अनजका, the dissolute goat

7: 59 EST

2014-08-24T00:13:25Z

7:59 YAAAAAAAY DOCTOR WHO TIME!!!

8:01 WTF I HAVE TO WATCH 15 MINUTES OF BULLSHIT AND ADS WHY SPACE WHY

depressing link round up time!

2012-03-13T15:17:35Z

Because I am sick of FaceBleugh.

What if democracy is just an illusion?
In their 1846 book The German Ideology, Marx and co-author Frederick Engels took a look at human history and made a plain but controversial observation. In any given historical period, the ideas that people generally think are the best and most important ideas are usually the ideas of the people in charge. If you have a lot of money and own a lot of property, then you have the power to propagandise your worldview and you have incentive to avoid appearing as if you're propagandising your worldview. Or, as Marx and Engels would put it: The ruling ideas of every epoch are the ideas of the ruling class.

Afghanistan: The dead just keep piling up.
Say what you want about Israel, at least it doesn't pretend to "respect" Palestinians.

I Don’t Want To See Their Faces; I Don’t Want To Hear Them Scream.
And there he sleeps. And you could bomb my house and blow up my car and take away a leg and an arm and I might take your compensation check and relocate and regroup and nurse my grievances in the barroom. But if you or you or you or anybody came in here and killed him, I don’t care if you’re Christian or Jew or Mohammedan or a pagan suckled in some creed outworn, if you hurt him accidentally or on purpose, under orders or because you snapped under the pressure of your third deployment. I’d just want to kill you. And I don’t doubt I might kill you slowly and abuse your damned corpse in some ugly way. You and the guy behind you and the army that comes after that. I’d open you up and I’d nail you to the porch floor.

Hello LiveJournal! 3 months of lung butter's done with, but still no job. Please send rent!

Welsh goatlore

2012-02-10T12:47:39Z

Among the traditions of the origin of the Gwyllion [there is] one which associates them with goats. Goats are in Wales held in peculiar esteem for their supposed occult intellectual powers. They are believed to be on very good terms with the Tylwyth Teg, and possessed of more knowledge than their appearance indicates. It is one of the peculiarities of the Tylwyth Teg that every Friday night they comb the goats' beards to make them decent for Sunday. Their association with the Gwyllion is related in the legend of Cadwaladr's goat: Cadwaladr owned a very handsome goat, named Jenny, of which he was extremely fond; and which seemed equally fond of him; but one day, as if the very diawi possessed her, she ran away into the hills, with Cadwaladr tearing after her, half mad with anger and affright. At last his Welsh blood got so hot, as the goat eluded him again and again, that he flung a stone at her, which knocked her over a precipice, and she fell bleating to her doom. Cadwaladr made his way to the foot of the crag; the goat was dying, but not dead, and licked his hand--which so affected the poor man that he burst into tears, and sitting on the ground took the goat's head on his arm. The moon rose, and still he sat there. Presently he found that the goat had become transformed to a beautiful young woman, whose brown eyes, as her head lay on his arm, looked into his in a very disturbing way. 'Ah, Cadwaladr,' said she, 'have I at last found you?' Now Cadwaladr had a wife at home, and was much discomfited by this singular circumstance; but when the goat--yn awr maiden--arose, and putting her black slipper on the end of a moonbeam, held out her hand to him, he put his hand in hers and went with her. As for the hand, though it looked so fair, it felt just like a hoof. They were soon on the top of the highest mountain in Wales, and surrounded by a vapoury company of goats with shadowy horns. These raised a most unearthly bleating about his ears. One, which seemed to be the king, had a voice that sounded above the din as the castle bells of Carmarthen used to do long ago above all the other bells in the town. This one rushed at Cadwaladr and butting him in the stomach sent him toppling over a crag as he had sent his poor nannygoat. When he came to himself, after his fall, the morning sun was shining on him and the birds were singing over his head. But he saw no more of either his goat or the fairy she had turned into, from that time to his death.

Where have I been? I went to Europe for a while; left with bronchitis, came back with the flu. Need to start looking for a new job again, my lovelies, and a new brain. I wish I could burrow in my bed until May.

Writer's Block: The missing piece

2011-11-07T15:45:37Z

A non-polluting globally distributed sustainable source of energy not owned or distributed by corporations or other private interests. So, something between turning wastewater into coffee (already perfected by my cafeteria), and cold fusion out of snot and fingernails (working on it every time I dig in my nose). Also, the ability to communicate with insects. Also, the ability to communicate with people.

The Secret

2011-10-21T02:02:24Z

That noted Communist rag, Forbes, is at it again.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2011/10/11/why-the-we-are-the-53-tumblr-matters-its-the-culture-war-stupid/

Conservative individualism – the sense that one’s success and failure is dictated solely in terms of an atomic struggle – sits at the heart of most of these tumblrs. In this view of the world, outside inputs have no bearing at all on individual output. Wall Street is just another independent force. Somehow the market crash of 2008, the housing bubble, the ability to get government loans or work for the military, these are all the work of individuals with no collective effort or commitment or external influence whatsoever.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2011/10/13/the-we-are-the-53-tumblr-is-heartbreaking/

The notion that this is the American dream, that men diagnosed with a horrible cancer should work 72 hours a week to support their families, is deeply tragic.

The military weighs in:

http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2011/10/11/340150/individualists-in-the-marine-corps/

I don’t want to be in the position of telling a veteran that I know his business better than he does, but that would be a mighty strange kind of military in which solidarity, teamwork, and the effective operation of a large public bureaucracy play no role.

http://www.tinyrevolution.com/mt/archives/003561.html

I look at that and it tells me that I've failed, you've failed, we've all failed, and because of that we're all going to die. These people not only won't fight the killer billionaires stomping on their windpipe, they'll brag about getting stomped on and ask for more.

PS: why do so many Americans pay no income tax? Babies! Those scum-sucking parasites.

God Bless the 53% and their plans for 300% employment. At least they're not whiners! All we need is positive thinking; and the economy will be back to growing like cancer.

tigers do

2011-10-18T04:36:06Z

kayıtsız şartsız teslimiyet

Mississippi Personhood Amendment

2011-10-12T16:56:56Z

Originally posted by james_nicoll at Mississippi Personhood Amendment [...and some other people before him, I'm unclear where his contribution started]

Okay, so I don't usually do this, but this is an issue near and dear to me and this is getting ~~very little~~ no attention in the mainstream media.

