We are going all out in our next entries.

Because it is T. Time. Said the silk screen artist to the t-shirt:

But in math a relationship is reflexive (vRv is T otherwise R is not a relationships), symmetric (vRy ⇔ yRv likewise), and transitive (vRy & yRz ⇒ vRz which is difficult to map onto certain things) and there is also a rule about when R inverts x, for an implied conjugate R', so with xRy & xSy you can have (xRy)S'y & (xSy)S'y oh I forget but it guarantees things like matrix multiplication and music and cellular automata all function in the way I want them to. Yes, it is subjective.

Yes, all out in the next few hours after we grade student work, write a few references, tidy our offices, tune P’s viola, and brave the snow... because we haven’t had dinner yet, plus I hear the front cover of Cosmopolitan is just fine this month.

H-J FROM amf.&p.,

xoxo

Vis fore ut dicta, a.k.a. V is for Vendetta is Revolting.

I was thinking (where “I” equals the shared mind of Amf. and Peter, where “shared” equals by mutual consent, unlike rape-stealing the mind, by which I mean being one of those people who kind of look at you with an intensity, often nodding their heads as they agree with themselves to make you agree with them, very overbearing and intrusive, the ultimate in gentle passive-aggression, or the people who sit too close, not respect aura(l) space [that looked like a “one” in parentheses but it is an “ell” to make a very clever statement which whatever I just blew it and it wasn’t that great to start with), which is terribly rude and uncalled for. At least I have better sense(s) than most, but I know where to draw the line that is not to be crossed. Now, that is a funny phrase, to cross the line. It’s like fickle, something having to do with “Am I or am I not” or “Should I or should I not” or “Have I or have I not” or “Am I this or Am I that” or “Should I project this or should I find some other filthy lie of an existence to push”... crossing that fine line, hairline, from face to baldface, boldface, and line becomes a lie, too close for comfort, like being taken around the Mount Baldface Circle Path in NH in the White Mountains, wow, (using an NZ term) that tramp is a symbol of ultimate deception: quite a steep climb, and the comedown was pretty wretched; looking back at it you realize that pleasant afternoon trip was a lie that wasn’t uttered, as in, collapsed from exhaustion, it was a bitch of a day: I personally like an extreme challenge, like Mount Cannon NH or Tongariro NZ, where you know you are up for some nasty footwork and ferocious wind emanating from up the ridge somewhere enough to knock you down, or a stroll around Fresh Pond, although that can be the biggest trick of them all (like, two hands holding desperately, for love or put quite in chemical or material terms for an exchange of human data). I am still trying to work out if Fresh Pond has some meaning, like Baldface or World’s End or god knows where else. Lyin’ Tricksty (of the Red Revolution)! But uncool. That was of no real significance because I am getting back to this post which started with three words) about La battaglia di Algeri, in English The Battle of Algiers. I saw it when it was re-released around six years ago, when it was billed as the film that t*rrorists use for training. Yes, it is pretty specific in details of insurgency. Why, when t*rrorism is vile—action disguised as military but with civilian targets, hence its extremely dastardly and cowardly nature, I mean, get a grip of reality which is never supposed to lie—would a film be billed as such? It’s like that ramble—I guess I’m effectively bringing them up and playing into the purpose I am describing, but everyone seems to know this already, on a need-to-know basis—just kidding, I’ve been watching too much Alias—The Coming Ins*rrection, which proudly proclaims that it was used as evidence in a French t*rror case. Point: what kind of publicity is that? Huge, but for whom? It reminds me of the obverse, when a far better cause was talked about, except for the part about any action directly against the government, or indirectly for that matter, e.g., in the manner of the Brigate Rosse of Italy, who wanted to push the state into a police state—and they partially succeeded, especially by kidnapping Aldo Moro, the Prime Minister—streets of Rome were deserted after dark such was the terror, and the military was extremely present, all in the 1970s, though they in fact barely killed, and their targets were not overly civilian; the Ba*der Me*nhof were a little more automatic weapon trigger-happy—etc. etc. I’m saying ins*rrection is sedition, not cool, but aside from that, the trial of James P. Cannon, a C*munist leader tried in 1945 (I really can’t be bothered checking) for sedition. The verbatim transcript of the trial is published as Socialism on Trial, with essays: it was a two-week long chance for Cannon to teach M*rxism in one of the most media-covered trials in the country up until that point. And he taught it in very simple, justifiably attractive terms: none of that dictatorship and expropriation nonsense, just a lot about the communal, sharing aspect, fairness to workers, etc., nothing scary; he kept the talk of sedition or revolution slightly separate, although it is more than just a lemma of Permanent R*volution in reality. The Algerian ins*rrection film was in fact played twice by the US military to senior advisors as a teaching aid in “low-level conflict” guer*lla tactics. How many films and TV shows are covertly like that? How many books? I mean, forget the Ins*rrection book because that is a little blatant. It seems to me, almost everything, be it preparation, action, or aftermath. All songs? Are we crazy? Do all clouds look like our pet cat fror NZ? (We shared!) It is a scare-music [“music” is an instance of metaphor here] of traversal or traveling. (Oh! The collective I just had my class listen to a piece called “Traveling Music” by Tod Dockstader, a visual/sounds effect designer from the 1960s, in Canada, who, after hours, secretly worked on his music: people didn’t have home studios in those days, in fact there were only a handful in the whole world, so we are very lucky to have his album Apocalypse. Disclaimer, as a devout and well-reasoned anti-eschatologist—someone who studies christian saints? I forget—I am very much not endorsing what I have just done—drawn attention to all zero readers of this except the mote of my brain, the flicker of the mind’s eye, certain things; except they will already know about this, such as is the case with my being of no such cause, unless teaching is considered a ?sedative activity—sometimes, like listening to Alvin Lucier’s “I am sitting in a Room” which is innocuous and is true, because, guess wait, I am sitting here not as a lunatic on the grass, or the potentially less innocuous—just a supposition on my part, I love the piece, but, hmmm, lately I have got to wondering so much, Bob Ostertag’s “Sooner or Later” which is on the same week’s listening list, but I am probably wrong, because despite [ick how many subordinate clauses can I nest—I used to live in a nest or we called it that but it was more of a rat’s nest that a bird’s nest, though I know I am not a rat so were we infested?—including this? There is usually an unsavory, sometimes slightly desperate reason for this malady, which is trying to say too many things in one sentence. Break up! Many sentences, not those feeble punishment technique of concurrent sentencing by some judges...] it being about war (a little boy burying his father, in El Salvador, vowing revenge), “sooner or later” seems a little casual or flippant or perhaps it was written then and now it is... now, now, now, all these successive nows, when will they stop, like a week, or a year? When the calendar runs out? Ha, they never run, they are in constant revolution. Oops. Wassup with me today, I think it is (i) stupidity, (ii) temporarily being soleless because my feet were too hot and I needed cold feet to cool off thus no sneakers, (iii) inculcated by the un cool cult [not really, I just wanted to “c”s the moment... like Candace Bergen in the 1970s advertising a perfume called C, and she would say, “C’s me”...] if reading mainstream—any?—newspapers with the scare of Egypt, the new events in Bahrain, I got to thinking of this culture of reading about uprisings, which, who knows, everyone who knows history knows, have been reported with increasing fervor, bah humbug they have been going on the whole time, wake up and smell the, er, I was going to be overly witty and say music in your iPhone collection but then I thought, nay, I can truly hear artifacts of their mp3 decoder (or it could have been the encoder, I don’t even trust LAME which is, not that I’d know, expected on torrent sites, especially membership ones like Oink was, to keep the quality high, recall how how some songs were distributed over Oink and other such things that sounded good then suddenly a minute in there was a message that warned against copying, and I suppose you could say it was secret because mp3s are viral, and perhaps a million were distributed in a day by a mass campaign of seeding all at once [I hope I am not giving ideas, see my comment below on good guys vs. bad guys, who are the good guys? The RIAA? They have nabbed so many MIT students who famously share files mainly because they invented the internet when Al Gore wasn’t inventing it, at least the RIAA had some courtesy not to sue directly the people, but to pass the names to the administration here (yes I am here right now, where else, there?) and they issued warnings and fines, but the funny thing is that it didn’t alter file sharing at all, but there was that Adobe CS4 virus that got a lot of Windoze lusers, another mass distribution of evil/propaganda, well, it’s hard to avoid saying things without it seeming like an instruction manual, just warning people NOT share files, but also to tune your ears to how bad mp3s sound; here is how to hear it: listen to OLD CDS, play the piano or guitar and sing, then listen to the mp3s, an early iPod—viral in their own right, I guess, slick, expensive, nabbing a particular sector of society, which is educated and not impecunious—couldn’t even play one of my pieces, on pure tones, which is weird because a slightly wobbly sine tone is easy to reproduce, as I teach, also every 2’14” [I forget] their was a glitch at 320kbps, or up to 9–11’ for a 128kbps mp3, and I think it was buffer loading, which is pretty shoddy, but I think the buffer thing has been fixed... at least on the Applemacintosh it is accessible software which takes us back to LAME or other open source software at places like sourceforge [forge is such a positive and good word, like some groups say “forging the [new way of some political kind]” but it also smacks of a forgery] but just because something is open source, do we believe it is safe or CORRECT in its task and being on sourceforge ipso facto we who can code [which is neither of us, oops] simply won’t look through it?

