The Rest is Violence

Plangent mid creole parturition, a sausage and bacon combo is the fool's best enemy. So now, a return of the furrower perhaps pends. Lately, arms off the gantry, legs bekind the doors. So... why solicit when what you desire arrives unbidden?

Because VHS collections are always now a SAD THING. How the mighty are swollen!

Peach flowers turn the dew crimson....

Not Samuel Beckett

Not Ian McKellan

Thanks Here

Bonce Bouncers

Sebastian Barry thinks so much, that supra-Rodin, he needs two hands to hold up his thought-laden bonce

You deserve this, not this, this

La Monte Young began work on his magnum opus, The Well-Tuned Piano, in 1964. For 27 years he kept the tuning a secret - only a few close friends knew it. In 1991, with the use of a calculator, a tunable Yamaha DX7, and a CD player with an A-to-B button, I tuned my synthesizer to the Gramavision recording of the work and figured out ten pitches of the tuning. Why not all 12? Because one pitch, G#, never appears on that recording of the work, and another, C#, only appears in one five-minute passage on the fifth CD. I told La Monte that I had figured out the tuning and wanted to publish an analysis of the work. He thought it over and agreed that it was time to release the tuning into public discourse.

Down the Upside Down Downside Path Upwards

HIGNFY stands for?

What do you think of sports? Be outrageous!

I want a new drug

Charisma of Novelty

Mobile Phones at the Beach, Not for Me

Once upon a time there was a man who sought escape from the prattle of his neighbors and went to live alone in a hut he had found in the forest. At first he was content, but the bitter winter led him to cut down the trees around his hut for firewood. The next summer he was hit and uncomfortable because his hut had no shade, and he complained bitterly of the harshness of the elements.

He made a little garden and kept some chickens, but the rabbits were attracted by the food in the garden and ate much of it. The man went into the forest and trapped a fox, which he tamed and taught to catch rabbits. But the fox ate up the man's chickens as well. The man shot the fox and cursed the perfidy of the creatures of the wild.

The man always threw his refuse on the floor of his hut and soon it swarmed with vermin. He then built an ingenious system of hooks and pulleys so that everything in the hut could be suspended from the ceiling. But the strain was too much for the flimsy hut and it soon collapsed. The man grumbled about the inferior construction of the hut and built himself a new one.

One day he boasted to a relative in his old village about the peaceful beauty and plentiful game surrounding his forest home. The relative was impressed and reported back to his neighbors, who began to use the area for picnics and hunting excursions. The man was upset by this and cursed the intrusiveness of mankind. He began posting signs, setting traps, and shooting at those who came near his dwelling. In revenge groups of boys would come at night from time to time to frighten him and steal things. The man took to sleeping every night in a chair by the window with a loaded shotgun across his knees. One night he turned in his sleep and shot off his foot. The villagers were chastened and saddened by this misfortune and thereafter stayed away from his part of the forest. The man became lonely and cursed the unfriendliness and indifference of his former neighbors. And in all this the man saw no agency except what lay outside himself, for which reason, and because of his ingenuity, the villagers called him the American.

- from The Pursuit of Loneliness by Philip Slater (1970)

Central to the argument of this frisky but intellectually gripping work of fiction is the idea of two oppositional human types - the idorrhythmics, who are solitaries, each moving to his own rhythm of life, unique, separate; and the cenobites, the solidaries, who join in brotherhood and live in common. And a person must be either the one or the other. Never both.

- from a review in Expletives Deleted by Angela Carter (1992)

Aforementioned Dags

Who goes? You decide.

Tenderness it welled : slow, swelling, Full it throbbed. That's the chat. Ha, Give! Take! Throb, a throb, a pulsing proud erect.

Words? Music? No, it's what's behind.

Bloom looped, unlooped, noded, disnoded.

Bloom. Flood of warm jimjam lickitup secretness flowed to flow in music out, in desire, dark to lick flow, invading. Tipping her tepping her tapping her topping her. Tup. Pores to dilate dilating. Tup. The joy the feel the warm the. Tup. To pour o'er sluices pouring gushes. Flood, gush, flow, joygush, tupthrop. Now! Language of love.

