Hale Halloween

May all your guising be genteelly gothic.

What would St Paul occupy?

“For Nietzsche, God and the law form a pact of mutual support steeped in blood.”

– Giles Fraser, Redeeming Nietzsche: On the Piety of Unbelief

Search term haiku

Wolf eye [/] makeup

Scary spider fantasy

Franciscan virtues

“An ever-growing shortage of time, …

“an acceleration of the conflict with the world, these are the results. How can a human being, within his restricted life-span, cope with the fact that the world is expanding beyond historic time and beyond the temporality of nature into a virtual infinity, with the discrepancy between the potentiality of an individual life and the general time limits of the world at large becoming intolerable?”

– Christoph Wulf

Rapport à soi, age six

“When I was putting my socks on I said to myself, ‘Welcome to your new life.’”

The creatures within

Is it normal to have tiny bugs living in my laptop? They emerge whenever I open it and occasionally wander the screen and keys as if looking for the ESC button. I thought of training them to edit my work but more likely they spend their time in the bowels of the machine redacting files and moulding my manuscripts to sinister ends. Still, I can’t bring myself to have at them. Our ecology seems stable enough for now.

Žižek at the Opera House

A.k.a. the copulating turtles—an authentically ecological image, according to the big Ž. And actually, amid the rehashed jokes, the numerous, varyingly vulgar TV and film examples of “ideology at its purist”, the discussions of Zionism’s antisemitism and capitalism’s utopianism, there was a distinct lack of theology, and a preponderance of attention to ecology. Though he’s said it before, and is hardly the first to critique feelgood recycling, green consumerism, and market solutions, his thought seems to be moving towards an engagement with the commons in not only the social but also the ecological sense. And seeing as he’s clearly exhausted the pop culture archive, the natural world is an enormous untapped resource of biological perversity just begging for Hegelian-Lacanian explication! Just ask de Gourmont: “The spider eats her male; the mantis eats her male; in locustains, the female is fecundated by a spermatophore, an enormous genital bunch-of-grapes. She gnaws through this envelope of spermatozoides to the last shred. These two facts should be brought together.” For is this not the clearest example of the dialectical reversal…?

Anyway, someone else’s twenty bucks well spent. (Thanks T!) For bonus lisped anecdotes, he’s testing Tony Jones’s mettle on Q&A right now.

Nine citations on theology and horror

1.

“To what extent is ‘life’ as a concept always situated between a biology of a non-ontological ‘life itself’ and an onto-theology of the life-beyond-the-living, or ‘after-life’? But what comes ‘after life’? Is it death, decay, and decomposition, or is it resurrection and regeneration? Is it, in biological terms, the transformation of the living into the non-living, from the organic life of molecules to non-organic matter? Or does it involve a theological re-vitalization of the resurrected, living cadaver?”

Eugene Thacker, “Nine Disputations on Theology and Horror,” Collapse IV (‘Concept Horror’, May 2008)

 

2.

“Spider” (1997)

 

3.

 

4.

“All such statements as: 1. ‘We are dead to sin,’ 2. ‘We live unto God,’ etc., signify that we do not yield to our sinful passions and sin, even though sin continues in us. Nevertheless, sin remains in us until the end of our life, as we read in Galatians 5:17: ‘The flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other.’ Therefore all apostles and saints confess that sin and the sinful passions remain in us till the body is turned into ashes, and a new (glorified) body is raised up which is free from passion and sin.”

Martin Luther, Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans 6:2

 

5.

“For the life of the bodies of the ungodly is not the life of their souls but of their bodies, a life which souls can confer even when those souls are dead, that is, when God abandons them; for their own life, in virtue of which they are immortal, still persists, in however low a degree.”

Augustine, City of God, XIII.2

 

6.

“the carnal diagrams of flesh are imbued with dust soups (the ultimate mess); they are mapped by syntheses of dust with xenochemical hydro-currents and cosmic wetness, and mobilized by the intelligence and vigor of epidemics. This is neither to glorify the flesh in the context of monotheism and its creationist basins (God made you out of dust), nor to pay tribute to the flesh and its carnal politics; it is to declare that flesh is already a reeking catacomb of dust-compositions, drenched by deluges.”

Reza Negarestani, “The dead mother of all contagions,” Cyclonopedia: complicity with anonymous materials

 

7.

