What is I fighting for?
I fought the law but the law one,
I fought the law I fought for fun
I fought the law but the law won.
I fought the law but the
Why is the walrus such a bore?
I fought the law but the law one,
I fought the law I fought for fun
I fought the law but the law won.
I fought the law but the
What am I but a metaphor?
I fought the law but the law one,
I fought the law I fought for fun
I fought the law but the law won.
I fought the law but the
Monday, November 24, 2003
The Future is a Genre
(and therefore iterable)
On Solyaris (dir. Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972, based on the novel by Stanislaw Lem).
Notes
Kris is a psychologist charged with considering the possible conclusion of the Solaris space project. Before departing he meets Berton, who was ejected from the mission after reporting on all sorts of queer visions while on a mission to rescue a fellow cosmonaut who had been lost on the planet. Berton has some insight, hardly communicable to someone with "the mind of an accountant," as he claims Kris has. He urges Kris not to recommend bombarding the Solaris -- it would not be a moral thing to do, Berton claims.
Here are two summaries from http://www.imdb.com/:
Summary by Dan Ellis:
> The Solaris mission has established a base on a planet that appears to
> host some kind of intelligence, but the details are hazy and very secret.
> After the mysterious demise of one of the three scientists on the base,
> the main character is sent out to replace him. He finds the station
> run-down and the two remaining scientists cold and secretive. When he also
> encounters his wife who has been dead for seven years, he begins to
> appreciate the baffling nature of the alien intelligence.
Summary by Philip Brubaker:
> This film probes man's thoughts and conscience, as it follows a
> psychologist who is sent to a space station situated over the mysterious
> Solaris Ocean. The two other scientists there tell the psychologist of
> strange occurrences in the station, and the Ocean's eerie ability to
> materialize their thoughts. After being in the station for a while, the
> psychologist finds himself becoming very attached to it's alternate
> reality...
After a short while at the station, Kris meets an apparition of his late wife, who had committed suicide after he left her. She is very much flesh and blood. They watch a film from his childhood that he had brought with from earth. In the film, there are images of Kris' mother in a fur coat.
The issue of "Khari"'s true identity is further complicated as the head scientist of the station, Dr. Sartorius, demonstrate that she does not have blood in her veins, and that can not be killed. He is propagating bombarding the planet, as that must be the source of the cosmonauts' delusions. Kris, who originally championed the same solution to the problem of Solaris, now has second thoughts. Nothing Sartorius says can alter the fact the he loves his wife.
Dr. Snaut, the third cosmonaut on the station, has invited his colleague to his birthday party, to be held in the library, the only space in the station without windows. It is decorated with all sorts of contraptions of European High Culture. Kris brings Khari to the festivities, which Dr. Sartorius does not approve of. Dr. Snaut recommends Kris not to worry about the bookkeeping of science, but rather to delve in texts that will provide understanding, such as Don Quixote. He opens the book in front of Kris and Khari, and quotes from Sancos Pancha's Ode to Sleep:
Dr. Sartorius reminds Kris that he is a scientist, and that that entails certain obligatory relations to objects of observation:
This scene is followed by a confrontation between Dr. Sartorius and Khari and the exchange of some harsh words:
Notions
(and therefore iterable)
On Solyaris (dir. Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972, based on the novel by Stanislaw Lem).
Notes
Kris is a psychologist charged with considering the possible conclusion of the Solaris space project. Before departing he meets Berton, who was ejected from the mission after reporting on all sorts of queer visions while on a mission to rescue a fellow cosmonaut who had been lost on the planet. Berton has some insight, hardly communicable to someone with "the mind of an accountant," as he claims Kris has. He urges Kris not to recommend bombarding the Solaris -- it would not be a moral thing to do, Berton claims.
Here are two summaries from http://www.imdb.com/:
Summary by Dan Ellis:
> The Solaris mission has established a base on a planet that appears to
> host some kind of intelligence, but the details are hazy and very secret.
> After the mysterious demise of one of the three scientists on the base,
> the main character is sent out to replace him. He finds the station
> run-down and the two remaining scientists cold and secretive. When he also
> encounters his wife who has been dead for seven years, he begins to
> appreciate the baffling nature of the alien intelligence.
Summary by Philip Brubaker:
> This film probes man's thoughts and conscience, as it follows a
> psychologist who is sent to a space station situated over the mysterious
> Solaris Ocean. The two other scientists there tell the psychologist of
> strange occurrences in the station, and the Ocean's eerie ability to
> materialize their thoughts. After being in the station for a while, the
> psychologist finds himself becoming very attached to it's alternate
> reality...
After a short while at the station, Kris meets an apparition of his late wife, who had committed suicide after he left her. She is very much flesh and blood. They watch a film from his childhood that he had brought with from earth. In the film, there are images of Kris' mother in a fur coat.
In KRIS' cabin: KHARI watching herself in a mirror.
KHARI
I don't even know my own self. Who am I? As soon as I close my eyes I can't recall what my face looks like. Can you?
KRIS
What?
KHARI
Do you know who you are?
KRIS
Yes, all humans do.
KHARI
Ah... (pause) That woman in the fur coat, she hated me.
KRIS
That's your imagination. That woman died long ago, before we even met.
KHARI
I remember her very clearly. What makes you deny it? I tell you I do remember. I came over for tea, and she told me to leave the house. So I left at once, I remember it very well. And what happened after that?
KRIS
After that I went away and that was the last time we ever saw each other.
KHARI
Where did you go?
KRIS
To another city.
KHARI
Why?
KRIS
I was transferred.
KHARI
But why didn't you take me with you?
KRIS
It was you who refused to come.
KHARI
Ah... Yes, now I remember.
The issue of "Khari"'s true identity is further complicated as the head scientist of the station, Dr. Sartorius, demonstrate that she does not have blood in her veins, and that can not be killed. He is propagating bombarding the planet, as that must be the source of the cosmonauts' delusions. Kris, who originally championed the same solution to the problem of Solaris, now has second thoughts. Nothing Sartorius says can alter the fact the he loves his wife.
