‘Almost fifty years have passed since the publication of this remarkable book (Editions de Minuit, 1957). Mary Dalwood’s translation appeared rather quickly by the standards of academic publishing (Calder and Boyars, 1962); but still, outside of a small circle of intellectual Francophiles, Bataille was and remained largely unknown. Even in Vincent Descombes’ Modern French Philosophy, which many of the UK’s leading ‘Continental’ philosophers of the present day were devouring as undergraduates in the 1980’s, Bataille is only mentioned in passing. Why read the relatively obscure Bataille now? And why read Bataille’s Eroticism now? Besides the practical considerations that it is two pounds cheaper, the illustrations are noticeably crisper, and it is easier to fit in one’s pocket than the 1987 edition?

‘Perhaps the speed at which a thinker becomes canonical is an index of how little their thought changes anything. Even if that were so, it by no means implies the counter-principle that a thinker’s profundity can be measured by the degree of ignorance afforded to them by the kingmakers who write histories of French thought. Sartre’s swiftly popular philosophy of freedom and responsibility, for all its avowed atheism, made perfect ontological and moral sense to anybody who had enjoyed a short term with the Jesuits. God was dead for many Twentieth century intellectuals, but all His values remained in place in the ‘human soul’, the unique being-for-itself. The anti-humanism of Bataille was then and is now beyond the pale for many readers. Despite the profound relevance of Bataille’s work to fields as diverse as theology, psychology, literature, anthropology, economics, sociology, and philosophy, there was never the slightest chance of Bataille joining the popular lists of the great and the good. It is not that Bataille is a second- or third-rate thinker. Rather his thought was simply too disruptive, and even when he was alive his mixed and virulent output had something of the character of an unburied corpse. Eroticism is amongst the most important works of one of the most stimulating and neglected French thinkers of the Twentieth century. Anyone who has laboured through the endlessly qualified and deferred prose of late-phenomenology would do well to look at Bataille’s Eroticism as soon as possible. Much contemporary French thought is as difficult but ultimately harmless to assimilate as a ten course tofu banquet. After such fare, the encounter with Bataille’s late works – particularly Eroticism, Literature and Evil, or The Tears of Eros – should be satisfyingly dense, bloody, and rich. Earlier texts such as Guilty, Inner Experience and On Nietzsche are to say the least challenging, even to the most sympathetic readers. Eroticism is not an easy text for reasons we shall come to presently, but it is arguably the easiest and most rewarding portal into Bataille’s disturbing world.

‘Broadly speaking, Bataille is a programmatic (though not a systematic) thinker. But his programme is self-avowedly impossible. This impossible project involves examining those blindingly over-lit or twilight points at which theorization collapses or dissolves into seizure, sobbing, fugue, orgasm, or the scream of anguish. Eroticism is not an object of enquiry, simply because the erotic is precisely that ‘sacred’ materiality which abrades and ruptures the categories of subject and object, self and world, inside and outside, human and animal. Unlike Hegelian reflections upon the logical constitution of the limit, Bataille is primarily concerned with the somatic limits of experience and theorizations thereof. It is not our habits or their disruptions which make us human, Bataille contends, for animals seem to exhibit as much: “animal sexuality does make for disequilibrium and this disequilibrium is a threat to life, but the animal does not know that […] Eroticism is the sexual activity of man to the extent that it differs from the sexual activity of animals. Human sexual activity is not necessarily erotic but erotic it is whenever it is not rudimentary and purely animal…”.

‘Such a bludgeoning division between the human and the animal (especially via the dubious privilege of ‘knowledge’) might suggest that Bataille is proposing a partially-atheistic humanism similar to Sartre’s. But that is merely the surface: the entire notion of separability (logical, ontological, moral or biological) is rapidly abraded in Bataille’s world. Indeed, only the relative ‘discontinuity’ of conscious ‘beings’ absurdly raising themselves above the blind ‘becomings’ of a world of material continuity can configure this set of problems as a set of problems. It is the habitually desired balances and equally habitually desired transgressions of those habits that makes human embodiment so uncanny.

‘The impurity of this book will no doubt offend the sensibilities of many academics, whatever their stance on the value of interdisciplinarity. Bataille’s twisted and tangled reflections on incest, art, mysticism, pre-history, cell division, philosophy, menstruation, economics and murder form not so much a rich tapestry of argumentation as a catastrophe. ‘Catastrophe’ in two senses, one positive, the other negative: firstly, if one expects from Bataille an ‘argument’ in the classical mode, a careful connecting of evidential propositions to safe conclusions, one can only see this kind of work as confusion and abomination. This is the positive catastrophe of Eroticism (and indeed, of eroticism). Like the common or garden variety of misogynist bore pointing to the child-molester, the purportedly abject failure of an other’s behaviour to measure up to decent standards is seized upon as evidence of the positive value of ‘respectable’ theoretical work. The ‘straight’ anthropologist, sociologist, theologian or philosopher will be much reassured by the untenability of Bataille’s corpus on their terms. From the inside of any hygienically constituted discipline, Bataille is a transgression which shores up the norm. This is the ‘positive’ or utile value of his catastrophic work.

