A real estate catalogue to cheapen all houses

ANIZAR, Louis Armand, Equus Press, 2024.

I recently staged a book signing for Louis Armand. I borrowed his look and sat with Armand’s latest, ANIZAR, on the table before me at a café in central London. The café manager had sold me the spot. He allowed me to buy it and their patience for half an hour or so, an outlay, an investment, that Louis still owes me for.

To authenticate things, I bought 50 copies for the event, which the author himself owes me for too. So let it be known, I am owed both for the café hire, and for the books.

None present had ever seen the author in question and so I put little effort into my act. I suspect none had heard of him either (not unusual for most authors, in most cafés), and so it took some effort—mainly time sat in sullen reflection—to get them to come over.

My table was by the door. I’d grab customers as they were about to leave, having allowed them to first study me at a distance for the duration of their Americano, or Latte, or whatever it was they were drinking.

As I sat, I wondered what they might be thinking, and decided, as they studied me behind my pile of books, they probably thought something like, There’s An Author Behind A Pile of His Books. Or this was their beginning thought, which meant I had succeeded.

This book’s a cypher, I would admit to each person I enticed over. It is actually an upcycled real estate catalogue, I said. I’ll sign it for you, but first you should know that the book I’m signing is a real estate catalogue, and that I messed with the thing until it became ANIZAR. Each copy I gave away gratis. This heightened the effect.

If you read this book closely, I said, you’ll find the real estate catalogue behind the text. Everything is there that you’ll need. Just read the book minutely, I said, and you’ll find all its particulars. You can buy this house if you read the book. The house is waiting for you to buy it, and it’s cheap.

As are all the others, I continued. This book contains the secret to the cheapening of all houses, I told them. Read it closely and ask yourself why Armand writes humxn and not human, for instance, or why he rearranges words as he does, and then ask yourself how this might cheapen all houses.

By the time my half hour was nearly up, the first customers had returned, and asked me if I might interpret various sentences they felt might be key to deciphering the book. I suspected these sentences were chosen more or less at random—they tended to come from the first few pages.

And so there was the line, Man can’t sleep on a gutload of piss, which, for some reason, I myself rather like. A customer came back with that and asked me if it meant the property, the desirable bit of real estate, might be next to a water course.

Or the chapter title, Tempus Edax Rectum, which had given me so much pleasure, even if I remained unsure what exactly was meant (I had Englished it). Is this another clue, a customer asked.

And then there was the more solemn line, Here…once dwelt gods where now dwells the sole specimen of a missing link, all but forgotten because barely known & in any case unlikely ever to be missed. The person who came with that line looked to me like the perfect specimen of a missing link, but I did not say so.

I felt that this choice bit of text ought to have stirred the conscience of the person who came back with it, but again, they suspected it was merely a cypher and wanted me to show them how they could disregard the words and find the meaning beneath. I told them this was reading it all wrong.

Naturally, several came upon the word ANIZAR itself as the key and wanted me to explain what Armand meant when he wrote It means nothing. It cld mean anything. And so we are propelled from the particular to the universal. ANIZAR.

But I was busying myself with the present customer. I would like to think that the remaining customers formed an eager queue, and did not continue to regard me, as I regarded them.

ANIZAR contains the code, I told those there waiting, to a nice little bit of real estate and a quota of happiness. Read the book, I said. It will cheapen everything so that nothing remains of the old fixities and everything can be done.

And then a plucky customer picked up the book and read Richard Makin’s summation on its back. Most literature represents a latent fascism, he began.

The entire queue, or the queue as I imagined it, seemed faintly amused. Is that part of the cypher too, the man said. No, I replied, and then looked up at the café owner. But also Yes, insofar as these are also Armand’s words. You’ll find them inside the book as well as on the back of it. It was a mistake to use the term cypher, I added. You have become fixated on one word, I told the queue as I imagined them, and you are still reading it entirely wrong.

This book, I said, the beauty of this book and its writing, I told them there assembled, is its demonstration, this book is a demonstration, I told them, of possibility. When I read Armand, I said, I sometimes have the feeling that everything is not dead and closed off and the world is not stuck, that it is not finally fixed in its ways, after all, and there is still some leverage.

But then, Armand knows the importance of the counter-faculty too, the one which would say, Optimism…means keeping up the capacity for surprise. Despite knowing better. Or, more bluntly, it’s idiots all the way down. / And haemorrhoids all the way up.

And that there will be vast swathes of time (and we must endure them) in which nothing happens beyond what has to happen. There are days when the elements are, to put it plainly, by & large unsympathetic to the labours of intellection & this was one of them.

…a thought, if there ever was, to nag yourself with.

//

Ansgar Allen is the author of books including a short history of Cynicism, and the novels, Black Vellum, Plague Theatre, The Wake and the Manuscript and The Sick List.

[image: Bronze gilded chasse, 13th century]