Who was it who described wrote about the “melancholic tradition of mimeticism” which gave us all those Greek anecdotes about pigeons pecking at Apelles paintings of fruit and the like? One of those anecdotes is Leonardo da Vinci’s claim – which LI culled from Schiller’s article in the Journal of the History of the Neurosciences – about an artist who painted a picture that was so vivid that anyone who stood in front of it was bound to yawn – since it was a picture of a yawning man.

Yawning is, of course, one of those mysterious mimetic behaviors – Aristotle compared its apparent contagiousness in men to the donkey’s irresistible inclination to urinate if it spots another donkey urinating. Which, given LI’s limited contact with donkeys lately, we haven’t been able to scientifically validate. However, there is something entrancingly meta about a painting of a behavior that is popularly considered mimetic framed by a discourse that considers painting to be modeled on certain canons of imitation.

Schiller’s essay cites another, more ambiguous response to the mimetic situation in animal studies:

“This brings us back to the oral aggressiveness of yawning. It finds a surprizing parallel in the experimental field, including the sexual aspect. Thus two Nigerian Patas monkeys, a male and female, produced what looked like yawning when they were exposed to mirrors, either fixed or hand held. They would also lick and chew them. The male displayed penile erection or masturbation at the same time. Yawning was repeated up to 23 times in rapid succession and would gradually diminish to a total of 67 yawns in 10 minutes as the mirror was losing its sense of novelty (Hall, 1962).”

That yawning or masturbation is the primal response to self examination is, from a philosophical perspective, a rather unpleasant thought. However, skipping bravely ahead, LI is bringing up the yawning topic to warn our readers that we are planning a post about the French philosopher Badiou. The mention of philosophy usually clears the room around here – so be warned.

When we vanished from graduate school (grad students, much more than old soldiers, don’t die, they just fade and fade and fade away), we had finished a master’s thesis that dealt with such French philosophes as Derrida and Deleuze. Lately, in taking a gingerly stroll around the web, we’ve discovered that today’s continentals are all about Badiou. Or at least there are a lot of excellent sites about him: Undercurrent (which, malheureusement, has gone under), is a good place to start. There is also a really smart philosophical site, Charlotte Street, which we’ve been planning on adding to our blogdex or whatever the hell you call the links section. We’ve already added Infinite Thought to our blogdex. The deleuzian journal, The Pli, introduction.html often has articles on Badiou-ian topics.

As for the man himself, he is widely distributed over the Net. We’ve included his site on contemporary French philo on our blogfuckingdex already. We particularly recommend reading his autobiographical sketch, The Philosopher’s Pledge (l’aveu du philosophe) and his 8 Theses on the Universal (like Luther, Badiou has a weakness for nailing up theses. It is an interesting early modern genre – mixing the axiomatic with the polemical, and allowing a certain hurried simultaneity of propositions – rather like a confused but inspiriting charge across a battlefield – in which all are held in semi-isolation, the logic of their dependence one on the other being, it seems, partly up to the reader to decide). Here, to continue the theses theme, are 15 theses on art – which is what LI will probably be discussing.

In the last two or three months, you could squeeze the NYT as hard as you like but you wouldn’t produce a tenth of the news about Iraq that you get from, say, one visit to the daily war news blog. The new propaganda phase re America’s loveable situation comedy version of the Chechnya war, set in a Mesopotamia far, far away, where darling women show their little purple smudged fingers and are surely preparing to embrace Jesus if we only let them, is not to report it at all. So, for instance, where is the report that the British transport plane that was shot out of the sky in December might have been brought down from a height of 15,000 feet? –the first example of the use of the shoulder mounted anti-aircraft missiles that we all know are out there, distributed like popcorn to various jihadists by the CIA in the Afghan liberation thing (remember how we were all for Islam back in the day? ah, our sweet semi alliance with Osama, before islamo-anticommunism – so good, and good for you, unless you happen to be a woman without a burkha -- became islamofascism – so bad, and unliberty lovin’), and surely available for the taking from weapons dumps that the American soldiery was too understaffed to guard – getting more understaffed as the weapons so looted were turned upon that soldiery.