‘The negative catastrophe of Bataille’s Eroticism is concerned with the work of the writer as something impossible and paradoxical. It amounts to nothing less than an incitement to the pursuit of non-utile work. The production of a book which is literally good-for-nothing (except perhaps the de-commodification of knowledge) is about as heretical an idea as could be fielded in the free democracies of latecapitalism. Yet Bataille’s project, if it can be thus described, is precisely geared towards a theorization of the conditions under which everything is wasted for the sake of a sacred, impossible contact with the ‘outside’ of the human world of work and utility. It is for this reason that Bataille’s book, for some, remains as enigmatic, compelling and sordid as the transmission of an impossible truth: as if a close relative with a good career and a great marriage had been arrested in a public lavatory for a practice so unusual that the Crown Prosecution Service were having difficulty deciding whether or not it was covered by existing laws.

‘The greatest difficulty that a philosophical reader might encounter in Bataille’s Eroticism may well be the uneasy relationships Bataille courts with two large figures in the history of Continental thought. Throughout Eroticism one senses the suppressed and distant noises of a titanic battle between Nietzsche and Hegel. Both are mentioned, the former more or less in passing and the latter as a means of pointing up the failures of a selfsatisfied, stabilized and systemic notion of philosophy. Hence my claim that Eroticism is a difficult text despite its deceptively straightforward and conversational tone. The path by which one reaches a thinker will always to a certain extent colour the reading; but with Bataille’s work there seems to be a particularly chronic inbuilt problem concerning hermeneutics and personal histories. Readers from a broadly Hegelian background will probably find Bataille’s reflections upon unmediated ‘base’ materiality naively pre-critical, whilst readers approaching the work from the domain of a ‘Nietzschean’ critical materialism will scent something suspiciously dialectical about many of Bataille’s formal argumentative moves. Bataille does indeed suffer from all manner of faults at the level of methodology, often crushing together statistical studies, myth, dialectics, genealogy, poetry and appeals to biological ‘fact’.

‘Yet in a way this failure (or, refusal) to make explicit any kind of harmonic synthesis between his approaches to the impossible (non-)object of his enquiry is entirely appropriate for an attempt at understanding the nature of radical disruption. The extent to which one considers his bricolage enlightening may ultimately be undecidable on theoretical principles alone. For some, the ragged urgency of Bataille’s mission may lead them to excuse him on similar grounds to Malcolm X’s “…by any means possible”. For others, it may provoke something closer to bewildered horror, as when Colonel Kurtz asks “Do you think my methods are unsound?” and Captain Willard answers “I don’t see any methods, Sir.” Throughout Eroticism Bataille is keenly aware of the difficulties involved in the attempt to communicate and justify one’s journey into radical alterity, given the paradox of language as method for communicating only the commonest experiences (see particularly his chapters on DeSade in Part II).

‘Anybody interested in the darker side of the arts, social sciences and humanities, or who is interested in destroying their lives as utile subjects should read this book.’ — Mark Price

 

____
Further

‘Erotism’ @ goodreads
Cogent thoughts of a sick mind
off the shelf: Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death & Sensuality
Eroticism, violence, and sacrifice: A postmodern theory of religion and ritual
Sexuality in organizations: An approach based on Georges Bataille’s theory of eroticism
Consumption, Transgression, Eroticism: Watching Claire Denis’ Trouble Every Day with Georges Bataille
Fetishism: Georges Bataille and Sexual-Textual Transgression

 

____
Illustrations

____
Extras

“As-Far-as-The-Eye-Can-See (At the Limit of Vision)”

Interview de Georges Bataille sur l’art et l’angoisse.

Georges Bataille : la mort à l’oeuvre par Michel Surya

Débat entre Georges Bataille & André Maurois: Où en est la critique littéraire? (1948)

 

____
Interview (1958)

 

‘In [the interview], Bataille appeared relaxed and handsome, and scandalous (for the times) beneath an absolutely serene exterior (his way of saying the worst of things with an air of innocence was all his own). He talked about literature and what was ‘essentially childish’ and infantile about it. It is a childishness that literature has in common with eroticism: ‘It seems to me to be very important to perceive the infantile nature of eroticism.’ Evidently Bataille was little concerned about demonstrating that eroticism was innocent in the sense that morality would like to understand it. It has the cruel, black innocence of childhood. To understand it, we must reflect on what Bataille said of Gilles de Rais: ‘We could not deny the monstrosity of childhood. How often would children, if they could, be a Gilles de Rais.’ It is a monstrously happy childhood that Bataille was thinking of, a childhood that has no limits except those imposed by law (by authority). And literature is dangerous because it is linked to childhood; because it is the element within us that is open to childhood that it is essential for us to ‘confront the danger’ in it, and that it is essential, through it, to ‘perceive the worst’.

