Monsters (De)Forming at Dusk/Half-Way

This post has been in various states of incompleteness for several weeks, so I shall use it as a half-way, formative-assessment-directed reflection. 

 We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
   (T. S. Eliot, 'Little Gidding', Four Quartets)

How do I articulate what can seem so... fragile, flickering, intangible, un-graspable by a fist made of flesh or law? In infinite and shifting shades of graphite, it finds some degree of expression (there/not-there), ambiguous, delicate (or uncertain), blurred, smudged, indeterminate. In words, though, it's too clean, too up front. This, a fragment from Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, is some kind of approximation:

A trace is the apparition of a distance, however close that which it evokes may be. Whereas the aura is the apparition of a nearness, however far away that which left it behind may be.

Approximations, like perception at twilight. No clean, cold, bright (illusory) knowing designed to warp the (self-)perception of the viewing subject. Not surveillance, surveys, clinical or legal judgements, objective evaluations, all tending towards suasion, herding the masses through inculcation, internalisation (no big sticks required).

It's not dawn (O brave new world...). It's crepuscular.

Eleanore Mikus, Tablet Litho #3 1968

'The worst/Are full of passionate intensity'. 'Look', say all the authoritarian politicians, when interviewed and challenged. Never 'Listen', always 'Look'. At what?

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
 
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

~W. B. Yeats

This comes closest (linguistically):

I see well what limits my gaze; and it is precisely there, against those high insurmountable walls, that I like to get lost…

To give a name to this joy would be to mislay it … These are approximations because the mystery remains whole …

Writing. By tiny brushstrokes, tiny hard brushstrokes. Brevity, from the heart…

Shadows that arise and lie down as evening comes on, lengthening shadows that cross the hills and that I watch until they disappear, with a final leap, beyond the last ridge where I know that they will continue to break up and fade yet where also, it seems to me, inexplicably, a kind of speech gathers them together...

The wound at the edge of the heart, the tireless night cricket, and the sculpting of the sky amid the crackling of the solar grass are all nourished by the same hope…
(Poem Fragments by Pierre-Albert Jourdan)

  Or, more/most briefly, in Jourdan's words:

The abyss is likeable when you can find lodgings in it.

The slogan of the Italian Fascists under Mussolini was 'Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato' (everything for the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state). Soon even this tiny nook in Blogland is likely to be drawn inside the state should I persist in mentioning contemporary news events. I shan't be seeking lodgings.

"Cut the Wires"

And so it begins:

Max Mosley, the former Formula One Boss turned privacy campaigner following a News of the Word sting, has told MPs he supports "cutting the wires" to internet sites who publish "the worst" pieces in breach of press regulation.

He was speaking alongside press regulation campaign group Hacked Off at Department of Culture, Media And Sport select committee into press regulation, 24 hours after MPs agreed a landmark Royal Charter.

 Favourite response, a tweet from Mark Wallace:

Quite quaint that Max Mosley seems to think that the internet works like a tin can telephone.

And one gloriously combative solution:

You newspapers know who the front-men are in Hacked Off and you know some of the backers. Let’s take a prominent example. Hugh Grant. Here’s what I would do right now if I were you. I’m speaking to all newspapers here. All you have to do is comply with his demand for privacy to the letter.

Delete every story in your archive that mentions his name.

Delete every photo of him in your database.

Delete every review of everything he has ever been in.

When reporting on Hacked Off in future, refer only to ‘a Mr. Grant’ and do not include a photo. Better yet, use a pixellated photo and caption it ‘blurred to respect Mr. Grant’s demand for privacy’. Even better yet, use a pixellated photo of Shrek.

Report nothing on the man in any way at all. Do not cover any films or other roles he appears in in the future. Show no pictures of him and do not mention him when reporting on any showbiz parties or awards ceremonies.

No matter how outrageously he behaves, don’t report it. Not one word. Even if he wins the Nobbly prize for unelected petty dictator of the year, don’t report a single word.
He says he wants privacy from the Press but really he wants you to report the good stuff and keep quiet about the bad stuff. Give him total privacy. Absolute and unconditional privacy. Report nothing at all about him, ever. Either you can report it all or you report nothing at all. Allow no middle ground.

That might learn his censorious, dictatorial little soul.

