I don’t quarrel with the historical diagnosis contained in this account of the deformations of Western sexuality. Nevertheless, what seems to me decisive in the complex of views held by most educated members of the community is a more questionable assumption—that human sexual appetite is, if untampered with, a natural pleasant function; and that “the obscene” is a convention, the fiction imposed upon nature by a society convinced there is something vile about the sexual functions and, by extension, about sexual pleasure. It’s just these assumptions that are challenged by the French tradition represented by Sade, Lautréamont, Bataille, and the authors of Story of O and The Image. Their work suggests that “the obscene” is a primal notion of human consciousness, something much more profound than the backwash of a sick society’s aversion to the body. Human sexuality is, quite apart from Christian repressions, a highly questionable phenomenon, and belongs, at least potentially, among the extreme rather than the ordinary experiences of humanity. Tamed as it may be, sexuality remains one of the demonic forces in human consciousness—pushing us at intervals close to taboo and dangerous desires, which range from the impulse to commit sudden arbitrary violence upon another person to the voluptuous yearning for the extinction of one’s consciousness, for death itself. Even on the level of simply physical sensation and mood, making love surely resembles having an epileptic fit at least as much as, if not more, than it does eating a meal or conversing with someone. Everyone has felt (at least in fantasy) the erotic glamour of physical violence and erotic lure in things that are vile and repulsive. These phenomena form part of the genuine spectrum of sexuality, and if they are not to be written off as mere neurotic aberrations, the pictures looks different from the one promoted by enlightened public opinion, and less simple.

Susan Sontag, “The Pornographic Imagination”

I busied myself to think of a story—a story to rival those which had excited us to the task. One which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awaken thrilling horror—one to make the reader dread to look around, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart….

Invention consists in the capacity of seizing on the capabilities of a subject and in the power of moulding and fashioning ideas suggested to it….

And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper. I have an affection for it, for it was the offspring of happy days, when death and grief were but words which found no true echo in my heart. Its several pages speak of many a walk, many a drive, and many a conversation, when I was not alone; and my companion was one who, in this world, I shall never see more. But this is for myself; my readers have nothing to do with these associations….

Mary Shelley, Introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein

raised by pigs

my brother is applying to be a cop. he’s already a deputy with a semi-major city’s sheriff’s department, but he wants a transfer to somewhere more suburban. my dad was formerly an FBI agent. you can listen to him here, guesting on the relentless picnic. he sucks. full disclosure, I worked for the campus PD in college. it was the best paying student job. but no thank you, never again. I lucked out that an Oedipus complex trained me to be distrustful of the police state.

unfortunately, I also better understand cop psychology than most people who put ACAB in their Twitter bios. empathizing with viewpoints I disagree with comes so easily to me because my entire psychological development is a struggle to parse through the cryptofascist background noise of my upbringing. speaking of Oedipus, I would love to hear what Freud has to say about how I was affected when my dad left me, 7 months old, for Quantico, to return as an American Gestapo agent. I have suspicions.

anyway, I’m supposed to fill out a character reference questionnaire for my brother’s new department. he’s fine, much smarter than most cops. I just don’t understand how he could want to be a cop, and not in the abstract, from my political or moral objection to policing. like, he was never someone to enjoy wielding power over others. he often threw a fit when he felt like we were asking him to make a decision that affected everyone. but he doesn’t know anything else to do. he’s lazy, he didn’t enjoy school. most of his life was devoted to playing baseball, so when that didn’t work out career-wise, where was he supposed to go? I mean my answer would be “not be a cop,” but what does my opinion matter.

and that’s just it, my opinion does not matter. not to the police department asking me for a reference, not to my brother, not to my dad, not to this fucked world where everything seems awful and doomed and I can see it so clearly and it does not matter. I have tried to push back against their blinkered worldview. during the protests last summer I threatened to stop visiting if my dad didn’t take down his “thin blue line flag.” wrote a whole letter explaining my position and why it never feels like I can be heard. they did not take down their fascist memorabilia, and I have visited them since.

