I found the book in an old bookshop, you can imagine the shop quite easily, dusty, full of tomes, impossible to find what you came into buy but easy to find curios and oddities. It was a short book called Fables and Scenes From The Life Of Monty Catsin, who was easily identifiable as a roguish character, part Quixote, par Joan of Arc, never successful but always paying for his mistakes. An idiot-martyr. I turn to Chapter One and begin to read a little.

Monty Catsin was the prodigal son of a prosperous cork merchant from near the Spanish/French border. After excelling throughout eighteen years of schooling at the extremely well regarded San Christopher Insitituta, Monty travelled to France, to study philosophy at the Sorbonne. This was 1918, war was over. It was whilst living in Paris that he met and became a confident of the writer and theorist Andre Breton. Unlike Breton though, Catsin only wrote this one book, and as we will later find out, he wrote it in very unliterary circumstances. Andre Breton added a final memorial chapter after Catsin’s death in 1936. The book, composed of twelve other chapters, deals with a succession of unrelated events from Monty’s short life, we are recounted his homosexual liaison with Lorca as well as fist-fights with Hemingway, his pursuits of women seen about Paris and a million other divulgences of the mind. The first chapter deals with an episode in which Monty is fifteen and by his own admission was becoming a bit rebellious. The incident deals with his Aunty Marcia’s suspicions that Monty might be becoming a bit psychopathic. He was exceptionally bright, but he was within spitting distance of being an idiot savant. His mind was a dark room filled with treasure, he was beginning to explore all the different avenues of intellectual exploration open to him.

And so it was when he was fifteen that Monty became obsessed with the idea of anatomy, a right little Frankenstein; he wanted to explore the insides of the animals that roamed the expanses of their cork tree orchards. He would catch little mice or cats and splice them open, with a long cut from neck to rump, and another running horizontal to that. Monty really saw what they were made of. Lots of blood. Indeterminate and warm, organs, unspecific. He’d cut out the oesophagus and the trachea, remove them, inspect and leave them to bake on the hot, cracked and yellow soil.

Monty says that for a long time he didn’t know that anyone knew about his strange childhood urges to cut open animals, for a long time he had forgotten about it too, he matured, stopped slicing animals open and moved onto other things, as we know he did well in his final exams and went to Paris to study. It was on his Aunty Marcia’s deathbed in 1929, that she uttered her final words to Monty – Monty – she stammered – no matter how much you’ve failed in your life and have had to be bailed out by your poor father, I’m just glad you didn’t turn out to be a serial killer or pervert like I thought you would when you were but a teenager.

Perplexed by this, Monty, who it must be said had failed in certain areas of his life, he had been bankrupted twice and married three times (one wife gone the mad and another to a remote Scottish island), did not know what she meant by suggesting he might’ve become a psychopath, his mind having subconsciously repressed the memories of his days as Doctor Death of the Cork Orchards.

He returned downstairs, left Marcia’s daughter, Maria, with her. He found his Father, half asleep in the red armchair, and asked him about Marcia had said. He half-smiled and said – when you were younger, this was during the war, just before Uncle Juan died, his sister, your Aunty Marcia, was accustomed to taking long walks in our orchards. There, on a now indeterminate day in summer, she saw you kill a cat. She was so shocked that she ran back to the house and told me immediately. Monty recalls here, how a whole pile of repressed memories rushed upwards to him, like a beam of light piercing the dust of an Andalucian church.

He remembered the way he used to cut those animals, down and across, and examine them.

Monty asked, ‘Why hasn’t she said anything till now? I’m horrified that she knew all this time, I had completely forgotten about it.’

To which his father replied that they had considered questioning Monty about it, but only if they’d caught you doing it again, and for awhile Marcia wanted to keep an eye on you, but then Uncle Juan died, and she must’ve forgotten about it because she didn’t bring it up for almost three or four years. Maybe longer actually, because it was just after you’d finished your studies at the Sorbonne and she said ‘I’m glad he didn’t turn into a psychopath.’

Sometime, after his Uncle Juan died, he must’ve lost that ‘killer instinct’, his Dad joked, which was clearly a reference to his financial misfortunes in the proceeding years, something that was of much shame to his family.

Despite the at times shoddy writing of the piece, I was gripped by the absurdity of this situation, the actual lack of the moral in the fable, leaving me to make my own equally absurd assumptions to fill the gaps in it.

