Richard's Podcast
Discussions of Johnny Pulp
Richard's Podcast
Johnny Pulp's new novel JP1 and JP2 (Speedball Books London 2026)
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This new Johnny Pulp text presents a fragmented, surreal narrative centered on metaphysical contamination and the blurring of boundaries between history, technology, and art. Through archival transcripts and shifting perspectives, it explores the idea that human consciousness and infrastructure act as receivers for alien or "unreal" futures that persist alongside the present. The story follows figures like TELLER and L as they navigate haunted locations like the Tanks at Tate Modern and a mysterious Manor in Retford, where Giacometti’s attenuated sculptures and obsolete radio equipment become conduits for non-human observation. These sources suggest that imagination and memory are not private experiences but structural vulnerabilities that allow outside forces to manifest. Ultimately, the narrative portrays a world where bureaucratic records and technological debris document a slow, inevitable invasion of reality by entities that exist beyond ordinary geography.
So I want you to picture an impossible train station appearing in this like thick freezing fog of 1950s England.
SPEAKER_00Oh, setting the scene right away.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, but hold on. Now picture William Blake's biblical hallucinated angels descending from this apocalyptic sky into that exact same fog.
SPEAKER_00Right, which is already a huge tonal shift.
SPEAKER_01Exactly. And now I want you to wipe all that away and picture extreme underground BDSM happening in a damp concrete bunker.
SPEAKER_00It's quite the whiplash.
SPEAKER_01Right. What if I told you that all three of those things are actually blueprints for the exact same cosmic apocalypse?
SPEAKER_00I mean, it sounds like a collision of three completely incompatible universes. You have, you know, gyreaucratic post-war sci-fi and then 18th century mystical poetry and then modern psychosexual eroticism. Yeah. But somehow in this context, they're all the exact same story.
SPEAKER_01And that is the labyrinth we are stepping into today. We're doing a deep dive into a wildly ambitious avant-pulp project called I Write What I Want to Feel by the author Johnny Pulp.
SPEAKER_00Yes, Johnny Pulp, which is a name that carries a lot of baggage.
SPEAKER_01Oh, totally. For a bit of context, if you're listening to this and you actually know Johnny Pulp's work, you might be scratching your head right now. Because this is a guy who is normally known for um, well, hyperviolent, extreme sex, Aubant Pulp paperbacks.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, he's basically the king of visceral shock value.
SPEAKER_01Right. But this project, this is entirely different. It is this dense, metaphysical masterwork.
SPEAKER_00And honestly, the structure of it is what makes it so daunting to unpack. Pulp didn't just write one novel here.
SPEAKER_01No, he didn't.
SPEAKER_00He wrote two distinct versions of the exact same story. So they feature the exact same core characters, the same general thematic trajectory, but they are completely split by genre.
SPEAKER_01Which is such a wild flex for an author.
SPEAKER_00Right. Version one is this surreal, hyperbureaucratic sci-fi horror.
SPEAKER_01And then version two just throws out the sci-fi entirely.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. It becomes a deeply psychological, extreme, erotic exploration.
SPEAKER_01So our mission for this Vive is to basically figure out why. We are going to unpack how Johnny Pulp uses these two completely contrasting genres to explore the exact same theme.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, we're looking at how human interpretation, our communication systems, and like our deep-seated desires literally build reality.
SPEAKER_01Let's unpack this because we have a ton of ground to cover. We're talking about art, architecture, literature, and how they shape existence itself.
SPEAKER_00But I think to understand that subtitle, I write what I want to feel. We really have to start with physical space.
SPEAKER_01Right, the geography of the book.
SPEAKER_00Specifically, we have to go underground in London, down into the Tate Moderns tanks.
SPEAKER_01Okay, yes. Because if we are talking about how systems build reality, the physical setting is basically the foundation of the whole thing.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. The narrative in both versions essentially orbits this one highly specific location. We are introduced to our two central characters here, Major Teller and this enigmatic woman who is known only as L.
