Freddie Mason's The Viscous

Slime, stickiness, fondling, mixtures

Perhaps I’ve just not read enough in the genre of cultural studies, but I can enthusiastically say I’ve never read a book like this. The Viscous is an open-access text (so you can totally grab a PDF for yourself right here) from Punctum Books, a “peer-reviewed … Open Access (OA) publisher devoted to academic and para-academic authors …”. Purportedly a study of slimes, goos, colloidal mixtures and other viscous substances, Mason explores stickiness and self-retarding fluidity in forms ranging across the 1919 Boston Molasses Disaster, fossil fuels, dense guitar solos, endometriosis, an historical attempt at using bats to deliver napalm (which you really need to read for yourself), and the unwarranted cohesion of ideas: “the tendency of concepts to form sentimental, yet violently defended, bonds with one another regardless of the efforts of the consciousness that, at one time at least, might have been considered their receptacle.”

I guess I should make clear that this is not a book of poetry, given that’s what I usually write about here, but Mason does engage with poetics. There’s even a photo-series midway through the book showing the results of “Experiments in Kneading Dough and Asemic Writing Simultaneously” conducted with The Union of Bakers and Poets in Paris as part of the “research” for the book. Mason does not, however, find space to reproduce the little poem about viscosity that I remember learning as a physics student, attributed to physicist Lewis Fry Richardson:

Big whorls have little whorls

That feed on their velocity

And little whorls have lesser whorls

And so on, to viscosity.

Sorry, couldn’t resist reciting that bit, which I believe is a parody of an Ogden Nash verse, “Big bugs have little bugs upon their backs to bite ‘em, and little bugs have littler bugs, and so ad infinitum.” But to get back to the review, I can’t do better than to share a few choice quotes from Mason:

This writing isn’t completely slimy, slime isn’t ever an answer.

While it recognizes the want of slime, it also resists this want.

These aren’t the words the viscous always wanted me to write.

Or this one:

…it is extremely common … for us to imagine the starlight excreting some goo-like substance. The popular imaginary of extra-terrestrial encounter is almost always an encounter with a being of, if not total blobbiness, a corporeality of considerably intensified tremulousness. With a few exceptions, opening a can of baked beans has more in common with how people tend, or tended, to imagine a meeting of the third kind than what scientists might be able to predict.

Slime invokes the alien, yet is also deeply human, involved in intimacy and bodily revulsion. (There’s a lengthy and illuminating disquistion on William Burroughs, going into this aspect.) Weirdly, slime is also somehow cute. The genre of the Instagram slime video gets detailed treatment here:

These slime Instagram films are not exactly cute. Although something might become cuter the blobbier it is, doughy matter is not cute. I think it’s more accurate to say that the cute object aspires to the blob, without ever actually being allowed to get there. Cute things disappear off a blobby horizon. But, all the same, these films luxuriate in … this state, a hand held pliancy with soft contours, a trivial availability that advertises itself as edible. Indeed, many of the comments on the films will list potential names for the slime, these are often imaginary foodstuffs: Dirtypeach! Cheatocrumbs! Pumkinguts!

Further on cuteness, particularly of the Internet variety:

Rather than blasting off into an immaterial cyberspace through our screens, it is also possible, if you wish, to cutify the web, transform its immensity into a rubber, goggle-eyed moron sitting in your pocket, awaiting orders. Cute aesthetics are the recoiling from the digital sublime, the disguised containment of that which would otherwise overwhelm you. Just as a cute bundle of soft puppies we coo at is also a clustered instance of their solidarity to one another, the trace of their instinct to form packs and hunt you down in the forest.

I learned a lot from The Viscous, much of it of the “whacky facts” style of online science fandom: the galaxy is full of space-grease; hagfish secrete a substance that jellifies sea-water and makes them effectively too bulky for a predator to gulp down. I also learned a fair bit about Freddie Mason: that he’s held some rather odd jobs and survived a few hazardous youthful misadventures, at any rate. But mostly I learned how much I enjoy this style of writing—freewheeling, associative, unhinged, melodic, conceptually syncretic, a packrat’s hoard of stuff held together in loose suspension by a distinctive voice and unifying obsession.

Publication Details

Author: Freddie Mason

Title: The Viscous

Publisher: Punctum Books

Year: 2020