Domestication Lost Overnight: Fun and Games with Killing Joke

Poster advertising the Killing Joke album  

Fire Dances (1983)

 

Get out my way - we go / Take back those ways you know 

Fun and games come out to play / Fun and games for unknown days [1]

 

I.

 

I've said it before and I'll doubtless say it again: Isn't it amazing how certain songs from one's youth continue to resonate in one's imagination? [1] 

 

Thus it was that, while reading for a possible future post discussing The Wild Boys (1971) in relation to Lord of the Flies (1954) [2], I couldn't help recalling the Killing Joke song 'Fun and Games' [3]. 

 

Like the above novels, this track also plays with ideas to do with feral youth and the breakdown of civilisation and I thought it might be amusing to write something about its lyrical content [4] in advance of the forthcoming Burroughs-Golding study as a kind of punk teaser.

 

 

II. 

 

Essentially, the lyrics to 'Fun and Games' - which can be found on genius.com - provide a brief exploration of subcultural atavism. But, interestingly - because the song establishes a moonlit setting - we are encouraged also to consider ideas to do with nocturnal liminality.

 

Atavism is an interesting term whose meaning within biology is fairly straightforward and fixed: the reappearance of an ancestral characteristic (or genetic trait) in an individual organism after several generations of absence; i.e., it's an evolutionary throwback caused by mutation - think of a baby born with a vestigial tail.    

 

But atavism is also used by those working in the social sciences, where it refers to the tendency for a people in times of social upheaval to revert to the ways of thinking and acting of a former (more primitive) age. And that's what excites Jaz Coleman and the other members of Killing Joke; the possibility that a people might discover its ancestral past and wilfully reject modernity.   

 

The album Fire Dances (1983), on which 'Fun and Games' features, is a call for the becoming-pagan of disaffected youth in the UK via a series of fun and games that lead participants from social enslavement and conventional models of maturity to anarchic autonomy and the cruel innocence of childhood. 

 

Killing Joke are not advocating merely for a lifestyle choice: one is being challenged to make a total commitment; to take back those ways long abandoned and step outside the gate. Whether this necessitates fleeing to Iceland or unto the ends of the earth, is debatable. 

 

III. 

 

The opening lines of 'Fun and Games' immediately establish a liminal setting: 

 

Twilight open and you're on your own 

Moon is shining, you want fun and games

 

Twilight represents a threshold state, mirroring the boundary between the rational, white-faced daytime self and the untamed, dark-bodied self that comes out to play at the witching hour and dances round bonfires, etc. 

 

During those hours that do not quite belong to one day or the other - the intermediate time when dreams seem real and reality but a dream - standard routines, social conventions, and normal expectations are all suspended. Bakhtin referred to this suspension or overturning of the established order through song, dance, comedy, and chaos as the carnivalesque. 

 

Now, while that sounds joyous and liberating, one should be aware that the carnivalesque has a dark and violent underbelly. For when you do away with law and order you don't just get harmless fun and games, you also open the way to savage and destructive desires - including the desire for torture and human sacrifice. 

 

Finally, it's interesting that the song indicates that one is very much alone at this time: awake, while the rest of the world sleeps blissfully in its bed. Such isolation enables introspection. And introspection often involves hearing the voice of a demon whispering inside your head that says: Let's play wild - volatile!

   

 

IV. 

The second verse of 'Fun and Games' is interesting in that it reveals that playmates - a word privileged by Arthur Askey and Hugh Hefner alike - belong to both sexes: All the boys and girls join together in the streets and have the same wild look in their eyes (domestication lost overnight).  

 

And the reason this interests is because it starkly contrasts with The Wild Boys and Lord of the Flies, both of which are concerned only with young males. There are no girls on Golding's unnamed island and, in Burroughs's novel, the Wild Boys are an armed group of militant homosexuals intent on destroying heteronormative civilisation [5]. 

 

As for Killing Joke, well, whilst 'Fun and Games' seems to accord boys and girls an equal right to play, sexual politics remains one of the most underdeveloped areas of their work. Indeed, we have to wait nearly three decades until the song 'Pole Shift' explicitly makes the connection between the overthrow of civilisation and libidinal liberation. 

