Annual Book Sale – Expect Tolstoy, Sluts!

THURSDAY TO FRIDAY – Annual University Booksale!

Thousands of titles to be had, including:

• Sir Walter Scott
• Tolstoy
• A brown book
• Victorian children’s poetry books that smell like scotch and quinine
• Dead spiders
• Books with hair in them
• The Collected Works of NOT FOR RESALE
• Sluts, like, all over the place
• Live spiders
• The Wonderful Colours of Monet – (black and white plates only)
• A shitty early translation of Nietzsche on “The Superman”
• Seriously, sluts love used books
• Old Sawburgh Jahosaphet’s Book of Humourous Tales 1907, including “Mother, The Smoked Herring!”
• First garbage novel by awesome modern author and nothing else
• Automative Repair Manual ‘87
• A book with inappropriate terms for ethnic groups you should buy to show your friends
• Woody Allen: Interviews – This Shit Has No Jokes
• A book of Victorian medical practices you will buy for 25$ and never look at again
• Mein Kampf, but stamped “Perth Public Library – Young Adult”
• A History of Scottish Presbyterianism, Vol. VI Only (MUST PURCHASE WHOLE SET)
• No Jane Austen after 9:15 thanks to that bitch over there
• A box full of nothing but shredded newspaper
• Antonio “Toni” Negri and Michael “Mikey” Hardt – Holy Moly, Revolutioly!
• The Vice Guide To Ethical Butt-Buggery and Fuckbuddery
• The Poems of Alfred Tennyson x 600 copies
• Hearken Not to the Kaiser
• Dual language texts that make Latin students unduly excited: Pominius’ List of Roman Chamberpots
• Edgar Allen Poe – Misc. Unscary Tales – “A New Bedford Jaunt”, “The Dictionary Man”
• Dated fashion magazine your mom makes you buy for your sister not to read
• Pamphlets for things that don’t exist anymore using words you find confusing together
• It’s in old German Fraktur font but check it out I think the title says “Boner”
• The Unpurchasable Works of Rudyard Kipling
• The Cuntlickingly Offensive Book of Limericks (Paris, 1933 how did they know that word)
• A big pile of bags – sorry we’re out of bags
• Grover’s Garlic Garnish - A Utopian Tale
• The Thousand and One Nights - illustrated etchings of Dore w/ Titties Edition
• That lone book in Hungarian
• Christianity – It’s The Only Religion, Stupid!
• Escapades in Far Off Burma Old Bean Lemon Squash Wot
• A Glimpse at the Future: Life As it May Be in the Year 2000 – (moon chalets, top hats)
• No you can’t just leave them here while you get more, I am not a faithful Japanese guard dog
• The Collected Works of Lenin With His Face On The Front – buy this and try not to look insane
• Learn to Play the Sackbut
• That girl over there likes Dostoyevsky and I need to give her my patronymic
• Thomas Pynchon Book, sweet cover, ok, he did WHAT in her WHAT?
• A shitty hymnal you will buy because you thought it was “beautiful even though I’m an atheist”
• Avid book collecting enthusiast who mispronounces “Goethe”
• The Reference/Dictionary section you stand in until somebody moves over in modern lit
• A coursepack with notes in pink pen (“OMG he never even called her”)
• Jacques Derrida’s Really Unpopular Book On Film Or Photography Or Something
• Judaism, Judaica, Jumanji
• Breadmaking for the Nonce
• Tom Brown’s Blah Blah Blah Blah
• The Tactics of the Waffen SS  – A Book For Men In Fedoras
• Oh My God a Book On Etiquette From Like A Million Years Ago
• Commercial Cobblery
• A German Cookbook That Seems Normal Until Page 7 – Pork Foreskin Goulash
• Slavoj Zizek – Something Borrowed, Something Blue: Reading Lacan in the Antepenultimate Times

…And, like, more!

Kant avec :(

The following "ecrit" was put together by the famous rogue psychoanalyst Jas Pecan in his very fruitful outpouring of the early 2000's, known as his "symbolic" period. During this epoch of Pecan's thought, the motif of symbolic representation was probably touched upon at some point, although no one can say for certain. What is certain is that this text, condensed from the lost source for "Seminar XXCL: iPodipus Comp(r)ex", which was also probably pretty weird.

Kant avec L

That the work of Lacan anticipates the emoticon, be it in respect of the catalogue of mathemes, symbols, rude words etc. is a stupid thing to say, which gets repeated endlessly among literary types; the fault, as always, belongs to the Internet.

