It goes without saying that all of this could simply be another case of XOXO slipping something into the epic’s drink (i.e., drugging its sherbet). XOXO is forever doodling on Ike’s mind, and on the minds of bards (doodling on all our minds) with his sharp periodontal curette, and forever feeding “the apophenic mania of experts to find hidden and farfetched links and correlations. Is it possible to predict XOXO’s behavior toward human beings based on his alliances with other Gods? For example, what is his position vis-à-vis the La Felina / Mogul Magoo schism? Shanice had, from the beginning, cliqued up with Mogul Magoo, so XOXO (after Shanice’s withering critique of his poem) had naturally cliqued up with La Felina. But XOXO is too intractable a nihilist to ever be considered aligned with any single faction. And it always bears repeating that the Gods view human beings with a fundamental detachment, almost as if they were characters in a video game. They are entertained by humans. Sure, they have their favorites (Ike is famously La Felina’s favorite), but the Gods basically love to fuck with people — literally, in the sense of having sex with them (e.g., Bosco Hifikepunye with Mi-Hyun and Ike’s daughter), and in the sense of fucking with their minds (e.g., XOXO).
A Chinean comandante decries what he calls “the self-flagellation over our affinity for XOXO.” The shadowy death-squad leader says that, although experts routinely call XOXO “a resentful poet manqué who plies the epic with drugged sherbet and shoots it up with military-grade ass-cheese,” what the God has actually done is taken a single static tableau (that of Ike Karton “standing on his stoop, on the prow of his hermitage, striking that contrapposto pose, in his white wifebeater, his torso totally ripped, his lustrous chestnut armpit hair wafting in the breeze, his head turned and inclined up toward the top floors of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, from which the gaze of masturbating Goddesses casts him in a sugar frosted nimbus”) and, thanks to all his filigreed interpolations (i.e., noncanonical bloopers), turned it into a massive, stupor-inducingly redundant epic, and he deserves major kudos for that. (As he’s giving this interview, the severed heads of fifteen vagrant, drug-addled bards, strung together with coaxial cable, are found floating in the Passaic River under the Pulaski Skyway. These fifteen bards had recently signed a statement which urged aficionados of the epic to rapidly chant “Ike, Ike, Ike, Ike, Ike!” (“it should sound like Popeye laughing, or like Billy Joel in ‘Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song)’—‘But working too hard can give you / A heart attack, ack, ack, ack, ack, ack’” as a way of “fucking with the mind of the mind-fucking God”—an obvious reference to XOXO). The notorious Chinean death-squad comandante (whose nomme de guerre is “lol”) quickly issues the following addendum: “Don’t want my previous statement to be misconstrued in any way as a condemnation of self-flagellation. If it’s inconvenient to have someone else flagellate you, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with flagellating yourself. It’s an excellent way to relieve tension, which can increase your risk of stroke or heart attack.” “When I was a kid,” lol reminisces later, over coffee, “most of my friends loved the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, but I preferred the Shia Day of Ashura processions in which young men ceremonially whip their own backs with barbed chains and razors.” He says that the first movie scenes that gave him a hard-on were when seaman John Mills (played by Richard Harris) gets flogged with a cat-o’-nine-tails in Mutiny on the Bounty and when Lucrèce Borgia (played by Martine Carol) is whipped by her brother, Cesare (played by Pedro Armendáriz), in Lucrèce Borgia (aka Sins of the Borgias). Favorite poem? The poem XOXO wrote for Shanice about the businessman who became so terribly aroused when he was flogged in the woods by some of his colleagues (“They gang up on the ‘new guy’—someone who’d only recently been transferred to their division — and, in what appears to be a sort of hazing ritual, they tie him to a tree and whip him with his own belt. His pants fall to his ankles, and it’s obvious that he’s aroused.” Reminded that most experts interpret the poem to mean that the protagonist is aroused not by the robust flagellation, but because he sees an ineffably beautiful butterfly flit by, lol shakes his head vehemently. “I think he’s aroused by the robust flagellation.”)
The Goddesses prefer gazing at inert and immutable images (“onanistic ornaments”) while they masturbate. This is why, the Chineans insist, the only significant image of Ike in the entirety of the epic is the one of him “standing on his stoop, on the prow of his hermitage, striking that contrapposto pose, in his white wifebeater, his torso totally ripped, his lustrous chestnut armpit hair wafting in the breeze, his head turned and inclined up toward the top floors of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai.”
In an event at the Celeste Bartos Forum of the New York Public Library billed as THE CAPO DI TUTTI FRUTTI in conversation with Lorena Bobbitt (who was replaced at the last moment by Malcolm Gladwell), a man purporting to be The Capo di Tutti Frutti (his face was covered by a balaclava) answers the question “What do you think is the sexiest inert and immutable image?” by proposing “A photograph of a chubby, perspiring fifty-year-old woman bending over to pick up a mah-jongg tile from the floor of some cabana, coquettishly exposing her hairy hole.” This creates quite a stir, prompting some in the audience to call out their own suggestions: “What about a Hummel figurine of a plus-size Bavarian beer maid getting a dental X-ray, wearing a low-cut dirndl and a lead apron,” someone proposes. “Some defaced plinth in a piazza,” someone else says. “A magazine layout of models showing the half-chewed-up food in their mouths,” says another. The Capo di Tutti Frutti (or whoever he is) glares at the audience, shaking his head vehemently. “A photograph of a chubby, perspiring fifty-year-old woman bending over to pick up a mah-jongg tile from the floor of some cabana, coquettishly exposing her hairy hole,” he repeats.
That night, thousands of rats descend on an enormous obelisk of baklava that’s been erected by bearded, bare-chested intellectuals in cargo shorts to protest a significant uptick in the number of vagrant, drug-addled bards who are being slaughtered.
Tuesday: 8:00 PM Eastern
“Snapping Out”
Here, as anyone with even the faintest familiarity with The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 2: Crème de la Sack knows, Vance is supposed to snap out of his reverie and ask Ike whom he’d rather fuck, Jenny Sanford or Silda Spitzer. And Ike the Kike—“haloed martyr, edged in splendor, the stone homunculus, who never curdles into the comprehensible”—is supposed to impassively ignore the question, his eyes remaining fixed in the direction of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, and then Vance is supposed to ask, “Well, who do you think are the hottest Goddesses?” prompting Ike to compile his “Ten Gods I’d Fuck (T.G.I.F.)” list (headed, of course, by his beloved La Felina and including Lady Rukia, La Muñeca, Las Pistoleras, and several others, including a hitherto unknown Goddess named Hmm Uh, who is now considered a Goddess of surpassing significance, although some experts continue to believe that “Hmm Uh” was simply what’s called a “speech disfluency” or “verbal placeholder”—a meaningless interjection that Ike unconsciously inserted as he tried to think of other Goddesses he’d fuck). And this is the list in which Ike fatefully neglects to include Shanice, which sets into motion an inexorable concatenation of events culminating in Ike’s death at the hands of Mossad sharpshooters hiding among the leaves of the trees across the street from Ike’s hermitage.