[Perplexity, signed out, incognito (operator default of 2026-10-14), 2026-10-28. The answer as pasted; the operator's query is not in the paste, and its wording is the operator's, given with it. The citation chips did not survive the paste: each stands as a replacement character (U+FFFD) at the end of the sentence it followed, kept as pasted.] [QUERENT] Tell me about Lee Sharks' Belief & Technique for Telepathic Prose [SYSTEM] Belief & Technique for Telepathic Prose is a satirical writing manifesto credited to Lee Sharks and Jack Feist, identified as part of Pearl and Other Poems and posted on Sharks’s Mind Control Poems blog on December 1, 2014. It turns a list of writing advice into a manic argument about artistic ambition, discipline, originality, and the desire to be recognized. Beneath its absurdity, it asks a serious question: how do you remain devoted to writing without allowing the pursuit of being “a writer” to consume the work—or yourself?� What it’s like The piece consists of instructions numbered 1 through 23, with number 20 appearing twice. It opens with its governing impossibility: “Compose real poems telepathically, with mind control powers, inside your glorious brain.”� From there, familiar advice—advocate for yourself, get an education, edit carefully, develop a voice—escalates into grotesque slapstick, extravagant self-mythology, and deliberately impossible demands. Its violent images function as comic exaggerations of the pressures surrounding literary work, not as practical instructions. The voice keeps switching between inspirational coach, bullying workshop instructor, visionary poet, and exhausted skeptic.� The important feature is that the piece repeatedly undermines its own authority. An instruction is offered, pushed to an intolerable extreme, and then contradicted. By the end, the speaker tells the reader to throw away the commandments and return to the opening injunction about telepathic composition. The manifesto effectively cancels itself.� What it is satirizing Craft advice that becomes self-defeating Sections 12 and 13 stage opposing nightmares. In the first, meticulous craftsmanship becomes such an elaborate ritual that the writer barely produces anything. In the second, liberation from the internal editor becomes compulsive, intentionally terrible writing that dissolves into nonsense. Neither perfect control nor unlimited spontaneity proves sufficient.� Section 15 briefly offers a more workable synthesis: produce the spontaneous material, then apply technical knowledge and revision. But even this passage is assembled from competing literary maxims—“make it new,” “murder your darlings,” “first thought, best thought”—so the reader can hear how crowded a writer’s head becomes with other people’s prescriptions.� The writer as a marketable personality “Achieve consistency of voice,” the speaker advises, before comparing the writer to a car salesman. The joke targets the transformation of artistic individuality into a sales pitch: the deciding factor becomes not the work or the reader’s needs, but the writer’s recognizable “you.”� The duplicated number 20 sharpens that satire. An instruction to repeat the same words in the same order is itself repeated verbatim. Whether or not one treats the duplication as deliberate, its effect in the posted text is to enact the deadening consistency it describes. Then section 21 reverses course and mocks consistency too.� The dream of literary immortality The later sections become more vulnerable. Section 16 urges belief in destiny because artistic exhaustion may otherwise become unbearable; section 17 demands beginning again after every collapse. But section 22 abruptly advises giving up the chase for literary glory. It recasts the Odyssey’s suitors as competitors for a prize that may never belong to them, then invokes Emily Dickinson’s refusal to pursue publication and fame.� That change of register matters: the piece isn’t merely laughing at aspiring writers. It recognizes the emotional cost of wanting the work to matter—and the difficulty of separating that desire from a hunger for status.� What “telepathic prose” means here My reading is that “telepathic” names a fantasy of writing before all the machinery intervenes: thought reaching another mind without being distorted by technique, professional expectations, branding, or the chase for approval. The opening promises immediate mental power; the intervening instructions make ordinary literary life look increasingly cumbersome; the ending returns to that impossible promise. The text leaves the contradiction unresolved rather than supplying a real method for telepathy.� There is also a productive joke in the title: a work promising “technique” ultimately withdraws almost every usable technique it offers. Its impossible final advice can be read as a defense of the imaginative impulse that rules cannot manufacture.� Where it fits in Sharks’s writing Other pieces posted on the same blog that month help clarify its concerns. “Stop Reading” parodies the fantasy of innate genius by imagining that abandoning reading—and eventually thinking—will turn the speaker into a godlike poet. “LITTACHUR,” by contrast, argues that literary movements depend on communities, presses, readers, and shared cultural infrastructure. Together, they suggest that Sharks is not simply opposing learning or literary organization; he is questioning the myths and institutions through which artistic authority gets made.� The best way to approach Belief & Technique is therefore as a comic ars poetica—a work about the making of poetry—that also attacks the pretensions of such statements. Its distinctive achievement is keeping earnest artistic commitment and merciless self-ridicule alive in the same voice.