SPEAKER_01Just L.
SPEAKER_00Right. And they're inside the Tate Modern Tanks. For context, if you haven't been there, these aren't your typical, you know, bright whitewalled gallery spaces.
SPEAKER_01No, not at all.
SPEAKER_00They are these massive circular concrete chambers underground. They were actually originally built to hold millions of gallons of industrial oil for the bankside power station.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, just picture the acoustics in a place like that. It's damp, the walls always seem to like sweat, and there's this lingering ghost of machine oil and river water in the air.
SPEAKER_00It's literally an industrial ruin that society has repurposed for modern art.
SPEAKER_01But Johnny Pulp places Alberto Gicometti sculptures in this space. And in the logic of the novel, they aren't just art pieces to be looked at.
SPEAKER_00No, they're active participants. The text describes visitors walking through the tanks and getting this distinct, paranoid feeling that these incredibly thin, elongated, bronze figures are watching them.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, the book calls them evacuated or um failed vessels.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Powell We really have to look closely at that phrasing, evacuated vessels. Because G. Comedia's figures, historically, they're famous for being thinned out, scraped away, reduced almost nothing.
SPEAKER_01Just these wire-thin silhouettes.
SPEAKER_00Right. But in the context of this novel, pulp is weaponizing that aesthetic. It isn't just a stylistic choice by a Swiss artist, it is a defensive survival strategy by the sculptures themselves.
SPEAKER_01The survival strategy against what exactly?
SPEAKER_00Well, they have starved their own mass down to the absolute minimum to avoid being occupied. Occupied by what? By an invading otherworldly transmission that the book refers to as the angel.
SPEAKER_01Oh wow.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. The logic the novel sets up is that a full, robust human form has enough space inside it to be possessed by this transmission.
SPEAKER_01So if you're too thin, there's no room for the demon, basically.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. A reduced, hollowed-out form can only be circled by it. The angel can't get a grip on something that is already giving up its own substance.
SPEAKER_01It's like walking into a room and realizing the furniture is taking notes on your anxiety. The G Cometti sculptures are functioning like emotional lightning rods. Yes. But I want to push back on something here, or at least try to get to the bottom of the mechanism. Why go to all this trouble?
SPEAKER_00What do you mean?
SPEAKER_01Like, why use a real world, highly specific industrial space like the tate tanks and real world statues to convey this? Why not just write uh, you know, the characters felt a deep existential dread?
SPEAKER_00Ah, because that brings us directly to the meaning of the subtitle. I write what I want to feel. Pulp's entire method here is parsing emotion into physical architecture.
SPEAKER_01Okay, parsing emotion into architecture.
SPEAKER_00Right. He isn't interested in describing sadness or dread or vulnerability as just internal feelings. He externalizes them. He builds scaffolding around the emotion.
SPEAKER_01So the setting is the feeling.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. In this universe, an emotion isn't just something that happens inside your head, it is an infrastructural event. The Giacometti figures represent human beings reduced to pure persistence and attention.
SPEAKER_01If you're listening to this on your commute right now or doing the dishes, just think about the mental architecture you've built over the years to deal with your own stress or trauma.
SPEAKER_00Right. We all have those spaces.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, we all have these internal rooms we retreat to. And Pulp is essentially saying that internal room isn't just a metaphor, it's a real place. We take our old, exhausted coping mechanisms and try to turn them into art galleries.
SPEAKER_00That is a brilliant way to put it.
SPEAKER_01We frame our trauma so we can stare at it, just like London took an old toxic oil tank and turned it into a gallery.
SPEAKER_00That is a perfect translation of the book's mechanics. The tanks act as a collaborative character. By placing extreme, inaccessible emotional pressure inside an industrial fuel chamber, pulp is showing us how we constantly repurpose our own internal industrial ruins into spaces for modern emotional survival.
