sweet effay

For those still trying to make up their minds whether to go for Pride and Prejudice or Wuthering Heights, Mark K-P responds to my post on perversion here and I respond to his response in the comments box.

Like everybody else, I spend a lot of time admiring the Cinestatic Homepage; particularly the latest searches box. What on earth is 'sonic porn'? I'm guessing that it must be really worthwhile because either loads of people are looking for it, or one person is extremely desperate to find some. I tried Googling for it, but imagine my frustration when the main recommendation was Whorecull where they just seem to have put it into Sonic Truth in order to generate lots of hits. Given that you can insert just about any sexual term into Google and come up with page upon page of related filth, I now have this vision of sonic porn as the Holy Grail of the twenty-first century libertine; erotica of such pure degeneracy that only a very few have tasted its forbidden pleasures. I wonder if the Whorecull team can enlighten me as to the nature and whereabouts of this fantastic material.

I spent today hanging round the hospital, which is something of a habit of mine. I get my own bed there on Friday so that they can take bits of bone off my hip and graft them into my arm (no trips to the tattoo parlour to obtain metal and scars for me: I get it done on the NHS). Here in the Flatlands, we have the longest orthopaedic waiting lists in the country. However it appears that our lovely flagship PFI hopital (insufficient staff and equipment, but a pay-per-view TV at the end of every bed) is tackling them by cutting down on the amount of time they let you convalesce (or, as they put it, bed block). The consultant reckons I'll be going home on Saturday, whereas the shortest I've been in for a bone graft before is four days. I'm playing along for now, but if New Labour think that I'll be helping them meet their health targets by going home with a handful of pills when, by all rights, I should still be wired up to a PCA pump full of morphine, they've got another thing coming.

I am not sure whether Mark is correct to claim that Idealization is presupposed in any erotic love relation, but I am certain that it doesn't always function in the way he describes. Whilst agreeing with him and Infinite Thought that the distinction between human and animal sex is based upon the fact that there are no such things as real persons in the former (which is simply to say that the erotic takes precedence over basic biological mechanisms), I cannot agree that all erotic love relationships are based on what is essentially Hegel's master/slave dialectic.

In contradistinction, I would hold up one strand of Bataille's theory of eroticism as an example of a series of practices which, rather than being centred on the worship of one partner, has its focus on excess and reciprocal debasement. Mutually racking up the levels of intensity via forms of consensual perversion is about bonding via complicity in these acts rather than acceding to strictly defined power games. Bataille is surely is correct to link this to taboo, although his focus on wallowing in guilt may say more about his inability to shake off his Catholicism than anything fundamental to the joy of such acts of perversion.

The whole Courtly Love/Glamasochism thing stinks of project with an infinitely deferred goal: 'the act itself is unimportant/boring'. For Bataille, the opposite of project is sacrifice, but this has nothing to do with role-playing to a set of fixed rules. 'Sacrifice falls into the forms of project, but only in appearance (or to the extent of its decadence). A rite is a defining of a hidden necessity (remaining forever obscure). And whereas, in project, the result alone counts, in sacrifice, it is in the act itself that value is concentrated' (Inner Experience, pp. 136-137 my emphasis). Glueboot is spot on when she says that 'sex/fucking/whatever, does not necessarily have to include the actual act of penetration', but it should never be unimportant or boring.

The sexual acts depicted by Bataille in The Story of the Eye and The Blue of Noon have nothing to do with the worship of one partner by a robot. Rather they are the actions of two individuals bound together in a mutual desire to achieve an ever closer relationship via their complicity in progressively more degenerate acts. These acts may include other protagonists, but such people are simply tools for the central couples' ever-growing intimacy on a road of limitless perversion where each act is enjoyed as the pinnacle of their love, but that pinnacle is subsequently topped via further transgression. There is nothing more unnatural and unbiologizing.

I would suggest that most of the problems with Glamasochism (and, indeed, courtly love) stem from the attempt to rationalize (as opposed to merely theorize) the most irrational of acts. It is very easy to do this with Masoch (and Sade) and his obsession with mistresses and contracts. However even the giving and receiving of sexual pain is not necessarily bound up with such things, but can rather be an act of affirmation based solely in the present and focussed on the intensity itself.

There must be something about the air in the South West which makes people come up with entertaining stuff.

Psychbloke posts some fun pictures and has an interesting line in semiotics exegesis. I pray that he actually stands up in front of students and explains Saussure to them by displaying his collection of Star Wars models.