my thinking is I shouldn’t be so plain spoken about this, and instead use it all as the basis for fiction, which I fear will be weakened if I pull the veil back and let you see what goes into it. but I also think it’s valuable for me to be honest and forthright about this. then, when I get accused of being a plant, an op, a spook, or otherwise complicit, at least no one can ask why I hid this stuff. while we’re at it, what my dad does now, ie provide “security consultation” for very wealthy people, is even more evil, and by association probably sullies me worse, even though I refuse his offers for work. all these moral dilemmas are brought into focus by my mere existence, and I have no idea how to deal with any of them.

part of me wants to sandbag this reference questionnaire, somehow be a minor wrench in the oppressive machine recruiting my brother. but the questions just make me sad. “How often do you have contact with the candidate?” rarely. I miss my brother always, he was the only person I really had when my parents divorced. even though we have very little, next-to-nothing in common, he and I have no problem spending time together. enjoyable time. but I barely hear from him, in part because I harbor resentment over how I was always a satellite for my dad’s and brother’s interests, following around the baseball team my brother played on and my dad coached. but that childish indignation on my part seems to have created the space that made it possible for my brother to drift into law enforcement without any input from me.

when you’re a coward, everything’s always too little, too late.

astrology twitter account

mystic/empath/boddhisattva/annunaki [love letter emoji] • clairaudient/claircognizant/clairvoyant/clairtactile/clairolfactic [“see no evil” monkey emoji] • [cancer emoji][sun emoji] | [aquarius emoji][moon emoji] | [capricorn emoji][up arrow emoji] • check out my onlyfans for [eggplant emoji][water droplets emoji]

—

~*~weekly horoscope~*~

aries, taurus, gemini, leo, virgo, scorpio, sagittarius, capricorn, aquarius

yesterday will come back if you make it tomorrow. beware people who would do you harm. send a letter to friend. no, not that friend.

—

[new moon face emoji] what is shadow work? [magic orb emoji]

shadow work is when we decide to finally look in the mirror of our soul. sometimes the mirror shows us what we don’t want to see. but this mirror is in our soul. light your inner light so it shines off the mirror inside. then with lucidity, you will be ready to join the dark side. [purple imp emoji]

thoughts on Jennifer’s Body & the occult

somehow I lived til 2021 without having seen Jennifer’s Body (dir. Kusama, 2009). the movie deserves its cult status and does not deserve such a low score on rotten tomatoes. or maybe it does, but only if we lived in a world where real Movies got made, not advertisements for merchandise. I’d give anything for someone to make a zero-fucks campfest as bonkers as Jennifer’s Body in 2021.

I mean, ultimately it’s nowhere near a perfect movie. I can’t even say for sure if it’s a Good movie. not sure if it’s really my business saying if it’s Good or Bad anyway, but that’s an aesthetic discussion I’m not getting into now, not exactly. Jennifer’s Body is definitely a Fun movie, and it’s got grit and texture and takes silly risks and let’s itself be overrun with ideas. so few movies do that nowadays. and far be it from me to criticize a movie that burns Chris Pratt up in a fire explicitly symbolic of the World Trade Center attacks.

where it loses me is in the last 1/3, when Diablo Cody has to explain the mechanism of evil and tie it all up, and the film’s logic becomes too convenient. this hinges on easy “occult” cliches that offer very corny justification for Needy’s escape and revenge. when she goes into her school library searching for answers and finds an extensive “occult” section, me, being the pedantic librarian I am, I was like “yr school library would not have those books.” (later, Needy’s boyfriend “hangs the lampshade” on this when he asks her “our library has an occult section?”) but like, fine, like, the movie obviously relishes the absurdity of teen films and splatter flicks. the end just gets a little too Diablo Cody, and wobbles.

