Doo doo doo Da da da

Stole this from Maggot, and LOVE IT!

"It is not advisable, nor was it ever, to lead a Dada life. It is and it was always foolish and self-destructive to lead a Dada life because a Dada life will include by definition pranks, buffoonery, masking, deranged senses, intoxication, sabotage, taboo breaking, playing childish and/or dangerous games, waking up dead gods, and not taking education seriously."

- Andrei Codrescu

Speaking in Tongues

'Our tongues, their tongues, tongueness. Tongue twisting, tongue lashing, tongue tying; on the tip of the tongue. Tongue wagging, tongue-and-groove, tongue-in-cheek, tongues of land; speaking in tongues. Sharp tongues, shoe tongues, harness tongues, bell tongues. Gift of tongues. Bite one's tongue, find one's tongue, hold one's tongue, lose one's tongue. Give tongue.'

-- Kathy Neustadt, 'The Folkloristics of Licking'

Bone, Brain

A trembling in the bones may carry a more convincing testimony than the dry documented deductions of the brain. ~Llewelyn Powers

Angles in the Architecture

Two quotes for this day:

“I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.”

and

“The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark.”

Both Michelangelo, and both very apt for my current creative situation.

Camouflage

In his work on mimicry, Callois makes it clear that an insect's ability to camouflage itself does not have a survival value-- it does not protect the creature from attack or death, and in fact may leave it open to even more hideous and unimaginable forms of death. He cites the case of a caterpillar cut in half by pruning shears, or the insect devoured by a member of its own species who mistakes it for a leaf...

Callois introduced a wanton dimension to his explanation of such features of animal existence. Camouflage, the capacity to imitate one's habitat or surroundings, far from performing an adaptive function, witnesses the captivation of a creature by its representations of and as space, its displacement from the center, from a "consciousness" of its place (in its body, located in space) to the perspective of another. The mimicking insect lives its camouflaged existence as not quite itself, as another.

-- Elizabeth Grosz, Animal Sex: Libido as Desire and Death

The Boar's Bite

Vatsyayana ... his list of kisses included The Balanced Kiss (kisses on the curve between the breasts), The Forcible Kiss (kisses implanted on the breasts), and The Chaste Kiss (kisses given from the breast downwards to the waist). While among his recipes for erotic 'scratching and biting' is The Boar's Bite:

'the most appropriate portions of a the body for this type of biting are the female breasts and shoulders. A small portion of the skin of the breast or shoulder is held between the teeth and chewed, and then another portion is taken, and so on, leaving a long, unbroken line of red stain.'

Commenting on the violence of The Boar's Bite, one authority notes in the most charming and matter-of-fact way that for obvious reasons this particular bite should be strictly avoided 'when dealing with virgins or other people's wives...'

-- Mervyn Levy The Moons Of Paradise

There's More To Life Than Books You Know

‘Book-learning is a weak substitute for the stench and frustration of the laboratory, just as art history of a meager reading of pictures unless it is based on actual work in the studio. To a non-painter, oil paint is uninteresting and faintly unpleasant. To a painter, it is the life's blood: a substance so utterly entrancing, infuriating, and ravishingly beautiful that it makes it worthwhile to go back into the studio every morning, year after year, for an entire lifetime’

– James Elkins (2000:5)

Excess Art

To make oneself into a work of art is in a sense the only response to an imminent and ridiculous redundancy of the specific forms of the body; and to make oneself into a work of art (as Nietzsche and, following him, Michel Foucault suggest) is not to simply aestheticize life, to dandify it, or to make oneself into an object or spectacle for the artistic investigation of others. It requires living one's life and one's body in excess of what is required-- in excess of discipline and even in excess of aesthetics.
To live one's life as a work of art is, among other things, to once again return to one's body as the site and source, the origin of pleasure and productivity and to utilize it differently, to move and act in ways other than those that have habitually confined us. Acting differently also leads to being acted on differently-- to sense differently, developing each sense beyond its usual biological reach and inquiring into the limits and transformability of biology itself. Developing alternatives-- synesthetically cross-mapping the senses onto each other, sensing differently, using the senses in terms of the range and scope of the other senses, exploring how each sense functions or is capable of functioning quite differently from its assumed and normalized role. To develop these alternatives is inherently invested in artistic activity. It is to render the body differently in representation, for representation is, as I have argued, almost a second skin, a diaphanous sheathing for bodies that transforms what the body is and does. It is looking good in both senses-- looking at something well (outside the domain or order of the gaze) and being looked at, as well.