-from Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)

Cixous also discusses writing on both a metaphoric and literal level. She aligns writing with masturbation, something that for women is supposed to be secret, shameful, or silly, something not quite adult, something that will be renounced in order to achieve adulthood, just like clitoral stimulation has to be renounced in favor of vaginal/reproductive passive adult sexuality. For women to write themselves, Cixous says, they must (re)claim a female-centered sexuality. If men write with their penises, as Gilbert argues, then Cixous says before women can write they have to discover where their pleasure is located. (And don't be too quick to decide that women write with their clitorises. It's not quite that simple).

Cixous also argues that men haven't yet discovered the relation between their sexuality and their writing, as long as they are focused on writing with the penis.

- from http://www.colorado.edu/English/courses/ENGL2012Klages/cixous.html

XXXIV

Come, let me write. And to what end? To ease

A burthen'd heart. How can words ease, which are

The glasses of thy dayly-vexing care?

Oft cruel fights well pictur'd-forth do please.

Art not asham'd to publish thy disease?

Nay, that may breed my fame, it is so rare.

But will not wise men thinke thy words fond ware?

Then be they close, and so none shall displease.

What idler thing then speake and not be hard?

What harder thing then smart and not to speake?

Peace, foolish wit! with wit my wit is mard.

Thus write I, while I doubt to write, and wreake

My harmes in inks poor losse. Perhaps some find

Stellas great pow'rs, that so confuse my mind.

XVIII

With what sharp checkes I in myself am shent

When into Reasons audite I do goe,

And by iust counts my selfe a bankrout know

Of all those goods which heauen to me hath lent;

Vnable quite to pay euen Natures rent,

Which vnto it by birthright I do ow;

And, which is worse, no good excuse can showe,

But that my wealth I haue most idly spent!

My youth doth waste, my knowledge brings forth toyes,

My wit doth striue those passions to defende,

Which, for reward, spoil it with vain annoyes.

I see, my course to lose myself doth bend;

I see: and yet no greater sorrow take

Than that I lose no more for Stellas sake.

- from Astrophel and Stella by Sir Philip Sidney (1591)

How Bourgeois was Faust?

But at night the atmosphere changes. Sounds become muffled, thoughts grow louder. "Only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva take flight," noted Walter Benjamin, quoting Hegel. Time seems closer to that moment halfway between wakefulness and sleep in which the world can be comfortably reimagined. My movements feel unwittingly furtive, my activity secret. I turn into something of a ghost. The books are now the real presence and it is I, their reader, who, through cabalistic rituals of half-glimpsed letters, am summoned up and lured to a certain volume and a certain page.

-from The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel (2008)

Mindful of the shambles of the day,
But mindful, under the blood's drowsy humming,
Of will that gropes for structure; nonetheless
Not unmindful of the madness without,
The madness within - the book of reason
Slammed open, slammed shut

I only know things seem and are not good.

-from Nightwalker by Thomas Kinsella (1968)

Fatal Horophagia in Mayo

JIMMY [entirely convinced] : It's a fright surely. I knew a party was kicked in the head by a red mare, and he went killing horses a great while, till he eat the insides of a clock and died after.

-from The Playboy of the Western World by J.M. Synge (1905-7)

Beery Swine in Norway

Russell said it would be dark.

Wittgenstein said he hated daylight.

Russell said it would be lonely.

Wittgenstein said he prostituted his mind talking to intelligent people.

Russell said he was mad.

Wittgenstein said God preserve him from sanity.

from The Wittgenstein House (Skjolden) by Alec Finlay

filet O fish for my tortured wife

Art for art's sake, for those who spend all their spare time in front of the television set and tell the newspapers what books they are saving up for the summer even though they then don't find time to read them, and over the Christmas holidays relax an evening or two with good literature? I'm not an idiot, for those folks I write when I have something to tell them. Art for art's sake I write for myself and my wife. The importance of an appreciative audience cannot be overemphasized.

from Serious Poems (1997) by Kai Nieminen

David Lynch digs fish, whereas I'm guessing Roger Qbert is a McRib-Mannnn...