‘It was Bataille’s first and last television appearance. He was too tired to remember what he had found to say (though in fact he had been clear to a fault); leaving the studio, he only recalled having talked about polygamy, and this was enough to send him into raptures.’ — Surya

Interviewer: First I want to ask you about the name of this book. What evil are you talking about?

Bataille: I think there are two opposite kinds of evil. The first one is related to the necessity of human activity going well and having the desired results, and the other consists of deliberately violating some fundamental taboos like, for example, the taboo against murder or against some sexual possibilities.

Interviewer: As in do evil and act evil.

Bataille: Yes.

Interviewer: Does the name of this book indicate that evil and literature are inseparable?

Bataille: Yes, I think so. Maybe it’s not very clear at first, but to me it seems that if literature stays away from evil, it rapidly becomes boring. This might seem surprising. Nevertheless, I think that soon it becomes clear that literature has to deal with anguish and that anguish is based on something that is going the wrong way, something that no doubt will turn into something very evil. When you make the reader see this or, at least, put him in front of the possibility of a story with an evil ending for the characters he’s concerned about (now I’m simplifying what novels are about), when the reader is in that unpleasant situation the result is a tension which makes literature non boring.

Interviewer: So the writers, any good writer, is guilty of something when writing?

Bataille: Most writers are not aware of that, but I think there is a profound culpability. Writing is the opposite of working. This may not sound logical, but still, all the amusing books are efforts that went against real work.

Interviewer: Could you name one or two writers who felt guilty of writing, who thought they were criminals because they were writers?

Bataille: There are two whom I wrote about in my book who are exemplary in that regard. They are Baudelaire and Kafka. Both of them knew that they were on the side of evil, and consequently that they were guilty. With Baudelaire, it’s clear by the fact that he chose the title “Flowers of Evil” for his most intimate writings, and with Kafka, it’s even more clear. He thought that when writing he went against the wishes of his family and therefore he put himself in a guilty position. It’s a fact that his family let him know that it was evil to spend his time writing, that the right thing to do in life was to devote himself to commercial activities, and if you did something else you were doing something evil.

Interviewer: But if being a writer is being guilty of something then for Kafka or Baudelaire, being a writer is also not being very responsible. That was the opinion of their families. This feeling of guilt is for them something childish. Do you think that Baudelaire and Kafka felt guilty of being childish when writing?

Bataille: I think it’s very clear, they even say so. They felt that they were in the same situation as a child before his parents: A child who’s been naughty and who consequently has a guilty conscience because he thinks of his beloved parents who are always telling him what not to do, that it was an evil thing to do in the strongest sense of the word.

Interviewer: But if literature is childish, if writers are guilty of childishness when writing, does that also mean that literature is childishness?

Bataille: I think there is something essentially infantile in literature. It may seem incompatible with the admiration that one has for literature and which I share. But I believe it’s a profound and fundamental truth that you can’t really understand what literature means if you don’t approach it from the child’s point of view, which is not to say from a lower perspective.

Interviewer: You wrote a book on eroticism. Do you think that eroticism in literature is infantile?

Bataille: I’m not sure if literature differs from eroticism in that respect, but I think it’s very important to realize the infantile character of eroticism in general. To feel eroticism is to be fascinated like a child who wants to take part in a forbidden game, and a man fascinated by eroticism is like a child before his parents. He’s afraid of what might happen to him, and he never stops until he has a reason to be afraid. It’s not enough for him to only do what normal adults content themselves with. He has to become scared. He has to find himself in the same situation as when he was a child and constantly afraid of being scolded and even punished in an unbearable way.

Interviewer: Maybe you and I have given the impression that you were condemning this childishness. But in fact, it’s time to go back to the title of your book: “Literature and Evil”. You are not condemning neither literature nor evil. Could you tell us more about the ideas in the book?

Bataille: It certainly is a warning. It says there is danger, but, maybe, once you realize the danger, you have good reasons for confronting that danger. I think it’s important for us to confront the danger that is literature. I think it is a very great and real danger, but that you are not a man if you do not confront that danger. I think that in literature we can see the human perspective in its entirety, because literature doesn’t permit us to live without seeing human nature under its most violent aspect. You only have to think of the tragedies, Shakespeare – there are lots of examples of the same genre. And finally, it’s literature that makes it possible for us to perceive the worst and learn how to confront it, how to overcome it. In short, a player finds in the game the force to overcome what the game contains of horror.

