a semiotic journey through my fascism

a_tilted_bottle @ 2009-12-09T11:01:00

2009-12-09T16:01:14Z

I think this is pretty funny. A friend of mine found this on Craigslist, and I'm pretty sure it's talking about me. It was posted a couple days after the Jandek show, after which I went to Jong Kok with some friends and talked about my favorite Golden Girls episodes.

"You, Me, Kim Chi and Bea (Arthur)

I overheard the table next to us talking about "Golden Girls" at Jong Kok.
I glanced up and immediately noticed your soft hair strewn across your downcast eyes.
You appeared sad even though you were in the company of good friends.
How can someone so beautiful seem so sad?
I can sense a deep sorrow within.
You deserve someone to nurture you.

I can sense beneath your timidity an unrestrained animalistic passion, which I hope to unleash.
I hope to cradle you in my arms as we savor every fleeting moment.
At dawn the chariot of Apollo will greet us.
I will nuzzle your phallus as a puppy nuzzles its mothers teat, gently licking away till the last bits of milk are spent...
...and I am fully engorged and both are satisfied.

Plant your seed upon the garden of my tongue, and I will plant mine upon your taut hindquarters.
Srsly, I could bounce a quarter off that thing;)

...but I digress.

I feel as if I have flown too close to the sun--like Icarus, I will be cast down to my demise....

contact me. "

http://baltimore.craigslist.org/mis/1481493187.html

a_tilted_bottle @ 2009-09-05T03:09:00

2009-09-05T07:16:28Z

A sentimental scene from a movie

Why do you read such books!
the furious governess shrilled
at the pink child, embarrassed,
who replied in a sentimental tone:

I was never the best at anything,
as the stories always begin,
...and books don't talk back,
They don't laugh at you-- they
don't even know you exist.
They just sit there:
In their stupid little world,
waiting, unaware that they
are characters, their world
merely a text.

a_tilted_bottle @ 2009-06-24T05:59:00

2009-06-25T05:06:05Z

Note the similarities between Paradise Lost, Book V, 460-74 and Anaxagoras.

a_tilted_bottle @ 2009-06-10T14:33:00

2009-06-10T18:33:14Z

The Wheel of Fortune

Curtains open on our young hero in an hour glass, pounding,
the Magician, brooding, pacing:
“Release the sand, water boys!”
Two Fools slide across stage, turn the Wheel;
the red sand begins to fall, our man is in danger.
Space and time slipping away, he remembers:

The beach was cold, but they were warm, they were
Sand, water, boys, release: the
Lovers, together, alive, unbridled.
They danced beneath their Mother Moon,
and Father Sun smiled proudly:
“Boys, water the sand: release
the flower.” And they did.

But now our man looks into the eyes of Death,
“Water boys! The sand! Release!”
Where is two (VI) when he is one (XII)?
This is where the one meets three,
And the third penetrates the glass.

* * *

The clumsy creators under the Sun
--Magicians, Lovers, Fools--
they dance all day, and then at night,
they sing their song to the Moon:

“If I was the flower, you’d be the soil.
If I was the soil, you’d be the rain.
If I was the rain, you’d be the flower.
Never the same, never the same.”

A lonely star has found its mate,
but, alas, our Man is Hanged.

a_tilted_bottle @ 2009-06-04T23:53:00

2009-06-05T03:58:50Z

"Art used to be a game of nuts in May, children would go gathering words that had a final ring, then they would exude, shout out the verse, and dress it in dolls' bootees, and the verse became a queen in order to die a little, and the queen became a sardine, and the children ran hither and yon, unseen...Then came the great ambassadors of feeling, who yelled historically in chorus:
Psychology Psychology hee hee
Science Science Science
Long live France
We are not naive
We are successive
We are exclusive
We are not simpletons
and we are perfectly capable of an intelligent discussion.
But we, DADA, don't agree with them, for art isn't serious, I assure you, and if we reveal the crime so as to show that we are learned denunciators, it's to please you, dear audience, I assure you, and I adore you."
-Tristan Tzara, "Monsieur Antipyrine's Manifesto", 1916, pp. 2

a_tilted_bottle @ 2009-05-03T02:52:00

2009-05-03T06:53:16Z

eternity begins and ends in bed. the day and night are measured in your eyelids.

a_tilted_bottle @ 2009-04-01T16:15:00

2009-04-01T20:16:48Z

The Buried Life- Matthew Arnold, 1852

Light flows our war of mocking words, and yet,
Behold, with tears mine eyes are wet!
I feel a nameless sadness o'er me roll.
Yes, yes, we know that we can jest,
We know, we know that we can smile!
But there's a something in this breast,
To which thy light words bring no rest,
And thy gay smiles no anodyne.
Give me thy hand, and hush awhile,
And turn those limpid eyes on mine, 10
And let me read there, love! thy inmost soul.

Alas! is even love too weak
To unlock the heart, and let it speak?
Are even lovers powerless to reveal
To one another what indeed they feel?
I knew the mass of men conceal'd
Their thoughts, for fear that if reveal'd
They would by other men be met
With blank indifference, or with blame reproved;
I knew they lived and moved 20
Trick'd in disguises, alien to the rest
Of men, and alien to themselves--and yet
The same heart beats in every human breast!

But we, my love!--doth a like spell benumb
Our hearts, our voices?--must we too be dumb?

Ah! well for us, if even we,
Even for a moment, can get free
Our heart, and have our lips unchain'd;
For that which seals them hath been deep-ordain'd!