SPEAKER_01It gives the emotion a baseline.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. The space modifies the emotional emphasis. The concrete acts as a baseline for the anxiety. And it sets a terrifying precedent for the rest of the novel.
SPEAKER_01Which is what?
SPEAKER_00That imagination in this book isn't private. It isn't harmless. It prepares a site. It literally makes a place in which something else can arrive.
SPEAKER_01And what arrives is where the novel shifts gears incredibly hard. We leave the modern art galleries of London and we move geographically and tonally to something much older, grayer, and cold. Yeah, we move to the industrial north of England. Places like Worksop, Sheffield, Redford, these sprawling networks of abandoned railway lines.
SPEAKER_00And the lens through which we view this setting is purely Cold War science fiction.
SPEAKER_01The transition is intentionally jarring. Pulp leans heavily into a direct homage to 1950s and 60s British sci-fi.
SPEAKER_00Oh, absolutely. For anyone familiar with Nigel Neal's Quartermas serials, this is going to feel incredibly familiar.
SPEAKER_01Right, the old BBC stuff.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, we are suddenly plunged into a world of men in tweed overcoats holding clipboards, speaking clipped BBC English, and trying to use civil service bureaucracy to face down incomprehensible cosmic dread.
SPEAKER_01This is where I struggle a bit with the tone, to be honest.
SPEAKER_00How so?
SPEAKER_01Well, the horror here isn't a giant multi-tenacled monster kicking down the door of a laboratory. The horror is like an anomaly in a railway timetable. It's an impossible train station appearing in the fog, listed in this ominous document called the Atlas of Unreal Railways.
SPEAKER_00Yes, the Atlas.
SPEAKER_01Why use the hyperpolite, dry, administrative language of 1950s civil servants to describe a reality-ending cosmic horror? Doesn't that just deflate the tension?
SPEAKER_00Actually, it amplifies it through what we can call the quartermass effect. Polp uses administrative language precisely because it is the ultimate human attempt to contain the uncontainable.
SPEAKER_01Okay, I think I see where you're going.
SPEAKER_00Think about the epistemology of the 1950s, the fundamental way people understood the world back then. It was an era before modern irony, before digital cynicism. People fundamentally believe in the power of committees and ministries and forms and paperwork.
SPEAKER_01Right. There was a system for everything.
SPEAKER_00They believed that if a problem existed, you could manage it by filing it correctly.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell So it's the contrast. It's the absolute hubris of saying, well, we have a cosmic reality-shattering entity invading our dimension. Let's form a subcommittee and stamp a manila folder classified.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. And the terror is generated when those systems completely fail to categorize the infinite. The bureaucracy is the only shield humanity has and we watch it crack. Wow. Let's look at how the infrastructure itself becomes the threat. The abandoned train stations, the rusting tracks in Sheffield. They don't just represent economic decline. In the novel, they represent histories and futures that never arrived, stacking on top of the present.
SPEAKER_01There is this scene that I think perfectly illustrates how the mechanism of this horror works. We have these three girls hiding out in an abandoned warehouse in Sheffield. It's freezing.
SPEAKER_00Oh, this scene is so good.
SPEAKER_01No, one of them is wearing a gabardine coat, like a 1950s archivist. Another has this battered leather satchel covered in peeling railway labels. Crew, Doncaster, York.
SPEAKER_00Just layering on that nostalgia.
SPEAKER_01Right. The atmosphere is thick with fog. Yeah. And then they hear a phantom train horn echoing through the mist. They realize that these otherworldly entities, the book calls them the standing forms, are arriving.
SPEAKER_00But they aren't dropping out of the sky and flying saucers.
SPEAKER_01No. They are arriving via the infrastructure. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_00This is a deeply Ballardian concept. The idea of J.G. Ballard, where infrastructure acts as a conduit for the supernatural or the psychological.