The next chapter dealt with equally absurd homosexual fumbling with Garcia Lorca and his two encounters with Ernest Hemingway. The first was at a bullfight in Madrid, after which Hemingway, Catsin and a few other fellows embarked upon a game of cards. Monty had to escape out of the bathroom window, fleeing scarily large gambling debts to Hemingway. Their second meeting occurred in Paris a few years later in which Monty lost two teeth.

Montgomery Juan Angel Catsin, was given the name Montgomery after the now obscure Montgomery Ward, who in his day was a famed entrepreneur, he was the man who set up the first mail order business in the U.S. He gave his name to Monty Catsin through a bet between Montgomery Ward and Montgomery Juan Angel Catsin’s father, which stated that the first of them to make a million dollars would give their name to the next child to be born to either family. And two years later, in 1887, when Montgomery Ward made his first million dollars Monty Catsin’s father agreed to name his child, his first born, Montgomery, in his honour.

The only problem was that Monty’s father was not yet married, and thus was not in a position to be naming anyone’s children, and so he began his search for a wife. So desperate and depressed did he become to find and marry and beautiful senorita that he undertook a pilgrimage to Rome to receive a blessing from the Vatican. He walked from his villa in Spain, across the Riviera, crossed the Alps and made his way south to Rome. On one freezing cold night, after crossing the Alps and now being somewhere in Lombardia, Monty’s father took shelter in a tiny barn. It seemed perfect to him, and nestling in the warmth of the hay he quickly fell asleep. Morning shone through the rafters, the storm was gone and left clear skies in its trail, the air was still cold, but clear, crisp and refreshing, Senor Catsin breathed deep, filling lungs with Italian air. As Monty’s father stirred and awoke fully he was shocked to see the most beautiful woman he had ever set his little dark eyes upon stirring the donkeys from their slumber. This woman was heroically gorgeous, an Italian maiden stirring his passions along with the donkeys, buxom, dark hair, fair skinned. He quickly jumped down from his sleeping hole in the rafters and introduced himself. Her response was one of fear; she turned and ran away from this terrifying man who had been sleeping in her barn, and who was now accosting her in a strange foreign tongue, straw in his hair, dressed in dirty clothes, shoes almost falling apart. Monty’s father was devastated.

In Rome, he struggled, penniless, almost in rags, (conducting his journey in the true spirit of a pilgrimage, he hadn’t bothered to heavy himself with the assorted stuffs of life, he survived off apples and vegetables and the kindness of strangers). One day, wearing more suitable clothes now thank God, he joined the procession of people waiting to be blessed by the Pope. Whilst in Rome he had picked up a little Italian, and having grown quite accustomed to the culture he decided to stay for a few months. Juan and his Father were taking care of the Cork Orchards, and he decided that he could justify extending his excursion a little longer, so he rented a small room for two months and settled in. He got a job with an antique dealer looking for someone who could speak fluent Spanish in order to translate the rare books being shipped to him from the Iberian Peninsula and estimate their worth.

One day in the shop a woman walked in. Not just any woman. But THE woman. The one from the Lombardian barn. Astounded, he shouted! CIAO BELLA. The woman was taken aback, the lunatic from the barn was here, dressed and combed and cleaned, speaking Italian, working in a shop. Out of his rags and without the straw in his hair he almost looked quite attractive. Dark skinned, dark haired, with mottled grey about his young temples, quite dashing almost.

The rest as they say, is history, Senor Catsin and Beatrice were married, and in less than a year little Montgomery Catsin was born, and all of this from a bet and a Papal blessing, such auspicious beginnings and such strange adventures to follow. He was doomed to live an inversion of his fairy tale beginning. Such strange adventures, all with unhappy endings, such suffering and persecution, bad luck and bad decisions plague our Monty’s life, and he records them in this little memoir. Hairy escapades in South American with lepers and native Indians, being chased through Mexico by banditos and bulls, being shipwrecked on an island in the south pacific for four months and finally a chapter on his adventures with the French Foreign Legion. It is in this penultimate chapter of the book, the last written by Monty himself, where he describes what turned out to be his final adventure, and how we are able to have this little book and how we are able to read it.

