The Drill Press

publishers aiming to get in your head: We no longer publish books. We might decide to publish books again in the future, but too little work of quality was available to us (or anyone else, from what we have read of late). The early twenty-first century in the US is awash in functional illiteracy. Tests of US college graduates have shown that the rate of functional illiteracy of college graduates has gone from 30% in the 1970s to 70% in the first decades of the 21st century. If you are a college graduate younger than 50, there is a less than 50-50 chance that you understand what you read. This should be no surprise to anyone who listen to news commentators or politicians. Paul Ryan, for example, famously claimed to have read Ayn Rand and to be a follower of Rand's as well as a devout Catholic, a contradiction given that Rand philosophical writings quite clearly state atheism is a fundamental tenet. People who confuse Rand's writings with libertarianism are also examples of functional illiterates. Worse, those who claim to read Friedrich Hayek and confuse his economic ideas with libertarianism are examples of functional illiterates, given that Hayek explicitly rejected libertarianism as impossible and was in fact by his own admission a monarchist, rejecting also democracy. But at least Hayek could read with comprehension, as he did not confound the philosophical position of libertarianism with the US state's rights movement.; The 20th century model for publishing houses printing books on paper pimped by semiliterate agents with their heads up their asses is antiquated and doomed. I continue to seek writers (to read) who understand the process of writing, conscious of their words and sentences and paragraphs and why they should come together in a given form, but even this is not enough. Very few who are published have anything to say, though there is a burgeoning cancer of quasi-nonfiction devoted to mythology as American history (recall Tom Brokaw's absurd The Greatest Generation, mythologizing the generation of US veterans who played almost no part in defeating Hitler's armies. The D-Day invasion freed Western Europe from four German divisions (and kept the Soviet Red Army from being the liberator). The Soviet Red Army defeated Hitler's armies, fighting 140 divisions. In the process, the Soviet military lost about 12,000,000 soldiers and 10,000,000 civilians.) Almost everyone in the US has learned history from Hollywood, and that includes many of those with degrees in history. Worse, college level textbooks in subjects like economics and finance are now comic books. We used to make jokes about that. I wonder when subjects with actual content like mathematics and physics will go to a comic book format. I wonder how something like Walter Rudin's elementary textbook Principles of Mathematical Analysis will look as a comic book. Will there be a drawing of the Cantor set instead of the mathematical description? If you think you are functionally literate, get a copy of this text and read the first chapter. There are no prerequesites and it is a perfect example of show, don't tell.; Thoughtful, literate and literary writers outside the norm of genre-slavish zombies to a moribund culture continue to be a challenge to find. There are a few presses with some integrity, such as Civil Coping Mechanisms, Enigmatic Ink, Equus Press, to name three, but they remain as difficult to locate as written works beyond fifth grade English with third grade mentality. Comic book superheroes are the height of US literary culture. We eschew the whores who don't have any idea of literary history or literary roots or education beyond ceremonial certification, without meaningful experience or an original viewpoint. If one must flop on one's back and open one's legs, at least do it with some integrity, ingenuity, experimental fervor and sense of adventure. With so little new or original, we remain without interest in the outpouring of shit. (Note: we respect prostitutes who serve with integrity and distinction, whether it be writing or honest sex.)

still available:: Jim Chaffee's São Paulo Blues is again in print with Canadian publisher Enigmatic Ink.; Enigmatic Ink São Paulo Blues by Jim Chaffee; It can be obtained from Amazon.com in the US and in the United Kingdom.; Amazon.com; Amazon.com.uk; São Paulo Blues by Jim Chaffee; "Exactly like US foreign policy: brutal and pointless. A joyous read." – Betelgeuse Star and Teleport

now available:

Jim Chaffee's Studies in Mathematical Pornography: The American Dream is now in print with Canadian publisher Enigmatic Ink.

Enigmatic Ink Studies in Mathematical Pornography: The American Dream by Jim Chaffee

It can be obtained from Amazon.com in the US and in the United Kingdom.