SPEAKER_01Like the roads and rails are arteries for ghosts.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. The railway network in Pulp's novel isn't just carrying coal or passengers, it is carrying time. It is a distribution network for abandoned futures. There's a brilliant line in the text that notes that trains never entirely leave Sheffield. They just travel through different years.
SPEAKER_01Which is such an eerie thought. The idea that a train horn you hear at 2 A.M. might be a train from 1957, or a train from a 1964 that never actually happened because of some altered timeline.
SPEAKER_00Right.
SPEAKER_01And these standing forms, which by the way, look suspiciously like those impossibly thin Giacomedi figures. They're just waiting patiently on the platforms of stations that don't exist on any map.
SPEAKER_00The horror is administrative before it becomes cosmic. A locked filing cabinet that suddenly contains a timetable for a world that ended, a ringing telephone in a room that has been walled off for 30 years.
SPEAKER_01So creepy.
SPEAKER_00Pulp is demonstrating that reality itself is behaving like a bureaucratic system managed by something with absolutely no interest in human comfort.
SPEAKER_01Okay, so if the railways and the 1950s bureaucracy are the conduits for this cosmic dread, the actual language powering the dread comes from somewhere else entirely. We are talking about the 18th century visionary poet William Blake.
SPEAKER_00The introduction of Blake is where the novel A's systems theory really takes off, and I will admit it demands a lot from the reader.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's a huge pivot.
SPEAKER_00In Pulpa's universe, there is a literal organization called the Blake Research Facility, but they do not treat Blake's mythology, his epic poems, his paintings as art.
SPEAKER_01What do they treat them as?
SPEAKER_00They treat them as technical diagrams. They view his illuminated manuscripts as operating manuals for communication ecologies.
SPEAKER_01I have to be honest, treating an 18th-century romantic poet as a telecom engineer sounds like a massive stretch. Is pulp just retrofitting modern tech jargon onto old poetry to sound smart? Or does the text actually justify this leap? Like how does a poem become a machine?
SPEAKER_00It justifies it by taking Blake's own claims seriously. Blake claimed he was transcribing visions of higher realities.
SPEAKER_01Right, he was famously having these intense visions.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. The facility in the novel operates on the premise that Blake wasn't writing metaphors, he was documenting signal agents moving between cognitive environments. Let's break down the specific figures to see how Pulp translates them.
SPEAKER_01Okay, let's do it.
SPEAKER_00In Blake's original mythos, Albion is the primordial universal man. In Pulp's novel, Albion is humanity functioning as a massive, unconscious telecommunications field. We are all just nodes in a giant network.
SPEAKER_01Okay, that tracks. And what about Eurozin, the bearded, godlike figure with the compass, usually measuring the universe?
SPEAKER_00In traditional Blake scholarship, Eurozen is a symbol of oppressive law and reason. In Pulp's technical translation, Eurozen represents bounded cognition.
SPEAKER_01Hold on. Bounded cognition. In plain English, does that just mean our brains can only handle a tiny slice of reality before we panic and start putting things in little manageable boxes?
SPEAKER_00That is exactly what it means.
SPEAKER_01Okay, so it's a defense mechanism.
SPEAKER_00Yes.
SPEAKER_01It would just overload.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. But the most terrifying translation pulp makes is with the ghost of a flea.
SPEAKER_01Right. Blake famously painted this muscular, terrifying, bloodthirsty creature holding a bowl for blood, which he claimed to have seen in a seance-like vision.
SPEAKER_00Yes. In the novel, the facility reclassifies the ghost of a flea as a predatory receiver morphology.
SPEAKER_01Which is quite the mouthful. What does a predatory receiver morphology actually do?
SPEAKER_00It means it is a literal machine or a monster that hunts concentrations of historical intensity. It doesn't care about morality, it doesn't judge whether a human event is a tragedy or a triumph, good or evil.
SPEAKER_01So what is it looking for?
SPEAKER_00It tracks density. When human appetite for conquest or knowledge or power becomes dense enough in a specific location or time, the flea manifests to feed on that transmission.