Dr. Snaut, the third cosmonaut on the station, has invited his colleague to his birthday party, to be held in the library, the only space in the station without windows. It is decorated with all sorts of contraptions of European High Culture. Kris brings Khari to the festivities, which Dr. Sartorius does not approve of. Dr. Snaut recommends Kris not to worry about the bookkeeping of science, but rather to delve in texts that will provide understanding, such as Don Quixote. He opens the book in front of Kris and Khari, and quotes from Sancos Pancha's Ode to Sleep:
Senor, I know only one thing, and this is when I... (pause) and that is when I sleep I know no sadness, no fear, no hope, no blessing, no work. Praise be the gentle sleep's creator. That currency [...] has only one defect for it lacks too much of death.
Dr. Sartorius reminds Kris that he is a scientist, and that that entails certain obligatory relations to objects of observation:
In the library.
DR. SARTORIUS
At least I know why I'm here. I am here to work. Nature created man so that he might gain knowledge. (Slams his hand holding his glasses in the table so the glasses fall out of their frame. Continues calmly.) In his ceaseless march to truth man is condemned to knowledge. The rest is of no consequence. (pause) If you will permit me to inquire about a colleague, exactly what are you doing on Solaris?
KRIS
What a question.
DR. SARTORIUS
It can't be your work that brought you here. Except for your trust with your ex-spouse absolutely nothing here seems to interest you. Your time is spent in bed discussing scientific ideals. And I'm supposed to appreciate the great job you're doing. I fear you've lost contact with reality. If you ask me you're plain lazy.
KRIS
Oh, stop it.
This scene is followed by a confrontation between Dr. Sartorius and Khari and the exchange of some harsh words:
KHARI
I'm not finished. I'm a woman! Treat me with consideration.
DR. SARTORIUS
Woman? How can you say that? You're not even a human being. Try to understand that, if in some way you are capable of understanding. KHARI is dead. She doesn't exist. As for you, you're only a reproduction, a mechanical repetition of the form, a copy from a matrix.
KHARI
Yes. Perhaps, yes. But I... I have become a human being. I can feel just as deeply as any of you, and I feel pain.
Notions
- How we imagine the future is structured by the genre of future (cf. software companies' etc. scenarios of "the future", Sid Meyer's Civilization prominently; the dependecy of Luc Besson's Fifth Element on Ridley Scott's Blade Runner etc.).
- We know what we're coming from by not where we're going. (Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.)
- On teaching Aristotle's Ars Poetica: In some elementary textbooks it is the claimed that we can imagine all sorts of odd curves in a drama (i.e., that the drama doesn't have to be structured as exposition, increasing tension, crisis, decreasing tension, climax/catastrophe, but that the order may be different or some other such change). In other words, these books are inventing Aristotle. But what's the purpose of the curve? It is as if these textbooks assume (with Boileu) that it was a prescriptive tool?
Tuesday, November 18, 2003
“Don’t freak out, now.” It’s a terrifying moment after the OS starts up and I wait motionless and for the mother board to finish her processes. I still have the resolution to move the mouse so as to cause the pointer to mark the white square with the green “R” at the top right corner of the screen, but the enforced period of impassivity inflicts an increasing sense of doubt. My mind starts wandering, thinking of the Spider game, and, as a result of it, the man dressed in a Spider Man costume in London, fighting for his rights to custody over his daughter, which, again, causes me to think of Robert Bly and the Howl of the Wild. Bly had this idea that Men needed to Get Out More. “If we’d only get out more,” he reasoned, “we would become milder characters, more gentle in our manners and cetera.” So what he did, like, you know, what he’d do, kind of, was to take a bunch of guys into the forest, you know, like, kind of, and Howl. This procedure was undertaken in order to bring the Male Id in junction with the Male Ego, hence manufacturing a kind of sutured response in the subject, abnegating the effect of the Mirror Stage and the Symbolic Order, as it were.
(All these observations must be meticulously noted in the Journal, so that future biographers won’t miss (out on) all the clever theoretical observations I was actually undertaking while playing, say, Civilization or Age of Emires. The latter of which being, of course, a Microsoft game. Let it also be said now and henceforth that I am, also and as a matter of fact, aware that one shouldn’t start a paragraph with a parenthetical remark, I mean, that’s just not on. But let US stick to the moot point, which are that Bill Gates, while being a nasty sort of guy, being up to all sorts of wickedness, I am sure, is not the cause of his blame. Or to blame for his cause, for that matter. Mr Bill, as we call him here in the Colonies, should not be killed (terrible movie, by the way, not even boring, fell asleep after an hour, good sleep though, wish he’d turn down the volume a bit on Vol II, but -- maybe he won’t --), but seen as what he is -- a lackey in a white shirt. He’s got his little Mansion on the Hill, now, with all kinds of nice gadgets running around greeting him, “Hi, Bill,” when he gets home at night, usually late, ‘cause he’s got to work Long Hours at the Office, sincerly, and these robots are perfect replicas of the dolls in Ridley Scott’s house. (Note to Big Other: Please make a Cultured Reference note.)
All articulation is directed to a future self, the self of the Other, a becoming self, never there in-it(’s)-self. (Derrida scholars, et so on.)
But, yeah, I was talking about Mr Bill. A moot sort of wickedness. Thing is that he’s extremely successful at what he claims to be doing, he would be considered the cream of the puff to the dudes in his kind of social field. (Bourdieu-scholars, take note.) He’s the cherry on the icing, the cream of the doughnut, the paste of the cut of the [relatively new, at least in it’s ideological formation] managerial class. The logic of accumulation goes: I want more money. Simple, really. Thing is that it’s exponential (yes, Paul Stone, you can calculate it’s “growth”), and, hence, and because of it, if the capitalist want 10 Norwegian Kroner return on his “loan” today, you can be sure he’ll demand 100 Kroner tomorrow, and you’d better deliver, or he’ll bump you down to the previous level. (Very few participants stay on ‘till the end in this game, as you may appreciate.) Here is the major difference between a neo-liberal logic of The Economy and the socialists ditto [and it is to be noted that neo-liberal economic ideology has now become part of the (neo-)conservative stock, and, hence, and because of it, a conservative virtue, and, because of it, indicating both the need to rearticulate the ideological juncture of this kind of logic, it’s ideological home, so to speak, and to reassess the strategies outlined in the work of Pierre Bourdieu, founded, as it is, on the linkage of stragegies of the “neo-liberal” at his moment (downsizing, privatisation, globalisation, etc.), which are now associated with conservative political movements]:
* We are eating a cake, but each of us wants more to eat every day (in an exponential fashion). This is not a problem, dude, because the cake keeps growing, courtesy of our magical system, called (fan fare) Capitalism (in it’s neo-liberal/conservative ideological articulation).