 

In other words, it is only in 2012 that they finally set out their vision of a future wherein "the taboos of today are tomorrow's delights" and bourgeois sexual morality is swept away in "one great orgasm by the light of day" [6]. 

 

 

V. 

 

The third and final verse of 'Fun and Games' elevates the game from localised juvenile delinquency to an apocalyptic generational coup:  

 

Games get bigger all the time 

Because the playpen's falling - stakes are high 

And the child will conquer - step by step [7]

  

Literally speaking, a playpen is simply a small, portable enclosure with high sides made of mesh, plastic, or wood that keeps a child safe and contained so caregivers can get on with other tasks without constantly having to provide supervision.

 

But, here, it refers metaphorically to the restrictive institutions of childhood - such as the family unit, the nursery, the school ... Its falling thus suggests wider societal collapse. When the architectural boundaries of adult supervision crumble, the games lose their benign, recreational status and transform into existential events (stakes are high).

 

The declaration that the child will conquer subverts the traditional teleology of maturation. Instead of growing up to inherit the adult world, youth take over - step by step - through atavistic force. 

 

This mirrors the tragic climax of Lord of the Flies, where Jack and his followers smash the democratic rules established by Ralph and Piggy. However, whereas Golding introduces an adult authority figure (the naval officer) at the final moment to halt the slaughter, the Killing Joke lyrics offer no such restoration of order. 

 

Thus, in a sense, 'Fun and Games' is closer in spirit to The Wild Boys, which also ends with a dreamlike (or, if you prefer, nightmarish) vision of the traditional world collapsing as untamed youth achieves its global victory and the downfall of adult civilization. 

 

 

VI. 

  

The relentless, almost incantatory repetition of the refrain fun and games come out to play at the conclusion of the song strips these phrases of their innocent connotation. By juxtaposing the terminology of childhood with the vocabulary of political (and psychological) instability, the song is a strangely compelling hymn to youth gone wild.  

 

Killing Joke are, if you like, a punk version of Golding's choir boys - happy to paint their faces and summon their own atavistic demons during nocturnal rituals around the fire. Golding - like Freud [8] - might view this with despair but Jaz Coleman and his fellow discontents think this in terms of liberation. 

 

Notes

 

[1] Lyrics from 'Fun and Games', written by Killing Joke (Jaz Coleman, Paul Ferguson, Paul Raven, and Geordie Walker). See note [3] below for more details. 

 

[2] I discuss this phenomenon with reference to another Killing Joke track taken from the album Fire Dances and the concept of a reminiscence bump in a post titled 'Musical Memories' (30 Aug 2023). 

 

[3] 'Fun and Games' is on Fire Dances (E. G. Records, 1983) - the fourth studio album by Killing Joke and first to feature new bass player Paul Raven. It was critically well-received and reached number 29 in the UK Albums Chart.  

 

[4] Although I am not here going to discuss the music, it is certainly the case Paul Ferguson's tribal drum tracks, Raven's bass and Geordie's jagged guitar work provide the perfect sonic landscape for Jaz Coleman's call to come out and play.

 

[5] Golding excluded girls to focus exclusively on what we would now call toxic masculinity in relation to his own lifetime experiences, on the grounds that he simply didn't know enough about girls to feel qualified to write about them. 

      Burroughs, meanwhile, was openly and aggressively misogynistic, excluding female characters as a matter of principle - in his queer utopia, gay male liberation comes only after the complete erasure of any female presence. 

 

[6] Lyrics from the song 'Pole Shift', by Killing Joke (Jaz Coleman, Paul Ferguson, Geordie Walker, and Youth), the opening track on the album MMXII (Spinefarm Records, 2012) - their fourteenth studio album. The only other track I can think of that has a sexual edge (and some heavy breathing), is 'Lust Almighty', on Fire Dances (1983). 

[7] Lyrics from 'Fun and Games', written by Killing Joke. 

 

[8] For Freud, writing in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) there is a permanent antagonism between the demands of instinct and the restrictions of a civilisation that is founded upon a repression of those instincts. 