Amazon.com

Amazon.com.uk

Cover of the book Studies in Mathematical Pornography: The American Dream

"This is a book where men go to die." – Thor Garcia, author of The News Clown

Read Thor Gracia's review

Read Tom Bradley's review

Read Maurice Stoker's review

A Broca Literária: Broca fechou às submissões.; A Broca Literária

We're new, we're vicious and we're hungry.: We seek a few good readers. Terrestrial intelligences seeking pleasure in engaging the brain, eschewing the standard television-aping pap presented by the major houses as literature. Readers relishing the English language, prose that realizes its potential, and tales that exploit the marvels of reality wherever it is found.; We seek a few good writers. Authors renouncing cliché with tales outside the mainstream, explicit in setting and detail to transport the reader, trusting rather than bludgeoning the reader. Creators of convincing creatures in unique settings.; You can eat off our prose.

Manifesto In Five Easy Movements: This work simultaneously appeared on the computers of our three founding editors as they made plans to start this publishing house. Investigation revealed slight variations in text which over time merged into this version; under the properties were three different comments, though the title and author were as given. One comment stated CHANCE: Computer enHANced, another CHANCE: Computer Hosted AlieN intelligenCE. In the third a longer description: A work by silicon life forms created by information and inhabiting the web. Later one of us got an email with no address simply stating Collective intelligence from bits to words.; Click To Read the Full Manifesto

The Big Stupid Review
Modern Tragedy, or Parodies of Ourselves: By Robert Castle; It had seemed reasonable – more reasonable than wrapping it in a newspaper he hadn't read or throwing it out with the carpet ("Or mailing it to his ex," I said under my breath) – well, reasonable to a confirmed bachelor, to take the poop and put it into the sink's garbage disposal. The disposal never worked the same, and Joe would have been wise to purchase a new one at the cost of a few hundred dollars. The episode certainly has made Joe's friends reluctant to come over to the condo, even when Joe was offering free beer and Pay Per View heavyweight bouts. more...
Totally Enchanté, Dahling: By Thor Garcia; "Who doesn't love a little black cock?" Lindsay laughed and took another slug from the bottle of cabernet. more...
Hastini: By Rudy Ravindra; However much she loathed the idea, in desperation, she had tried to find a suitable man on-line. She signed up on many sites like match.com, met a few men. Some were genuinely interested in finding a life partner, others were simply looking for fun. They all test-drove her but didn't make an offer. Not that the ride was bad. She pulled all the stops, gave it her best. But the men she met didn't seem interested in taking the relationship further. It was as if after sampling her wares, they decided to move on to better prospects, like butterflies flying off to more colorful flowers with sweeter nectar. more...
Unexpected Pastures: By Kim Farleigh; Cristina's window-framed, blue-eyed blondness faced the spotlight that coated the world with eerie superficiality, like a sun in a black, lunar sky. Anyone scaling the slopes would have been caught by that night-time sun, an easy target for the lookout-tower men upon the hilltops. more...
Nonviolence: By Jim Coulter; "Hey kid," Peter called out. "I'm not going to blast you into eternity with an assault rifle. more...

