larvatus prodeo
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Below are the 12 most recent journal entries recorded in the "Michael Zeleny" journal:
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05:50 pm
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strange sex some may have known
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“There are many occasions when the muscles that form the lips of the mouth move the lateral muscles that are joined to them, and there are an equal number of occasions when these lateral muscles move the lips of this mouth, replacing it where it cannot return of itself, because the function of muscle is to pull and not to push except in the case of the genitals and the tongue.”
—The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, translated by Edward MacCurdy, 1938 |
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“I tell you that one?…I tell you about the Polack who thinks Peter Pan’s a wash basin in a cathouse?…The difference between erotic and kinky? Erotic you use a feather, kinky you use the whole chicken?”
—Elmore Leonard, Stick, 1983 |
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I write about what people do to each other. It isn’t pretty.
—Derek Raymond, The Hidden Files, 1992 |
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HANNAH: Sex and literature. Literature and sex. Your conversation, left to itself, doesn’t have many places to go. Like two marbles rolling around a pudding basin. One of them is always sex.
BERNARD: Ah well, yes. Men all over.
HANNAH: No doubt. Einstein—relativity and sex. Chippendale—sex and furniture. Galileo—‘Did the earth move?’ What the hell is it with you people?—Tom Stoppard, Arcadia, 1993 |
At the outset of an eponymous 1832 novel, Honoré de Balzac caused Louis Lambert, his precocious Swedenborgian hero, to air out his doctrines of meaning:
| —Souvent, me dit-il, en parlant de ses lectures, j’ai accompli de délicieux voyages, embarqué sur un mot dans les abîmes du passé, comme l’insecte qui flotte au gré d’un fleuve sur quelque brin d’herbe. Parti de la Grèce, j’arrivais à Rome et traversais l’étendue des âges modernes. Quel beau livre ne composerait-on pas en racontant la vie et les aventures d’un mot ? sans doute il a reçu diverses impressions des événements auxquels il a servi ; selon les lieux il a réveillé des idées différentes ; mais n’est-il pas plus grand encore à considérer sous le triple aspect de l’âme, du corps et du mouvement ? À le regarder, abstraction faite de ses fonctions, de ses effets et de ses actes, n’y a-t-il pas de quoi tomber dans un océan de réflexions ? La plupart des mots ne sont-ils pas teints de l’idée qu’ils représentent extérieurement ? à quel génie sont-ils dus ! S’il faut une grande intelligence pour créer un mot, quel âge a donc la parole humaine ? L’assemblage des lettres, leurs formes, la figure qu’elles donnent à un mot, dessinent exactement, suivant le caractère de chaque peuple, des êtres inconnus dont le souvenir est en nous. Qui nous expliquera philosophiquement la transition de la sensation à la pensée, de la pensée au verbe, du verbe à son expression hiéroglyphique, des hiéroglyphes à l’alphabet, de l’alphabet à l’éloquence écrite, dont la beauté réside dans une suite d’images classées par les rhéteurs, et qui sont comme les hiéroglyphes de la pensée ? L’antique peinture des idées humaines configurées par les formes zoologiques n’aurait-elle pas déterminé les premiers signes dont s’est servi l’Orient pour écrire ses langages ? Puis n’aurait-elle pas traditionnellement laissé quelques vestiges dans nos langues modernes, qui toutes se sont partagé les débris du verbe primitif des nations, verbe majestueux et solennel, dont la majesté, dont la solennité décroissent à mesure que vieillissent les sociétés ; dont les retentissements si sonores dans la Bible hébraïque, si beaux encore dans la Grèce, s’affaiblissent à travers les progrès de nos civilisations successives ? Est-ce à cet ancien Esprit que nous devons les mystères enfouis dans toute parole humaine ? N’existe-t-il pas dans le mot VRAI une sorte de rectitude fantastique ? ne se trouve-t-il pas dans le son bref qu’il exige une vague image de la chaste nudité, de la simplicité du vrai en toute chose ? Cette syllabe respire je ne sais quelle fraîcheur. J’ai pris pour exemple la formule d’une idée abstraite, ne voulant pas expliquer le problème par un mot qui le rendît trop facile à comprendre, comme celui de VOL, où tout parle aux sens. N’en est-il pas ainsi de chaque verbe ? tous sont empreints d’un vivant pouvoir qu’ils tiennent de l’âme, et qu’ils lui restituent par les mystères d’une action et d’une réaction merveilleuse entre la parole et la pensée. Ne dirait-on pas d’un amant qui puise sur les lèvres de sa maîtresse autant d’amour qu’il en communique ? Par leur seule physionomie, les mots raniment dans notre cerveau les créatures auxquelles ils servent de vêtement. Semblables à tous les êtres, ils n’ont qu’une place où leurs propriétés puissent pleinement agir et se développer. Mais ce sujet comporte peut-être une science tout entière ! Et il haussait les épaules comme pour me dire : Nous sommes et trop grands et trop petits ! |