]] I forget, I am halfway through a sentence, though being halfway is a little misleading since we don’t know how long it will be, and compared with the sentence itself being an event occurring in acto in all its single-lettered glory, the ending is a very occasional event which means if we recall Mr Staples’ (!! we remembered !!) Math with Statistics class at our high school, we would use a, um, now we are unsure, a Student T distribution [so-called because it was research at an institution and something about royalties or it being secret, Wikipedia will have it and normally I research the facts carefully, practically knowing some Wikipedia essays backwards [for me, things related to graphic design, but all roads lead to Heisenberg and Eigenfunctions, dork], but it is a Poisson distribution which sounds like someone spreading fish all over the world like in our water supplies, imagine opening the faucet and whitebait [are they specifically NZ? it didn’t give me a spell-error] stream out, they are pretty small [we made fritters of them as children pre-vegetarian but I cut the eyes out and that left nothing! Without the eyes, what are they?] gulp, another fish in body [I had a friend Kay Ward—no names are ever changed here, and I wonder what he is up, I should have looked him up on my [Peter’s] last trip to NZ which was so wonderful but has ruined the country for him because it can never be the same, too hard to explain], but Kay was befriended by a very fun and clever and witty and jack-of-all-trades man, Mr King, who fixed radios, and he said “one man’s fish is another man’s poisson” which struck me as pretty clever, hence my calling him clever; it is also witty, hence my calling him witty],

]] yet another discursion to ga-ga land... fomenting at the mouth I mean I am foaming at the mouth but that might be the rabid disorder I have. If we can read all this dangerdangerdanger in newspapers, then I see read, so I must see write. And that is what it is, call it what you will; these people write. If two wrongs hardly make a right, many rights are impinged by many rights impinging. There is a strange accusative thing happening, doubling up the subject of the sentence with the object. “I’m trying to make things right here” takes on a whole new meaning, probably several but I have a head and just took Imitrex which leaves a very bad taste in my mouth, post-nasal. It ADHDs me to yet two more thoughts, and that is the bifurcated idea that even if we hear that human rights are being abused, we are still having the word “right” drum-banged into our head (although banging a dr*g usually means that late Led Zep alBum, In through the out door, sort of up-lies).

Rightrightrightrightrightritetritetrite what is tetri? Lots of “four”s? and this is the bi-parttwo of the -furcation, and that is when you read or hear anything (or however things enter the head, I’ll never know for circular reasons, since) you never know if it is the good guys or the bad guise (because they are usually in dis- as good, how awesome is that... NOT), and having said that, it sometimes doesn’t matter, since you learn, you learn, and if you are discerning, it doesn’t matter how you build up your knowledge if you can have access to many sources, and that that is not a privilege but a right (there we go) for anyone and everyone, and the worse thing would be if your access to privileged information was by privilege, okay, I was a Harvard Ph.D. student and it takes privilege (who am I kidding? For me it was luck and the minor fact that I wrote my application statement of purpoise and two essays as proof whatever, but my exceptional scholar of a girlfriend made minor rewrites—and liked swimming and said she was a “porpoise with a purpose”] as I was far removed from elite academic style of writing. It did the trick, thanks!) and we all, as far as I know, were not in some special club, etc. thought lost, I’ve been making a video tonight, and being confused by film titles and trying to think of them in Latin, more on that, the second point now the bifurcobfuscation has been covered, and that is I have forgotten, but the Algiers movie, no suggestion at all being made, I swear, and no disrespect at all being paid to these people or their groups, professions, etc., just an observation, that one has most of the letters of “fascism” in his name (the director) and the other has most of the letters of “nazi” in his name (an author): now, I will throw in that this was a nationalist uprising, and it was quite socialist, BUT, and that’s a big BUT: it was not national socialist, i.e., nasty nazi. Just an observation that names can be toyed with in the mind: I have a neighboring apartment in my building, in which a couple with the names Canney and Tsaltas live. Um, “canny” means sharp, smart, derived from Scots I think, and “stultus” mean stupid in Latin. So the other names on the door buzzer list (I disconnected our buzzer because I could hear all that neighbor’s door intercom communications, and i checked the wiring, and it was crazy f.-ed up and it seemed that it was possible—with the building’s very old wiring—that those neighbors could hear everything I said, as if the listen button had been pressed and I was downstairs at the door. So I snipped it. Definitely not the landlord’s door, bless him, he was a wonderful landlord, and sadly he is deceased now, and his wife is now the landlady, and she is the sort who said, honey, if you are struggling with the rent, make sure you call me, and if you are depressed, call me too... how awesome is that): McCall on the call list by the door, too! But I say this other name about winning a cop, which struck me as scary. Um, er, that is one half of me (us). So, I was attributing meaning so something that had no real meaning, just that low synaptic-threshold-of-firing syndrome I seem to have. So everything I write is genuinely nonsense, plus I write with impunity because it is not as if anything I could write, so long as not threatening or libelous, could cause any trouble, any of my far-fetched ideas, putting my paintings up, my music, photos, etc. And I celebrate where I teach, where I live, this country, New Zealand, everything!

))) I forget how many close parentheses I need. What was I going to write? I have on a scrap of paper “rodeo vending engine” and ”indeterminate 3D structure” and “vis 2005⟶1605 und [some scrawling in German I guess from the “hun” oops that’s terrible I mean “und”] and “MegaDrumMachine and PopcornFiltersOuter” which are MaxMSP patches someone I am no longer close to wrote—she was a decent musician, in a strange way, I taught her a lot of electronic music things back at home after I had finished teaching. (I think I resent that slightly.) So I just managed to talk about what I was going to talk about. I wander what people do with what I teach them? I teach simple and advanced electronic music composition techniques, and that includes visits by other artists, an expert producer, recording techniques, but mainly computer (somewhat expert) mixing and composing with recorded, analog, early digital, noise, the opposite, and sampled sounds, a lot of layering, some tricks in DSP in the advanced course, although the students increasingly know more digital signal processing than I, which is understandable because I quite (both Is) some time ago, like 22 years ago to be precise. Ach, 22. It is a nightmare number for me. Ex-girlfriend/ex-boyfriend’s birthday, a frat number, the age one of us was when we had mono for the second time (thus, stereo, though current thought is that it was Cat Scratch Fever, very acutely). But 22 is to be celebrated, as it is part of the 4th of July, as are cubes and canon balls, I am led to believe, as all are in the fireworks here, presumably all around the country (I almost wrote around the whole world! I forgot there is no global hegemony [yet—just very much kidding [I hope]]). ))}} to be sure.

Now to find a picture to post, a movie for the other blog, and another composition. And since it is a holiday tomorrow, I will write a 12 minute long poem of prose that is probably terrible, have the Mac speech synthesizer read it like I have in four posts in the other blog (by which I always mean Tumblr, which has a symbol that informed the way I made my video which is of a large painting). I wish I (we) could sing.

Now to eat, take ADHD meds, and post a picture here. I think people must wonder about how we take photos everywhere, we are both faculty/academic staff, well-known enough, but perhaps because we, at our respective and very respectable institutions, carry our camera around, snapping photos of dirt or water stains or posters at strange angles (and we both are), etc. and I wonder if this sort of thing can get one in trouble, even more so, for the wrong reasons? That would be sad. We are in a minor [nothing legal, thank god, nor the key of Fauré’s 9th Barcarolle which is beautiful] predicament, and we are referring doubly to both wes of we. Camera caused it? Trying to say it is a snake that has swallowed an elephant and not a hat? Blip. Food.