Mississippi is voting on November 8th on whether to pass Amendment 26, the "Personhood Amendment". This amendment would grant fertilized eggs and fetuses personhood status.

Putting aside the contentious issue of abortion, this would effectively outlaw birth control and criminalize women who have miscarriages. This is not a good thing.

Jackson Women's Health Organization is the only place women can get abortions in the entire state, and they are trying to launch a grassroots movement against this amendment. This doesn't just apply to Mississippi, though, as Personhood USA, the group that introduced this amendment, is trying to introduce identical amendments in all 50 states.

What's more, in Mississippi, this amendment is expected to pass. It even has Mississippi Democrats, including the Attorney General, Jim Hood, backing it.

The reason I'm posting this here is because I made a meager donation to the Jackson Women's Health Organization this morning, and I received a personal email back hours later - on a Sunday - thanking me and noting that I'm one of the first "outside" people to contribute.

So if you sometimes pass on political action because you figure that enough other people will do something to make a difference, make an exception on this one. My RSS reader is near silent on this amendment. I only found out about it through a feminist blog. The mainstream media is not reporting on it.

If there is ever a time to donate or send a letter in protest, this would be it.

What to do?

- Read up on it. Wake Up, Mississippi is the home of the grassroots effort to fight this amendment. Daily Kos also has a thorough story on it.

- If you can afford it, you can donate at the site's link.

- You can contact the Democratic National Committee to see why more of our representatives aren't speaking out against this.

- Like this Facebook page to help spread awareness.

Writer's Block: These are a few of my favorite things

2011-10-07T20:37:32Z

When I first started? The hustle and bustle and all the new friends and flamewars and jameth making trouble in the neighbourhood!
These days? It's like cruising down an empty highway at rush-hour because all the traffic is going the other way (i.e. Dreckwimpth, Fecesbook and Feeble+)... Cruise control and have a nap. I've still got enough people to visit, and hope to start writing myself again.

I do miss all the hubbub, though!

Writer's Block: When the moon hits the sky...

2011-10-05T15:06:09Z

I don't think most things described as pizza in North America qualify as such in Italy; at least my Bolognese friend was aghast at our sacrilegious innovations.

That said, some heresies I have enjoyed:

Thin crust but not too thin, pref. whole wheat or multigrain; pesto sauce; mozzarella, walnuts, bacon, apple, roasted garlic, mushroom.
OR
Thick fluffy crust, tomato sauce, mozzarella, anchovies, pineapple.
OR
Kosher k'laf pages torn out of an illuminated copy of the second book of Aristotle's Poetics, lightly toasted over a funeral pyre at the banks of the Ganges, spread with the cerebro-spinal fluid of a kraken thickened with ground filberts and the eyelashes of an owlbear, topped with the hoof of Sleipnir, claw of Garuda, hot sujuk, lint from the Emperor's New Clothes, and a fried Portuguese Man O' War.

wandering

2011-09-17T23:00:32Z

There is no escape. You can’t be a vagabond and an artist and still be a solid citizen, a wholesome, upstanding man. You want to get drunk, so you have to accept the hangover. You say yes to the sunlight and pure fantasies, so you have to say yes to the filth and the nausea. Everything is within you, gold and mud, happiness and pain, the laughter of childhood and the apprehension of death. Say yes to everything, shirk nothing. Don’t try to lie to yourself. You are not a solid citizen. You are not a Greek. You are not harmonious, or the master of yourself. You are a bird in the storm. Let it storm!

--hesse

caprinus @ 2011-01-10T20:08:00

2011-01-11T01:08:20Z

"Oh look, he's posting something!"
"Something exciting?"
"No, it's a link to a contest he wants you to spend 30 seconds voting on so a friend of a friend can win a kitchen because there is a Boletus picture in it and because the intermediary friend is very nice and gave him a job-lead. And the contest ends soon. Maybe today? He's not too clear on it."
"He looks exhausted and brain-dead."
"I hear he's been working 14-16 hour days. And he's not even sure he's making any money doing it. That's why he's hoping for a swift return to the sanity of library work. Or any office job, really. 3 am - 6 pm is not a good stretch, and he's driving a van so other people's lives are being endangered!"
"That's kind of douchey."
"Yes. He should get some fucking sleep instead of posting on LJ."
"Fucker."

linkorama + warning to Toronto bikers

2010-11-26T23:22:10Z

EDITED TO ADD, via northbard:
Bridges on the Don Valley Mountain Bike Trail have been sabotaged. Please inspect all bridges before proceeding!!

Fran Lebowitz is so cute. I like how she talks about herself in 3rd person, like Bob Dole. And she's such a Luddite.

So even low technology I find troublesome. Basically with computers it’s a typing thing. I don’t know how to type so if they ever get into the no-typing thing, maybe I’ll have a look.
A series of hand gestures or...
Yeah, or saying "hello" or whatever. When they invented the iPad a year ago or whatever it was, someone was showing it to me, a friend of mine, and he said, "Look at this, you could do this, Fran." I said, "What is this called?" "An iPad — and you can do this and that and use a pen like it’s a pad." I said, "It seems to be going in my direction. When it becomes an actual legal pad and a ballpoint pen, I’m good. I have plenty."

Flying squid! Squid can fly! Aaaaahhh!

Some LJer writes a good piece on the TSA procedures and how's they've been pointed out as troublesome by women since they started: http://elusis.livejournal.com/2141915.html

I have such a headache. And it's cold in the house. Waah waaah waaahhh.

R.I.P. Peter Christopherson

2010-11-26T16:48:15Z

"Just walking along the street, I am constantly struck dumb by the beauty of a piece of rust on an old gate, or the purity of the sound of a blind beggar singing for his supper, or the chord made by three competing air-conditioners. I think that most people filter out those kind of things from their perception of life, by necessity -- to avoid going mad from the overload. In doing so, they miss a whole mind-blowing, extraordinary world of joy. All I have always tried to do is share my joy, that joy, with other people" -- Sleazy in a recent interview.

I'm so sad. Just found out Peter Christopherson died on Nov. 24th, in Thailand. 55 is too damned young.