* Or: We are sharing a cake in such a way that a few (and they are decreasing in numbers) get to eat more and more of the cake (in an exponential manner) and, even if it was the case that the cake is growing, the growth of their increasing demands are outstripping any possible growth of the cake, and, as a consequence, the vast majority of eaters have to eat LESS every day. If, however, the majority of cake eaters would realize their common situation, they would grab their forks in a stabbing motion (and, yes, that is a brutal metaphor -- there is another version, the one I tend to favour, in which the greedy cake monsters -- they’re kind of like Mr Kreosot of Monty Python fame -- take up arms to force the majority of cake eaters to eat less, and the majority must take up arms to DEFEND their selves (hence the prevalence of the term Defence force as signifying the armed wing of the state, as if it was never used against state’s OWN POPULATION)).
Structuralist Marxists would say that the state under capitalism serves as the armed wing of the Kreosots of thishere world. It is myths (in it’s collective form also referred to as Ideology, dominantly in the singular) that masks this Reality. If people (the vast majority of increasingly starving cake eaters) would only see past the veil, turn their faces from the back wall of their cave and turn to See The Light, they would be transposed from the realm of the fake to the realm of the real, the realm of darkness to the realm of light. It is, however, and according to Zizek, not that easy.
It is, actually, impossible to imagine a state in which reality could ever be unmediated. [Anarchists would say that that is because we need to Abolish State.] Because, if notions like Meaning and Reality are to have any Social Implications, they must by constructed as matters of iterativity. If I want Meaning to signify ‘Terrorists are really Wicked People’, I may do so, and it may be meaningful to me in a system(at)ic manner, but not if my systems are screwed up, see what I mean. Meaning can’t mean whatever I want it to mean, if I want it to mean anything to anyone but me. But that doesn’t mean that the word meaning can’t have more than one meaning. So, hence and in other words, it is not possible to imagine a social meaning without some sort of structure, or mediation, or iterativity.
* Iterativity implies structure.
But, says the post-structuralists, the fact that there must be structure for us to communicate, doesn’t mean that it can only be One Structure, now, does it? I could coomunicate with Tom at this moment, but not with Dick and Tracy, and with, say, Dick at the next moment, but not with Tom nor Tracy, so as to imply that there could be different ways of communicating with Tim, Dick and Tracy (or Jerry, or whatever). But oh, squeek the structuralists with their grumpy old-men’s voices, “but at the Deep Level, young man, and this is something you will realize when you Grow Up (and See the Light etc.), all structures are really One, the One Deep Structure. And if you try to take that Faith away from us, vee veel Cut Off Your Chonson.” Anyway, this is still an ongoing debate in Certain Circles.
Which is a long way of saying that “You don’t have to be deep to be structured.”
(All these observations must be meticulously noted in the Journal, so that future biographers won’t miss (out on) all the clever theoretical observations I was actually undertaking while playing, say, Civilization or Age of Emires. The latter of which being, of course, a Microsoft game. Let it also be said now and henceforth that I am, also and as a matter of fact, aware that one shouldn’t start a paragraph with a parenthetical remark, I mean, that’s just not on. But let US stick to the moot point, which are that Bill Gates, while being a nasty sort of guy, being up to all sorts of wickedness, I am sure, is not the cause of his blame. Or to blame for his cause, for that matter. Mr Bill, as we call him here in the Colonies, should not be killed (terrible movie, by the way, not even boring, fell asleep after an hour, good sleep though, wish he’d turn down the volume a bit on Vol II, but -- maybe he won’t --), but seen as what he is -- a lackey in a white shirt. He’s got his little Mansion on the Hill, now, with all kinds of nice gadgets running around greeting him, “Hi, Bill,” when he gets home at night, usually late, ‘cause he’s got to work Long Hours at the Office, sincerly, and these robots are perfect replicas of the dolls in Ridley Scott’s house. (Note to Big Other: Please make a Cultured Reference note.)
All articulation is directed to a future self, the self of the Other, a becoming self, never there in-it(’s)-self. (Derrida scholars, et so on.)
But, yeah, I was talking about Mr Bill. A moot sort of wickedness. Thing is that he’s extremely successful at what he claims to be doing, he would be considered the cream of the puff to the dudes in his kind of social field. (Bourdieu-scholars, take note.) He’s the cherry on the icing, the cream of the doughnut, the paste of the cut of the [relatively new, at least in it’s ideological formation] managerial class. The logic of accumulation goes: I want more money. Simple, really. Thing is that it’s exponential (yes, Paul Stone, you can calculate it’s “growth”), and, hence, and because of it, if the capitalist want 10 Norwegian Kroner return on his “loan” today, you can be sure he’ll demand 100 Kroner tomorrow, and you’d better deliver, or he’ll bump you down to the previous level. (Very few participants stay on ‘till the end in this game, as you may appreciate.) Here is the major difference between a neo-liberal logic of The Economy and the socialists ditto [and it is to be noted that neo-liberal economic ideology has now become part of the (neo-)conservative stock, and, hence, and because of it, a conservative virtue, and, because of it, indicating both the need to rearticulate the ideological juncture of this kind of logic, it’s ideological home, so to speak, and to reassess the strategies outlined in the work of Pierre Bourdieu, founded, as it is, on the linkage of stragegies of the “neo-liberal” at his moment (downsizing, privatisation, globalisation, etc.), which are now associated with conservative political movements]:
* We are eating a cake, but each of us wants more to eat every day (in an exponential fashion). This is not a problem, dude, because the cake keeps growing, courtesy of our magical system, called (fan fare) Capitalism (in it’s neo-liberal/conservative ideological articulation).