-- Elizabeth Grosz, Naked (2006: 200)

Hanging On

It is often as though the skin were dramatising the primary significance of the word 'bear'. In much sadomasochistic practice and imagery, there is an obsessive interplay between the attack on shape carried out through the use of weights, or objects hung from the skin in order to distress and distort its contours, and the display of the skin's reassuring capacity to support weight. The skin bears weight as its owner bears suffering. In one ritual practiced by masochistic performance artist Bob Flanagan, a third meaning was enacted: he hung plastic babies from hooks in his skin, as a way of demonstrating the enforced bearing of children (1993: 61). Hanging objects from one's skin seems to reduce one's skin to an object, merely fleshly stuff to be played with at will and without mercy. But to hang yourself from your skin, or, as we might say, in a small but prepositional shift, by your skin, as practised, for example, by the self-modifying performance artist Stelarc, who hung himself high in the air through hooks in his skin, is to reduce yourself to the condition of object, or mere mass or weight. The hung person is of course reduced to an object, a mere carcass. They are wholly vulnerable and available. But they are also supported, borne up by the mortification they elect to have to bear. Suspension gives a curious compensatory sense of protection. Language gives us another literalisation here; of the person in the appalling condition, it must be said that they literally depend on their own skin.

— Steven Connor, ‘Mortification’ (2001: 44)

Dairy Queen

'I knelt down by the huge brown animal and with my hot cheek pressed into its rounded flanks let my fingers tease out long lines of milk which hit the metal pail beneath with the satisfying ring of bullets. It was hot and dark inside the milking sheds and the strong sweet smell of the heavy beasts, their milky breath and the hay was making me drowsy. I leant my full weight against the firm body of the animal and closed my eyes. Its skin was soft and warm. Outside I could hear the sound of girls laughing and playing and I wanted to join them in the gardens and the sunlight that I knew lay beyond. The fields were like a paradise: all the buds were splitting, the grass was green and the still air spilled with floating seeds and luminous insects. I knew it all lay beyond the door and yet I stayed in the dark of the sheds. With my strong brown fingers, I pulled methodically at the animal's shuddering sack of milk and watched as the bucket slowly began to fill with the warm frothy liquid. Every now and then I'd dip my finger in and suck on the sweet milk like a child.

When the pail was full I stood up and wiped the perspiration from my face. My entire body was hot and I could feel tiny rivulets of sweat trickling down the insides of my thighs. The animals around me moved in anticipation and I could see milk oozing from their swollen teats dripping down onto the floor. I lifted the pail and began to walk unevenly across the bran, but as I moved my foot caught on a stone and the bucket jerked from my hands and landed with a clatter. The milk immediately spilled out, forming a large white lake on the dirty stone floor.

'You're very clumsy,' a voice said from inside the barn.

I looked around me and saw a shadow in the far corner.

'Don't you think you ought to clear it up? Get down on your hands and knees and lick.' I hesitated and the voice repeated itself. 'I said, get down and lick it up.'

Slowly I put the pail down and crouched on the floor. The stones were cool and smelt mildly of ammonia.

'Lick,' the voice again commanded and I stuck out my tongue and began to lick at the pool, all the time aware of the fact that a man stood in the shadows watching me. Then I heard him cross the barn and felt him prod me from behind with his boot.

'You're far too slow,' he said. 'It will never get cleared up at this rate. Take off your skirts and underclothes and clear it up.'

I stood up slowly and began to slip off my clothing until my lower half was naked. When that was done I felt his hands on my shoulders pushing me down so that I had to squat in the white pool. I began wiping at the milk with my skirts.

'Not with your clothing,' the man said, grabbing my skirts from my hands.

I crouched down lower and immediately could feel the cool milk brushing against my sex. I dragged myself over the floor.

'That's better. Much better,' he said. 'Now get down on all floors like that animal. I could hear the man crouch down beside me. 'Let me see you drinking from it,' he said, pushing me towards the beast in its stall.

I put my tongue to the warm sack of milk and began to suckle the animal, making my lips work as fingers, tightening and relaxing them to ease out the milk, and all of the while I could feel the man's hand touching me between my milky wet legs, stroking and caressing me. The milk dripped from my sex and spilled from my mouth.

'You've made a terrible mess of yourself,' he whispered gently as he moved closer and began to lick the milk from my skin.

I could feel his strong tongue like a giant cat's rasping and flicking up inside me. My body shuddered with short even spasms and I felt myself unfolding like a fat pink bud. I wanted him now, and it was as if he read my desire for at that moment he mounted me and pushed with the full weight of his body deep inside.
In the dark I could hear the animals growing restless, stamping the ground, waiting. The beast I was drinking from shifted uneasily. My mouth filled again with its warm sweet milk, and as I drank my body heaved with the thrust of the man and the animal's moaning and slowly filled to the brim with thick rich milkiness.' (Fermentation, Angelica Jacob: 11—14)

Eat Your Elkins, Its Good For You

Promise.

'The alchemist's interest in putrefactio is shared by contemporary artists, many of whom see something beautiful in natural decay. The rotting fruit, blooming at the back of the refrigerator, is also outlandishly beautiful with its crown of bluish hair spreading over a glowing orange skull. So is the throat ravaged with bronchitis, blossoming in smooth white flowers. And the bloated deer half-swamped in the lakeshore is also beautiful, with its gorgeous smooth hide stretched into a lucent bubble. There are hundreds of examples in fine art, each more nauseating and compelling than the last. The installation artist Anne Hamilton soaked a thousand pennies in honey, and then let them gather a film of dust; Andres Serrano made stagnant infusions of piss, semen and milk; Frances Whitehead works with fabrics soaked in water, muds, oils and resins.'

again from What Painting Is (70)

Fermentation Is Yeasty Death

Fermentation is yeasty death. A body that burns becomes lifeless powder, but a body that ferments rots and and the room fills with unbearable stench. As it swells, there is a strange and fascinating rhyme between a belly that distends with swampy gasses and a belly swollen with a growing child. To the alchemists fermentation was full of digestion, pregnancy, and new life. A vessel called the uterus was considered best for fermentation, but alchemists also mimicked the womb by placing their sealed vessels in manure, and even by places vials in horses' vaginas. In general, vessels were sealed in imitation of the closed womb, and opened in imitation of Caesarean section...