The Occult: A History, by Colin Wilson, as seen in Jennifer’s Body (dir. Kusama, 2009)

speaking of the occult (hoped for a more artful segue, but fuck you this is my blog), I started reading The Occult: A History, by Colin Wilson. truth be told, I’m ambivalent about the occult. And to maintain my ambivalence, or to prevent it from being too easy to determine what I “actually” think, I sometimes struggle with how much I should write publicly what I feel about my preoccupations. I don’t have simple explanations for my perverse fascinations, or for my idiosyncratic convictions. like, in The Occult, Wilson writes about faculties often termed paranormal or supernatural as being nothing of the sort, and that we all have some measure of perception that is subconscious, instinctual, not explainable by narrow conceptions of “logic.” this seems obviously true to me, based on my own experiences with premonition, intuition, and nonverbal communication. from this epistemological basis, though, one could easily follow lines of thought and feeling that would not only seem insane, they would feel insane. when one attempts to communicate felt truths from that alienated point of view, with all the conviction of someone asserting that 2 and 2 is 4, a mismatch of contexts gives the impression of psychosis. if you’ve ever read the writings of schizophrenics or any of those books that get labeled “conspiracy theory” on the back, you know what I mean. I have a stack of these books, plus books on shit like ESP, astral projection, Theosophy, Rosicrucianism, etc., that I intend to read once my school work is done. whether it’s all true, or if I’ll go crazy, or if those are two sides of the same coin, we’re going to find out.

were it to have not been so horror-lore exposition-y, Jennifer’s Body obviously would have been a different movie, so my criticism feels a little meaningless. I most value art that commits to its premise, which hell fuckin yeah that movie commits.

new moon in libra

in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the narrator’s conscience exacts revenge on him, for two things. one is murder, but not only murder, a murder where the victim, an old man, almost catches him, the murderer. because the old man knows there’s someone else in the room, the narrator doesn’t have the same unfair advantage he would ambushing an old man who’s asleep. so that’s weighing the ol’ Scales against him. then, after there’s blood on his hands, the narrator lies to the cops. now, who wouldn’t agree that such dishonesty denies the relative equality between souls? this is Nietzsche’s (oct 15) ironic sense of justice inverted into felt guilt, a burning guilt brought on by the double violation of near-mutual recognition.

I listened to Christopher Lee read the story and I wanted to say he overdoes it, but the narrator really is that cartoonish in prose, & so is a lot of Poe, who I’m revisiting because I’m trying to write a horror story this month; “The Sphinx” I like more because it’s weirder, more oblique and disconcerting; it has something to say about shared reality, alienation, and democracy. “The Tell-Tale Heart” seems more like an exercise in pacing. could also be an overexposure thing. cartoonish isn’t necessarily bad either, to be clear, not a critique of Poe really. idk it’s Libra szn I can’t be *that* mean. tho Bela Lugosi (oct 20) kinda disappointed me in The Black Cat (1935), “suggested by” Poe’s story with the same name and carried by Boris Karloff’s performance (and his great costumes).

last night I watched Bad Girls Go to Hell (1965), a delightfully gothic sexploit that titillates and horrifies in equal measure. creepazoid rapists & malevolent city slickers shot in high contrast black & white, cast in shadows stark enough to compete with the most self-serious of the German expressionists. not to mention stacked-brick-house 60s babes, wearing (and removing) all kinds of lacy things. all of which is to say it was extremely “my shit.”

Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity

Ecclesiastes 1:2, c’mon you knew that.

mornings are like this: the alarm goes off at 6:50am, which I snooze until 7:00am. I fail at avoiding the internet for the first 15 minutes of wakeful consciousness, winding me into compulsivity from the jump. the sink’s never empty because my kitchen is tiny and I am lazy. or, rather, I do not afford myself the same consideration I would for guests on whom I want to make a good impression (ie women I want to see naked). clean the french press, make a cup of coffee, sit down with whatever I’m working on that day: right now it’s this. sometimes I read, sometimes I waste a bunch of time looking at my screens. the sun this morning is muted by lingering clouds that had electrified the sky all night, a rare thunderstorm on the Southern California coast. for some reason I am still being coquettish about where I live. fine it’s Ventura, that’s where I live. I don’t really care if you know I guess. then I eat a yogurt, shower, sometimes hit the bong, and head to work.

on balance, I could stand to “do” more, and more intensely. maybe I’ll get into microdosing; I bought a vial of LSD at the start of 2020’s COVID lockdown and haven’t sampled any of it yet. an experiment in living and perceiving for the sake of documentation. but doing things so that there’s something to write about is extreme vanity, only for the cameras, like a Kim K (Oct 21) pap walk. all the same, vanity is a powerful motivator for me, I will admit shamelessly. perhaps I ought to accept as much, under this airheaded bimbo of a Libra new moon.

