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)