Psychobabel
Harry Potemkin thought he was a simple back-alley dream surgeon, an unlicensed psychologist with a very unorthodox technique, but he has gotten lost in a dream, and he must figure out if it is his dream or the dream of his Adversary because in one of those two, he doesn't really exist. And so begins the final conflict between a man who has never dreamed, and the man who is just a dream. Are they schizophrenic facets of each other, oneiric combatants locked in a perpetual struggle, or are they each a reflection of the other?
And the only anchor in either dream is the blackleaf, a rare entheogen that Trinity Pharmacopoeia will stop at nothing to procure, including flooding the dream realm with their poisons. The only bastion still standing in this toxic landscape is a shifting labyrinth of the "Potemkin Mosaic," a four-dimensional dream journal that Harry doesn't recall writing.
But he must have written it, as it is the collapsed summary of his life. Does he exist, or is he one sentient personality in a damaged psyche desperately trying to heal itself?
| PSYCHOBABEL, forthcoming from Farrago Press, 2009 |
The Oneiromantic Mosaic of Harry Potemkin
Mark Teppo's serial hypertext novel, The Oneiromantic Mosaic of Harry Potemkin, links the collisions of contemporary cognitive theory and the literary weird. Literally. Written in twelve parts (serialized monthly throughout 2007), The Oneiromantic Mosaic turns traditional narrative problems (such as linearity, textual fixity, and recursion) on their heads. The Oneiromantic Mosaic charts one of Harry Potemkin's (a black-market oneirologist) investigations into the archetypical syntax of cognitive imagery. He can literally enter others' dreams, which he does regularly to effect cognitive recovery, understanding, or conflict. The investigation is a surreal, self-devouring tour de force into the associative dreamscapes of contemporary consciousness. But Teppo doesn't leave his readers awash in his 1920s Weimer Republic-meets-Baudrillard's simulation.
Each dream (chapter) comes awash with hyperlinks, which in the form of correspondence, dream journals, internet message boards, and other cultural artifacts, teach themselves (and the reader!) the necessary "meanings" behind the abstracta in the dreamosphere. These "nodes" worm their way beneath the progression of the dreams, linking back to themselves and each other. The effect is dizzying, enlightening, and at times disturbing.
The Oneiromantic Mosaic appeared first as part of the 2007 Farrago's Wainscot Exhibition, but it is now available in an expanded form at www.psychobabel.net. As Barth Anderson, author of The Patron Saint of Plagues and The Magician and the Fool, instructs, "Do. Go. Take the big pill." You'll find a number of familiar themes from the last century's most powerful thinkers (Derrida, Saussure, Foucault, Freud, Baudrillard, Barthes), but you'll find them in a new, cutting-edge experiment.
Read it today! Free!
"Easily one of the most remarkable offerings [at Farrago's Wainscot]."
—Midori Snyder
The Endicott Studio for Mythic Arts
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"Teppo's Oneiromantic Mosaic of Harry Potemkin is a magnificent freakshow, a choose-your-own adventure by and for psychotic mystics. Do. Go. Take the big pill."
—Barth Anderson
author of The Patron Saint of Plagues and The Magician and the Fool
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"Potemkin reaches into the ethereal, grasps its strands, and becomes enmeshed in the mists of dream, puncturing the veil, from time to time, in sudden moments of startling lucidity, only to find that beyond that veil is another and another and another. It is an ambitious work, a labyrinthine carnival that leaves the reader clutching at the ever shifting walls of reality and perception—the author's, the reader's, and that of Potemkin himself. Read, wander, lose your self, and try to find your self again. Sleep easy, if you can."
—Forrest Aguirre
World Fantasy Award-winning co-editor of Leviathan 3, author of Fugue XXIX and Swans Over the Moon
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