Rather let it be said that Lacan "anticipated" nothing except the "emoticon" with all of his "matheme bullshit".

The question that immediately arises when one considers the thousands of variations on the emoticon is that of the originary, or rather the Ur-moticon. A classical liberal would suggest L, the nasty, brutish, and short response to the original text message of birth. On the other hand, the Jacobin believes the J must fulfill this role; “L'homme est né libre, et partout il est dans les fers.” Is it perhaps the K, a tabula rasa? The Pagan :D? The Biblical :O ? Or does the “moticon” predate the “emo” entirely? Is Ur­-moticon the Poundian ideograph? Hieroglyph? Cave painting? Is it not the terror of the mask, but the horror behind it? And what if that horror were a banana? What then? Or even worse - no banana at all.

Sometimes a banana is just a banana.

Actually, Ur-moticon is no image at all. It is something closer to the notification noise, vibration, or shock before the message is even opened. Ur-moticon is the terror of the pure signifier. The confrontation of absolute nullity – the void behind the veil of Sais, once ripped aside, revealing the originary gap (gross!) sabotaging from the get-go all attempts to posit meaning or connection, flawed ab initio, ex nihilo and ad nauseum. It is a quantum operation – as soon as the message is opened, the "blank" notification is given its signification - meaning is posited retroactively; that "jerk really did eat all of the Doritos", as such. Only after the message is “received” can Ur-moticon allow itself to die – except that, try as it might, it cannot die.

It cannot die precisely because the emoticon is the birth of subjectivity ($>OMG) itself. The Dharmic cycle of Samsara only begins with the positing of the subject, the “I” and its caravan, spinning endless text msgs for itself in the great cosmic dance of WTF. A dance that can, by no means, STFU by its own efforts.

What is the relationship of the emoticon to the Lacanian matheme? Actually, there is no “emoticon” as such. There is only ever actually Ur-moticon. The emoticon arises when Ur-moticon is integrated into the symbolic order by an act of traumatic violence-via-text. But it is never a stable state; the signification of the emotion, once read, is the opposite of finality. An emoticon never stands on its own; it always demands textual and contextual interpretation. And not just for the receiver. An emoticon is not a sexual act; it cannot communicate, it can only masturbate. (S > $keet$keet).

The sadface does not say to the Other “this is how I feel. I feel X”. It says, rather, “che vuoi? What do you want from me?” and in so doing, establishes itself as a hysteric subject to be communicated with. The text is never received from the sender, it is always stuck in the endless cycle of the Outbox. Even if you reset the phone. Even if you call your service provider. Even if you screenshot it and send it as an attachment. There are no such things as emoticons.

This is different from claiming that there are non-emoticons, which of course everyone will readily admit. These are often encountered in the form of Emojis, shockingly specific or subversive emoticons which are (temporarily) effectual precisely because their precision overrides their “generic” status as an emoticon. One is not shocked by the Emoji in relation to the context of the message, one is shocked by the Emoji as such – how can it exist so minutely? Who the fuck has an emoticon for horseracing?

Nevertheless it is an illusion. An emoticon cannot be translated; an Emoji can be. One cannot account for the effect of J as “smiley face” etc., but with the multiplicity inherent in an Emoji, precisely because it is not generic but only appears in the style of the generic, as it were, it is completely translatable into words. An Emoji always originates as a phrase. It is therefore a fetishistic stand-in for the original loss of Ur-moticon – “if I cannot have a meaningful message, then the medium will itself be the meaning”. 

McLuhan masturbating in front of a camera while shouting his infamous slogan.

One might claim the emoticon as the extreme endpoint of the Deleuzian facial (gross!). Deleuze and Guattari, who see the face overcoded everywhere and on every each thing in the schizophrenic and altogether wacky world of capitalism, would have been the first to deny that the emoticon represents the mere facializing of speech as such, or some Heideggerian interpretation of its masking the technological etc. The emoticon is no face. That is the terrifying thing about it. There is no hidden gaze or overcoded machinery in the emoticon itself. The emoticon cannot emote. It cannot even whistle awkwardly and leave the room to "get some fresh air" while the subject shuffles to the corner.

But if it is not a face, then what is the emoticon which does not exist? The emoticon which does not exist is a mask for the most unnecessary, stupid, ugly, and ultimately and non-existant part of speech: the punctuation mark. Antiquity had none such marks, and despite the tyranny of modern grammar, usage always resists their codification, their utility. They have always been a superfluity; are always untenable by themselves; always require context to give them any meaning at all; truly there is no such thing as punctuation. What is the emoticon but the horror of the punctuation’s inability to die?