Oh, I have dreamed of three things when we were at primary school (as well as many other things and many other places, but these three related ones just entered my head): how to build the perfectly safest house. Mine, not saying whose, was a mile underground, surrounded by concrete and lead, and a gap with giant hydraulic spring-like things, then the same encasement, and a secret entrance somewhere. But a single vulnerability is enough. Like an anything addict, recovered, just one slip up, and recidivism is the new buzz. A trope in mythologies: the Achilles tendon. The next think was how to commit the perfect crime alone, like robbing a bank. I figured out that it simply wasn’t worth it, and since I equated leaders with criminals, I also determined what many kings and queens and emperors have found out the hard way: it pays not to be a leader, to have a high profile. And the third was how to survive a nuclear war: we were teenagers in the 1980s and there was a glut of endgame movies—Terminator, The Morning After, Wargames, as well as ton of survival films. We had, as all NZ kids—it was compulsory—to watch all those movies, and Watership Down which I write about elsewhere and since it is in quite an interesting webmaze, we will link to it as soon as it is back up, it is more of an insurance policy or repository of private papers and the webpages but with a lot of spell errors to correct, and we watched a remake or the original Lord of the Flies to teach us, presumably, how we should not act.

Food. BTW the Latin in the title approximately means “You want things to be as it has been said” with a pun about the notion of force and power (“vis”).

I thaNK friends.

Drawing © 2010 Peter Whincop. I think this is his first Indian ink and paper piece blogged. And logs it has, and lines (and bark and mel for spectrographic freaks out there) OH! I wonder if there is place on the web we can drop an image and it does a 2D Cartesian, then 2D polar Fourier transform of it? That’d be more awesome than a little of five furry little kittens.

Making a World, then Tearing it Down, I Admit, by Sheer Panties and Hubris.

Painting and video © 2011 Peter Whincop.

The proof AIN’T in the pAINTing. The ID is in the vIDeo. Ergo sum. We have a sneaky feeling Peter’s not about to be outed as gay, but ousted as plain inconvenient. Not the sort of truth Al Gore speaks of (Man-Bear-Pig, which helped me with my name), but understated. And I’ll just add three things to this doughy mess-cum-pudding (where the proof is): currants, raisins, sultanas. Spotted dick, it ain’t no fiction, it’s found in Harry Potter so it is real. I had my first panic attack during the first Harry Potter film, it was that good. Spotted something, anyway. And, no, no outing or ousting, more probable is jousting (or that q-word from Harry Potter), if we get vaulted back to the middle ages.

Painting © 2011 Peter Whincop, proof that gremlins do not assist in any of his art.

Weapons of Medium Destruction by a 5 Year Old.

Images © 1974 Peter Whincop!

Like a carrot, you are a tap root, in NZ English.

[needs editing]

I used to talk about “The Gremlins.” It was my way of saying two, three things, which can be figured Seuss-instructionally “inside outside upside down.” From here will have to be another post, (1) I have forgotten, (2) I want to swim at the Z-Center while I am visiting MIT, (3) I have to deal with students!

This will have a high specific gravity. CAVEAT LECTOR. As if being the scribe wasn’t bad enough. I am trying to work out when I first started noticing discrepancies. They are made up by me of just observations.

(1) Bad printing alignment, color matching, and alpha-channel cross-talk by other colors: some, not I, speak forthrightly about such undesirability! Like, inscrutable—difficult to understand, impenetrable—um, is Adriana Lima an accident/undersirable/or wholly acceptable? Arbeit—er?—freely made decisions, I hope because the initial nice sounds of a tryptophan tastic Tunisia, triptych of temples—Sbeitla—Sb, I have no Antimony which is fairly poisonous, used in liquid metal batteries being developed at MIT, sounds like some unkind of dislike, and Kant had four of them

(3) In film I suppose subtle time adjustment, jitter and dither control, angle adjustment (in Final Cut the instructive DVD uses Angelina Jolie, so it would be angel adjustment), directedness of action, and sound “trickcraft” as it is known in the profession.

(2) There is no two.

This is all to say, the following DOES make a lot of sense when you put two minds to the task.

I thought Amf. had written about Lewontin and Gould’s article on Spandrels, but I have them in my notes. I’ll post them next. For now, we learn about Spolia, which is close to “spoils”—generally columns taken from diverse sources and put within a single structure; for me Basilica di S. Stefano Rot_ndo al Monte Celio springs to mind. I have spent many hours at the tiny circular (no, it’s not fat) church just above the Amphitheatrum Flavium in Rome, quite close to the palimpsestual Basilica di S. Clemente al Laterano, which is my favorite church in Rome itself (okay S. Ivo [alla Sapienza, the former location of L’università di Roma, now within the confines of Gli archivi di Stato] of Frencesco Borromini comes close, as does Il Tempietto di S. Pietro in Montorio of Donato Bramente, Il mausoleo di Santa Costanza [a S. Agnese fuori le Mura]—the photo on Wikipedia is—may I dither a response to this monstrously pathetic representation—truly fcuked up), which Father Leonard Boyle, former Librarian of the BAV—Biblioteca Apistolica Vaticana, as an amazing archaeologist, mapped in a veritable palimpsestual book, with layers of (architectural) vellum for the various layers of the church, right down to the Mithreaum and the sacrificial alter—one of my favored subjects these days. The Wikipedia article on S. Clemente doesn’t even mention Father Boyle. He was, dicitur, removed from his job as librarian by JPdue just before his [LB’s] retirement, as all his predecessors were made Cardinals. In such a way, the pope, who had, dicitur, difficulties with Father Boyle’s policies such as hiring women, could guarantee that the Irish-Canadian, later to be buried at S. Clemente, would never have a voice at the Vatican. Unlike Bernard Law—no elaboration, q.v., quiver, go figure, brrrr.

I must write one day about the truly great Father Reginaldus Foster. But another, logical post.

Dale Kinney, “Roman Architectural Spolia, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 145/2 (2001)

I think it may exaggerate the purposefulness of their builders to call them historicist. A truly historicist building would be a “strong” one in tense conversation with its historical sources; and these traditional basilicas—however wonderful for other reasons—are not strong in that way. In Bloom’s terms, the millennial repetition of the architectural idea of the basilica, like the reuse of spolia, “just happened.” Paradoxically, these buildings, which, according to the loose conception of “influence” demonstrated at the beginning of this article, should show Roman influence most strongly, on the “anxious” model show no influence at all....

Disproportionately steep from ground level, the central space looks normal from the raised perspective of the throne, in which the lower story almost disappears and only the upper arches with their two registers of columns are clearly visible.

The columns were proclaimed spolia by Charlemagne’s advisor Einhard, who wrote that Charles “was unable to find marble columns for his construction anywhere else, and so he had them brought from Rome and Ravenna.”³¹ In fact, a number of the capitals have proven to be Carolingian simulations of spolia, and the authentic spolia did not necessarily come from Rome.³² It is usually assumed that the claim to have acquired spolia from the old imperial capital cities was made for programmatic reasons, to express Charlemagne’s own pretensions to imperial status and grandeur; thus the palatine chapel figures in most discussions of spolia as a paradigm of influence in the normal sense employed by R. R. Bolgar: the “transmission of ideas.”³³...