Witkin: un dialogue inédit

Joel-Peter Witkin: Enfer ou ciel / Heaven or Hell

Sous la direction d'Anne Biroleau

 

Présentation

 

^"Le photographe américain Joel-Peter Witkin élabore depuis près d’un demi-siècle une œuvre singulière et troublante. Troublante par l’univers intérieur qu’elle révèle, à la fois tourmenté, étrange, et habité par la certitude d’une réelle présence du divin. S’il se situe au plus près de l’humain en choisissant ses sujets dans des milieux marginaux ou aux pratiques extrêmes (transsexuels, adeptes du SM, malades mentaux, handicapés physiques), il transcende l’anecdotique et le spectaculaire : la gloire et la misère de la chair manifestent dans ses photographies une inquiétude métaphysique et philosophique, voire mystique, qui s’enracine dans l’immense culture artistique de Witkin.

L’occasion était belle de souligner ici cette circulation constante des thèmes, en faisant entrevoir la richesse et la diversité de la collection d’estampes de la Bibliothèque à travers une cinquantaine de gravures précieuses, dans un dialogue inédit et fécond avec l’œuvre du photographe : Durer, Rembrandt, Goya, Rops, Picasso, Ensor…

Cette confluence des influences revendiquées et du travail de la photographie comme collage, comme palimpseste (avec ses grattages, déchirures, abrasions du négatif, appositions de filtres et d’obstacles divers entre le support et l’agrandisseur) donne naissance à une œuvre qui se situe dans la grande lignée de Sade, de Bataille et aussi des mystiques chrétiens. "

 

Witkin claims that his vision spring from an episode he witnessed as a young child, an automobile accident in front of his house in which a little girl was decapitated.

It happened on a Sunday when my mother was escorting my twin brother and me down the steps of the tenement where we lived. We were going to church. While walking down the hallway to the entrance of the building, we heard an incredible crash mixed with screaming and cries for help. The accident involved three cars, all with families in them. Somehow, in the confusion, I was no longer holding my mother's hand. At the place where I stood at the curb, I could see something rolling from one of the overturned cars. It stopped at the curb where I stood. It was the head of a little girl. I bent down to touch the face, to speak to it -- but before I could touch it someone carried me away".

^{When you learn early in life that heads may fail to stay attached to their bodies, very little is likely to seem obvious or stable.}

Goya's Last Caprice

ununmbered plate from Goya's Disasters of War

Goya's handwritten draft title of the volume now known as Disasters of War was Fatal consequences of Spain's bloody war with Bonaparte, and other emphatic caprices (Spanish: Fatales consequencias de la sangrienta guerra en España con Buonaparte, Y otros caprichos enfáticos). Amongst three unnumbered etchings gathered at the end of the sequence is the one above, usually labelled 'Proud Monster' or 'Fierce Monster', and usually placed first of the three, followed by the two concerning Truth. One of the 'emphatic caprices', all of which are connected by some element of allegory, there is a double ambiguity here, both in the nature of the creature itself (which finds a curious echo in the Montauk Monster), and in the direction of the bodies of humans in its maw - are they being devoured or disgorged?

Barbers Again

Soldiers - don't give yourselves to brutes, men who despise you and enslave you - who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think and what to feel, who drill you, diet you, treat you as cattle, as cannon fodder.

Don't give yourselves to these unnatural men, machine men, with machine minds and machine hearts. You are not machines. You are not cattle. You are men. You have the love of humanity in your hearts. You don't hate - only the unloved hate. Only the unloved and the unnatural. Soldiers - don't fight for slavery, fight for liberty. ('Barber' speech from The Great Dictator)

On not tolerating intolerance

It's the ultimate modern shibboleth. We've passed far beyond the quotation attributed (in The Friends of Voltaire, 1906, by S. G. Tallentyre) to Voltaire, that 'I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it'. Now it runs 'I disapprove of what you say because it hurts my or someone else's feelings and I demand something be done to shut you up and make you pay!'.

'Hate Speech' is the new lucrative and exciting area for the state and the law(yers) in which to spread their tentacles. Saying hateful/hurtful words now appears to be a more serious crime, in terms of sentencing, than actual physical hurtful acts. Whatever happened to pointing and laughing at idiots as a way of dealing with their idiocy?

