Rogueish
02/01/12
The other interesting thing about Vorticist Britney Spears was the experience of spending an afternoon making the macros. When the connection between Britney and vorticism occurred to me, I looked through BLAST for quotes and through Britney fan sites for pictures and then started trying to fit the text on the pictures. This meant trying to find an aesthetically pleasing arrangement of text in an image the composition of which was usually determined by the curves of Britney’s body; that is, it involved an odd sort of typographic eroticism. And a rather dubious sort of eroticism it is, too, as it involves me actively arranging meanings around a passive and mute young woman. This dubiousness is appropriate in a way, though, as the Britney/Vorticism connection lies in the relation between modernism, industrialism, and populism, which is not necessarily a combination that has been especially pleasant for the women caught up in it.
No Useless Leniency: Refusal of Work→
01/31/12
Leopoldo Lugones’s short story ‘Yzur’ (from his 1906 collection Strange Forces) is a tale premised on the idea that monkey’s have refused language so they will not be forced to work. The narrator of the story evolves a theory that this initial refusal has led to a degeneration in monkeys, and he aims to demonstrate this by returning one to speech. He buys the animal Yzur from the circus and proceeds to his experiment.
Using methods to treat deaf-mutes the narrator laboriously tries to encourage the development of speech through physical manipulation and a system of association of vowels with food treats. This initial process takes three years and no word is uttered. What does happen is the monkey develops a contemplative sensibility, and the tendency to cry.
The narrator becomes more and more frustrated, deciding that Yzur can speak but is choosing not to. This is reinforced when the cook tells him the monkey has spoken a few words (although the cook can’t remember all the words, only bed and pipe). The next day the narrator, convinced the monkey is ironically taunting him, beats the creature violently and the monkey only sheds tears in silence.
01/29/12
Perhaps the most useful thing that came out of setting up the Vorticist Britney Spears tumblr is that I discovered that full scans of both issues of BLAST are online (Issue 1, Issue 2).
01/26/12
For some reason I have spent much of today gripped by a terrible desire to make a “Lena Katina? I barely know her” joke.
01/25/12
I am so far advanced that I will have finished with the whole economic crap in 5 weeks’ time. And having done that I shall complete the political economy at home and apply myself to another branch of learning at the Museum. It’s beginning to bore me.
01/25/12
On FULL COMMUNISM-
cursory notes on the evolution of a memetic non-demand.
You hear it everywhere, these days, if you walk within a certain activist milieu. It’s a token demand, a given. FULL COMMUNISM- I wouldn’t get out of bed for anything less. It’s a joke, a dumb joke. It’s a communist meme. Like all good memes, it’s pretty much devoid of meaning, in terms of content. But its use denotes something else– a Zizekian uber-demand, a demand which goes beyond. FULL COMMUNISM is both a lack, in a very real sense, but also a pointed lack, its very meaninglessness a cry for meaning.
On the fascinating UK ultraleft meme economy.
From Ned's Review of Lana Del Rey→
01/25/12
It sounds like the soundtrack to a James Bond movie directed by and starring twelve year olds.
In more “descriptions of Lana Del Rey that I think are supposed to be critical but which make me want to listen to her album” news.
(The rest of this review is sort of positive-ish although in the rather patronising “it’s for tween girls so let’s lower our standards” genre, of which I am not a huge fan).