“Often,” he has said to me when speaking of his readings, “often have I made the most delightful voyages, carried along by a word down the abysses of the past, like an insect floating on a blade of grass consigned to the flow of a river. Starting from Greece, I would get to Rome, and traverse the extent of modern ages. What a fine book might be written of the life and adventures of a word! Doubtless it has received various stamps from the events that it has served; it has revealed different ideas in different places; but is it not still grander to consider it under the triple aspects of soul, body, and motion? To regard it in the abstract, apart from its functions, its effects, and its actions, is it not a matter of falling into an ocean of reflections? Are not most words colored by the idea they represent externally? To whose genius are they due? If it takes great intelligence to create a word, how old does it make human speech? The combination of letters, their shapes, and the look they give to the word, are the exact reflection, in accordance with the character of each nation, of the unknown beings whose memory survives in us. Who would philosophically explain to us the transition from the sensation to a thought, from the thought to a word, from the word to its hieroglyphic expression, from the hieroglyphics to an alphabet, from the alphabet to written eloquence, whose beauty resides in a series of images classified by rhetoricians, and forming, as it were, the hieroglyphics of thought? Was it not the ancient mode of representing human ideas as embodied in the forms of animals that determined the shapes of the first signs that the Orient used for writing down its language? Then has it not left its traditional traces within our modern languages, which have all inherited some remnant of the primitive speech of nations, a majestic and solemn tongue whose majesty and solemnity decrease as communities grow old; whose sonorous tones ring in the Hebrew Bible, and still are noble in Greece, but grow weaker under the progress of our successive civilizations? Is it to this time-honored spirit that we owe the mysteries lying buried in every human word? Is there not a certain fantastic rectitude in the word TRUE? Does not the compact brevity of its sound contain a vague image of chaste nudity, of the simplicity of truth in all things? The syllable exudes an ineffable freshness. I chose the formula of an abstract idea on purpose, not wishing to pose the problem with a word that should make it too easy to the apprehension, as the word FLIGHT for instance, which is a direct appeal to the senses. But is it not so with every word? They are all stamped with a living power that comes from the soul, and which they restore thereto through the mysterious and wonderful action and reaction between thought and speech. Might we not speak of it as a lover who draws from the lips of his mistress as much love as he gives? Thus, by their mere physiognomy, words call to life in our brain the beings whom they serve to clothe. In the way of all beings, they have but one place where their properties can fully act and develop. But perhaps the subject comprises a science to itself!” And he would shrug his shoulders, as if to say, “But we are too high and too low!” |
 Thus Balzac extends etymological naturalism of Cratylus into the realm of Romantic aesthetics. In keeping with his observations, etymological creation continues in our days. Accordingly, in a muchly discussed article published by The New York Times on 5 November 2006, James Gleick testified:Much of the new vocabulary appears online long before it will make it into books. Take geek. It was not till 2003 that O.E.D.3 caught up with the main modern sense: “a person who is extremely devoted to and knowledgeable about computers or related technology.” Internet chitchat provides the earliest known reference, a posting to a Usenet newsgroup, net.jokes, on Feb. 20, 1984. In a Usenet message dated 10 January 2004, OED lexicographer Jesse Sheidlower confirmed the policy of “accep[ting] Usenet quotes as archived on (formerly) DejaNews or (now) Google Groups, in certain circumstances.” Hence a specimen of OED draft entry dated March 2003, which reflects such acceptance in language unfit to print in our newspaper of record: ( Beware of Rodents! )
Tags: animals, bullshit, gerbil-clap, language, phenomenom, sex, sodomy, tasteless
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04:24 pm
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desperately seeking gypsies and nose rings
“Relocating bears is illegal in California, and a permit to execute a bear can only be issued to a homeowner if the animal has attacked people or livestock.”