On 27 February 2013 the Canadian Supreme Court explained why expressions of intolerance are intolerable:

Hate speech is an effort to marginalize individuals based on their membership in a group. Using expression that exposes the group to hatred, hate speech seeks to delegitimize group members in the eyes of the majority, reducing their social standing and acceptance within society. Hate speech, therefore, rises beyond causing distress to individual group members. It can have a societal impact. Hate speech lays the groundwork for later, broad attacks on vulnerable groups that can range from discrimination, to ostracism, segregation, deportation, violence and, in the most extreme cases, to genocide. Hate speech also impacts on a protected group’s ability to respond to the substantive ideas under debate, thereby placing a serious barrier to their full participation in our democracy. (h/t Reason)

The Supreme Court's unanimous decision that punishing a man for expressing disapproval of homosexuality is perfectly consistent with freedom of expression...subject to 'reasonable limits' upheld the Saskatchewan Human Rights Tribunal ruling against Bill Whatcott, who in 2001 and 2002 distributed flyers condemning the normalization of homosexuality in public schools. The  Tribunal ordered Whatcott to pay a $17,500 fine and to stop handing out anti-gay literature, citing a provincial law banning material that 'ridicules, belittles or otherwise affronts the dignity of' people based on various prohibited criteria, including sexual orientation. The Supreme Court concluded that two of Whatcott's flyers, headlined 'Keep Homosexuality out of Saskatoon’s Public Schools!' and 'Sodomites in our Public Schools', were hateful enough to be banned:

Passages of these flyers combine many of the hallmarks of hatred identified in the case law. The expression portrays the targeted group as a menace that threatens the safety and well-being of others, makes reference to respected sources in an effort to lend credibility to the negative generalizations, and uses vilifying and derogatory representations to create a tone of hatred. The flyers also expressly call for discriminatory treatment of those of same‑sex orientation.  It was not unreasonable for the tribunal to conclude that this expression was more likely than not to expose homosexuals to hatred.

The court said prohibiting such speech 'balances the fundamental values underlying freedom of expression with competing Charter rights and other values essential to a free and democratic society, in this case a commitment to equality and respect for group identity and the inherent dignity owed to all human beings'.

But the cognitive dissonance of this apparently doesn't hurt the brains of the Court's judges as it does mine. I've met many Mr Whatcotts over the years, with sandwich boards and flyers, telling me that I'm going to Hell. Unless any of them had actually hit me with a sandwich board or tried to force feed me a flyer, it would never have occured to me to phone the police and whine about hurt feelings. Because, oddly, the Mr Whatcotts also have 'the inherent dignity owed to all human beings'. To stand outside in all weathers and risk mockery and attack means, if nothing else, that he really believes what he says.

But only selected groups get awarded the right to never be offended without recompense. In victimhood poker I hold a high value hand. But playing it would make me that most regrettable creature, a government pet. Coddled, protected, performing tricks on command or risking being put out in the back yard. Thanks, but no thanks.

Aphorism #6

The pen may be mightier than the sword but if they`ve confiscated your pen what else is there to reach for? (Anon)

Halloween-as-Carnival

Turned up some curious photographs from pre-WWII U.S. Halloween parties...

A mask, grotesque, inhuman or caricatured, is sufficient, it seems, without any further costuming, to grant the wearer licence to disrupt and disturb the conventional order, to play with their identity, to perform as an other. Although the mournful demeanour of the female in the first image suggests she'd rather have come as something else, anything else...

Old Boneless (and Hegel)

Our mother’s maids have so frayed us with Bull-beggars, Spirits, Witches, Urchins, Elves, Hags, Faeries, Satyrs, Pans, Faunes, Sylens, Kit-wi-the-Canstick, Tritons, Centaurs, Dwarfs, Gyants, Impes, Calcars, Conjurors, Nymphs, Changelings, Incubus, Robin Groodfellow, the Spoorn, the Mare, the Man-in-the-Oak, the Hell-wain, the Firedrake, the Puckle, Tom-thombe, Hobgoblin, Tom-tumbler, Boneless, and such other Bugs, that we are afraid of our shadow (Reginald Scot, Discoverie of Witchcrafte, vii. 15, 1584)

Couldn't be, could there?

Without the common courtesy to maintain a discernible shape (so run away, screaming 'A formless thing! Save yourselves!') or to represent something, from the folklore of Scotland, Ireland, England, and the Hebrides comes an amorphous horror slithering and floating along desolate roads.

