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Hydra: Labyrinth, Mythology, Wilderness

On the Post-Punk Methods of Ethel Alcohol


by Hélène Concret



Whether scanning through the shelves of London’s many anarchist or alternative culture bookstores, or burrowing through obscure private archives of anarchists’ ‘zines, punk literature or artist’s publications from 2000’s subcultures through the early 2020’s, one name is likely to be omitted in both instances: that of literary post-punk writer, code-anarchist and minor personality Ethel Alcohol.


In point of fact, very little scholarly material exists about the works of Alcohol, (a point which is understandable given what we have managed to glean about her predispositions against both establishment and institution alike,) and it seems clear that the prolific activities of this artist have almost certainly been purposely concealed from view: let us make a thought-experiment and assume that her erstwhile ‘shying’ from public view, her reluctance to ‘appear’ (even in the phenomenological sense,) and her ‘retreat’ from public discourse were part of an overall plan or strategy, and constituted a flirtation, a beckoning to come with, an invitation to enter her labyrinth. To this ‘labyrinth’, we shall return later.


For now, the question remains: does the ‘shying’ of Ethel Alcohol frustrate her continued influence and legacy - or does this disposition actually promote it? If we were to speak of a core subject to Alcohol’s raison d’etre, it must be this: her personality is the work in which she is engaged - her character is the medium - and she works with this medium in diverse, obscure and sometimes barely curious ways. To begin with, you must go looking for Alcohol - she isn’t simply there in the way other writers are there - for instance, you can look up other writers and their works with relative ease. Ethel Alcohol and her works don’t really even exist until that moment you go looking for her; that’s how she comes into being. This work is pure anticipatory participation; when we are ‘looking’ for Ethel Alcohol, Ethel who is ‘shying’ [in an active sense], she appears not to exist at all, not ever to have existed - but this cloak of invisibility represents only one element of her grandiose schemata of dissimulations, her maze-like conception of self which creates what we now recognise as ‘post-punk identity’, a distillation of personality, its subsequent redistribution back into the cultural economy as ‘indexes’(the cultural artefacts for which she is best known,) and of course, Alcohol, of a purely literary distillation.


This article hopes to acquaint new readers to the works of this underrepresented and reclusive character, and to establish a remedial timeline of events and literary works for other scholars and interested individuals to build upon.



***



To speak of Ethel Alcohol’s origins is akin to barking up a proverbial wrong tree: Ethel Alcohol evaporates without a trace. The subject under examination is a sensibility, not a person; a sequence of placed indexes, not a history of an individual. Distillation is key: distillation of character, and of personality.

The limited information we do have about the person going under the name ‘Ethel Alcohol’ derives almost exclusively from oral anecdote, from those who actually met her, and from those who came across the purely virtual forms of Alcohol online, in her network of paper-cutout ‘selves’ posted in forums all over the internet, and elsewhere, and other curious projects still as yet to be attributed to the mysterious Alcohol. Her long-term associate Feral Anthony Anthony put it this way:


“Well, ‘97 was a crucial time for Alcohol: everyone was into Alcohol at the time. You’d see Alcohol all over the place, and it just seemed like someone had spilled the bottle, you know what I mean? Or maybe it was ‘79? Of course, it was 1979. None of this had happened yet. The Alcohol was to come later. That’s the effect Alcohol has on you. The Bacchus of Basingstoke…


“That’s what we used to call her; the Bacchus of Basingstoke. She was born in Basingstoke. It’s as good a place as any to be born in, innit? But, you know, she wasn’t ever going to stay there, like, permanently or nothing, ‘cause Ethel really was a nomad, you know what I mean? Anyway, everyone knows Basingstoke’s enough to make anyone go nomadic! [guffaws]


“You need to trace her way from Basingstoke in the south of England to Tamil Nadu in the south of India, and from there to Catalonia in the south of Europe. But you won’t find her - not in any of these places anyway - and yet, she’s in all three at once, like the Trinity, know what I mean? But in a very real sense she isn’t in any of those places at all. Everything is about meta-realities and meta-verses with her, you know. It’s all pretty intricate - she would say ‘like minarets’ - or the geometry of a Tamil temple, dug into the ground. There are some, you know, technicalities you need to take into consideration as well. She would say, ontologies, or something.”


