Give a Girl the Right Shoes ...

Photo by Mario Testino for Vogue

Mario Testino's stunning photograph of Suki Waterhouse, Cara Delevigne, and Georgia May Jagger in the new edition of Vogue (April 2015) obviously owes a great deal to Antonio Canova's sculpture The Three Graces, in which the beautiful young daughters of Zeus are shown huddled together in naked embrace.

What excites most about Testino's photograph, however, is not the obvious sexual allure of the models but the fabulous faux-fur heel sandals they're wearing, designed by Sophia Webster for Shrimps (SS15), the playful fashion label created by Hannah Weiland.

Miss Webster, a graduate of the London College of Fashion and the Royal College of Art, presented her first collection of footwear in SS13, after having worked as a design assistant to Nicholas Kirkwood. She has rightly been recognised within the British fashion industry as a genius and received several prestigious awards for developing a unique but nonetheless commercially viable aesthetic that, like Canova's sculpture or Testino's picture, combines beauty, charm, and joy in a modern, sophisticated, slightly subversive manner that one is almost tempted to term neon-classical.

As Marilyn Monroe famously said: Give a girl the right shoes and she can conquer the world.      
 

The Conspiracy against the Human Race

Hippocampus Press, (2011)

Thomas Ligotti is a contemporary American writer of supernatural horror with philosophical pretensions. He is often described as a cult author, which is a way of saying that he is little known and little read, but much loved by those few who are familiar with him and his work.

For the record, I'm not one of these. And, having just finished reading his first full-length work of non-fiction which comes with an admittedly intriguing title and somewhat creepy cover, I'm not about to become a Ligotti fanboy in the foreseeable future. 

The Conspiracy against the Human Race is pessimistic, nihilistic, and anti-natalist. Unfortunately, it's also badly written. His one big idea, which is repeated and capitalised throughout the book - that life is MALIGNANTLY USELESS - may very well be true, but there are far worse and more shocking things than this; such as producing books that are MIND-NUMBINGLY TEDIOUS.   
 
Ray Brassier should, in my view, be embarrassed to have provided even the briefest of brief forewords; one that attempts to fig-leaf over the obvious shortcomings of the book by suggesting that Ligotti, thanks to his status as an artist, is liberated from the conventional demands placed upon a writer of critical theory and unencumbered by the "cringing deference towards social utility that straightjackets most professional philosophers" [10].

This is just bluster and it disappoints almost as much as the text that follows. As for Brassier's hyperbolic claim that Ligotti "sets out what is perhaps the most sustained challenge yet to the intellectual blackmail that would oblige us [humanity] to be eternally grateful for a 'gift' [life] we never invited", this is saved from being laughable only by strategic use of the qualifying adverb perhaps.

Having said all this, there is one passage in the final chapter of Ligotti's book with which I fully agree; a thanatological dismissal of that most overrated faculty called upon by poets and others of whom we should always be suspicious:

"Without death - meaning without our consciousness of death - no story of supernatural horror would ever have been written, nor would any other artistic representation of human life have been created for that matter. It is always there, if only between the lines or brushstrokes, or conspicuously by its absence. It is a terrific stimulus to that which is at once one of our greatest weapons and greatest weaknesses - imagination. Our minds are always on the verge of exploding with thoughts and images as we ceaselessly pound the pavement of our world. Both our most exquisite cogitations and pour worst cognitive drivel announce our primal torment: We cannot linger in the stillness of nature's vacuity. And so we have imagination to beguile us. A misbegotten hatchling of consciousness, a birth defect of our species, imagination is often revered as a sign of vigor in our make-up. But it is really just a psychic overcompensation for our impotence as beings." [218].  

On The Horror of Living in the Moment

I used to celebrate the idea of living in the moment. That is to say, of enjoying the very nowness of time with neither memory of the past, nor anticipation of days to come.

But now, having witnessed how Alzheimer's traps and isolates a person precisely in a perpetual present, I know that this is actually a petrifying prospect. One might become innocent, in a Nietzschean sense of the term (i.e. as a concept closely tied to forgetfulness), but one becomes less than human rather than overhuman and increasingly without world, as Heidegger would say.

In other words, to live in the moment is to inexorably turn to stone ...         