* Or: We are sharing a cake in such a way that a few (and they are decreasing in numbers) get to eat more and more of the cake (in an exponential manner) and, even if it was the case that the cake is growing, the growth of their increasing demands are outstripping any possible growth of the cake, and, as a consequence, the vast majority of eaters have to eat LESS every day. If, however, the majority of cake eaters would realize their common situation, they would grab their forks in a stabbing motion (and, yes, that is a brutal metaphor -- there is another version, the one I tend to favour, in which the greedy cake monsters -- they’re kind of like Mr Kreosot of Monty Python fame -- take up arms to force the majority of cake eaters to eat less, and the majority must take up arms to DEFEND their selves (hence the prevalence of the term Defence force as signifying the armed wing of the state, as if it was never used against state’s OWN POPULATION)).
Structuralist Marxists would say that the state under capitalism serves as the armed wing of the Kreosots of thishere world. It is myths (in it’s collective form also referred to as Ideology, dominantly in the singular) that masks this Reality. If people (the vast majority of increasingly starving cake eaters) would only see past the veil, turn their faces from the back wall of their cave and turn to See The Light, they would be transposed from the realm of the fake to the realm of the real, the realm of darkness to the realm of light. It is, however, and according to Zizek, not that easy.
It is, actually, impossible to imagine a state in which reality could ever be unmediated. [Anarchists would say that that is because we need to Abolish State.] Because, if notions like Meaning and Reality are to have any Social Implications, they must by constructed as matters of iterativity. If I want Meaning to signify ‘Terrorists are really Wicked People’, I may do so, and it may be meaningful to me in a system(at)ic manner, but not if my systems are screwed up, see what I mean. Meaning can’t mean whatever I want it to mean, if I want it to mean anything to anyone but me. But that doesn’t mean that the word meaning can’t have more than one meaning. So, hence and in other words, it is not possible to imagine a social meaning without some sort of structure, or mediation, or iterativity.
* Iterativity implies structure.
But, says the post-structuralists, the fact that there must be structure for us to communicate, doesn’t mean that it can only be One Structure, now, does it? I could coomunicate with Tom at this moment, but not with Dick and Tracy, and with, say, Dick at the next moment, but not with Tom nor Tracy, so as to imply that there could be different ways of communicating with Tim, Dick and Tracy (or Jerry, or whatever). But oh, squeek the structuralists with their grumpy old-men’s voices, “but at the Deep Level, young man, and this is something you will realize when you Grow Up (and See the Light etc.), all structures are really One, the One Deep Structure. And if you try to take that Faith away from us, vee veel Cut Off Your Chonson.” Anyway, this is still an ongoing debate in Certain Circles.
Which is a long way of saying that “You don’t have to be deep to be structured.”
Wednesday, November 12, 2003
“Watching Suy Kui act is deeply disturbing,” Diderik said. “She is a seemingly seemless display of trenchant display of phallic imagery.”
We were seated in the Spectre of Kabool, drinking green leaf tea and chewing chiabattas.
“Burp,” said I. “I’ll get another pot. You want one?”
When I returned, Diderik was still staring into space, in exactly the same posture as I’d left him. I put the cup of tea in front of him.
“So, what else have you been up to lately,” I asked.
“Well, it’s uncomfortable to work for TRU. I mean, I was used to the restrictions in the tried and tested EyeRak system, but there’s a whole different set of pre and pro scriptions now. I can’t go into them. I mean, they’re classified for one,” Diderik said.
“No, I meant what have you been up to after Sinsemilla left.”
“Oh, that,” Diderik said, but I know he merely pretended not to be bothered. It was a secret, albeit public, scandal that Diderik’s compulsive wife, 20 years his junior, had left him for a bouncer at the TRU Executive’s Club. She passed me in the rush the other day, driving a red BMW convertible. Diderik was still driving his hammered old Trabant. It was parked across the street from the bar we were patronizing, with a coating of white tape around the left side mirror, probably put there to keep it from falling apart, standing out from the grime and rust of the battered vehicle.
“No, listen, I mean that
‘I’m not comfortable in this corporation,
but this corporation has made itself comfortable in me!’”
“Stop quoting Ekelöf and get to the point, I said, waving my hand vigorously, as if to scare away some fishy flies from his discourse.
“No, I mean that Suy Kui offers no resistance to the imaginary. She’s the terrifying spectral image of phallic desire.”
“As in Natural?” I said. “Nonsense. What do you know about Hardcore?”
“Well, I know it was a boook written by Linda Williams, in which she discourses upon the porn genre.”
In the book, Diderik said, Williams elaborates the concept of visual spectacle, using at is a vehicle to explain the prevalence of the cumshot as an ocular gimmick. The cumshot constitutes the high point of a hand-job sequel, usually around 15-20 minutes in duration. The sequel typically opens with some narrative pretension: a lightly clad sorority girl gets a visit from the post-man, or horny house-person is having one’s cable fixed, and so on. Then her step-sister or room-mate emerges from the shower or bed-room, preferable in the nude, and the action begins. This sequence is tightly scripted, and, finally, ending in the infamous, and already-mentioned, cumshot. What Suy Kui had managed in her work, Diderik said, was no less than the most perfected embodiment of the phallic imagining to date.
“It’s brutal. You never know if you’re watching a machine or a person.”
“A personal machine, perhaps,” I said, in an, admittedly failed, attempt to be witty.
“Or a mechanical person,” Diderik explicated, while fishing out another cigarette from his packet with his hand-implants. He’d stopped wearing the skin cover, and the metal screws holding his hands together were on display in their cruel and senseless honesty.
We were seated in the Spectre of Kabool, drinking green leaf tea and chewing chiabattas.
“Burp,” said I. “I’ll get another pot. You want one?”
When I returned, Diderik was still staring into space, in exactly the same posture as I’d left him. I put the cup of tea in front of him.
“So, what else have you been up to lately,” I asked.
“Well, it’s uncomfortable to work for TRU. I mean, I was used to the restrictions in the tried and tested EyeRak system, but there’s a whole different set of pre and pro scriptions now. I can’t go into them. I mean, they’re classified for one,” Diderik said.
“No, I meant what have you been up to after Sinsemilla left.”
