Energeticum / Phantasticum - Tom Bradley

. .

Résumé :
Energeticum/Phantasticum: a Profane Epyllion in Seven Cantos recounts history's first deliberate experimentation with LSD-25 (phantastica). Ernst J?nger, the notorious death-worshiping Iron Cross Honoree, slips in some amphetamine (energetica), resulting in a manifestation of the Plasmator, the insane spirit who has masqueraded as Jehovah for three millennia. During this Ur-bummer, which extends over fourteen hundred and sixty lines of blank verse, time and space are roundly violated. We sit in with Mozart as he composes an inferior concerto for an obese patron. We help Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin annihilate humanity in the Himalayas. We reduce Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins to little boys and tuck them into their bunk-bed for the night, where they suffer lucid dreams of Roman beast wranglers and concentration camp matrons hiding in the closet. The Plasmator barges back in and assumes the shape of Wayne Newton, the Midnight Idol, who closes off the show with a guest appearance, live from Las Vegas.

Biographie:
When TOM BRADLEY was a little boy he was given a gazetteer for Christmas. As little boys will, he looked up all the places in the world that start with the F-word. There were two: Fukien in China and Fukuoka in Japan. Little did he suspect that he would one day be exiled to both.
Tom is a former lounge harpist. During his pre-exilic period, he played his own transcriptions of BACH and DEBUSSY in a Salt Lake City synagogue that had been transformed into a pricey watering hole by a nephew of the Shah of Iran. He taught British and American literature to Manchurian graduate students in the years leading up to the Tiananmen Square massacre. He was invited to leave the Flowery Middle Kingdom after burning a batch of student essays about the democracy movement rather than surrendering them to the leaders. He wound up teaching conversational skills to freshman dentistry majors in the Japanese imperial university where they used to vivisect our bomber pilots and serve their livers, sushi-style, at festive banquets. But his WRITING somehow sustains him.