Moments of Wonder

Illustration of (Diane Morgan as) Philomena Cunk 

by Jack Hughes for Gallery 1988

http://jackmrhughes.tumblr.com/ 

Wonder, says Socrates, is the mark of a true philosopher. 

In fact, philosophy has no other origin but this dizzying sense of astonishment before the universe and the manifold things that compose it. Thus, in attempting to understand the latter, one must expect one's head to spin; for objects, although alluring, are ultimately alien and perplexing in nature, rather than familiar and reassuring.   

Sadly, this disconcerting, vertigo-inducing sense of wonder is, according to Ian Bogost, "all but eviscerated in modern thought". Some people speak of scientific wonder but this is founded upon a form of logic that merely furthers the will to knowledge and human conceit.  

However, there remains at least one woman sick with wonder in a way that invites a detachment from ordinary logics; a woman who is permanently puzzled and beautifully bemused by the world around her - Philomena Cunk - and any torpedophiles who have not yet watched her brilliant (and hilarious)  Moments of Wonder are encouraged to do so ... (begin by clicking here).

Notes

Diane Morgan is an actress, comedian and writer best known for playing Philomena Cunk: dianemorgan.co.uk

Jack Hughes is a London-based, freelance illustrator: jack-hughes.com

       

Can't We Talk About This?

John Keane, The Death of Theo Van Gogh (2007)

www.johnkeaneart.com

In November 2004, Dutch filmmaker and provocateur Theo Van Gogh was brutally slaughtered on an Amsterdam street for his part in the making of a short film entitled Submission; a film which, primarily, examined the relationship that exists between Muslims and their God and asks how necessary reform of Islam might be possible when Allah demands absolute obedience to his laws, with no room for doubt or critical dissent amongst his worshipers.   

Having shot his victim multiple times, Van Gogh's devout assailant then cut his throat and attempted to decapitate him in front of horrified witnesses, before finally plunging the knife deep into the dead man's chest. Apparently, among the last words spoken by Van Gogh to his killer were: Can't we talk about this?

Ayaan Hirsi Ali - Van Gogh's friend and collaborator on Submission - writes: 

"It was so Dutch, so sweet and innocent. Theo must have thought there was some kind of misunderstanding that could be worked out. He couldn't see that his killer was caught in a wholly different worldview. Nothing Theo could have said to him would have made any difference."

- Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Infidel, (Pocket Books, 2008), p. 321   

I recount this deeply depressing incident by way of a response to a presentation recently given by John Holroyd on the topic of Islam.

Holroyd, a Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens hating crypto-theologian, teaches philosophy and religious studies at a London college and is a man for whom these subjects are perfectly compatible, if not, indeed, one and the same thing. His paper, in essence, called for still greater dialogue between the West and the militant forces of Islamic extremism, thereby strangely echoing Van Gogh's naivety in the face of those who hate us, hate all that we love and hold dear, and mean to do us mortal harm.

Now, whilst I concede that it might be good to talk - and that loving one's enemies might be the Christian thing to do - sometimes, unfortunately, there's really nothing further to discuss and inasmuch as this loving of enemies can lead to a reluctance to actively combat the forces of murderous and reactionary violence, then Jesus's teaching might be said to result in immorality and risk the triumph of evil.   

Thus, rather than listen to Jesus, I'd sooner heed Michel Foucault who argued that fascism - whether it be political or religious in nature and whether found in the hearts and minds of others or, indeed, in our own acts and pleasures - must be vigorously resisted as an essential aspect of living an ethical life.

  

Black Noise (On the Poetry of Francis Ponge)

Kazimir Malevich, Black Square (1915) 

Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

I'm not sure I fully understand what physicists and audio engineers mean by the term black noise - I think it refers to a noise whose frequency is located close to zero (or what is commonly known as silence) on a spectrum of sound - but I like how philosopher Graham Harman uses the same term within his work to describe the background hum of mysteriously muffled objects hovering at the fringes of human intelligibility.  

Perhaps it's this gentle and virtually-inaudible sound of things that the French prose-poet Francis Ponge was able to attune his ear to ...

