Busted (Inc.) 2001:
In Which a New Civic is Guided

an afterword by Christine Stewart

How to think of our ears as eyes. The membrane is lucid illuminat.
      Shaw and Strang’s text, Busted, steers impossibility clear to itself. To range and arrange: to theft and settle-shift. A linguistic inspection into the rhetoric of things: governance, nation-pop, hockey-rift, language-pant and liberty.
      This writing is carbonic, competitive and clear.

      To alp our lyric theft.

      It writes itself toward, yet civic.
      Instruction: dioptric; that is, refractive and surface, arch and splinter.
      Busted razes the discursive frames that still the possibilities of reason, society, nations, identity, persons, morality and justice; it records, fragments, listens to generations and the generation of historical agency and/or control to note the articulation of social relationships; it rails against the flaccid generic – the justifications of historical subjugation; corrupts convention’s larynx and cruel pretty lyric in triangular (self-supporting) seen metrical pediment.

      all lout boot locus
      stoop peep venus

      So fremescent, it flays the body politic and exposes the frantic rust of capitalism, colonialism:
      ‘Gripe: A Social Column for the Republic’ – rotating crystal counter-load us crowd rats.
      Specific linguistic, Anglo-politic, the class-Canadian, language nor origin, oppression is sounded: exposed, apprehended, attended to in trace (language, history, media, language act, war measures act, Canadian act):

      just watch me

      Busted recoils this trace, retrieves from it other historical possibility and relation. In opposition, it ruptures meaning and writes its own tubular fashions, its own subject rash economy, its own strident ripe:

      Anthem
      Credo
      Edict

Busted conjugates, attentive to and poetic by the gatherings of sound: plaster rue gash rust plaster disquisition.
      Hard cut and pricking out the said: it reveals another layer.
      Ape to its own succulent lyric: word-smatter forms the aggressivity of this clamour:

That is not say that we abolish poetry, nor that the self is invented by the alphabet but rather so fucking early that vexed double sense to be sung and words spoken.

Write ironic and the eye/ear of the collision – wack the eponymous settler; Shaw and Strang intersect, indent and posit.
Unstable landscape, tectonic – the need to make a thing shaky.
It is difficult: an objectile scoff.
Not not polemic. But liberation.

      never again will we be pitched, or checked

      Busted vexes the civic, encourages uncontrollable, incalculable in advance.
      It thrives in the rocket of the linguistic emergent:

      An infinite decibel.
      A slight pinion.

Possibility is in acoustical resistance. Not hewn – nor message is brimfire.
      Busted works itself (in other words) open. Open to a wider Liberty, less eclipse – more flame-bright verb and air.

      Torch Song 7:

      forgive my lack of directive …
      let us seek not eclipse …
      let us never stop singing for Liberty,
      never stop singing for Liberty –