Fate, which foresaw 30
How frivolous a baby man would be--
By what distractions he would be possess'd,
How he would pour himself in every strife,
And well-nigh change his own identity--
That it might keep from his capricious play
His genuine self, and force him to obey
Even in his own despite his being's law,
Bade through the deep recesses of our breast
The unregarded river of our life
Pursue with indiscernible flow its way; 40
And that we should not see
The buried stream, and seem to be
Eddying at large in blind uncertainty,
Though driving on with it eternally.

But often, in the world's most crowded streets,
But often, in the din of strife,
There rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life;
A thirst to spend our fire and restless force
In tracking out our true, original course; 50
A longing to inquire
Into the mystery of this heart which beats
So wild, so deep in us--to know
Whence our lives come and where they go.
And many a man in his own breast then delves,
But deep enough, alas! none ever mines.
And we have been on many thousand lines,
And we have shown, on each, spirit and power;
But hardly have we, for one little hour,
Been on our own line, have we been ourselves-- 60
Hardly had skill to utter one of all
The nameless feelings that course through our breast,
But they course on for ever unexpress'd.
And long we try in vain to speak and act
Our hidden self, and what we say and do
Is eloquent, is well--but 'tis not true!
And then we will no more be rack'd
With inward striving, and demand
Of all the thousand nothings of the hour
Their stupefying power; 70
Ah yes, and they benumb us at our call!
Yet still, from time to time, vague and forlorn,
From the soul's subterranean depth upborne
As from an infinitely distant land,
Come airs, and floating echoes, and convey
A melancholy into all our day.

Only--but this is rare--
When a beloved hand is laid in ours,
When, jaded with the rush and glare
Of the interminable hours, 80
Our eyes can in another's eyes read clear,
When our world-deafen'd ear
Is by the tones of a loved voice caress'd--
A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast,
And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again.
The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain,
And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know.
A man becomes aware of his life's flow,
And hears its winding murmur; and he sees
The meadows where it glides, the sun, the breeze. 90

And there arrives a lull in the hot race
Wherein he doth for ever chase
That flying and elusive shadow, rest.
An air of coolness plays upon his face,
And an unwonted calm pervades his breast.
And then he thinks he knows
The hills where his life rose,
And the sea where it goes.

a_tilted_bottle @ 2009-03-31T14:59:00

2009-03-31T19:08:19Z

I tutored a girl today who was writing a paper on a Rita Dove poem. There is this part in the poem where the little girl talks about how she would baptize her earlobes with rosewater to forget about her dead father, and that reminded me of Sissy Spacek in Bandlands, the part where Holly writes sentences on the roof of her mouth with her tongue so that no one could read. Something about that connection made me feel really sad all of the sudden.

I fell asleep while taking a test in my Philosophy of Science class. I think the teacher thinks I'm an idiot now. I was too tired to think of how to fully answer the question on Duhem and his form of underdetermination. The girl next to me copied my test when I fell asleep. I think she will be disappointed in herself when she gets her test back.

I have a lot of papers to grade but no place in my patience to grade them. I want to see new faces smiling and walk around outdoors. I wouldn't mind a nice intellectual conversation for once, too. Where do I want to be right now? Who do I want to be with?

a_tilted_bottle @ 2009-01-16T06:37:00

2009-01-16T11:47:21Z

I forgot that, when soaked in libations, words flow as smooth as soldiers: trained, ordered, and with a mission. Though I still am disappointed with both the Internet and the real world, I'm getting better with the issue of loving myself. When focusing on others, less on literary behemoths, the world seems very bleak, to say the least. I guess I never really pulled my nose out of my books long enough to truly accept that, yes, this is what we have become. It is not idealistic perceptions of Marx or hedonistic fantasies of pacification. I live in a world that is decadent enough to consider even me intelligent. Degeneration works quite literally and obviously, though we may like to entertain ourselves enough to think it works in mysterious ways. It's comforting that way.

The Scholar by the Roadside

2008-12-07T16:31:07Z

As he traveled the hillside, Xu Yen of the Yan Xian came upon a scholar of seventeen or eighteen. The young man, who was lying by the roadside, said that his feet hurt and asked for a lift in the goose cage which Xu was carrying. At first, Xu thought he was joking. But the scholar got into the cage, and the cage looked no larger than before while the scholar looked no smaller. He sat down quietly beside the two geese, and they did not seem to mind him. Xu picked up the cage again but found it no heavier.

Further on, he stopped to rest under a tree when the scholar, coming out of the cage, offered to treat him to a meal. When Xu accepted with pleasure, the scholar took from his mouth a copper tray laid with all manner of delicacies. The utensils were of copper, and the food had a rare flavor and fragrance. After several cups of wine, the scholar told Xu: “I have a girl with me. May I ask her to join us?”

“Certainly.”

Then, from his mouth, the scholar produced a girl of fifteen or sixteen, richly dressed and amazingly lovely. She sat down, smiled, and feasted with them. After the meal, the scholar, slightly tipsy from drinking too much plum wine, went to go lie down.

The girl saw this as her opportunity. “Though I have married this main,” said the girl to Xu, “as a matter of fact, I hate him. I have brought my lover with me. Now that my husband is asleep, I shall call him out. Please do not say anything.”

“Certainly not,” agreed Xu.

Then the girl produced from her mouth another young fellow of twenty-three or four, intelligent and charming, who chatted with Xu. Just then, the scholar started to wake, and the girl took a silk screen from her mouth to hide the new man. The scholar made the girl join him in bed. The newcomer then told Xu, “Though that girl is fond of me, I don’t care for her. I have brought another girl with me and would like to see her now. Please don’t let anyone know.”

