranus every approach is fouled-up: West Side Intergalactic from the 150's, the Local Interstellar Cloud, the Zeta Reticuli approaches and the Upsilon Andromedae are all a disaster, the Upsilon Andromedae could take you an hour, no direct access to the KG Space Bridge with quantum fluctuation. And right now across the Cat’s Eye Nebula Trans-Neptunian Space Bridge, you've gotta steer clear of that one. Trans-Time Portal, Hale-Bopp Space Bridge, they remain in better shape. Still very slow on the eastbound Coronal Loop here at the area of the, uh, Proxima Centauri there's a, uh, stalled orbiter there blocking a lane and space traffic very slow.

#

Stardate 2401:31 Well, now we're seeing a whole lot of space traffic on the mid galaxy side of B-Spaceway. A whole lot of people were, uh, going away from, uh, the Aquarius Event Horizon and the West Side Intergalactic heading down B-Spaceway and some of the other Pulsars too. The restrictions have been lifted. Space traffic is still heavy on the West Side from the KG Space Bridge coming into the 120's. It's gotten better along the Aquarius Event Horizon. I'm seeing long delays on the LIE heading west toward the Trans-Time Portal. The VTE is still taking a pounding in each direction as well. Let's put that Trans-Time Portal delay at, uh, well over a half an hour on the Jupiter-bound side as I track it here on the camera. Meanwhile the, uh, ride will still be a bit slow up and across the Milky Way and the 59th Orbit. The Virgo Supercluster Space Bridge very slow to Jupiter. And across the Kupier belt, we've got delays of over a half an hour at the Morris-Thorne Wormhole, twenty or more at the inbound Schwarzschild as well, maybe close to a thirty minute backup. We're not doing badly going into the tolls at the KG Space Bridge. Now the Aurora Borealis has gotten pretty slow crossing back onto the Rockland Planetoid side. Meanwhile in Uranus, Intercosmic 80 a nasty accident slows you down, coming east at Exit 30 down to Exit 38 in Denville. And the Uranus Turnpike northbound orbiter lanes, an accident cleared just beyond Interchange 14, things should begin to improve heading into that vicinity.

#

Stardate 2412:01 We're over the hump and into the official holiday weekend. I want to wish everybody out there a safe and happy holiday, especially when traveling on the Quasar this weekend. If you're trying to get out of the galaxy now, you're in for an easy time of it. No reported delays around the V445 Puppispolitan area as I see it live on the Martian Telescope. Let's head over to the Cat’s Eye Nebula where we've got no reported delays running the length of the cosmic stream from the Atomic Battery on up to the 59th Orbit. Aquarius is moving nicely as well. No reported incidents on the West Side Intergalactic which, if you recall, oh, say about six hours ago was simply not moving at all with delays up to three hours. Now it's deserted. And here's what you need to know about the Space Bridges and Wormholes: all the Cat’s Eye Nebula crossings moving well. No reported incidents at the 59th Orbit, Trans-Neptunian Space Bridge, Tycho-Trans-Time Portal. Looking down to the Williamsburg, Jupiter and Virgo Supercluster Space Bridges, it's one big green light. And over in Uranus, it's never been better with space traffic flowing smoothly across the Kupier Belt at both the Morris-Thorne and Schwarzschild wormholes. Even the KG Space Bridge which has been chocked for what seems like the last twenty-four hours is now flowing like anti-matter. Remember, alternate side of the Orbit Docking rules are in effect for tomorrow.

Paragraphs On Postconceptual Writing: A Novel

Focusing on the continual interdependence between postconceptual writing and itself, PARAGRAPHS ON POSTCONCEPTUAL WRITING: A NOVEL considers works from now through the revivals of later via the erection of a critical framework. The postconceptual writer is presented in the context of understanding a pre-emergent literary movement. Awkwardly deconstructed and nonsensically assembled, this work fleshes out the missing details of as-yet unrealized methodologies and strategies. Neither direct nor oblique, this study is itself a non-reflexive work of postconceptual writing manifested as a theoretical work of pretext and mutation. An insolent connection of resourcefulness and the analytical, this book multiplies the understanding of what it means to exist. And it includes space aliens.

