Third World Magicks

by Mike Kleine

two music journalists. prestige, the Great Fear. waves of static. fleeing the body into something somehow more corporeal. white cube and black magician. hazy buzz-z-zzz-z-z-ing sound effects. bloodrip.exe and bertrand yamasaki. tiny, intimate, personal cataclysms. deep earth rumblings. the worst type of acid rain. youtube videos of mountains. quantum chromodynamics. broken-down vr synthetics. a pink ray to the brain. the stench of ambient decay. a bronze-age gargantua monolith.

in the triptych third world magicks, significance, music and the measure of personal worth tear through dimensions of physical reality. music journalists blank zizou and bloodrip.exe calmly assess and destroy one another on the sharp metallic edges of claiming and competing for cultural capital, amidst the desperate attempt to stake relevant space in the esteems of others. all the while, people continue to exist on an island. all held captive by black magician, who renders souls into dust among leisure, boglioli linen suits and men with japanese names born from portugal, all while they create The Art. and then, the actual world comes crashing in after mike kleine’s peers begin to write about the book itself. 4th wall dramaticks. something something, critical mass.

how do we measure what we create? how do we decide what is great? who truly controls the orbits of the moon? and when is it acceptable to erase something that already exists? third world magicks is a place where experience is only worth how it is described. it is a story of people who enjoy the ideas of things. it is a stage where death is meaningless. the beginning of time. and then, the ending of everything else... evaporation. abject bliss. artificial terror. oceans are burning.

206 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2022

About the author

Mike Kleine is an author who grew up in West Africa. He currently resides in the American Midwest.

Reviews

[Maggie Siebert]

i cheated so i will rate when i go back again and follow the rules

[Barry Paul Clark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely stunning journey to read this. His language, cadence, decisive descriptiveness, it’s all such a treat to experience. Every new entry into the Mike Kleine catalog is beyond its predecessor (and they’re all incredible)

P.S. sorry Mike I couldn’t follow instructions and wait… 😬

[Zadignose]

This book is an intersection of fascination and despair. It starts off sounding like Klein's most conventional book yet. Then it hops on over to the universe where most of Mike's previous writing resides. It plays with the notion of text on a page expressing something ineffable, such as music, by way of visual and linguistic analogy.

I wanted to say something about the tension created by meaning striving to break out of a prison of stunned silence. I'm not sure it that's right, or what I really should say. But I've said it.

Then the book invites its critics/champions in to speak for it.

I hate to ask, but is there an element of writer's block at play here? Maybe Mike has found his own way to tackle that by making it the theme of the work itself, a meta-fictional expression of wondering what the heck this writing thing is all about anyway. It's not overt in the text of the first two sections, but the critics in the last section may have started scratching at the surface of this question.

Like all of Kleine's works, a big part of the fascination is the notion that it's part of something bigger, and what it's about feels 10% explicit and 90% implicit.

[meow · Rating 5 out of 5]

I made a playlist with a song by nearly each of the musical artists at the one part it’s a good playlist

I think I liked the first part more than the last part, which rendered kinda AI, kinda Gertrude Stein, a chain of subjects and processes programmed into grammatical sense but without like totally psycho results. Something about it made me fall asleep at my desk and then work woke me up and I finished it

[Jesse Hilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

THIRD WORLD MAGICKS. Mike Kleine. 2022. Inside the Castle. 201 pages.

third world magicks is an odd curiosity, an artifact, an artistic gesture. There’s an insubstantiality to it both as an object and as a work of literature that defies description. It exists on a triple boundary between art piece, story collection, and elaborate joke, a wild ungoverned no-man’s-land.

I have never read an Inside the Castle production before, nor delved into the more artistically experimental small publishing houses that exist in the scene. So perhaps some crucial aesthetic or literary context was missing. I had enjoyed listening to Mike Kleine’s Karaoke Night at Diasuke’s, which I encountered as a recording somewhere in the outer reaches of the Twitter map like an oracle occulted away behind a boulder in an arcane video game universe, which tells you an unsettling story in an fluidly changing AI voice. It, along with some musical interludes Kleine produced for the towering sonic superstructure of the podcast Alt-Write, was an experience that stood out because of both its form and content. third world magicks makes similar moves. It’s a small book with sparse text printed in lowercase Consolas font, which a prefatory note tells us is “a monospaced typeset designed by luc(as) de groot as a replacement for courier new. it is the only standard windows os font with a slash thru the zero character.” This font choice, and the layout and design of the book, gives it a renegade, xerox, zine quality which makes it easy to read through in a day.

