prrttt
By Jeanne Graff.
Cover for prrttt by Jeanne Graff, published by Semiotext(e)
Excerpted from prrttt, a novel published by Semiotext(e).
°4
The flatulence has returned. The bread and the cheese I ate in Dongo formed into a thick paste that prevented gas to flow freely through my colon. I remember images of the ride twenty years ago, the LED lighting has just been installed in the Swiss wagons and on the train station’s information signs didn’t yet exist in Italy then; after Lake Geneva is Lake Maggiore, on the other side of the Alps, and today my stomach gargles ever so slightly which means the bloating is giving signs of pushing towards my exit. I’m hoping the train will arrive at Milano Centrale, that I will be able to attend this dinner and go home the next day. I hear a hesitant whistling as the train warms beneath me. If I have understood correctly, the strikes are only stopping the regional trains and not the international lines. I’m starting to feel much better as the gas leaves my body. That is normal and healthy. Not to move when sitting on a train for example, that’s what is causing bloating now now. The body has simply gotten used to being in movement.
Sushi in the United States. Sushi in the United States does not always sit well with me. There is something in the texture that encourages the formation of intestinal gas. When I eat it I fall asleep early, but sometimes late, it's very interesting. From the fish, I can feel some heated winds making their way down onto the chair. After three days, I am hoping to pass it completely; every day I use a different hot sauce to mark time and feel the sting on the way out – or it is the same hot sauce that stings on the way in but dissolves and passes incognito on the way out, or yes it does or something else stings like a very strong spice or undigested chunk or see– you don’t really know anymore. Constantly travelling is like ski touring every day: you have to keep checking your gear to make sure you have everything you need, that you didn’t forget anything – most important is the beano.
Sometimes you check twenty times a day to make sure if it is indeed in your pocket. You develop the skill of packing your suitcase in your head at any time of the day or night. You mentally scroll through your stuff, then compose combinations following the amount of fiber eaten at events you will have to attend and what gas-producing foods will be served. From fifteen days and up to one month, you have enough items to make a tour and the amount of tablets must be sufficient to handle any situation. The problem is crossing between a country with high gluten cuisine into bean/cheese/broccoli and fish/asparagus diet during the same trip, then it becomes disruptive to think of two moments of the year at the same time, to imagine your entire wardrobe simultaneously having to be dominated by spare underwear and without crossfading. It’s like layering two years of farts on top of each other, the past one and the one that’s coming.
When I go to Milan by train, I always think of a flatulence I produced in 1991. She was the result of a bean salad i ate in the neighboring town of N------, and the same kind accompanied me during my travel throughout the 90s, and in the 00s too. We were visiting family, Bruno and her cousin Jacqueline; they grew up like sisters in the 30s. Malou used to tell me that they would “hop their way to school,” propelled by an ancient type of fart resulting from a explosive mixture of acquafaba and a special type of fibrous italian artichoke available during the war at that time. Limping war casualties they were seeing everywhere. When Jacqueline died Bruno started to lose his mind: she was the love of his life, they did everything together. In the morning he was still okay, but at night he would mistake me for my doctor and would share hypotheses on the link between diet and gas. His mother used to visit him from Southern Italy – he would tell this story ten times a day – coming by train with a suitcase full of brussel sprouts, which she would store on the balcony and boil for dinner, one after another according to the number of guests. It was delicious. I remember the fresh breeze coming from the italian window punctuated by hot, peppery backdrafts coming from the kitchen pushing in the opposite direction. Today this would be forbidden by the health department. In the taxi with Massimiliano, he introduces me to Alberto who immediately farts. I tell them the story of Malou’s friend, an editor who decides one day to write his own book. He’s in his house in Venice, goes out to buy fancy toilet paper, beano and laxatives, and when he gets back home he recites the alphabet in fart thanks to a special italian technique of rectum gymnastics, then goes out again to take a walk and falls down dead. Alberto tells me I’m speaking about his grandfather.