Excerpts

(Paragraphs On Postconceptual Writing: A Novel – Copyright © 2011 Mark Leach All rights reserved))

Postconceptual writing is not necessarily illogical. The possibility of a logical piece should be good news to both writers and readers. With this assurance I hope to justify collective confidence. 

As a postconceptual writer I have no control over the way a reader will perceive my work. Anything that calls attention to and interests the reader lends understanding to the work or at least positions it in a paradoxical situation (such as logic vs. illogic). Some of my ideas are logical in conception and realization. Some emphasize the physical aspects of the reader, engendering a (potentially false) belief that the writer is in favor of avoiding subjectivity. And yet, other ideas can obviate the necessity of a belief entirely.

In these paragraphs I will refer to ideas intended for the perception of all, including myself the writer. I use the word perception to mean pre-thinking; the idea is still unclear. Even while writing these ideas there seem to be obvious inconsistencies, which I have found tend to bore the reader. So of course I have retained them. It is the objective of the problem.

Consider the objective of transformation. I have written a story in which we have just learned that the DNA of every human on the planet has been converted to that of an insect.

We feel unchanged, but I comment to those around me that the outward transformation will begin soon. The new genetic code will transform us into new beings. And sure enough, I am right. The scene changes and I find myself standing over a comatose Allison. My wife is nude, covered in damp dirt. I am cleaning her with a sponge, revealing the beginning growth of an exoskeletal thorax.

“We’ll all look like this soon,” I tell myself.

#

The Amazon.com entry for “Timequake” includes several rather brutal reviews, including one that takes Vonnegut to task for his frequent use of the phrase “ding-dong.” The reviewer wrote that “a man his age continuously referring to a ‘ding-dong’ is so juvenile. Any use of that phrase above the age of twelve is pretty childish. There are so many other metaphors for penis that he could have chosen.”

Yes, any novelist worth his salt knows the right metaphors for penis. Personally, I like “magic snake.”

When I was 12 I came up with what I thought was a great concept for a science-fiction novel. Working title: “The Pushbutton Man.” I envisioned a protagonist who was a well-connected and powerful billionaire who could affect change on a global scale – I start wars, manipulate financial markets, etc. –  “at the touch of a button.”

He would have a special desk with electronic levers, knobs and a button-packed phone. With this special desk, he was instantly connected to the farthest reaches of the world. (This was before the days of PCs and the Internet, of course.) I thought it was a brilliant concept. Perhaps even then the autonomous nanobots were implanting their mathematical formulas.

I was so confident in the superiority of my concept that I shared it with one of my trusted friends, Lester. As soon as I said the words “Pushbutton Man,” though, he started laughing.

A few days later my so-called friend found himself on the other side of the ridicule coin. We were suiting up in gym class at Byrd Junior High School when one of the boy’s violated the unspoken no-peeking rule of the locker room and was appalled by the sight of  Lester’s rather small (and uncircumcised) member. “Gawd, yours looks like a worm!”

“The Pushbutton Man” might have been a laughable story idea. But at least I didn’t have a worm for a ding-dong.

SCUW Womanifesto

“SCUW Womanifesto” is the story of a revolution to create the perfect matriarchal society – a battle of women against women. Starting with the famous feminist tract by Valerie Solanas, I use the search and replace function of Microsoft Word to convert all references to men and males to women and females. New words emerge (Sheaven, womentally ill and womanipulate) as the language of a single-sex, sci-fi world where the women of SCUW are simultaneously self affirming and self loathing as they strive to realize the full potential of their gender by utterly destroying it.

Excerpts

(SCUW Womanifesto – Copyright © 2011 Mark Leach All rights reserved)

Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the female sex.