Three funereal tracks.

From "Form Grows Rampant", by The Threshold HouseBoys Choir, a recent Thai-centred solo project: Part I. A time of happening.

From "The Ape of Naples", by Coil: Going Up. Lyrics from "Are You Being Served?"

Also from "The Ape of Naples": Fire Of The Mind. Vocals by (and picture of) John Balance, Peter Christopherson's long-time partner and collaborator, who predeceased him in 2004. Seems like only yesterday.

Does death come alone or with eager reinforcements?
Death is centrifugal,
Solar and logical
Decadent and symmetrical,
Angels are mathematical

Angels are bestial,
Man is the animal

The blacker the sun,
The darker the dawn
Flashes from the axes
On the humming way to the stars
Holy holy, holy holy, holy oh holy
Holy holy, holy holy, holy,
Holy holy, holy holy, holy
Man is the animal
The blacker the suns,
The darker the dawn

Snark levels need calibrating.

2010-11-23T06:47:23Z

One problem with my extended vacation from LJ: it appears that in the crucible of a certain kinky social networking site that's been taking up me posting time, I've gotten more vicious. While the Rants group I've been frequenting there is not quite the seething cesspool that 4chan is, the expectations of civility are very low, and pulling punches largely unheard of. Being rhetorically uncompromising with people one is friends with, at least in the circles I hang out in, is a badge of trust there. The marks we leave on each other with our lashing tongues are consensual, and everybody's safeword is the power button on their computer.

I suppose that's partly the appeal; I've always liked a good verbal brawl. But... must remember to temper remarks, to blunt teeth when outside of that collaborative piranha tank.

In the meantime, I remind my long-suffering remaining friends and acquaintances here -- to tap out of a discussion, you too have the self-same safeword -- and possibly let me know you're leaving the fray so I don't blithely assume it had nothing to do with me and continue with some callous, alienating bullshit. I'll be horrified to know I've really really hurt your feelings in a lasting and irreparable fashion with something I've said, and will understand if you take me off your flist if that happens, but assure you all my aims are always playful and temporary. Blake's "opposition is true friendship" is the motto.

The funny thing is, on FL I am seen as the namby-pamby group-hugging hippie, the school-marmish voice of reason telling people to behave and not go to far with their sardonic shenenigans! Context is queen.

maybe something we can all agree on...[1]

2010-11-23T05:27:46Z

Joss Whedon is a good sport about Warner Bros. stupid decision to ~~ruin~~ reboot the Buffy franchise.

[1] just kidding! Joss is a hack who hates women!

A Debate Between Pro- and Anti-Sex Feminists Moderated by a Depth Psychologist

2010-11-22T23:33:36Z

[reposted by permission of author, FL user "irtehkinkylol"]

HORNEY: Hi, I'm Dr. Carolyn Gustav Horney and welcome to another edition of Compulsive Ruminations, the show where we disappear into our navels talking in circles about the issues that matter to you. With me today I have two distinguished panelists to talk to us about the relationship between sex, power and liberation. On my left is Annie Bright, avant garde performance artist and self-styled pro-sex feminist. Ms. Bright was the director and head perfornographer of the recent event, Labial Folds: A Happening about Pussies and Papercrafts. And since nobody wanted to be on the right, further down on my left is Dr. Cynthia McDworkin, who describes herself as a radical feminist and is the author of the recent article And Ain't I A Woman, The Sojourner Truth Stamp as the Spinning, Folding, and Mutilation of Women.

As always here on Compulsive Ruminations we will slow down, reflect, listen deeply into our diverse voices, and manipulate each other with passive-aggression and victimhood; utterly failing to work through feelings, let anything go, or move forward into happier and healthier ways of living. I'm Dr. Carolyn Horney and this is Compulsive Ruminations.

I'd like to start with opening remarks. Dr. McDworkin?

MCDWORKIN: Thank you Dr. Horney. Notwithstanding the denial of a few pornographers, in a world where one in three girls is sexually assaulted before she reaches eighteen, where emaciated women are used to sell everything from alcohol to toothpaste, and where women's tortured bodies are dumped like so much litter in the desert outside Juarez, the public display and commodification of what should be the most intimate areas of our lives can only be an act of aggression. Setting aside a few token Uncle Toms, men own everything, write the laws the govern everything, use the force that imposes those laws on everyone, and more often than not get away with it when they rape someone, anyone. The pornographers dress our young sisters up in schoolgirl drag, truss them up like turkeys and insert cold metal implements into their vaginas and rectums, saying that I have been a dirty, dirty girl looking at the magazines under daddy's bed and I need a firm hand of discipline on my white cotton panties followed by daddy's hot load in my face-- In such a context, that is, under patriarchy, the conclusion is inevitable: sex is violence.

HORNEY: Ms. Bright?

BRIGHT: Thank you, Carolyn. While rape and exploitation are serious issues, we can all cum as we are to the revolution of pleasure. The big secret they don't want you to know is that we are all freaks. The only people who even think they are normal are the ones who have so cut themselves off from their own desires and the associated shame that they live in an Ozzy and Harriet world where the married couples have separate beds, at the cost of all the of the color, beauty, and depth of feeling in life. Further, where porn goes up rape goes down. It is the repression of puritanism that leads to the exploitation and aggression--you can use women to sell toothpaste because the buyers are so full of repressed, fearful desire that sex is a back door into their most vulnerable places. In conclusion, I would like to invite everyone to my performance tomorrow at eleven PM at the PussPuss Club, entitled Full Cavity Pee, in which I suspend myself upside down from the ceiling at the edge of the stage and audience members are invited to urinate down my nostrils and into my sinuses while I enter a Tantric state of infinite sexual bliss. At the climax of the show and of my body, the orchestra plays Ode to Joy while I blow the urine out of my body and into the first five rows.

HORNEY: Wow, Annie, that's a very evocative image for me. It makes me think of Odhinn hanging on the Yggdrasil to attain knowledge of the runes, or the Hanged Man of the Tarot. It also makes me think of Shiva holding the pain of the world in his throat chakra. I see themes of death and rebirth, sacrifice, subversion--turning the order of things upside down to attain deep wisdom. What do you think, Dr. McDworkin?

MCDWORKIN: I see rape.

