The HyperText Initiative's White Star Quarterly Reader No. 1

In the summer of 1999, a young student (“X”) at a university in the midwest came across a box. It was in the upstairs closet of a large house they called “The Miracle House” in a small town in Kansas, into which he’d moved following his first year of college. He spent that summer alone, waiting for his roommates to arrive in the fall. Upon examining the contents of the box, he found that it was full of all sorts of material, mostly literary— poems, stories, essays, cassette tapes, minutes from meetings, manifestos, and a few drawings and photographs— by a number of young people who he assumed must’ve lived in the house at some point prior to his moving in. He took it with him when he moved and every time he moved, and over the years learned that the material in the box was all written or created by one or more of a group of seven students who formed— according to the smattering of documents left in the box— a small literary society they called, more or less, “the white star society.” At some point he began laying the groundwork for organizing the contents of the box into an archive for the express purpose of curating said archive into a novel-length book. He called the project The HyperText Initiative. 

Eventually, however, he passed both the contents of the archive and the burden of the project on to a friend of his (“Y”), who intermittently worked on it until it was stolen from his apartment sometime in the early 2000’s. It wasn’t until the late ‘teens that it was “rediscovered” via a particularly improbable coupling of coincidence, code-breaking and a treasure hunt, and ended up in the hands of its final curator (“Z”). By this time records of the project and its provenance had been added and the archive addended to include its journey, and so its new curator followed suit, adding the story of his story to its story until he was finally almost finished with it by the spring of 2020, when he all but disappeared. 

Enter The Parallax Conspiracy for the Articulation of Thaumaturgical Research/ Ideas, who now has the pleasure of continuing the work of The HyperText Initiative by publishing four of the essays that comprise a small percentage of the archive, together with short biographical sketches cobbled together from clues found there, as well as some ostensibly well-informed daydreams and extra-archival materials regarding who and what The White Star Society was— and what happened to them. This portion of the project is called The White Star Quarterly Reader. 

Most of what we know about the members of the white star society is gleaned from documents found within the archive, though with a few— as is the case with Eugene Love— we were able to track down and get in contact with folks who knew them. Not a single actual member of the group, however, has been located to date, though we continue to try.

At the time of the writing of his essay, Eugene Patrick Love was 19 or 20. A Korean-American cisman, he and his younger sister were raised by their mother in a suburb of Kansas City. He wore his hair long and played in a number of punk bands (Ride to Ruin!, No / Thanks), and only attended college for a year and a half before dropping out and disappearing— the first of the White Star Society to leave (and the only one for whom we have some account of said leaving). His primary contribution to the archive are a handful of cassette tapes on which he recorded a smattering of “spoken-word” poems, though he apparently hated that term. The essay in this volume represents his only written contribution, and was written at the request of the rest of the group as they worked to publish their own journal. His last known whereabouts was Colorado but, like the rest of the white star society, his current whereabouts remain unknown. 

His essay, “(More) Regular-Ass Everyday (Historical) Materialism(, Please),” was given its title by its current editor, as a) the original manuscript lacked an official title, b) the term itself is central to his essay, and c) said editor thought that bringing the vernacular of online social media discursive practices might help would-be readers clock the goals and aims of the text. In it, Eugene critiques the ideas behind common colloquialisms by pointing out the way both of those things are “taken up” andused to perpetuate “exploitation and domination” of the world by the ruling class. 

The essay is divided into three parts. In the first, THEFT IS THEFT, he shows how seemingly simple, lazy colloquialisms reveal the contradictory calculus of value in capitalist society, and the fundamentally idealist notions that this sort of common sense is predicated on. In the second, THE DEATH OF THE SOUL, he shows how the common idea that we have a soul works parallel to that idealism, and articulates the mechanics of how it is used to subjugate people. In the third and last part, AGAINST GRATITUDE, he shows how the fetishization of certain affects similarly works to maintain a sort of self-imposed docility on people who might otherwise be animated to fight against those powers that rely on that self-policing. 

The essay seems to end without an ending, and all the characteristics of someone for whom a new way of seeing (and therefore of living in) the world is rushing upon them, connecting heretofore unconnected dots. The almost gentle abruptness of the end of the text seems to be an echo of his life at the time, that point where he apparently decided to stop what he was doing and leave, like a sort of sigh of relief. 

Besides the above text, the inaugural issue also features an interview with Eugene’s roommate at the time of his departure, as well as a Eugene’s playlist for the writing of his essay (along with some notes on the importance of music to Eugene and his writing endeavours) and a brief introduction to the second installment of the series, Hannah Torres’ “Illocutionary Meditations.”