“Certainly not,” Xu once again agreed.

Then the second man took from his mouth a girl of twenty or so. They feasted and amused themselves until they heard the scholar stirring.

“Those two are getting up,” the second man said. He popped the girl into his mouth.
The first girl returned and told Xu, “The scholar is getting up now.”
She swallowed her friend and sat alone with Xu.
Then the scholar came out and told him, “I am sorry I slept for so long. You must have been bored sitting here all by yourself. As it is growing late, I should bid you farewell.”

With that, he swallowed hte girl and the utensils, leaving only a big copper tray for Xu. This tray was some two feet across, and in parting, the scholar said, “I have nothing worth giving you, but keep this as a souvenir.”

During the Taiyuan period (376 C.E. - 396 C.E. ) Xu served as an advisor in the Imperial Library and showed the tray to Minister Chang III, who discovered from the inscriptions that it was made in the third year of Yong Bing (60 C.E.).

Rhetorical Rule

2008-11-21T10:24:56Z

The other day in my bioethics class, one of the students questioned the why the validity of Don Marquis’s ad hoc argument on abortion was questionable. The professor became side tracked on the argument form of why ad hoc arguments were considered invalid, and began to propose to the class that he had asked his dissertation adviser this question when he was in grad school. The dissertation adviser did not know the answer but advised my professor to stay away from them anyhow.

In this anecdote, I see two things at play: the discourse of a philosophical community (mental, as well as verbal), and discourse’s strong stance on the separation between rhetoric and philosophy. To the latter, the separation is most famously due to Socrates in Plato’s numerous dialogue like The Protagoras and The Gorgias and The Phaedrus where Socrates links the sophists--the main performers and teachers of rhetoric--with unethical behavior. The syllogism then reads that sophists are rhetoricians, sophists are unethical, and therefore rhetoric is unethical; this is a very simple logical error: the syllogistic logical fallacy of the illicit minor. However, since then, philosophy and rhetoric have been split. Aristotle, critical of his teacher’s faulty logic and emphasis on the metaphysical, realized the importance and use of rhetoric as a means of leading people toward happiness. He also realized the flaw, one which Plato also discusses in The Republic: Rhetoric can be used to persuade for a teleology which is unnatural through convincing argument forms (like the ad hoc). But it was for this reason that Aristotle allowed and encouraged the study of rhetoric as it was through scrupulous rhetorical study that people would learn ways of persuasion as well as recognizing truly illogical argument forms. I think of the study of rhetoric as a sort of rhetorical immune system building. Aristotle also limited rhetoric to the political sciences, specifically to the supposed philosopher kings who philosophized the right way of doing things and used rhetoric as a means of leading humanity toward functionality and ultimately eudemonia. For the quotidian to use rhetoric would be immoral, since it could detract from the philosopher king’s agenda, leading humanity astray from teleology or the natural order of things. Or at least this is what one reading of The Nicomachean Ethics would flush out. There tends to be a lingering question of whether the function of people (and therefore the ethical rightness or wrongness of people's characters) is necessarily intertwined in a person's work. Are ethics personal or political?

I'm sidetracking myself. As I was trying to say, the invalidity of ad hoc arguments has become institutionalized into the discourse of philosophy ever since, later factoring into the established academic tradition of philosophical study. I think it is perhaps because of the institutionalized study of philosophy that ad hoc arguments are seen to be invalid, partially due to history of the tradition and partially due to realization of how rhetoric can affect politics. Creating a rhetorically persuasive argument using an ad hoc argument form is precisely that rhetoric which Aristotle and Plato feared. Aristotle's rhetorical rival, Isocrates, accounted for the fact that this would happen and created his own branch of rhetorical theory based on performance rather than persuasion; he called his pedagogy "philosophia", as true lovers of wisdom are wise in action, not in argument. Today, in this day and age, philosophy does not concern itself with rhetoric as it concerns itself solely with argument and not performance--or at least the analytic tradition does not concern itself with performance. If it does focus on performance or action, it focuses on things abstract like illocutionary speech acts, a very small part of communication or communication theory brooded over for the sake of a coherent analytic counterpart to continental philosophies of language.

And meanwhile, Sarah Palin nearly became our Vice-president. Barack Obama became President-elect Obama. And John McCain's "straight talk" non-rhetoric rhetoric won over the minds of 46% of our population. Ignoring a problem, even historically, does not make it go away. I think my professor's comment regarding ad hoc arguments, as well as the comment he made about his dissertation advisor not knowing why ad hoc arguments were considered invalid, demonstrates the impracticality running through the veins of the institutionalized profession of the philosopher.

Braindead

2008-08-27T22:02:22Z

So back to school is pretty boring and drunken. Karaoke night didn’t work out. I ordered a pizza, and then it was over. Instead, I watched A Zed & Two Noughts, which, it turns out, is a lot like Dead Ringers, except with a Michael Nyman soundtrack (typical) and a Peter Greenway attitude toward narrative (also typical, obviously). Today, I was supposed to be a TA for a class which I thought was the class I was supposed to TA for, but it turned out that it wasn't. The class I TA for is on Monday. I can't TA for that class. It interferes with that discourse analysis class I am taking, so I'm going to see if I can TA another ethics class in place of that Monday class.