- James Elkins
What Painting Is (143-144)

Read My Lips

Have been meaning to post this quote for ages. From Irigaray's The Sex Which Is Not One:

...woman's autoeroticism is very different from man's. In order to touch himself, man needs an instrument: his hand, a woman's body, language... And this self-caressing requires at least a minimum of activity. As for woman, she touches herself in and of herself without any need for mediation, and before there is any way to distinguish activity from passivity. Woman "touches herself" all the time, and moreover no one can forbid her to do so, for her genitals are formed of two lips in continuous contact. Thus, within herself, she is already two-- but not divisible into one(s)-- that caress each other.

Come To Me New

Her eyes were full of tears. I had hurt her. I regretted telling her those stories about my girlfriends. I had wanted to make her laugh and she had laughed at the time. Now I had strewn our path with barbs. She didn't trust me. As a friend I had been amusing. As a lover I was lethal. I could see that. I wouldn't want to have much to do with me. I knelt on the floor and clasped her legs against my chest.

'Tell me what you want and I'll do it.'

She stroked my hair. 'I want you to come to me without a past. Those lines you've learned, forget them. Forget that you've been here before in other bedrooms in other places. Come to me new. Never say you love me until the day when you have proved it.'

-- Jeanette Winterson
Written on the Body

Who Be Owl And Who Be Pussy-cat?

The Owl and the Pussy-cat
by Edward Lear

I

The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea
In a beautiful pea green boat,
They took some honey, and plenty of money,
Wrapped up in a five pound note.
The Owl looked up to the stars above,
And sang to a small guitar,
'O lovely Pussy! O Pussy my love,
What a beautiful Pussy you are,
You are,
You are!
What a beautiful Pussy you are!'


II

Pussy said to the Owl, 'You elegant fowl!
How charmingly sweet you sing!
O let us be married! too long we have tarried:
But what shall we do for a ring?'
They sailed away, for a year and a day,
To the land where the Bong-tree grows
And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood
With a ring at the end of his nose,
His nose,
His nose,
With a ring at the end of his nose.


III

'Dear pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling
Your ring?' Said the Piggy, 'I will.'
So they took it away, and were married next day
By the Turkey who lives on the hill.
They dined on mince, and slices of quince,
Which they ate with a runcible spoon;
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
They danced by the light of the moon,
The moon,
The moon,
They danced by the light of the moon.

Chaotic Rainbow Men

From the Monster's desk calender. First one apt 'cos there was a big rainbow over the river when I visited her office this morning, and as for the second one- you can guess why it struck a chord. Does THREE DAYS AT A (fun) WOMEN'S AND GENDER STUDIES CONFERENCE make it any clearer why this resonates?

Today: 'we live in a rainbow of chaos.' Paul Cezanne

Weekend: 'I'm not afraid to show my feminine side – its part of what makes me a man.' Gerard Depardieu

Settle, Petal

I had a rose named after me and I was very flattered. But I was not pleased to read the description in the catalog: "No good in a bed, but fine against a wall."
-- Eleanor Roosevelt

Love Thyself

'The link between sexual intimacy and knowing comes about through the idea of secrets revealed through bodily knowledge shared with a lover. Sex with ourselves while alone is also a form of intimacy with literary connections. And the secrets we reveal to ourselves when masturbating can be even more revealing, or confronting, than those we learn from our partner. There’s nothing like sexual desire for oneself to fuel narratives of the wildest kind. This is when the secrets of our bodies perhaps speak most eloquently and without censure' writes Fiona Giles in MilkBrain: Writing the Cognitive Body (2007).

Extra justification for a little 'private time'. Or public, as you please.

Egghead

It is very remiss of me, but a quick search of this here blog reveals that I have NEVER included this quote! Apologies... From Lewis Carroll's 'Through The Looking Glass':

"I don't know what you mean by 'glory,'" Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. "Of course you don't -- till I tell you. I meant "there's a nice knock-down argument for you!'"
"But `glory' doesn't mean `a nice knock-down argument,'" Alice objected.
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in a rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less."
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean different things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master -- that's all."
Alice was too much puzzled to say anything, so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again.
"They've a temper, some of them -- particularly verbs, they're the proudest -- adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs -- however, I can manage the whole lot! Impenetrability! That's what I say!"

Cracked

One of my dear friends has the following as her signature line, and I am inclined to agree:

'Blessed are the cracked, for they let in the light'