In the Beggarly Style of Imitation. Jean Marc Ah-Sen

that Imitation had two paramount objectives unrelated to Ah‑Sen’s literary career: it was meant to publicly lend attention to the Translassic system, but it had to at the same time delegitimize the Sudimentarist school of writing, which encouraged writers to assume the lives of their fictional characters. Sudimentarism was the chief rival to all of the Translassic Society’s efforts for validation among writers. These impediments took the form of legal challenges, infiltration of the Society by intelligencers, and in two confirmed instances, the threat of physical violence towards high-ranking Translassic associates using bound Sudimentarist hardbacks, all under the direction of my father, Artepo Lepoitevin, the founder of Sudimentarism. The war of words between the two camps escalated well past acceptable laws of decorum, which undoubtedly contributed to the droves of disaffiliations on both sides. Ah‑Sen may have thrown the first stone and deserves his fair share of responsibility for characterizing my father as a participant in the “bourgeois diffidence that forbade extramarital affairs unless it concerned making love with run-on sentences.”

      An air of ill-starred futility suffuses my memories of these engagements. It is difficult to feel indignant when the source of your woes has left the surface of the earth. When my father died, the way was clear for Transmentarism—a bizarre amalgam of the two systems forged by Ah‑Sen’s hand—to take the place previously occupied by its primogenitors. Seemingly having cast off the two main stumbling blocks in his life, Ah‑Sen was free to pursue his sesquipedalian campaigns in the “literary underground” unencumbered by such inconsiderable factors as friendship, incorruptibility or sincerity of intention.

      If there is any justice in this world, Ah‑Sen will read this introduction and be mortified by the unlicensed look behind the iron curtain of his mind in the exact degree I was mortified to see no mention of my name in this windowless tome (unless you count “Tabitha Gotlieb-Ryder,” the most unflattering of tributes I could conceive for myself), my sizeable contributions to these pieces annulled by some cack-handed legerdemain. Mortification, as the saying goes, is good for the soul.

      Ah‑Sen can one day write on these issues and cease his parade of false attributions he has publicly advanced behind a monolithic selfdom of staged worry and mock principles. It made perfect sense when Translassitude was a going concern, and I would likewise take full credit for the novels Ah‑Sen draffsacked on my behalf, but those days are long behind us, and I derive no commercial benefit from doltish associations with the past; I see no need why he should either.

      I suppose Ah‑Sen will have the last laugh, though, a laugh partaking in what Jack London called the “grimness of infallibility.” He possesses confirmation that the final “sentiment and direction” I delivered unto him all those years ago in our studio on Ludlow Street was in fact a visionary diagnostic of our times; and while it was meant to be in the spirit of an exhortation, I now see that the suggestion that “there are no new ideas, only unusual ways of forgetting” has become little more than a dispensation to “write” with ungrudging impunity.

      –K. Tanner,

      NYC, 2020