Well, in other news, the apartment is dumb. I have a jock roommate on the wresting team. He has red hair and smokes a lot of pot. He didn't bring anything with him to school except a blanket, a television, and Call of Duty 4 or whatever that game is. Oh, and a computer. Either way, the common room is empty. There is no TV. There was a karaoke screen earlier, but then I got pizza, so that's gone now, too. Things aren't too fun around here. Everyone graduated, so there's no one to challenge me anymore. I went to my first class today and it was boring. I felt college-old, like I ought to audit or something. But I went drunk. I've been drinking every day. Like a lot. Like, this is going to be a semester-long bender, a lot. That's how bad it is now. There's a Chick-fil-a on campus and a Starbucks and a Dunkin Donuts. They fired all the workers, and I feel like it was the solidarity coalitions duty to realize that, if they complained about Sodexo enough but didn't realize the repercussions of getting them off campus, people would be worse off. This one black lady who used to work at the Grill-- I asked her where her friend was. She looked at me all stoic and said, "She din make it." Like as if it was war or something. Fuck, I'm so privileged, and still, I'm a whiney bitch. A drunken whiney bitch.

I haven't puked yet, and I'm gonna try and keep it like that forever. Rumi says that the reason Islamic outlaws libations is because alcohol brings out the inner spirit, the innermost desires and stuff. Most people are angry or sad but mostly self-destructive. Rumi was at peace. For him, drinking was a conversation with God in the garden of his mind. For me, I think it's more like self-deprecation, but like, hide and go seek with that self-deprecation. I'm alone in my room now typing. I am alone, in my room, now, typing... drunk. And I will be hungry soon, I bet. Oh! I know! Let me microwave a fucking burrito! NO! Stoner jock didn't bring a microwave. Neither did Carl. Fuck. I hate this stupid fucking place.

Carl needs academic babysitting and indirectly asked me to academic babysit him. I'm gonna be working as a TA, a writing center tutor, and a wushu coach. On top of that, I'm taking a grad class, two other classes, a training course, and working on my senior thesis on god knows what. Top that off with sporadic anxiety attacks and insomnia and you have hell. I rented this Peter Greenaway TV special on Dante's Inferno, and I would watch it now, but I have a headache. Fuck graduation. Fuck all of this. I don't want to be doing this anymore. But, I mean, I've been bread to think there is no other way, right? Like, where is my television? Where are my burritos? This must be hell, right? Maybe I'll learn something this year. Or maybe I'll go mad. Or maybe I'll buy a TV and a DVD player and some groceries and make Carl get a microwave in exchange for academic babysitting. Maybe, by next week, the stoner jock will come out of his den because he likes the common space more than his barren room. Maybe I'll spend most of my time at Martin's feeling dumb while he talks about a totally different world of non-college brilliance and art and stuff. Maybe anything. Maybe I'll sober up and feel dumb and rewrite this entry but pretend like it's the first time I'm writing it. Maybe this is the rewrite, the re-envisioning, like Death Race from Death Race 2000. I will do this, of course, after I write an entry where I answer a question I originally posed in this entry about a movie where there was this trashy high class woman at a social gathering and she showed someone her scar and said "that was my twin sister... siamese twins". Doesn't that kind of sound like it could be a Peter Greenaway plot, though? I mean, it's sort of like A Zed & Two Naughts, maybe. Shit...

a_tilted_bottle @ 2008-08-24T23:26:00

2008-08-25T03:26:37Z

So fucking boring. Shit.

a_tilted_bottle @ 2008-08-24T05:14:00

2008-08-24T09:14:13Z

The Will of Freedom

In the prison, the young mystic poet is being held without ransom by the Turanians. A old man, a fellow mystic, sneaks into the prison dressed as a guard. He has brought with him gold to give to the poet so that he may bribe his jailers. The young poet, however, refuses the money, telling the old man, "Friend, there is nothing God has given you which can free me." With this, the old man leaves distressed.

The next day, the man rides into the prison yard not only with gold, but stallions and jewels which excite even the spoiled Turanian king Afrasiab. With the pressure of the kingdom this time, the young poet is once again presented with his liberation, and once again he refuses. "Nothing God has given you can free me, my friends. I am sorry." The guards become infuriated by this proud gesture, and the chief officer of the prison requests from the king Afrasiab permission for the young poet's immediate execution. Permission is granted.

Panicked by the wild turn of events, the old man pleas with God himself to convince the poet to escape. Echoing straight into the heart of the poet, God speaks: "I demand that you live, my child. Accept the freedom provided by the old man and live out your life in mystic divinity, away from the bars of this prison they have caged you in."

As soon as God was finished speaking, a deep breathe escaped the poet's lips. In a calm voice, the poet spoke. "You, my Lord, are like that old man. You do not yet understand what is meant by freedom and what is meant by imprisonment. What can one man truly give to another? What place does freedom have in the hands of these men? In the words of this world? This heart only knows submission. I am a poet, my Lord. I will demonstrate this much to you."

With a smile on his face, the poet sprawled out upon the floor of his cell, and died.

a_tilted_bottle @ 2008-08-23T16:51:00

2008-08-23T20:52:46Z

The happy ending of Theodore Sturgeon's short story The World Well Lost will fill your gut with tears and your face with hopelessness. Don't believe me? Well then go fuck yourself. Oh, the loverbirds. The loverbirds.

