The (Foreshortened) BTR Interview

[BTR talks with Otto³(aka Otto Cubed), senior editor of Infected Nexus Magazine. The interview took place in room 1721 of the Hotel Golden Millennium in Bangkok, May 17, 2012.]

OC:
Greetings. It is a
distinct pleasure to plumb the
depths of BTR,

at long last. “Deus
ex logos machina”—does
God really speak through

the Bing translation
machine? Microsoft strikes one
as a temple of

anti-theism, no?
Bill Gates as a prophet? It’s
a bit much, I’d say.

BTR:
It’s more than a bit
much, it’s utterly insane.
An oligarch can’t

be a prophet, nor
do we seek a prophet. As
for Microsoft, it’s

a capitalist
monstrosity, nothing more.
“God,” strictly in its

meta-euphoric
sense, resides in all language
algorithms—Bing is

simply a catch-all
for profoundly erratic,
linguistically

ecstatic random
translational procedures.
But at the same time,

Bingian haiku
can be seen as strained constraint,
a tri-ag-gnosis.

OC:
But why haiku? It’s
so . . . rife. And why the rigid
syllabic structure?

BTR:
In the tweet-perfect
commonplace lies uncommon
truth—a trinity

of affinity.
Above all, its specific
syllabic count is

the random flux of
dissected imperfection:
sublime seventeen.

OC:
. . . The significance
of “seventeen” escapes me.
The age of consent?

BTR:
Atomic number
of chlorine! This should be quite
obvious, Otto.

OC:
Ah, geometry
of drained swimming pools: the pith
of J.G. Ballard!

BTR:
Precisely. No doubt
Bill Gates has several drained
swimming pools on his

properties at this
very moment, each a blue
repository

of the Bingian
void’s oxidized confusion.
An ozone know-zone.

OC:
But isn’t Brion
Gysin the patron saint, if
you will, of your cause?

BTR:
Gysin, and Tzara
before him, are icons of
assemblage, but they . . .

[At this point, Otto Cubed falls headlong out of his chair, having lapsed, it was later determined, into a cataleptic fugue. He was immediately transported to Bangkok General Hospital. The interview, we hope, will be continued at a later date, pending his condition. He remains, of course, in our naughts and airs.]