As F. Anthony Anthony would have it, Alcohol was flowing, and tending toward the south; but who would trust the word of such a person? We know that F. Anthony Anthony is not a credible witness to Alcohol’s character, because that name is just one of a huge series of pseudonyms through which Alcohol transports herself to her objectives. Like other practitioners experimenting in the field of multiple personalities, (figures such as Fernando Pessoa, Cindy Sherman, Søren Kierkegaard to a greater extent, and the Italian Oulipo group,) Ethel Alcohol develops and deploys manifold mythologies - often they are to be found competing with each other, ignoring each other, arguing in the street with each other, one being being abducted by another, or sometimes getting along just fine together like bread with butter - but all the while producing dialectic and internal schism reflected in the literature. As a mode of practise, Alcohol spawns personalities sometimes for specific purposes or situations, or as reactions to certain presuppositions, or even disinterestedly with just a cursory stroke of the pen; alike, the world as construed from Alcohol’s points-of-view is populated with a bizarre, fictional clan of characters, a cacophony of voices that, were they to speak at once, would sound as a growling, snarling, spewing beast. A hydra with many heads -


The works characterising the early 2000’s are evidently transitional for Alcohol, although one can clearly see the formation of Alcohol’s ‘fractal procedure’ method of writing in these early pieces: a method described by one grammatologist we spoke to as; “...loosely related to the Homeric technique of constructing poetic meters from interchangeable blocks of content, (which may be easily remembered by the orator,) only in Alcohol’s raison the procedure is more akin to those fractals seen in certain villages in Zambia, (and Tamil Nadu also,) where the design can be seen to follow principles of chaos theory.”(1) The series of pamphlets began in London in 2006-2010 and collected under the title ‘Hydra’ found its way into the library at the London School of Postdoctoral Outcasts with the help of associate and architecture critic Belinda O’Babylon. The pamphlets themselves, produced in bold italic fonts, with curious segmentation of phrase and sentence by a plethora of arrows and lines demarcating subdivisions in the text making it almost illegible, suggest a series of flows and interruptions akin to the tropes of ‘Unitary Urbanism’(2), as though in the place of fictional characters as we know them through literary convention, we are presented with the various components and engines of a large, inexplicable and almost abstract machine labouring under an unseen workload, and with a completely opaque output. One might consider Marcel Duchamp’s so-called ‘Large Glass’ as a semi-functional analogue in terms of the mode of representation and interaction between elements, rather than interpersonal relationships between characters. The characters are utilised by Alcohol as cyphers - a mark representing a nil-value - but coaxing the reader to identify with one particular piece of the engine and its grinding motions as though it were a person. The purpose for this imposture and dissimulation never becomes transparent, however, but rather must sit amongst our doubts over such wilful obscurantism which merely suggests an overarching complexity to which we are occluded.


It would be prudent to remember however that these literary tropes exist in the Alcohol universe - or perhaps we should more accurately say labyrinth - as constituent parts of the hidden trap laid for unsuspecting readers like you and I. It is precisely these kinds of tropes that, for Alcohol, constitute her own mode of escape; the many characters, their points of view, even the manner of their description represent a map of ways out of the labyrinth she has constructed - but into which we are being lured. The game she is playing with us may, in the final instance, be to trade places with us in the labyrinth like the proverbial genie of the lamp, a bait-and-switch move, or on the other hand the game may even be a benign one, a simple ‘offering’ to the reader of a place in this meta-verse of her fabrication. The notion of the ‘labyrinth’ is crucial to an understanding of Alcohol, and it seems we are being asked to conceive of a labyrinthine literary corpus which deconstructs itself when we try and penetrate its inner-sanctum and secrets, and yet there exist enough indications in the corpus itself to remind us that there is no ‘inner-sanctum’ or ‘secrets’, either, and that this temple is a nihilistic one. 


