Excerpt from Chapter 9 'Distant Star' by Roberto Bolano

Vertical Submarine's latest project is not only unoriginal but mild in comparison to St. Martin's School of Art's Sculpture class of 1969 or the story below by Bolano:

In 1968, while the students were building barricades and the rising generation of French novelists were putting bricks through the windows of their school or losing their virginity, he decided to found the sect or movement called "the barbaric writers." While intellectuals were taking to the streets, the ex-legionnaire shut himself up in his tiny caretaker's flat in the Rue des Eaux and began to hatch a new kind of writing. the apprenticeship consisted of two apparently simple steps: seclusion and reading. In order to take the first step, one had to purchase provisions sufficient for a week or go hungry To avoid inoppurtune visits, it was also neccessary to make it clear that one was not to be disturbed for any reason, or pretend to be away travelling for a week or to have contracted a contagious disease. the second step was more complicated. According to Delorme, one had to commune with the master works. Communion was achieved in a singularly odd fashion: by defecating on the pages of Stendhal, blowing one's nose on the pages of Victor Hugo, masturbating an spreading one's semen over the pages of gautier or Banville, vomiting onto the pages of Daudet, urinating on the pages of Lamartine, cutting oneself with a razor blade and spattering blood over the pages of Balzac or Maupassant, in short, submitting the books to a process of degradation which Delorme called "humanization." A week of this "barbaric" rituals resulted in a flat or room full of filth, stench and ruined books, with the apprentice writer wallowing in the mess, naked or in underwear, drivelling and wriggling like a new-born baby, or, rather, like the pioneering fish that had decided to make the break and live out of water. The barbaric writer, said Delorme, emerged from this experience with a new inner strength, and, more importantly, a deeper understanding of the art of writing, a wisdom acquired through what he called "real familiarity" with and "real assimilation" of the classics, a physical familiarity that broke all the barriers imposed by culture, the academy and technology.