Dr. Kane X. Faucher

Kane X. Faucher is a Canadian author and academic in London, Ontario. His accolades include: Associate Editor: The Semiotic Review of Books, The Poster: Journal of Visual Rhetoric in the Public Sphere, Semiophagy: Journal of Pataphysics and Existential Semiotics, Co-Editor-in-Chief, Autopsia.




Excerpt from "The Vicious Circulation of Dr Catastrope": Book 2


Author’s Prologue


It was by the King’s decree that I continue this tale, and indeed it was he who detained me with his crackling whine and tearful lamentation that the story not be at its conclusion. It was quite embarrassing, actually, and an unkingly attitude to strike this wee and whelpish commoner born of a whore and a carnival barker (whom the Bible commands me to honour, as I do in my own way best befitting God’s humour rather than his spiteful wrath). If it were not for my good spirit and duty to my Country and Crown, I may have faced the gallows had I not complied—so amiss was the King’s state, his noble comportment and great carriage that succors us all brought down to a kind of crestfallen and browbeaten tit-saggery. You may thank the King and his weepy insistence for the continuance of my tale. But I should explain why I was initially intending to break with the chronicle at this point:

It was my intention to end the tale abruptly, just as I must do at the tavern when the little harpy I betrothed so long ago screeches from outside the public house doors loud enough for the whole town to hear, a sonorous voice that can etch glass and cause a man to rip off his ears because of its pure vertiginous Beauty. When my darling Scylla—whom I love with unsinful, devoted reverence, and with whom I conjugate in copulation only for reproduction purposes—sends me out on an errand to fetch a few yards of sausage and a flagon of C-grade bovine fat to fill the larder and the figure of her womanly corpulence, I usually set a spell in the olde tavern, making a kind of segue from the quotidian labours to wag tongues with the lads. It is here we mix tales of courage, bravery, and Man’s eternally invanquishable Spirit in the face of all tribulations – including that fine institution of marriage (God granting, and with a pure faithful heart). When the round is passed a few times, I am called upon to offer up a tale that will give these men hope and further reasons to rejoice in the spirit of Fraternity. Alas, the exquisite spawning-mother of all my precious pupae does usually beckon me from my tale in mid-stride, she being lovingly persistent as only the most glorious of goats one sees in the garden of the Hesperides, or with the constancy of a Homeric potato in the pocket.

Dr. Catastrope is not here resurrected in his due honour, and I recommence the tale I so fiendishly left off with another like soul named Francois. But amidst words of lofty praise and the call for my deification within the canon of Letters, there come the sour note of those gimcrack lollygagging critics whose only gift—as it is granted from the boweline depths of most vicious Hades—is to publicly excoriate me with their idle slanders and barbaric invectives. O the heaped insults against such a fine person that I am! How may I endure their pickled talk, born as it is from the lowest of the barrelhouses in West Manchester or perhaps the unkempt brothels of Upper Brunswick? Of the things that have been imputed to my person, I find these items in the worst of taste:

That I am:


A bagharper


A clodsniffler


A colonoscopic burst


A pus-filled tumorous excrescence


An execrable word flaunter


A verbletter


A loose spigot


A corrupt wine-barrel sheriff


A shiller of hard pitch


A wharfsman of mean disposition


A miser of description


A toilsome narrative voice


An inveterate listmaker


A hackish dwarf


A purveyor of literary emesis


A broken gangplank of Reason


A toppled tower of turpitude


A rainfeverish troll


A snapped wet twig in the kindling


A one-ended bridge


A fimbriated mannerist


A rugmerchant of lies


A mercenary of bad fortune


A diviner of phlegmatic spittoons


A plodding mendicant friar


A crass flytrap hanging from the rafters of alehouses


A double-dealing madcap


A shellfish of human misery


A chamberpot poet


A scat-meter of Man’s lowest watermark


A fabulist


A cinder in the wine


A frog-eyed belly-padder


A mattress-bound dilettante


A sinus-blocked cracker


A sawduster of sausage filling


An all-beef patty


A solicitor of a drain of pale


A cloudy fuller


A woadmaking lettersmith


A walking pox


&c.,


Am I to endure such things? I think not! My chronicle is surely immune to such vicious criticisms by these lean snarling curs. Anyhow...

Is this a disastrous turn I see before me? Methinks I spy... a metaphor! Turn your better cheek before me lest my elegant club find your conceptual backside! Little did you know, you speakers of twin-tongues that Dr. Catastrope is also a verb formation that one can no longer ignore. Bring out your slate boards and copy this out for memory:





Catastrope (ka-ta-strohp):



1. Proper noun of Dr. Catastrope

2. A noun that signifies a disastrous turn, composed of the Greek katastrophein and trope (a turn).

3. Catastropic: Adjective meaning that which pertains to the fricative and post-labial sound that is emitted in a time of distress. Ex.: This musical noise brings me to the point of utter distress, it is so catastropic!

4. To catastrope: infinitive of the verb, catastrope, meaning a desire to strangle people who think they can write tales about children committing suicide. Ex.: If you publish that tasteless shit-for-shit text, I will personally catastrope you! To Catastrope you would be a necessary function of my being!

Verb usage of to catastrope

I catastrope

You catastrope

He / she / it catastropes

We / they catastrope

You (plural-formal) cataspin





Present perfect continuous: catastroping (we were catastroping all weekend until our ears fell off from imagined leprosy).


Past: catastroped. Johnny catastroped his way to ruin.

Adverbial form: How catastropely our lives go, leading forever to that Great Toilet.

Comparative: John is almost as catastropish as Mary.

Implied Superlative: John is the catastropiarch of the group. He is more catastropely catastropish than anyone he knows.

Ebonic form: katasdope, cat-stroke, catapa-tatapope, schizosoap, k-tope, k-topaz bling dang bin phat dawg.

Addendum note: The rumoured second usage of the word as a proper noun denoting an island in the Atlantic measuring three metres square is unsubstantiated, for it would make the man an island. The other use, in biology, is a recent addition. A catastropod is a type of mollusk that dies of ennui due to a porous shell and an internal intolerance to salty water that negatively affects its psyche. It usually reproduces grudgingly.

Now that we have cleared up these nasty grammatical matters, I owe you the continuance of my chronicle in this second book. Anyhow, let us get to it since I must get back to my long neglected beverage to which I must pay flapping lip service rather than to the dry non-distilled likes of you.

Catastropely,

Your Fabulous Narrator.