Old Boneless represents absolutely nothing, that is, absolutely nothing human or animal beyond predatory devouring of the unsuspecting. Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature makes provision for two kinds of monsters. On the one hand it accounts for monstrous deviations as necessary components of the richness of nature itself. Although these monsters exceed derivation from the concept directly, they do not resist its movement and therefore are nothing more than contingent particularities. Such monsters do not impede the demonstration of the science.

On the other hand, the Philosophy of Nature is also afflicted by a kind of deviation that exceeds this determination of acceptable and accountable monsters. These second-order monsters resist the movement of the concept insofar as they constitute aberrations that deform the very method of rationality. A shapeless, insubstantial, mindless, motivationless monster that will nonetheless eat you defies categorization, eternally taxonomically identified as “other” or “miscellaneous”. Most monsters are described by what they are (an undead human, a half-man half beast, the souls of the departed), even if that is a deformation of the category of existence. Old Boneless is described by what he is not. What could be more monstrous than a thing whose ontological status cannot even be named? Could anything be more monstrous than a creature that steadfastly refuses to participate in the order of the universe? Old Boneless not only rejects order, he pretends it doesn’t exist at all as he floats in an amorphous mass on the back roads of the British Isles, absorbing the odd human into his absolute negation.

Making Monsters: Montauk

at about 30′ away i could see what i think was the back shoulders of a very large version of the montauk creature alive and well and hunting swans… pinkish skin and large shoulders was all i could make out ….. when we got close enough for my son to hear it clearly …he said “pop theres a monster” and he started backing up fast… shit we both
did…. the area has many places i think something like this could hide easily…. i went to check for prints the next day but it rained pretty hard that night and there was nothing……. my son is 7 and while he does have a vivid imagination  im 39 and i dont

July 2008. For a while the only public photograph of the Montauk Monster was this one:

But then a new one emerged. (Photographs may not lie but they do tell different kinds of truth.) From another angle, in a different light, taken sometime earlier judging by the lower level of decomposition, the same 'monster' on the same beach:

Speculation in published reports included theories that the Montauk Monster might have been a turtle without its shell, although turtles do not have any teeth, or a science experiment from the nearby government animal testing facility, the Plum Island Animal Disease Centre. Mad scientists manufacturing crazy hybrid animals which then escape from the lab into the wild is the stock-in-trade of shlock horror, after all. The monster is now stated, categorically, to be a raccoon, its appearance much altered by prolonged submersion in seawater. But the human mind struggles to impose that kind of scientific order on a chaotic and distorted creature thrown up by the ocean, and, moreover, finds pleasure in thoughts of monsters. Especially dead ones.

Living chimera, on the other hand, disturb the category of 'human' profoundly. This sculpture by Australian artist Patricia Piccinini (made with, among other things, leather and human hair) frequently provokes howling or weeping on internet sites where it appears, since it is taken to be a living creature. Posed in an ostensible hospital environment, it passes for a medical freak or a medical experiment. Once taken for an actual creature, no one seems to find it very amusing, only horrific or deserving of compassion.

Kidnap and Torture

The State claims and exercises [a] monopoly of crime ... and...it makes this monopoly as strict as it can…. It punishes private theft, but itself lays unscrupulous hands on anything it wants, whether the property of citizen or of alien.... Of all the crimes that are committed for gain or revenge, there is not one that we have not seen it commit – murder, mayhem, arson, robbery, fraud, criminal collusion and connivance. (Albert Jay Nock)

A man arrested for driving while intoxicated and then forced into solitary confinement for 22 months tried to get help by writing to the jail's nurse, but the only response he got was a dose of sedatives, his lawyer said.

Stephen Slevin, 57, was arrested in August 2005 in New Mexico’s Dona Ana County, charged with aggravated driving while under the influence and possession of a stolen vehicle, although Slevin maintains the car was lent to him by a friend. On Tuesday, a federal jury in Sante Fe awarded him $22 million in damages for enduring inhumane conditions in the Dona Ana County jail.

Slevin had one medical examination after being arrested and was labeled suicidal, his lawyer said. He was jailed in lieu of posting a $40,000 bond. He never appeared in court. He never saw a psychiatrist. And, despite being permitted an hour's exercise per day, frequently spent the entire 24 hours locked in a windowless cell. Toenails curling around his foot because they were so long, fungus festering on his skin because he was deprived of showers, Robinson Crusoe mingled with Josef K, lost inside the grinding wheels of the state.

