Peggy Piggy

I recently changed all the “pig”s in my writing in Pork Trial into “peg”s. Now it is Peggy O.

DESIGN
http://www.designboom.com/contemporary/peg.html

Pigs:

Peg = Pig in certain tongues
Other dialects

Meaning: Its source is margaron, a Greek name meaning “Pearl.”
Origin: “margaron.”
Nickname For: Margaret and Peggy
Popularity: The name Peg ranked 3778th in popularity for females of all ages in a sample of the 1990 US Census.
Though this name appears on the 1990 U.S. Census lists, it is used by only a small percentage of the general population.
Narrative: This name came into use among English speakers by way of Latin (as Margarita) and Old French (as Marguerite). It has been closely identified with Scotland, to the point that one commentator has pronounced it ”the national Scottish female name.”
However, in the late 20th century it has been most prominently borne by Englishwoman Margaret Thatcher, the United Kingdom’s first female Prime Minister.

http://www.babynamer.com/peg

http://mortzortigoza.blogspot.com/2011/02/tax-cheats.html

quote: “I drooled more as “Ceboom” jeans and boots sporting mayor Mike Rama has concluded on his speech in English (Cebuanos are not good in Tagalog, they are a disaster. They pronounced “pig” as “peg” “shit” as “shet”) to us mostly Filipino-speaking delegates of the National Hog Summit at the convention hall of the swanky Water Front Hotel & Casino”
*

Chink:

Violin Peg

Peg Puzzle

**

Reading an interview with Kristeva by Sylvere Lotringer, I come across a statement about mixture. She talks about her theory of the abject, how religions produce and take aim at the abject. Art is deeply related to religion and has a history of being responsible for “purification,” so in that way it is structured around catharsis– Aristotle’s ladders. Pigs, like art, have a fraught rhetorical history. The art I am drawn to are not pure, this art does not achieve catharsis. It simply runs and runs. Someone is overwhelmed by connections. Too many holes causes deflation and collapse, but these are not closures, a collapse is another hole. It probably has to do with the aperture of the internet, which has made violence and identity ambient.

I am myself uncomfortable with the use of the word “peg” in this book because it is neither the peg or the pig, it refers to both and neither. I like it that way, but my training as a purifier doesn’t let me relax. I like this tension. It sits between inert and organic, death and life, plant and animal, error and movement. It reads like a wrong word because it is mispelled. A vowel has been exchanged. It is a kind of clot that opens. The pig is especially devious as a non-kosher animal, because it has split hooves, but is not ruminant, (both are requirements to be kosher). It is the only non-kosher animal with split-hooves. All other split hooved animal are edible.

Non-kosher animals are impure in that they do not respect separation between states/identities: Kristeva says in the interview:

For example, there are animals that have elements, paws or other attributes, that are thought to be attributes of beings who inhabit the earth. These are animals that inhabit the water, but have the attributes of animals that live on land. In other words, they find themselves straddling land and sea. And starting from this crossroads situation, this non-respect of the land-sea separations, let’s say, [separations] of the attributes that belong to two categories, these animals would be considered impure. So one sees that the idea of defilement [taint] in fact concerns a non-respect of structure. 
http://semiotexte.com/?p=123

Pigs are also impure for being omnivores and scavengers.

See a peg, and it looks like something cloven, almost a hoof. It attaches by pinching, and is itself only because it is pinched together itself by a wire or string, or because it is slit. It is used for drying laundry, a traditionally womanly activity and very much a lower-class staple. In the movie industry, it is called a bullet or ammo, being worn around a lighting agent’s waist, it is also used to prevent celebrities’ straws from falling into their drinks. I use a bullet to keep my cheese bags closed, cereal fresh.