 

___
Book

Georges Bataille Erotism: Death and Sensuality
City Lights Books

‘A philosopher, essayist, novelist, pornographer and fervent Catholic who came to regard the brothels of Paris as his true ‘churches’, Georges Bataille ranks among the boldest and most disturbing of twentieth-century thinkers. In this influential study he links the underlying sexual basis of religion to death, offering a dazzling array of insights into incest, prostitution, marriage, murder, sadism, sacrifice and violence, as well as including comments on Freud, Sade and Saint Theresa. Everywhere, Eroticism argues, sex is surrounded by taboos, which we must continually transgress in order to overcome the sense of isolation that faces us all.’

Excerpt

*

p.s.Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, That’s what I’ll look for, thanks. Apparently they’ve discovered that people who drink coffee every day live longer, yay! ** Jack Skelley, JammingJack! Oh, man, it was rough. It was like Death Valley was vacationing in Paris. Now it’s raining and far more than decent outdoors, at least for the next 24. Thanks about the grab bag, bud. So, I’m assuming we’re watching ‘The White Ribbon’ for Saturday, right? Lurve, me. ** Dominik, Hi!!! It was fucking unearthly. The heat. But good old rain came along and murdered it this morning, at least for the time being. Nice that your bro is around. I’m going to indulge in some seaweed something or other maybe even today since the outdoors is beckoning again. Your love knows me so well! Love floating a spring of mistletoe over the head of every Emo boy in Budapest, G. ** Robert, Hi. Ha ha, right? The heat got murdered in the middle of the night, and it’s honestly kind of sirenic outside my windows this morning. But it was murderous yesterday. ‘The Turin Horse’, excellent. He’s pretty consistently great. Hm, yeah, going to readings seems like a logical ‘in’. I feel like there must be interesting writers in Chicago, but I cant think of any because I rarely know where writers live for some reason. I’ll have a think, and if there’s someone(s) who seem cool who I know at all, I’ll try to hook you folks up. In the meantime writing a bunch seems like a pretty happy solution from my outside perspective. What’re are you working on? ** Steve Erickson, It’s particularly weird here because, unlike NYC, Paris has never had extreme heat before, or not in forever at least, so there’s this heavy wrongness about it that makes it quite scary in addition to being annoying. But the heat is gone as of about 3 am today for the time being. No, I don’t know the Romance album. Hm, worth at a least a dip, it sounds like. So, thanks. If there are (such videos), I didn’t find them when I made that post. In fact, there were a lot more Hades videos in the original, but they got killed by youtube since then, so I suspect there’s less chance of finding that kind of booty now. ** Happy Prince, Hi. Ha, well, you’ve read my work, so that interest of mine can’t be hugest surprise. In fact, I don’t believe I have ever written a friendly, sex-positive sex scene, not because I don’t think real sex isn’t positive, of course, but I sure do think it’s boring and dumb to write and read about. i did not melt, seemingly, although I haven’t looked in the mirror with my glasses on yet. I’m definitely not an expert whatsoever on Mishima and his inner workings and motivations, but I do think the ‘fascist’ tag is extremely simplistic in his case and just lazy thinking. I’ll never understand why people want everything to be resolved and identifiable. It seems delusional and arrogant or something. So, not huge thoughts on my part, and I need more coffee, but there you go. What are your thoughts/analyses? ** Bill, Thanks, Bill. I’m sure we’ll get at least one more of those brutal onslaughts before the summer is over, but hopefully not for a restful few weeks. I don’t know ‘The Projector and Elephant’ or those guys’ work whatsoever. You’re so good at winnowing really good stuff. Anyway, needless to say, I’ll initiate getting them under my belt (or wherever). Bon midweek! ** Okay. I realised the other day that I haven’t done a Bataille post in a long time, and so I did an eeny-miney-mo thing, and the winner was ‘Erotism’. See you tomorrow.

