Culinary Performance by Julie Roessler – Three Red Squares and an Orange – with live noise at the Mockbee/SS Nova in Cincinnati Ohio’s Brighton District for the release party of the novel, A Beautiful Woman, by Roesing Ape.
2003 A Beautiful Woman Excerpt – Shit More than You Eat
Job was moving in the earth, swimming through grimy black dirt and rocks and roots, letting it flow into his mouth and out of his ass in one fluid movement. As if Job himself were earth, mud, and stones. And so Job was earth and swam up close to the surface where he could blow into the bottoms of roots and crunch to dust the discarded skeletons of devoured rodents. He tickled seeds out, and he carved caverns, and he stirred the lava with his root earth tongue, and he cradled the hard rotating iron ball at the center like an enfant. Which was the enfant thought Job. He painted the magma brown, and the melting liquid red and orange and yellow, and he painted the crust gray and beige with splatterings of red and yellow and ochre and mauve and blue and purple and chemise and etcetera. Job was colorless in stretching to the rims of the globe, circular himself; globular Job was pregnant with heat and rock. It rained, and his exterior became damp and mossy, mold grew and things sprouted and ate of him. They covered all his skin, devouring, and in eating they bloomed and had more hunger among them for that. They multiplied, and ate of the earth. Fortunately, in a strange turn of physical law wherein through the displacement and transforming of mass with the external addition of powerful light, it seemed like they shit more than they ate, and so a protective coating was laid about Job in the cloth of dead and rotting dung and corpses. This seemed even tastier to them than Job had himself, and so they pretty much left him alone after that. So Job was allowed to fall asleep in wakefulness on a beautifully warm early December day.
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2003 A Beautiful Woman Excerpt – Emasculation
Job had meant to cut off his penis. He had actually been looking forward to this event for quite some time, and it had required the greatest of efforts to keep from doing it much sooner. He had read in Plato once where Socrates had asked or been asked or something about how it felt to be old and no longer have the constant reproductive urge. Whoever had been asked had responded something to the effect of that it had been quite like getting off of an unruly and untamed horse in exchange for a gentle and slow mule. Job had had much envy of that feeling, and it had never occurred to him that what he really should have been aiming for was his testicles rather than his penis, as they were the true seat of that unruly horse. Nevertheless, Job had jerked off into the water’s hold and at the moment of orgasm he had taken his little red Swiss army knife and sliced off that engorged organ and let it drop into the water after his seed as he began screaming in a fit of the most bizarre mix of pain and pleasure he could ever have imagined. Needless to say, the mix had quickly become a completely homogeneous solution of pain, and then horror had added itself to the mix as Job saw the geyser of blood that had been used to foster his erection shooting out trying to erect the world. In this state of idiotic disarray, Job had slipped on his own blood trying to climb down from the latter upon which he stood, ironically enough not really either on his own jism or blood, rather a day old public employee’s loogy, but Job thought it was his own blood, and this had a poetic importance for him which we’ll just leave be for right now, and fell the twelve feet down totally unprepared, and, quite unused at this point to landing on concrete as opposed to dirt, he broke his left arm in two places quite painfully. Bone jutted out in what seemed to Job a mocking sort of way just below his elbow. Now this fucking hurts, thought Job, forgetting about his cock for once.
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