      He argues that this repression is not only necessary, but a good and vital thing; that humanity is better off domesticated in the name of love. Yes, a loss of instinctive freedom can cause a certain amount of suffering and lead to guilt, but it's a price worth paying in Freud's view. For to give free expression to wild and dangerous desires is to surrender to the 'death drive'.   

 

 

Dancing in the Rain: Notes on The Wild Boys

Simon, John, Andy, Nick, and Roger - 

the (not so) Wild Boys of Duran Duran 

Photo by Mike Owen (1984)

 

I.

 

Just to be clear: I don't much like - and have never much cared for - Duran Duran [1].

 

Having said that, their single 'The Wild Boys', released in October 1984 [2], intrigues because of its controversial point of literary reference: namely, the novel of that title by cult American author William S. Burroughs.

  

 

II. 

 

The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead (Grove Press, 1971) tells the story of a group of youths who, in a dystopian near-future, revolt against civilisation and embrace a life of savage violence, drug-fuelled hedonism, and sadistic homosexuality. 

 

As a piece of fiction, it isn't really my cup of tea: too experimental for my tastes [3].

 

Nevertheless, if one reads it as a work of radical (anti-assimilationist) queer theory akin to Monique Wittig's Les Guérillères (1969) [4], then it certainly has philosophical interest and it remains a favourite book among those who align themselves to the counterculture and wish to challenge heteronormative ideas and values.

 

 

III.

 

Apparently, the idea for the song came from the Australian director Russell Mulcahy, who wanted to make a full-length feature film based on Burroughs's surreal and sexually explicit novel. 

 

Mulcahy asked the band to produce a soundtrack and, excited by the proposal, Simon Le Bon immediately began writing some lyrics for a title track based on Mulcahy's brief synopsis of the book [5].  

 

Meanwhile, the rest of the group set about writing the music, taking inspiration less from Burroughs and more from Frankie Goes to Hollywood who had hit the number one spot in the UK charts earlier that year with their phenomenal debut single 'Relax' [6].    

 

'The Wild Boys' became one of the band's highest-charting singles, peaking at number two in the charts in both the UK and US. Naturally, Mulcahy directed the accompanying video which was filmed on the 007 Stage at Pinewood Studios and cost an outrageous sum for the time (over a million pounds).  

 

 

IV.  

 

Mulcahy originally intended his award-winning music video to act as a teaser for his proposed cinematic adaptation of Burroughs's novel. Unfortunately, however, this ambitious film project never came to fruition [7]. 

 

Well, I say unfortunately, but perhaps it's just as well ... 

 

For I worry, having seen how the Duran Duran video gives Burroughs's deliriously homoerotic vision a boring, hetero-masculine, Mad Max-style makeover, what else Mulcahy - despite being gay - would have done to straightwash [8] and tame the story of The Wild Boys.

 

Ultimately, despite his vulgar auteur tag, Mulcahy is very much a mainstream commercial director rather than an underground filmmaker and should probably be prevented from even considering certain projects. 

 

Any adaptation of The Wild Boys that stays even halfway true to the book is never going to be given the greenlight by a major studio, open in cinemas across the land, or find a wide audience - not even among Durannies and members of the MTV generation.      

Notes 

 

[1] When my girlfriend Gillian bought a copy of the Duran Duran single 'Save a Prayer' in August 1982 (taken from the album Rio) it caused a huge row. I regarded it as both a betrayal of everything punk stood for and a compromise with everything punk had sought to destroy. The fact that she was defended in her actions by my friend Kirk Field at the time - as he also liked this new wave ballad - is something I still haven't forgotten or quite forgiven to this day. 

 

[2] 'The Wild Boys' was the only studio track on the Duran Duran live album Arena (Parlophone, 1984), and was produced by Nile Rodgers, who gave it the same kind of energy as he had given 'The Reflex' - the number one single released by Duran Duran in April 1984, from the album Seven and the Ragged Tiger (EMI, 1984).   

 

[3] This is not to deny the writer's genius or the book's greatness. For an insightful (and appreciative) review of The Wild Boys by Alfred Kazin in The New York Times (12 Dec 1971), please click here. 

