The South; or, Alles wird Trauben

For the first time, really, I find myself in the southern part of the old world, and there is something peculiar about it. The quality of decay (equally of paint and morals) is entirely superior here.

Concretely, one may observe this is in the sugar packets that are three times the size of ones you would find in the new world or in northern Europe, the ubiquity and cheapness of drink, the succulents sprouting from collapsed roofs. Austerity is to be found nowhere, and particularly not in the church, where one may find the severed head of St. John the baptist and obscene gilt drapery (not painted, but carved in wood and now dripping with who knows what substance).

But, as many have observed, there is also a mental south, and this is equally irresistible and horrifying. Here, one does not dream, but is kept in a fever state. There is no future in the south, you see- only the occasional pleasure which entirely resists planning or deferral. This is why we view it as permanently youthful, despite the wrinkled facades and rotting infrastructure. The south is precisely the point at which thanatos meets eros.

It is also 'Jack on his Deathbed,' illustrated so aptly by Walton Ford:

She treads the path that she untreads again

There is so much space to be reckoned with! And I spend so much of my time being transported — usually by car, which makes me nervous and/or sleepy — that I’m just about ready to revolutionize the whole system: change all the places to go and all the ways to go there. For example — in a perfect world —

I would go everywhere that Deutsche Bahn does not go by Gossamer Albatross, which is like a flying bicycle —

in 1979 the Gossamer Albatross traversed the English Channel and won the Kremer Prize (which is given to pioneers of human-powered flight).

And then I would fly to my houseboat — which would be round, and as much like a floating hobbit hole as possible.

My dearest ambition in life is to be a river rat like Johnny Depp in Chocolat.

And if the river got too rough, I would just go sleep in my bubble house on the beach.

Suggestions for reality shows ( ... mostly involving academics)

One of the most disturbing but most entertaining consequences of living in America has been that both of us now watch much more TV than we ever have in our lives. It’s kind of a love/hate thing: it’s so vacuous... so soulless... so ADDICTING and BRILLIANT... Reality TV is, of course, the best kind, appealing perpetually to our fascination with the real vs. the un- or hyperreal, and really our only complaint is that reality TV doesn’t feature enough academics (what, who says pasty professors can’t be telegenic?!).

To remedy the situation, we propose the following shows:

1. Publish or Perish: Academics in the Ring (i.e. if a contestant fails to publish in a peer-reviewed journal, he or she must be ‘peer-reviewed’ by The Adjudicator)

2. Wax figure-sculpting contest: can you fool the audience?

3. Wax person contest: can you fool the audience?: this entails setting people on stage while the judges and/or audience attempt to guess if the person is a real person or a wax person; see our previous post on the wax person phenomenon.

4. The Next Best-Selling Teen Novel: must draw major plot elements/religious persuasions out of hat

5. The Apprentice: Ljubljana (with Slavoj Žižek instead of Donald Trump; his hair is anyway vastly superior)

6. Dance-ademic: is deconstructive criticism parasitic or isn’t it?! is there such a thing as universal grammar or isn’t there?! did Michelangelo sculpt Laocoön or didn’t he?! DANCE IT OUT! Showdown, bitte.

Short story collection

Lauren has just shown me this v. amusing site, the Random Title Generator. It’s rather formulaic — one title is always [Adjective] + [Noun], another is always The [Noun] of the [Noun], etc., and the pool of potential words to be plugged in is relatively small — but still, if you play with it long enough, it yields some pretty entertaining results.

Here are my favorite titles, randomly generated by the internet, and their accompanying recommended plot summaries, randomly generated by my imagination:

The Cracked Person: a thriller graphic novel, about a man who, in a scientific experiment gone horribly wrong, accidentally combines his DNA with that of a pepper grinder*;

Vacant Voyages: genre: photography/psychoanalysis — pictures of people staring into space, with scholarly commentary;

The Unwilling Name: starring Hortense, or Tiglath-pileser the Third;

The Girl of the Person: a vacuous tale, to be sold exclusively by Urban Outfitters;

Lovely Snake: an epic poem, narrated by Cleopatra, describing her thoughts in the moments before she puts the asp to her breast;

The Magnificent Doors: a coffee-table book for people who love both architecture and Jim Morrison;

Crying in the Ice: über-depressing — will undoubtedly win the Booker Prize;

The Consort of the Petals: an eighteenth-century drama of scandal, passion, intrigue, decadence — basically, Dangerous Liaisons, except with flowers instead of people.


* this takes place in the future, obviously, when inanimate objects have been discovered to possess DNA...

Simulating Summer

What do you do when temperatures dip to a positively unnatural -20 degrees Fahrenheit (-29 degrees Celsius for the non-initiates)? If at all possible, board yourself up in your cave, put your samovar in overdrive, and do everything you can to trick your brain into believing it's summer. The following things have given me some relief.

1. The new Destroyer album, Kaputt, which is doubly-summery-- it's vaguely nostalgic in precisely the way August is, and it channels the 80's, which are eternal summer, in the best way possible. I showed a dear friend this video, and he asked me, "Is that guy Dan Bejar?" Only in my dreams...

2. Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), which is suffused with all the sunshine that one could possible desire, enough perhaps to become somewhat stifling. Anyone who knows me well will tell you that I have a soft spot for white dresses and inconceivably monumental rock formations, and this contains plenty of both.

3. Hallucinating elaborate and lengthy thunderstorms! For it is not just the sunshine that one misses in winter- the electricity simply is not there, and thundersnows are the rarest occurrence. I attempted to find a virtual substitute, and came closest with the 'virtual thunderstorm with a 3-d holophonic sound illusion' (I'll give anything a try that sounds like it could be part of a 19th century sideshow), but I think the science of artificial 3-d thunder is dubious at best. Still, it is better than the snow, which absorbs any sound at all.

Three kinds of love

The first is love mixed with architecture: yellow hot-water-bottle windows, a tear in every one, and the red tower from Vienna Westbahnhof.

(Hundertwasser, Yellow Houses — it hurts to wait with love,

if love is somewhere else — jealousy, 1966)

The second is tiny, that shies at the hooting of cars, that adores the bells of horse-trams.

должно быть, маленький,

смирный любеночек.

Она шарахается автомобильных гудков.

Любит звоночки коночек

(Mayakovsky, A Cloud in Trousers, 1915)

The third is contained in twelve billion words, beginning in ----, ----.

The first kind of love speaks German; the second, Russian; the third, English.

The Vegetable Lamb: Number 1

The Vegetable Lamb, a little project of mine which Madeleine has been providing enormous amounts of assistance with (and contributing to!), is finally here!

The Vegetable Lamb Issue 1:

Number 1

By Lauren Greyson in Art

The inaugural issue of the Vegetable Lamb has arrived! Featuring everything from accounts of trans-species friendships to meditations on difference and repetition, this issue is meant to introduce the indiscernible in all its depth and breadth.