An analysis of the first stanza of written_insin's poem "Incision"

2008-08-21T05:33:35Z

The first stanza of written_insin's poem "Incision":

Writhed across the satin sheets of lore, scents coalesce the atmosphere
Of a chained and faceless storm
Locks of magenta wilt and whisper
A torture that was only tepid in anticipation
A soft incision, a cut through
The gentle flesh of the valleys requiring constant surveillance
Core of the hurricane, eye of the tempest
Spirals through a bloodletting reign

My analysis:

"Satin sheets of lore" must imply some sort of universal symbol of someone or something, perhaps mythological, cf. the old gods of lore or the book of lore.
The participial phrase describing the subject of the first sentence, “sense”, is apparently “writhed”. “Writhed”, according to the OED, is a transitive verb which means to be twisted or coiled. In your poem, it is intransitive, though, and the intransitive verb for writhe means to flourish or sprout. I will treat it otherwise, however. I believe you meant it to mean coiling, viz. writhing in pain.
When you say “scents coalesce the atmosphere/Of a chained and faceless storm”, this reads that a smell is taking the atmosphere—i.e. air pressure, water vapor, cold front—and mixing the atmosphere together, assumedly to give it a face. Perhaps the chaining you refer to is due to the atmosphere’s lack of homogeneity; that is, it’s chained up because it’s not conforming to social norms, cf. Bakhtin’s theory of centripetal and centrifugal heterodoxy in Four Essays. This also explains why the storm has no face: he (if I may gender the storm, as I’m sure you intended) has been imprisoned and his face hidden from society. I think the obvious reference here points to Dumas’s The Vicomte of Bragelonne. Please correct me if I am wrong.
The scent and atmosphere, because they’re coiled around the sheets (which are mythological), gives the impression that they come from the sheets or from something which occurred on, in, or to the sheets, such as sex or laundry. Either the smell of laundry or sex is coalescing (riling). What is riling if not a prisoner from the French Revolution, what given the man in the iron mask allusion? I guess this must all be happening in the Bastille. Oh! So what this sentence means exactly is that sex inspires prison revolt! I get it, I get it…. The storming of the Bastille was definitely based on sex and laundry; you’re right. In the core of the French Revolution, there was a feuding dialectic between progeny and cleanliness, sex and laundry. Nice!
On a more universal level, I’m guessing this is about a battle between the Id and the Ego, using the French Revolution as an allegory.
Atmosphere implies air-pressure, which when personified becomes blood-pressure, aiding further credence to the claim that the sent is physiologically exciting the prisoners. Like an “aphrodisiac”, whose aromas produce lasciviousness, the sent is kind of like an “ares-desiac”, a war scent, one similar to the chemicals used to cause revelry in the Vietnam war— Ares, here, being paralleled with Aphrodite to accommodate the image of satin sheets and prison break. Love is war. The battle between Id and Ego, like I said. I really appreciate the Freudian undertones!
Also, going back to that chemical used in Vietnam, I think you actually implied a very cleaver connection which I would not have even caught, had it not been for that blood-pressure/scent connection. Vietnam is a war torn country, destroyed by the French-Indo-Chinese Revolution. This scent seems to relate all back to France. Does this poem jest at the failure of the French Revolution through the evocation of the Vietnam War?
While the “locks” here in the third line may seem to imply bundles, it would not actually make sense to have locks of an abstract color; ergo, the lock this poem speaks of is the other kind of lock, i.e. lock and key. The magenta lock alludes back to the image strand of prison, a flamboyant prison. Or perhaps it alludes to psychedelia—a psychedelic French prison, such as the one Jean Genet’s dream prison in his homoerotic film Un Chant d’Amour. Is Jean Genet the man in the iron mask?
The previous reference to the lack of homogeneity now more clearly is referring to Jean Genet, I feel, as he was imprisoned himself for opposing French culture.
While the word “tepid” in line 4—meaning “lacking force”—is ironic for the image of a prison revolt, it here fits precisely because of Jean Genet’s sexual fetish with the phallic nature of ballistic weaponry.
Backtracking a little, I now see that the “locks” are “wilting” due to the prisoner’s revolt being successful; the “torture” “whispers” for this same reason, too. This is the same way torture whispers in everyday life outside of a prison, much like Michel Foucault’s analysis of power and gaze when analyzing the great Utilitarian Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon in his seminal work Discipline and Punish.
While the line “A soft incision, a cut...” may seem like it is grammatically and pragmatically incorrect or that it follows from no prior statement, it actually shows the disconnection of poetry, metaphor, and metonym. The statement of the incision carves itself out of the poem and arrives at the title of the poem, Incision. The line is an incision itself of grammar. In the image strand of the prison break, prisoners are incising the gates, opening them up; this line does the same to the prison of the poem’s structure, to grammar, and to language.
This notion of incisions, of cutting, now justifies the mythology of the sheets—“the satin sheets of lore”—as this timeless act of hegemonic struggle in language (Id and Ego in representation) acts as a creation myth: more specifically, the creation of freedom. Hence all the references to sex, laundry, and Freud.
The lock can also be seen as a symbol for the vagina, as you put a key in it. I don’t know why I missed that one. Either way, the image strand does not budge. This is a strong piece!
As you mentioned in your message to me, the “valley” in line 6 is meant to be “the valley of the mind, like the grooves on the brain’s surface”. This ties back in to the “writhing” in line one, the coiling, as brain is coiled, as well as the “spirals of bloodletting” in the final line of the stanza. Going back to the global theme of dialectic Id and Ego, the brain can be seen as the location of the prison. When there are no holes in a brain—be the holes from ecstasy or a bludgeoned aphasia or, really, any sort of “mental instability”—the brain is topologically indistinguishably from a sphere.
A sphere is a perfect prison, as there are no entrances or exits, only space. The universe is a sphere with an infinite radius.
Those who have holes in their brains, such as those with “mental instability” like Jean Genet, cannot be entrapped in this sphere prison.
The prisoners, the “mentally unstable”, can break out of prison because of the incision, the holes in the sphere, in the brain, etc. This is how revolution manifests at an ideological and cultural level.
The “core of the hurricane” and the “eye of the tempest” are both metaphors for the hole, the gate, the cervix, the passage to freedom.
Finally, you mention “bloodletting”, which in retrospect was a rather cruel and unsuccessful psychiatric procedure performed most notably by English psychiatrists. Could this reference be a nudging at the universality of this problem of entrapment, this problem of the sphere? It is not just the French Revolution but also the psychiatric revolution. In this final line, are you extending the image strand out of the “eye of the tempest” or the hole in the sphere, the gate of the prison, into contemporary “Generation RX”, born out of English psychiatry? Brilliant!