Commentators have noted (3) that the whole body of work, from the numerous and anonymous websites commonly attributed to her, the many publications to which she contributed and which often appeared in only very limited numbers, right down to the manifold pseudonyms under which she posted markers relating to the work in obscure online forums: all of this activity, regardless of how peripheral, should be treated as meaningful indexes in the literary corpus: each act constitutes a distinct location, a junction in her ‘labyrinth’. In this sense we should be aware that the labyrinth may be considered analogous to Dante’s formulation of hell’s concentric circles, only in Alcohol’s formulation there is no overarching sense of order or justice from above or below, or even in the human plane - there is only the all-pervasive chaos of Heraclitus, and the temple - Alcohol’s literary corpus - and it’s numerous labyrinths reflect this.


However we decide to conceive this labyrinth, one thing remains indispensable to its navigation: the act of walking. For Ethel Alcohol, walking is a type of activism; a protest and a revulsion against sedentary living, against the stationary life created as a mindless by-product of the agricultural revolution - in short - against domestication. The theme of domestication returns over and again in the story of Alcohol, the result of which is a haphazard unravelling of the social construct ‘woman’, and the re-formulation of a new animal ‘woman’ - often taking the form of half-breeds of all kinds; half-woman, half-animal, a centaur (but with high heels and stockings,) a becoming-animal, a mode of being, in the Deleuzian sense. Like her neolithic forebears, the merging of human and animal in Alcohol’s dream worlds happen on a purely symbolic level too oblique for casual explication - it must be felt - but even the feeling is too dangerous, too wild, too untamed a thing to bear. Only through walking may the feeling reach its potential and be liberated from its contents. Walking is a requirement for her becoming-nomad.


The transition to this ‘nomadology’ is most apparent in her seminal 2013 piece ‘Palm Pilot’, (a work which has yet to be verified as Alcohol, but which is generally acknowledged as a core part of the corpus by her followers.) The myth attached to the piece is also relevant: in October of 2013, new material arrived which alleged to be the work of Ethel Alcohol, but its mode of reception was as strange as the literature itself. Her one time associate Johnny Threecars, who at that time was librarian at the London School of Epistemology, (but who was also reputed to be an underground publisher of hardcore neo-Jasperian ontology and handcarved woodblock-print pornography, and the publisher of an occasional ‘zine printed on the library’s Xerox machine, and which contained only photocopies of the rubbish found in the library at the close of each day, along with the names and lending histories of the people to whom the rubbish had belonged,) recounts the story this way:


“Ethel made a statement to me, via email, in which I believe she laid out the future direction of her practise. I decided to include her email on the back page of the 3rd edition of my ‘zine ‘Belonging/Unbelonging’, which was a small poetry journal I was producing at the time which examined discarded things and their discarders. I would watch the comings-and-goings of the library from behind my computer screen, and after closing time I would harvest all this data, all the waste left by library users, into a form of pataphysical poetry. I have a copy of the email by Alcohol here:


From: ‘The Prime Sinister’ methylated_spirit@primenet.nl

Tuesday 03/11/2013 14:29

To: You, Ex King Zog of Albania, Fred Dibnah, Every Catholic Alive

CC: Anthony Anthony (Feral), Tucker Carlson’s Eyebrows, Stormy Drains, Belinda O’Babylon, Nutty Lewis, Kim Karkrashian, The Turgid Ontology Crew, Chauvinist Trevor Samarkand


In the new Bacchanals, the following districts shall apply:


The permanent state of paranoia, when fiction is the sole currency of the world: that is where I wish to be - inspired, afraid, alone, in a world of my own making - a world of my own unmasking...


I have found the Gothic barrio, a subsection of the city built of pure paranoia. It is always foreign, the way I am to myself. This is a barrio of nomads: nothing is fixed in this neighbourhood. We are not fixed.


The address, the way to find this barrio, is as follows:


Open your right hand. Looking at the palm, identify the first line you see. Then follow this direction or take the street which closest approximates its trajectory. Continue in this direction until you reach the end of your life.