My mother spoke Swiss German to me until I was five years old but I’ve forgotten everything. I could speak Italian but it’s a bit remote in my head, I can’t really find the words anymore. I’m listening to Liscio, who’s sitting next to me at this dinner, and when the hot stench comes in contact with my nostrils I understand he's passing asparagus mixed something else. Maybe pork. He explains that he holds back farts inside the small intestine to help them develop, mostly by building up intense pressure in the abdomen until they inevitably spill over to the large intestine and accelerate through a shitty corridor. Those techniques are widespread in Italy, most people have a high intestinal expansion potential but no vision for that. Most of them are family people and have this potential but they just don’t even think about it! So Liscio helps them to enlarge their colons and push air out only once a good temperature and density have built up. He tries whenever possible to keep the same students, which generally leads to better results but not always. Then he adds his dietary reccomendations like meat and cheese, onions, asparagus, fish, an additional layer, like frosting on a cake. His own colon has a capacity of seven thousand cc of stored gas. blahkjadsflhkahkjlsdklhjadskhjasfdkhljfsadkhjl whatever wwhatever This would have interested Malou. Then he asks me in English: “So who are you? What’s your essence? What’s your flavor?”
I command my sphincter to let go of the burning hot draft it's been striving to contain and soon we are enveloped by an intense, violent smell with kombucha, hot past due rice sake and spicypulled pork notes. We both smile.
Coming back from Vietnam, Massimiliano wakes up in the middle of the night and farts in his bed. The sphincter's vibration almost killed him. He’d simply forgotten where he was after having slept in a dozen of places over a dozen days, or maybe it was a hallucination due to jetlag sleep which can sometimes create a kind of fever, like a really deep sleep in the afternoon, where it’s difficult to distinguish reality from dream. From the notes of dried quid and hot sauce, he realizes he's in Hue, the city of love.
Born in Bergamo, he now lives between New York and Milan. His work takes him to Hô Chi Minh City and Poland, and he’s just decided to rent another flat in Los Angeles. Awesome. Meanwhile, he’s spread his butt cheeks to pass gas in every corner of the world and his rectum is split in two by a fine wall of skin noticed by the doctors at birth, creating two mirrored spaces with similar dimensions but different gases: one for the more peppery and dry notes of every fart, the other for the moist and hot drafts. Behind his bladder, there is an adjoining organ that serves to store gas his great-great-grand-mother stored in a similar organ two hundred years ago and passed on to her daughter to make room for other children. The special sphincter holding the little pouch airtight is inspected several times a day as a leak of the dank, century-old fart would prove fatal, their only movements consisting of these back-and-forth spams.
(TO BE CONTINUED)
ABOUT THE NOVEL
Composed between destinations, in cafes, museums, airplanes, and bars over three years, Jeanne Graff‘s PRRRRTTTTT captures the interesting musings of a loose sphincter passing gas resulting from consumption of from broccoli and fish, meats, dairy, wine, nuts and seeds whose smell in gas form is not always their own initial one. A loose chronicle masquerading as a novel, prrrrrt— like Michelle Bernstein‘s All The King’s Horses, the Bernadette Corporation‘s Reena Spaulings, and Natasha Stagg‘s Surveys — couches sharp observations in a laconic and ambient style. By not saying too much, prrrrtttt says everything about the vicissitudes of a creative and transient life.
“There’s an art of writing amidst the farts and almost-farts, and Graff‘s ear for existential specificity finds momentum in even the most glancing encounters. Always on the move Graff‘s phototropic texts incline toward human heat, hallucinating characters upon contact.”- Christopher Glazek
To read an interview with Jeanne Graff by Juliana Huxtable click here.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Writer and curator Jeanne Graff was born in Lausanne, Switzerland and lives in New York. She is a columnist for May Revue (Paris), works in a vineyard, and teaches at HEAD art school in Geneva. In 2014, Graff founded 186f Kepler, an art space without walls. She has organized numerous international exhibitions, and perofrms with her band Solar Lice. Graff recently completed a writing residency at Villa Noailles in Hyeres, France.
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