The blog of the Poison Pie Publishing House is posting a new entry every day from January 1, 2017 to December 31, 2020. The writings from each year are collected into a novel. Four brief notes taken from the forward to the final volume are reproduced below.
1. A Literature of Non-Idiomatic Improvisation
This tetralogy is a work of non-idiomatic improvisation. The author wrote one page each day. Upon completion of each passage, the text was uploaded to the site of the Poison Pie Publishing House. Just as non-idiomatic improvised music eschews elaborate after-the-fact polishing so too is this writing subject to no further editing. Such improvised music is "heard as played"; these books are "read as written".
2. Writing as Listening
Each of the one-thousand four-hundred and sixty-one passages in this tetralogy was written in its entirety to the accompaniment of a recording of a particular piece of music. The work is identified at the end of each passage. Such a process admits the embodied cognition in the music. Furthermore, as the American pianist Vijay Iyer has noted, "[M]usic can be viewed as a consequence of active listening...Placing the skillful listener in such an active role explodes the category of experiences that we
call listening to music..."
3. A Tetralogy
The content of all four books represents a daily contribution beginning January 1, 2017 and ending December 31, 2020, corresponding approximately to the term of the current president of the United States of America. Lest there be any misunderstanding, this collective work is an unambiguous repudiation of the forty-fifth president of the United States of America, who invoked the lowest forms of divisive rhetoric to take office with a minority of the vote, aided by the intervention of a foreign power. While in office, this president, on a daily basis, has stoked the worst impulses of Americans, attempting to set one against the other for his own advantage.
4. No Apology
The title of the tetralogy is "How I Survived the Presidency of Douchebag J. Troglodyte: A Daily Account". For those who decry this title as an antagonistic provocation, which further inflames the unproductive hyper-partisanship that currently consumes the country, we do not disagree. At the same time, we are compelled to justify the title by the recognition that failing to explicitly call out the egregiously corrupt behavior of our elected leaders threatens to normalize it for future generations.
Staff of the Poison Pie Publishing House
January 19, 2020