SPEAKER_01There's a quote from the source text that spells this out perfectly. It says, um, attention becomes appetite. Appetite becomes antenna.
SPEAKER_00That is the core mechanism right there.
SPEAKER_01So if you are obsessing over something, if you are historically hyper-focused, you are turning yourself into a radio tower that summons this predator.
SPEAKER_00And that completely answers your earlier skepticism about whether treating a poet as a telecom engineer is just a gimmick. By utilizing Blake this way, Polp proposes that our symbolic systems, our myths, our poetry, are actually operational. They do things, they generate frequencies.
SPEAKER_01Man, that is wild. And this brings us to a massive sprawling section of the novel. Blake's mythology isn't the only system operating in this universe. Pulp introduces a whole arsenal of conceptual machines that are trying to control, hack, or infect reality.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it becomes a multifront war.
SPEAKER_01And he draws heavily on famous avant-garde authors to build these weapons.
SPEAKER_00The text describes these as interpretive systems that have become material. They are literal machines for producing reality, fighting a war over how the universe should be structured. The first one we encounter is the Burroughs virus.
SPEAKER_01Obviously, based on the writer William S. Burroughs. He famously said, language is a virus. So I'm assuming pulp takes that entirely literally.
SPEAKER_00Yes. The Burroughs virus treats language as a literal viral contagion.
SPEAKER_01But how does it work mechanically in the story?
SPEAKER_00Aaron Powell It replicates and infects timetables, archives, and communications. It doesn't try to build a coherent narrative, it just multiplies. It takes a phrase, strips it of context, and pastes it everywhere until the system crashes from the noise. It is an ideological infection spreading without understanding.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell So it's a brute force attack on meaning. But then we have the countermeasure, right? The marble fawn.
SPEAKER_00Yes.
SPEAKER_01This is a concept lifted directly from Dennis Cooper's novel. And the text says it uses language not as a virus, but as ornate labyrinthine architecture. How does that counter a virus?
SPEAKER_00Think of it as a trap made of syntax. The Burroughs virus wants to copy and paste blindly. The marble fawn is designed to seduce, conceal, and overwhelm moral inspection. It traps hostile transmissions inside interpretive labor.
SPEAKER_01Okay, I think you get it.
SPEAKER_00If the Burroughs virus is a mindless swarm of data, the marble fawn is like a Chinese finger trap. The harder the virus tries to attack it, the more tangled it gets in the ornate sentences, the subtext, the sheer architectural complexity of the language. It makes the enemy keep reading itself until it stalls out.
SPEAKER_01Architecture versus virus, labyrinth versus contagion. But there is a third faction that hates both of them, isn't there? The Atari Swarms. This represents pure optimization logic, machine futures.
SPEAKER_00Yes. The Atari swarms operate on the logic of an arcade game algorithm. They seek simplification, clear win conditions, and the absolute elimination of all nuance, ambiguity, and poetry.
SPEAKER_01They just want to win the game.
SPEAKER_00Right. They don't want a labyrinth, and they don't want a virus. They want a clean, zero-sum grid. They hate the concept of a remainder. Anything that can't be cleanly categorized, used, or deleted.
SPEAKER_01This is such a wild concept. It's like deploying a complex sonnet to fight a spam computer virus while a Pac-Man algorithm tries to eat both of them because they aren't moving in straight lines.
SPEAKER_00It's a literal tech war, but fought with literature and philosophy.
SPEAKER_01And the darkest machine in this arsenal is drawn from J.G. Ballard, the Atrocity Museum. This system treats catastrophe as an exhibit. And this is where the text gets incredibly heavy. It specifically uses the history of the Nanking rape as an example of how this machine operates. And obviously, we have to note to our listeners, we're simply reporting on the text here and how the author uses these events. We're not taking any political sides or endorsing the framing, just unpacking the novel's mechanics. The text explores how extreme historical trauma continues to act as a transmission field.