The content is a little more difficult. It seems to be two short stories (novellas?) followed by a lengthy section devoted to as essay and blurbs for the book itself, from the likes of Ken Sparling, Vi Khi Nao, Josiah Morgan, Jon Chandler, and Elle Nash. This last section takes up like a fourth of the book—the praise is incorporated into the book, ouroboros-like, in a way that might seem … unseemly to a mainstream audience reading books with blurbs barely referenced on the cover or front page. But we’re in another place outside of the flow of normal book design, motivation, expectation.

The two novellas pertain in different ways to music. In the first, entitled “find out what happens when people stop being polite, and start getting reel,” a music critic named blank zizou is assigned to go with another critic called bloodrip.exe to hear a Serbian musician named abul mogard play at a venue. zizou has a need to appear a certain way to bloodrip.exe, who she thinks is “kind of cute.” She wants to impress them (bloodrip.exe is never assigned a particular gender). They go together to the venue and interview the Serbian musician. In the bar before the performance they talk and there is one of the most phenomenal things about the entirety of third world magicks, a loooooooong list of all the musical acts they talk about. Just delivered in a flat, affectless play list. I recognized a good chunk of the obscure, outré musicians listed there, for which I gave myself bonus points, but many I did not know, and I took the list as a potential source of recommendations for future listening. The ratio of musicians you recognize from the list to musicians you don’t seems to function as a kind of access key for the rest of the book. The list serves as a kind of orientation for the reader, perhaps to bring them into the world of the characters of the book, but also perhaps to trick them? I don’t know. But it’s a fascinating hurdle to try to jump. I don’t know if I made it or if I knocked my teeth out on the track surface.

blank zizou then pays attention to the Serbian musician abul mogard’s performance and is, to put it mildly, taken to “another place.” A lengthy hallucinatory vision quest occurs when zizou listens. The impression is made that zizou has an extraordinary ear for music that others do not have, and upon resurfacing from abul mogard’s performance, she can see clearly that music criticism is a field for some real heads vs most people who are just doing it “only because they know how to take advantage of other people.” Ins way the novella is a kind of “ars poetica” but about music, the subject it is notoriously hard to write about as the quote, variously attributed to Frank Zappa, Elvis Costello, and others, goes: “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” Kleine has boogie-woogied some arcades, balustrades, and cornices in third world magicks.

Speaking of architecture, the second novella, entitled “as long as ropes unravel fake rolex will travel,” appears to be a chronicle of a group of people on an unnamed island constructing a white cube that has magical (or perhaps magickal) properties that are unclear. They seem to be working under the supervision of a character named “black magician” who is at times absent from the construction site. The workers have outlandish names (the book in a consistently applied typographical quirk would stylize it “outl&ish names”) such as constantinople de renobles, marques framberk, and ursula mantriesta and struggle against setbacks, personnel restructuring, and the constant undertow of surreal plot-points to complete the construction task and start others. This section was perhaps less interesting that blank zizou’s musicological trip but had some humorous and mysterious wrinkles. You get the impression on some level that these stories are not meant to be read as “stories,” the book is not meant to be read as a “book,” and literature is not meant to be absorbed as “literature.” It’s bizarre and dreamlike, Luis Buñuel teasing you in book form.

The essay and blurbs in the back of the book I won’t comment on, that being an annex of “extra-book” critical material.

I would take a look at other Mike Kleine productions, with the caveat that his literary output, from this book’s example, is an ambient affair with little of traditional substance to grasp hold of but much texture, visual latticework, brain stimulation, and trippy coolness.

[Evan Femino · Rating 5 out of 5]

Enjoyed element of instructing reader at one point in this to wait two weeks before continuing on. Something I’d personally been curious about seeing for a while. Book, not necessarily even the writer; but just kind of the book telling you to hold up, wait.