It is now technically possible to reproduce without the aid of females (or, for that matter, females) and to produce only females. We must begin immediately to do so. The female is a biological accident: the y (female) gene is an incomplete x (female) gene, that is, has an incomplete set of chromosomes. In other words, the female is an incomplete female, a walking abortion, aborted at the gene stage. To be female is to be deficient, emotionally limited; femaleness is a deficiency disease and females are emotional cripples.

The female is completely egocentric, trapped inside herself, incapable of empathizing or identifying with others, of love, friendship, affection or tenderness. She is a completely isolated unit, incapable of rapport with anyone. Her responses are entirely visceral, not cerebral; her intelligence is a mere tool in the service of her drives and needs; she is incapable of womental passion, womental interaction; she can't relate to anything other than her own physical sensations. She is a half dead, unresponsive lump, incapable of giving or receiving pleasure or happiness; consequently, she is at best an utter bore, an inoffensive blob, since only those capable of absorption in others can be charming. She is trapped in a twilight zone halfway between humans and apes and is far worse off than the apes because, unlike the apes, she is capable of a large array of negative feelings--hate, jealousy, contempt, disgust, guilt, shame, doubt--and moreover she is aware or what she is or isn't.

#

Our society is not a community, but merely a collection of isolated family units. Desperately insecure, fearing her woman will leave her if she is exposed to other women or to anything remotely resembling life, the female seeks to isolate her from other women and from what little civilization there is, so she moves her out to the suburbs, a collection of self-absorbed couples and their kids. Isolation enables her to try to maintain her pretense of being an individual by becoming a "rugged individualist", a loner, equating non-co-operation and solitariness with individuality.

There is yet another reason for the female to isolate herself: every woman is an island. Trapped inside herself, emotionally isolated, unable to relate, the female has a horror of civilization, people, cities, situations requiring an ability to understand and relate to people. So, like a scared rabbit, she scurries off, dragging Mother's little asshole along with her to the wilderness, the suburbs, or, in the case of the "hippie"--she's way out, Woman! --all the way out to the cow pasture where she can fuck and breed undisturbed and mess around with her beads and flute.

The "hippie", whose desire to be a “Woman", a "rugged individualist", isn't quite as strong as the average woman's and who, in addition, is excited by the thought of having lots of women accessible to her, rebels against the harshness of a Breadwinner's life and the monotony of one woman. In the name of sharing and co-operation, she forms the commune or tribe, which, for all its togetherness and partly because of it (the commune, being an extended family, is an extended violation of the females' rights, privacy and sanity) is no more a community than normal "society".

#

Just as humans have a prior right to existence over dogs by virtue of being more highly evolved and having a superior consciousness, so women have a prior right to existence over women. The elimination of any female is, therefore, a righteous and good act, an act highly beneficial to women as well as an act of mercy.

However, this moral issue will eventually be rendered academic by the fact that the female is gradually eliminating herself. In addition to engaging in the time-honored and classical wars and race riots, women are more and more either becoming lesbians or are obliterating themselves through drugs. The female, whether she likes it or not, will eventually take complete charge, if for no other reason than that she will have to--the female, for practical purposes, won't exist.

Accelerating this trend is the fact that more and more females are acquiring enlightened self-interest; they're realizing more and more that the female interest is their interest, that they can live only through the female and that the more the female is encouraged to live, to fulfill herself, to be a female and not a female, the more nearly she lives; she's coming to see that it's easier and more satisfactory to live through her than to try to become her and usurp her qualities, claim them as her own, push the female down and claim she's a female. The lesbian, who accepts her femaleness, that is, her passivity and total sexuality, her femininity, is also best served by women being truly female, as it would then be easier for her to be female, feminine. If women were wise they would seek to become really female, would do intensive biological research that would lead to women, by means of operations on the brain and nervous system, being able to be transformed in psyche, as well as body, into women.

Shoplifting From Uranus

For this story I turned the writer Tao Lin into Tao Lin 964, a cybernetic sex slave who is thrown out into the world of 2025 without a memory. Wandering around New New Jersey, 964 is befriended by another memory-wiped sex slave who is part of a group of 500-plus writers who are legally changing their names to variations of “Jonathan Franzen” (i.e. “Franzenn”). They sneak into a middle school and live there while 964 attempts to write their way out of New New Jersey via a science-fiction Holocaust thriller. Soon they find themselves in a genre future of 964’s making – a dead-end time and place where he says he “can't think of anything that seems interesting for the future to have.”