 

[4] For a discussion of Wittig's novel (and its influence on the thinking of Nick Land), see my post titled 'Fanged Noumena: On Nick Land and the New Amazons' (1 June 2026). 

      I'm aware that Burroughs wrote from a very different perspective to Wittig, but I think there's a similar political logic and an aesthetics of negation at play in their writings. For example, both authors reject notions of reform, explicitly calling for total revolution and the destruction of bourgeois institutions such as the family. They also both believe that this revolution against the straight mindset is something that must be fought at all levels - including (and not least of all) the level of language. 

 

[5] It might be noted at this point that Russell Mulcahy and the boys from Duran Duran weren't the first to be inspired by Burroughs's novel. Malcolm McLaren, for example, was a huge William Burroughs fan and before settling on the name Bow Wow Wow for the band he assembled and managed after the Sex Pistols, he considered calling them the Sex Gang Children - a phrase he coined based upon his reading of The Wild Boys. 

      And - predictably - David Bowie also credited The Wild Boys with aesthetically influencing the creation of his Ziggy Stardust persona, for which he thanked Burroughs when they met in person at an event in November 1973. This successful encounter, which was featured in Rolling Stone in February 1974, is recalled by Jon Savage in 'When Bowie met Burroughs', The Guardian (9 Mar 2013). 

 

[6] 'Relax', by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, was produced by Trevor Horn and released on ZTT Records in October 1983. It reached number one in the charts at the end of January 1984 and was one of the decade's most controversial records - far more so than Duran Duran's 'Wild Boys' - it was even subject to a BBC ban owing to the sexually explicit nature of the lyrics (and Mike Read's distaste for such). A different version of the song features on the Frankie Goes to Hollywood debut album Welcome to the Pleasuredome (ZTT, 1984). 

      The band were marketed by ZTT co-founder Paul Morley in direct opposition to their pop rivals; a quarter-page ad for the single appeared in the music press declaring that Frankie Goes to Hollywood were going to make Duran Duran 'lick the shit off their shoes'. 

      The original video for the song, directed by Bernard Rose, was set in an S&M themed gay nightclub and featured the band members interacting with several characters of the kind that one might expect to encounter in such a venue. Not surprisingly, this too was banned by both the BBC and MTV. I provide a link to it so that readers can compare and contrast it with the Wild Boys video made by Mulcahy (I think I know which Burroughs would have preferred). 

 

[7] Speaking of projects that never came to fruition ... Burroughs himself had, in fact, written a screenplay based on his novel, which he hoped to have produced as a low-budget, hardcore gay porn film. However, after negotiations with the notorious Fred Halsted came to nothing, Burroughs abandoned the idea. 

      On a happier note, in 2017 The Wild Boys was finally adapted into a full-length feature film titled Les garçons sauvages, directed by Bertrand Mandico. It's not what one would call a faithful adaptation - more a clever reimagining. Thus, while it adopts certain ideas and carries over a transgressive spirit from the novel, the film replaces Burroughs's fragmented, non-linear narrative with a continuous plot and introduces supernatural elements to do with gender metamorphosis that are entirely absent from the original work. However, while moving away from the sadistic cisgender male homosexual experience, it remains defiantly a queer, anti-heteronormative movie - just all a bit more dreamlike. Click on the link provided to watch the trailer.  

 

[8] Straightwashing refers to the manner in which fictional gay and queer characters are portrayed as straight in order to make their representation comply with heteronormativity. A common justification for such queer erasure includes a concern with mainstream audience reaction. 

 

 

Better to Be a Prosimian Than a Superhuman (Or Why I Prefer Lemurs to Lemurians)

A Lemurian in their cosmic-astral form dancing through the heavens [1] 

and a pair of lemurs in all their wet-nosed beauty ghosting in the forest

 

 

I.

 

Humanity is a species desperately insecure about its place in the universe. The Copernican revolution followed by the death of God hasn't helped matters. 

 

However, existential anxiety does in part explain the rise of numerous New Age mythologies which offer alternative histories of mankind based on pseudoarchaeology and various occult beliefs. 