There is no lower story, however, and the columns are disposed on receding semicircular paths between the piers. There are no straight lines like the heavy horizontal cornice or the vertical planes suggested by the rectilinear alignment of the columns at Aachen (Fig. 8). Although the elements are the same and the designs are unmistakably related, the effects of these interior spaces are almost opposing: balanced proportions and serene expansiveness in San Vitale, dominant verticality and stark prismatic constraint at Aachen.³⁵

It is unclear whether the palatine chapel was meant to reprise San Vitale specifically, or whether their resemblance denotes a more generic affiliation with a tradition of centralized buildings associated with emperors and kings.³⁶ Even in the latter case San Vitale remains a conspicuous point of reference, an indubitable source for the Carolingian chapel, as the formal resemblance between them is much closer than one normally finds among medieval buildings. But the spolia are a difference, signaling an area of resistance. The column shafts and capitals in San Vitale were newly made for the sixth-century construction, and the capitals, in particular, are distinctively post-Roman, comprising early Byzantine shapes (impost capitals, folded capitals) and decorative motifs (Sasanian palmettes, vine scrolls, interlace) that are flagrantly unVitruvian. ³⁷ Vitruvius probably was unknown to the architect of San Vitale, but Charlemagne’s advisors knew his treatise well. Einhard puzzled over its “obscure words and names.” ³⁸ Students of Vitruvius would have appreciated the conceit of bringing spolia especially from Rome. They might also have applauded the designer of the chapel for rejecting the qualities that modern architectural historians find Byzantine in San Vitale, notably its curvaceous grace and the hanging effect achieved by dissembling weight and gravity, in order to foster qualities that we consider Roman: solid, static masses, unnecessary height, traditional ornament.³⁹ The spolia are indices of the builder’s intensely retrospective aspiration, in Bloom’s terms, an anxious avoidance of the more immediate traditions of effeminate Byzantine and uncouth Frank.

[This continues, and starts, very interestingly. I kept in the footnotes in case they are a secret signal to passing UFOs, rather like the tune in Close Encounters of the Third Kind]

Now for this. Best snope this: [nyc.gif]

[Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayhem_(crime) on 20110208-1914]

Fetter v. Beall
The most significant revolution in common-law mayhem doctrine came in 1697, when the King's Bench decided Fetter v. Beale, 91 Eng. Rep. 1122. There, the plaintiff recovered in a battery action against a defendant. Shortly thereafter, “part of his skull by reason of the said battery came out of his head,” and the plaintiff brought a subsequent action under mayhem. Though Fetter is also known as an early example of res judicata, it is most significant for expanding the ambit of mayhem to include “loss of the skull.”

[Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ragging on 20110208-1918]

I call this mind-rape, just one form of it, anyway. It really and truly is criminal, unconscionable, and it happens. Not sure if res judicata, as obvious as it might seem, is especially fair.

Ragging
Ragging is a practice in educational institutions in India and Sri Lanka that involves existing students baiting or bullying new students. It is similar to the American phenomenon of hazing. It often takes a malignant form wherein the newcomers may be subjected to psychological or physical torture. Currently, Sri Lanka is said to be the worst affected country in the world.

Recent cases
Since 2001, ragging has been the focus of a number of legal actions. For example, the Supreme Court of India defined it in a judgement as actions that "adversely affect the physique or psyche of a fresher or a junior student".

A report from 2007 by the Indian anti-ragging group Coalition to Uproot Ragging from Education analyzed 64 ragging complaints, and found that over 60% of these were related to physical ragging, and 20% were sexual in nature.

[I have removed footnote references in the hope that this is rendered less conforming to any particular code of publishing conduct, just because i’m a rebel.]

Another reference for which I couldn’t think of a tag to give to it.

[I would read that, more than just this, weighing in all the details also of the the following cadence/coda/cadenza/credenza/credentials (a falling, tail, falling, place for writing, things to have someone believe you are in fact you)]

[Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boys_are_stupid,_throw_rocks_at_them! on 20110208-1935]

On misandry:–

Can you imagine if a company put out a line of T-shirts that said, ‘Black people are goobers, drop anvils on their heads’ or ‘Homosexuals are stupid, throw rocks at them’? And can you imagine the San Francisco Chronicle doing a story on how cute these T-shirts are?... Turn it around and imagine shirts suggesting the following: ‘Girls lie and will break your heart. Throw rocks at them’ or ‘Little girls are not soft and cuddly, they are mean and vicious and will destroy you.’ Can you imagine a newspaper doing a cute little headline and story on how wonderfully cute little boy fashion has become? I doubt it.

—Rush Limbaugh

Why do I somewhat agree with a man I have always despised? I don’t think I’m drifting to the right, more to the left-right-out because history possibly will swerve in the near future to a hell unknown that takes us back to I don’t want to know but it is perhaps a minor fear, some form of Medieval or medium-evil Devo “Whip It” goshdarn it I can’t really speak of such things. (Because writing is privileged over its binary opposite, speech, according to Derrida, upending Rousseau, but not eliminating the category. The word upend is peculiar: it is like U-Haul. U-Pend. Patent pend? Patient pend? Pending what, depending on what, defending what, deafening whom, offending whom, offensive forcing whom, certainly not sitting on the fence with Hume, too much spending—I hear as a complaint on a day on which $1.1tr of cuts were made—pend, mend, send, bend, it’s gonna be the end. Incend.0 SO MORE ON THIS:

As a 16yo I stayed after English class (5th form = American 10th grade) to be a giant unpoetic math-like dork with Geoff Shepherd, an incredibly good English teacher, new to our school. He was a thespian, good looking, spoke very nicely, held our attention, and we largely responded. I started doing all the lighting design and ladder climbing for school productions. That is by-the-by. I asked him if he knew of any sentences like the one I am about to write, which I gave him. It had to be seen. Perhaps now, heard, but then, seen. He said, no, he prefers the Romantic poets. The sentence, in its second, slightly more sensible form, really does apply these days (said my bruised head, and my right big toe—at least it was the right that was crushed, and fell off, I mean, the toe nail, after a good beating): “Go to the ranger’s tops.” I was thinking of a Park Ranger, like one tending Mt. Tongariro, one of NZ’s wonderful volcanoes. I said, if you shift the spaces, like “together” becomes “to get her,” the sentence becomes “Got other anger stops?” Poignant. Dorky.

I just notice the word upend: “word upend”⟶“wor dupend” which is dripping with possibilities. “was/war/we’re/warped depend/deepened/duped/end,” and I can’t but help feeling the word “puella” there, but I’m single, and beautiful/pretty in the feminine (Classical and Modern Latin) is somewhat not unappealing. But the puella come from nowhere, except for the first line of Ovid’s “Pyramus and Thisbe” from his first book of Metamorphoses. Nothing to fight for or upend, but just remembering my past, which was sweeter than this vile present. Well, it isn’t really THE present, it is MY present. NO, wrong way around. The past, I was in my little world. I was nice, despite some very bad character traits. Innocent too (same contradiction applies). I wake from this happy slumber (okay, the slumber itself was dreadful, foreboding, cruel) of forced insanity, true: I was forcibly made to feel (and subsequently go a little) mad. Only my imaginings were REAL!! How unfair is that. And of course, since it is real, it persists. Yuck, IHTFP. The people up North-East at MIT have those letters to mean, ostensibly, I Hate This Fcuking Place. Knowing these clever students, it is probably a chemical formula, possibly just baking soda. Hacking too, a funny thing. People don’t waste their time. No one learns Morse Code for the heck of it, or scrapes body parts pretty bad just to tag their name in an abandoned room somewhere. But I secretly (oops! no longer a secret) wish I had done all those things, the pipes, the careful planning, the moving of parts, say, of a firetruck (which had Latin on it which is extremely cool), yes, piece by piece, then assembled on the Dome of MIT. I have been to a couple of places, but that was pretty basic. That is where I took the photo, either here or on Tumblr, of “The Head Phone Tomb.” Everything has a name, except some people have a number. Says No.6, “I am not a number, I am a free man.” Then Rover, the big white ball—in fact a weather balloon, “when the balloon goes up” is a weird expression I heard lately, perhaps 99 red ones? That was the 1980s, bounces on him, arise from the sea which in this case isn’t a metaphor.