* (restored)

 

 

‘Chloroform’s characteristically sweet odour isn’t irritating, although inhalation of concentrated chloroform vapour may cause irritation of exposed mucous surfaces. Chloroform is a more effective anaesthetic than nitrous oxide. The metabolism of chloroform in the body is dose-dependent; it may be proportionally higher at lower levels of exposure. A substantial but variable percentage of chloroform from inspired air is retained in the body; it is extensively metabolized by the liver. Metabolites of chloroform include phosgene, carbene and chlorine, all of which may contribute to its cytotoxic activity. Prolonged administration of chloroform as an anaesthetic can cause toxaemia. Acute poisoning is associated with headache, altered consciousness, convulsions, respiratory paralysis and disturbances of the autonomic nervous system: dizziness, nausea, and vomiting are common. Chloroform may also cause delayed-onset damage to the liver, heart and kidneys. When used in anaesthesia, insensibility was usually preceded by a stage of excitation. This was followed by loss of reflexes, diminished sensation and loss of unitary consciousness.’ –– general-anesthesia.com

 

Gameboy boy

Thoroughly Modern Millie

Guy friends

Buffy

 

 

After Dinner We Take a Drive into the Night

We are watching for someplace to eat. We feel we are prey

for the insane scavengers of the air. We cannot make up our minds

and race five hundred miles away from our hosts.

I begin to feel passion.

I walk back and forth and it is a slow movie,

without the interest of acting, only walking.

Far from my prying eyes she strips off her clothes.

Oh for the wings of a bird.

The record slows down;

sweat falls on the instruments;

the musicians are bored.

A hand comes from the clouds to give me a poem.

I accept it and we shake hands.

The incident with the hand haunted me for the rest of my life.

I began to gasp. It is time to sing the death song,

clearing the tops of the trees, hearing the glass

from the window and the traffic from the street.

Each year is a supermarket; no, each year is captured by a word,

repeated with nostalgia, overwhelmed by ineptitude,

dropping to the ground and rolling down the bowling alley of the sky.

— Tony Towle

 

 

 

Derelict aquatic park on Mars

‘The above first image offers a clean wide area view of this anomaly site without the distracting clutter of arrows and labels. I’ve done this because this site is otherwise busy with anomaly evidence and pointing it all out tends to make things get very crowded. Despite the above scene initially looking like there is little anomalous evidence in it, this is a very important site both from a surface water and civilization evidence point of view. The water and civilization evidence here is my fourth and last report to be drawn from the NASA-JPL-MSSS official MGS MOC M02-00163 narrow-angle image strip. As previously reported, this strip has produced the most numerous anomaly evidence so far for me of any single strip I’ve yet encountered in the official science data.

 

 

‘What we’re looking at here is a huge entertainment park sporting a aquatic theme but on a massive monumental scale and quite different looking than anything seen here on Earth. Further, this park has been subjected to some disastrous calamity leaving a portion of it in wreckage and some of the rest of it appears to have essentially been abandoned and allowed to become at least partially derelict and in ruins. Certainly, at the very least, this place is no longer operational as to its initial intended purpose.

‘One of the first things you should be aware of is that there is a very bright glow area producing a lot of light in this scene pointed out with an arrow and label. Whether this is a highly reflective spill area or an intense glow produced from within and/or on the ground is unclear because no amount of darkening will allow a sufficient view into this bright glow spot. At ground level immediately adjacent to and just a little to our right of the flow area is the terminating end of a huge skeletal bridge system coming in from further to the right. It has twisted and dangling girders at the glow area indicating a massive failure of the bridge right at this its largest point.

‘I strongly suspect that this bright glow area is something residual and possibly still active representing some catastrophic failure of something at this point in the past that helped create the sudden failure of this facility and its abandonment. This is also probably why it remains abandoned and not a candidate for reconstruction.

 

 

‘Imagine yourself now traveling across the trestle over the river from our right to our left and into the mid area of the still existing part of the bridge before getting to the terminating end but in the days when this site was fully operational. To your left you would see the giant shark like monument with its head area towering and appearing to hang over you dwarfing you and even the bridge system. Seen under the raised shark like monument’s front-end and behind it would be the lower profile mollusk like monument. In those past times, these two giant monuments would have probably been seen in standing open liquid water as though the creatures the monuments represent were alive in the water.

‘As large and dwarfing as these aquatic creature monuments are, on the opposite side of the bridge to your right from the same spot you would have seen a far larger far more massive colossal size clear conical shaped dome the size of a small mountain dwarfing everything. This clear dome would have been full of water and probably very large live creatures in that water appearing suspended in the air towering over you. Imagine the psychological impact as you leaned back to take in the monstrous height of this great massive pillar of water towering above you. The clear dome is still there, empty of course of water, and it appears intact and undamaged.

‘Imagine the great technical power it would have taken back when this was built to have constructed such a dome strong enough to withstand the outward pressure of all that mountain of water and its occupants even on a planet with a lesser gravity well. This clearly demonstrates just how technically advanced who ever designed and built this was or is and just how tough these clear domes on Mars can be amounting to heavily armored immensely strong constructs. Try as I have, I can’t detect any breach in the dome or that its shell has been damaged either.

