self/fashion

here is a paragraph

that I just came across in one of my approximately 65 files called “dissertation notes,” “dissertation quotes,” “diss stuff 3,” or some variation thereof:

Toilet training does its best to teach the child to get rid of its excrement with socially-sanctioned levels of discretion and mild shame, but all sorts of complications can arise and throw things off course: the child might refuse to shit at all or might shit too much, might do it in the wrong place or at the wrong time, might be excessively excited or excessively terrified by the process or the products. And those products, the feces, take on notable symbolic contours in the infantile unconscious: Freud posits that the child equates shit with gifts. (Klein, as is her wont, takes this concept and explodes it wildly: for her, feces can look not only like gifts but like breasts, penises, limbs, teeth, weapons, machines, monsters, food, flowers, babies, and so forth.) This produces a lasting unconscious (and, of course, analytic) association between excrement and money - and then, more generally, between the anal region and its (dis)functions and various modes of what might be called “output”: emotional, affective, erotic, intellectual, verbal, artistic…

Obviously this is not a very well-organized system - I partly blame myself and my GayDD; but I mostly blame Word, which is always fucking shit up - and many of the quotations and passages in these files are not accompanied by proper citations, like say the author and title of the book they’re from (let alone the page number), and yet I almost always know immediately upon reading the first line of a given paragraph pretty much exactly where it’s from. It’s just something I’m kind of good at; all through college and high school, I always scored 100% on those stupid “passage recognition” sections of exams without really ever studying at all for them.

BUT - this one I did not recognize. I couldn’t think where I had read it. I couldn’t remember ever having read it. And then I realized that I might have written it. But I don’t know! I don’t know whether I wrote it; and if I didn’t then who did!

This is kind of a problem.

is dürer's "pfeiffer und trommler"...

the gayest image of all time?

surely it is among them!!

diss-in-progress sentence of the day!

Up ev’ry evenin’ ‘bout
Half eight or nine
I give my complete attention to a
Very good friend of mine
He’s quadraphonic, he’s a
He’s got more channels, uh
So hologramic, oh my TVC one five

I brought my baby home, she,
She sat around forlorn
She saw my TVC one five,
Baby’s gone, yeah
She crawled right in, oh my my
She crawled right in my
So hologramic, oh my TVC one five
Oh, so demonic, oh my TVC one five…

Thus, despite all its obliquities, “TVC 15” is, on one level (a surface level, perhaps; but this after all is Bowie, and it might be a mistake to dismiss surfaces too quickly), quite readable as a sci-fi tragicomedy about a love triangle between the singer, his “baby,” and his television –- a television that is imagined (hallucinated?) as futuristically super-powered (so hologramic…oh so demonic) yet that is still indubitably recognizable as a television (he’s got more channels), and moreover one that was (he’s quadraphonic) technologically contemporary in 1976 and is now quaintly outdated, which throws even further off-kilter the absurdist-materialist thrust suggested by the counterpositioning of those connotatively dissonant yet structurally interchangeable descriptors: quadraphonic, hologramic, demonic — and about a series of twists and turns in relational/positional alignment within that triangle: a series of transfers and transformations –- transitions, transmissions — of information and desire, of bodies and (in) space; which, though profusely multi- in valences and variables, are all mediated through the centripetal and (literally!) consuming figure of a technology of transmission, a machine that for all its actual and fantastical capacities of attraction and absorption and even action retains also the “unblinking” solid materiality of a thing: oh my T V C one five, oh oh, T V C one five…

dissertation-in-progress sentence of the day!!

My dearest Bobbie, Bosie has insisted on stopping here for sandwiches. He is quite like a narcissus – so white and gold. I will come either Wednesday or Thursday to your rooms. Send me a line. Bosie is so tired: he lies like a hyacinth on the sofa, and I worship him.

You dear boy. Ever yours OSCAR

The effect of this rests in the rapid and lovely moves between a casual ease and a lambent eroticism, between the prosaically literal and the profusely figurative; in the juxtapositions that are made at once surprising and fluent by the materiality – the irreplaceably specific thingness – that gives each side its own impact but puts them somehow on the same plane: sandwiches (sandwiches, of all things, with something about them so simultaneously practical and yet effete, so quotidian and yet ornamental, so trivial yet – as conjured under the “insistence” of the petulantly adolescent provocation of Bosie’s sex appeal – ineffably wrenching) juxtaposed with a white and gold narcissus; the plain declaration of “Bosie is so tired” with the extravagant one of “like a hyacinth on the sofa, and I worship him” –- each, in its own way, plainly coded, coated, with extravagant adoration.

is really at a loss as to how to proceed with this chapter…WTF WHY SO HARD??

was going to make some SERIOUS chapter progress, but then I spent all afternoon on my etsy store instead. oh well: http://danec18.etsy.com