Empire V by Victor Pelevin

– 07’and ‘Suicide-Bimbombers of Beelzebub’ (categories of fashion models so designated by some particularly misogynistic vampire) my original conception underwent an important clarification:
    It is not as simple as that. What precisely is natural sexual attraction? When you look close up at a girl who is considered the epitome of beauty, you see the pores in her skin, the pimples, the chapped lips and so on. Beauty or ugliness can be sensed only at a distance, when the lineaments of the face can be reduced to a schematic diagram which may be compared with the manga-style templates stored in the unconscious mind. Where these templates come from is anyone’s guess – but one suspects that in our day they have less to do with the genetic code than with the Glamour industry. In the world of automation, coercive governance of this type is known as ‘override’.
    There were a few entertaining moments. One sample turned up twice in my programme, under different headings. The preparation was classified as: ‘Art Projects Curator Rh4’.
    The red liquid had come from a middle-aged lady who really did look as if she could be an Islamist suicide-bomber. Both Baldur and Jehovah had included her in their lists because in their eyes a curator was seen to be someone pursuing an occupation midway between Glamour and Discourse and thus representing an invaluable source of information. I thought otherwise. The purpose of the degustation was to study the inner world of the contemporary artist, but this curator had not even mastered the jargon of her profession – she was merely Googling her way round it. There was, nevertheless, one touching detail: she had experienced orgasm only once in her life, when a drunken lover had called her a pubic louse feeding on financial capitalism.
    I expressed my perplexity at this outcome to Jehovah and was informed that this experience was, in fact, the point of the lesson inasmuch as it revealed the subject in its entirety. I said I did not believe it, whereupon he made me sample three artists and another art gallery curator. Afterwards I made the following entry in my notebook:
    On average, the contemporary artist is an anal prostitute with a mouth stitched shut and an arse painted on the wall. And the so-called curator is a person who sets himself up as the artist’s spiritual pimp despite the complete absence of any spiritual dimension in the proceedings .
    Writers (whom we also covered in the Glamour course) were slightly better. After familiarising myself with their category I wrote in my notebook:
    What is the most important thing for a writer? It is to possess a malicious, morbid, jealous and envious ego. If this is present, all else will follow.
    Assorted varieties of critics, experts, press and Internet culturologists (it was around this time that I finally worked out what the word meant) found their way into the Discourse curriculum. A half-hour excursion into their universe allowed me to formulate the following rule:
    The interim height of a crab louse equals the height of the object onto which it craps, plus 0.2 millimetres .
    The last note I made on the Glamour course was as follows:
    The most fruitful technique for promoting glamour in modern Russia will be anti-glamour. ‘Deconstructing’ glamour will allow it to infiltrate even those dark places where glamour itself would not dream of trespassing.
    Not all the tastings had an epistemological purpose. Baldur often had me pry into another person purely in order that I should familiarise myself with a particular brand of Spanish crocodile-skin footwear or line of men’s eau de cologne. A highborn English economist found his way into the Glamour list because he was a specialist in expensive clarets, and he was followed in my investigations by a Japanese designer whose silk neckties were the best in the world (it emerged that he was the son of a man who had been sentenced by court