Saline Glibbery is swingingly licked by Maltese Marinetti!

Here are three definitions from new-to-me-to-you book, The Poets' Encyclopedia, but only by our own good ol' Dick Higgins! More later? Slamdunk! Better late than ever:-

AESTHETICS - That branch of religion which is concerned with the unseen or unperceivable mysteries of the arts: a speciality of Central Europeans, but an unmentionable topic in North America.

AMERICAN ART - What middle class dropouts make for upper class sponsors when they aren't too busy posing as socialists.

POET - A painter's poor cousin.

Humguf! From too too true to Tony Drago...

The Collapsed Supercilia of Zelda Zonk

In December 1954, Monroe bought a plane ticket under the name 'Zelda Zonk' and abruptly abandoned Hollywood for New York. - from The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe by Sarah Churchwell (of the earnest lantern-jaw, and flailing vociferous hands):-

Daft cunts like Paul Morley

1a) I can't look back like some fans can. I can't get beyond the fact that most of it was shit - most of the people telling me otherwise are daft cunts like Paul Morley and all those other talking heads who make money out of that sort of shit.

from Renegade by Mark E. Smith

V'angry couture of Fernando Pessoa

As the time nears for a sloughing of the outer layers, I am left to ponder to where my new proclivities will orient me, and via what means of carriage. The weather is...

Can anybody save Shambo?

A corpse claps hands like a pebble in a window pane - Benjamin Peret

STOP RACKING YOUR BRAINS

nobody reads poetry nowadays

it doesn't matter if it's good or bad

- Nicanor Parra

Assuming you can get over the initial feeling of queasiness, The Enema Bandit is a genuinely hilarious movie - Jonathan Ross

By the grace of God, we,

King of all chickens The Unclean have fried,

and Grand Duke of all eggs said chickens have laid,

- Vladimir Mayakovsky

The surrealists promised a new world, but they merely delivered 'mysteries of Paris'. They promised a new faith, but did that really mean anything? Oh literature, what petty crimes are committed in your name! - Henri Lefebvre

Here's the truth simply stated. . . bookstores are suffering from a serious crisis of falling sales. - Louis-Ferdinand Celine

People are ashamed, not of the injustices they do, but of those they receive. - Giacomo Leopardi

King Vidiot, Joseph Rutter and Frank Silva Strike Again

Frank Silva, aka Bob from Twin Peaks, is credited as 'Painter' on the film Joysticks from 1983, which receives a score 0f 2.4 on imdb. The reviewer Woodyanders calls it "A misunderstood masterpiece of rancid 80's schlock art." Here are some quotations from the film taken from imdb:-

King Vidiot: [Opens french window and climbs in]
Joseph Rutter: What are you doing here?
King Vidiot: You said to come.
Joseph Rutter: To my office, I meant...
King Vidiot: Don't like offices.
Joseph Rutter: So why didn't you come through the door instead of the window?
King Vidiot: Don't like doors.
Joseph Rutter: Well, come in. Take a seat.
King Vidiot: Don't like seats.

Joseph Rutter: If you're half the man I think you are, ...
King Vidiot: Oh I am, Mr Rutter, I am half the man you think I am!

Joseph Rutter: I think we have something in common.
King Vidiot: So you like to hang around in public lavatories as well?!

And the top 5 plot keywords:-

Arcade / Generation Gap / Fart / Teen Movie / Nerd

You can always trust Frank Silva to pick them for you!