Links for context:

Some of my pig poems are in Ugly Fish and this blog (see poems) but all the pigs are pegs now in my working version. pig poem: 
http://vbw14.blogspot.com/

Fourth (pigfish) is copyright Mutable Realms. modeled in 3ds max textured in Deep Paint 3d

Pig fish piggy banks can be found in Asia. I think the pig and the fish are auspicious there. So that’s another layer of stuff to my peg.

i wrote a post on the velveteen rabbit and velve-teens over at montevidayo (caption from source): Riva London stars as the velveteen rabbit in Ballet Theatre San Luis Obispo’s holiday production.PHOTO BY BARRY GOYETTE (Source: http://www.montevidayo.com/?p=2784 )

on the dashboard of my vehicle to conquer anxiety

TRAFFIC TO HERE:

Top Searches

zdzislaw beksinski, city bird, pig primal cuts, joyelle mcsweeney nectropastoral hiromi, post traumatic

ON MY EASEL THAT IS A CHAIR:

I title my painting: The Ritual that Fertilizes

INSIDE MY GOOSE PIMPLES:

Internal Nebula
(crystalline)
Rocks growing slowmo
(crystalline)
I conquer claustrophobia
(crystalline)
And demand the light

It’s the sparkle you become
Conquer anxiety
Sparkle you become
Conquer anxiety

in which I jot notes as I read Sontag

In an effort to bloat and galvanize my memory glands, I’m going to take notes while I read. I am currently reading Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation”.

Do you know that she was buddies with the late Paul Thek? Paul Thek is great. He makes sculptures of flesh encased in glass. And he paints. He also made some artifacts of the Pied Piper.

L introduced me to him, I think, and I fell in love with the meat man. Susan was also in love with him. It was a tumultuous, repressed kind of vibration that went on between them, with lots of affection and lots of fight. This book I’m reading is dedicated to Paul, whom she once asked to marry, and to have a child with. He complied too late. Eventually he died of AIDS, estranged. Paul used to say, “I’m against interpretation”, when annoyed by art critics. Criticism is boring, but boring can be rewarding.

Su says: “Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art. It makes art into an article for use, for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories.”

Sometimes, I guess. Allegory and narrative/illustrative things seem eager for interpretation/explication. It is made to speak to, against, or from ideology. The stuff (like crazy modern stuff or avant garde) that is difficult to explain are what Su calls “flight from interpretation”, stuff that is born on the run. But this is somehow done through transparency. The less symbolic, the more flighty. The goal of criticism should be to show “how it is what it is” and not “what it means”.

“In place of hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.”

Su says content is an illusion.

I don’t feel a great distance between hermeneutics and erotics. Speaking of erotics eventually turns into a kind of hermeneutics or interpretation because it is about the relation between you and the object, you have to put words to sensations, name them, pattern them. It would be more consistent to not speak at all, if I want to leave the object as what it is. You can say it exists as what it is before I see it or before I say something about it, or you can say there is no such thing as “what it is”. This seems redundant to me. Perhaps she means something similar to the way Elizabeth Grosz speaks of art as the production of sensations, affects, and intensities rather than concepts or problems. The issue then, is subjectivity. Being subjected to art includes both planes, being jolted out of one (sense) or the other (concepts/language). You are the content, in other words.

One useful thing I got from this essay is Cocteu’s quote: “Decorative style has never existed. Style is the soul, and unfortunately with us the soul assumes the form of the body.” The style is the message, the medium is the massage.

I am also reading “Ordinary Sun” by M. Henricksen.

“

… She felt like flesh. She wasn’t hanging.

‘All answers are hells.’

“

Have you seen The Thing?

The Thing is this alien parasite that attacks you, turns your body inside out, and then reconstructs your body and lives inside it. The reconstruction is exactly like you.

Influence is The Thing that waits for you in the dark. When you are alone. Then it becomes you.

Yes, it is astral/alien.  The Thing is ultimately anything alive, because you cannot tell when you’ve been influenced/infected/inspired. You can trust no one.

The Thing is ultimately dead. It can only live through others, through manipulation and possession.