69 pairs of trochees to chant in a baseball stadium

Alright let’s go clap, clap, clapclapclap Boris Yeltsin clap, clap, clapclapclap hippie burnout clap, clap, clapclapclap Stanley Kubrick clap, clap, clapclapclap Sour Diesel clap, clap, clapclapclap paranoia clap, clap, clapclapclap COINTELPRO clap, clap, clapclapclap Marxist discourse clap, clap, clapclapclap Leon Trotsky clap, clap, clapclapclap Frida Kahlo clap, clap, clapclapclap artist’s artist clap, clap, clapclapclap foamtop surfboard clap, clap, clapclapclap hot young singles clap, clap, clapclapclap hiked-up g-string clap, clap, clapclapclap “What’s that mouth do?” clap, clap, clapclapclap HR meeting clap, clap, clapclapclap antifascist clap, clap, clapclapclap Ku Klux Klansmen clap, clap, clapclapclap vaccine skeptic clap, clap, clapclapclap right-wing nutjob clap, clap, clapclapclap Donald Rumsfeld clap, clap, clapclapclap Don DeLillo clap, clap, clapclapclap “Go on Cum Town” clap, clap, clapclapclap unpaid intern clap, clap, clapclapclap bloody knuckles clap, clap, clapclapclap pin-up tattoo clap, clap, clapclapclap phat ass white girl clap, clap, clapclapclap West Coast shithead clap, clap, clapclap Samuel Beckett clap clap, clap, clapclapclap BDSM clap, clap, clapclapclap active shooter clap, clap, clapclapclap anti-Semite clap, clap, clapclapclap Thomas Pynchon clap, clap, clapclapclap schoolgirl fetish clap, clap, clapclapclap Jeffrey Epstein clap, clap, clapclapclap middle finger clap, clap, clapclapclap Alfred Hitchcock clap, clap, clapclapclap meth addiction clap, clap, clapclapclap new nonfiction clap, clap, clapclapclap algorithm clap, clap, clapclapclap 3D printing clap, clap, clapclapclap neural network clap, clap, clapclapclap mean Latinas clap, clap, clapclapclap marijuana clap, clap, clapclapclap tig ol’ bitties clap, clap, clapclapclap cumstain, sorry clap, clap, clapclapclap Hunter Biden clap, clap, clapclapclap Ella Emhoff clap, clap, clapclapclap Sirhan Sirhan clap, clap, clapclapclap kickflip faceplant clap, clap, clapclapclap lubricated clap, clap, clapclapclap hardcore porno clap, clap, clapclapclap anal prolapse clap, clap, clapclapclap unerotic clap, clap, clapclapclap bean burrito clap, clap, clapclapclap cocaine traffic clap, clap, clapclapclap Franklin Credit clap, clap, clapclapclap John Krasinski clap, clap, clapclapclap futures market clap, clap, clapclapclap kratom OD clap, clap, clapclapclap revelation clap, clap, clapclapclap DMT trip clap, clap, clapclapclap transcendental clap, clap, clapclapclap Bodhisattva clap, clap, clapclapclap Tender Buttons clap, clap, clapclapclap broken promise clap, clap, clapclapclap lover’s quarrel clap, clap, clapclapclap “What an asshole” clap, clap, clapclapclap LMAO

zhuang zhou, jokerfied

sometimes I think myself into a place where all preconfigured systematic knowledge, from scientific rationalism to dogmatic theology and everything between, seems as though to only obscure the infinite variability of pata/metaphoric mythopoesis. so like, maybe the idea that the universe is however many billions of years “old,” maybe that’s only a metaphor and all thinking consequential to premises so ignorant of their own abstraction will never overcome its blindspots. it’s all stories, is what I think I’m saying.

which isn’t to suggest that metaphor is “bad” or that clear literary thinking ought to focus, Iowa-workshop-style, on Things and Senses. I do not write “concrete/literal” alt-lit blah blah blah, because we still can’t be sure we’re not the butterfly in the dream.