BRIGHT: Now, Cynthia. I spent months organizing this thing. I did the promotion, booked the venue, hired the orchestra, built the suspension rack. Could it be any clearer than I want it? No need to ask for a consent form, I had to fill out one of those for the insurance people.

MCDWORKIN: You're identified with the aggressor. In any trauma there's a part of us that survives by submitting. Any mammal will do that if it's helpless enough.

BRIGHT: But this really is what I want to be doing. Don't you think a desk job would be easier? I went out of my way to carve this niche out for myself because it's what makes me happy.

MCDWORKIN: When you grow up being used, it can be the only thing that's fulfilling, because it's how you learned to get love. We're swimming in oppression like a fish in water, we're permeated with it, it's normalized. In such a context you can't trust your instincts. Female masochism is expected and we are trained for it from before we can walk, that doesn't make it a good idea.

BRIGHT: Supposing I agree with you, and I don't, what better way to turn that masochism around than to make them pay for it? Have you ever tried to change your kinks? You can't. The Mormons tried that by showing gay guys pictures of hot men and then shocking them or making them puke. But all the hot sexy Mormon torture in the world can't control desire. I met a guy who bottomed for the research daddies in Salt Lake. He was a little weird but still gay as a tree full of parrots. If the patriarchy has made me a masochist I'm stuck with it, I might as well put it to work for me. I have wild sex, I meet interesting artists, I travel the world, I don't have to slave away in an office or as a housewife. If this is oppression I don't think I could stand the pleasure of liberation.

MCDWORKIN: But you'll never know the pleasure of being your own woman.

BRIGHT: What does that mean, being an academic suck-up?

HORNEY: I'd like to take a moment to invite us to examine the themes that have been coming up so far. I find it interesting that here we are, early on in this rather public exchange, and the discussion is centering around power, submission, and what feelings we can trust. Is it possible that we are really more concerned with being dominated by each other, here in this room, than we are with the patriarchy? At least in the short term.

[LONG SILENCE]

BRIGHT: I'm sorry I called you a suck-up. I think that article of yours was brave. I know it's a man's world in the academy.

MCDWORKIN: Thank you.

[SILENCE]

HORNEY: Dr. McDworkin, you've touched a couple of times already on denial and normalized sexual violence. I wonder if you have anything to say about recent comments by Whoopi Goldberg, for which she has taken some heat. She asked whether the rape allegedly committed by Roman Polanski was, quote, rape-rape, and later defended Mel Gibson after tapes emerged on which he threated his estranged wife. Your thoughts?

MCDWORKIN: Roman Polanski drugged an underage girl and penetrated her while she begged him to stop. How is that not rape-rape? What would a partial rape even look like? An act is either consensual or it isn't. I have to wonder what happened to Whoopi that it's such second nature for her to make excuses for perpetrators.

BRIGHT: I don't have much to say in defense of Mel or Roman, or Whoopi for that matter. But look at all the sadomasochism in Mel's movies. Braveheart is an elaborate torture fantasy, toward the end he even refuses the drug to block the pain that is smuggled to him. Well before The Passion of the Christ it should have been clear that noble suffering is part of Mel's core life theme, and probably his core erotic theme. If he had worked that out consensually in bed he might not have wound up imposing it nonconsensually on a woman and child. It's when desire is repressed that it pops up in the wrong places.

MCDWORKIN: In his movies Mel was perhaps trying to work his stuff out symbolically, but clearly it didn't work. What's your evidence for fantasy preventing oppression rather than encouraging it? And where are the right places for violent desires, your sinuses?

BRIGHT: See? Right beneath the surface of your outrage is the shame and scapegoating. You can barely finish a thought without talking about how dirty I am. I think you're the one who feels dirty. [PAUSE] Look, rape is horrible but there are things you can do. Go to therapy and cry it out, your rage is legitimate but contain it appropriately, don't impose it on those of us who are ready to take some risks and have some fun.

MCDWORKIN: Oh, sure, therapy solves everything. I see fourteen year old girls out hooking in the streets of Oakland. They're probably acting out abuse they're getting at home, and soon they'll be addicted to drugs to cope with the pain, and then they'll be slaves to the pimps. When they're thirty year old hags who look sixty, dying of AIDS on the street, I'll be sure to tell them that everything will be fine when they get some therapy. This is my whole point, rape is not some bizarre aberration, it's more common than having good health care, it's as American as apple pie, baseball and genocide. You can't solve something like that by talking about it quietly one-on-one with a well-paid professional. It's the rapists and pornographers who need therapy, I'm just fine, thank you.

BRIGHT: Wait, rapists and por--

HORNEY: I'd like to turn the discussion if I could to a recent event, the shutting down--some would say censorship--of the erotic services section on craigslist. Annie, it's your turn to start.

BRIGHT: The most troubling thing about the censorship of craigslist is that anybody who understands anything about the internet knows that it's not going to work. The pimps and their clients have already gone to other sites. They have money and power, it's easy for them to move around. The only people hurt by this are the independent sex workers who can't as easily or as safely shift to seedier places.

MCDWORKIN: But it sets a precedent. A company that was making money on the exploitation of women was stopped. Others will follow.

BRIGHT: Craigslist didn't charge for erotic services ads until they were taking so much heat they had to hire lawyers to review every post. But lets talk about making money from sex work. Craigslist's CEO pointed out that their erotic services ads weren't any worse than what was appearing in the back of the weekly alternative papers. I find it notable that the most-read progressive media in the country is funded largely by escorts. And it's not much different for me. I don't have a cushy academic job, I would be silenced if it weren't for the sex work I do.

MCDWORKIN: You could make money and speak your mind working with spammers, too, but you'd probably object on moral grounds. I find it interesting that you won't help annoy people with unsolicited email but you're fine doing business with pornographers and pimps.

BRIGHT: I don't recall ever working with pimps--

MCDWORKIN: You just said they were on--

BRIGHT: --we're going to talk about each other's strange bedfellows let's look at your friends, the fundamentalists. They spend most of their time trying to push us back into being barefoot and pregnant household slaves but suddenly they're your best friends when they go after porn. And these are the same people who went after craigslist. I don't see them in the rape crisis centers, they're not interested in fighting exploitation they're just puritanical moral crusaders who want sexual slavery to happen in the shadows where they don't have to think about it. And where they can secretly take advantage of it.