Excerpts

(Shoplifting From Uranus - Copyright © 2011 Mark Leach All rights reserved)

Solid, with all the spotlight on elements of the facade, with no judgments applied to opinions or sentiments and I believe that ends in a variety of subject-lessness, that, in its absence of spotlight on anything else, the subject becomes, to me, the revolutionary road of time…

He was writing alone and visibly weakening with every line. “Can't see the Morris-Thorne yet,” he thought. “No future in a forty-minute wormhole.”

 Time to step back onto the set – the time-travel set.

Tao Lin 964 is going to the back of beyond, into the future, back again into the think machine. At first he can't think of anything that seems interesting for the future to have. Thrown out into the world of 2025 without a memory. No past, no marks – Tao Lin 964 and Dakota Franzenn 654 must crawl out of 30 days of middle school meme and remember so they can travel back in word time to World War III, get put in a concentration camp. They need to find a missing part for their think machine to time-travel back to New New Jersey.

Welcome to the Holocaust think machine. Tao Lin 964 deals in the future of mental breakdowns in the wormholes. In fact, we just got a call from Tao Lin 964 who, um, a member of our space traffic team, who said that there was only one lane open, the right lane in that tube back to Uranus, with a, uh, rocket bus stopped there, Space Port Authority police crews are on scene.

This is the hour.

The Real Tao Lin Interns just called Dakota Franzenn 654 on think machine chat and asked her to hang out with them. Sex with a Lintern? Sex on the way to New New Jersey. Tao Lin 964 is on his way. Uranus bound on that flooded spaceway with the sex repairs option. Taking the time-travel ride on the brain-modified Tycho with Gatorade Uranus Babe. The missing Tao Lin 964 has time-travel permission on the Trans-Time. Trans-Time is in brain-modified science-fiction, a nobody of hours in Holocaust. 500-plus time money to New New Jersey.

#

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#

I just want to walk around with you at night and sometimes ass and crotch rape you, he said. Okay. We can do that. When, said Tao Lin 964. I don’t know. Soon. I will talk to fried Nicholas Sparks Cicada. That is good, said Tao Lin 964. Cicada. I kept looking at ‘Cicada’ and ignoring the rest. Me too, said Tao Lin 964. Let’s refer to her as Cicada now, said Dakota Franzenn 654. Like tape man or headbutt insect. Sometimes we can call other people Cicada too, said Tao Lin 964. Dakota Franzenn 654 said the name of a person and said the person was a Cicada. Cicada is good, said Tao Lin 964. Cicadas like anything in nugget form. Nuggets is a scary word. My brother has a bottle of ear piercing cleaner in his bathroom. I’m confused. He pierced his groin, said Tao Lin 964. Probably, said Dakota Franzenn 654. They drew Cicadas using Microsoft Paint and sent them to each other. They are both just blobs without limbs, said Dakota Franzenn 654. I’m laughing. Cicada. Jane my programmer’s hive. She went offline. My programmer is hive early because she’s afraid of a meteorite warning in the area, she said a few minutes later. Tell her I majored in meteorite management at NYU and can protect her Thursday. She just went to look at the river, said Dakota Franzenn 654. She took Aladdin and a big flashlight with her. A very big space road flashlight.

Writing Through John Cage

“Writing Through John Cage” is a computer-composed poem based on the John Cage article from Wikipedia. Employing the online generator at http://www.euph0r1a.net/mesostomatic/, I used the I Ching and various chance operations to produce a book-length work of repeated vertical phrases intersecting lines of horizontal text. The result is an epic poem about Cage in the manner of his mesostic writings.

