Extrait :
The Secret Cuisine
To understand what’s actually going on in any idiom, any genre, we need to turn this model inside out. Forget the notion of genres as delimited by formal constraints. The constraints are techniques. With a volta this is obvious, but even the number of lines is not a limitation; it is a technique of economy and of structural patternings — two sevens, two sixes and a two, three fours and a two, four threes and a two. Those techniques are core components, conceits around which individual works develop an entirely original articulation, not boundaries on what that articulation can be.
You can make anything with the core components used in the SF Café — those quirks. They are no more than a breach of the ongoing possibility of the narrative, after all, the injection of an alethic modality of could not happen. That is the technique at play in the SF Café’s cooking, the secret ingredient that could be anything that could not be — by history, science, laws of nature, rules of logic.
No, there are no constraints on what you can do with the alethic quirk, only tribes of taste — look, see them now, as the librarian turns her head — raging for burgers only in the booths, fried chicken only at the tables, tribes of taste raging for proper burgers, proper fried chicken, tribes of taste raging against each other and against the chefs, with the insufferable petulance of the entitled. We do have our favourite recipes and the right, we think, to expunge all else from our café. We are a plethora of follies, not least in the fervour with which we howl injustice that the sating of our demands for “more of the same” should lead to derision.