Big-Dick Drug-Addled Blind Bards
from Jersey City
Sétirbéléc sel suot reut!
Ike
Cut their motherfuckin’ heads off!
Big-Dick Drug-Addled Blind Bards
from Jersey City
Ffo sdaeh ’nikcufrehtom rieht tuc!
Ike
Death to every name on the Forbes Celebrity 100 list.
Big-Dick Drug-Addled Blind Bards
from Jersey City
Tsil 001 Ytirbelec Sebrof eht no eman yreve ot htaed.
Ike
Guillotine Jerry Bruckheimer, James Cameron, Bono, Simon Cowell, and Elton John.
Big-Dick Drug-Addled Blind Bards
from Jersey City
Nhoj Notle dna, Llewoc Nomis, Onob, Noremac Semaj, Remiehkcurb Yrrej enitolliug.
Ike
Guillotine Spielberg. Guillotine Jennifer Aniston and Michael Bay. Guillotine Coldplay.
Big-Dick Drug-Addled Blind Bards
from Jersey City
Yalpdloc enitolliug. Yab Leahcim dna Notsina Refinnej enitolliug. Grebleips enitolliug.
Ike
Guillotine fucking Jerry Seinfeld. Guillotine Tom Hanks and Ryan Seacrest and Brad fucking Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio and Dr. Phil and Judge Judy and Alec Baldwin and Bethenny Frankel!
Big-Dick Drug-Addled Blind Bards
from Jersey City
Leknarf Ynnehteb dna Niwdlab Cela dna Yduj Egduj dna Lihp Rd. dna OirpaCid Odranoel dna Ttip gnikcuf Darb dna Tsercaes Nayr dna Sknah Mot enitolliug! Dlefnies Yrrej gnikcuf enitolliug.
Ike
Long live the flesh-eating, subproletarian ragazzi di vita!
Big-Dick Drug-Addled Blind Bards
from Jersey City
Ativ id izzagar nairatelorpbus, gnitae-hself eht evil gnol!
Ike
Let me hear all my fuckin’ big-dick drug-addled blind bards from the Upper Peninsula say “HEY!”
Big-Dick Drug-Addled Blind Bards
from the Upper Peninsula
YEH!
Ike
Let me hear all my fuckin’ big-dick drug-addled blind bards from the Upper Peninsula say “XOXO—we takin’ our motherfuckin’ epic back!”
Big-Dick Drug-Addled Blind Bards
from the Upper Peninsula
Kcab cipe ’nikcufrehtom ruo ’nikat ew—OXOX!
In a provocative (though virtually incomprehensible) essay titled “Memory and Obsolescence,” first published in the August 1958 edition of the children’s magazine Highlights, coauthors J. D. Salinger and A. J. Foyt analyze this mirrored call-and-response between Ike (doomed introvert, implacable neo-pagan, coy Taurus, Saint Laurentian fusion of the tough and the tender) and the bards, which is driven by the mesmerizing beat of empty soda can against BMX spoke. Salinger and Foyt explain the incongruity of Ike’s profane, clamorous exhortations (“a full-bore venting of all his fevered antipathies toward celebrities and, implicitly, an impassioned avowal of his devout affiliation with the humble and abject”) by suggesting that they are “whispered, if not wholly tacit”—after all, if you’re addressing bards who are “hyperproximal” or who reside “intracranially” (i.e., in your “minibar”), there’s really no need to raise your voice. Salinger and Foyt go on to claim that “the fact that the bards are represented here as repeating what Ike says but backward means that, essentially, Ike is continuously pulling himself out of his own ass, inside-out.”
“Ike is continuously pulling himself out of his own ass, inside-out” is another way of depicting the inside-outness of Ike’s simultaneous narration and enactment of the epic. When you think (and you don’t have to actually say it out loud) “I am a hero,” you immediately become a karaoke bard because you’re simply reading what XOXO is inscribing into your brain. But because the epic subsumes everything extrinsic to it, the karaoke bard is instantly turned back into content, i.e., back into a hero. Salinger and Foyt call this unending process “enveloping inversion.” And they liken the inside-outness of Ike’s simultaneous narration and enactment to the In-N-Out Burger “secret menu,” and specifically the “3x4”—three beef patties, four slices of cheese. Not only do the alternating layers of cheese/beef/cheese/beef/cheese/beef/cheese parallel the alternating inversions of hero/bard/hero/bard/hero/bard/hero, but the 3x4 configuration corresponds to the three letters in the name “Ike” and the four letters in the name “XOXO” and, most significantly, to the license plate HPG-XOXO, a license plate analyzed in stupefyingly granular detail over the course of an essay that runs some thirty thousand words (every one of which audiences expect the vagrant, drug-addled bards to recite verbatim).
Ike’s “Apostrophe to the Bards” could also be “A Cry from the Smallest Box,” i.e., a cri de coeur from the depths. What Salinger and Foyt mean here is that Ike could be calling out from within XOXO’s hyperborean hermitage or, more likely, that in The Big Lacuna, Ike finds himself in an extreme spiritual state, in the innermost embedded place, in the innermost and smallest of all the epic’s ever-diminishing Chinese nested boxes or Russian Matryoshka dolls (or “M-dolls”). The smallest, most deeply embedded version of the “Ike M-doll” (which is a purely practical construct — in theory, of course, there is no terminus in an infinitely recursive reductio ad infinitum) is basically a freeze-frame at the very threshold of existence which is called “The Minibar.” This is why the Gods are sometimes said to reside in “The Minibar,” which is sometimes likened to an infinitesimal zero-dimensional point called a Severed Bard-Head, and which is sometimes thought to symbolize Ike’s head. The amplitude of the vibration of a “terminal” infinitesimally recursive Severed Bard-Head is referred to as “high-pitched” or “HPG” (“High-Pitched Gibberish”). And, of course, HPG-XOXO is the license plate of the Mister Softee truck that hit Ike during Spring Break and the final license plate that traverses Ike’s field of vision as he orgasms at the precise moment of his assassination by the ATF/Mossad.