Amazing, and I wish my screen wouldn’t flash at me whenever I write something about MIT or conspiracies or theories of kerning or when I quote the NY Times (which I very much like, just read about Google searches being “black-hat” stacked by J.C. Penney), or I put up one of my compositions or videos, or paintings/drawings especially, or comments about how I believe that, well, I leave that remark involving the words, not connected, alpha, www fora, trees, lights (what about xmas?), lyrics, books, and anything having a shred to do with anything I have been doing all my life, to which I have some propriety relationship: my ideas! My output! Is identity theft going on by proxy, by taking everything from me? By causing enough despair for me to willingly give things up? I think not. I don’t have fears, a strange brain-chemistry thing, oh very strange brain, oh very strange chemistry, che misterioso. Basically playing music, then composing it, analyzing it, teaching it including time and frequency domain, writing words of many means but nothing especially orthographic though I am font-obsessed and did have a Letraset font catalog which I read obsessively and it was just the alphabet! Mind you, for transfer-stencils, as a kid, and designed fonts at the age of 10, and was Greek/Norse/Egyptian myth-obsessed, and I had The World Atlas of Mysteries with an awful photo of Spontaneous Human Combustion leaving a Zimmer frame and shoe after the person immolated, I write about representation, I was involved in the editing of my ex-girlfriend Cammy Brothers’ dissertation and book on Renaissance architectural sketches of ruins and built/unbuilt works by the architects, and worked on formal music theory with the greatest modern music theorist David Lewin at Harvard where we spend half our time rotating and inverting and retrograding strings of notes, using Markov chains, infinite and finite string systems, dovetailing, counting intervals, duplicating notes as singularities (BEFORE the recent spate of them), and studying ways of understanding, semantically, difficult but seemingly obvious texts (and his book on the subject was published, finally, posthumously) and that involved excising parts of the music kind of hypermetrically in the sense, loosely speaking, of Cone, Lerdahl and Jackendoff (I am being very generalizing here), etc. I work on representation of transformational voice leading between two sets, basically a critique of current ideas on the subject, their metaphors, which makes the heating pipe very unhappy with me (yes, a metaphor, and metonymy and metaphor are major parts of my dissertation). I like everything to be in words. Able to be spoken, heard as-is.

So, yes, I do all this. And I am about to put up a couple of videos. I don’t know how well they will be received, but here goes nothing.

[The following from a good sort!]

Gypsy Wife

And where, where, where is my Gypsy wife tonight
I’ve heard all the wild reports, they can’t be right
But whose head is this she’s dancing with on the threshing floor
whose darkness deepens in her arms a little more

And where, where is my Gypsy wife tonight?
Where, where is my Gypsy wife tonight?

Ah the silver knives are flashing in the tired old cafe
A ghost climbs on the table in a bridal negligee
She says, “My body is the light, my body is the way”
I raise my arm against it all and I catch the bride’s bouquet

And where, where is my Gypsy wife tonight?...

Too early for the rainbow, too early for the dove
These are the final days, this is the darkness, this is the flood
And there is no man or woman who can't be touched
But you who come between them will be judged

And where, where is my Gypsy wife tonight?...

—Leonard Cohen

Famous Blue Raincoat

It’s four in the morning, the end of December
I'm writing you now just to see if you’re better
New York is cold, but I like where I’m living
There’s music on Clinton Street all through the evening.

I hear that you’re building your little house deep in the desert
You’re living for nothing now, I hope you’re keeping some kind of record.

Yes, and Jane came by with a lock of your hair
She said that you gave it to her
That night that you planned to go clear
Did you ever go clear?

Ah, the last time we saw you you looked so much older
Your famous blue raincoat was torn at the shoulder
You’d been to the station to meet every train
And you came home without Lili Marlene

And you treated my woman to a flake of your life
And when she came back she was nobody’s wife.

Well I see you there with the rose in your teeth
One more thin gypsy thief
Well I see Jane’s awake—

She sends her regards.
And what can I tell you my brother, my killer
What can I possibly say?
I guess that I miss you, I guess I forgive you
I’m glad you stood in my way.

If you ever come by here, for Jane or for me
Your enemy is sleeping, and his woman is free.

Yes, and thanks, for the trouble you took from her eyes
I thought it was there for good so I never tried.

And Jane came by with a lock of your hair
She said that you gave it to her
That night that you planned to go clear

Sincerely, L. Cohen

—Leonard Cohen

._. ._. ._. ._. ._. ._. ._. ._. ._. ._. ._. ._. ._. ._. ._. ._. ._. ._. ._. ._. ._. ._. ._. ._. ._.

Those are amphibrachs. But feet. Meter.

Leonard Cohen’s own liner notes:–

I had a good raincoat then, a Burberry I got in London in 1959. Elizabeth thought I looked like a spider in it. That was probably why she wouldn’t go to Greece with me. It hung more heroically when I took out the lining, and achieved glory when the frayed sleeves were repaired with a little leather. Things were clear. I knew how to dress in those days. It was stolen from Marianne’s loft in New York sometime during the early seventies. I wasn't wearing it very much toward the end.

According to Wikipedia: In the 1999 book, The Complete Guide to the Music of Leonard Cohen, the authors comment that Cohen’s question, “Did you ever go clear?”, in the song, is a reference to the Scientology state of “Clear.” Cohen was very briefly a member of the Church of Scientology, which he had heard was a “good place to meet women.”

And, “why not?”

Check out www.songmeanings.net for some Revelations. [Bad guise!] Also find P’s “Wild-blue-inland-kid-intimacy” which is on one of our main blogs. [The words of a great man!] To swing the other way completely, read about what is accidentally celebrated (no, I mean wesentlich/Anfall, not zufällig) in Wikipedia, on the swastika. I simply cannot reproduce the postcard here because it is so vile, and freedom of speech referring to something before it apparently became evil and vile but with an implicit grope to it as there is in the article on eugenics, is not warranted other than for a reasonable rest.

This will continue later; I have a bACKlog of things to get through. SpAeter.

Coded Crack.

Video*/images*/text(!)/sound © 2011 Peter Whincop

*including the weird shapes (like a cloud) that form, like people (attract according to Wiccans, which is pretty cool and better than opposites attract—I am genuinely impressed with everything I read about Wiccans) doing things (like, using the loo), structures (compositions by my friend Peter from the Netherlands for whom I wrote the MaxMSP patches for a couple), maps (the email address of my friend Peter from New Zealand), plots (of land for gardening, especially ones given to communities by local authorities), anything my wild crazy little inland empire can conjure (that doesn’t mean “with the law,” it means “sworn together,” as in a conspiracy, which is from “to breath together,” with a PIE base *(s)peis- “to blow”—cf. O.C.S. pisto “to play on the flute”), etc., more visible in the next video I put up. Part intention, and part intention-by-proxy, in that the wonderful bonus feature of the Mac rendering engine (probably QT—funny how that sounds like cutey—in this case 7 Pro) + iPhone and broken Macbook Pro screen made some of these shapes which I emphasized, and I decided to keep them, kind of like found art except someone also by intention fcuked—I am speculating, and this is of course only speculation and part of a fantastic nightmare—with these OS drivers and engines. Just a thought. Last time I went crazy and told someone brainy about it—and he almost developed the Unified Field Theorem a couple of decades ago, and that is independent of my madness—he said that I have to explain how it happened, not just observe that it happened, or so I claim. Hence, my semi-obsession which has yielded a pretty decent artistic output. So, the common factor is the OS. And my sleuthing. Thank god for the eh?! in sleuth, it points the way. I should meander restaurantwise, prey that eating fruit with aplomb and pears, apples, etc., de-hungers that aching gut. Stabbing sideache almost fcukked this slightly lonely victim (since surgery...).

And all because someone broke my little heart. Silly them for bothering to meet me. YEARS AGO. Anyway, it has been quite the favor to me in the LT (long term) [invariant? I think not]. And where I’m from, favours (yup, with the U—I think a U-bend is what Kiwis call an S-bend, for removal of sh!t etc.), are shared at will, and never negatively.

And also by exhaustion (... late) I am virtually prostrate.

Oh, and by the way, this is Peter walking through our apartment, talking about all the paintings and mess on the floor.

Some of these words are duplicates.

The first of these is, like, words and pitchas, in our bedroom bookshelf. They are our main dissertation books, Peter’s main dissertation notes, books on music and philosophy that are okay—not rubbish but not living room material—some aesthetics and Marxist-aesthetics books, my currently-being-read books also -being-looked-into/at, blank books, my paper compositions, and a styrofoam bird that was once a symbol of much happiness not a cymbal of terrible clash.

The second is my most recent picture I have made a film of it on our Tumblr site. I have made some very odd stills as well. I explain it fully at Tumblr.

Why the two blogs? Hah! We have many. Tumblr and Blogspot, Bebo for photos, Weebly for a blah blah on Cavell, Nozick, Quine, and other Harvard philosophers, all on meaning and how we draw them from words: Must We Mean What Say of Stanley Cavell is our starting point. The heating system here is rattling angrily at me—there it goes again, saying “Peter” in its sultry tone, hair flicking back.