“Oh, that,” Diderik said, but I know he merely pretended not to be bothered. It was a secret, albeit public, scandal that Diderik’s compulsive wife, 20 years his junior, had left him for a bouncer at the TRU Executive’s Club. She passed me in the rush the other day, driving a red BMW convertible. Diderik was still driving his hammered old Trabant. It was parked across the street from the bar we were patronizing, with a coating of white tape around the left side mirror, probably put there to keep it from falling apart, standing out from the grime and rust of the battered vehicle.
“No, listen, I mean that
‘I’m not comfortable in this corporation,
but this corporation has made itself comfortable in me!’”
“Stop quoting Ekelöf and get to the point, I said, waving my hand vigorously, as if to scare away some fishy flies from his discourse.
“No, I mean that Suy Kui offers no resistance to the imaginary. She’s the terrifying spectral image of phallic desire.”
“As in Natural?” I said. “Nonsense. What do you know about Hardcore?”
“Well, I know it was a boook written by Linda Williams, in which she discourses upon the porn genre.”
In the book, Diderik said, Williams elaborates the concept of visual spectacle, using at is a vehicle to explain the prevalence of the cumshot as an ocular gimmick. The cumshot constitutes the high point of a hand-job sequel, usually around 15-20 minutes in duration. The sequel typically opens with some narrative pretension: a lightly clad sorority girl gets a visit from the post-man, or horny house-person is having one’s cable fixed, and so on. Then her step-sister or room-mate emerges from the shower or bed-room, preferable in the nude, and the action begins. This sequence is tightly scripted, and, finally, ending in the infamous, and already-mentioned, cumshot. What Suy Kui had managed in her work, Diderik said, was no less than the most perfected embodiment of the phallic imagining to date.
“It’s brutal. You never know if you’re watching a machine or a person.”
“A personal machine, perhaps,” I said, in an, admittedly failed, attempt to be witty.
“Or a mechanical person,” Diderik explicated, while fishing out another cigarette from his packet with his hand-implants. He’d stopped wearing the skin cover, and the metal screws holding his hands together were on display in their cruel and senseless honesty.
Tuesday, November 11, 2003
It was a strange time in the history of EyeRak Inc. After many years under the fraternal leadership of Comrade Mistos, followed by the attentive command of General Mistos, and the glorious paternity of Cardinal Mistos (the same Mistos after converversions), the competing Terror "R" US, ok!? had finally managed to wring control of the corporation after an aggressive knife-to-the-throat attack on EyeRak shares. It had installed its leader, Managing Director Sotsim, who persistently declined to comment rumors that TRU planned to downsize all "non-essential" staff and replace them with robots supplied the mother corporation.
Primarily, though, it was expected that TRU was interested in the rights to important mineral assets under the ownership of EyeRak Inc. It was a matter of a number of gold and diamond mines in the Accessories Division of the corporation, and the Spring of Muses, an ancient site of pilgrimate for poets on the TRU payroll, who would now have free or a significantly reduced price on access to the shrine, which would enable TRU to cut costs and put more money in the Future Fund, a large vault of money only accessible to the Inner Trust, a cabal of Managing Directors of the Clan Chosen by Mammon.
It was a strange time, indeed, for employees of EyeRak Inc. With the spectre of mass firings looming, they had adopted a number of strategies to better their own chances in the new corporation, however it might be shaped. Some had started writing long, elaborate letters to the new management team, laying out how their husbands were out of work, their daughters lacking the most essential of winter clothing, and how desperately they needed to keep their job. Others would take extreme measures to find out when a manager might stop by their particular part of the corporation, and would then put on their best clothes, and bring a parcel of tea-leaves from their own garden to present the manager as a token of appreciation of and confidence in their leadership. Yet others would make complex plots to undermine the chances of fellow employees in the competition for work in the new corporation. Project papers would accidentaly dissapear in the shredder, memos from junior managers prompting urgent action would get lost, compromising the position of employees considered rejectable by a certain push of fate.
Primarily, though, it was expected that TRU was interested in the rights to important mineral assets under the ownership of EyeRak Inc. It was a matter of a number of gold and diamond mines in the Accessories Division of the corporation, and the Spring of Muses, an ancient site of pilgrimate for poets on the TRU payroll, who would now have free or a significantly reduced price on access to the shrine, which would enable TRU to cut costs and put more money in the Future Fund, a large vault of money only accessible to the Inner Trust, a cabal of Managing Directors of the Clan Chosen by Mammon.
It was a strange time, indeed, for employees of EyeRak Inc. With the spectre of mass firings looming, they had adopted a number of strategies to better their own chances in the new corporation, however it might be shaped. Some had started writing long, elaborate letters to the new management team, laying out how their husbands were out of work, their daughters lacking the most essential of winter clothing, and how desperately they needed to keep their job. Others would take extreme measures to find out when a manager might stop by their particular part of the corporation, and would then put on their best clothes, and bring a parcel of tea-leaves from their own garden to present the manager as a token of appreciation of and confidence in their leadership. Yet others would make complex plots to undermine the chances of fellow employees in the competition for work in the new corporation. Project papers would accidentaly dissapear in the shredder, memos from junior managers prompting urgent action would get lost, compromising the position of employees considered rejectable by a certain push of fate.
Thursday, October 30, 2003
They say that those unable to display a stiff smile in daily intercourse lack a sense of humor, according to amateur surgeon Zarathustra D. Johnson. To aid these unfortunate souls, author Diderik Humble jr. has invented a new, great devise: a novel gesture in sign language, by which it will be possible to spare one's facial muscles and instead smile by means of a sign!!! (A hand signal.)
It is opined that the invention (method) will be of significance not only to preserve marriage, but also to promote international understanding.
On behalf on the South Minnesota Ignoramus Society
(the Reception Committee)
Darwin P. Johnson
president
It is opined that the invention (method) will be of significance not only to preserve marriage, but also to promote international understanding.
On behalf on the South Minnesota Ignoramus Society
(the Reception Committee)
Darwin P. Johnson
president
Tuesday, October 28, 2003
Thishere in response to jlsperanza of aol.com, who on lit-ideas 23 Oct 2003 at 9:02, announced the publication of an
> English/Iraqi Iraqi/English
> Phrase Book
>
> by J. M. Geary with the
> collaboration of J. L. -- and authentic native Iraqi's
>
> Baghdad and Memphis: The Buckley School of Languages,
> with the auspices of the Seattle School of Scholasticism, Paperback, iii
> + 112 pp, with illustrations throughout.
