Overview

Herein lies not a book, but a surrealist experimental machine for surr thinking. A psychogeographic engine powered by stray thoughts, dictaphone recordings, and the radical ghost of B.S. Johnson. In Swansea Automatic, Rhys Trimble does not write about Swansea; he allows the city's sedimented unconscious to write itself through him, using a series of alchemical experiments prescribed by the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets as his volatile medium. This is a creative manual that systematically deranges the language to map a city's soul. Swansea emerges as a macromolecule of myth and memory, a liminal space of tidal moods, industrial scars, and psychic detritus. The text fractures and reassembles before your eyes-a cut-up of local history and internal monologue, a scientific textbook for a universe where logic has been disabled.What results from this hazardous process is a new form of testimony. It is the city's collective Tinder profile, swiping right on everything in its vicinity; it is a wedding vow for a final, apocalyptic hook-up; it is a logbook from a journey into the self, with Annwn the dog as psychopomp. Trimble has forged a vibrant, unstable, and utterly essential artifact-a book that is simultaneously a journey, a weapon, and a prayer, leaving the reader, like the city itself, thrillingly altered. ""This book has shaped this piece of text [ITSELF] already-by neighbouring it (& in my mind) co-opted it, made it something other than an essay-part of SWANSEA culture-We obey these local rules slavishly-and fail to exploit them-[NOT SURE WHAT I'M ON ABOUT HERE]""Authorial violence: Swansea Automatic was published 10 years ago, around the last year of the snake to 0 acclaim except for by those who read it of course. I even did a little residency, which was more like squatting ina little shop on the High Street, Swansea but as time has passed, I came to consider this one of my few, if not only book that can boast the synthesis of my extreme late modernist tendencies and some attempt to fit into the aesthetic of popular fiction. nonetheless it doesn't pull too many punches, it's comedy, it's poetry, it's deconstructed pros, e even philosophy, textual analysis, cynghanedd, and more.Spinning Around the dirty first person narrative is the self-referential Vonegut and recycled psychogeographic of the Fiery Elephant of Johnson, Brooke-Rose, and Sinclair. An attempt to exercise the Demon of Swansea from my formative years. But actually set in North Wales just as much. Swansea is a dream city that could just as easily be London, Glasgow, Belfast, Lublin or Cairo...A second bite the cherry: a second edition is occurring, along with the audiobook and kindle edition and the album (movie!), hopefully generatinga hammer blow on the collective unconscious of our post-media universe. Swansea Automatic justifies itself to me because 2015 was also the very last gasp of the fin de siècle of the apocalyptic contemporary, where the post beats, post flaneur metanarratives where still just about alive. It's rare for me to look back, but I had an idea this one could be a cult book somehow. Help it become so and consume as such, cultishly. RT

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