 

The possibility that we are descended from superhuman - possibly alien - beings addresses the pathological need to feel not only exceptional but cosmically significant. We obsessively imagine ethereal ancestors to validate our uniqueness, while pushing the flesh-and-blood miracles staring back at us from the natural world to the edge of extinction. 

 

This is perfectly illustrated by the way in which a scientific hypothesis about a lost continent called Lemuria - intended to explain the presence of lemurs on Madagascar - was hijacked by theosophists in the late nineteenth century and transformed into a bizarre myth of a primal spiritually advanced species of man.  

 

In other words, humans decided that the evolutionary history of lemurs was of no great concern to them - even though, of course, their evolutionary history is our evolutionary history [2] - and that it was far more fascinating to invent a fictional race of giant, telepathic beings who once lived on a sunken continent: ladies and gentlemen, meet the Lemurians ... 

 

 

II.        

 

To understand how deeply this preference for conceited fantasy over objective scientific fact runs, we must look at how the myth of Lemuria developed. It did not begin with an esoteric vision; it began, rather, with a pile of bones and an attempt by British zoologist Philip Sclater in 1864 to solve a geographical puzzle [3].

 

Sclater noticed that fossilised remains of lemurs were found in both Madagascar and India, but, curiously, not in the landmasses between them. Before the mechanics of continental drift were understood, the only logical explanation Sclater could devise was a sunken land bridge beneath the Indian Ocean; a continent he named Lemuria, in honour of the primates whose ancient remains inspired him. 

 

Initially, then, Lemuria was a theory within respectable mainstream science. But after the famous German biologist Ernst Haeckel suggested in 1868 that Lemuria might also be the lost cradle of humanity, the idea was appropriated by thinkers outside the scientific community, including Helena Blavatsky and members of her Theosophical Society. 

 

They didn't give a shit about the evolution of lemurs or patterns of primate migration. They simply wanted a stage upon which they could play out their mad racial fantasies and conjure up visions of a lost world inhabited by a root-race of hermaphroditic superhumans channelling cosmic energy with sacred crystals [4].       

 

Theories about Lemuria were laid to rest when, in the 1960s, the scientific community finally accepted Alfred Wegener's theory of plate tectonics and continental drift, first proposed in 1912. However, the idea lived on in the popular imagination, especially among those prone to New Age beliefs, crackpot history, and pseudoarchaeology and there is now a vast body of fringe literature available for those with the time and patience [5]. 

  

It is now believed by those who like this sort of thing that the last of the Lemurians are holed up - literally - beneath Mount Shasta, in Northern California, in a hidden, jewel-encrusted city called Telos [6].   

 

 

III.  

 

Strip away all the comforting New Age delusions and a simple truth emerges: It is infinitely preferable to be a real wet-nosed prosimian than a mythical Lemurian. 

 

Certainly for my part, I have no desire to become spiritually superhuman. On the other hand, however, I would quite happily become-animal or reincarnate as any species [7] of forest-haunting lemur [8] subordinate to the alpha-female leading my troop.     

 

Being a lemur - i.e., an actual living creature - offers distinct advantages over being a Lemurian; i.e., a mythical being born of lost-continent lore. For one thing, you are actually alive - and that, as Lawrence says, is the most marvellous thing of all: "For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive" [9].

 

Inhabiting a lush, tropical habitat, lemurs lead a relatively stress-free existence: foraging for food (which is plentiful and varied); sleeping, sunbathing, leaping from tree to tree, and cuddling up with other members of their tight-knit and highly cooperative family troops (a demokrasian'ny fikasihana as they say in Malagasy). 

 

Before the relatively recent arrival of man, lemurs enjoyed a safe and peaceful existence for tens of millions of years [10]. 

 

IV. 

 

So, we have to ask: Why do so many people find an imaginary humanoid more compelling than a biological organism, such as a strangely beautiful (and beautifully strange) lemur?

 

The answer is simple: myths flatter the human ego, whereas evolutionary reality demands humility. 