Ethel A



These directions are obvious nonsense - a simple gesture as opposed to an actual instruction - but the curious reader should still wonder where those directions might lead, were one to indeed follow them to the letter, and follow the life-line to its end: one might even reach a state of nomadism, in a certain sense.


Whether this ‘charting of arbitrary courses through life’ constitutes her ‘Gothic barrio’, (the term Alcohol uses for this purely literary construction, ostensibly to quickly conjure in the mind of the reader an array of tall, crooked, windowless buildings lining very narrow, irregular and well-worn streets, almost paper cutouts and not real edifices at all, a purely mental fabrication,) or whether this psychogeographic trope of discovering new ways of navigating the familiar city hides another intent, is uncertain. What we do know however is that this effort to interrupt the flow of capital as it is ingrained into the architecture of the city, with its gated islands of privilege cut off from pockets of impoverishment and inequality, its financial centres, its flows of influence, reward, abuse, neglect, and the ever-shifting territorial demarcations of this human habitat, constitutes a meta-environment for Alcohol. Likewise, we know that a trip to the Catalan city of Barcelona as a teenager had a profound influence on Alcohol inasmuch as it became the gateway for her return after her intermediary wanderings in India. Looking at the Gothic neighbourhoods of Barcelona, one can’t help but invasage a Benjaminian ecstasy of the urban environment from the point of view of the disinterested spectator or flâneur. It was this purely mental architecture - one which belongs most properly to the mind’s eye - which appears time and again throughout the corpus, and which eventually came to constitute the basis for her 2019 novel ‘Barri d'ombra’ (Shadow Neighbourhood): a comprehensive archive of written descriptions of the buildings in that ‘mental architecture’ drawn entirely from memory, constituting a development of the earlier prototype ‘labyrinths’ from the London period in the early 2000’s.


But this nomadism, (which may just, in the end, be a nomadism of pure spirit,) leads us to another scene in the story of Ethel Alcohol’s raison d'être: the wilderness. We should note at the outset that this ‘wilderness’ could be considered in one sense an aesthetic category, and also in the sense of ‘being-lost’ as a mode of being, but it could also indicate a state of ‘wild-ness’, of re-wilding the human animal, as oxymoronic as it sounds.


It is nevertheless curious to note the way Alcohol’s work charts a genealogy of habitat, from the urban, built environment of the city-state, the nomadism and desert of the hunter-gatherer, and the call of the wild, so to speak, of pre-history. In order to reach such ecstatic states of mind as to call upon the mentalities required to construct modes of being which offer a radial plurality of self, Alcohol initially worked on a series of voice-recordings for a new type of poetry she developed in early 2014: a series of visceral ‘attempts’ at speaking, through the ‘deterritorialized mouth’ of Deleuze-Guattari, of a wilderness in and of the mouth, even in the words themselves - words which have lost their sense, have become a grunting, shrieking, crying, howling, crawling, whelping poetry. This series of recordings was first broadcast on August 4th, 2014 on Sanef Radio - an official station for road traffic information in France. The broadcast was hacked by an associate of Alcohol’s, Jean Itinerant, (the radical code-poet of Arles, infamous for his self-generating alibi-writing app.) For around three hours that August afternoon, drivers were subjected to unremitting shrieks and howls before technicians could resume the normal broadcast of traffic flows and stoppages. Numerous accidents were recorded around the Ile-de-France, and other localities that day, not to mention that the heavens opened, and it rained fish.(4)


Inspired by the effects of this special broadcast, Alcohol later developed a smartphone app alongside Itinerant specifically designed to get users lost, to take them to her ‘wilderness’ so to speak: available only with a digital invitation obtained over darknet forums, the app hacked into the map server on any given user’s phone. The app would then proceed to generate disorienting schisms in cartographic space, sending the user to discontiguous locations as if one were either drunk, or in a Kafka novel. The user would also be inundated with calls cyphoned by the app to the user’s phone, calls consisting solely of the whelping, shrieking and howling of a drunken Ethel Alcohol.