This is where we stand, then. A text message is sent from the Big Other, the dominant discourse of the symbolic order. It gets stuck in the outbox. The message contained three items: a word, a punction, an emoticon. Ur-moticon reduces these three to the originary "terror" of the neighbour with a cell-phone plan. The message is still stuck in the outbox. What does it contain? The true terror lies in the fact that one can only read it from the phone that sent it. What does it contain, encore?

Hey! sup :P

And so the terror of the Real emerges.

Kendrick Contra Wagner

The music world was set a-flame today when hotshot rapper and self-defined "eiffel tower" Kendrick Lamar claimed the title of "the King of Bayreuth". Not content with the recently claimed title "King of New York", as well as his previous distinctions of "Viscount of New Edinburgh" and "Welterweight Thumb Wrestling Champion", Lamar has this time decided to go after the big names in classical music. On a guest verse in a recent release by overshadowed rapper Kurly Frie$, Lamar suddenly dropped a "hall of fame" lyric listing off the big names of history's greatest composers:

I'm usually homeboys with the same meisters I'm sprachstimmin' wit
But this is art music and them mensches should know what time it is
And that goes for Vivaldi, Mozart, Bach
Mendelssohn, Webern, Wagner, Offenbach
Schubert, Schumann, Buxtehude, Charles Gounod
I got love for you all but I'm tryna murder you maestros
Tryna make sure your posterity never heard of you maestros
They dont wanna hear not one more bar or reverb from you maestros

Notably lacking on the list is the name of Gustav Mahler, which Kendrick has long since despised as "overripe" and "decadent". But that verse alone was made twice as contentious when Lamar claimed the title "King of Bayreuth":

I'm important like the Pope, I'm as mean as the Kaiser
I'm Otto Bismarck's offspring, I'm the King of Bayreuth

The small Bavarian town is the living site of Wagner worship, where the composer founded his famous "festspielhaus" or "happy fun house" for the performance of his serious and not-for-dicking-around "music dramas". How, where, why or when the west-coast rapper from Compton can lay claim to this site is still something of a mystery. However, rumours are circulating that Lamar is attempting to put on a production of Parsifal, the most esoteric of Wagner's operas and once strictly restricted by the composer to performances only at the Bayreuth stage. Kanye West, J. Cole and the Wu-Tang Clan are all said to be involved, sending the message out to the opera world loud and clear: dooodoodooddoodooo brrrap.

Meanwhile, responses to Lamar's claim have been somewhat slow in coming. Unlike the rapid vitriol and fast verses that followed Control within a matter of hours, the latest controversy has proven more difficult for Kendrick's competitors to match up to. On the list are nonetheless a String Quartet in G Minor by Action Bronson, A Versace Tone Poem by Migos as well as a Gilbert and Sullivan style Operetta piece by Odd Future, featuring Frank Ocean and Tyler the Creator in drag searching for their lost goat.

"This is just what classical music needed" tweeted conductor of the New York Philharmonic James Nevine. "Classical music has always been about competition, and Kendrick did just what needed to be done to re-ignite the old beef of Brahms vs Wagner, or Handel vs Bach. Too many of these composers nowadays are just sucking each other's dicks."

Energy East, 2013

I understand the need for a pipeline.
It helps the economy.
Is a nationwide boon.
Jobs from here to Alberta.
How much natural landscape will
Really be affected?
Think about the great projects of nature:
Isn't the Natural World
One big Pipeline?
Or how about the Spiritual Plane;
In the last book of his Republic
Plato posits that the souls of rational beings 
Are pumped across the Elysian national dreamscape
A la tube.
I think Hegel saw history as something
Of an interplay of natural resources
Criss crossing the bare skeleton of nature
In pipelines of Absolute Reason.
Lenin would like them well enough.
Mao would love them.
Pipelines will defeat Nazis and Communists
By becoming Nazi and Communist.
A pipeline is the worst form of government
Except for all those others.
A pipeline is the stuff of Habermasian communication,
Democracy, friction-less capitalism,
The Internet!
A pipeline!
Love in the abstract
Is a swirling cascade of my natural gases
Pumped to your processing plant!
Don't you grasp how important this is!
The future is not just about stasis,
Not just about ideals,
Not just about the triumph or fall of Party or Nation,
Not just the return of divinity to
Mortal substance...
The future can be about making money too.