MCDWORKIN: At least I'm not having sex with them.

BRIGHT: Yes, you like the power dynamics simple in bed and complicated in politics. What do you do in bed anyway, masturbate on opposite sides of the room while talking about how much you respect each other?

HORNEY: I'd like to point out that--

MCDWORKIN: Better a prude than a tool of the patriarchy.

BRIGHT: I'll get my harness and give you my tool of the patriarchy, ice queen.

HORNEY: Can we just take a --

MCDWORKIN: RIGHT TO THREATENING RAPE YOU PRETENTIOUS POSTMODERN TOWN BICYCLE!

BRIGHT: YOU BACKED ME INTO THAT YOU VICE-CUNTED PROFESSIONAL MARTYR!

HORNEY: In this exchange I see the archetype of the Divine Twins, lovers and rivals, united in--

MCDWORKIN AND BRIGHT: SHUT! UP!

HORNEY: I -- um.

[SILENCE]

MCDWORKIN: You two set me up. This was a journalistic ambush.

BRIGHT: You think I would conspire with that headshrinker?

MCDWORKIN: A minute ago you were going to rape me with a strap-on, I wouldn't put anything past you.

BRIGHT: Oh, please, I should go get it just so you can see it's nothing to be afraid of.

MCDWORKIN: Go ahead, rape me right in front of the cameras, show the world what you're made of, what really gets you off.

BRIGHT: You'd like that wouldn't you, everybody watching while I open up your tight little pussy for you.

MCDWORKIN: (folds arms) ... Yes.

BRIGHT: ... You wanna beg for mommy?

MCDWORKIN: ... Yes.

BRIGHT: Huh?

MCDWORKIN: Yes, mommy.

BRIGHT: C'mere mommy will make it better.

[MCDWORKIN AND BRIGHT BEGIN TO MAKE LOVE]

HORNEY: And so we end with an alchemical transformation, a hieros gamos, ...

MCDWORKIN: Please ... yes ... please ... yes ... please ...

HORNEY: ... A Mercurial mystical marriage of seeming opposites into blissful union ...

BRIGHT: God ... God ... God ... God ...

HORNEY: ... reconciling conflicts and remaking the world, ending where we began with sacrifice and deep transformation. I'm Carolyn Horney and this has been Compulsive Ruminations.

BRIGHT AND MCDWORKIN: GOD! PLEASE! GOD! PLEASE! PLEASE! YES!

time travel 101

2010-11-21T08:24:56Z

The simple truth is that going back a year in time will also move you a light-year away in space. This resolves the usual grandma-murdering paradoxes; you will never affect "the past" at your start coördinates because even travelling at light speed you won't get back home until the moment you left, but you can use your "time"-travel machine to visit Alpha Centauri 4.37 years ago. Unfortunately, you will also visit every other point on the surface of a 4.37-ly radius sphere, having been converted to a stochastically uniformly-distributed wave-front of energy equal to your resting mass.

The Khwairakpam-Skaay Theorem posits a mathematical method for projecting the energy as a coherent bundle in a known direction (or rather, making it leap to a specific point on the sphere's surface) if means for manipulating the target's total quantum state can be found; this theory is, for obvious reasons, still untested, and does not provide us with means for converting the arriving bundle back into matter.

However even if these targetting problems were to be overcome, as a method of "instantaneous" interstellar travel or even interstellar warfare or communication (if only energy is to be delivered to the end-time/point) the basic time-machine does not satisfy. This is due to the prohibitive power requirements -- an ideal, lossless Heisenberg-stabilized engine is estimated to consume close to one second of current total solar output per light-second travelled by a target of about 80 kg (or its equivalent energy). Khwairakpam-Skaay targetting would likely bring additional costs.

What if we didn't want to reach the stars, but simply something in our neighbourhood? For less than 1.66×10²³ kilojoules you can have near-instantanous "travel" anywhere in the world (longest distance will be directly across the globe, 12756 km, which is about 0.043 light-seconds away -- meaning you'd arrive 0.043 seconds in the past -- and Sun's output is estimated at 3.86×10²⁴ kJ/s). Keep in mind, 4.74×10¹⁸ kJ is the current annual energy consumption of the whole Earth, so you'd need to harness that for oh, 35 000 years to have enough for your single-use teleporter. Which would convert you into a storm of lovely radiant energy.

Impractical!

Even if, in the future, we find ways to harness the power of total energy conversion, yielding ca. 9.0×10¹⁶ J/kg, we'd still need to convert 1.8×10⁸ kg of mass, a sizeable amount, equal to water in 72 Olympic-sized swimming pools. There might be some practical applications of such a device in an energy-rich future, as an ansible, for example; we leave these for another class.

Dante's Love/Dantes' Loves

2010-10-27T17:42:06Z

A few months back I somehow ended up at the image below(*), a sketch for the unfinished middle panel of an incomplete triptych Dante Gabriel Rossetti set out to make for a cabinet belonging to William Morris ca. 1859.

The dynamic balance of day and night caught my attention; the mysterious inscriptions pinned it. What was this drawing all about?

***

Inscribed inside the crescent moon (framing the head of Beatrice gazing up to the sun), in Italian: "QUELLA BEATA BEATRICE CHE MIRA CONTINUAMENTE NELLA FACCIA DI COLUI", that happy Beatrice who now gazes continually upon His countenance. Inscribed around the Sun (the head of Christ gazing down to the moon), in Latin: "QUI EST PER OMNIA SAECULA BENEDICTUS", [He] who is blessed throughout all ages. Inscribed along the diagonal dividing line between light and darkness, again in Italian: "L'AMOR CHE MUOVE IL SOLE E L'ALTRE STELLE", The Love which moves the sun and the other stars. Against this background stands a moth-winged and androgynous Love with a sombre face, dressed in a pilgrim's hat and robe, holding an unstrung bow and arrow and a sun-dial dated 1290, the year of Beatrice's death, and pointed to the 9th hour, traditionally that of the death of both Beatrice and Christ.