She was too perfect. Even the hair. Very sad. For her.

Flickr for photos (soon), Facebook for ignoring, Friendster for pretending to share certain politics, YouTube just to link to, LiveJournal just because we found it today, Scribd or something to put up poetry and that which resembles the poetry, and very very many more.

So why the __? They are IDs, as in, Identity Documents. An amazing friend from my (P) first two years as a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard, in 1996–1998, de Vie (she was Fleur de Vie Weinstock) was an undergrad, and went on to continue being a very wise (and fun) person, whose words I should have heeded, just a few words, “You’re like A**** in too many ways, you have to be careful.” And so I wasn’t. Very wasn’t. I almost died, too. de Vie has a poetry blog—a mailing list that I will find the (l)ink too. REMEMBER WHO YOU ARE is her most recently posted poem. Very important.

To remember who I am, it helps to leave a trace. More than a trace. That is more so that no prospectors can mud their way through the muck at the end of the mining of whatever is being mined. Some ore. I saw that being done in North Carolina, kind of a tourist trap. There was a cave too, and we went in without permission. And the fake whitewater rafting, training ground. And more. On that later.

“Please don’t flow so fast”

Image © 2010 Peter Whincop.

News Flash: Random Pigment Forms Living Art.

All images (photos and paintings/drawings © 2010-2011 Peter Whincop.

Lost and Found. Rightful Owner Please Claim.

SO MY SOUL CAN SING

she is not able to lean
  she could lie me flat
  i never taught her
  even that she needed
  that teaching
  fcuking thing or two
  or many

and sweetly
  face planting where i sat
  and it left the smell
  of me she never
  said kept her close
  because her words are
  an eel
  and then face planting
  just trails this
  with trash

all from an email there are many
  and that was the sweetest
  and most direct she was
  she has a silken tongue
  now she isnt like her
  eel words
  make from her a
  scarf
  with fiber reactive
  some chemical
  basic fixing
  im just avoiding
  saying dyeing

  she has never touched
    large breasts
    we looked at them together
    they would look strange apart
    i thought we never
    looked estranged

that were playing a game of the lion
  punky or aslan
  or whatever he was called
  in the wizard of oz
  where there is a little man
  behind a screen
  on some kind of machine
  peddling

    i never liked green
      more coke thats no joke
      poke veins that was not me

his wears the witch
  and the wardrobe
  should
  no there is
  are a few places
  of ex
  cision
  this follows from the part
  about the wizard of oz

where clothes are guarded
  i think i can learn
  from metric gashing
  they were torn
  and they were the
  greek plural of hymen

    long measure inside
      your head job
      was written for senior
      house
      over a year ago
      it is techno
      not mine
      it is noise
      mine

      my greatgrandfather
        and grandfather
        we called him poppa
        which is what dad is
        now called
        they were both mine
        sweepers in two different
        wars or their boats
        were and they were
        commodores

it plays tricks
  it i have faith in
  it can hurt the timpanum
  just the right one
  because i am not nasty
  because it sucks draws
  really hurts
  thump okay that isnt so nice

once a lien is forced upon
  my sister is a lawyer
  and i imagine she is
  a very good one just because
  a property and there is
  he is forced upon
  would be knees but
  no turning back
  it is forfeit
  youre damaged goods

and by you of youre
  i dont mean you
  a person
  well barely
  i mean the other
  people you have
  as friends or something
  like that

you have crossed a lion
  and you failed to
  recognize the verb
  i read in my
  verlaine translation
  zebraed

    jen k and i loved
      and the fake zebra
      skin and canopy
      were i think
      perfect and well
      timed and

    jen m
      is dream
      other than
      and perfect in fact honest
      so not one just plu
      perfect
      since recently
      i woke up

i cleft phalanx
  behind and tainted
  because how ever
  could something
  that has the trappings
  of something attractive
  and needed
  and

    it was my lien
      i am alien
      it was at me lying
      onto them
      me no
      no lean

you dont go near poison
  she has caused
  damage
  from bite
  cold twice
  nunce shy
  because they play
  golf on rooftops

she visited my
  home and saw
  the floodgates open
  like bloodletting
  from a liver problem

she opened those gates
  she stood near the sulpheric
  vents at the center
  of my country
  of my country
  she courtesy raped
  my parents and
  my home
  and my life

how to identify yourself
  protect let yourself
  be known everywhere
  post mad
  sui generis
  everywhere
  do not lie ever
  let everyone you dont
  know know you

then plans are like the
  things that
  are anonymous
  infinity
  and other
  foiled again

she and therefore you
  lied lied lied
  that is three times
  i really mean year
  you dont toy with love
  as fcuked up and lame as
  that sounds
  so the following holds
  true in
  that

i dont really like
  fcuking if it is
  more like its past tense
  with with with the
  to be thing in
  front of it

then tortured
  just a moment
  that there are some things
  agreeable
  and as with property
  contract other things
  my sister talks about law
  plots of land and
  needs to be assessed
  of course
  it was
  really flogging
  a dead she aint what
  she used to be
  no she wasnt

then tortured
  then hissed at
  but i wasnt supposed to
  know i found out
  just like kenneth anger
  and doris day
  street car named
  desire
  whos afraid
  careful with that
  axiom person i forget
  ultravixens and crapping on hitler in a bath

then they
  or it her
  lied cheated stole
  charged threatened
  and i am
  am i i
  asked anything

i think not
  because ill let you
  think my mind is wrecked
  my mind is wrecked
  no it isnt
  i dont know kung fu
  but im you know the line
  the rest of it

i can write in many ways
  and they all stare at you
  to save you from
  having to stare
  and this part
  is funny
  when i would write
  in front of people
  who might have been hostile
  or at least expert
  dormant in some
  i imagine latent
  before i knew them
  i wouldnt do it now
  to two people and

    they know who they are
      not that that is
      important
      i like them
      i like they are friends
      and if they
      it not bothers
      me too
      much even if they
      do not like me
      because wisdom doesnt
      operating on a need
      too
      know laws and policy
      helps
      early letter
      thank you for whatever reason
      that

a strange phrase
  or using funny strokes
  and it would mean something
  or not
  and i would know which
  but to see them
  unpuzzle or try
  was in the most
  happy in
  miserable days i have known

      one of you dressed in very
      naughty clothes
      for three
      i wasnt
      weeks
      it was a struggle
      but so was
      so was
      was

because i was aware and
  couldnt even muster
  suicidal feelings
  to see their faces
  heads tilted with
  that puzzle
  meant to be left alone
  and the eyes trying hard
  not to be caught looking

and it still works
  and it is like
  the end of the great escape
  when our hero is caught
  by hearing the right
  language when he should
  have left it alone
  it is funny how
  people are really
  very naked

naked

but those x ray glasses
  sold for ten cents
  in nineteen fifties comic books
  take time to wear
  but they work

and the moral of
  this story is that this
  story how
  can i return to
  anything
  and how can i let
  every detail
  remain the same not
  for me but just because
  and how can

a thief liar cheat whore
  which is a mythical
  being and not possible
  in the real world
  therefore was not only
  part of a nightmare
  but the breeding horse
  of dark hours

itself and there was
  once a bag and she at
  least pretended
  well she did that
  too well for
  a long

time to like cats
  but she is really
  a dog
  person i think
  and through
  extreme smugness
  let that cat
  right out of
  that bag

it dint

come back the very next day

and nothing can stop us now
  which was a cheap song of my
  guilty pleasures she said she liked
  and i am the only body she will know
  and she will never leave me
  we will be together for our whole lives
  she loves my mind
  and wonders what it would be like
  to be inside of me
  like my phrase to be alone
  together and to rest her
  head on my heart and to
  fcuk me i think only
  so i would pass out
  except for those parvors
  her blight i imagine
  and says we are fully bonded
  that we are inseparable
  that she needs me
  for her whole life and her only
  genuine cry was when i was actually

leaving her for real
  she doesnt know that
  i was leaving her
  for real that terrible may
  ergo
  her crocodile tears won the
  wrong award which is quite funny
  they were fake tears
  you fcuking bitch arse cnut
  and that it
  took a lot to stay
  but i chose
  to overlook
  discrepancies because
  young people are supposed
  to grow up and i was
  evidently more than
  willing to