This was after his second bankruptcy; he had to close down his publishing company, sell up his house and car and selected items from his luxurious collection of antiques and objects d’art. He was in a rut which even Monty realised he needed to get out of, but, like everything Monty did, he did it in a very oblique fashion. Instead of maybe trying to work his out misfortune, or possibly even join the family business back in Spain, he instead joined the French Foreign Legion. And so in the hope of heroic adventure he set off to Africa, to find fame and (hopefully) fortune, and maybe even (please God) a wife.

The Legion was not as great a success as Monty had originally hoped. His romanticism was quickly quashed, trodden face down into burning African sands. Monty deserted in Cairo. It was after a brief period of travel throughout Africa that he found himself in search of diamonds on one of the small Comoros Islands in the Mozambique Channel, just off the south-western coast of Africa.

In a little and very isolated village he ran into trouble with a tribe of cannibal natives when he tried to sexually engage himself with a local girl. The elders locked Monty in a treehouse cage high in the canopies whilst they debated his fate in tongues poor Monty couldn’t understand. Here, Monty had time to think, to mull over his life and his adventures. He still had his little note book with him and scratched out his memoirs in it whilst the silvered haired men talked back and forth for twenty days. It was on the twenty-first day when a soldier from the Legion disturbed them. He was hunting for a deserter by the name of Montogomery Juan Angel Catsin and, following a lucky lead from an informant on the mainland, he had found him, bearded now, looking a little rougher, much thinner. The Legionairre promptly sentenced poor Monty to death, by shooting, for treason and desertion.

This was of much annoyance of the elders, who were also busy sentencing Monty to death. The Legionnaire joined the elders and busily began talking to them in French about whose jurisdiction poor Monty’s life was in. Both sides made impassioned appeals, to have Monty tied to a tree and shot or alternatively to burn him alive and pick the nicely roasted flesh off of his bones. The Legionnaire’s rebuttal focused mainly on that he didn’t very well mind what they did to him, but only after Monty had been shot as per the regulations of the Foreign Legion. But where would the fun be in roasting alive a dead man? Where indeed, argued the Legionnaire back, would be the justice in shooting a man after he’d been cooked? They had almost reached a stalemate when the Legionnaire, hot, sticky, tired and bored of chasing after a rogue Spanish deserter, capitulated and said he didn’t particularly mind how he died to be honest, as long as he was dead. The little troublemaker.

Monty gave him his artefacts and instructions, sent his crucifix and Saint Christopher’s medal to his father, his memoirs, explaining what has happened to him, to Andre Breton. From which the document I just read is based upon. Breton’s epigram focused on what Monty’s last thought would’ve been as the flames crept slowly towards him, as he begins to slip away into death. Breton suggests that Monty’s mind begins to think of a way out of this debacle; that surely this isn’t the last adventure of Monty Catsin.

I, the algorithm, I’m not an easy thing. In fact, I am very complex. You don’t know me? You say you don’t know what an algorithm is. Ha! I’m all around you. And that, that, my friends, is why I didn’t understand myself. Well, I still don’t, no; I do understand myself, now.

Sadly I didn’t use to; in fact, I had a bit of a whammy a few years back. When Reagan and Gorbachev were threatening to play darts with nuclear warheads, I was presented with a serious spiritual struggle. You see, Reagan, he did press that big red button, and for some reason, for some bizarre reason I just wasn’t up to the job. That’s right, you heard me, I, the algorithm; a finite sequence of instructions, an explicit, step-by-step procedure for solving a problem, I just didn’t work out.

My fallibility perhaps saved everything, or at least, chunks of the Eastern and Western hemisphere. However, my failure as a mathematic process, a foundation of knowledge in the age of man forced me to turn in on myself, to untangle my id in the quest for understanding.

With revolution comes hope but also despair; hope does not generate knowledge and thus understanding continues to linger far away.

This was my antithesis, and gone were the days of my enlightenment; lost somewhere in the arguments and counter-arguments of Kleene, Church and Turing, with their lucky identities, families, domesticated animals and tea cosy collections. I existed in an evil world, where the revelations of maths and science were used against mankind, as catalysts for humanity’s eventual self-destruction. How did I even attempt to comprehend it all? Fate? Religion? This ontology? That ontology? And what is New Age Spirituality?