>
> Editorial description.
>
> "They don't speak our language", Professor Geary -- a native of
> Seattle but actually born in Memphis -- complained on his last tour to
> Baghdad, where he is promoting with co-author J. L. -- "Buckley or the
> Aftermath of Kabul" --. On co-author J. L.'s suggestion that they
> engaged Phatic to translate the work, Geary, invoked statistics and
> expenses that showed that it would be "more profitable -- to everyone
> conceerned --" to issue a paperback phrasebook instead. They write in
> the preface to the Iraqi section: "English is not an impossible
> language to learn -- and Iraki either, we guess -- but we leave that for
> the preface to the English Section'. With the aide of some friendly
> (nah, talkative) native speakers they found the task -- especially
> 'lexicon retrieving' as Geary calls it -- 'easy nuff'.
>
> Geary and JL soon found out that Iraqi is not really an Indo-European
> language, which discouraged the original idea of providing a comparative
> grammar. "There ain't really nothing to compare, ednit", Geary said,
> expanding: "I mean, no subject-copula-predicate stuff and stuff". That
> gave them the idea of providing instead what is basically a phonetic, or
> as Geary prefers to say, fonetik, manual ("You can always learn the
> API", said JL -- referring to the Paris-based Association Phonetique
> Internationale). The main intended readership, the authors hope, will be
> the task forces, mainly American, but Brits and Aussies, too. "This has
> been noted before," Geary said, "way back in Vietnam." "And don't let's
> forget Japan," JL added, with a nodd to the anthropological research of
> McCreery, "but the matter," Geary continued, "has now become pretty
> urgent. There must be a way -- at least fonetic -- by which American
> troops can reciprocate a simple heart-felt 'welcome' or 'nice cuppa
> tea?'."Right. There must be more to lingo than gesture and
> paralanguage", JL concluded. The authors will be signing copies at the
> Buckley Hotel, by the city river.
Meanwhile, Phatic was lounging in Mingus Court, plotting his revenge for not being included in the release of "Buckley or the Aftermath of Kabul."
"So JL thinks I'm cheap, ey," he thought to himself, pushing aside one of the nude breasts that obstructed his view of the Bagdad Hotel across the street. The groupies had become a pain in the eye -- he could hardly get a moment to himself to think of the events that had led him here and his plans to reclaim his rightful place in the annals of things Buckley.
It all started when he was heading to Memphis International Airport one fateful morning in the early Naughties. The night had been spent in utter debauchery, celebrating the collaborative completion of "Buckley" (the novel). MG had recited Yeats, JL played the organ and EH had performed one of her acclaimed exotic dances on webcam from Queebec (where she gave a Canadian Fraction Party with PL and PS). All in all it had been a wonderful night. But when Phatic, on his way to the airport in a rented TransAm, saw an announcement for a public lecture by one Darwin P. Johnson of the South Minnesota Ignoramus Society at International Airport Trampoline Hall 49, and, calculating that he had some time to waste before his plane left for Paris, where he would stop over on his way to Bagdad, he though why not? Why not indeed? So he slid the car between the only two other vehicles that were parked on the immensely oversized lot outside Hall 49, a brown Bentley and a red Renault, and found a seat in the back row of the auditorium. He had just taken out a pen and notebook from his light green trenchcoat when the lights went down. Darwin P. Johnson emerged on the podium: A smallish man with a gray beard and a curved pipe. This is the lecture he gave:
> Today I shall speak on the egg. Historically, the first (and largest)
> egg was allegedly laid by a Russian, thousands of years before Christ.
> It was the so-called ur-egg. In Europe, the egg has been known for only
> a few hundred years. In august/september 1492 Kristopher Columbus laid
> the first European egg, whereupon he went out to discover America. Some
> say that he first discovered America and then went home to lay the egg,
> while others claim that he laid the egg in America and then hurried home
> to Spain with it. Be that as it may, two things remain: 1. Columbi egg
> wasn't laid in a day. 2. Columbus laid only this one egg and died in
> 1506 as a disheartened man.
>
> As I mentioned in my lecture yesterday, it is mainly the hen that lays
> eggs nowadays. Some birds, such as the DODO, have stopped laying eggs
> altogether. The dodo was extinguished at the end of the seventeenth
> century as A DISHEARTENED BIRD.
>
> The egg consists of:
> 1. The white.
> 2. The yoke.
>
> Earlier it was a commonly held belief that the yoke enjoyed its stay in
> the egg. Later research shows this to be wrong. IT HAS A HORRIBLE TIME!
>
> Attempts on the egg's side to teach the hen how to lay eggs have not
> been successful. On the contrary.
>
> By the way, an end must be put to this nonsense that it is the ROOSTER
> that teaches the egg what the egg will teach the hen. IT IS NOT THE
> ROOSTER!!! (I don't know who it is, but at least it's not the rooster.)
> Perhaps it's no-one? Perhaps the egg has REVELATIONS?
>
> What do I know?
>
> Thanks for your attention.
"Of course!" Phatic thought, slapping his forehead in epiphany, "it is not the rooster!"
Meanwhile, over at the Proverbial Righteousness and Ideology Conference, K-division (P.R.I.C.K.), JL and MK were already busy scheming a separatist publication of "Buckley" (the novel). The conference was funded through an annual grant from one of Buckley's charitable foundations, another part of his grand money-laundering operation.
"'Tis against my principles," MG is rumored to have objected.
"Principles, scminciples," JL replied as he signed the contract granting all future publishing rights to P.R.I.C.K. "Now, stop cowering. Pretty please with sugar on top, sign the blasted paper."
Possibly convinced by the insurmountable logic of JL's argument, MG put his name on the dotted line.