 

 

‘The above image presents an enlarged even if very grainy look at the two giant creature monuments. We can see these at all only because of their huge size. Their location on the other side of the bridge from the bright glow area, their huge size, and their probable solidity as monuments probably shielded them from any real damage in the calamity that otherwise destroyed a portion of this show case park as to its intended purpose.

‘The monument on the left in the above image clearly represents some kind of fish type aquatic creature. The fairly clear head, nose, mouth, and eye visuals at the left end of the object with sunlight reflecting off of this area and with the head area elevated above and a little over the bridge structure as well as the general body shape indicates that this is probably a shark like creature.

‘The monument on the right in the above image appears to possibly represent some kind of mollusk or clam like creature. On the left end of this object nearer to us, you will note that this broader proportioned end’s leading edge is ragged and irregular. This is all typical of invertebrate bivalve type aquatic creatures as is the narrowing taper of the body to the probable hinged rear end you also see here. What is not so typical is the dorsal fin structure starting in the mid part of the bivalve’s upper back area and extending straight back in a narrow dark line to and wrapping around and under the bottom of the creature’s rear end.

‘This is not likely to be some ancient dead ruins subjected to a long span of time of weathering and exposure. Rather, it is more logical that either this evidence’s disaster was of relatively recent date not giving sediment enough time to build up or someone is currently and actively maintaining part of this facility or both.’ — Joseph P. Skipper

 

 

‘Your smell is intoxicating’

 

Stylish French women in the Soviet Union

 

 

The Promotion

I was a dog in my former life, a very good

dog, and, thus, I was promoted to a human being.

I liked being a dog. I worked for a poor farmer

guarding and herding his sheep. Wolves and coyotes

tried to get past me almost every night, and not

once did I lose a sheep. The farmer rewarded me

with good food, food from his table. He may have

been poor, but he ate well. And his children

played with me, when they weren’t in school or

working in the field. I had all the love any dog

could hope for. When I got old, they got a new

dog, and I trained him in the tricks of the trade.

He quickly learned, and the farmer brought me into

the house to live with them. I brought the farmer

his slippers in the morning, as he was getting

old, too. I was dying slowly, a little bit at a

time. The farmer knew this and would bring the

new dog in to visit me from time to time. The

new dog would entertain me with his flips and

flops and nuzzles. And then one morning I just

didn’t get up. They gave me a fine burial down

by the stream under a shade tree. That was the

end of my being a dog. Sometimes I miss it so

I sit by the window and cry. I live in a high-rise

that looks out at a bunch of other high-rises.

At my job I work in a cubicle and barely speak

to anyone all day. This is my reward for being

a good dog. The human wolves don’t even see me.

They fear me not.

— James Tate

 

 

 

iDoser: Gates of Hades

‘iDoser is an application for the playback of proprietary audio content that uses binaural sounds to produce an effect similar to using certain drugs like LSD, marijuana and cocaine. It’s supposed to be perfectly safe and it’s 100% legal.

‘Research into the neurological technology behind I-Doser is sparse. Peer-reviewed studies exist suggesting that some specific binaural beat mixes can affect aspects of mental performance and mood, act as analgesic supplements or affect perceptions, but there have been no formal studies of any effects of mixes particular to I-Doser.

‘I wasn’t really interested in those that simulate drugs but there’s one that caught my attention. It’s called Gate of Hades. Gates of hades is a musical beat and series of sounds designed to make you feel particularly disturbing emotions. Specifically, it’s supposed to make you feel like you are falling into hell at infinite speeds. It’s iDoser’s strongest product and ideally it should scare you to death. This is what description says:

‘”Expect nightmares, near death experiences, and strong onset of fear.”

‘And I don’t expect any less since it costs $200.’ — Mayhem Makes Runescape Pure Clan and Community

 

Nichlas

German boy

Friend

Luke

Clint

 

 

 

Muse

from Pepi’s Symposium

Jean Cocteau

 

 

‘There is in every madman a misunderstood genius whose idea, shining in his head, frightened people, and for whom delirium was the only solution to the strangulation that life had prepared for him.’ — Antonin Artaud

‘Being sober on a bus is, like, totally different than being drunk on a bus.’ — Ozzy Osbourne

‘The youth, intoxicated with his admiration of a hero, fails to see, that it is only a projection of his own soul, which he admires.’ — Ralph Waldo Emerson

‘All the mistakes I’ve ever made in my life have been when I’ve been drunk. I haven’t made hardly any mistakes sober, ever, ever.’ — Tracey Emin

‘It’s kind of fun to do the impossible.’ — Walt Disney

‘People don’t deserve the restraint we show by not going into delirium in front of them.’ — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