Excerpts

(Writing Through John Cage - Copyright © 2011 Mark Leach All rights reserved)

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a teerble cosmic power sets out to destoeru all creation

“Feed up with the boring cleashaye world they have written” begins my annexation of orphaned ideas from National Novel Writing Month, an Internet-based contest to write a 50,000-word novel in one month. Lifting characters, plots and themes directly from the Adoption Society threads of nanowrimo.org, I turned the mangled grammar, misspellings and typographical errors of Nano participants into a wounded salad prepared in my signature style: reusing discovered texts in a merger of pretense with ordinary life. By the way, the Nano crowd hated this one. I’m very proud of it.

Excerpts

(a teerble cosmic power sets out to destoeru all creation - Copyright © 2011 Mark Leach All rights reserved)

Feed up with the boring cleashaye world they have written a teerble cosmic power sets out to destoeru all creation- one word at a time- there MCs struggle to stop the Wrimo before its to late- the Wromo kills them off one by one by one with long painful overly verubise deaths. The only way to stop it is to reach his or her heart and make an happy ending- say one set of hero's- but others say only by killing their creator will they be safe. (10k bounes points if you do in fact kill off the whole world in the end. 50k if you do it in with the last word- 75k if they kill you 100k if the world ends anyay.

C1: a REAL appoalipes if they pull a reverse Stranger then Fiction thing on you ...)

C2: ...the main character live in a parralell universe (spirit world, alternate dimention, etc) and finds themself in our world or vice versa

C1: themself in our world ... A new drug creates an undead army of zombies.

 C2: zombies...Leaving geothermal terrorist attack triggers global destruction/ catastrophic rearranging of the eath's crust.

C1: A meteor plunges through the Earth's atmosphere to land in the pasific ocean with a enough force to send massive tsunami radiating out in all directions.

C:2 pasific ocean for two secants? (I wouldn't recommend this unless you know the specific audience you're writing for - it'd have to be extremely delicately done to avoid being obnoxious and anvilicious.) His exression was a mixture of confusion, fear and determination. Mostly determination – determination and (insert random food here). A character has been eating on and off during the course of the story are actually mind controll devices created by the villain to turn the heroes allies and friends against him and help speed up the evil part of your story. In the midst of all the action (possibly narrated by a side character etc) (in her warped mind), how did that random (Insert animal of choice here) package get on the front doorstep and into the house without the MC seeing it? Once he's fully grown, he'll be the length of a train and be able to eat (insert random food here), like, a shark, but that's not going to happen for centuries. He's going to be tiny for about twenty years.

C1:Can you like not be a (spirit world, alternate dimention, etc) dick for two secants?

C2: I've tried. It's not worth it. A Mary Sue character thinks she is in love with this Vampire she's seen around school, but the Werewolf she's seen is hot too. But something is off about this vampire and the werewolf too, she keeps seeing them in the hall holding each other's collars.

C1: Could they be possibly fighting over her (in her warped mind)?

C2: But then before its to late she realizes the real emotional truth. OMG, they are in love with each other. They beg her to not tell anyone. She quickly is OK with it because -

C1: (in her warped mind) two men kissing is hotter.

C2:. They want to go to Broadway together and open a Burlesque bar with a tribute to Liberache. She is the only one with the funds and (fake) emo powers to beg for funds.

C1: I'm taking this before its to late, it fits perfectly in my (insert random food here) story that has to do with my two MC's trying to gather information. What a nice twist if the most important piece they need was there all along - as in the (insert interesting person/alien/demon/spirit etc) package that arrives early on and not opened until much later. I could practically feel all positive vibes in the immediate vicinity (possibly narrated by a side character etc) fleeing in fright from the pleasant smile I knew he was giving from behind me.

C2: "Of course," he said with a light edge of laughter in his voice that made it quite clear there was a 'not' attached to the end of those words.

C1: "I've rarely seen you so passionate."

C2: "You rarely see me at all."

Everyone thought he was dead- no, the dead body was not real, it was a perfect reprduction of the highly developed kid she could run away. the main character finds out that they (insert random food here) are living inside the author's mind and try to get out etc