a_tilted_bottle @ 2008-08-16T05:03:00

2008-08-16T09:37:09Z

Tonight I

saw a movie. I watched The Edge of Heaven, which was the Turkish-German version of a Robert Altman film, most likely Short Cuts. Supposedly, according to the reviewers, it was chock full of notions of diasporic identity issues and didactics of foreign policy, but to read this, you pretty much have to be retarded. Nationality was not an issue. It was about disconnection, distance, dissonance, and the struggle for an emotional reconstruction. That Fossbinder actress, Anna Karina, made it very clear that film was not to be viewed in a nationalistic or didactic lens. There was no focus on emotion. It was the structure. The disconnection.

saw Sherif, who came back from Iowa for a few days, threw himself a party at his old house, and was bummed when the only people who showed were people from Fredrick and his old roommates. He's loved more than he knows. Most people just don't do things anymore. They spend Fridays alone or at shows alone. Sherif spent most of the time at his own party alone. He started playing a new computer game called Portal. He started playing it on his seventh or eighth beer. And I was on my tenth. Then I left.

after finding out my favorite Baltimore bar, Club Charles, has been shut down and relocated to like South Carolina or something ridiculous like that, I went to the Copycat Annex to see Martin and his friend, Nate, who does the video for Eats Tapes. The City Paper described Eats Tapes as "the kibosh on whole fields of techno naysaying" and even throws in a little slogan: Techno, heck no? Eat a tape!. They were techno. Very predictable. Scott was there, of course, dancing like a gorilla and being selective as to who he talked to. A quick hi and then he's off. On Tuesday, he asked Edward to go with him to see Weedeater. I need to get over the fact that he liked Edward more than me, I do, but I still feel that he fucks me over more than I deserve, and it's always in subtle and passive ways. I'm probably reading far more into it than is actually there. Either way, some kid who is in Teeth Moutain whose name I forgot already said hi to me. I think the only reason why is because I'm friends with Martin and he wants to be. Owen. His name was Owen. He was pretty much licking Martin's balls, hoping that Martin would acknowledge and endorse his band. He's friends with Scott. That's the other time I met him. And he reads Deleuze (obviously). That's another time I met him, too, at the Mt. Royal Tavern. I forgot him each and every time. I probably shouldn't. Teeth Mountain will probably be really, really big.

got wasted and dizzy.

went back to Martin and Drew's to help entertain Eats Tapes and eat food. They were staying at Martin and Drew's for the night cause they were on tour and that's what touring bands do. Over food, there was a lot of Baltimore bashing coming from Nate and we couldn't really deny any of it. Baltimore is a shit hole, but it's one which has soul. It's one you grow to love. Before the bashing, Nate was showing an amazing piece of video art that he bootlegged from a museum in San Francisco . The piece was by a video artist named Mike Kelly, whom I've never heard of but apparently should have and ought to be ashamed of not having heard of him. The piece was pretty amazing, actually. It was on what speculatively goes on in those cliche high school year book photos of events, except it assumed the school to be filled with magick-wielding occultists. There was a focus on Gene Simmons and norse gods, Garth Brooks and Southern Baptists, wiccan auditorium dancing, Aleister Crowley walks in the forest, school shrubbery reciting Americanized Percy Shelly and Lord Byron sonnets, Brandon Lee's specter coming to life out of the paintings the art club brought in of their favorite gods, Kanye West had a similar story to Brandon Lee but he was competing with Kobe Bryant, etc. At one point the Garth Brooks Southern Baptist regaled the Viking Kiss fangirl with a story about a land at the bottom of a cesspool "a bubblin and a bustlin". They didn't know they were in a cesspool, and they didn't know that at any point, that membrane surrounding their civilization could pop and destroy their civilization. Ergo, Garth Brooks is better than Gene Simmons. There was also a high school musical with satanist mimes and country girls singing about Tijuanna hay rides. I think it was one of the most brilliant things I've seen this year. And I've seen a lot this year, I think.

held my vomit in a bumpy car ride back home drunk. Don't drink and drive unless you're good at it. Now I have a splitting headache and am eating Singapore noodles and drinking lots of water. Drunk food and preventative measures for tomorrow's hangover. I really ought not to eat these noodles. I've been really self-conscious lately about my weight. Since I tore my hamstring, I've been inactive, lazy, slothish, whatever. I haven't been acrobatic. I haven't done a million push ups a day, ran seven miles, and then practiced how many times I can rotate in the air after a kick before landing. I can't. Really, I don't know how to burn these carbs. I've been checking out that Zone Diet the fat guy from Mexico is doing, but I doubt I'd be able to follow that. I think you have to pay money for people to make you a schedule or something, anyways. At least officially. My wrist on my left hand has been hurting when I try and put pressure on my palm, too. I don't know what this pain is, but it is the worst. I can't do push ups. Well, I can. i just have to do them on my knuckles.