“Sounds from distant bombs (these becoming commonplace). No option for me but to spend twelve uninterrupted days, alone and without friends, staying in my room, depressed and vulnerable to gnawing anguish.”

Georges Bataille, “April-June 1944,” On Nietzsche

 

8.

“As I rapidly made the mesmeric passes, amid ejaculations of ‘dead! dead!’ absolutely bursting from the tongue and not from the lips of the sufferer, his whole frame at once—within the space of a single minute, or less, shrunk—crumbled—absolutely rotted away beneath my hands. Upon the bed, before that whole company, there lay a nearly liquid mass of loathsome—of detestable putrescence.”

Edgar Allan Poe, “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar”, Tales of Mystery and Imagination

 

9.

Meat Abstract (1989)

Put ya dance pants on

September miscellany

The Year’s Best Australian Fantasy & Horror 2010, edited by Talie Helene and Liz Grzyb, has been published by Ticonderoga. It includes my Androphagi story “Schubert by Candlelight,” originally published in Macabre. They also recommend “The Nullarbor Wave”.

The AA judges described The Angælien Apocalypse as “A story with strong foundations in both religious (Christian) and alien abduction mythology, which married the two ideas into a fast, flippant and over-the-top plot.” Which is almost as good as “[it] lost me … towards the end of the story when it turned into a soap opera. The author, whose name I can’t even recall, went way too far with his far from original idea”. I forget myself sometimes, too.

And the Pseudopod commentariat have pegged “In Memoriam” for the by-numbers revenge tale it is. Still, thanks to the mobility of podcasting, for one reader “Target will never be the same”—which is better than, y’know, the loo… They also brought this site to my attention. Now that is some supreme commitment to bad taste.

Now playing: … And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead, “Isis Unveiled”

Time skies

Two days ago, the sky was dusty, its blue muted by a wind-borne grey more organic than metallic. As sinusitis pulped grey matter like rotten fruit, and birds transferred building materials between trees, that heavy sky externalised my thinking. I composed the talk about the phenomenology of animal life that yesterday vets and biomedical researchers would greet with suspicion and eagerness. Yet who really believes we can elude quantification? Today, smoke filled the air, filtered the sunlight orange, invaded nostrils and the hung washing. At dinner a blokey data miner suggested we are nearing a new enlightenment. I drove home for the shift change, idled on our street to hear out “Time Flies”, but gave up halfway through. There are more skies to come.

Invariable principles

“What I found most disturbing was the sense that the hardcore of rioters came from a feral underclass, cut off from the mainstream in everything but its materialism. … Punishment alone though is not enough … Locking people up without reducing the risk of them committing new crimes against new victims the minute they get out does not make for intelligent sentencing. … It’s not yet been widely recognised, but the hardcore of the rioters were, in fact, known criminals. … That is the legacy of a broken penal system – one whose record in preventing reoffending has been straightforwardly dreadful. In my view, the riots can be seen in part as an outburst of outrageous behaviour by the criminal classes – individuals and families familiar with the justice system who haven’t been changed by their past punishments. … I am introducing radical changes to focus our penal system relentlessly on proper, robust punishment and the reduction of reoffending. This means making our jails places of productive hard work … However, reform can’t stop at our penal system alone. … fix not just criminal justice but education, welfare and family policy.” (Ken Clarke, “Punish the feral rioters, but address our social deficit too”, The Guardian 5 Sept 2011)

“The answer to these criticisms [of the prison] was always the same: the reintroduction of the invariable principles of penitentiary technique. For a century and a half [make that two] the prison had always been offered as its own remedy: the reactivation of the penitentiary techniques as the only means of overcoming their perpetual failure; the realization of the corrective project as the only method of overcoming the impossibility of implementing it. … Word for word, from one century to the other, the same fundamental propositions are repeated. They reappear in each new, hard-won, finally accepted formulation of a reform that has hitherto always been lacking. … One should not see in delinquency the most intense, most harmful form of illegality, the form that the penal apparatus must try to eliminate through imprisonment because of the danger it represents; it is rather an effect of penality (and of the penality of detention) that makes it possible to differentiate, accommodate and supervise illegalities. … There is no penal justice intended to prosecute all illegal practices which, to do so, would use the police as an auxiliary and prison as a punitive instrument, and not leave in its wake the unassimilable residue of ‘delinquency’.” (Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish)

“Among Animals”

I was interviewed by the vibrant Jane Ulman for this documentary,  among some colleagues and other folks passionate about animals. It aired on ABC Radio National’s 360 programme yesterday, will be repeated Wednesday, and can be downloaded as a podcast as well.

