Awakening thus in fugues & paroxysms, Agon M. Nar did thereupon consult mediated Oracles, offer leveraged tribute to images of Nielsen & Stasis, & sacrifice two whole humidors of Davidoff 9'' Deluxes upon the offering-pyre of Emmē, Winged Goddess of Victory. There was much market research. Finally, journeying personally to the uniscreened video center of Stan 1–3 & (aided by charts & pointer) pitching his epiphany to the big boys, Agon M. Nar found Tri-Stan & S.&D.’s Executive ICOP well pleased. Codependae kept intercepting emergency calls to Stasis’s pager.
& so it came to pass that, on the same week Sissee Nar’s nose was Enhanced into eternal aquilinity, Nar & Tri-Stan’s much-ballyhooed Satyr-Nymph Network was born & licensed for analog broadcast. In brief, S-NN comprised an ingeniously simple 24-hr low-overhead loop of mythopoeia mined at 10¢/$1 from the loded stockrooms of the BBC’s toga’d & grape-leafy mythophilic period 1961–7. Here the prefeminist epiclete Ovid the O. usurps & dithyrambicizes — without credit or tribute — the historian Dirk of Fresno’s account of S-NN’s philosophy, Codependae’s invidious dreamsong, Agon M. Nar’s oneirically inspired bid to launch the greatest kabal network of all BC time — the Satyr-Nymph Network: ‘… basically an ingeniously simple 24-hr interspliced loop of mythopoeia harvested from the gravid stockrooms of the BBC’s antically antique ’60s & targeted at that uneasily neoclassical demographic class that already consumed reruns without even chewing. This lonely & insomniac audience found the invariant sameness of S-NN’s circuit of British b/w mythic skits — serial legends of e.g. Endymion & Pyramus & Phaeton & Baal & Marpessa & surreally cockney Niebelungs — good: reliable, familiar, hypnotic, & delicious as the taste of their own mouths. For Agon M. Nar, this appetite for repetitive echo spelled divine inspiration — in the words of statistical microecon, autogenerative Demand. For not only did S-NN feed at the syndicated trough of viewers’ hunger for familiarity, but the familiarity fed the mythopoeia that fed the market: double-blind polls revealed that in a nation whose great informing myth is that it has no great informing myth, familiarity equaled timelessness, omniscience, immortality, a spark of the vicarious Divine.
‘… that A.M.N., when deep asleep, heeding the song of a jaundiced Goddess with three gray heads & one Curtis Mathes remote, began actually to believe he could explain the very nation on whose left shoulder he moved & shook. There existed today, the three sham-Stans sang, an untapped national market for myth. History was dead. Linearity was a cul de sac. Novelty was old news. The national I was now about flux & eternal return. Difference in sameness. “Creativity”—see for instance Nar’s recombinant own — now lay in the manipulation of received themes. & soon, the C# siren Foretold, this would itself be acknowledged, this apotheosis of static flux, & be itself put to the cynical use of just what it acknowledged, like a funnel that falls through itself. “Soon, myths about myths” was the sirens’ prophecy & long-range proposal. TV shows about TV shows. Polls about the reliability of surveys. Soon, perhaps, respected & glossy high-art organs might even start inviting smartass little ironists to contemporize & miscegenate BC mythos; & all this pop irony would put a happy-face mask on a nation’s terrible shamefaced hunger & need: translation, genuine information, would be allowed to lie, hidden & nourishing, inside the wooden belly of parodic camp.
‘I.e., the Medium would handle the Message’s P.R.
‘& for the wise & clever Agon M. Nar, it had already begun. This process. For of course Codependae was doing to Agon M. Nar what Agon M. Nar’s S-NN would do to the fluorescent BC market, viz. convincing him that those most bivalent of pharmaka, double-edged gifts so terribly precious & so heavy on the heart that a thousand sleepless weeping years couldn’t even start to make good their price… persuading A.M.N. & USA that the unearnable gifts of inspiration were naught but the products of his own mortal genius, through recombination. Agon M. Nar was invited, in unseen short, to imitate a God. To re-present history. To let’s say for instance combine the fall of Lucifer & the ascension of Aepytus into a Dynasty-type parable about the patricide of Cronos. Oprah as Isis, Sigurd as JFK. & all in fun, is the thing. Keep it light, self-mocking, Codependae sings in Nar’s tri-Stanley’d dreamvoice. Let the heroes tell their “own story,” & their confabulation of myth with fact & Classical with post-Enlightened will reveal meaning & compel market-share. & there can be young upscale ads infinitum, hip paeans to Bacchus & Helen & ultrabuff Thor. & the revenues from the campy old BBC loops can then be plowed back into deliberately cheap & stagy S-NN/Telephemic myth-reproductions, which “original” remakes can then themselves be run over & over, really late at night, say from 4 to 5 A.M., laser-aimed at those sleepless pre-Cable repetiphiles who can’t but get stoned just watching.
“That is to say,” the covert Codependae spells it out behind A.M. Nar’s multichart pitch to the three ancient Stanleys whose guise she’d used to dybbuk Nar in the first place, composing thus her own insidious loop, unseen, “that S-NN will purvey myth & compel — share by purveying myth about the transmogrification of ‘timeless’ myth into contemporary campimage. A whole new kind of ritual narrative, neither Old Comic nor New Tragic — the sit-trag. Pure Legend: about itself, legend, theft, repetition, eternal return, self-regeneration as loss as self-regeneration. A kind of cosmic outtake, Gods flubbing lines, cracking up, mugging at cameras.” Etcetera.’
All this according to Dirk of Fresno.
& the Satyr-Nymph Network came to be, is the rub. Three palsied liver-spotted thumbs were raised before resuming the eternal struggle for the Stans’ one remote. S-NN was run up the E-M flagpole. & lo. Sine production costs or satellitic overhead but very much cum an Olympian advertising budget, S-NN kicked much 24-hr ass. The BBC’s resuscitated situation-tragedies were instant syndication classics on the order of Rascals & Caesar/Coca. Obscure BBC contract players from the R.S.C.’s minor leagues, now well into their thespian senescence, enjoyed cult followings & sudden endorsement cachet. A muffler company put a toothless cockney Midas under lifetime contract & so did prosper; a bald & trifocal’d Samson did health-club spots; etc. Everyone was winning. TriStan became an even more proud member of the Sturm & Drang Family of E.F.C.’s; Agon M. Nar received an honorary Emmē & was wisely & cleverly humble about it; Sissee Nar continued to Enhance, tan, aerobicize, flourish, & consort; Reggie Ecko of Venice bounced in & out of detox facilities, returning ever to his high-N pipe & velvet Crown & Temple of Very Short Prayers & Trinitron to await, via the hirsutely groomed Robert Vaughan, the transformation of his benthic ire into narrative meaning.