Together, the first two counterposed inscriptions are the ending of the very last sentence of La Vita Nuova(**), Dante Alighieri's autobiography and devotional to the love of his life, Beatrice. The diagonal inscription is, in turn, the last line of the last canto of the last book of the Divine Comedy (Paradisio: Canto XXXIII, line 145), the book in which Beatrice acts as Dante's guide through the Heavens, a place where the pagan Virgil cannot go.

The upper left half of the drawing, with potent rays emanating from the solar Godhead, and Beatrice's leftward gaze, also, I think, references Canto I of Paradisio (43-48): "Almost that passage had made morning there / And evening here, and there was wholly white / That hemisphere, and black the other part, // When Beatrice towards the left-hand side / I saw turned round, and gazing at the sun; / Never did eagle fasten so upon it!"; and the Eros-pilgrim's bow and arrow recall "And thither now, as to a site decreed, / Bears us away the virtue of that cord / Which aims its arrows at a joyous mark" (124-126).

The upper half can be said to represent the eternal, sublime love of the Creator for Creation -- agape. The lower half, a night sky spattered with wheeling stars (inferior suns) and hung with a reflective and feminine moon -- is more problematic. Beatrice is first Dante's earthly love interest, that is an image of the carnal love of the Created for each other, eros; but she shines with the distant light of Heavens to which, moth-like, she is instinctually drawn once freed of her mortal body (see Paradisio, Canto I, 103-141). That which is best, or purest, or most essential in Dante's Love is sublimated into the spiritual ecstasy of worship; erotic desire represents love gone astray, "in the same wise as one may see the fire / fall from a cloud". The Pilgrim Love travels between the nether and the upper world, mediating between mortals and eternity, pointing the way and clearing a path that we should follow: up into the world of the Empyrean ideal.

When I last wrote about the fulcrum between light and darkness, it was in connection with some thoughts about a late 19th century take on Hellenistic paganism; this roughly contemporaneous Pre-Raphaëlite take on Christian mysticism is a part of the same trend of thought criticized by Louÿs: another example of the world-view which would make of the flux and circle of being a rigid and normative hierarchy, a ladder of worth. In the upper left: Godly, manly, solar, Latin, Logos, Agape. In the lower right: the vulgar, vulvar, incomplete crescent moon, feminine desire glowing with merely reflected light in the chaotic darkness below. And yet, somehow, Rossetti does get the balance between the poles, I believe. There is something wild and true about his meditation on the equation between divine and erotic love. Christ too gazes down and needs, yearns for Beatrice; his need and yearning a refined, aspirational analogue of the invisible, implied Dantes creating-but-outside the frame: Dante the writer (whose arrow-like guide Beatrice is through Paradise), Dante the painter (whose guide, Alighieri, is strung like a taut cord between Christian virtue and the romantic object of desire), and Dante the viewer, you and me. Of course the idea that the highest rung of this journey is in some way a creation of the lowest, is inexpressible, because of the religious philosophy which forbids it. Again, the ideology obscures the truth: that there is only Dante, that ours only is the act of Creation and of Love. The figure of the dead and therefore incorruptible Beatrice is our canvas and our page, on which we can project our worldly search for love in its most favourable light.

The other aspect of the image which makes it less than perfect for my meditations is its gender structure; it excludes the viewer who is a heterosexual female or homosexual male. Within the Western religious strictures which constrains the Dantes, it is, again, impermissible to imagine Love mediating between two women or two men, or to envision a female God. But I am forgiving of this flaw; I'll pretend the creators of this image just happened to choose this arrangement of faces by chance, not as an immutable truth. Whose face graces my Moon, and whose fills the Sun, is my business, mine and the Pilgrim Love's.

(*) Morris being a real life mentor of the fictional mad potter, Benedict Fludd, from AS Byatt's The Children's Book, which I had recently finished reading, I thought maybe I came across it looking up some of the background on the book, but no -- I was researching the supremely silly Dundreary whiskers. For reasons unfathomable Google pointed me to H. C. Marillier's 1899 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, An Illustrated Memorial of His Art and Life. Wha? Typical Internet search serendepidity.

(**) So, altogether, joining the Latin and the Italian: "...that happy Beatrice who now gazes continually upon the face of One who is blessed throughout all ages". Only that what I gloss as 'happy' is also 'blessed', and 'Beatrice' is also 'blessed one', so there's some clever word-play I can't quite capture in English. Also, there appear to be other, slightly different versions of this line in the Italian versions of La Vita Nuova I found online (e.g., ... quella benedetta Beatrice, la quale gloriosamente mira ne la faccia di colui qui est per omnia secula benedictus; not speaking Italian, I am not sure how far Rossetti may have taken liberties with the original.

Closing tabs.

2010-10-27T15:33:57Z

Another link dump! Get your links, free!

1) http://gawker.com/5673652/americans-not-very-good-at-being-corrupt

OK, what's with the map? First of all, I *hate* this projection. Do we seriously need to inflate the size of Siberia and Canada? Wouldn't it be nice to see better detail in Africa? Secondly, how do Severnaya Zemlya or Franz Joseph Land or Baffin Island get a rating, but Svalbard and Greenland do not? If you're going to be ridiculously, needlessly precise, at least be consistent.

As for the content, ok, poor countries are generally more susceptible to corruption, no big surprise there. Interesting outliers; Chile, Uruguay, Bhutan, Botswana, UAE, Costa Rica, and Italy.

2) Need to find a copy of this book: http://www.amazon.com/Overcoming-Depression-One-Step-Time/dp/1572243678/ref=sr_1_3?s=gateway&ie=UTF8&qid=1285788746&sr=8-3

3) Understanding Mobility in America -- 'American Dream' notes:

By international standards, the United States has an unusually low level of intergenerational mobility: our parents’ income is highly predictive of our incomes as adults. Intergenerational mobility in the United States is lower than in France, Germany, Sweden, Canada, Finland, Norway and Denmark. Among high-income countries for which comparable estimates are available, only the United Kingdom had a lower rate of mobility than the United States.

Households whose adult members all worked more than 40 hours per week for two years in a row were more upwardly mobile in 1990-91 and 1997-98 than households who worked fewer hours. Yet this was not true in 2003-04, suggesting that people who work long hours on a consistent basis no longer appear to be able to generate much upward mobility for their families.

4) Rare earth metals in your home: where can you find some cerium, lanthanum, neodymium and praseodymium? Lighter flints. The rare earths are not particularly rare, but extraction is messy, which is why most of it is done in China.