 

For the science reveals that our ancestors were not glowing, ethereal giants, but small, scurrying, bug-eating mammals that survived by clinging to branches in the dark. It demonstrates how we are intimately linked to the lemur through shared DNA, skeletal blueprints, and social impulses - and a lot of people find that disconcerting. 

 

In fact, those who subscribe to Idealism and myths of human exceptionalism despise all animals, including lemurs, because they remind us that we are fundamentally the same: eating, breathing, shitting, fucking, and dying just like them.  

 

To believe in Lemurians is to believe that we are the descendants of gods. It implies that the universe is a story centred entirely around the human potential to transcend our biology, our mortality, our terrestrial nature. It allows us to indulge in escapism, looking both backward and forward to a golden age of spiritual perfection while we busy ourselves actively destroying the Earth we live on.

 

The Lemurian is a sterile projection of Victorian and New Age anxieties: nothing more. The lemur is a miracle of evolution, perfectly adapted to an environment that they help maintain in one of the most biodiverse places on Earth [11]. 

 

When we trade the lemur for the Lemurian, we exchange a vital link to our own evolutionary history for a funfair mirror that reflects only our selves in a crazily distorted manner. Looking into the limpid amber eyes of a lemur [12] doesn't connect you to a fake spiritual hierarchy, but to the foundational elements of our own behaviour, including not only cognitive flexibility, but the need to be in touch - with other people, but also with plants and animals and inanimate objects [13].  

 

The next time you hear some idiot rambling on about the ancient wisdom of the lost continent of Lemuria or the spiritual aura of its fictional inhabitants, tell them to put down their crystals and go look at the vibrant chaos of the natural world unfolding in their own back garden. 

 

The phantom continent is exposed as a historical footnote born from a misunderstanding of what the fossil record was telling us. But the animals that inspired the myth are still there, clinging to survival in the forests of Madagascar. We don't need to invent a magical past to be a part of something wondrous. Reality is already spectacular enough. 

 

Stop looking for the Lemurian: celebrate the lemur!

 

Notes

 

[1] Artwork by Harry Rankin for the cover of the debut album by Sophia Space Agency, The Turning Blue, released on Lemurian Records (2026). For my thoughts on this dark ambient project by Melpomeni Kermanidou, please click here.   

 

[2] As primates, both humans and lemurs share a distant common ancestor. The split into two distinct suborders - humans belong to the Haplorhini along with other dry-nosed apes and monkeys; lemurs belong to the Strepsirrhini (wet-nosed primates) - occurred over sixty million years ago. 

      As those who have devoted their professional lives to studying lemurs will tell you, "both living species and their extinct relatives, are a crucial part of the human story", for despite millions of years separating us, "we still share genes, complex social lives, and many of the same susceptibilities to disease".  

      For more information, please visit the Duke Lemur Center, founded at Duke University (North Carolina) in 1966. The DLC is a world leader in the study, care, and protection of lemurs - Earth's most threatened group of mammals (although lemurs have thrived for tens of millions of years, human activity and climate change has now left many species either endangered or critically endangered).

 

[3] See Philip Lutley Sclater, 'The Mammals of Madagascar', in The Quarterly Journal of Science, Vol. 1, pp. 213-219.

 

[4] I really don't want to follow Blavatsky too far down the theosophical rabbit hole, but, in brief, she believed Lemurians to be the third of seven distinct root races from which modern humanity evolved. Exceedingly tall beings, Lemurians possessed a third eye via which they could perceive higher dimensions. Unfortunately, after discovering sex they began to mate with lower species. This led to their spiritual degeneration and eventual downfall (although, on the bright side for any primatologists reading, it did result in the creation of apes).

 

[5] See the work of James Churchward, for example, who developed the concept of Lemuria in several books published in the 1920s and '30s. He referred to it as the lost continent of Mu, however, and identified its location in the Pacific Ocean (also incorporating ideas to do with Atlantis into his work). 

      See also L. Sprague de Camp's classic study Lost Continents: The Atlantis Theme in History, Science, and Literature (Gnome Press, 1954). An updated version was published by Dover Press in 1970 and it remains one of the most reliable books on this subject.