The Quiet Itch of Juliet Stevenson's Tonsured Moustachios

The novel, which is a work of art, exists, not by its resemblances to life, which are forced and material, as a shoe must still consist of leather, but by its immeasurable distance from life, which is designed and significant, and is both the method and the meaning of the work.

from A Humble Remonstrance by Robert Louis Stevenson (1884)

quoted in The Case of the Persevering Maltese: Collected Essays by Harry Mathews (2003)

The Fully Boz Scaggs of Corpulent Christi

FATHER [Almost soundlessly, with mellifluous modesty]: All I wanted to know sir, is if you, as you are now, can truly see yourself... as you see, for example, in the distance of time, what you were at one time, with all the illusions you had back then, with all those things in and around you as they seemed to you then - and which were actually real to you - well then, sir, if you think back to those illusions which now you no longer have, to all those things which now no longer 'seem' to be for you what they 'were' at one time, don't you feel - not necessarily the boards on this stage - but the ground, the very ground beneath your feet give way - when you deduce that in the same way 'this', the way you feel right now, all the reality of today, the way it is, is destined to seem an illusion to you tomorrow?

DIRECTOR [not having understood well and astounded by the specious argument]: And so what? And what are we supposed to conclude from all this?

FATHER: Oh, not a thing, sir.

from Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello (1921)

Freud's a fraud, and Skinner's of no use

"Do you consider yourself sufficiently protected, sufficiently safe?"

A shadow of fear passed over the face of the President.

"What do you think?" he asked with an arrogance tempered by anxiety, an anxiety masked by arrogance.

"I think you will be as protected and as safe as possible so long as you feel unprotected, unsafe."

"Ah," the President said, impressed.

-from Equal Danger by Leonardo Sciascia (1971)

The Chronic Ramping of Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus

What links Albert Pujols, Edgar Renteria and Bartolo Colon?

Sex, Consolation for Misery?

"Grown up? Never- Never!" - Piero Paolo Pasolini (henceforth PPP) 1960

Samuel Beckett and"Mush"

As in, inspiration from the.

Twilight turns from amethyst to deep and deeper blue...

Today's literature: prescriptions written by patients - Karl Krauss

Aspects of the Povel

"Her smile resembles a sneer. I couldn't take it anymore so I shat my pants. The summer of Japanese beetles. Our pyromaniac cousin who I thought was hot burnt an ant with a magnifying glass. 'He's gonna take over your uncle's company someday,' my dad says. Feeling jealousy when my aunt showed me his prom pictures. If only they were there when I caught the sunfish. A man helped me unhook it and released it back into the pond. Its torn palate and perforated hoses on people's lawns.

A paragraph of Povel by Geraldine Kim picked at random.

If you don't do it, nobody will.

Train your brain, pay your rates.

Why the long face?

NATASHA [taking off her shirt]:

Look, I'm absolutely naked,
I have become one long face,
that's how I get into the bathtub.

-Alexander Vvedensky 1931.

That guy there is supposed to take you to the promised land...

and he did, see second half of video below:-

Ally Sheedy's Sweet Left Foot

Ally Sheedy in the parto-necessary lovefest on the films of John Hughes, don't you forget about me, to John Hughes his mself:-

John, thank you for giving me the best role I ever had [talking about The Breakfast Club]. Thank you for showing me what I was capable of. Thank you for watching, for trusting us, for so loving and appreciating every moment. You showed me what a great director can be and can do. I could never even repay you. Thank you for giving me the experience of a lifetime.

I disagree with some of this. First of all, she has the worst role in the film by far. No real smart lines, no great dancing, and a godwaffle makeover scene that almost beclouds the best chamber piece since The Long, the Short and the Tall.

Secondly, just to take the two films before BC and one after, she was provided with, and excelled in, much better roles in Wargames, Oxford Blues and St Elmo's Fire, where it is clear that she has a magnetic screen presence to match and postcede the bests of Broderick, Lowe and assorted Nelsons, Estevezs and McCarthys, that is not tapped at all in BC. Whither the urbane possibilities, the sheckling subalto? Plus the ending, the ending, bending from Bender to subcenterrr.

