“Please don’t flow so fast”

Image © 2010 Peter Whincop.

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

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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.

Is this an Exaptation to the Rule of Hegemony?

Try it at 480, not 360. And full screen.