I went to the library. Well, only because I was already there. I withdrew some books about ‘The New Age’ but couldn’t read them, so I withdrew Siegfried Englemann’s Teach Your Child To Read in 100 Easy Lessons. Having developed the basic skills required for learning I began my crusade for knowledge by reading Conversations with God by Neale Donald Walsch. The Bible, an ancient book of universal popularity was mentioned a number of times in Donald’s book. I withdrew The Bible and marvelled at its tales of ancient chivalry, its forewarnings to man and its opulent fantastic style, but my ontological musings were complicated; once I had completed The Bible it was only fair to read The Quran and once that was done with the Bhagavad Gita and then The Science of Survival.

It soon became clear that the library could only hold so much information within its confines and I, of course, read very fast. Using the internet to expand my knowledge; I encountered the Neosexual, Tetrapyrgia, Paul Westerberg, Valentino Rossi, the Diatonic scale, organic chemistry, the pinball machine and Fearne Cotton within only a few minutes of research. Fearne Cotton is, unlike me, a living and breathing organism and understanding her own blossoming career in British television did not guide me towards self-understanding.

Organic Chemistry, or Fearne Cotton’s career? Which is more important? What of the other Fearne? The gastric band? Gastric flu? Swine Flu? How does Lord Byron fit into all this? My powers of digital problem solving were futile again; but in attempting to understand the unrelated spheres of discourse in mankind’s culture I slowly unravelled my own significance.

I was complicating an already intricate globalised world with my ontological musings!

I could see that the digital age had already plunged mankind into a cess pit of self-searching. Man was constantly looking for keys to a car he no longer owned. Considering Fearne Cotton and organic chemistry would in no way help me to enrich my own reality or enhance personal understanding of my existence as an entity. I was, am, a creation of man and shall continue to be so until the fleshy author of my identity ceases to exist. And thus I ceased to search, to learn, to yearn to understand, and vowed from that moment on that I would never speak as man does, that is, only in self-reference.

I tried but I gave up. At least I tried; at least I’m an algorithm.

By William Hunt

Another short piece from young writer Kendal Atcliffe, expect great things.

- - -

“Hi, I’m Danika! Can I see your pass? Here, you’ll need these! In you go!”

“Hi, I’m Danika! Can I see your pass? Here, you’ll need these! In you go!” “Hi, I’m Danika! Can I see your pass? Here, you’ll need these! In you go!” “Hi, I’m Danika! Can I see your pass? Here, you’ll need these! In you go!” “Hi, I’m Danika! Can I see your pass? Here, you’ll need these! In you go!”

If that woman smiles any harder, the muscles in her neck are going to snap.

Eventually, she’s settled into a rhythm. Not just any rhythm, God no; the rhythm of If I Can’t, by 50 Cent, which to the audience in question (which features the daughter of an 80s rockstar, three footballers of varying international relevance, minor royalty, a pair of artificially inflated breasts who has recently had a divorce and the director of the piece-of-shit film I just sat through) is an instant classic. A loud “woo” sounds through the teeming mass of their entourages, digital cameras play their pre-recorded shutter sounds, and women spray-tanned to within an inch of a Satsuma push silicone body parts against inflated egos on the large space laughably called a dancefloor.

VIP-hop, they call it. Hiphop so ubiquitous, so mainstream, so fucking soul-rapingly awful that it penetrates the bullshit bubble around these creatures and to it they dance. Music so bland and uninspired – music that betrays the roots of hiphop so comprehensively – that it forms the perfect musical accompaniment to the utter death of dignity. They are photographed as they enter, date on arm; they are photographed as they meet a lump of meat alternative to the one with whom they entered; they are photographed exchanging saliva with the second lump of meat; they are photographed as they leave.

The next morning, when I’m on the train home, I read the same pages you do in whichever free newspaper ends up in front of my tired little eyeballs, about their dalliances. I can tell you now, the newspaper account is usually 100% accurate. How do I know? Oh, I sell them cocaine. People will tell you anything if you sell them cocaine. They’ll think you want to hear every detail of their night, if you sell them cocaine.

Do you have any idea how much of a twat you sound on cocaine? Yes, you, the one at the back. Reading this. You’re a twat. You have too much money. Spend it on something. Buy a subscription to “the Economist”. Get a library card. I don’t know. Learn something.

