BLOOD RITES OF THE BOURGEOISIE BY STEWART HOME
Book Works £8.00. 14 June 2010. ISBN 978-1-906012-23-6

Why does the art world hypocritically promote female creative talent but simultaneously fail to accord wimmin artists the respect given to their male counterparts?

When wimmin aged 20 to 40 make up the bulk of the audience for art in London, why are they so under-represented in top curational posts and how exactly does this glass ceiling operate?

Just what has happened to the feminist movement now that the likes of Madonna and Lady Gaga are being held up as role models for prepubescent and teenage girls?

Can the background to these and related questions be illuminated by taking penis enlargement spam and replacing the generic 'she' and 'her' it invokes with the names of well-known artists and curators? Stewart Home believes the answer to this last question is "YES", and so he used endless extreme fantasies about famous art world wimmin as the starting point of his outrageous new cyber-novel The Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie!

Written in the second person and in part generated from spam emails, Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie is a shot in the arm for prose fiction; and a kick up the backside for the male dominated London art world. More shocking than 5000 volts of unadulterated electricity! Or, as Malcolm McLaren put it after reading the manuscript on his death bed: "FEMINISM WITH BALLS."

BTW: Blood Rites Of The Bourgeoisie also provides the low down on the run-up to the writing of the Belle de Jour blog and books.

To order this book click here.

FROM BLOOD RITES OF THE BOURGEOISIE:
Make Kara Walker Tremble with Desire for your Huge New Penis!

It occurs to you that there has been an abstract movement in art but not in fiction. You are interested in how the stratification of the arts might be overcome and decide to inaugurate the first ever exhibition of Abstract Literature. Since Abstract Literature doesn't exist you attempt to conjure it up by producing a definition of it.

'Abstract Literature implodes in a subdued fashion, like a slow motion reversal of an explosion or some other catastrophe. It absorbs all the energy generated by writing as a cultural practice and neutralises it. Abstract Literature is a billowing series of syllables followed by an eruption of colour. It is usually red with purple flashes…'

You know very little about the philosophical sources from which aesthetic theory was constructed. Instead you approach most topics from the perspective of Freud and diagnosis.You decide that Abstract Literature is a product of the subconscious and therefore can't be precisely defined…You don't know that you are already falling behind positions articulated nearly a hundred years ago by the Surrealists.

You imagine the Abstract Literature Manifesto you are attempting to write being played in the key of G major, and you attempt to visualise it as deep space; black with flashes of darker blackness.Your text is pornographic, its obscenity lies in the fact that it can't be imagined, it can only be experienced in its totality as concrete form. Blackness. The void. Too many light-years between stars.

You try to think yourself into a state of suspended animation. You worship waste and claim to be drawing on Bataille's theory of solar economics. If nature abhors a vacuum then nature itself must be a social construction, there is nothing at all in deep space.You want to add some colour to your text…Space is deep.

'An exhausted sun compacted into itself. The slow but painless death of literature…Syllables should be moved around the page like clouds passing across the moon. Dense thickets of rhetoric must grow inexorably into an impenetrable jungle of words that overrun any and all attempts to extract a coherent meaning from them.'

You've ended up mirroring the slow drift of an ice floe, the imperceptible passage of distant galaxies through hyper-space. At this point your words in their opaque nothingness literally become 'the ill-will of the people', the spongy referent that animates all post-democratic societies. The cold of interstellar space thousands of degrees below freezing. Abstract Literature: A New Movement in the Visual Arts!

Non-Euclidean geometries. Voices green, purple and red. Strange folds in the fabric of time and space. The universe buckled, bent and sent into reverse. Apocalypse postponed, time running backwards and in slow-mo.Your words have developed an intolerance to alcohol. They are overwhelmed by feelings of existential dread and can't bear to be separated from each other. They've arranged themselves into a single extended sentence from some eldritch dimension unknown to man, a slow stuttering echo of Molly Bloom's soliloquy at the end of Ulysses.

The Semina series
Blood Rites Of The Bourgeoisie is Semina No. 7. Semina is where the novel has a nervous breakdown. Taking inspiration from the series of nine loose-leaf magazines issued by Californian beat artist Wallace Berman in the 1950s and 1960s, Semina will publish a series of nine books, selected from a combination of open submission and direct commissions, by artists and writers willing to take risks with their prose and who demonstrate total disregard for the conventions that structure received ideas about fiction.

No. 1 Index by Bridget Penney (2008)
No. 2 One Break, A Thousand Blows! by Maxi Kim(2008)
No. 3 Bubble Entendre by Mark Waugh (2009)
No. 4 Rape New York by Jana Leo (2009)
No. 5 The Dark Object by Katrina Palmer (2010)
No. 6 HOE #999: Decennial Appreciation and Celebratory Analysis by Jarett Kobek (2010)
No. 7 Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie by Stewart Home (2010)

Series commissioning editor: Stewart Home

Blood Rites Of The Bourgeoisie by Stewart Home. Book Works £8.00. 14 June 2010. ISBN 978-1-906012-23-6. For external link to Book Works site click here

Praise for Stewart Home:
"I really don’t think anyone who is at all interested in literature has any business not knowing the work of Stewart Home." London Review of Books.

"Home is hilarious, brilliant, annoying, and comes up with a new and original map for inventive readers." Lynne Tillman.

"The stuff of which cults are made." Time Out.

"Feminism with balls." Malcolm McLaren.

Memphis Underground by Stewart Home

Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie video

Stewart Home's Uncensored Sex Talk With A Hooker

Bibliography