ursi me comedant
Tags: animals, food, latin, persiflage, tasteless, violence
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10:33 pm
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l’homme aux rats
Anarchist, Symbolist, insubordinate dreyfusard, man about town, Octave Mirbeau is an indispensable maître mineur of the Third Republic. His most popular work, Le Journal d’une femme de chambre, merited film treatment by the greatest Latin directors of all times, Luis Buñuel and Jean Renoir. His most scandalous novel remains unfilmable. In Le Jardin des supplices, which appeared in 1899, at the height of the Dreyfus Affair, Mirbeau targeted fear and hatred, the twin foundations of bourgeois society, in a narrative arc traversing the terrain of desire and disgust to culminate in a strange sexual obsession. ( And what about the rats? ) As a rodent, the rat is both taxonomically and etymologically dedicated to gnawing, rodere. Its intelligence and tenacity culminate in omnivoracity tending towards the extreme forms of cannibalism, qualifying this potentially docile and easily trained animal as an exemplary consumer in the wild. Since its inception 110 years ago, Mirbeau’s conjuration of rodential ass torture has gnawed and wriggled its way through the margins of respectable culture. ( For example… )
In our own time, we find a more extroverted way of flaunting deceased rodents in a male posterior: ( TransRatFashion alert! )
…which after all, is only a contrapositive to the popular practice of not giving a rat’s ass.
Crossposted to ![[info]](http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) larvatus and ![[info]](http://stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) strange_tears.
Tags: animals, aristotle, cicero, french, gerbil-clap, latin, mirbeau, sex, violence, weber
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10:43 pm
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founts of inspiration
Stendhal + Antoine Berthet = Le Rouge et le Noir
Flaubert + Delphine Couturier = Madame Bovary
T. Coraghessan Boyle + Roger Dier = Thirteen Hundred Rats
Tags: animals, french, gerbil-clap, literature, stupidity
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10:42 am
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deadbeat tenant
Tags: animals, home
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10:24 am
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get your licks in
Clean your desktop here.
Tags: animals, computers
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02:44 pm
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world’s largest mini-elephant found
You-know-who should click here.
Tags: animals, family
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05:43 pm
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your ladyship’s pussy’s inside
Herewith a convincing candidate for the most nauseating screed in the history of mankind: ( Read more... ) Snatching lace from top-booted pussy’s vomit takes some kind of Victorian chutzpah. Thanks to Jack Campin for this inspirational tale.
Tags: animals, bullshit, comedy, sex, tasteless, usenet
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11:35 pm
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petit mort pour rire
― in memoriam Cosmo of the Magnificent Sunrise
February 26, 1994 ― January 6, 2006
| Petit mort pour rire |
A small death for giggles |
Va vite, léger peigneur de comètes !
Les herbes au vent seront tes cheveux ;
De ton œil béant jailliront les feux
Follets, prisonniers dans les pauvres têtes… |
Take off, agile currier of comets!