SPEAKER_00And I think it handles it with cold, impartial mechanics, which is what makes it so unsettling. The Atrocity Museum doesn't moralize, it observes that human suffering creates a massive energetic signature. The trauma from Nanking generates a dense historical gravity, and that is exactly the kind of transmission field that the ghost of the flea, that predatory receiver we talked about, tracks and feeds on.
SPEAKER_01The horror is that the universe doesn't care about the suffering. It only cares about the signal strength.
SPEAKER_00Exactly.
SPEAKER_01The book is suggesting that history itself might just be edible to these larger cosmic systems. The atrocity museum doesn't grieve, it arranges horror as a display. It archives violence.
SPEAKER_00That is the Ballardian core. Violence becomes a display system. Suffering becomes an archive. And the horrifying implication for the characters in the novel is that these possibility farms where new futures are growing might just be an atrocity museum of futures, arranging possible worlds as exhibits and asking which one generates the most useful signal.
SPEAKER_01Okay, we have to ground this because this is an incredibly dense, swirling vortex of concepts. We have Giacometti sculptures hiding from angels, 1950s train stations carrying lost time, Blakey and monsters feeding on attention, viral language, and trauma museums.
SPEAKER_00It is a lot to hold in your head at once.
SPEAKER_01It really is. But all of these massive, abstract cosmic systems eventually converge on two human figures standing in the rain Major Ingrid Teller and the Enigmatic L.
SPEAKER_00Everything we've discussed distills down into the relationship between these two women and what they represent. Let's start with Major Teller. She is described as a red-haired, immaculate military officer.
SPEAKER_01Very pulled together.
SPEAKER_00Visually, she looks like she just stepped out of a highly polished World War II propaganda film. Functionally, she represents the immune response of civilization.
SPEAKER_01She is the Atari Swarm personified in a way. She wants order.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. Her function is stabilization. She wants to stop time, finalize a selection of reality, and prevent the premature arrival of whatever cosmic threat is descending via the railway lines.
SPEAKER_01So her goal is basically putting reality on pause.
SPEAKER_00She wants to lock reality into a permanent, unchanging state to save humanity from being overridden by the virus or eaten by the flea.
SPEAKER_01And there is L. Yeah. She is the total opposite. She's the receiver, the seed, the remainder. She's vulnerable, unstable, and she actively refuses to be categorized.
SPEAKER_00She's the antithesis of the Atari Swarm.
SPEAKER_01Right. She has this persistent attraction toward hidden narratives and alternative realities. Because of that openness, she acts as a massive antenna for all these hostile systems. Normally, in any standard genre story, Teller would be the clear hero. She's the disciplined military officer trying to save the world from an apocalypse, and L would be the liability, the foolish person who accidentally summons the monster by asking too many questions.
SPEAKER_00But pulp completely subverts this dynamic.
SPEAKER_01He totally does. Teller's solution is framed as a tragedy, and L's vulnerability is framed as a necessity. Why?
SPEAKER_00Because it ays a philosophical battle between closure versus continuation. Teller's position is terrible, but highly logical. If the story continues, the cosmic catastrophe arrives and destroys us. Therefore, we must suspend movement. We must halt time, halt change, and become a frozen exhibit to survive.
SPEAKER_01But L recognizes the fatal flaw in Teller's logic. L realizes that stopping time means stopping care.
SPEAKER_00Yes. Elle embodies the claim that stopping continuation would itself destroy what is actually worth saving. About humanity.
SPEAKER_01Because to care about something is to exist in time with it.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. Care requires continuation, requires attention, repair, persistence, and the willingness to let things remain unfinished and ambiguous. L is the remainder that no system, not the Atari Swarms, not the Atrocity Museum, not Teller, can fully digest or optimize.
SPEAKER_01This is the core thesis of the sci-fi version of the book. If time stops, care stops. If care stops, humanity survives, but only as a frozen exhibit in the atrocity museum.
