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Wiggling Wishbone: Stories of Pata Sexual Speculation [Autonomedia], 1996 illustrated collection of speculative stories, meta-essays, blasphemies, and pata-fictions "that, through force of language, reveals the limits of power and commerce."
Compared to Burroughs, Borges, Ballard, Southern, Phillip K. Dick... Illos. by Jonathon Rosen, David Sandlin, Dix 10, Foto Sifichi, Kaz, Ned Sonntag, Yossarian, Valerie Haller... The collection's “intelligent rage” addresses Hitler from his dog’s point of view, a sexual liaison with Andy Warhol, the Pope’s wet dreams, a forensic scientist falls for a car crash victim, a trip through a mail order catalogue and others. Plantenga has been called “the William Gibson of the Lower East Side,” “a punk Borges,” and simply “an incredibly talented underground writer.” Wiggling Stories have been published in many online and analogue magazines. |
Wet Dreams of the Pope by bart plantenga & Black Sifichi appears in Wiggling Wishbone &, in 2012, was published as a chapbook by Eraserhead Press. The radio play was produced by Lukas Simonis for VPRO, Worm & Klangendum & can be heard here. The CD version is available at Underbelly
PSYCHO-GEO-CATO TRAVELS originally appeared in Wiggling Wishbone. Take a trip through a mail order catalogue and have your mind reupholstered. Published in Unlikely Stories: Episode IV, Spring 2012.
commentary:
The William Gibson of the Lower Eastside • Charlie Morrow, composer frightfully intelligent • Andrei Codrescu, National Public Radio an incredibly talented underground writer • Glenn Branca, composer [RIP] playfully experimental, funny & futuro like the high end of sci fi and the high end of erotic fiction • John Strausbaugh, New York Press Plantenga writes fiendishly inventive short pieces of fiction. • Russ Kick, Outposts cryptic Phillip K. Dickian sci fi stories full of gruesome detail delivered hard-boiled style. • Evelyn McDonnell, Village Voice |
A scathing assault on passive cultural carrion who get their rocks off strictly from media consumption. A thoughtful, clever & well-written collection... a hilarious & disturbing vision of the not-so-distant future.
• Margaret Weigel, Paramour "I find the story 'Woman With One Too Many Faces" perhaps too inspiring... I like this story a lot." • Judy Lopatin, author Modern Romances "Bart Plantenga has constructed a dense, and often hilarious, tropic of shattered pasts and people who cannot be separated from their plastics, machines and isms in his glorious collection of meta-fictions, Wiggling Wishbone. The only way this could be done convincingly is at the level of language. The prose is an intense cauldron which ties together the body… But the book's core consists of a thoughtful reworking, a deeper elaboration of, the principles of [the crime] genre… Wishbone reshapes this material in an unusual way. It could be said that the book's great innovation is to project a noir future. … Language gives us a future. The critical yet poetic language Plantenga accesses mixes the technocratic language of the armored state with the observant, chivalrous talk of the ad character. … Thus the book's substantial powers include: 1) a transvaluation of noir values, 2) a transplanting of them into a more critical look at how the apparatus of modern domination works, 3) a deeply felt, darkly imagined world, with plausible, real, anguished characters, 4) the beautifully sophisticated stranding of the two worlds by the creation of a neo-language that takes in both its bivalved fluctuations." • Jim Feast, Boston Book Review |