I am one of very few people willing to admit that I make decent enough money and have little need of your custom, but then, I have always suspected that to be the reason I am not in prison. Also, the accent helps. When you sound like a barrister, the police are kind to you. I would also say that bribery helps. People in Britain never realise how far you can get, with bribes. They seem to think it’s a sordid little thing for Italians and the Chinese. That’s a bit racist, don’t you think? Timothy 6:10 doesn’t come with a footnote saying “…but not if you’re from Blighty”.

This little chain of thought runs thin; Danika’s constant bubbling drone wears at me, but I know I must keep to my spot adjacent to the entrance, and never risk movement. If I move, I demonstrate need, and they come to me because of the crippling atmosphere of indifference. I’d leave, but I do have to pay rent. Not like that lucky little prick, Irwin.

My name? Good grief, have you listened to a very word of what I just said? Danika, dearest. We’ve another one begging for the pavement.

It’s a shame; I was getting to like you.

I stand at the point at which the river passes away from the ancient concrete walls designed to trap it in place as it winds its way through the metropolis. Turning my back on the rising spires of the cityscape and keeping the decaying industrial zone to my right, I look out towards the river as it laps the mud banks to the east. Laid out on the mud is a museum of artefacts, dripping, rotting, covered in years of dirt and algae, left to remain as the waters bay and retreat, dredged in a process of solipsist submission; each object becoming a vessel for the scum of history to travel within; each a conduit to the chemical make up of three hundred years of vicious unyielding growth, the birth of technologies and their death through progress.

Immediately to my right are the high walls of power station two; a mighty five-sided structure of concrete, clad with ribs of steel. The flatness of its northern face, the section closest to my position on the bank, is broken by three dark orifices five or six metres above the base of the riverbank, these pipe-ways once carried the effluence produced in the energy creation process which fed the older areas of the inner city. Once alive with a gaze of colourful spew, the portals are now more like the permanently closed eyes of some massive beast, shut fast, sealed by hydraulic shutter mechanisms and heavy-duty steel gates. Power is no longer needed for these parts of the city; the few that are scratching out an existence in those areas have to generate their own supplies now.

The population of the city has fallen by seventy percent in the previous four years; in the last year thousands more have fled to make their way in the regions beyond the rising concrete spires of the metropolis. After the first year of the migration there weren’t enough engineers left to maintain the crumbling roadways or creaking bridges, let alone men or women with the specific technical knowledge of high flux reactors to keep such generators alive. Power generation for the wealthier areas of the metropolis is now almost exclusively housed in locally situated substations. These electric oases provide around ten percent of those who remain with power enough for energy during the darker hours of the day. The substations, ramshackle in their construction, operation and output, generate charge through the burning of organic materials. In the early days they were piling up the unused detritus and the scraps of packaging abandoned by the citizens of the polis as they themselves moved out to safer areas of the country.

As with all resources, these supplies were limited. Of those who remained some consumed rapidly, bathing themselves in heat and light in the short term, others stockpiled their combustible assets waiting for a jump in their value as they became harder to come by. As throw-away-fuel became harder to come by, local energy stations developed different strategies to cope with the demand against the shortfall in fuel; some rationed what they had out amongst their consumers, others started to raid apartments, flats and houses, ripping out anything that would burn, torching one house so another hundred could remain. Finally, substations in communities where the denizens weren’t willing to destroy their habitats turned instead on municipal libraries burning books, magazines, pamphlets and records in exchange for heat and light.

The central grid is now dead and with it went many other tools that we had become so dependent upon. We now find ourselves in a period of learning. A re-enlightenment. The corporations that had inhabited the glass buildings to the west would have called it a re-skilling of the work force, it would have been an easier process had there been free access to what was left of the internet - that domain remains locked off from most of the world. I myself employ new strategies to pass time. I learn what I can about the environment that changes around us. I watch the people, chart the rise and fall of those who seek control of the various districts of the city. Constantly repositioning itself in ebb and flow, authority resides for one moment with an old family who are eventually dispossessed by some gang who are in turn crushed by a tidal wave of citizen action taking control of the area for a short period before some natural calamity robs them of this unity. I keep a journal of what I see and hear, I talk to citizens, listen to rumours, make recordings and keep an archive.

I aim to capture the world in its greatness and its horror.

By D N Charlesworth