Alcohol’s peripatetic methods became the subject of a new venture that same year - the ‘Sham-Petersburg’ project of 2014-15 - a website which functioned as a fairly accurate copy of the Russian city of St. Petersburg, constructed from photographs supplied to Alcohol by a photographer associate from that city going under the forum name of E-katerina. Having never travelled to Russia, it appears Ethel Alcohol used tools such as Google street view as a method of walking around and charting the necessary areas in order to create the HTML ‘paper cutout’ version found on the website, which itself was located in private servers in the basement of on an oil rig in the North Sea. Unfortunately for us, ‘Sham-Petersburg’ is alleged to be hidden behind layers of encryption making it invisible from the ‘surface net’, and an encrypted key is required for access.(5)


It was with ‘Sham-Petersburg’ that the method of applying a cartography of sense onto unconscious geographies, (ostensibly the outer-rings and regions of personality,) became a prominent area of research for Alcohol. Echoing the practice of the psychogeographers before her - of Guy Debord, Asger Jorn, Constant Nieuwenhuys and others - an anarchic frustration of the conduits by which capital flows, and a psychological re-wilding through the practice of deterritorializing the city characterise the corpus of Alcohol’s work. There are however countless other trajectories one can take as reader, and the interested reader is encouraged to begin charting their own passage through this body of material in order to produce their own fissures, grafts, junctions, and ways through it: this article is intended only to introduce the reader to Alcohol.


In around 2015, Alcohol had apparently disappeared from her usual haunts in London, (under railway bridges, in car parks on the outskirts of the greater London area, or around the edges of certain parks in Southwark, to name a few ideal locations,) and it was some time before any new indexes or activity could be attributed with any certainty to Ethel Alcohol. The first indication of a continuity in the Alcohol project was a website (6) designed around the floorplans of various Hindu temples in the Tamil Nadu state of India. The site employed drawings and photographs made by Alcohol of colloquial temples in and around the Villupuram rural district, and utilised the spatial design of those plans to construct a composite ‘virtual’ temple. Exploring the step-pyramid form of the inner temple sanctum as a contrasting architectural trope to that of Dante’s concentric circles of heaven and hell appears a congruous step for Alcohol - a step formed from simple right-angles. This ‘step’ form was then extrapolated into short pieces of prose which followed the ‘steps’ both upwards and downwards, up the outside steps of the temple, or down the perpetually dark inverse steps located within. At this moment, ‘Inverse steps’ become symbolically very important to the great walker Ethel Alcohol, and this new practice went on to impact later psychogeographic research in Coimbatore province.


Arunadevi Kumar, who until recently was head of the Department of Subcultures and Anarchy at the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras, Tamil Nadu, described working with Alcohol as recently as last year:


“She would say - Ethel would say - that her method regarding art was ‘as private a matter as the inside of her eye lid.’ But despite such evasions, there is still much we can learn from what she is saying and the way in which she is saying it. For example, she told me one morning, (with a look of abject resignation I might add,) that a small encampment of European settlers had arrived on the inside of her eyelid, and that troops were already being garrisoned around their fortified position and from which munitions, logistics and communications had been centralised. She said there was ‘no hope’ anymore for a reasonable settlement, not now that the inside of her eyelid had appeared on the imperial map. Furthermore, she was very worried that this scene would not be surreal for at least another five hundred years. This fact caused Ethel quite some consternation.


“But, notwithstanding her work on postcolonial theory, we should note from this period that Alcohol’s studies of temples in both our district and back in Viluppuram are not to be seen through the neo-colonial lens of the tourist or sight-seer. The symbol of the temple is very powerful in Alcohol’s work, and it holds manifold purposes. When she writes of the Sagrada Familia Cathedral in Barcelona, the great masterpiece by Gaudi, we know that she views this edifice primarily as a Temple, and her interest is in the psychosocial function of the Temple as the great organiser of the human animal.”


