Contents

The First Book Bernadinism
Bernadinism is a most solipsistic, hierarchical and elitist system. If you are not named Alva Bernadine then you are excluded. My philosophy is written down in my photo-albums, Bernadinism: How to Dominate Men, Subjugate Women and Stupefy Children. In them I keep my writings and photographs. They are albums that I wrought with mine own hands. The first one has 198 screws coming through the cover at you and the heads of the same number penetrating the back, so that when it is shut, the screws appear to be going all the way through. They contain work of such filth and degeneracy, the most cursory glance of it would turn a novice nun into a whore and a moral majority campaigner into a sexual pervert. It is very sharp, and like the philosophy it contains, very dangerous.

More than once I have cut my hand on it. Once I was carrying it face up and I stumbled forward and nearly fell chest first on to it. I was immediately struck by the ironic implications. Although I would not have been the first one to be killed by a book - for throughout history there have been many put to the sword or burnt at the stake for writing revolutionary or heretical books - I would have been the first man in history to be impaled on one. The thought strangely pleased me because the only historical events of interest to me are the ones I have initiated myself. The design of the book, most importantly, follows the Bernadinian tenets, which are "More is More" and "Function should follow Form." It has two covers - an inner and an outer - and as a consequence does not open fully, but that does not matter because it looks good. And as the wise man knows, nearly all is in the seeming.
The Second Book of Bernadinism
The second book of Bernadinism has 12 mousetraps on the cover. I decided to photograph it with a dead mouse in one of the traps and went to a pet shop to purchase one. The owner showed me some white ones and I asked if he had any brown ones. He told me there was no call for brown ones, as the public would not buy them. If I wanted a brown one I would have to catch one myself. As a black man this was not lost on me. I could not believe it – racial prejudice extended even as far as the colour of mice. White pure. Brown diseased. The mouse, however, whom I named Descarte, made the supreme sacrifice to gratuitously decorate my album. I had suffered for my art long enough and decided it was someone else’s turn to suffer for my art. If it had consciousness, I am sure it would have gloried in its immolation on the altar of Bernadinism.