Bataille & Carnival Smut

For those unfamiliar with Georges Bataille I have chosen two selections from his work.

A lot of reading follows but more can be found at Supervert or at your local bookstore. I highly recommend Literature and Evil for philosophy/criticism and My Mother, Madame Edwarda and the Dead Man for literary smut.

Excerpted from The Cruel Practice of Art:

The Painter is condemned to please. By no means can he transform a painting into an object of aversion. The purpose of a scarecrow is to frighten birds from the field where it is planted, but the most terrifying painting is there to attract visitors. Actual torture can also be interesting, but in general that can't be considered it's purpose. Torture takes place for a variety of reasons. In principle it's purpose differs little from that of the scarecrow: unlike art, it is offered to sight in order to repel us from the horror it put's on display. The painted torture, conversely, does not attempt to reform us. Art never takes on itself the work of the judge. It does not interest us in some horror for it's own sake: that is not even imaginable. (It is true that in the Middle Ages religious imagery did this for Hell, but that is precisely because art was hardly separable from education.) When Horror is subject to the transfiguration of an authentic art, it becomes a pleasure, an intense pleasure, but a pleasure all the same.

To see in this paradox the mere effect of a sexual vice would be vain.

It is with a sort of mute, inevitable, inexplicable determination, like that in dreams, that the fascinating specters of misery and pain have always lurked among the background figures in this carnival of a world. No doubt art does not have the same essential meaning as the carnival and yet, in each, a part has always been reserved for that which seems the very opposite of pleasure and amusement. Art may have finally liberated itself from the service of religion, but it maintains it's servitude with regard to horror. It remains open to the representation of that which repulses.

Next, a warning, this is not work/library/child safe. Don't show your mom unless she's very, very cool and more than a little crazy. It is explicit, violent, and absurd. You have been warned. From The Story of the Eye:

She had no qualms, and instantly amused herself by fondling the depth of her thighs and inserting this apparently fluid object. The caress of the eye over the skin is so utterly, so extraordinarily gentle, and the sensation so bizarre that it has something of a rooster's horrible crowing.

Simone meanwhile amused herself by slipping the eye into the profound crevice of her ass...she tried to keep the eye there simply by squeezing her buttocks together. But all at once, it zoomed out like a pit squooshed from a cherry, and dropped on the thin belly of the corpse, an inch or so from the cock.

In the meantime, I had let Sir Edmond undress me, so that I could pounce stark naked on the crunching body of the girl; my entire cock vanished at one lunge into the hairy crevice, and I fucked her hard while Sir Edmond played with the eye, rolling it, in between the contortions of our bodies, on the skin of our bellies and breasts. For an instant, the eye was trapped between our navels.

Well. That about says it all.

Yesterday when talking in class comic book super heroes came up and I was reminded of this book that I have. Secret Identity is a book about the lives of one of the original Superman creators after leaving DC. Joe Shuster was the guy who originally drew Superman and developed the iconic look. After the creators lost the rights to the comic, they were left scrambling to make a living. Shuster ended up drawing fetish porn for the mob.

-Christian

Do Not Eat Near These Pictures

A teratoma is a tumor that contains normal human tissues. Found most commonly in the ovaries and testicles, teratomas are capable of growing hair, teeth, bones and sometimes limbs. They contain tissue that resembles brain, liver and lung tissues. Some cases have even reported finding embryos encapsulated within a teratoma... yep, that is correct, a pregnant tumor. Most recently, in October 08, a doctor removed a brain tumor only to find it housed feet and slightly developed body parts.

In some cases, teratomas are confused with parasitic twins, conjoined twins where one "parasite" half-formed body feeds off of the life of another fully human body.

Besides the obvious reasons, teratomas are grotesque because they resemble the monsters I used to imagine that lived under my bed.

Without completely rewording the entire articles, I would definitely check out some of these wikiPages... this is some weird shit.

Enjoy your lunches friends,

Ali Blum

Unnatural life

Mummys are cool, but equally cool is the living dead. Seeing all these posts about death and the dead made me think about one of the most terrifying themes in literature, people giving inanimate things life. Frankenstein is obviously a good example. Another one that less people are familiar with is the story of the Golem, a legend that takes place in the 1600s. Basically the story is that the Rabbi of Prague, using mysticism, creates a Golem to protect the Jewish community from anti-semitism, but the Golem eventually gets out of control and has to be destroyed. There was an German silent film made about the legend in 1920 called Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam (The Golem: How he came into the World). Here’s a picture from the film.

I dunno, whenever read these stories I can help thinking about our technological age, computers, robots, and how this fictional fear of unnatural life doesn’t actually seem quite so ridiculous. MIT is apparently working on personal robots with a human-like range of expressions. Is that creepy to anyone else?
-Lauren

The Twenty-Eight Famous Murders With Verses

These pictures are from a remade 1988 print collection of The Twenty-Eight Famous Murders With Verses which is based off of the 1866 by Getsuoka Yoshitoshi. It's called "Ero-Guru… a type of Japanese illustration that depicts extreme acts of violence in an erotic manner. The word ero-guru means “erotic grotesque nonsense” and the loosely defined movement goes beyond illustration into literature, film and music."

I wish I had more information on it, or a link to the rest of the series.

Odilon Redon

So I mentioned him in one of the first days of class but I'll bring him up again.

Odilon Redon. One of my favourite artists. And I am just reminded of his work repeatedly while doing these readings. In On Ugliness, for instance, malformations of the human form. It is exactly what makes his work so mesmerizing for me. I just love everything about his early charcoals. His later work, I'm not so keen on. But his early works. Those are art.

Here's some examples. They get cut off by my browser, but if you click them you can see the uncropped images. I don't really have much to say about them, not for lack of knowledge on the subject but because I think that the pictures show so much more than I could. Gosh I just love them.












-Colby

Genie in a Bottle

Recently, I have become fascinated with the concept of "feral children." For those of you who do not know, a feral child is a child who has been raised in isolation or by animals. Think Romulus/Remus and Tarzan.

In 1970, welfare authorities discovered a feral child (who they call "Genie") who had been strapped to a potty chair in a dark room
for 13 years. She had been beaten and isolated from the world by her father. Other accounts of feral children include a wolf-boy and an abandoned boy who was raised in the African bush by monkeys. These accounts seem too strange to be true, almost circus freak-ish.

While reading a book about Genie and other ferals, I came across this interesting passage...
"So wild children exist in the fault line between disgust and desire. They embody our desire for escape, freedom and wonder; yet they also provoke the disgust felt for the merely corporeal, the wholly physical- the disgust for that which has no self, no love and no remorse" (237).
- Savage Girls and Wild Boys, Michael Newton

It is definitely an interesting book and will be available in VanPelt as soon as I return it.
Also, if you have a spare forty minutes or so, there is a really great documentary on the discovery of Genie and the attempts to assimilate her into society.

Part 1

-Ali Blum