It was only later, after Phatic, disguised as a Burundian refugee, had issued a barrage of fake spam mails offering penis extensions, free Viagra (TM) and cheap sex with horny house-persons that the mood in the separatist camp changed. JL was struck by a sense of conscience after a visitation from Virgin Mary, in whom he didn't believe, in a dream. MG, on the other hand, noted that while the Viagra (TM) was free, the sex was 'cheap' and hence a for-pay service. Little did he know that Phatic's LP "Buckley -- the collected Folk Songs" had been an instant popular success upon its release in Eyerak earlier that year, affording Phatic with sex in any imaginable gender, case and number. MG, unaware, as he were, of Phatic's act of deception, wanted money to "feed the monkey", as he put. So when JL, in a soft moment, suggested they'd allow Phatik, as he said it, in a Germanic sort of accent, to translate Buckley to Eyeraki, MG balked.
"That's beyond our means, JL. We're gonna milk this baby dry," MG said, sporting a devilish grin on his exiled South State face.
Meanwhile, Phatic had been busy organizing a band of agitators, the Post-Pragmaticist Stress Order, to persuade the Eyerakis that JL and MG really were lackeys of the imperialist Buckley's scheme to colonize the translation business. He had attended hisself some of the tea-parties organized by the Order. Tea was key to the heart of the Eyeraki. Phatic knew that after reading up on the scholarly literature on Eyeraki culture, and always offered free Lipton Service tea at his public recitals. In an interview with The Daily Veil, Phatic offered this explanation:
"It started spontaneously, but it has now become a stock moment of these events that the crowd, upon my arrival on stage, will lift their Coca-Cola cardboard cups filled with tea, stomp their feet, and exclaim, in a rhythmical fashion, 'Phatic, you are welcome.' The tea always does the trick in Eyerak, doesn't it?"
Meanwhile, Phatic had been colluding with EH to win her over to his side. She was in trouble with her employer, a think-tank in Quebec, after having delivered an oversized, zero-paged paper as her report on "Reading Readers Reading: 'Moma is a Psycho and other tales of liberation'."
Meanwhile, the Post-Pragmaticist Stress Order had tried to convince the Eyerakis to stay away from Bagdad Hotel this particular morning. Plans had been made, alliances struck and young maidens, shameful of their fate as unmarrieds -- as was their wont in Eyeraki culture --, had arrived in hordes at Phatic's backstage door to volunteer as missionaries in Phatic's crooked course for Ontological Eyeraki Autonomy NOW!
As he reached for another grape, held ready for him by one of the maidens, Phatic had a snug sense of self-satisfaction. The counter- strike was planned in its minutest detail. A maiden, disguised as a beret-clad blind man in a wheelchair, would roll into the lobby of Bagdad Hotel at precisely 10:01, signally to the hotel clerk, a member of the order, that she should set off the trigger mechanism, a fall-trap under the podium where JL and MG would be seated boasting their separatist release. They would then be flushed around an intricate system of tunnels, dug specifically for that purpose, under the streets of Bagdad, to end up in the dungeons of Mingus Court, where they would be forced to listen to recitations of spam mail offering penis extensions, free Viagra (TM) and cheap sex with horny house-people in accented English to all eternity.
"And then," Phatic thought to hisself, "I shall be free. At last."
... to be continued
(or not)
> English/Iraqi Iraqi/English
> Phrase Book
>
> by J. M. Geary with the
> collaboration of J. L. -- and authentic native Iraqi's
>
> Baghdad and Memphis: The Buckley School of Languages,
> with the auspices of the Seattle School of Scholasticism, Paperback, iii
> + 112 pp, with illustrations throughout.
>
> Editorial description.
>
> "They don't speak our language", Professor Geary -- a native of
> Seattle but actually born in Memphis -- complained on his last tour to
> Baghdad, where he is promoting with co-author J. L. -- "Buckley or the
> Aftermath of Kabul" --. On co-author J. L.'s suggestion that they
> engaged Phatic to translate the work, Geary, invoked statistics and
> expenses that showed that it would be "more profitable -- to everyone
> conceerned --" to issue a paperback phrasebook instead. They write in
> the preface to the Iraqi section: "English is not an impossible
> language to learn -- and Iraki either, we guess -- but we leave that for
> the preface to the English Section'. With the aide of some friendly
> (nah, talkative) native speakers they found the task -- especially
> 'lexicon retrieving' as Geary calls it -- 'easy nuff'.
>
> Geary and JL soon found out that Iraqi is not really an Indo-European
> language, which discouraged the original idea of providing a comparative
> grammar. "There ain't really nothing to compare, ednit", Geary said,
> expanding: "I mean, no subject-copula-predicate stuff and stuff". That
> gave them the idea of providing instead what is basically a phonetic, or
> as Geary prefers to say, fonetik, manual ("You can always learn the
> API", said JL -- referring to the Paris-based Association Phonetique
> Internationale). The main intended readership, the authors hope, will be
> the task forces, mainly American, but Brits and Aussies, too. "This has
> been noted before," Geary said, "way back in Vietnam." "And don't let's
> forget Japan," JL added, with a nodd to the anthropological research of
> McCreery, "but the matter," Geary continued, "has now become pretty
> urgent. There must be a way -- at least fonetic -- by which American
> troops can reciprocate a simple heart-felt 'welcome' or 'nice cuppa
> tea?'."Right. There must be more to lingo than gesture and
> paralanguage", JL concluded. The authors will be signing copies at the
> Buckley Hotel, by the city river.
Meanwhile, Phatic was lounging in Mingus Court, plotting his revenge for not being included in the release of "Buckley or the Aftermath of Kabul."
"So JL thinks I'm cheap, ey," he thought to himself, pushing aside one of the nude breasts that obstructed his view of the Bagdad Hotel across the street. The groupies had become a pain in the eye -- he could hardly get a moment to himself to think of the events that had led him here and his plans to reclaim his rightful place in the annals of things Buckley.