wait when i first realized
  she was a cheat and a liar
  but she wasnt a liar
  she was a lie

she was a lie
  her legs parted easily
  and her lips said come hither
  but they never quite said
  my name but guess who i
  am

thinking of right now
  god i am stupid
  but love strikes
  in the the same
  place
  burn an eyebrow

she was right
  very right
  and i am the body etc
  and loves together lives
  bonded whole inside nothing stop

but define the long measure inside
  your head job
  i think she is trapped there
  until i die or go far away
  and she needs me to be healthy
  while my brain is her living space

i dont understand who she is
  i know who she is
  i dont understand what she is
  why she lives in my head
  i do not know what the real
  person is then and why
  and more why
  sweetly so
  was i raped like penetrated
  but there is no withdrawal

and i will do everything
  i can balance a lot
  she must regret and hurt
  she asks for human protection
  she asks to be have

protection from humans
  she is not real
  even if somewhere she is
  and i will never see that
  monster horrific disgusting
  i saw a photo of her cnut
  in a very naughty pose

she who does not
  pay rent but
  asunder knows how deeply
  and intensely
  i wanted to vomit
  seeing something so horrific
  and that even a
  photo of her

prettiness makes me
  have to cover my eyes and agonize groan
  very uncomfortably
  even bite my piano muscle
  joining my thumb to
  my hand on the top
  which would be partly
  from masturbating

but you got the wrong hand
  because i genuinely
  cant stand the sight
  of her and i hear
  her voice when played
  because i cannot see or

hear her in any memory
  because she has faded
  the good has faded
  she is truly
  adjective
  abject
  they havent invented it yet
  but it will be short
  with the only vowels
  being faux and awkward
  and lets just use schwars

and the consonants
  grating and harsh
  and not dwell on a word
  for such an unworthy
  cause of

so i understand little
  behind the scenes
  and how it is
  connected to the sky and
  to lights and ice
  and twigs and the hairs
  on my arms

and to faces and
  things that
  fascinate
  but i am not gullible
  doppelgänger
  monstrosity
  i am not
  full of
  foot

i dont need to ask about why
  the latin word
  verber
  makes feedback
  need some latin
  it means lash as in
  lash out not as
  in eye lash
  out

and i dont know why she needs
  to extend her nerves
  into my brain
  or i am imagining this
  or there is nothing in my head
  because there is some fancy
  research into tapping
  into brains without
  entering them

and so many ands
  and i do not think
  we hear about most research
  and that is not because it
  is sponsored by our government

think hard about that

which
  and how strange is this
  i am on their side
  my former enemy
  imperialism
  because they rape and pillage
  and are systematic abusers and
  aggressors and racists and
  so many other things

a reminder are you thinking of that that

but that is the nature of
  the bourgeois beast
  and who knows
  i do
  that one day things will be
  different but not in this way
  the writing is not on the wall
  or books or in that way
  but privately together
  not by metaphor
  or foraging
  through

id say everything
  but i have laryngitis
  and here is the only
  punctuation here
  ripping that hymen
  i mentioned before
  because guess what
  it was symbolic
  and i always preferred
  symbolic solutions in math
  to number crunching:

the mark is a colon
  because they are full
  of sh!t
  and the american government
  and people did not plan
  to be this way
  as terrible as it is
  and some are
  in general

but these other people
  who tortured me
  though that is a small
  part of their subterfuge
  and the secular zion
  with a bitter twisted
  head though like a

rhizome or a
  flat hierarchy
  and they have ordained
  themselves and are ordained
  into things that they oppose
  but are blind to it
  rapists them all
  face off like the movie
  with somebody cage
  and the scientologist

it might have been
  someone else
  this is all to say
  they are truly planned
  evil of evil
  they know they know
  they dont really comprehend

and are virtually
  illiterate with very few
  exceptions and
  they struggle to gather
  people who know
  anything other than
  their expertise

so i am blessed it seems

    they flattered me

to be what they thought
  was stupid
  but

they are the smartest
  of course and
  soulless people
  some have souls but are

    masochist sadist amuck forth running bare

misled
  bishopric
  of course people are confused
  or have been
  even promoted even rewarded
  by self importance by duty
  or some other leverage
  just as in the
  dumbest parts of history
  or the pawns
  held tight to their

chests or underage
  and how do cults
  work
  by communications of course
  i think i know
  because one especially
  cultureless clueless
  almost famed
  one around here
  for her virtues
  as they are
  and brilliance

makes me think of the
  late 1970s and
  i am your automatically lover
  i am made from the cloth
  i am maiden material
  fabric

has doped my synaptic
  band gaps
  and i only semi
  conduct myself
  now but i am
  so STRONG

iamFEAR
  less

they plan they are revolting
  it is essential
  not accidental
  if you didnt pick up
  on it
  that was quite philosophical

that you do not know
  what is happening
  which is kind of
  what you collectively
  which is one of the
  many contradictions in
  your coming
  insidious
  directionless
  or just a utopian
  teleology without
  having chewed on
  your fat
  big ugly λόγος
  or is it prosaic
  logos

i sometimes forget
  i am addressing
  not murmuring

they do not know
  i do not care
  but they do not know
  and all i want is
  death of my current
  brain derrangement
  also their utter failure
  but history is kind
  so i die
  or i dont
  and i dont
  care and IF
  i live

then
  words that continue
  this diatribe
  and those word
  are

One Line Too Many, A Thousand Not Enough.

Throwing out the Baby with the Barthes Water.

(Said the tree: P here) My first masters (Mus.M. incomplete of course) thesis was entitled “S/A: on the Death of Socrates and Analysis.” Clearly that is ridiculously clever. But the retarded voice in my head, which is extremely retarded (did I mention?), is indicating a complete synaptic firing of a blank. S/A = an “essay,” and “to essay.” The thesis was on Erik Satie’s Mort de Socrate, the third movement, you know, with the hemlock. Which itself is around a thousand things to comment on, hence the masters level (ASP-RPG = academic single-play role-playing game). And it was analysis, but (kind of falteringly) a deconstruction of the act of music analysis. I was an angry young man, disliking the rigor of structuralist methods. Or anything else I was made to learn or was forcibly taught. But it was a kind of inversion of Roland Barthe’s S/Z: an Essay. That book is a virtuosic retelling, analysis, meta-analysis, method, meta-hodos, whatever ever, “anything you can do he can do meta” way beyond (ugh, that’s what “meta” means) what anyone else could do. Barthes was the bridge from structuralism to post-structuralism, I think. And following his writings is really a pretty decent way to follow French critical thought from the early 60s to the 80s. (The S and the Z more than anything else refer to the difference between the grapheme “s” and the /z/ sound that we make—if at all in French.)

Here a couple of things about Barthes. I love him; his work is a pleasure to read as well as dripping in meaning about a thousand times richer, more useful, reasonable, beautiful, and unambiguous (can can something be more unambiguous? That’s like driving twice as slow. Or, kind of morally or medically, smoking “natural” cigarettes is better for you health I THINK NOT! Not as disastrously terrible. But you never hear it put that way, so I mean, less ambiguous) as any Great Pretenders to drippiness. (I’d rather be a raindrop than a drip, as the song goes.) There is not a senseless moment, there is no talk about nothing, there could never be a high sin tax levied because his word order is consistent, and ~-ly “just right” (pretty left, actually) in the Goldilocks sense.

I’ll look for the original (translators are very smart people) but my French is not my Italian or Latin (where I can beat out a fairly good translation, or correct some over-zealous or determined one, in fact, in all my premature perjaculations, my shortcomings, I think I’m pretty okay at translating or editing. I took quite a subtle bashing because I have always, only when invited and with a gentle hand, corrected girlfriends’ papers, mss., whatever, and that is because I am deflecting my own writing agenda (Latin, things to be done). So I can feel good at writing well. A lot of journalistic writing that mixes units of thought (50% of this, but 0.3 of that): all that needs correcting. The Greeks and Romans had terms for Rhetorical figures, for a reason. But I did notice that my uncontorting of texts (“but, although they, often consider—only by...” non-tail-end recursing) was often ignored. It took me a while to realize quite why, especially as the issue was directly raised within that very reason. Okay, a little philosophically regressive or retrogressive. But, again, how the hoity toity in the modern sense are really the hoity toity in the old sense (the pretentious are mere fools).