When I got back to it two weeks later it felt like I was reading a new book. I had a slight memory of the previous section but mostly had forgotten. Except for a few choice similarities between the parts which was curious - the way I had a sort of sense memory of those parts two weeks prior.

Interesting conceit. Well executed here because it slots in so nicely with Kleine’s universe. Feels a natural extension to the ways he likes to reach out and try and touch his readers with text.

There’s some really funny stuff in here.

[mai · Rating 5 out of 5]

What is a book? What is a novel?
I don’t know, do you?

[Johnny · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wrote the flaps for this book (see above) which Mike or someone at the publishing house did a great job fixing up. That's what I've got to say really, with the benefit of Mike or someone at the publishing house's generous hand, everything up there. I mean every word of it, even the wonderful additions. This book rules. I think MIKE KLEINE hit his stride in a way that will make sense in a decade with Karaoke at Daisuke's, and this is walking right alongside that book in an unshared universe but a shared wavelength of his totally let loose imagination right now.

I don't star rate books on Goodreads anymore even though I star rate movies on Letterboxd unless I'm throwing support to the books that I really thing need to be read, which if you're on this page you read books like this and I urge you, read read read! If you're accidentally here, just read it anyway. MIKE KLEINE is a wonderful writer.

Anyway, here's my review, bulgogi typo preserved:

Two music journalists. Prestige, the great fear. Fleeing the body into something somehow more corporeal. A white cube and a black magician, Bloodrip.exe and Bertrand Yamasaki. Tiny, intimate, personal cataclysms.

In the triptych THIRD WORLD MAGICKS, significance, music and the measure of personal worth tear through dimensions of the physical world. Music journalists Bloodrip.exe and Blank Zizou calmly assess and destroy one another on the sharp metallic edge of claiming and competing for cultural capital amidst the desperate attempt to stake relevant space in the esteems of others. We are held captive by the Black Magician, rendering our souls into dust among leisure, Bulgogi linen suits and men with Japanese names born from Portugal as we create The Art. The actual world crashes in as Mike Kleine’s peers write about the book itself.

How do we measure what we create? THIRD WORLD MAGICKS is a world where experience is only worth how it is described, about people who enjoy the ideas of things, about what it is to slowly fade into abject artificial bliss/terror.

MIKE KLEINE writes in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. THIRD WORLD MAGICKS is his 6th book. He is 32.

[Bob Comparda · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was fresh. It was simplistic, but complex. Was like reading a modern day Vonnegut who likes to play with his words and ideas, and treats the blank page like a canvas. Really enjoyed the way the words themselves evolved throughout the book with different spellings and abbreviations. Also theres a nice sized list of different musical artists to check out that i am excited about! Mike Kleine is an author as much as he is an artist and I am very excited to experience his next work.

[William Bevill · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite books of the year, I can't possibly describe it and do it justice. This is a mind-adventure, a Soufflé of words, a mental mastery, and a fever dream. Halfway through the book, you are instructed to put it down and not read it for two more weeks. Please follow the author's wishes. Do yourself a favor and read this especially if you have dived into Mike Kleine's other brilliant works- I have suggested Kanley Stubrick to others as a first-time read into his wonderful world.

[Josiah Morgan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wrote a blurb for this book's release & have now lost track of it in some bizarro transmutation of technological fortunes, I wish I could share it with you, but in the meantime, if you must know, this is the funniest book I've read in a long time & demonstrates Kleine's immense aptitude for surprise, comedy, illusion.

[in8 · Rating 5 out of 5]

https://5cense.com/22/1023.htm

[brigid masaire · Rating 5 out of 5]

after all i’ve been reading lately, this is an absolute delight. difficult to review in that the included blurbs do such a perfect job already.

third world magicks is a layered experience that one does not often come across in literature. soak it up.

[Lu Louche · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first part moved like static caught in rhythm. Hypnotic, then plain, then suddenly sharp. A writer loses herself in sound which was the best part of the whole book.

The pause broke the spell but I didn‘t cheat and was still invested afterwards.

The next part was more of a blur of structure and voices and music and language. Which is the element the novel is build around, describing music that can only be experienced with words that are not as pre- and descriptive as commonly thought. But it didn’t really work and the commentary blended into the narrative at the end didn’t either.