Journal Of Precognitive Memories
The Gospel of Wealth: Towards a New Generation of American Consumership: By Jim Chaffee. Texas has developed a textbook to teach economics and finance to America's future consumers at the end of middleschool before they drop out of school. Read the first review of this innovative new text which contrasts Adam Smith's misguided notions of true capitalism versus Andrew Carnegie's cogent outline for economic behavior in his classic "The Gospel of Wealth." more...
A Film Too Far: The Battle of the Strait of Hormuz: By Jim Chaffee. Finally Hollywood has made the definitive war epoch of our time. A film that puts into proper perspective the US role as a military superpower in the late 20th century. More, it presages the US mission as peacekeeper and maintainer of order in the 21st century. We refer to the heroic actions of the US Navy in the Persian Gulf, in the Strait of Hormuz, on 3 July 1988. The film is entitled The Battle of Hormuz Strait. It recounts a heroic encounter between the forces of good and evil that too many Americans have forgotten or never learned. more...
Maurice Stoker quasireviews The Vicious Circulation of Dr. Catastrophe: A Polemical Ensemble by Kane X. Faucher: By Maurice Stoker. Once again I am torn from my fairyland of gleet to review for the loutish Drill Press. On this occassion none other than Pig Bodine himself, wearing U. S. Navy enlisted dress blues (gabardine, not the issue thick wool cracker jack outfit) with insignia of BM2 and tar flap collar adorned with the doctoral regalia colors of his economics PhD lined in the glorious hues of his third rate university (or maybe just some afterthought from hell), an SP armband affixed to his right upper arm. How this lunatic escaped his asylum is anyone's guess, but he shows up and pulls me from the gloryhole in the Yokosuka O Club after whacking with his billy club a couple ithyphallic knot-hole protrusions, lovely boles both, to which I was in alternate attendence. Unceremoniously handcuffed, no less, and instead of a brutal sexual assault locked into a hotel room with a book (The Vicious Circulation of Dr. Catastrophe: A Polemical Ensemble by one Kane X. Faucher), a pad of cheap yellow paper and a handful of ecru wooden number two pencils with blunt writing leads. more...
Maurice Stoker on Tom Bradley's Even the Dog Won't Touch Me: By Maurice Stoker. I'm leading a tour of fellow literary professionals. Writers, editors, publishers, and agents. Lots of agents. A tour for a clutch of charities. A service tour of the glory holes of Europe. Western Europe. We do the US and Canada later in the year.; It seems that with Cheney and Bush Jr. having memoirs surreptitiously penned and to be published in the near future, they are both going to be with us on the US leg. I can't wait to see the Secret Service agents on their knees beside the former President and his Vice chowing down on anonymous wiener dogs protruding from holes in stark bathroom walls. Although I have been informed that SS will require all anonymous participants submit to short arm inspection and penile toivel, probably laving away the tasty smegma from around those few remaining lovely foreskins. more...