It all started when he was heading to Memphis International Airport one fateful morning in the early Naughties. The night had been spent in utter debauchery, celebrating the collaborative completion of "Buckley" (the novel). MG had recited Yeats, JL played the organ and EH had performed one of her acclaimed exotic dances on webcam from Queebec (where she gave a Canadian Fraction Party with PL and PS). All in all it had been a wonderful night. But when Phatic, on his way to the airport in a rented TransAm, saw an announcement for a public lecture by one Darwin P. Johnson of the South Minnesota Ignoramus Society at International Airport Trampoline Hall 49, and, calculating that he had some time to waste before his plane left for Paris, where he would stop over on his way to Bagdad, he though why not? Why not indeed? So he slid the car between the only two other vehicles that were parked on the immensely oversized lot outside Hall 49, a brown Bentley and a red Renault, and found a seat in the back row of the auditorium. He had just taken out a pen and notebook from his light green trenchcoat when the lights went down. Darwin P. Johnson emerged on the podium: A smallish man with a gray beard and a curved pipe. This is the lecture he gave:
> Today I shall speak on the egg. Historically, the first (and largest)
> egg was allegedly laid by a Russian, thousands of years before Christ.
> It was the so-called ur-egg. In Europe, the egg has been known for only
> a few hundred years. In august/september 1492 Kristopher Columbus laid
> the first European egg, whereupon he went out to discover America. Some
> say that he first discovered America and then went home to lay the egg,
> while others claim that he laid the egg in America and then hurried home
> to Spain with it. Be that as it may, two things remain: 1. Columbi egg
> wasn't laid in a day. 2. Columbus laid only this one egg and died in
> 1506 as a disheartened man.
>
> As I mentioned in my lecture yesterday, it is mainly the hen that lays
> eggs nowadays. Some birds, such as the DODO, have stopped laying eggs
> altogether. The dodo was extinguished at the end of the seventeenth
> century as A DISHEARTENED BIRD.
>
> The egg consists of:
> 1. The white.
> 2. The yoke.
>
> Earlier it was a commonly held belief that the yoke enjoyed its stay in
> the egg. Later research shows this to be wrong. IT HAS A HORRIBLE TIME!
>
> Attempts on the egg's side to teach the hen how to lay eggs have not
> been successful. On the contrary.
>
> By the way, an end must be put to this nonsense that it is the ROOSTER
> that teaches the egg what the egg will teach the hen. IT IS NOT THE
> ROOSTER!!! (I don't know who it is, but at least it's not the rooster.)
> Perhaps it's no-one? Perhaps the egg has REVELATIONS?
>
> What do I know?
>
> Thanks for your attention.
"Of course!" Phatic thought, slapping his forehead in epiphany, "it is not the rooster!"
Meanwhile, over at the Proverbial Righteousness and Ideology Conference, K-division (P.R.I.C.K.), JL and MK were already busy scheming a separatist publication of "Buckley" (the novel). The conference was funded through an annual grant from one of Buckley's charitable foundations, another part of his grand money-laundering operation.
"'Tis against my principles," MG is rumored to have objected.
"Principles, scminciples," JL replied as he signed the contract granting all future publishing rights to P.R.I.C.K. "Now, stop cowering. Pretty please with sugar on top, sign the blasted paper."
Possibly convinced by the insurmountable logic of JL's argument, MG put his name on the dotted line.
It was only later, after Phatic, disguised as a Burundian refugee, had issued a barrage of fake spam mails offering penis extensions, free Viagra (TM) and cheap sex with horny house-persons that the mood in the separatist camp changed. JL was struck by a sense of conscience after a visitation from Virgin Mary, in whom he didn't believe, in a dream. MG, on the other hand, noted that while the Viagra (TM) was free, the sex was 'cheap' and hence a for-pay service. Little did he know that Phatic's LP "Buckley -- the collected Folk Songs" had been an instant popular success upon its release in Eyerak earlier that year, affording Phatic with sex in any imaginable gender, case and number. MG, unaware, as he were, of Phatic's act of deception, wanted money to "feed the monkey", as he put. So when JL, in a soft moment, suggested they'd allow Phatik, as he said it, in a Germanic sort of accent, to translate Buckley to Eyeraki, MG balked.
"That's beyond our means, JL. We're gonna milk this baby dry," MG said, sporting a devilish grin on his exiled South State face.
Meanwhile, Phatic had been busy organizing a band of agitators, the Post-Pragmaticist Stress Order, to persuade the Eyerakis that JL and MG really were lackeys of the imperialist Buckley's scheme to colonize the translation business. He had attended hisself some of the tea-parties organized by the Order. Tea was key to the heart of the Eyeraki. Phatic knew that after reading up on the scholarly literature on Eyeraki culture, and always offered free Lipton Service tea at his public recitals. In an interview with The Daily Veil, Phatic offered this explanation:
"It started spontaneously, but it has now become a stock moment of these events that the crowd, upon my arrival on stage, will lift their Coca-Cola cardboard cups filled with tea, stomp their feet, and exclaim, in a rhythmical fashion, 'Phatic, you are welcome.' The tea always does the trick in Eyerak, doesn't it?"
Meanwhile, Phatic had been colluding with EH to win her over to his side. She was in trouble with her employer, a think-tank in Quebec, after having delivered an oversized, zero-paged paper as her report on "Reading Readers Reading: 'Moma is a Psycho and other tales of liberation'."
Meanwhile, the Post-Pragmaticist Stress Order had tried to convince the Eyerakis to stay away from Bagdad Hotel this particular morning. Plans had been made, alliances struck and young maidens, shameful of their fate as unmarrieds -- as was their wont in Eyeraki culture --, had arrived in hordes at Phatic's backstage door to volunteer as missionaries in Phatic's crooked course for Ontological Eyeraki Autonomy NOW!
As he reached for another grape, held ready for him by one of the maidens, Phatic had a snug sense of self-satisfaction. The counter- strike was planned in its minutest detail. A maiden, disguised as a beret-clad blind man in a wheelchair, would roll into the lobby of Bagdad Hotel at precisely 10:01, signally to the hotel clerk, a member of the order, that she should set off the trigger mechanism, a fall-trap under the podium where JL and MG would be seated boasting their separatist release. They would then be flushed around an intricate system of tunnels, dug specifically for that purpose, under the streets of Bagdad, to end up in the dungeons of Mingus Court, where they would be forced to listen to recitations of spam mail offering penis extensions, free Viagra (TM) and cheap sex with horny house-people in accented English to all eternity.
"And then," Phatic thought to hisself, "I shall be free. At last."
... to be continued
(or not)
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