Aphorism #5

The human being who invented singing was walking with bare feet over brambles.
      Pierre-Albert Jourdan

(Un)Intended Consequences

Passive Eating

Government actions are urgently required to discourage eating:

• A ban on advertising in print media, electronic media and in public places.
• A ban on sponsoring sports, etc by food producers. Using fit, healthy people to advertise food sends the wrong message to the public.
• Plain wrapping and standardised labelling of all food with graphic images of the consequences of eating food. Food brands may not be printed any larger than 0.8 pt on any part of the package.
• Packaging shall only identify the type of contents (see Addendum L.5 for the list of 308 approved types), the quantity therein and its obesity rating in blobs.
• The highly addictive “fresh food” shall be prepared so as not to be visually attractive. Fruit and vegetables shall be left in cardboard boxes in the sun for at least 2 days before being put on display to customers.
• Refrigerated food shall be packaged and stored so that the use-by date is no more than 4 days from the time of packaging to discourage hoarding.
• Companies which previously prepared (and served) food directly for customer (“restaurants”) will be assisted in converting to a non-food business.
• Fast-food outlets shall be replaced by authorised dispensaries with restricted working hours.
• Citizens shall be issued with electronic passes that they must produce in order to buy food in order to facilitate managing their condition.
• All producers of food shall be licenced, including garden plots, trees and shrubs yielding edible matter. Any such means which have the potential to exceed production beyond licenced allowances, shall be seized and destroyed. Owners of garden plots, trees and shrubs shall, at their expense, install and maintain facilities for remote monitoring of those means by the Bureau Against Redundant Food.

Until Governments make these essential laws to protect the health of the public, parents can protect their children from the effects of passive eating by:

• Not eating in the presence of children.
• Leaving the house and staying well away from doors and windows if they must eat.
• Not eating in the car or other enclosed space which may be occupied by children in the future.
• Seeking medical advice to help with their eating habit.
• Showing the children the filthy results of eating before flushing.
• Remembering that humans can get adequate nourishment from sources other than food. e.g. tofu.

In order to protect themselves against future litigation, workplaces must implement eat-free policies including:

• Bans on the consumption of food while working near others including other employees and customers.
• Instigating random searches to discourage the smuggling of food into the workplace.
• Placing signs on the doors of lavatories reminding employees that they wouldn’t need to use the lavatory unless they’ve been eating.
  Lavatories do not need to provide comfort or privacy. Gradually reducing the number of available lavatories will further encourage employees to kick the habit.
• Introducing urine and blood tests for employees in high-risk areas.
• Providing counsellors with appropriate psychological training to help employees kick their eating habit.
• Installing CCTV cameras in high risk areas such as lunch rooms and lavatories.

Obesity is a global problem as long as people are induced by Big Food that the consumption of food is a status symbol, provides enjoyment and comfort.

[Shamelessly borrowed, out of admiration, from Contrary2Belief.]

Zombies and Cockroaches

According to Paul Krugman:

Zombie Lies 'remain part of what [every naive or politicized observer] knows to be true no matter how many times they have been shown to be false. Kill them, and they just keep shambling along'.

Cockroach Ideas are 'ideas that you try to flush away, but keep coming back. (Are cockroach ideas the same as zombie ideas? Not quite, I would say; I think of cockroach ideas as misconceptions held because the people holding them are just unaware of basic facts, while zombie ideas are held by people who refuse to acknowledge contrary evidence)'. 

Aphorism #4

Man is born free and is everywhere in chainstores.
      Pliny the Welder

Less Weltschmerz*, more Hikikomori**

Sitting on a bus crawling through the tram works in Beeston, on the way to the doctor's, this came on the mp3 player. Would that I could find the oomph to be incited to some blood-letting, in the Demolition Triangle....

* Weltschmerz - lit. world pain; mental depression or apathy caused by comparison of the actual state of the world with an ideal state
** Hikikomori - pulling inward to confinement, acute social withdrawal

The End of Justice

“These final amendments should now resolve all right thinking citizens of Middle England that this is a sensible, worthwhile Bill which they would give their support to.”

He admitted the plans to hold more hearings in national security cases behind closed doors in so-called closed material procedures were not ideal, but said they offered “the only practical means of delivering justice where otherwise there would be none”.