Much the same magentism, and excelling at the same historical period, Kevin Sheedy:-

Check out the two-finger salute AND the goalkeeper's posing pouch. Sheedy was always described as having a sweet left foot, as if it alone would wine, dine and bed the ladies with its crossing and set-piece abilities. As if it could dextrously (sinisterly) alight the fire of sexual symphonia in the clattering basins of human predonda. Hillary, the family Sheedy doth perumpt me to quip, how bout how I was so much younger then, hand how unforkly I'm older than that new.

As was Ally Sheedy, who was pally not needy, 22/23 at time of BC, already a published author and journalist and who had failed an audition for Ringwald's part in Sixteen Candles, where she had turned up with two black eyes. She also later turned down Kelly McGillis's part in Top Gun, and became addicted to sleeping pills during a relationship with a Bon Jovi guitarist.

Anthony Michael Hall coits on Ally Sheedy- "Ally had such an aura. She loves books, old music, Bob Dylan [see]. At the time [BC filming], she was a big fan of Edie Sedgwick and the whole Warhol period. She was kind of ahead of herself in her eclectic palette of tastes. Ally, to this day, is like an older sister to me" [all this from the book Brat Pack Confidential].

But Anthony MH himself had the most mamazing development. From the geek and the nerd, he became the bully and the fug (later nonentity on SF channel) in many films, as soon as 1990's Edward Scissorhands. I feel a great kinship to this pattern (minus nonentitial), the parital path of another hero, Morrissey slightly, to beefcake bruiser.

Everybody loves chocolate, and the distance from tip of chin to tip of nose, is a challenge to the best of us, hungry hungry hippos borne back ceaselessly into repaste. And Mildred had a cute face, but was no actress, so what beans, Mr Beans?

Depressed by soup

What is not about exclusion?

That's four day old fish. I'm not buying it.

Enlarge to "Behold: A Depressed Duck".

Next post- why Harry should be king NOW!

Franka Potential if you Famke Yachances

Grief by Georges Bataille

Grief

grief

grief

oh grief

oh grief

oh my tears of sap

my saffron dick

oh to pull down my pants

and piss myself.

Daily Denby

The Climate by Edwin Denby (1948)

I myself like the climate of New York
I see it in the air up between the street
You use a worn-down cafeteria fork
But the climate you don't use stays fresh and neat.
Even we people who walk about in it
We have to submit to wear too, get muddy,
Air keeps changing but the nose ceases to fit
And sleekness is used up, and the end's shoddy.
Monday, you're down; Tuesday, dying seems a fuss
An adult looks new in the weather's motion
The sky is in the streets with the trucks and us,
Stands awhile, then lifts across land and ocean.
We can take it for granted that here we're home
In our record climate I look pleased or glum.

But you have to hear it in Denby's voice for full effect

Read all about him here

Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain

Often I really want to buy into Iain Sinclair- he's so bald and referential. I always try, and then get so far, and feel a bit ashamed of my own world's lack of filthy texture and phatic stains. It's kind of the opposite of Emerson- it makes me feel too clean, healthy and optimistic. I don't smoke, and I don't really drink, not as a lifestyle, and I only collect books and references with the delusion perhaps of their utility, rather than as a enervating obsession. Instead I guess I should be looking through the flood damaged detritus of somewhere grimy like, I don't know, Hartlepool (if it floods there), to find that one lost fabled and besmirched copy of a Blake plate where he draws the map of London showing the plague pit where he buried his mojo. And then find that it is under the Olympic Stadium, but has been found and is being installed beneath the Millennium Wheel using lottery money. Or some such Robert Frippery.

I think the following sentence, the last in the introduction to his supremely depressing anthology, "London: City of Disappearances", sums up why I can only take Sinclair in small doses:_

'At the finish, even the cabinet of curiosities will betray us; all we can ever know is the shape the missing object leaves in the dust - and the stories, the lies we assemble to disguise the pain of an absence we cannot define.'

I can see how it's trying to be all Gatsby-ish, 'So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past', and I am extremely partial to a bit of Gatsby-business, but come on, give me a break. I can't let such unadulterated miserrimus win the day. What about Smarties? These will never betray us. And what about the stories of Dick King-Smith? Are these really there to disguise the pain of an absence we cannot define? Please, Iain, let me have something as a sop, I worked hard in school, and was a good boy to my mummy...