‘Perversity is the muse of modern literature.’ — Susan Sontag

‘My peers, lately, have found companionship through means of intoxication–it makes them sociable. I, however, cannot force myself to use drugs to cheat on my loneliness–it is all that I have.’ — Franz Kafka

‘The obese is in a total delirium. For he is not only large, of a size opposed to normal morphology: he is larger than large. He no longer makes sense in some distinctive opposition, but in his excess, his redundancy.’ — Jean Baudrillard

‘Oh! the little fly drunk at the urinal of a country inn, in love with rotting weeds, a ray of light dissolves him!’ — Arthur Rimbaud

‘I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me.’ — Hunter S. Thompson

‘Science has not yet taught us if madness is or is not the sublimity of the intelligence.’ — Edgar Allan Poe

‘I don’t do drugs. I am drugs.’ — Salvador Dali

‘Every extension of knowledge arises from making the conscious the unconscious.’ — Friedrich Nietzsche

 

 

‘Many years ago, my then-8-year-old friend Spencer asked a prominent jazz musician for an autograph, but when he was given the usual signature, he scolded, “Not your name… Mine!” Following his lead, I’ve been asking writers, artists, politicians, and movie stars to sign my John Hancock, er, Paul Schmelzer. So far more than 70 have agreed…’ — Paul Schmelzer

 

Mikhail Baryshnikov

 

Jimmy Carter

 

Charlie Daniels

 

Dan Castellenata

 

Ed Ruscha

 

Errol Morris

 

Fats Domino

 

Frank Gehry

 

Mr. Rogers

 

Isabel Allende

 

Jeff Tweedy

 

Barbara Kingslover

 

Kweisi Mifune

 

Laurie Anderson

 

Matthew Barney

 

Naomi Klein

 

Robert Wilson

 

Thurston Moore

 

Wim Wenders

 

Wolfgang Puck

 

Yoko Ono

 

 

The Hotel

The two knights suggest to the king that he take the hero

into his confidence. The pantomimes are spaced to accommodate them.

It is a work of great beauty. It is night. Four boys

remain on the scene. They choose four girls. This is what happens:

Her beauty and her brains work like fire. She is shocked

by his remark that he cannot spend too much time. We see grace of

body and mind being torn to pieces. Now begins the bitter aftermath.

Now the prayers of Orpheus are answered. It is the ancient

myth of Orpheus. Orpheus cannot console himself with his own song.

The song of the lyre is inadequate to his bereavement. Now he finishes

the song. Everything is green. Everything is splashed with color.

— Tony Towle

 

 

 

Vicious Coffee

‘A cup of iced coffee at an Adelaide, Australian cafe called Vicious Coffee boasts 80 times more caffeine than a shot of espresso and 50 times more than a regular cup of coffee. That amount of caffeine is half the amount of a lethal dose.

‘It is recommended you take your time drinking a large, which should you should sip over four hours. Otherwise? RIP. The “high” will last you 12-18 hours. According to the USDA, a fluid ounce of espresso has 64 milligrams of caffeine and 95 milligrams in an 8-ounce cup of coffee. Vicious coffee, however, has 5 grams of caffeine.

‘According to the owner of the cafe, Steve Benington, “Some people love it and some are broken by it.” — Elite Daily

 

 

Chocolates

 

In 1934 a woman was charged with killing two children with strychnine laced chocolate.

In 1976 suspected terrorist, Wadia Haddad, died after allegedly being fed poisoned chocolate for six months by Mossad agents.

In 2006 a man killed his parents by serving them a chocolate mousse containing poison.

A woman fought with husband over a chocolate cake. She claimed she attempted to leave with the cake but her husband objected. They quarreled and she settled it by stabbing him to death.

In 1990 a man was charged with killing a 3-year-old girl by force-feeding her a chocolate cake. She choked to death.

An 82 year old man was attacked and robbed by thugs posing as chocolate salesmen. A week later he died of a heart attack.

A 75 year old heart patient was thrown to the ground by a drug addict. The addict was running with a box of stolen chocolate bars when the collision occurred. A month later the man died.

In 2008 a young man confronted a teenager who threw a partially eaten bar of chocolate into the window of his sister’s car. The confrontation escalated into a fight. The man later died from a head injury he received during the brawl.

In 1910 a young woman dies while trying to share her chocolate with her co-workers. She attempted to cut the bar in pieces and instead slipped and cut an artery in her leg.

In the 1960’s iron pills were chocolate coated. They resembled and tasted so much like candy that many young children ate them. None of those kids didn’t survive.

A man, dropping blocks of chocolate into a cauldron, died after falling in.

An employee of the South Bend Chocolate Company was found dead in a company machine.

A 19 year old man was found dead by his fellow employees. He had become submerged in a giant tank of molten chocolate.