Spooky Action At A Distance
Sub-band Coding in the Aether, Information Ghosts, and Doctor Franklin’s Dream America by Damien Lincoln Ober: By Jim Chaffee. There is one other bit of nonsense that the novel shares with contemporary confounding of the facility with gadgets for technical savvy, and that is the idea that coders (programmers) are somehow a driving force of technology. Those of us who worked in the research and development of high technology programs that implemented something more substantial than social networking sites, stuff like the Global Positioning System (GPS) or range safety or the variations of two-way radios known as cellular phones, know that coders are the ditch diggers of technology. In this novel, however, coders are magicians, sorcerers whose codes are incantations. more...
Pseudoscience Fiction in Louis Armand's Cairo: A Review: By Jim Chaffee. The unnamed horror, The Digital, a bugaboo that is difficult to wrap one's head around, is an unnamed horror in the tradition of Lovecraft. It made me think of the cartoon by Tom Toles in which Randolph Itch dreams he is being coerced to walk a wireless tightrope, high-wire funambulism with wireless technology, high speed no less. more...
Quantum Library Science: A Review of the Infinite Grey by Kane Faucher: By Jim Chaffee. The history of the world after the atrocity of volume two is written in the collapsed style of the Russian mathematician turned pseudo-historian Anatoly Fomenko, in which various early periods of history are denied existence and folded onto later periods, with events separated in time made equivalent through a reality as heavily filtered and with an internal logic as constrained and not even wrong as that of the ultrafinitists regarding mathematics. Hence we find the equivalence of Paul Fabulon and Paulus, Degree Holder, much as Jesus and Plato are amalgamations of several historical figures in Fomenko's chronology. This without considering the placeholder known as Alberto Gimaldi being the same as Paul Fabulon and Jonkil Calembour even as the placeholder Paulus, Degree Holder may be Ram Calembour. And of course, there are no ancient times before the atrocity, in keeping with the New Chronology of Fomenko where the Old Testament was written after the New Testament and regards events that occurred during the Middle Ages, the existence of the dark ages being denied. So with the historical chronology regarding history before the great atrocity and of the so-called Grey, there is in fact none, since there was no prior existence. A trick common these days among such as the followers of Fomenko, the Ultrafinitists, the Tea Party, or dwellers in Ian Random: deny what is not to one's liking. It is the equivalent of calling the filling of a shit sandwich filtered foodstuff. more...
Nation on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown: Singular infinitesimal Variations on Thor Garcia’s Only Fools Die of Heartbreak: By Jim Chaffee. In the post-Manson Los Angeles days of Angelo Buono and Kenneth Bianchi, of the John Holmes murder trial and McMartin Preschool sexual mass hysteria witch trial, of the Night Stalker, your best friend lives a life of contrast to yours. His family is stable; they live in a big house in the better part of town. He attends a military academy and graduates from West Point. Later he tells you that his sister, who had initiated you to petting, performs fellatio on groups of his classmates, that his parents divorced and his father had a sex change and lives as a woman in the house which has become a ruin in a slum. Your friend goes off to Somalia. more...
Beyond Brown and Bubbly: Louis Armand’s Breakfast at Midnight: By Jim Chaffee. Armand’s story worms its way out of an infested history beyond the control of the protagonist, wriggling unbidden like an ascaris from an anus. more...
The Bloodsucker of Nagasaki: By Tom Bradley. There's a vampire in my background. He has stalked me all my life, but he failed to fix his fangs in my jugular until, like an idiot, I blundered into his tomb and offered up my throat. Now I'm stuck. more...
A Sickness Called America: Thor Garcia's The News Clown: By Jim Chaffee. In a single news article, Garcia captures the US as a society: "In tune with an increasingly mentally-ill society, America's leaders are demonstrably the most warmongering on the planet. They appear bent on a course of foreign policy blundering and fiscal mismanagement that is almost certain to lead to bankruptcy and the irreversible decline, if not total impoverishment, of the nation and its people. The U.S. population, crippled by its mental illness and made impotent by conglomerate control of the mass media, appears incapable of offering any meaningful resistance when their politicians nonsensically announce the start of another oversees war in the ‘interests of peace and free markets,' but which only serves to further endanger the future livelihood of the average American citizen." more...
Singular Extracellular Matrices and Information Rebirth in Kane Faucher's The Infinite Atrocity: By Jim Chaffee. Randees like Paul Ryan are even more amusing to watch, even if in the long run more damaging to society. Mr. Ryan famously declared himself to be a devout Catholic atheist. Of course, he didn't say it in so many words. He claims to be a devout Catholic and he also claimed to be a follower of Ayn Rand or at least of her philosophy. The Catholic Church itself informed Mr. Ryan that such a position was logically untenable given that a fundamental tenet of Rand's "philosophy" is atheism. This is a necessary condition to be a follower of her philosophy, probably one of the less stupid ones. That the clueless Mr. Ryan (who said after the rebuke from the Church that he was not a follower of Rand, a lie given that it was recorded: he had made this statement during a speech to a "conservative" group) didn't realize this simple inconsistency tells us that 1) he lied about having read Rand or 2) he cannot read with comprehension. Since his requirement that his staff read Rand's gibberish (something one would assume they had done and seen through in high school or before) implies he has read her work, he then cannot have comprehended it. That is, the man cannot read with comprehension. He is a functional illiterate. Given that among his generation of humans educated through college within the US one has only a fifty-fifty chance of meeting a functional literate, that is no surprise. more...