Though information about Alcohol’s extended stay in south India is scant, there are however important indices through which we can trace her intellectual development at that time. The project entitled ‘Roadside’ (2006-2008) - an entire collection of short stories written from the point of view of a dirty, waterlogged roadside in Combiatore province apparently without any special significance, is a case in point. We find, if we trace Alcohol’s development, these ‘places in particular’ - extended studies of places of little concern or human interest. For Alcohol, these are places which usually appear only briefly or cursorily to the mind as we pass them on our way somewhere else, and the existence of which is carved into the memory from the brief generalisations sketched hastily by the mind when there is a general absence of detail to furnish those memories accurately. To explore such a place so meticulously as Alcohol does, with such great care and attention, almost comes across as a pilgrimage:, but this a pilgrimage to nowhere-in-particular, (which reveals itself, logically, to in fact be a place-in-particular.) This collection of stories first appeared in November of 2015, and was printed in a small run of 20 numbered copies by a small backstreet publisher of political pamphlets in downtown Viluppuram, and was available from the nearby bookstore on Nehruji Road.


A signal component of Alcohol’s practice which began in the India period is the manufacture and production of what she calls exoselves: avatars and alter-egos which she has posited into the cultural melee for specific, (but unspecified,) purposes. The production of this series of fictional personalities, partly online and partly off, partly male and partly female, partly human and partly animal, fits a pattern of Alcohol’s obsession with blurring: the way alcohol blurs vision is not a metaphor. This web of personalities, often connected by a thread, but also often isolated and completely alone, (and sometimes accessible only to Ethel herself, not even to her devotees,) can be traced from the belligerent arguments over neo-Kantianism on Reddit subforums of 2016, to the series of counterattacks posed by nihilist characters on 4chan at that very same time. These ‘exoselves’ constitute a mode of extension: it is one of the method by which Alcohol influences the world at large - Ii is an extension of power, if you will. Having extruded or purged ‘selves’ from her psychology and into the world - maintained them, grown them, fed them, got them drunk even - and having projected a self beyond her own biology into the electrical impulses of the internet, her digital slime, when traced, leads one into an artwork of intricacy, profundity, and danger. The labyrinthine self, conceived and constructed by Alcohol in these diverse manners, marry the traits of poor interpersonal boundaries with the boundless creative libido that would characterise her later style. In this labyrinth, Ethel is Ariadne, the minotaur, and the labyrinth itself - and all three are occluded from each other - are lost in each other - are drunk on the myth of their own existence, and are lost, lost, lost. As it is put in the words of Tamil poet and friend S.P. Aadithya:


“It doesn’t matter if she’s real or not: that is to miss the whole object, and even the partial object. No, this is about ways. Ethel is a way. Ethel Alcohol is a way with things, with words, with the world. You’ll see, and also not see, though this ambiguity could still be said to be the way. Try to think about this thing outside of the physical body and its attribution to a particular character. Ethel Alcohol comes across more like a spider who has extended her capacity to feel and interpret the world through the orb web in which she sits, patiently monitoring the delicate registers upon the threads - and yet, even this interpretation is lacking, for Ethel Alcohol only comes into being when you go looking for her: you become her, so to speak, in searching her out.”(7)


This sequence of fictional selves, partly Kierkegaardian in scope and complexity, partly neo-Buddhist in attitude toward subject and object, (and also in the Buddhist tradition of the ‘retreat’ so to speak,) ensures that Ethel always has a hatch through which she can slip, an escape-route or special thread leading her out of the spider’s web of selves she has amassed and woven together, a labyrinth of selves in which she is concealed from herself as much as to us. Alcohol treats this maze of selves as a retreat - the way the anchorite sits on the banks of the Kaveri river in Tamil Nadu, somewhat removed from the hubbub of Srirangam and the smoke of Tiruchchirappalli beyond, or the way Zarathustra returns to his cave after a certain exposure to society - exposure, the way a photographic plate is exposed to light through the shutter of a camera. In the ‘retreat’, this exposure becomes art. 