5) Some links for reseeding to FL when I have a chance: Delaney (Nova", interview), Clay Bond (who was like a real life character from a Delaney novel), RIP, on West Virginia, and a bloody vignette (warning: strong language, adults only).

6) Something about soup? http://www.soupsong.com/index.html

7) LJ links to revisit if I feel like thinking more about effective forms of dissent and justifications for shop vandalism. Best post-G20Toronto reflection from Mamamamatas; good round-up of links from muckefuck. Yes, I have had these tabs opened since July, don't laugh!

8) Russian art terrorism, "How to Steal a Chicken?". (adult, NSFW)

Ruminations

2010-10-13T15:05:40Z

O divine garçon, from that bottle which you first poured for me,
Add two cups more, more, more, overflow me with joy.
I might have lived not knowing its sweet taste,
But now the cork is out, you must make me drunk and ruined.

You are my Mecca, this is my fuck prayer,
The heart-shape of my shivering ass the perianth
Turning to face your sun, awaiting
The piercing arrow of your secret wisdom.

Rumi, quatrain 1693 + original, inspired by Bbl

It's the most wonderful time

2010-10-11T21:46:01Z

The Canadian Thanksgiving (French: Birkat Hachama) is held earlier in the year so hordes of fat Americans can't come here and kidnap all our produce. The prized delicacies of the Thanksgiving table include jellied moose nose and fatty polar bear liver (too toxic to eat, but we sniff it and dip it in our Red Rose tea). Note: The chicken neck is not eaten at Canadian Thanksgiving.

During the festive dinner, four questions are asked and answered:

1. What Happened To the First Nations?
They went to a better place, like Grandma.

2. Why Are These Herbs So Bitter?
They're not bitter, they're organic.

3. Why Must The Boiled Meat Be Dipped In Salt Water Twice?
It symbolizes the British Navy and Cuisine.

4. Why Must We Slouch At the Table?
It symbolizes the spineless French.

We then give thanks for the Trans-Canada Highway (May Her Majesty Protect It From Potholes), bilingualism (The Core of Our Strong Economy Is In Duplicate Government Services), socialized medicine (Some Day There Will Be a Cure For Winter) and indoor plumbing (So I Can Poop Without Leaving My Igloo).

For dessert we cover our loved ones in cake and lick it off.

why nothing's simple III

2010-10-03T06:05:36Z

Here's the unnecessarily obscure poem I whined about a few entries back. For musical context, one might listen to, for example, the Master Musicians of Jajouka. Other (variably significant) references I normally would just throw out there and not bother explaining, trusting that readers rise to the challenge -- except these days I am riddled with doubt and self-hate and it's another self-indulgent fault of mine for me to pick at -- include:
--Marsyas, the Satyr who lost his musical contest with Apollo, his skin and his life, and enjoyed an afterlife as a Roman symbol of subaltern free speech, or parrhesia;
--the folk tale "The Goose Girl", in which an unjustly decapitated horse's head hanging over the city gates affirms the heroine's true self and wins her redemption, retold by Brecht in a Depression-era poem in which an old nag dying in the streets of Berlin is set upon and carved alive by hungry people;
--a shitload of blown musical instruments from different cultures and eras, associated with "low class", mad, Dionysian, or wild contexts. In ancient Greek settings the aulos, for example, bore the connotation of the instrument of slave-girls and hetaerae, prostitutes who entertained at drinking parties (symposia);
--and speaking of wild, drunken parties, we have the Komos, the Bacchanalia, and the medieval Feast of Fools, "a brief social revolution, in which power, dignity and impunity is briefly conferred on those in a subordinate position", presided over by the Lord of Misrule;
--the Blatant Beast, a villain from the Faerie Queene whose many-voiced mouth slandered and assailed all, with no regard for station: "the Blatant Beast ran at him with open mouth, huge and horrible; it was all set with a double row of iron teeth, and in it were a thousand tongues of every kind and quality--some were of dogs, that barked day and night; some of cats that yawled; some of bears that growled continually; some of tigers that seemed to grin and snarl at all who passed by; but most of them were tongues of mortal men, who poured forth abuse, not caring where nor when; and among them were mingled here and there the tongues of serpents, with three-forked stings, that spat out poison at all who came within reach, speaking hateful things of good and bad alike, of high and low, not even sparing kings or kaisers, but either blotting them with infamy or biting them with their baneful teeth";
--Phrygia, the death-place of the liberated Marsyas, also connotes barbarism, freedom and manumission, via the symbolism of the Saturnalian Phrygian cap, first worn by Marsyas' friend Midas to cover the donkey ears pinned on him by Apollo for judging the satyr's pipe music as the winning composition.

O Marsyas, Die Du Hangest (Parrhesia)

Flutes, reeds, and syringes,
    Whistles and tibiae,
        Auloi and salpinges
Speak to me, call through me;

Pipes, rhaitas, restless air,
    Mournful cacophony,
        Aeolian despair,
Sigh through me, weep with me;

Conchs, horns and bones, sing out,
    Shawms, mazamir, agree,
        Bagpipes and duduks, shout,
Laugh with me, cry through me;

Komast, bacchant, and fool,
    You blatant beasts of glee,
        Of panic and misrule,
Bleat with me, bray with me;

Hetairai pursing lips
    That blow a kiss to me
        With cunning fingertips
Prey on me, play with me;

Flayed in some Phrygian cave,
    My skin nailed to a tree...
        The outcast and the slave
Pray to me, plead through me;

My voice from flesh unwound,
    Defiant song set free,
        Until the trumpets sound
And end all things

why nothing's simple I

2010-10-03T05:42:54Z

there's a farmer in a distant country working on the land
a hat upon his head and a shovel in his hand
till the soil, plant the seed, wait awhile, cut the leaf
and send another cup of tea to me

I'm a spoiled child of the Great Imperialist State
I cannot kill my meat nor grow the food upon my plate
I've never walked a mile to the well when the tap runs dry to tell
what will become of you and me?

what will become of us? who will give us trust?
will you believe me when I say I never loved
profiting from your pain, that I felt shamed
when I looked the other way?

woke up this morning, revolution knocking down my door
"those capitalist pigs? no, they don't live here anymore"
slipped out the back door, into my car
how far can you drive? how far?

there's a farmer in a distant country, working on the land
food turned into flowers for the uptown florist stand
what you saved, another paid, to turn his soil into sand
the world will not deliver on demand

what will become of us? who will give us trust?
will you believe me when I say I never loved
profiting from your pain, that I felt shamed
when I looked the other way?

