By Jordan S. Carroll
Jordan S. Carroll: A Retrospective
When I think back on the previous fourteen articles and, indeed, this very article, I’m reminded of William Delvoye’s Cloaca. Cloaca, a conceptualist installation, is a giant mechanical reproduction of the human digestive system. Twice a day, a gourmet chef feeds Cloaca two meals; after 27 hours, it produces excreta on a conveyor belt. Several years and a team of scientists were required to create this room-sized shit-maker. Note well that modesty and self-deprecation are always false.
Subsequent articles, however, will be better. They will be sparklier, grander, still wrapped in their collector’s edition boxes. Expect a magnum opus each Tuesday. You will laminate your copies of The Cardinal and sell them on eBay. I will be signing my articles in the humanities quadrangle and, in the mere act of signing, I will make your college experience worthwhile. Your hearts will swell until your ribcages burst. You will see my words as if they were tattooed on the insides of your eyelids. I will spit in your eyes and you will see again; you will see men, like trees, walking.
Before we gaze further into my divining pond, we should look into the past. Here, we will find the roots of my future glory. Before grandeur, there was delusion. Let us look to the beginning. The first article was a little ditty about “memes.” It was written for one of the summer issues, but readers stood up and took notice. A few mimeographs were written. A fanzine-cum-academic journal entitled Carroll Studies sprouted up and died in the same month. It, and the next few articles, were obscured by academic skullduggery and avant-garde celebration.
From this haze came the seminal article “Social Problems Plague Jordan S. Carroll.” Some compared it to Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther and Nabokov’s Lolita as a brilliant exploration of the nature of desire. Young romantics began wearing bowler hats, trenchcoats and Fu Manchu goatees. The bleeding-edge technique of ironic third-person narrative swept the literary scene. Despite my campus-wide adoration, I remained alone. Rumors that this sparked a series of sympathetic suicides are patently false.
Other luminous articles followed, but fans cried for more of the same. They didn’t realize that I cannot remain stagnant. I started penning “Math Problems Plague Jordan S. Carroll,” but my spirit just wasn’t there. That is when I realized my latest masterpiece and my final article of this semester: “Jordan S. Carroll: A Retrospective.”
This article will be the final key in the puzzle I’ve constructed. Certain erudite readers have picked up on the patterns. I’ve dropped a few subtle hints. Clues are scattered about, both in my printed words and my online messages. In a labyrinth of words, I have dropped a Chinese puzzle-box containing the ultimate conundrum. For those of you who haven’t figured it out yet, the words “pastel nose” are particularly apropos.
I would like to thank all those who helped me along the way. Dire sacrifices have been made. Midnight raids, cemetery excavations, slowly acting poisons, debauchery and betrayal have all been necessary to complete this first task. It is the structure in which all other articles will be housed. Its grammar is the architecture. Its words are like great arches. Now, finally, I have placed the keystone. It is finished.