It commits spectacular unsightlinesses.

Does that scene remind you of the boar in Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke?

What happens to birth? The Thing does not reveal the possibilities of reproduction, only replication. Also, there are no women in the movie.

Princess Mononoke is about the struggle to coexist. The Thing is literal coexistence. When the other becomes you. The fear of that.

There is a strained analysis that parallels the thing in transition with marginalized womanhood. Guts orifices and uteruses and stuff.

I don’t mind it because womanhood is made up. That is the thing.

I am of the tribe perpetually worried about being pregnant.

Because of money.

When I think about the world, which reaches out to me from the internet, everyone seems like a Thing.

$

$$$

But I believe that we can break out of Thingness.

I can’t say how. I haven’t.

Summer Valentine

a painting I made (or am making, though I don’t think I want to continue with this one):

ACK came in the mail today:

The quality is surprisingly decent.

I also read (on Silliman’s blog) that 200 million americans want to publish a book. People complain that there is a lack of seriousness in self-publishing.

Perhaps that is true. But I am very serious about my unseriousness.

Been reading a lot of Doris (see above picture), which I purchased on a whim from Mayday Books. Makes me sad I missed out on the zine movement. I also got a Ken Dahl book (for Pony). He says that zines are now left for the amusement of sheltered bourgie somethings. Like me.

Watch out.

I have been thinking about phobias, exposure therapy, and art. I have trypophobia (of clusters of holes, and flesh bumps, or clusters in general. it’s hard to describe). Yayoi Kusawa has visions of polka dots taking over the world, overwhelming her, obliterating her. Sometimes I worry about the power of “art”, which comes from the ideology around it, and its ability to dilute, distort, and glorify terrible things. It can be very amoral. Beauty is. So I painted a cluster of flesh wounds in my painting for myself, so I am reminded that what I make is something terrible. I am curious about whether or not, if I keep doing it, it will lose its terrifying quality.  I also wrote little prose things concerning this:

i looked in the mirror and discovered my taste buds. i thought that they looked abnormally large, though i have not seen another’s person’s taste buds for comparison. the more i scrutinized, the more they seemed like little flesh sacks stuck to my pink lingual muscle. clusters of pale flesh pustules like milky grains of rice sprouting all over the surface of it. i stuck my tongue in and out between my teeth. the long white buds were like insect eggs on a leaf. any moment now they could give birth. in the dream, i regarded these little egg sacks with utter neutrality. upon awakening, the image awoke with me. fear and disgust awoke with me. everything awoke and the things filled my world once again with meaning, and the pustules on my tongue begged to taste meaning in everything, in themselves. they tasted themselves and their white, worm existences. in one of Plath’s poems, one of the first consciousnesses that remembered me, a black gap discloses itself. / on the opposite lip / a small white soul is waving, a small white maggot. my limbs, also, have left me. / who has dismembered us? / the dark is melting. we touch like cripples. (Plath, Event)

birth to my pigs

Paul Cunningham of Radioactive Moat has been in labor for many days (he made this gooey thing!), and my first chapbook should be arriving any minute now, with a full head of hair.

copy&pastings guess what i am writing about for finals

Taxidermia, one of my favorite movies! By Palfi. Probably not that fun to read on a blog, but since I haven’t posted in a month, and it seems relevant to the theme of mortal steaks, I’ll just vomit it up a little here. Oh, and this article is good and helped me think about the movie. You should all see it!