finished a book which I will forget most of in the morning. Oh, and I also recognized that I may have the worst memory... I would say in the world, but I hate cliches, and I'm sure amnesiacs have worse memory. But I have bad memory. It makes me want to kill myself. You have no clue. I will never amount to anything real and I can't stay awake for regular jobs. I'm so fucking spoiled. And I can't memorize Chinese characters because, a few months later, they all look familiar but you just can't remember what they mean. I was trying to read the newspaper tonight. It didn't work out. I don't know if it will ever work out. I need to take one more Chinese class to get my degree, an independent study, but I have no clue what to make it on. I was hoping to avoid having to read some piece of classical literature or something because my Chinese word processor, the one which lets me type in the pinyin and choose from all the possible choices and stuff-- that's expired now. It won't let me scroll over the texts and read what the pinyin is anymore, thus further distancing me from written to spoken Chinese. Sometimes I get really, really depressed and feel worthless, then I realize that everyone is like that all the time and I'm so fucking full of myself.

And that's what I did tonight. And apparently, at 5:30 in the morning, I still felt awake enough to type out a glimpse into my life. I wish I had musical talent. I would settle for being drop dead gorgeous, though. Both would be preferable.

a_tilted_bottle @ 2008-08-13T06:26:00

2008-08-13T10:26:46Z

Excerpt from Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon*:

One evening when Avi and his family had been over for dinner, Randy had said, "I'm the beard, Avi's the suit," as a way of explaining their business relationship, and from that point Charlene had been off and running. Charlene has recently finished a scholarly article, deconstructing beard. In particular, she was aiming at the beard culture in the Northern California high-tech community--Randy's crowd. Her paper began by demolishing, somehow, the assumption that beards were more "natural" or easier to maintain than clean-shavenness--she actually published statistics from Gillette's research department comparing the amount of time that bearded and beardless men spent in the bathroom each day, proving that the difference was not statistically significant. Randy had any number of objections to the way in which these statistics were gathered, but Charlene was having none of it. "It is counterintuitive," she said.

She was in a big hurry to move on to the meat of her argument. She went up to San Francisco and bought a few hundred dollars' worth of pornography at a boîte that catered to shaving fetishists. Fro a couple of weeks, Randy couldn't come home in the evening without finding Charlene sacked out in front of the TV with a bowl of popcorn and a Dictaphone, watching a video of a straight razor being drawn along wet, soapy flesh. She taped a few lengthy interviews with some actual shaving fetishists who described in great detail the feeling of nakedness and vulnerability shaving gave them, and how erotic that was, especially when freshly shaved areas were slapped or spanked. She worked up a detailed comparison of the iconography of shaving-fetishist porn and that of shaving-product commercials shown on national TV during football games, and proved that they were basically indistinguishable (you could actually buy videotapes of bootleg shaving-cream and razor ads in the same place that sold the out-and-out pornography).

She pulled down statistics on racial variations in beard growth. American Indians didn't grow beards, Asians hardly did, Africans were a special case because daily shaving gave them a painful skin condition. "The ability to grow heavy, full beards as a matter of choice appears to be a privilege accorded by nature solely to white males," she wrote.

Alarm bells, red lights, and screaming klaxons went off in Randy's mind when he happened across that phrase.

"But this assertion buys into a specious subsumption. 'Nature' is a socially contracted discourse, not an objective reality [many footnotes here]. That is doubly true in the case of the 'nature' that accords full beards to the specific minority population of northern European males. Homo sapiens evolved in climatic zones where facial hair was of little practical use. The development of an offshoot of the species characterized by densely bearded males in an adaptive response to cold climates. These climates did not 'naturally' invade the habitats of early humans--rather, the humans invaded geographical regions where such climates prevailed. The geographical transgression was strictly a sociocultural even and so all physical adaptations to it must be placed in the same category--including the development of dense facial hair."

Charlense published the results of a survey she had organized, in which a few hundred women were asked for their opinions. Essentially all of them said that they preferred clean-shaven men to those who were either stubbly or bearded. In short order, Charlene proved that having a beard was just one element of a syndrome strongly correlated to racist and sexist attitudes, and to the pattern of emotional unavailability so often bemoaned by the female partners of white males, especially ones who were technologically oriented.

"The boundary between Self and Environment is a social con[struct]. In Western cultures this boundary is supposed to be sharp and distinct. The beard is an outward symbol of that boundary, a distancing technique. To shave off the beard (or any body hair) is to symbolically annihilate the (essentially specious) boundary separating Self from Other . . ."

And so on. The paper was rapturously received by the peer reviewers and immediately accepted for publication in a major international journal. Charlene is presenting some related work at the War as Text conference:

"Unshavenness as Signifier in World War II Movies." On the strength of her beard work, three different Ivy League schools are fighting over who will get to hire her.

*I feel kinda like a herd-like nerd type reading this book, though it's quite funny. Overall, the man just needs an editor, I think.

a_tilted_bottle @ 2008-08-05T17:14:00

2008-08-05T21:15:09Z

Life sucks when you feel dumbness squash around your brain like a headache.

a_tilted_bottle @ 2008-08-05T01:38:00

2008-08-05T05:41:12Z

Type in the word "anxiety" into Google, hit search You'll get a link from Wikipedia first, and when you click on it, it'll explain that anxiety, also called solicitude, is a psychological and physiological state characterized by cognitive, somatic, emotional, and behavioral components. While Wikipedia may be right, it still doesn't seem to get it.

bus ride back from NYC

2008-07-24T18:42:58Z

.