These weeds wind-swept will stand in for your fur;
Your gaping orbs will shoot forth will-
o-wisps, locked up inside the noggin of a cur… |
Les fleurs de tombeau qu’on nomme Amourettes
Foisonneront plein ton rire terreux…
Et les myosotis, ces fleurs d’oubliettes… |
The ornaments called lilies of the valley
Will burgeon over your terrestrial woof…
Emboldened mice that trace your hillside grounds… |
Ne fais pas le lourd : cercueils de poètes
Pour les croque-morts sont de simples jeux,
Boîtes à violon qui sonnent le creux…
Ils te croiront mort ― Les bourgeois sont bêtes ―
Va vite, léger peigneur de comètes ! |
Let’s go, friend: the crate that shelters poets,
A worn-out plaything proffered for a proof,
A violin boxed up, its echo thrown aloof…
They think you dead ― mistaken for a goof ―
Take off, agile currier of comets! |
| ― Tristan Corbière |
― traduced by MZ |
Tags: animals, cosmo, death, doggerel, friends, memory, poetry, tough guys
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04:25 pm
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may bears gobble me
( You are about to view content that may only be appropriate for adults. )
Tags: animals, catullus, gerbil-clap, latin, sex, sodomy, tasteless, translation, vanity, violence
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02:01 pm
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man’s best friends 1
Michael first met his best friend Cosmo on their birthday, February 26, 1994. Cosmo, a sixth generation Californian Japanese canine-American, was perched on the hand of his breeder alongside his litter mate. Erin had found the breeder in Riverside. It was her idea to give Michael for his birthday present the very kind of a dog that he regretfully acknowledged lacking in responding to her Usenet personal ad three years earlier.
Michael knew the name before he met its bearer. Cosmo was to be named in honor of cosmic harmony celebrated by Socrates. He had to commemorate the political conviction of Michael’s father Isaak for rootless cosmopolitanism. A few weeks earlier, Michael and Erin saw a movie based on Ian McEwan’s novel The Cement Garden, whose adolescent protagonist fantasized about a heroic spaceman accompanied by his faithful dog Cosmo. Finally, the proposed name stood proxy for a Japanese euphemism for the male member, with which Michael’s prospective best friend had to be endowed in spades. In a word, it was overdetermined.
Two weeks later, Erin advertised herself as “young and available in LA” on the Usenet newsgroup alt.sex.services. ( Read more... )
Tags: animals, bullshit, cosmo, friends
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02:25 am
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lovers and fighters
[WebEx ex-President and outgoing CTO Min Zhu] first sexually abused [his daughter Erin] in August 1988. […] Just as [Erin] was about to fall asleep, Min Zhu slipped into bed with [Erin]. Although a brilliant student, [Erin] was naive and innocent about sexual matters. [Erin] had studied biology and was aware of the biological aspects of reproduction, but she was unaware of the "practical" aspects of sexual matters. Min Zhu was wearing shorts and a tank top/t-shirt. [Erin] was wearing shorts and a t-shirt. Min Zhu removed [Erin]’s clothes and began to touch her sexually. [Erin] verbally objected to his advances but Min Zhu merely stated that there was nothing wrong with what he was doing. Min Zhu proceeded to remove his clothes and forced [Erin]’s hand to touch him sexually. Min Zhu assured [Erin] that there was nothing wrong with [Erin] touching him in that way and that Min Zhu’s state of erection was normal. Min Zhu proceeded to turn on the lights, stating that he wanted to see [Erin] naked because he had never seen a virgin naked, since her mother was not a virgin when they were married. [Min Zhu] proceeded to place his hand between [Erin]’s legs and pronounced that the moisture in her vagina meant that her body was "being bad" and that she deserved to be punished. [Erin] attempted physically to refuse Min Zhu’s sexual advances. However, she was powerless to fight her father off. Min Zhu was approximately 39 years old, was a grown man in his prime, and was much larger and very much stronger than [Erin]. Min Zhu was approximately 5’11" tall and weighed approximately 160-170 pounds at that time. [Erin] was a fourteen-year-old girl, was only 5’4" tall and weighed less 90 lbs. Min Zhu became more aggressive and mounted [Erin]. When [Erin] struggled, Min Zhu began choking and restraining [Erin] with a blanket. He threatened to kill her. [Erin] stopped fighting her father as she was physically overpowered and feared that she would be severely harmed physically. [Erin]’s fear was all the more pronounced in light of Min Zhu’s long history of domestic violence and lack of remorse or conscience. Min Zhu then proceeded to rape [Erin].
— Excerpted from the January 18, 2000 draft complaint by Erin Zhu, the daughter, rape victim, and hush money recipient of WebEx President and CTO Min Zhu, filed as an exhibit in Opposition to the Defendants’ Motion to Strike in Zeleny v. Zhu & WebEx, Santa Clara Superior Court Case Number CV-809286. ( Read more... )
Tags: animals, cosmo, sex, violence, webex
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larvatus's journal