Harvest Moon

2010-09-23T16:27:08Z

...When we were strangers
I watched you from afar
When we were lovers
I loved you with all my heart.
But now it's getting late
And the moon is climbing high
I want to celebrate
See it shining in your eye.
Because I'm still in love with you
I want to see you dance again
Because I'm still in love with you
On this harvest moon.

obscure obscurity

2010-09-04T13:21:30Z

Some of my creative writing can be difficult to follow due to the expectations I have of the readers' vocabulary and cultural background. It is regrettable; when I write something I do not intend my style to be an impediment to meaning, but rather a tool for packing it more densely. I feel especially bad when I have written something for someone and find the message could not be satisfactorily decoded even by the intended recipient. And it's not just writing -- I remember with some special embarrassment episodes of teenaged flirting falling flat on their face because of my inappropriately ornate innuendo -- but writing really amplifies my natural tendency to overthink and overcomplicate utterances.

OK, I'll admit it, sometimes I go out of my way to make myself difficult to understand. I had to struggle hard to learn this language, making native speakers look up words is my revenge. I am an elitist philological snob. Fine, fine! I was always picked last to play team sports in elementary school and it turned me into a hideous sesquipedalian monster! I admit it, put away the pitch-forks! ...But no-- while that might be the passive-aggressive motivation of a normal English-speaking nerd revelling in educational pretension, I really come by this affliction honestly.

Even 25 years after I first started learning this language (British first, switching to a North American idiom only some years later) I have none of the native speakers' confidence in what I write. While I think I am good at processing other people's sociolinguistic and pragmatic codes, I can't ever really tell when something I've produced sounds colloquial and approachable or affected and stilted. As all sorts of words still give me pause and send me running for a dictionary, I don't really feel the difference of effort involved in parsing street slang and professorial philosophising; I am as likely to be stumped by an age-old short Anglo-Saxon term as by a long specialist borrowing from Greek, so in choosing between them, why not go for the Hellenism? --if nothing else it is usually more precise, less plagued by overlapping definitions unlike those more common lexical pebbles worn smooth through constant use... Chronologically, I did not go through the normal progression of childish babble evolving into a mature idiolect, informal into formal, or encountering the registers of different classes, regions, epochs as variously foreign bodies juxtaposed against the idiom of my home. My English is homeless, or at least itinerant; unsettled, uncentred. Instead of the effortless being in a language community I imagine a native speaker experiences, I feel I am always faking a performance. And if it is to be a performance? As I happened to absorb the stylistics of Victorian novelists before Archie comics, Tolkien before Winnie the Pooh, as my fluency, such as there is, coïncided with going to university -- this high register, dry, affected, and intentionally Baroque writing is where I find the most familiar, if not familial, shelter, covering for the semi-constant state of linguistic doubt and anxiety (a state which only got much worse during the course of my depression); and so here, on this ground, my performance feels the most effortless, the most like... second nature.

If this one motivation for prolix density is a kind of necessity, the second is rooted in play. I know that, for me personally, coming across a new word, an unexpected image pointing to some unknown context or derivation in someone else's writing is a moment of sweetness, of excitement, discovery. The meaning which is not plain, the message which has to be teased out, peeled apart, grasped at on my tip-toes, it's pure joy. Because I have to approach this language humbly, as a constant learner, there is no downside to finding myself challenged and confused. If I do throw in an intentional challenge to my reader, it is an invitation to play along with me. I never intend the experience to be disagreeable; but I have been given to understand that for many a native English speaker, a love poem one has to pause reading to look up a word in is a hostile love poem. That is terrible! Please, if you're ever puzzled by something I say here, it is not an attack on your education or erudition, never an attempt to belittle, always to expand, to entertain. That, or -- going back to that first motivator, my deficient code-switching and limited range -- an error on my part, an unintentional misuse of some internalized writing habit inappropriate for the given conversation.

***

I opened this with "expectations I have of the readers' vocabulary and cultural background", and so far I've really been talking about the former part, but it's the latter that really got me thinking about it. At least with some degenerate word, there's dictionaries... But what about (dim) literary allusions? Sure, there's Google and Wikipedia and such... Yet as I just found out, with an allusion it's not as easy to know what to start searching for, or when one has found the key one has been looking for. To what degree can I, should I, moderate my reliance on what I blithely assume to be our (as speakers of a Western European language) shared cultural heritage?

I just finished writing a poem drawing for its central image on the mythic tale and ancient views of Marsyas; conflated with the talking head of Falada the horse from one of the tales of the Brothers Grimm, "The Goose Girl"; and on Brecht's Depression-era poem referencing it, "O Falladah, die du hangest". Without Googling, do any of these elements ring a bell?

Because I'd been thinking about how I am often unintentionally obscure, I decided to Google all three parts for myself and include good expository links in a sort of a footnote... and with disbelief discovered that the fucking Brecht poem, which is the most recent and the most patently literary, cannot be found in English! (Or else I suck at searching?) Only after some desperate gyrations did I confirm it had even *been* translated; yes, it has, as "Falada, Falada, There Thou Art Hanging", and I know it because I heard a 30 second snippet of it on some jazz singer's website, and the title is listed in a book of Brecht's works indexed, but not displayed, on Google Books. But as for the full text? Nowhere to be found, grrr.

So can I slip it in there and assume people will recognize it? If no-one will, what is the point of alluding to it? But the poem's done, and as I had read Brecht's Falada poem in three languages including the original before I was 20, it never even occurred to me that in English it would be such an unobtainable rarity! And if I were to do a poll, and no-one knew the Brecht, or the Grimms, or the Greek myth, or the other cryptic references peppered in there, should I just throw away the finished poem? At what point does my love of transtextuality lead to incoherence? *sigh* And this is why truly powerful writing is so often simple. None of this frillery and drapery I love so much to trip over and get tangled in. Poems with footnotes, wtf was I thinking!?

...I blame larvatus. :P