Cuisine

A.J. once reserved a table a year in advance Chez Robert where a huge, icy gourmet broods over the greatest cuisine in the world. So baneful and derogatory is his gaze that many a client, under that withering blast, has rolled on the floor and pissed all over himself in convulsive attempts to ingratiate.
So A.J. arrives with six Bolivian indians who chew coca leaves between courses. And when Robert, in all his gourmet majesty, bears down on the table, A.J. looks up and yells: "Hey, Boy! Bring me some ketchup."
(Alternative: A.J. whips out a bottle of ketchup and douses the haute cuisine.)
Thirty gourmets stop chewing at once. You could have heard a soufflé drop. As for Robert, he lets out a bellow of rage like a wounded elephant, runs to the kitchen and arms himself with a meat claver.... The Sommelier snarls hideously, his face turning a strange iridescent purple.... He breaks a bottle of Brut Champagne....'26.... Pierre, the Head Waiter, snatches up a boning knife. Al three chase A.J. through the restaurant with mangled inhuman screams of rage.... Tables overturn, vintage wines and matchless food crash to the floor.... Cries of "Lynch him!" ring through the air. An elderly gourmet with the insane bloodshot eyes of a mandril, is fashioning a hangman's knot with a red velvet curtain cord.... Seeing himself cornered and in imminent danger of dismemberment at least, A.J. plays his trump card.... he throws back his head and lets out a hog call; and a hundred famished hogs he had stationed nearby rush into the restaurant, slopping the haute cuisine. Like a great tree Robert falls to the floor in a stroke where he is eaten by the hogs: "Poor bastards don't know enough to appreciate him," says A.J.

(William S. Burroughs, extrait // excerpt, Naked Lunch)

Competition

Shortly after my return from the Eleventh Voyage, the papers began to devote increasing space to the competition between two large washing-machine manufacturers, Newton and Snodgrass.

It was probably Newton who first marketed washers so automated that they themselves separated the white laundry from the colored, and after scrubbing and wringing out the clothes, pressed, darned, hemmed, and adorned them with beautifully embroidered monograms of the owner, and sewed onto towels uplifting, stirring maxims such as "The early robot catches the oilcan". Snodgrass's response to this was a washer that composed quatrains for the embroidering, commensurate with the customer's cultural level and aesthetic requirements. Newton's next model embroidered sonnets; Snodgrass reacted with a model that kept family conversation alive during television intermissions.

Newton attempted to nip this escalation in the bud; no doubt everyone remembers his full-page ads containing a picture of a sneering, bug-eyed washer and the words: "Do you want your washing-machine to be smarter than you? Of course NOT!" Snodgrass, however, completely ignored this appeal to the baser instincts of the public, and in the next quarter introduced a machine that washed, wrung, soaped, rinsed, pressed, starched, darned, knitted, and conversed, and -- in addition -- did the children's homework, made economic projections for the head of the family, and gave Freudian interpretations of dreams, eliminating, while you waited, complexes both Oedipal and gerontophagical.

(Stanislaw Lem, extrait // excerpt, Further Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy, "(The Washing Machine Tragedy)", trad. du polonais // transl. from Polish J. Stern & M. Swiecicka-Ziemanek)