 

[6] Mount Shasta - a potentially active volcano - has been the subject of a large number of myths and legends. In 1905, the American writer and mystic Frederick Spencer Oliver published his A Dweller on Two Planets which claimed that survivors from Lemuria had found refuge there after their own land sunk beneath the waves, building a complex system of tunnels and caves - carpeted with furs, apparently. 

      Later, Rosicrucian Harvey Spencer Lewis also wrote about the hidden Lemurians of Mount Shasta and his work - Lemuria: The Lost Continent of the Pacific (1931) - along with Oliver's, is largely responsible for the legend's widespread popularity. Predictably, belief in the US-based Lemurians has been incorporated into numerous new religious movements (or cults, as I think we might fairly call some of them) and today internet forums are still filled with people instructing you how to connect with your inner Lemurian.

 

[7] There are over a 120 recognised species of lemur divided across five main families. They are found exclusively in the wild on the island of Madagascar. Readers might be interested to know that with more than 200 animals across 13 species, the Duke Lemur Center (linked to above) houses the world's most diverse population of lemurs outside their native Madagascar.

      

[8] I say forest-haunting rather than simply forest-dwelling, as the name lemur comes from the Latin word lemures, meaning ghost. Carl Linnaeus chose this term in 1754 because of the nocturnal habits and slow movements of the animals and not, as is popularly believed, because of their large eyes that seem to glow in the dark and strange cries. 

 

[9] D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, ed. Mara Kalnins (Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 149. 

 

[10] See Katherine Rundell, 'Consider the Lemur', in The London Review of Books, Vol. 40, No. 13 (5 July 2018), where she writes: "The early human arrivals on the island eradicated at least 15 species of lemur. Now, largely due to deforestation, 24 species are critically endangered, 49 are endangered and 94 per cent of all species are threatened." 

      Rundell also explains how until recently there was a strong taboo on hunting and eating lemurs, which were believed to be magical creatures (part cat, part monkey, part human, part demon) but this has now mostly been eroded: "So the myths have not saved the lemurs." 

  

[11] Madagascar scores exceptionally high for global biodiversity, ranking as a top megadiverse country with over 90% endemic species. The UK, by comparison, ranks in the bottom 10% worldwide for nature-depleted ecosystems, retaining only half of its original plant and animal life due to centuries of industrialisation and intensive land use.

 

[12] I'm thinking here of something written by William Burroughs in his short eco-surreal novel Ghost of Chance (1991), that was primarily set in Madagascar and addressed the subject of environmental destruction. Burroughs was particularly fond of lemurs and described them as having eyes like "limpid amber, in which the pupil floated like a glittering jewel, changing color with shifts of the light". The story ends with the author requesting readers donate to the Duke University Primate Center.

 

[13] Lawrence's democracy of touch - mentioned earlier in the post (in Malagasy) - is founded upon what he terms the mystery or inspiration of touch and by which he means: "The touch of the feet on the earth, the touch of the fingers on a tree, on a creature, the touch of hands and breasts, the touch of the whole body to body, and the interpenetration of passionate love." 

      See D. H. Lawrence, The First and Second Lady Chatterley Novels, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn, (Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 323  

  

 

This post is for Meni.  

 

 

It's Your Verses That We Want and Your Verses We Shall Have! Notes on Plagiarism, Piracy, and Found Poetry

 

'Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, 

and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.' [1] 

 

 

I. 

 

Coming as I do from a punk anarchist tradition [2], I'm pretty much of the view that all property - including intellectual property - is theft and that piracy is a swashbuckling method of redistributing gold and cultural capital.

 

And I have little sympathy when bourgeois poets complain about plagiarism, bleating that such an illicit compositional technique is an assault upon originality of expression and the authenticity of experience (i.e., their artistic integrity). 

 

I can see there's something slightly shameful about covert plagiarism, when an attempt is made to hide or disguise what one's doing; if you're going to steal, then do so like Willie Brodie for the sake of the danger and to liberate ideas, not merely so that you might pass off something taken as your own. 