This is where I talk about the meat pack:

A disembodied female voice begins and ends the extremely male-focused epic of three generations of Hungarian men. Taxidermia implies that the “art” of history, so focused on masculine, rational perspective and desire, obliterates the feminine and its respective attributes. But as Stallybrass and White attest, what is overtly excluded or marginalized by the dominant class is also symbolically central to its identity. The female body is not the overt object of focus; it has been not just negated but also exploded, diffused and suffused throughout the entire film, but perhaps the pervasiveness of the grotesque in Taxidermia makes these othered, feminine images so blindingly conspicuous that once again, their source becomes invisible. The repressed female, the lower sex, the sex associated with the porcine, the bodily and instability of all manner is present only as symbol, yet it is physically channeled through the male body. Taxidermia’s taboo-laden terrain reconfigures the gendered terms of the social “economy of signs” and gives us a vision of history as regurgitated slop that resists rational determination. The feminine Life Cycle and masculine Revolution become one undifferentiated series of convulsing, distended stomachs, while the object of history turns into the grotesque mounting of a dismembered human corpse, an allusive hybrid of Michelangelo’s David and Antioch’s Venus de Milo.

blast not from the past

I have a paper due tomorrow and a lot of things to do as a function in sosighety. We all know what this means. Yes, it is time to go on the internet and not do the work. It is time to spew into a friendly void the digital bolus soaked in invisible bile from the shallow depths of my soul.

Mmhm, the gravity of my thoughts must affect smaller bodies. A tiny blip of an insight here, with The Lost Lunar Baedeker before me, a relic from my lazy venture as an undergraduate lit major, poorly appreciated by my slightly less acute mind, now jazzed and re-mixed with new enthusiasm and perspective…

Ok, I’ll stop with the stilted fun. But I do remember disliking the work of Mina Loy, and resenting having to write a term paper about her poetry. Now I kiss her dead feet. Now I am re-reading it and am amazed yet not surprised by this woman’s incredible poetic precociousness. Everyone of the Now Party is concerned with feminine excess and Deleuzian concepts of art. I’m reading “Parturition” and this little poem from decades ago already enacts/expresses the idea of territorialization and positive psychosis (in relation to motherhood and the female body). “I am the centre / Of a circle of pain / Exceeding its boundaries in every direction… Something in the delirium of night-hours / Confuses while intensifying sensibility / Blurring spatial contours / So aiding elusion of the circumscribed / That the gurgling of a crucified wild beast / Comes from so far away / And the foam on the stretched muscles of a mouth / Is no part of myself / There is climax in sensibility / When pain surpassing itself / Becomes Exotic…”

Ars poetica hooray. Joyelle McSweeney says some interesting things about motherhood and the “future” of poetry here: 
http://exoskeleton-johannes.blogspot.com/2009/12/future-of-poetry-by-joyelle-mcsweeney.html

I have been hearing a lot about membranes and chaos, media and architecture, rhythm and vibration… the questions that all these things are hung on is what does it mean to become other? Art is intensifying, making a perimeter or territory around/within  chaos. In other words, frame-making. It requires life. Grosz says it is haunted by the animal, by the primal love-call, carnal consummation. Deleuze says it is situated in the body but is not to be confused with sensation itself. He talks about the desiring-machine. The obvious outcome is reproduction.  And that is a complicated word.

In “Parturition”, “Impression of a cat / With blind kittens / Among her legs / Same undulating life-stir / I am that cat / Rises from the sub-conscious / Impression of small animal carcass / Covered with blue-bottles / –Epicurean– / And through the insects / Waves that same undulation of living / Death / Life / I am knowing / All about / Unfolding…“

Juxtapose that with McSweeney’s:

“5. The present tense, rejecting posterity and art’s endurance, insists on the artifice of creation and proposes children not as units of the future but as vulnerable portals between death and life. Children are death in life, their numeration and nomination the place where text happens.

In his late Fragmentations, the cuntphobic Antonin Artaud renders himself an ultra mother, without lineage: “Out of the motherless cunt I shall make an obscure, total, obtuse and absolute soul.” Artaud’s vision is of daughters whose bodies are a portal on violence and death—a portal which makes the body present and which becomes a kind if infinite catalog, life and death’s indeterminate co-extension:

“I saw the meningeal syphilis of my daughter Catherine’s legs, and the 2 hideous sweet-potatoes of the vats of her inflated kneecaps, I saw the onions of her toes blistered like her sex [...] I saw a skullburst like Annie of the ‘holy’ throat, and I saw her blood’s crown of intestinal thorns flowing from her on the days she wasn’t menstruating…
[Trans. David Rattray]” (McSweeney)

What kind of framing is motherhood? McSweeney said that becoming a mother made her goth. What kind of territorialization occurs during labor? Why is poetry obsessed with infanticide?