How she came to leave India is still unknown, but her subsequent appearance in the state of Catalonia in the far north of Spain was not registered until late 2018, signifying perhaps that during this period she had ‘gone to ground’ in military parlance. For sure we will encounter new threads when Alcohol wishes those connections be made: but until such a time we must for now consider only verifiable details. Catalonia, being a disputed territory, a borderland with a borderline sense of identity, with a tongue all its own, must have proved especially enticing for Ethel Alcohol: Catalan is a linguistic neighbour in the Romance language family tree to the ancient Occitan spoken by the troubadour Arnaut Daniel, and of whom many references are known to exist in Alcohol’s work. This genealogy of the wandering poet also procures the reader access to the Gai Saber of Nietzsche: another work we know Alcohol to have been intimate with. Last, but not least, we must also remember that Catalonia was a bastion of 20th Century Surrealism, and it is indicative that Alcohol should choose to hole up here.


In early 2019, a new chapbook of short fiction collected under the title ‘The Graft’(8) was published, and in which Alcohol exposits her thesis of synthetic ideas by manner of ‘grafting’ personalities and ‘sur-realities’ onto selected host personalities and realities, in order to produce new variants. Working through a cartography of cuts, of spaces in-between, disused, invisible, condemned or otherwise abandoned by people, alcohol constructs literary space and character akin to the ubiquitous paper cutouts seen earlier, constructing a unique form of shorthand developed in those preceding years. Not only did Alcohol construct, as promised, her ‘Gothic barrio’ in the collected stories set within that area of Barcelona, but also of note is the inclusion of a secret passage in the editor’s foreword at the beginning of the chapbook: a QR code which, when scanned, leads the reader to the website address http://not.com - a dummy site which tracks visitors by means of a hidden cookie and which generates code-poetry from metadata harvested from reader’s real-life movements. The following year, it was discovered that many of these QR codes had found their way into fly posters and onto stickers littering the Barcelona metropolitan area, and upon tracing the locations of these indexes back onto a standard map of the city, one can see the concentric circles of a vast orb ‘web’ spanning the Catalan capital. The poetry on the site, now comprising millions of lines of code, could be said to narrate the city’s ‘users’.


Though to be sure there is much that still remains unknown about the practise of this singular, (and yet, not-singular,) author, it is hoped that recent flourish of interest expressed in this exquisite corpse (or corpus) will begin to chart some of the many omissions on our map of Ethel Alcohol, although it should be said that eager critics seeking to colonise any of these strange islands are advised that they are almost certain to become Ethel’s playthings, given how sophisticated her online tracking activities have become. We also know that Alcohol has secretly been encouraging others to feed into this body of work with pseudonymously attributed works, and a meshing between fiction and reality can certainly be expected. What will become of this opus, what directions she is likely to take in future, we are unsure; but for certain the cacophony of voices attributed to Ethel Alcohol, the ecstatic dissolution of personal identity into the ether of literary abandon will continue like an infernal machine, and must be considered when we discuss the notion of post-punk as it relates to the subject of this article.



by Hélène Concret

Professora de l’Arte Surrealista

 

Footnotes


1. Eglash, Ron: ‘African Fractals: Modern Computing and Indigenous Design’ 1999 Rutgers University Press

2. Unitary urbanism was the critique of status quo "urbanism", employed by the Letterist International and then further developed by the Situationist International between 1953 and 1960. The praxis originates from the Lettrist technique of hypergraphics which was applied to architecture by the Lettrist International.

3. Trousers, Karen & Threecars, Johnny: ‘Literary Entropy and London’s Punk Revival’ 2013 [archipelago] Small Press

4.  It almost certainly did not rain fish, but this part of the mythology has survived somehow. According to Jeremy Like Jeremy, third cousin to the Duke of Nofixtabowed and sometime publisher of avant-garde literary theory, Ethel Alcohol “...could conjure fish out of the sky at any given instant, by recaning the names of her ancestors in reverse order.

5. The information we have managed to glean about the existence of the ‘Northsea Shamserver’ (as it is called by the cognoscenti) derives only from hearsay on certain radical architecture forums on the deep web, and from conversations conducted with those characters interviewed for this article.

6. Built when the geocities architecture had already become defunct, this website is now only accessible via deep web ‘mirror’ sites when geocities was discontinued. It remains somehow poetic that this work is now only visible through a ‘mirror’.

7. Aadithya, S.P. ‘Ways and Means’ 2016 Little Known Press

 

 


 

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