) somewhere. Why should thoughts be com

This is a nice summary of one of the essays in Barthes’ slender volume Image, Music, Text. (Another such work is his Mythologies, well worth reading, say, before diving into Žižek’s exercises in Pop Culture.) It is a summary of “The Photographic Message” (from the Hill Editition, Ed. and Trans. Stephen Heath, 1977. pp.15-31) by Laurie Dickinson on the teaching website of Prof. Michael Hancher. [Retrieved from http://mh.cla.umn.edu/ebibld3.html on 20110124-1016.]

In this essay, Barthes sees the newspaper as “a complex of concurrent messages with the photograph as centre and surrounds constituted by the text, the title, the caption, the lay-out and... by the very name of the paper” (15). He separates the totality of the representation into two structures—the visual and the textual—which are “contiguous but not ‘homogenized’” (16), and, laying the question of textual signification to the side, focuses on elaborating “a structural analysis of the photographic message” (16) and then on projecting some methods whereby the photographic image and attendant text relate. The photograph, according to Barthes, “transmit[s]... the scene itself, the literal reality” (17); that is, it provides a “perfect analogon” of the object represented. This direct representation (the “what it is”) is the photograph’s “denoted” message. In addition, a photograph also conveys “a connoted message, which is the manner in which the society to a certain extent communicates what it thinks of it” (17, italics in original). (Paintings or other, more ‘worked,’ visual forms, on the other hand, have a second-order meaning which is the denoted or representational (first-order) meaning supplemented by the second-order style or ‘treatment’ of the image.) Barthes lays out six “connotation procedures” or processes whereby a photograph takes on a connoted meaning. These are: trick effects, pose, objects which index certain things, photogenia, aestheticism, and syntax, where photographs exist in a series. Connotation is historical or social in the sense that how an image is connoted is entirely dependent on the conventions and expectations of the society within which that image appears. In his example, an image of fire will connote very differently in a culture in which predominates a belief in hell as an actual, physical place from one in which no such belief exists.

In his discussion of the interrelation between text and image, Barthes lays out two paradigmatic forms of interaction: in the first, the “image illustrate[s] the text” and in the second, “the texts loads the image, burdening it with a culture, a moral, an imagination” (26). In fact, he states, since words can’t “‘duplicate’ the image,” there is a new space of signification created “in the movement from one structure to the other [where] secondary signifieds are inevitably developed” (26).

If more people read Barthes...

And here are two quotes I lifted straight from my copy of the Hill edition, trans. Richard Miller, 1974. I will just leave them, “we have a neither confirm nor deny policy”; and try to find the French to sea how the translation shores up.

The more indeterminate the origin of the statement, the more plural the text. In modern texts, the voices are so treated that any reference is impossible: the discourse, or better, the language, speaks: nothing more. By contrast, in the classic text the majority of the utterances are assigned an origin, we can identify their parentage, who is speaking: either a consciousness (of a character, of the author) or a culture (the anonymous is still an origin, a voice...); however, it may happen that in the classic text, always haunted by the appropriation of speech, the voice gets lost, as though it had leaked out through a hole in the discourse. The best way to conceive the classical plural is then to listen to the text as an iridescent exchange carried on by multiple voices, on different wavelengths and subject from time to time to a sudden dissolve, leaving a gap which enables the utterance to shift from one point of view to another, without warning: the writing is set up across this tonal instability (which in the modern text becomes atonality), which makes it a glistening texture of ephemeral origins. (41–42)

The five codes create a kind of network, a topos through which the entire text passes (or rather, in passing, becomes text). Thus, if we make no effort to structure each code, or the five codes among themselves, we do so deliberately, in order to assume the muiltivalence of the text, its partial reversibility. We are, in fact, concerned not to manifest a structure but to produce a structuration. The blanks and looseness of the analysis will be like footprints marking the escape of the text; for if the text is subject to some form, this form is not unitary, architectonic, finite: it is the fragment, the shards, the broken or obliterated network—all the movements and inflections of a vast “dissolve,” which permits both overlapping and loss of messages. Hence we use Code here not in the sense of a list, a paradigm that must be reconstituted.The code is a perspective of quotations, a mirage of structures; we know only its departures and returns; the units which have resulted from it (those we inventory) are themselves, always, ventures out of the text, the mark, the sign of a virtual digression toward the remainder of a catalogue...; they are so many fragments of something that has been already read, seen, done, experienced; the code is the wake of that already. Referring to what has been written, i.e., to the Book (of culture, of life, of life as culture), it makes the text into a prospectus of this Book. Or again: each code is one of the forces that can take over the text (of which the text is the network), one of the voices out of which the text is woven. Alongside each utterance, one might say that off-stage voices can be heard: they are the codes: in their interweaving, these voices (whose origin is “lost” in the vast perspective of the already-written) de-originate the utterance: the convergence of the voice (of the codes) becomes writing, a stereographic space where the five codes, the five voices, intersect: the Voice of Empirics (the proairetisms), the Voice of the Person (the semes), the Voice of Science (the cultural codes), the Voice of Truth (the hermeneutisms), the Voice of Symbol. (20–21)

Any text, from any book, by Barthes (not the theologian) is worth more than a casual read. More a causal one. Oh, Susan Sontag is very interesting: her collection of essays on photography, which is called On photography, go out and read it; interesting feminist critiques, and on multiple “readings” of photos. I love her tag-line for her website: “If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader, then as a writer, it is an extension to my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other worlds, other territories.”

While I’m P-ing, A will [verb]: Belle and Sebastian, “Sukie in the Graveyard” (The Life Pursuit, 2006). I must have just written about “brass rubbing” somewhere else because that is what made me think of this song. I hope they don’t mind me posting it; Stuart Murdoch is one of the great craftsmen of the English/British language. He doesn’t drink the alcohol and is a vegetarian. He is thinks he is “straight to the point of boring himself.” (I think there’s a name for that; at least he didn’t say “dead boring.”)

Sukie was the kid, she liked to hangout in the graveyard
She did brass rubbings, she learned you never had to press hard
When she finished hanging out she was all alone
She decided that she better check in at home
There was an awful row between her mum and dad
They said she hadn’t done this, she hadn’t done that
If she wanted to remain inside the family home
She’d have to tow the line, she’d have to give it a go
It didn’t suit Sukie
So she took her things and left

Sukie was the kid, she liked to hang out at the art school
She didn’t enrol, but she wiped the floor with all the arseholes
She took a bijou flat with the fraternity cat
She hid inside the attic of the sculpture building
She had a slut slave and his name was Dave
She said ‘Be my photo bitch and I’ll make you rich’
He didn’t believe her but the boy revered her
He got her meals and he got her a bed
He watched behind the screen and she started to undress
He never got far
Just lookin’ and playing guitar

Autumn hanging down all the trees are draped like chandeliers
Sukie saw the beauty but she wasn’t wet behind the ears
She had an A1 body and a face to match
She didn’t have money, she didn’t have cash
With the winter coming on, and the attic cold
She had to press her nose on the refectory wall
They served steamed puddings she went without
She had to pose for life for all the scholars of art
She didn’t feel funny, she didn’t feel bad
Peeling away everything she had
She had the grace of an eel, sleek and stark
As the shadows played tricks on the girl in the dark

Sukie was the kid, she liked to hangout in the graveyard

It is very sad that smug cleverness and certain cultivation has a longer left leg: wrongly leans right loftily. Tears me up. I just noticed that plato upside looks a little like adolf. (I think the inclusion of the backward-masked Satanic message in “Stairway to Heaven” is to draw attention to how backward Satanism is, or something. Probably something, as things are.) But there is no irony or wit to be found in the plato/hitler thing, as I am sure that, if the latter could read the former, then the latter (which was previously the former but I’m now referring to a more recent clause) would acknowledge the [other] was a role model, except for the whole race thing rather than meritocratic thing. Which leaves two final thoughts: Some people who fit themselves into the category of “merit” think that Michael Young’s 1958 essay (now a short book) is seriousness posing as satire. He he. And, lead singer of OK Damien Kulash says (taken from Wikipedia), “The great thing about the internet is it is a meritocracy and it’s free.” Makes me want to find an abacus, and two tin cans with a string connecting them. Or... I’m not reading it right.

Not much left to say.