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a_tilted_bottle @ 2008-07-24T01:50:00

2008-07-24T05:53:23Z

The Thinking-Machine

My stomach knots open:
It is all clunking and ratcheting, the sickness
in the pit of my gut, thrashing, gnawing,
clawing aimlessly in these last days of
the twenty-first century, in a country, any country.
Name a country and it is there,
in me, knotted and sick, here,
in the thick darkness of sudden death--

We are aware of the situation, sir, take a seat
and the doctor will be with you shortly.

Costume adorned, it descends down
from the silvery plumage of an angel,
strobing, as if through a T.V. screen;
can you hear it calling to you now?
There are no grey clouds, no lovers,
only unexpected eyes and the gaze
of a hundred and eleven words, here, where
nothing but the thinking-machine answers.

Insomnia. So I'm going to write this up to 1953 unless sleep gets to me first.

2008-07-11T12:22:45Z

Chronology of Significant Philosophical Dates in Western Philosophy until Philosophy Posthumously Choked on Its Own Vomit

ca. 580 BC:

Thales of Miletus believes water to be the first principle, plaguing Western thought with the Philosophical obsessions of teleology, cosmology, and monism.

ca. 490 BC:

Pythagoras dies in Metapontum; the cause of his death was uncited. Many of the occultist Pythagoreans believed that he died from being squared on the hypotenuse, though this is a matter of speculation and is often overlooked by scholars as being folklore. While the Pythagoreans believed the world to be monistic number, number was only observable through phenomena and could not actually interact with the world of the senses. Such thoughts are irrational. Or maybe that's how he died...

399 BC:

The greatest evil history has ever known graciously died in Athens for our sins and for the sake of philosophical consistency, though Plato and his cult of Southern Baptists believed Socrates to have lived on immortally, participating with the Good. When helping old ladies with their groceries, have Socrates in your heart, and you may set yourself on the path toward immortality, too. But that depends on your telos. You know, a knife is only good for cutting if it's sharp.

The death of Socrates also leads to another one of Western society's greatest blunders. The agonizing loss of Socrates led Plato to angrily write nonsense in Book 10 of his Republic, which states that the unjust will be punished and the just will be rewarded. Little did he know that people would sorrowfully read him and take him seriously. This fully indignantly metaphysical and moralistic view of death and dying gave rise to the popularized Hellenistic thoughts pertaining to divine judgement, and this thought would later continue to corrupt as it infiltrated other worldly religions and finally settle in Christian theology, damning everyone from then after. Some Greek gift.

ca. 387 BC:

Plato founds the Academy in Athens, which is pompously and anachronistically regarded by Eurocentric scholars to be the first university. The etymology for the word “university” of course comes from the Anglo-Franco word “université” or the Latin word “universitat,” whose first utterances were roughly in 1300-1384 AD.

335 BC:

Aristotle, weary of Platonism, rivals his teacher by starting the Peripatetics philosophical school, which congregated at the Lyceum in Athens. While Aristotle thought the Theory of the Forms was ridiculous and sought to create a philosophy based on experimentation, he never actually seemed to do his experiments, ergo the classical folly of thinking all objects fall toward the center of the earth since all objects long to be in their natural place (a theory which also claimed that heavier objects fall at a faster rate than lighter ones due to speed and motion being proportional to mass, a mistake corrected by Isaac Newton, though Newton, like Aristotle, had no clue how gravity actually worked, hence his rationalization that gravity was actually just an example of the occultist theory of Action at a Distance).

a_tilted_bottle @ 2008-07-07T19:17:00

2008-07-07T23:17:13Z

     Wir, as they say in the old country, marschieren weiter wenn alles in Scherben fällt.
     We have your eoliths and your mesoliths and your neoliths. We have your Babylons and your Pompeiis, your Caesars and your chromium-plated (vital-ingredient-impregnated) artifacts.
     We have your bloody hatchets and your Hiroshimas. We march in spite of Hell, we do—
     Atrophy, Entropy, and Proteus vulgaris,
     telling bawdy jokes about a farm girl named Eve
     and a traveling salesman called Lucifer.
     We bury your dead and their reputations.
We bury you. We are the centuries.
     Be born then, gasp wind, screech at the surgeon’s slap, seek manhood, taste a little of godhood, feel pain, give birth, struggle a little while, succumb:
     (Dying, leave quietly by the rear exit, please.)
     Generation, regeneration, again, again, as in a ritual, with blood-stained vestments and nail-torn hands, children of Merlin, chasing a gleam. Children, too, of Eve, forever building Edens—and kicking them apart in berserk fury because somehow it isn’t the same. (AGH! AGH! AGH!—an idiot screams his mindless anguish amid the rubble. But quickly! let it be inundated by the choir, chanting Alleluias at ninety decibles.)

Walter M. Miller, Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz, p.225

Hunger for what?

2008-06-06T06:32:26Z

There is nothing to eat. Nothing here, nothing out there, nothing back when. I don’t remember what I used to eat— greasy food, I suppose. There is lots of greasy food out there and back when but none here. I have no appetite for greasy food, no desire to remember what it is that I like about it. I have been spending the day pondering, mostly in bed, hangover headache adorned, fan spinning loose on the ceiling. What is it that I like? What is it that drives my fingers to push down the keys instead of getting messy in ink? I tried writing today, and, like most days, this is what I got. I have no appetite for this, either.