Known as the poet of things, Ponge explored the fascinating universe of actual entities - from pebbles to cigarettes, and flowers to bars of soap - in the (admittedly anthropocentric) belief that all objects, whilst remaining fundamentally withdrawn, nevertheless yearn to express themselves and await the coming of a speaking-subject who might hear them and find some way to articulate their near-silence, thereby revealing something of their hidden depths and weird, inhuman otherness.

What I love about Ponge - apart from his object-oriented ontology - is the fact that he avoided all the tired conventions of poetry; such as empty symbolism and allegory, self-indulgent lyricism, or obvious appeals to emotion. He declared himself an enemy of both the drabness of the dictionary and the transcendent posturing of poetry and sought to combine description and definition with the power and purity of elementary language.

His principle aim, therefore, was to defeat the Stereotype and to do so with a form of speculative realism and something extremely rare amongst artists - intellectual integrity.  

Notes

Graham Harman, Guerrilla Metaphysics, (Open Court Publishing Company, 2005).

Francis Ponge, Le parti pris des choses (1942). This collection of 32 short to medium length prose poems is available in several English translations, including, most notably, those by Lee Fahnestock, Robert Bly, and Beth Archer Brombert. 

D. H. Lawrence's Becoming-Bat

Lawrence doesn't like bats, but this doesn't stop him writing about them in his poetry in a manner of real philosophical interest. For rather than anticipate Thomas Nagel's question and attempt to say what it's like to be a bat, Lawrence allows a proto-Derridean play of différance to infuse his writing, constructing a dummy creature with a mask-like face which parodies and subverts the very notion of an essential batness.

In the short poem, 'Bat', for example, Lawrence first confuses them for swallows flying late in the Italian twilight and sewing the shadows together. But then he realises his mistake:

Swallows?

Dark air-life looping
Yet missing the pure loop ...
A twitch, a twitter, an elastic shudder in the flight 
And serrated wings against the sky,
Like a glove, a black glove thrown up at the light,
And falling back.

Never swallows!
Bats!The swallows are gone.

This realisation that he's watching bats and not birds flitting about the Ponte Vecchio and flying overhead, gives Lawrence an uneasy creeping in his scalp. He thinks of them as little clots of darkness with wings like bits of umbrella:

Creatures that hang themselves up like an old rag, to sleep;
And disgustingly upside down.
Hanging upside down like rows of disgusting old rags
And grinning in their sleep.
Bats!

They may very well be symbols of happiness and good fortune in China, but not so for this former resident of Eastwood.

In the much longer and more amusing poem 'Man and Bat', Lawrence develops his chiroptophobia whilst again doing something of philosophical and literary import. The impure frenzy with which a bat flies round and round his room in mad circles of delirium disgusts and disconcerts him, but it also allows Lawrence to demonstrate not merely how experience might be transfigured into art and given poetic expression, but how writing is inseparable from a process of becoming.

Lawrence, that is to say, establishes what Deleuze terms a zone of proximity with the bat, just as he does elsewhere with various other birds, beasts and flowers. He becomes-bat as the bat in turn becomes-rag or old umbrella. This is not something which is easy to accomplish. But to affect a becoming of this kind is something which all great writers must achieve. Indeed, this is the very mark of literary greatness.  


Notes

For an excellent reading of Lawrence's poetry in terms of différance and intertextuality, see Amit Chaudhuri's study, D H. Lawrence and 'Difference', (Oxford University Press, 2003). I am grateful to Chaudhuri for showing how - contrary to the conventional view - Lawrence is not a simple-minded nature lover concerned with understanding the beauty and essence of real animals, but, rather, in artificially constructing creatures in and on his own terms.

'Bat' and 'Man and Bat' may be found in Volume I of the Cambridge Edition of Lawrence's poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (CUP, 2013), pp. 294-300.  

Baewatch

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKpo0v0wIbE

There invariably comes a point in the development of slang wherein it crosses the threshold that divides urban cool from the mainstream. When suddenly, terms used between a small number of linguistically creative and innovative hipsters are appropriated by unimaginative individuals who can only imitate and follow trends rather than set them - including those dullards in the corporate media and commercial world who try so desperately to be down with it. By way of an example of this, we might consider the brief evolutionary history of the term bae.     