Also, it is funny how every writer in the anthology starts to sound like Sinclair, there is totally not one drop of contrast. And I love a drop of contrast. Everybody is bookish and disappointed, a mage of wistful and bitter anti-nostalgic nostalgia.

Much better is the slewish glut of Russian absurdist satire that I am reading. Here, in the middle of the morass of human crapness is a precious and graspable seam (as all seams should be) of the dark humour which I find lacking in Sinclair's right-on spoddy superciliousness.

But to end more aptly with some Edward Thomas:-

Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain
On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me
Remembering again that I shall die
And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks
For washing me cleaner than I have been
Since I was born into this solitude.
Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon:
But here I pray that none whom once I loved
Is dying to-night or lying still awake
Solitary, listening to the rain,
Either in pain or thus in sympathy
Helpless among the living and the dead,
Like a cold water among broken reeds,
Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff,
Like me who have no love which this wild rain
Has not dissolved except the love of death,
If love it be for what is perfect and
Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint.

But at least Thomas had the decency to be at the front in WW1 writing this, not in bijou Hackney buying fruit on Columbia Road. Still, to conclude, I am a big fan of Sinky, and will continue to be until he is forgotten and I can rediscover him.

"For Blake the exegete is an "Angel", a "Philosopher". Either pitiful or presumptuous in Blake's eyes, such exegetes lift intellectual candles before the suns of vision"

Cumdurgeonly Urgency

A rhopalic is a form of wordplay named after the Greek word for club, which is thin at one end, and thick at the other.

A rhopalic by letter:-

I do not know where family doctors acquired illegibly perplexing handwriting; nevertheless, extraordinary pharmaceutical intellectuality, counterbalancing indecipherability, transcendentalizes intercommunications' incomprehensibleness.

A rhopalic by syllable:-

Some people completely misunderstand adminstrative extemporization- idiosyncratical antianthropomorphism undenominationalizing politico-ecclesiastical honorificabilitudinity.

Gulp.

laziness is a warm gun

Language, but no words...

in living color....

the anchorite cockroach- wham!

For my hirsute homunculus pal Dr Pot, here follows an 'Incidence' of Daniil Kharms, who is not only my favourite looking author, but a mighty great writer too...

The Plummeting Old Woman

A certain old woman, out of excessive curiosity, fell out of a window, plummeted to the ground, and was smashed to pieces.

Another old woman leaned out of the window and began looking at the remains of the first one, but she also, out of excessive curiosity, fell out of the window, plummeted to the ground and was smashed to pieces.

Then a third old woman plummeted from the window, then a fourth, then a fifth.

By the time a sixth old woman had plummeted down, I was fed up watching them, and went off to Mal'tseviskiy Market where, it was said, a knitted shawl had been given to a certain blind man.

THE END

[Blogging post-scriptum:- suddenly made me think of the style of Gilliam's Python animations, with their old 'Pepperpot' women. But Kharms was writing in the 1920s. Eventually he was censored, and only allowed to write children's stories and teach. He couldn't stop with the dastardly absurdist satire though, and died in a gulag in 1941.]

Valency Debate

Important news from Alexandre Dumas:-

"Cornelius kissed the tips of her fingers passionately. Was this because the hand held one of the offsets of the great black tulip? Was it because the hand was Rosa's hand? Those wiser than ourselves must find the answer."

Potlatch of another mouth

I in the of a enough to a. Much like a from a, but I like the of, in the very very and very. The and my like its my with the every around me.

I stood naked in the middle of a corn field tall enough to swallow a person well over six feet. Much like a scene from a superman movie, but I appear nothing like the man of steel, in fact image the absolute opposite very short, very bold, and very round. The wind breeze, gusting and tickling my toffee like skin, its sweet smell devouring my nostrils with sensational aroma, the bright sun light making every thing around me yellowishly stunning.