So saith Kenneth Clarke, just prior to the passing of the Justice and Security Bill in the House of Commons last night. David Cameron and other senior ministers were drafted in at the end of a four-hour debate to ensure the amendments were defeated.

Providing the entire Bill is passed formally later this week, it will mean that some civil cases involving national security issues could be heard in secret for the first time to protect sensitive information.

Existing terrorism statutes under RIPA have been used to prosecute people for putting too much rubbish in their bins, so there is no reason not to believe that this new statute will not see good, innocent people being gaoled on the whim of the CPS, with the gleeful complicity of police, parliamentarians and judges. This is, after all, an excellent way of getting rid of dissidents without the pesky requirement to show any evidence.

Kafkaesque might appear a fancy-pants literary term, but it's rapidly threatening to become a state of being in the UK.

For (Y)our Own Good: Denormalization

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. C.S. Lewis,  God in the Dock

And of all tyrannies, the most successful are the most covert, which work by stealth, through divide-and-rule, setting the majority against any chosen minority who are deemed 'dangerous' to the body politic.

The World Health Organisation's Framework Convention on Tobacco Control contains a central plank of global policy requiring signatories to engage in national activities which denormalize smoking, ie:

Denormalization strategies seek to change the social norms concerning tobacco consumption and exposure to tobacco smoke by informing the public about their negative consequences on health, society, the economy and the environment.

The programme to denormalize smokers has been so successful that the comment threads of mainstream newspapers all too frequently contain such gems as these:

33 Tartancult,
23/09/2011 00:54:29
I don't want smokers banned, I want them dead.
Cremation would be fitting

 Smokers are weak minded defectives. There's also plenty of fat smokers too. If I were consul and you smoked in public and/or your smoke was anywhere near a normal person you would be badly beaten.
Gordon Akman | Broadbeach - June 10, 2011, 10:49AM

JFW, 03/02/2011 16:43:33 I do hope never to be treated by an NHS worker who is stupid enough to be a smoker; it's worrying that some people that you might be forced to rely on in an emergency have such limited brain-power.

We could always just change the law to allow people to legally shoot dead anyone caught with a cig between their lips outside the four walls of their home, as long as it's not a rented home or presently under mortgage, since it's not technically their home. If people find a bullet through their head whenever they light up, they'll not light up. Simples. Probably won't happen. I can dream though. God, I'd have a field day if that ever came to pass...
- Ken, Kent, 6/4/2012 16:28

Breaking the smoking ban should carry the death penalty. Smoking is suicide and you will burn in hell.
Sent via tellyougov.com 16:48 on 4th March 2011

Never censored, although roundly condemned by other commentators, substituting 'smoker' for any other identifiable minority would constitute 'hate speech'. These statements are often attached, not to stories related to calls for a relaxation to bans, but to the fates of smokers who were forced outside by bans, defying bans, or the victims of denormalization itself.

Telegraph
Mrs Moss, 33, who had been a care assistant since she was 16, was found stabbed to death on after a frenzied attack at the back of St George’s Hospital in Hornchurch, east London.
    Friends said she had left the building to smoke a cigarette at around 10.30am on Thursday. Her body was found half an hour later by a woman walking her dog.

Eastbourne Herald
A 12-YEAR-OLD boy hanged himself with his school tie after a teacher caught him with cigarettes.
   David Arnett came into his Cavendish School classroom smelling of smoke on December 15. Teacher Joanna-Clea Burns told him off, confiscated the cigarettes and a lighter and gave him 24 hours to tell his parents.
   David told a friend the pain was ‘like a knife in his stomach’ during the walk home to Longland Road after school, and spoke about killing himself.

X Nomavayi

Boy, nine, died after his mother set him and his brother on fire as a punishment for smoking
A mother who killed her nine-year-old son by setting him on fire as punishment for smoking has been sentenced to 11 years in prison.
    Noluthando Nomavayi , 37, from Delft in Cape Town drenched her two sons with paraffin and set them alight when she discovered them smoking cigarettes in May 2011.

When socially-sanctioned hatred of a behaviour and a product tips over into hatred of the people using that product, no one should be surprised.

Aphorism #3

The liberation of the human mind has been best furthered by gay fellows who heaved dead cats into sanctuaries and then went roistering down the highways of the world, proving to all men that doubt, after all, was safe – that the god in the sanctuary was a fraud. One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms.

