Review of Mike Kleine’s THIRD WORLD MAGICKS

THIRD WORLD MAGICKS. Mike Kleine. 2022. Inside the Castle. 201 pages.

third world magicks is an odd curiosity, an artifact, an artistic gesture. There’s an insubstantiality to it both as an object and as a work of literature that defies description. It exists on a triple boundary between art piece, story collection, and elaborate joke, a wild ungoverned no-man’s-land.

I have never read an Inside the Castle production before, nor delved into the more artistically experimental small publishing houses that exist in the scene. So perhaps some crucial aesthetic or literary context was missing. I had enjoyed listening to Mike Kleine’s Karaoke Night at Diasuke’s, which I encountered as a recording somewhere in the outer reaches of the Twitter map like an oracle occulted away behind a boulder in an arcane video game universe, which tells you an unsettling story in an fluidly changing AI voice. It, along with some musical interludes Kleine produced for the towering sonic superstructure of the podcast Alt-Write, was an experience that stood out because of both its form and content. third world magicks makes similar moves. It’s a small book with sparse text printed in lowercase Consolas font, which a prefatory note tells us is “a monospaced typeset designed by luc(as) de groot as a replacement for courier new. it is the only standard windows os font with a slash thru the zero character.” This font choice, and the layout and design of the book, gives it a renegade, xerox, zine quality which makes it easy to read through in a day.

The content is a little more difficult. It seems to be two short stories (novellas?) followed by a lengthy section devoted to as essay and blurbs for the book itself, from the likes of Ken Sparling, Vi Khi Nao, Josiah Morgan, Jon Chandler, and Elle Nash. This last section takes up like a fourth of the book—the praise is incorporated into the book, ouroboros-like, in a way that might seem … unseemly to a mainstream audience reading books with blurbs barely referenced on the cover or front page. But we’re in another place outside of the flow of normal book design, motivation, expectation.

The two novellas pertain in different ways to music. In the first, entitled “find out what happens when people stop being polite, and start getting reel,” a music critic named blank zizou is assigned to go with another critic called bloodrip.exe to hear a Serbian musician named abul mogard play at a venue. zizou has a need to appear a certain way to bloodrip.exe, who she thinks is “kind of cute.” She wants to impress them (bloodrip.exe is never assigned a particular gender). They go together to the venue and interview the Serbian musician. In the bar before the performance they talk and there is one of the most phenomenal things about the entirety of third world magicks, a loooooooong list of all the musical acts they talk about. Just delivered in a flat, affectless play list. I recognized a good chunk of the obscure, outré musicians listed there, for which I gave myself bonus points, but many I did not know, and I took the list as a potential source of recommendations for future listening. The ratio of musicians you recognize from the list to musicians you don’t seems to function as a kind of access key for the rest of the book. The list serves as a kind of orientation for the reader, perhaps to bring them into the world of the characters of the book, but also perhaps to trick them? I don’t know. But it’s a fascinating hurdle to try to jump. I don’t know if I made it or if I knocked my teeth out on the track surface.

blank zizou then pays attention to the Serbian musician abul mogard’s performance and is, to put it mildly, taken to “another place.” A lengthy hallucinatory vision quest occurs when zizou listens. The impression is made that zizou has an extraordinary ear for music that others do not have, and upon resurfacing from abul mogard’s performance, she can see clearly that music criticism is a field for some real heads vs most people who are just doing it “only because they know how to take advantage of other people.” In a way the novella is a kind of “ars poetica” but about music, the subject it is notoriously hard to write about as the quote, variously attributed to Frank Zappa, Elvis Costello, and others, goes: “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” Kleine has boogie-woogied some arcades, balustrades, and cornices in third world magicks.

Speaking of architecture, the second novella, entitled “as long as ropes unravel fake rolex will travel,” appears to be a chronicle of a group of people on an unnamed island constructing a white cube that has magical (or perhaps magickal) properties that are unclear. They seem to be working under the supervision of a character named “black magician” who is at times absent from the construction site. The workers have outlandish names (the book in a consistently applied typographical quirk would stylize it “outl&ish names”) such as constantinople de renobles, marques framberk, and ursula mantriesta and struggle against setbacks, personnel restructuring, and the constant undertow of surreal plot-points to complete the construction task and start others. This section was perhaps less interesting that blank zizou’s musicological trip but had some humorous and mysterious wrinkles. You get the impression on some level that these stories are not meant to be read as “stories,” the book is not meant to be read as a “book,” and literature is not meant to be absorbed as “literature.” It’s bizarre and dreamlike, Luis Buñuel teasing you in book form.

The essay and blurbs in the back of the book I won’t comment on, that being an annex of “extra-book” critical material.

I would take a look at other Mike Kleine productions, with the caveat that his literary output, from this book’s example, is an ambient affair with little of traditional substance to grasp hold of but much texture, visual latticework, brain stimulation, and trippy coolness.