March 2010
19 posts
1 tag
Clutter & glut
We are the “affluent society” of such opulence that our abundance is not measured by accumulation, but only by discard.
In the tonnage of junk, trash, clutter and glut is the visible fulfilment and climax of our social power.
The proof of our wealth is not in what we hoard, but in what we waste, how much we relegate to the garbage heap.
In the logic and dynamism of our superabundance,...
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'the Versailles government could give the natives...
‘Upon lifting a stone one discovers all kinds of things, coral flowers or debris; beings who put themselves in a place of shelter. Among them a half-dead octopus opens its human eye. May he too return to the waters, this monster with a strange gaze.’
Where for her beloved Hugo the creature’s weird - the animal’s obdurate refusal to decode - foments ecstatic cephalophobic...
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Three stooges
What exactly have the Lobbygate Three done wrong?
This question should not get in the way of human reaction to their entrapped boasting, their excitement at the prospect of greasing wheels for lots of money. A minute must be granted for us to rock in spasms and waves of bile, the epic gusts of hate and nausea that such simpering, swaggering, preening occasions. That is natural and nothing...
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‘chasser vermine’
‘gully root’
‘douvant-douvant’
AKAs of Petiveria alliacea
“Spring at last, and there is a strong smell of burning plastic along the ring...”
– M. John Harrison, Climbers
Watching God
‘Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.’
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
Well. In pigment just perhaps. Ignore the bombast foregrounded and the yawing smokestacked tug heading away may have some wishes on board.
Every man’s wish (women’s, Hurston exempts) might plausibly be bobbing westward here, too.
But something changes when...
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You know who should totally be punished? For opposing demands to do unpaid extra work? Teachers working in deprived and low-income areas. You know who should totally support their mass firing? In the face of all opposition from their students? The President of the United States. There can surely be absolutely no better use of his time, nor anyone more deserving of a spanking.
?
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Essential(ist) oil
‘Aromatherapists...
“I suppose any note, no matter how sour, is a song if you hold on to it long...”
– DeWitt Bodeen, The Curse of the Cat People (screenplay)
A heuristic of interpellated writing.
‘Alice looked on with great interest as the King took an enormous memorandum-book out of his pocket, and began writing. A sudden thought struck her, and she took hold of the end of the pencil, which came some way over his shoulder, and began writing for him.
‘The poor King looked puzzled and unhappy, and struggled with the pencil for some time without saying anything; but Alice...
It’s all ‘occupied people’ this and ‘decades of dispossession’ that. What about US? Who will speak out for the real victims? What about our pain?
Various conceptions of personal space.
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Further proof were it needed
Chapter 1 - Spider as bad genre
For Bataille, the formless is a spider.
’[F]ormless is not only an adjective having a given meaning, but a term that serves to bring things down in the world, generally requiring that each thing have its form. What it designates has no rights in any sense and gets itself squashed everywhere, like a spider or an earthworm. … [A]ffirming that the universe...
“You are in a degenerate, chaotic outpost of Heaven.”
– Wyndham Lewis, Monstre Gai
3 tags
“[T]he doors clacked and trembled, splintering and reforming until they resembled...”
– Simon Ings, City of the Iron Fish