               H. L Mencken

The Leaning Tower of Babel (b)

If it had been possible to build the Tower of Babel without climbing it, it would have been permitted. (Franz Kafka)

'Where's your common sense? None of those books agree with each other. You've been locked up here for years with a regular damned Tower of Babel. Snap out of it! The people in those books never lived. Come on now!' (Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451)

 Surely no one will prove himself so great a bore as to contradict me in this. . . . The gods were bored, and so they created man. Adam was bored because he was alone, and so Eve was created. Thus boredom entered the world, and increased in proportion to the increase of population. Adam was bored alone; then Adam and Eve were bored together; then Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel were bored en famille; then the population of the world increased, and the peoples were bored en masse. To divert themselves they conceived the idea of constructing a tower high enough to reach the heavens. This idea is itself as boring as the tower was high, and constitutes a terrible proof of how boredom gained the upper hand. (Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or 1843)

Those who teach sacred texts as the word of God often dishonor the wisdom of our ancestors and distract us from self-awareness.  The stories are often cautionary tales about human ego - calcified into commandments, bones without flesh, which distort, misinform and mislead those with good intentions.  Examples include the Garden of Eden and the Tower of Babel, and are found in all religions.  These are about human nature - not God. (Earon Davis)

I am pleased to inform you that the Basic Skills Center is henceforth, to be known as the Center for Developmental Education. Dr. Andreach, Coordinator of the Basic Skill Center will be known as Coordinator of Developmental Education. Increasingly, colleges are dropping the basic skills connotation that goes with the kind of center we have established and are looking to the developmental aspects since they have more of a positive connotation than do basic skills. (Monmouth County Council)

 

State of the Art

Stock-taking. Or taking stock.

As ever the brain runs faster than the hand. So a pile of partially completed drawings and a queue of half-written blog posts.

Breathe.

Thanks, Claire... I think.

Seeking consolidation in one direction (for now, today, this week), the PLAGUE DOCTORS WITHOUT A PLAGUE (LOOKING FOR THE DYING) have taken centre stage. And that's ok. Groping after a visual language for the 'monstrosity' of the masses and the monstrosity of tyranny the plague doctor is a fertile image, combining a legacy of courage and folly and horror (imagine that looming over your sickbed), with older resonances of carrion birds, righteous martyrdom and scientific knowledge in the midst of social chaos. So, as of right now, there is a set of 6 drawings sketched out, all featuring the same Plague Doctor-esque characters, all of which will get priority in getting finished.

The moths and grotesque children and clones and barcoded people and all other works-in-progress will go on the back-burner.

And now back to finishing those drafted blog posts....

Head/Desk

“Sitting is so incredibly prevalent that we don’t even question how much we’re doing it ,” Merchant told the TED audience. “And because everyone else is doing it, it doesn’t even occur to us that it’s not OK. In that way, sitting has become the smoking of our generation.”

Soft Paternalism...

...steals freedom of mind as well as of body, and is thus more insidious. To contest its grasp can be like fighting fog.

Instead of bringing freedom, the fall of the oppressive authority thus gives rise to new and more severe prohibitions. How are we to account for this paradox? Think of the situation known to most of us from our youth: the unfortunate child who, on Sunday afternoon, has to visit his grandmother instead of being allowed to play with friends. The old-fashioned authoritarian father’s message to the reluctant boy would have been: “I don’t care how you feel. Just do your duty, go to grandmother and behave there properly!” In this case, the child’s predicament is not bad at all: although forced to do something he clearly doesn’t want to, he will retain his inner freedom and the ability to (later) rebel against the paternal authority. Much more tricky would have been the message of a “postmodern” non-authoritarian father: “You know how much your grandmother loves you! But, nonetheless, I do not want to force you to visit her – go there only if you really want to!” Every child who is not stupid (and as a rule they are definitely not stupid) will immediately recognize the trap of this permissive attitude: beneath the appearance of a free choice there is an even more oppressive demand than the one formulated by the traditional authoritarian father, namely an implicit injunction not only to visit the grandmother, but to do it voluntarily, out of the child’s own free will. Such a false free choice is the obscene superego injunction: it deprives the child even of his inner freedom, ordering him not only what to do, but what to want to do.

Slavoj Žižek, How To Read Lacan