FFR 205

"There's something wrong, there is something profoundly wrong with this world. I feel it and I know it, and every person with a living heart and an open mind knows it too." - László Krasznahorkai



To the readers of Fowl Feathered Review and the 12 casual employees of Circle K in Orange, Massachusetts,

The Hoboken meat of it all is a truth that can no longer be ignored.
Norman Rankin's work on Shakespeare and the common understanding, a text lost to all but the most obsessive of us, argues that the Bard's genius lay not in his invention of grand narratives but in his capacity to distill the essential, if brutish, truths of the street into a digestible form. He saw the world as a grimy, polyphonic theatre where the king's speech was just another form of street jargon, a high-flown patter for a low-down hustle. The universal, he argued, was never pristine; it was always soiled, always compromised by the quotidian. It was a philosophy that found its ultimate expression in the carnival of the common market, where the tragic hero was but a fishmonger and the fool, a philosopher.

To project this into our current studies is to see the internet not as a library, but as that same chaotic market—a teeming bazaar of half-truths, memes, and fleeting profundities. The scholars of today, the new Ran-kinists, are tasked not with a search for a pure and singular meaning, but with the deconstruction of this chaotic artifact. They seek the universal in the ephemeral, the profound in the profane. They are the taxonomists of the tag cloud, the archaeologists of the algorithm.

The leap to 21st-century postmodern multigenre fiction is, therefore, not a leap at all, but a natural progression. This new genre is the literary equivalent of a digital collage, a hyper-textual palimpsest where a single story is told through an avalanche of forms—a poem, a text message, an architectural blueprint, a police report. The narrative is not a line but a mosaic, and the truth, an emergent property of the inter-play between these disparate tiles. This is the disordered artifact Rankin predicted, a narrative so close to the raw experience of the world that it ceases to be a story and becomes a system of being.

The Formula: The Diatessaron of Narrative Dimensions
We begin with a base equation, a synthesis of the four essential dimensions of a story, a Diatessaron that binds the narrative:
(ME+ΠP+σS)∗ΔI=Nc
Where:
• ME = The Metaphysical Engine. The core philosophical concept that drives the narrative.
• ΠP = The Psychoanalytic Palimpsest. The sub-conscious motivations and ancestral traumas of the characters.
• σS = The Semiotic System. The language of objects, symbols, and actions, which convey meaning beyond their surface-level utility.
• ΔI = The Differential of Irony. The element of chance that introduces an unforeseen variable.
• Nc = The Coherent Narrative. The final, multi-layered story.
This formula, however, is merely the skeleton. The meat of the matter lies in the detailed application of each variable.

Detailed Application: A Scholarly Breakdown
Step 1: The Metaphysical Engine (ME)
This is the central thesis. For the Fowl Feathered Review's new trend, the Metaphysical Engine is the very act of processing. It is the brutal, industrial logic of the meat grinder, a literal and metaphorical machine that flattens all distinction, that reduces the singular to the collective, the sacred to the consumable. The fiction and poetry are not born, but rendered. This forces the writer to confront the philosophical question of what is lost when unique voices are fed into the same, brutalizing machine. The narrative is not a hero's journey, but a descent into the maw of homogenization.
Step 2: The Psychoanalytic Palimpsest (ΠP)
The psyche is a text written over countless times, a palimpsest of inherited traumas and forgotten desires. For the processed fiction, this is the inherent dread of the mass-produced soul. The characters are not individuals, but remnants. Their "ancestral trauma" is the memory of a time before the grinder, a pre-processed state of grace. Their neurosis is the result of being a composite, a stew of other people's memories, dreams, and anxieties. A poem about a father's love is not just a poem, but a sliver of that love, a fatty residue clinging to the memory of a stranger's childhood. It is the existential crisis of the collective subconscious, the anxiety of the anonymous.
Step 3: The Semiotic System (σS)
Every story has a language beyond words. In this new review, the symbolic system is simple yet terrifying. The meat grinder is not just a machine; it is the engine of postmodernity, the relentless, grinding force of commodification. The meat snacks themselves are the final, horrible product—portable, digestible, and utterly devoid of soul. A piece of dried jerky is not food, but a relic, a tiny, preserved remnant of a lost civilization. The art is not hung on a wall; it is vacuum-sealed and sold in a convenience store. The vocal fry, in this context, is the sound of the grinder itself—the low, creaking static of a machine that never stops.
Step 4: The Differential of Irony (ΔI)
This is the chaos factor, the moment when the system bends but does not break. The irony here is that something as mundane as a Hoboken meat processor could become the crucible of a new literary movement. The great, un-foreseen variable is the very location: Hoboken, New Jersey. This is not a grand, gothic city of forgotten dreams, but a place of commuter trains, delis, and a relentless, ordinary reality. The Differential is the friction between the high-minded, esoteric intellectualism of the art and the utterly banal, corporate-industrial context in which it is created. The discovery of a sublime truth in the detritus of a meat-packing plant—that is the essential joke, the beautiful, terrifying punchline.

 
Final Integration and the Absence of Fate
The universe is not a line, but a web of interconnected points, where the end of one story folds into a new one. This is not about motivational platitudes; it is a fundamental principle of existence. This new trend is not a narrative but a process. The reader is not consuming a story but a product. The genius of this enterprise lies not in the words themselves, but in the brutal, beautiful, and utterly unsentimental act of their transformation. By following this method, you are not writing a story but, with a nod to the grimiest parts of the meat processor, you are making sausages. And this, to the discerning reader, is the new truth.

—Virgil Kay, Editor, Rooster China Wok Habitué

Keywords: artesian garbage