As a term of endearment, bae is simply an abbreviated form of babe or baby and not - as some commentators rather ridiculously suggest - an acronym for before anyone else. It seems to have originated amongst young English speakers in the African-American community sometime in the middle of the last decade. From there, it quickly spread via social media and popular music into general urban usage before, finally, being seized upon by the big brands such as Pizza Hut and Burger King. Bae also found itself nominated in 2014 by the OED as one of the so-called words of the year.

If this marks a sign of its success, so too does it pretty much spell the end of the line for bae; it begins to bleach, as linguists say. In other words, whilst it persists as a term, it is increasingly drained of its colour and its vibrancy is appreciably diminished thanks to widespread usage as a marketing device and the unasked for granting of legitimacy.   

Still, we needn't spend too long mourning the death of bae; there'll always be new slang terms as the young, marginalised and stylish develop their own ways of speaking so as to confuse and confound old ears. 

Anyone Can Be Van Gogh With an iPhone

Sunfuckingflower (2015) by Stephen Alexander

Bored, I decided to take a picture of the one cheerful thing in the room: a sunflower. Still bored, even after taking the picture and looking at it for a second or two and wondering at its heart of darkness, I sent it to a friend who is a lover of all things floral.

She replied: "I suppose this proves anyone can be Van Gogh if they have an iPhone."

This struck me as a rather curious remark. One sensed a degree of hostility beneath the irony, although whether this was for me as an amateur snapper or for the specific tool used to capture and send the image, I'm not entirely certain. The remark did, however, remind me of something that D. H. Lawrence once wrote:

"When Van Gogh paints sunflowers, he reveals, or achieves, the vivid relation between himself, as a man, and the sunflower, as sunflower, at that quick moment of time. His painting does not represent the sunflower itself. We shall never know what the sunflower itself is. And the camera will visualise the sunflower far more perfectly than Van Gogh can."

Is this what my friend was, in her own rather mocking manner, trying to hint at? Was she, like Lawrence, seeking to defend the fourth dimensional aspect of an artwork; i.e. that magical quality which remains incommensurable with the painter, the object, or the technology involved in creating a visual image?

Perhaps. Otherwise, she's just being sarky ...!


See: D. H. Lawrence, 'Morality and the Novel', in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 171. 

Note: No ears were mutilated in the production of the above image.

 

 

Remarks on Fifty Shades of Grey

This weekend saw the release of the cinematic adaptation of the best-selling novel by E. L. James, Fifty Shades of Grey. 

The book - once described by Salmon Rushdie as the most badly written ever published - traces out the relationship between a 21-year old college student and virgin, Anastasia Steele, and her handsome, slightly older lover, Christian Grey. 

He is an extremely wealthy and successful entrepreneur who knows precisely what he likes in the bedroom and in the boardroom (power and control) and who demands much the same thing from the women in his life as he does from his employees; i.e. total subordination. In Christian Grey's world, everyone is expected to lick his arse and have theirs spanked.

Although she finds Grey intimidating, Ana also finds him irresistible and before long she's happily riding in his helicopter and letting him have his wicked way with her; he might not be a hearts and flowers kind of guy, but he sure knows how to beat, bully and abuse a girl.         

The work thus not surprisingly features explicit scenes of bondage, discipline, and sado-masochism, as well as more conventional - though no less problematic - forms of romantic cliché and is a prime example of a genre known somewhat sneeringly by critics as mummy porn. Despite being atrociously written and promoting a highly suspect form of sexual politics, the work has topped best-seller lists here and in the US, sold over 100 million copies worldwide and been translated into more than fifty languages.

As for the film, directed by Sam Taylor Johnson of all people and starring Dakota Johnson (as Anastasia) and Jamie Dornan (as Christian Grey), it too has provoked a huge amount of media attention, faced significant opposition, and received mostly negative reviews from the critics. But it too has raked in millions of dollars and set opening day records at the box office.

What, then, is there to say at last? Is Fifty Shades simply a contemporary version of Lady Chatterley's Lover; a novel perfectly suited to our pornified and semi-literate culture? 

It's certainly possible that we get the fiction and the authors we deserve. But it's rather depressing to realise this and to accept our own complicity and shameful submission as readers; for multiple shades of grey merge finally into one unpleasant shade of brown ...