Tom Bradley's FAMILY ROMANCE: excerpt and interview: By Tom Bradley et. al. As for the more explicitly testicular of our parents—who knows where absent Dad would come down on this issue? Mom and pathogens are the sole topics he's reluctant to discuss in secret letters from across the Judeuphrates, where has defected to please himself behaving like a traitor/apostate among the Relic Amalekites. more...
Author's Foreword to the New Edition of My Hands Were Clean: By Tom Bradley. The end of everything is going to be like a jumbo jet crash: what kills you is the sheer bouncing avoirdupois of all the other assholes jam-packed around you. The unprecedented apocalyptic monstrosity of the internet makes it obvious that our universe, and everybody in it, is hurtling into the final few screams of the Great Dissolution, as promised in the Vishnu Purana. The Night of Brahma will follow, when we all have to shut the fuck up, and even stop publishing e-books. more...
Les Apaches de la bibliothèque infinie: The Infinite Library by Kane X. Faucher: By Jim Chaffee. Imagine you've fallen in with bookish thugs. Hooligans of the word printed on paper. Canadian dealer in antique books Alberto Gimaldi finds himself in precisely this situation when he hires on with a collector named Castellemare who turns out to be a criminal master-librarian. Castellemare's vicious henchman Angelo first trains Gimaldi in the subtle art of retrieving escaped books only to later hunt him down to repossess books with which Gimaldi has absconded. The library from which books escape to the hands of selected readers, as did those with which Gimaldi made off, is the infinite library over which Catellemare ostensibly presides. Along the way, Gimaldi matches wits with Anton Setzer, former hireling of Castellmare, used bookstore owner and inventor-operator of an infernal device attached to the infinite library via a labyrinth. The device appends newly unwritten books to the library, a mind-boggling task given that the library holds everything written, actually or potentially, analogous to the sort of apparent paradox (only apparent) that haunts infinity in mathematical art. more...
Pseudo-scientists, Pseudo-Shamans, and Mass Delusion: Contemporary US Culture: By Jim Chaffee. Reality is that contemporary US society is afflicted with mass delusion. A goodly bit of it is illustrated by the above statements: ceremonial certification in lieu of active education whereby verbiage for verbiage sake passes for accomplishment. As an example of active education the author challenges the reader to give an argument that the square root of two is not a fraction (and for those who are not educated, a fraction can be taken as the ratio of two non-negative integers, assumed without common divisors, and a square root of a number is another number which when multiplied by itself equals said number). This is a simple exercise, but it does require two important items missing from both statements quoted above: operational definition and reasoning. Without them, words are wasted except for emotive purposes. more...
Notes From a Season at the Center of the Universe: Cecil Taylor at the Take 3: By Robert Levin. In late 1962, Cecil lands a three-month, four-night-a-week gig at The Take 3, a coffee house on Bleecker Street. It's right next door to The Bitter End where Woody Allen had performed just weeks before. (Allen was second on the bill and I'd thrown him a quick couple of lines in the Village Voice column—something about how this new comic exploited his appearance to good advantage.) more...
Meaning and Almostness: By Jim Chaffee. Essence and existence. For certain believers in God and such, essence precedes existence. For some unbelievers, most famously Jean-Paul Sartre or Simone de Beauvoir, the statement is reversed. Neither of these notions is anything more than a repetition of the point they are attempting to drive home, however, and as far as existential dilemmas go, the God-no God question is at best meaningless and really a yawner. Besides which all the arguments end in begging.; Consider instead a chilling ontological-epistemological cocktail with the potential for profound existential hangover. more...
Kalari Payat: By Gitanjali Kolanad. The young lithe bodies with long muscles under dark skin glistening with oil and sweat crouch and kick and leap, taking inspiration from the movement of elephant, lion, horse, snake. The actions are low to the ground, curving, punctuated by sudden high twirling jumps, just like the Malayalam script, all curves interrupted only rarely by a straight line. more...
Noise in the Machine: The Homogeneous Chaos Blues: By Jim Chaffee. Gilbert Ryle nailed Cartesian dualism by killing the ghost in the machine. Now someone named Carl Zimmer wants to use noise in the machine to kill a straw man standing in for genetic determinism. This mushy-headed blather arises as an attempt to simulate science-talk to people inured to comic book encapsulation of the most complex ideas. Who knows what the author intended to convey, or why, but the premise demands deconstruction like Lon Cheney Junior demanded a dew claw. more...
Free Jazz: The Jazz Revolution of the '60s: By Robert Levin. Four musicians (a saxophonist, trumpeter, bassist and drummer) abruptly began to play - with an apoplectic intensity and at a bone-rattling volume - four simultaneous solos that had no perceptible shared references or point of departure. Even unto themselves the solos, to the extent that they could be isolated as such in the density of sound that was being produced, were without any fixed melodic or rhythmic structure. Consisting, by turns, of short, jagged bursts and long meandering lines unmindful of bar divisions and chorus measures they were, moreover, laced with squeaks, squeals, bleats and strident honks. A number ended and another began - or was it the same one again? How were you to tell? No. No way this madness could possibly have a method. more...