Meanwhile, over at Kid Shirt, kek-w is surely single-handedly revitalizing Yeovil's tourist industry by painting a picture of a town where Satanists lurk in the subways and you can buy cheap Troma DVDs at every corner shop and garage. Back when I lived in Somerset all we knew about Yeovil was they had a sloping football pitch. We went there a couple of times to do a bit of shopping, but nobody ever mentioned that the place was full of industrial refugees who were setting up their own rave scene - Bollocks!

On the other hand though, that's just the sort of people Mrs effay spirited me down to the South West to get away from...

...that people who support hunting are a bunch of brain-dead fuckwits. What better way to make Peter Hain sympathize with their cause than by trapping him in his lair whilst blowing horns and baying for his blood? You can just see him sitting in his living room thinking "Gosh, what strength of feeling, and so many working class people too. I've changed my mind on this issue!" and definitely not "Now I know what the fox feels like surrounded by these tossers, they'll pay for this! Sod the proles amongst them; they all vote Tory anyway."

Still, can't complain: Not only have they given Hain lots of gip (and, lets face it, he deserves all the gip he gets), but the idiots have shot themselves in the foot as well - Hoorah!

Crikey, Uhalfbricking can't get the hang of A Thousand Plateaus! Perhaps he should be purged from my links list...

Actually, in the light this and Undercurrent's recent worries over his memory, I must confess that I have a similar problem: Bizarrely, despite my enthusiasm for all things Deleuze and Guattari and Anti-Oedipus in particular, I find that there are entire sections of the book that I am simply unable to retain. I feel as though I understand them when I am reading them and indeed have copious notes on them but, five minutes after I've turned away, I can't remember a bloody thing about them. This certainly isn't a failure on my part to take on board Soft[ware] Subversions' advice to make like I'm in a Grolsch advert. I've crawled through the thing in minute detail on at least ten occasions (in fact, I'm doing so again now, which is probably why I can remember this), but these particular sections simply just won't stick.

I have a sneaking suspicion the the reason for this is that my unconscious finds them boring and/or just doesn't care about the issues involved. I wonder whether this makes me a bad person?

Which sections of the book and how big are they? If I gave that away, I would no longer be able to blag my way through arguments about them.

So, the artist formerly known as Cat Stevens has been refused entry to the USA on the on the grounds that he associates with, and funds organizations which might be associated with, and funding terrorists. I have a sneaking suspicion, however, that this is just a cover-up for another US intelligence blunder.

Apparently the FBI didn't realize this evil man's identity until he was actually in the air. Now, given that he goes by the name of Yusuf Islam, my guess is that what they didn't spot was the fact that they had Cat Stevens heading towards them at several hundred miles per hour. Working with the usual out of date intelligence, they were unaware that he had given up singing dreary folk songs two decades ago and so presumed he was heading for a national tour. Naturally they refused him entry. On discovering their error, they breathed a sigh of relief at the discovery he was a Muslim and concocted the aforementioned excuse to cover their arses.

In a way, though, it would be more fun if they were telling the truth: I look forward to them taking their course of action to its logical conclusion and prosecuting Yusuf's record company, A&M, for associating with, and funding an individual who possibly associates with, and funds organizations which might be associated with, and funding terrorists...

...does the Cinestatic homepage claim this blog has been updated seven minutes ago, when I haven't been near it in ages and nothing seems to have changed?

The boys at Whorecull have been listing their favourite gigs. Not to be outdone, and because lists are fun if you're as anally retentive as I am, I now present mine :

Hawkwind/Fairfield Halls, Croydon 1977
Black Sabbath plus Van Halen/Hammersmith Odeon 1978
Inner City Unit/Lyceum 1979
B-52's/Hammersmith Palais 1980 or 1981
Ramones/Hammersmith Palais 1981
Roy Harper/Half Moon, Putney 1982
Here & Now plus Cardiacs/Marquee 1983
Hawkwind/Stonehenge 1984
Cardiacs/Whitelands College, Wandsworth 1985
Maximum Effect plus Cardiacs/Clarendon, Hammersmith 1986
Coil/Royal Festival Hall 2000

I went for eleven rather than a top ten so that I could stick in two Hawkwind gigs. In case this is against the rules, I should point out in my defence that there is only one member who was playing at both events. There would be a lot more Cardiacs gigs in there if the list had been any longer.