Arguably, it was the brief time Bean Newton spent with an office job that broke him. In the summer of 1997, Newton became an administrative assistant in the office of the Co-Vice Dean of Registratory Affairs at Purewater University, where this author was, at that time, a graduate student and a student assistant in the same office.
"owning a Quorum with the" dates from this period, when it was Newton's job to, among other things, make sure the various workers in the office and their faculty counterparts actually showed up for meetings. And while Newton's work had always been anarchic, this work marks a downward spiral into incomprehensibility from which Newton would never recover.
In contrast, "Redactivity Cured My Cold" from only a few months before, evinces the narrative coherence, however dreamlike and set in fantasy or sci-fi situations, that we also see in the Whip Shitback series, as well as Newton's well-known knack for the vernacular.
Let these works, then, be a cautionary tale on the dangers of academics and office work. -- E.W. Wilder
[. . . owning a Quorum with the Gentle Prosthesis . . .]
. . . owning a Quorum with the Gentle Prosthesis . . .
And here read "Gentile" or the average beerswilling angstrom, the sub-a-tropic particule in a sea of
concatenated purposes, the politico, pholosophic-o nonentity, the blimp on erection night; fancy the owl,
in all its suspender.
Beeps is tired of move.
The strophe is antithetical to the phosphoric CornFlakes.
They're all, after all, Geat.
It's just a smatter of thyme, the amphorous
additions of salt, the Earth and all
the six-billions, grained through our ground glass,
the tyrant, the ovum of splendor.
Redactivity Cured My Cold
an eyewitness account by Ron Cornpone
I was down by the septic lagoon anglin' for some carp when I seen this great big ol' ball of fire come shootin' up over Bobby-Shane's old Maverick, you know, the one with the white vinyl top and the one mag wheel? You know, the one what don't run. Right, the one with the tree growing up through it, not the other one what don't run.
Anyways, I seen this big ol' ball of fire and it's all green-like and yella and I called onto my ol' lady in the trailer, I called into her, and I says "Precious! Precious! Come out here'n looka' this!"
And by then, why it come up and grab'd me, the ol' ball o' fire did, and it sting me somethin' awful and by the time my ol' Precious come out the trailer it'd up'd and gone and left me all down on the ground betwixt the old beer bottles and car parts and whatnot.
It was right over there by the ol' broke down mowers where it happened and my old lady come out and says "Ronay!" She says, "I hain't seen you thet white since our weddin' night at the chapel of Elvis!" And I guess I coulda' been a little drunk too.
But I had a colt the night a'fore, you know, all snifflin' and bleary-eyed and suchlike and a pretty miserable time of it too if I do say so.
But anyways, I got up'n stumbled back into the trailer and all the way my old lady proppin' me up cuz I felt like I'd'a liked to'a died and there we was in the middle of the carpet by the dinette set that we won at the drawing over to the Dollar General and my head kinda' starts to clear up and I starts ta' feel fine, and I tells my Precious, I says, "Darlin', you ain't gonna' believe what jest happened to me, but whatever it was, it cured my colt."