SPEAKER_00A museum piece.
SPEAKER_01Right. L is basically saying, you know, I'd rather face the cosmic horror, I'd rather let the monster arrive than become a perfectly optimized, unfeeling machine.
SPEAKER_00It is a devastating choice.
SPEAKER_01Now I need to hit the brakes here. Yeah. Because everything we have just spent all this time unpacking, the sci-fi bureaucracy, the cosmic horror, the literary machines, the philosophical debate between Teller and L that is all version one of the novel.
SPEAKER_00Right, the sci-fi version.
SPEAKER_01But as we established at the beginning, Johnny Pulp wrote a second version of the novel. And this one is an extreme erotic BBSM fever dream.
SPEAKER_00It is one of the most audacious structural shifts in modern literature.
SPEAKER_01But I don't understand the causal link. We have this perfect sci-fi setup. The philosophical trap is set. Teller's solution means the death of care, and L's solution invites cosmic horror. There's seemingly no way to resolve this in a sci-fi setting without picking a side. Is that why Bulp had to write a completely different, erotic version of the book? To find a backdoor out of this philosophical trap?
SPEAKER_00That is exactly why he did it. Version two takes the exact same cosmic tension between teller and L closure versus continuation, selection versus remainer, and strips away the sci-fi metaphors entirely.
SPEAKER_01And replaces them with what?
SPEAKER_00To transpose it into intimate psychosexual domination and submission.
SPEAKER_01Wow. In the text of version two, the cosmic horror is gone. Instead, L is repeatedly subjected to extreme erotic abasement by Teller and these otherworldly figures. It's intense, it's highly visceral, and it takes place in that exact same Tate Modern tank with the G Comedi statues bearing witness.
SPEAKER_00It keeps the same architectural container.
SPEAKER_01It's like taking a giant sci-fi chess match and forcing the pieces into a deeply intimate, violent tango.
SPEAKER_00To understand how a BDSM dynamic solves a cosmic philosophical problem, we have to look at a concept introduced in the text by a fictional researcher named Dr. Margaret Vale. She calls it the openness catastrophe.
SPEAKER_01Okay, let's break that down. Dr. Vale argues that radical exposure generates radical opacity. What does that mean mechanically?
SPEAKER_00Think about what teller represents. Categorization. Yeah. Knowing exactly what something is so you can control it.
SPEAKER_01Like the Atari algorithm.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. The eroticism in version two isn't just about titillation, it's about illegibility. In version two, the narrative repeatedly stages scenes where vulnerability is formalized through submission.
SPEAKER_01So L is submitting to Teller.
SPEAKER_00Right. And L finds power in the submission because it allows her to be completely visible, reduced, physically exposed, stripped bare, without ever being fully known or computationally solved by Teller.
SPEAKER_01She is literally laid bare, but she refuses to be understood. Usually in a psychoanalytic reading of a BDSM text, you get that trope where the submissive is actually the one secretly in control, pulling the strings. But Pulp doesn't do that, does he?
SPEAKER_00No, he rejects that trope entirely. She doesn't secretly dominate. She inhabits subordination without reversal. By becoming an object of absolute intense fascination, she avoids becoming an object of certainty.
SPEAKER_01So Teller's obsessed with her, but still can't crack the code.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. The more intensely Teller tries to interpret her, map her, and dominate her, the less stable those interpretations become.
SPEAKER_01Oh wow. It's a physical manifestation of her cosmic role, as the remainder we talked about in the Atari Swarm section. Yes. The systems want to categorize her, optimize her, select her, and in version two, she essentially says, You can tie me up, you can dominate me physically, but you will never actually compute me.
SPEAKER_00The text explicitly notes that this creates the persistence of asymmetry. Complete equality implies complete transparency. Complete domination implies complete capture. But this BDSM dynamic creates a third space.
SPEAKER_01A third space.