A way to deceive the eyes of the end

It was a Saturday morning in the late nineties, and we had ninjitsu training to get to (with, no doubt, a hangover absorbing breakfast on the way), so a friend’s dad was entrusted to videotape The Tea Party’s performance of “Army Ants” on Recovery. More fool us. I thought it was lost forever, but no—recovery, it shines on.

Towards Complete Caesareanisation

The war against women continues apace. Long have the obstetric clergy dreamt of their interventionist utopia, where not a single vagina would endure the noniatrogenic risk of being penetrated from inside by a crowning infant. They are ever evolving their strategies for justifying, publicising and achieving the absolute medicalisation of childbirth. Their arrogance is now such that they grow impatient with every term pregnancy for which their scalpels are not medically indicated or freely elected. They commission studies and keenly anticipate the staggering control their results will endorse. With a slyly brazen mendacity, they allow the “cheeky” among them to imagine, in conference back rooms and on newspaper front pages, the complete annihilation of their enemies, the midwife underclass whose every delivery constitutes theft from their lucrative livelihood. They will not rest until no woman’s body suffers an event not their doing. One day, it is hoped, reproduction will be achieved without any necessity for care or labour—or ultimately, for women themselves.

Serendipitous diagnosis

“the compulsive neurotic wastes his time by endless procrastination and suddenly becomes stingy with it”

– Henri F. Ellenberger

Outdoor office

One for The Museum of Vestigial Office Technology.

“oh my god, I just saw a lion …

@desujon oh my god, I just saw a lion in front of wills memorial building, wish I had a camera!!! #bristol #riots #wtf        8 hours ago

@IAmTheRobotMan Female Asiatic Lion has been spotted outside Wills Memorial Building in #Bristol. I hope she relishes the taste of hoodies        8 hours ago

The desire for leonine liberty seems always to accompany social unrest. Thusly does the great zoöeschatological disputation’s solemn halt before a vision of barren humanity flicker with anarchic hope. Yet it is well known that escaped zoo animals trend to return to their immured Umwelten. One disputant recites his Hediger: “in such situations the police usually shoot far too soon and generally without need. Naturally, they act on the firm conviction that the sacrifice of human lives must be prevented as quickly as possible. It is not easy to convince the police that danger hardly exists. … Escaped beasts of prey are not dangerous absconding criminals, but just wild animals undergoing flight reaction.” This is soon agreed to be equally the case with illusory beasts, no matter how strongly the twitterverse might crave them.

What is anti-Semitism?

“I loved it, and made my first comic in well over a decade – an image of a double-penised ‘Jew Monster’ sodomizing a Christian woman and a Muslim woman simultaneously.”

From a great interview in The Comics Journal with Jewish cartoonist Eli Valley. I could have quoted the bit about comics and internet comments together forming a kind of loopy Talmud, or the bit about satire as stenography, or cartoonists as theologians, or so many other bits, but that would hardly have been in the right spirit, or as much of an enticement, would it?

The Ungathering

This morning, the youngest created a card game by drawing and cutting out little figures. On each turn you can play a card, or use an active card to attack, trap other cards, and so on. The results of all battles are fairly determined by him not by rules but in an entirely autonomous process of spontaneous choreography. After one such battle, I was shocked when, his combatant having been defeated, he screwed it up to be thrown away. My amazement was soon joined by shame as I watched him continue the game, thoroughly untroubled and absorbed. Unlike the deck-building fetishism of Magic: The Gathering, this is a noncollectible card game. Cards—or the knights, traps, snakes, fire-breathing monsters or other, largely undetermined creatures or capacities they constitute—last only as long as their fortune in a single game. Each individual character requires a new act of creation—and the capacity to do so is unlimited. Simply draw and cut them out.  Having rescued these scrunched up cards from among the coffee grounds feels like a massive betrayal. They will go back in the bin, and I’m uncomfortable with even this photo. Fuck negentropy—there is no entropy here. Nothing to redeem.