A senior citizen left the Sydney hospital to buy a chocolate bar. His body was located a week later.

A 60 year old man’s body was found in the streets of Aberdeen, Scotland. The old gent was carrying a box chocolates. The police think he might have been going to visit someone when he died.

A man with an eating disorder crammed an entire Mars bar in his mouth and choked to death.

A girl choked to death on a chocolate swiss roll. Unfortunately she suffered from a congenital problem that made swallowing difficult.

Chocolate eggs containing toys caused the choking deaths of at least three children.

 

Inhalable chocolate

 

 

Stephen Shanabrook “Chocolate Box : Morgue”

 

Chocolate Karl Lagerfeld boyfriend

 

Chocolate boat

 

Chocolate larvae

 

In an Osaka brothel, you can have snuff sex, whatever that means, with this chocolate prostitute for the equivalent of $10,000.

 

World’s largest chocolate bunny

 

Chocolate ammo

 

Chocolate-Avocado Cake

 

Julia Drouin ‘Disco Ghost’ (2013)

 

Chocolate Grace Jones

 

Frantz Kobe Sweets ‘Chocolate City’

 

Pink and white chocolate fountain

 

Chocolate covered peeps w/ strange chemical reaction

 

Michele Micha

 

Chocolate anus

—-

 

*

 

p.s. RIP Claes Oldenburg ** Dominik, Hi!!! Yes, and it’s going to be 41 degrees here today! We have this rather pathetic air cooler unit thing in the apartment that keeps one alive (so far) if one sits next to it but barely alive. Yeah, with blockbusters, I’m admittedly weird, but the less cogent and believable the characters are and the less coherent and realistic the storyline is, the more fun they tend to be for me. Are seaweed smoothies delicious? I’ve never had one. I bet I could probably find one out there, but I think I’ll be too busy hugging my pathetic air cooler unit today. Eek. Love making this heatwave as uninterested in Budapest as a vampire  is in someone who’s holding a cross in one hand and a wooden stake in the other, G. ** David Ehrenstein, Marc Blitzstein is pre-Leonard Bernstein? Wow. Clearly I know too little about him. Especially if he did an adaptation of ‘Threepenny Opera’. I’ll find him. ** Robert, Hi! Wow, cool, not even I have ever dreamed about this blog. Although I almost never remember my dreams, so who knows, I guess. You made it to Chicago. I don’t know the city well at all, but I could ask my friend Zac for tips ‘cos he went to university there. Man, I hope fun of some sort rears its non-ugly head, like, today. Did you figure out the MUBI issue? Which Tarr were you aiming at? I’d send you a hug but I’m too sweaty, and, trust me, it would not help. ** Jack Skelley, Skelletorinoville! Thanks for intro’ing me and Taylor. He’s great, I had really nice hangout with him. Oh, great, about the Bamberger thing. I’ve been thinking about Kenward (and reading) him a lot. Everyone, The great and very undervalued genius poet and writer Kenward Elmslie died recently, and the excellent scribe/thinker W.C. Bamberger has written what looks to be an excellent memorial piece about him, and the sleuth Jack Skelley found it and passes it along to us here. Jack! It’s going to be 106 degrees in Paris today! In motherfucking Paris! Help! Dying breath love, me. ** Bill, There are some Banks things online, as you saw in the post, all very worth watching, but not many, unfortunately. The problem is getting from apartment to a movie theater. It was so hot yesterday that a lot of the metros broke down, and people had to walk through the tunnels to get out, and it’s going to be even more broiling today. ** Nightcrawler, Hi. Yeah, it’s funny. The fragmentary thing is largely because he never finished it, so it devolves into his notes and plans, and becomes, accidentally, the first real experimental novel ever as a result, and that’s what excited me to death about it when I discovered it. Anyway, rock your day! ** Steve Erickson, I’m saving my debut of your album until my head isn’t almost literally melting, which, to believe the forecast, means as soon as tomorrow if I’m really lucky. Happy to have made a successful introduction of Banks’ films to you. No, I haven’t heard about Joshua Drummond’s project, but I’ll seek it out, thanks. Everyone, Steve has reviewed the documentary ‘My Old School’ here. ** Thrill, Ah, so it was already an escort name. I lose track. Yeah, the rate at which I gather those dudes and the putting together of those rather labor intensive lists does cause details to slip my mind sometimes. Hopefully not hugely often. I do have an interest in the combination of sex and a nihilistic viewpoint towards sex, it sure seems like, yes. Bon day. Don’t melt! ** Right. I reconstructed today’s post from the ruins of my dead blog because I always kind of liked it, and that’s the deal. You too maybe? See you tomorrow.