But if you're upfront and open about what you're doing - if your plagiarism is overt and you make no secret of the fact that you located your materials here, there, and everywere - then that seems admirable to me. 

 

In fact, I'm something of a fan of so-called found poetry ...

 

 

II.

 

Found poetry is verse created by recontextualising words, lines, and even whole passages purloined from elsewhere and then making a number of crafty modifications to the text in order to give it fresh meaning or look. How and to what extent the poem is changed - or treated, as they say in the trade - is really up to the finder.    

 

In a sense, a found poem is the literary equivalent of the readymades that Duchamp and the Dadaists foisted on the art world over a century ago. I don't know if he was the first to hit on the technique, but the great American writer and artist Bern Porter famously published Found Poems with the Something Else Press in 1972 [3] and it's him that I initially think of whenever the subject comes up.   

 

 

III.

 

Having found a text to work on, there are several ways one might then begin to fuck with it, including  ...  

 

(i) Erasure

 

Poems produced by erasure have had words from an existing text redacted or blacked out, thereby producing a new work whilst at the the same time making us curious about what has been concealed.

 

Thus, whilst erasure may subvert the question of authorship, it nevertheless acknowledges (and draws attention to) an original text and perhaps raises political questions around censorship, secrecy, and the control of information. 

 

The name often associated with the technique is Doris Cross, who, in 1965, famously placed certain columns from a 1913 edition of Webster's Dictionary under erasure [4]. 

 

(ii) Patchworking

 

A cento is a poetical patchwork entirely composed of verses, passages, or simply short fragments taken from an author (or several authors), then stitched into a new body of text à la Dr. Frankenstein. 

 

It's a very old form, originating in the 3rd or 4th century (if not earlier), but it's one that is still explored and experimented with today by writers such as myself [5]. 

 

(iii) Découpé

 

This is what we call in English a cut-up technique; i.e., one that involves a lot of textual snipping and rearranging in order to create what is known as an aleatory narrative; i.e., a story that incorporates chance or randomness into its composition and/or structure. 

 

William Burroughs and his pal Brion Gysin popularized this technique in the 1950s and 1960s, although it can be traced back to the Dadaists of the 1920s (Tristan Tzara was a fan of such instant poetry). 

 

It has since been used by many scissor-wielding artists in a wide variety of contexts, though those who think that découpé might magically reveal a text's implicit content or true meaning are being ridiculous [6]. 

 

In closing, let me express my admiration for Deleuze's attempt to transform the cut-up into a rather more promiscuous (and less learned) pick-up technique. As he writes: 

 

"You should not try to find whether an idea is just or correct. You should look for a completely different idea, elsewhere, in another area, so that something passes between the two which is neither in one nor the other." 

 

Deleuze continues:  

 

"You don't have to be learned, to know or be familiar with a particular area, but to pick up this or that in areas which are very different. [...] Burroughs' cut-up is still a method of probabilities - at least linguistic ones - and not a procedure [...] which combines the heterogeneous elements" [7]. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] T. S. Eliot, 'Philip Massinger', essay in The Sacred Wood, (Methuen and Co. Ltd., 1920), p. 114.

 

[2] That is to say, an anarchist tradition that owes more to Malcolm McLaren than it does to Proudhon. 

 

[3]   In 1972, Bern Porter published Found Poems via Something Else Press. It features hundreds of found poems selected from newspapers, ads and everyday printed matter, some involving collage techniques, others displayed as readymades. 

 

[4] For an interesting attempt to answer the question 'Who Is Doris Cross?' by Lynn Xu posted on the Poetry Foundation website (25 April 2014): click here. 

[5] See the post: 'My Name is Victor Frankenstein' (6 March, 2022): click here. 

[6] Burroughs was drawn towards the idea of a text being invested with unconscious meaning. He also suggested cut-ups may be effective as a form of divination: 'When you cut into the present, the future leaks out.' That seem's doubtful, although it's a nice thought. 

      I found this line from Burroughs in the 'Translator's Introduction' to Síomón Solomon's Hölderlin's Poltergeists (Peter Lang, 2020), p. 14.  

 

[7] Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (The Athlone Press, 1987), p. 10.