SPEAKER_00A space where recognition and eligibility coexist. Elle seeks contact while fiercely resisting incorporation. She seeks intimacy while preserving her opacity. Her attachment to defeat is actually an attachment to remaining illegible.
SPEAKER_01The desire to remain illegible even at the moment of greatest exposure. That is brilliant. Pulp takes this hyper-erotic pulp setup and uses it as a defense mechanism against a cosmic algorithm trying to delete human nuance. Elle breaks the machine by letting it hurt her without ever giving it the satisfaction of understanding her.
SPEAKER_00Which brings us to the endings. How do you conclude a project like this? Because these two versions explore the identical theme through completely different genre mechanics, they naturally arrive at very different yet equally unresolved conclusions.
SPEAKER_01Right. Let's look at version one, the sci-fi thriller ending. Teller and L finally face off at the ghostly Sheffield train station as the mass of cosmic intelligence descends.
SPEAKER_00The climax of the sci-fi plot.
SPEAKER_01Teller says, If you continue, it arrives. If I succeed, everything stops.
SPEAKER_00And El's response is the crux of the entire metaphysical argument.
SPEAKER_01She smiles. She looks beyond the apocalyptic horror and says, The second arrival isn't the arrival. Wait, sorry, she says, the second arrival isn't the arrival, it is only the invitation. And then mid-screen, the power cuts out, the book just stops.
SPEAKER_00And in version two, the erotic narrative abandons plot resolution entirely. It focuses heavily on the endless asymmetrical desire between Teller and L. It leaves L in a state of continuous ecstatic suspension and vulnerability, forever uncompleted, forever illegible.
SPEAKER_01As a reader, that is agonizing. Why does Pulp refuse to give us a clean resolution in either version? It's like watching a movie that cuts the black right as the bomb hits zero, but we never get to see the explosion.
SPEAKER_00It is agonizing by design. Think about what a resolution actually is in a narrative. To resolve the story, to show the explosion, to show the arrival of the aliens, or to show Teller succeeding would be to side with Teller's philosophy.
SPEAKER_01Ah, because resolving a plot is a literal form of closure. It's wrapping it up in a neat little bow, it's finalizing a selection.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. A clean ending is an Atari swarm. It deletes ambiguity. By leaving both novels in a state of suspended waiting, pulp forces the reader to physically sit in L's position. We are left with unresolved attachment. We are forced into the space of the remainder.
SPEAKER_01And L's final line, the second arrival is only the invitation, implies that there is no final state. Every apocalypse, every ending just reveals a deeper level of reality.
SPEAKER_00Just like Blake's apocalyptic poetry.
SPEAKER_01Exactly, which always emphasized unveiling new truths rather than just fire and brimstone destruction. Every arrival becomes the threshold of another arrival.
SPEAKER_00As the text says, waiting is not emptiness, waiting is suspended attachment. The story intentionally stops before a final decision can become one more system of control. The lack of an ending is the ultimate victory for L's philosophy of continuation. The care continues off the page.
SPEAKER_01All woven together to prove that our interpretations literally build the reality we are trapped in.
SPEAKER_00It forces a profound level of self-reflection. If Polpera's novel argues that interpretations, symbols, and narratives act as literal machines that build futures, well, this raises an urgent question for you, the listener.
SPEAKER_01Are your appetites right now turning you into an antenna?
SPEAKER_00Exactly. What future is being cultivated in you right now simply by having listened to this deep dive? As you process these ideas, the quartermass effect, the ghost of a flea, the openness catastrophe, you are no longer a passive observer. You are participating in a communication ecology. So ask yourself, are you just the reader, safely outside the text, or are you the receiver actively generating the next reality?
SPEAKER_01It really makes you wonder if that mental furniture, taking notes on your anxiety, is actually writing the script for tomorrow. Thank you for walking through the fog of the tanks with us today. Keep questioning the reality around you. Resist the urge for clean closures, and remember, the second arrival is only the invitation.