From this article, Aase Berg on Motherhood: “The mother’s relationship to the baby is the root of language, madness and complexity. None of the great serious works would have seen the light of day without the tracks that were inscribed in the early mother-and-child relationships. Life is based on the irrational and noisy language of this little crazy symbiosis.

The symbiosis is a positive psychosis between the mother and child (or father and child in the few instances where the dads dare to take time off to raise the kids). It’s a lesson in love. The world is no longer simply one devouring infant, it grows into an infant through interactions. In order for love to develop, there has to be distance. To feel love is only possible if one realizes that the symbiosis consists of two people. Love is an automatic split into you and me. You + me = we. If one is involved in the traditional, patriarchal psychosis there is no we, I am the world. In the great, self-righteous male despair there is no we, just one bloated I that swallows everything that moves…” (Berg)

Poetry of the “future” seems to sense that the body has been poisoned. What if the body really does recognize the fetus as an other, a foreign body, a parasite? Too much recognition is murder. In poetries of excess, reproduction is not a miracle of life but a complicated miscarriage, a gothic love story. Perhaps this can be read as a rebellion against the necessary history of natural fertilization, against love-childs, the products of great, self-righteous male despair that is the tradition of Poetry.

“

Without melancholy, without guilt

I want to get rid of Kanoko in Tokyo

Congratulations

Congratulations on your destruction

Congratulations on your destruction

Teruko-chan

Congratulations on your abortion…

” (Hiromi Ito, Killing Kanoko)

love

Super quick post because I have been pigging out too much, and my last three posts have been less posts than poem/diatribes. Now maybe I provide an explanation of the pigs that are falling out of me. Notes: many conversations about death drive lately, and conversations about the tiny “island” of poetry which has nearly no place in the “world” or the sea of life that is full of the unreal and the awareness that what we consume come from far away places of suffering but such means are disembodied and my life in academia is great and yesterday I met Dorothea Lasky whom I adore and I adore her because she is brave enough to say that she wants to give love and acceptance to the world, which I as a poet would like to do but I have too much evil inside me. I am inspired by her dedication to teaching and to her generosity of love which makes me feel hopeful about having a future as a teacher or something. It seems to me that it is less important/admirable/effective now to think of the poet as anything other than subterranean earthworms, which I do not mean as a bad thing, because earthworms are great. I agree with Lasky and have said this myself that poets are there to reconfigure language and I have said to my poet friends that the we are defenders of freedom though it is a darkness of freedom because the space that we occupy is the dark spaces left after all the lights and screens and modern capitalist life we are all capitalist and I struggle with the fact that I depend on the consequences of capitalism to have a chance at being a poet. I am not a poet of the everyday or the working class. I am too educated and I am not a musician and sometimes I wish I were a musician because it is immediate and visceral whereas people who read my poems have to be “educated”. My poems are supposed to be visceral too but it doesn’t make the body dance in the same way. Somatic poetry is interesting to me and people talked about it yesterday and it is exciting to see that it is growing trend and I write from the body and perhaps it is a reaction against a disembodied world. But it is also destructive of the body what I write and it is like dissection because it has to explode but it’s not really possible to be alive and open up at the same time and it is strange to see. It is not romantic to me, this business of being an artist. It is the opposite. It is disgusting and abject and fatal. But it is also necessary. Earthworms have to aerate the soil so that things can grow and I am going to aerate the soil of language as a flesh being because it is what I believe in. I will flesh these thoughts out more later. I have to go to school.