Well, who cares? Three soldiers one day, four the next – the best way to support the troops is to forget about em, let em die anonymously, fuck em, remember not to clutter up good newsprint with their names when you have to devote as much time as possible to faux news such as Martha Stewart’s transition into a parole officer’s problem, take every lie and misstatement doled out by the Central Command and treat it like holy writ if you write anything until the time limit is up on journalistic brown-nosing – oh, some hardhitting report on what really happened might be in order in a decade or two, or in somebody’s book – tie that yellow ribbon round the family credit card that the widows will have to pay off, maybe a little on your back work, with the hearty support of the Republican congress, now brought to you by Visa, as the country goes back to the ownership society ideals exemplified by Jim Crow and our founding father’s willingness to treat that labor problem with the overseer’s whip. Which is, apparently, the new meaning of the conservative fondness for original intent.

LI’s NYC correspondent, T., went to a Fortean meeting – or rather, a meeting of a dissident Fortean group. The meeting was, he thought, scheduled to be held in a Times Square bar he fondly remembered. Here is the report:

Oh my, was I wrong. First of all, I had this image in my mind of the joint - that I had been there, drank there.... - nope. Generally non-descript Greek diner and non-descript "bar" that looked just like the mauve/floral print/fake redwood diner. The "meeting" was not; it was, rather, a couple of people getting together for dinner. I mean: I prepared some material! So, after three of four minutes of disappointment, I began to enjoy the company.

I met and had some very nice conversations with, in particular, Joe and Sam [not their real names- ed.]. Joe is a big fine kind gentlemen who has a particular interest in the vagaries of the human condition. Specifically, he told me about his meetings with Otherkins - those who believe themselves to be descended from, variously, angels, dragons, vampires, elves etc....those who have overdosed on Tolkien. Sam shared his stereoscopic photos from the annual Guy Fawkes celebration: lots of anti-Papist feeling and lots of bonfires and explosions - looks like a hell of a lot of fun. He then shared some more photos, the subject of which looked very familiar to me, but not exactly. Yes, its him, rather older than the last time I saw him, but he, one of my most favorite writers: Samuel R. Delaney. I quickly learned that Sam is working on a documentary film on SRD. So we "talked shop" about his books for a time.

Which brings me to a point to be made: these Forteans (insiders, outcasts, pseudo-, whatever), these factions - they, in a sense, know their "stuff" too well; they very rarely have anything that you might term a 'context' for the stuff that interests them; and, for this I am generally a bit sad, they are too often surprised that a non-Fortean might share an interest in and a knowledge of their "stuff".

As for the factional feelings of these outcasts toward The International Fortean Society: it seems that its got everything to do with a well-known phenomena: the legacy of the founder and access to that source. Additionally, it seems that the guardian of the Fortean flame is a real pill; if these few have characterized her even remotely accurately, she is unpleasant on a good day.

Most uncharacteristically, I suggested as I was leaving that we do this again. I suggested further (oh no!) that some materials should be prepared by someone and presented at the next gathering. If this role falls on me (as it should since I was the dumbass that suggested it), I think that I'll do a few minutes on Hacking's stuff on multiple personality: I think that his method of analysis would be very helpful to this crowd.”

T. is lucky he didn’t fall into a “window area” – a term of art coined by Fortean John Keel to explain the strange doings in Point Pleasant, West Virginia that he made semi famous in his book, Prophecies of the Mothman:

Certain areas appear to be routinely visited by Fortean events. Depending upon your interests, these locales may be called “haunted places,” “monster countries,” “spook light sites,” “triangles,” or “windows.” John Keel created the concept and indeed coined the word, as well as certainly popularizing the notion of “windows” when he first talked about them menacingly and humorously in his articles and books of the 1970s. Although he introduced the idea in UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse in 1970, most people relate the term “window” to the area around Point Pleasant, West Virginia, and Keel’s book about it, The Mothman Prophecies (1975).

“The phenomena he records,” wrote Jerome Clark in High Strangeness (1996), “exemplify the window at its bizarre best: Over a period of many months UFO activity is frequent, sometimes so frequent that people go UFO-hunting on a nightly basis with reasonable expectations of sighting something. The sightings include events ranging from distant observations to close encounters. Paranormal activity of other sorts often amplifies as well; the Point Pleasant area was also a hotbed for encounters with men in black and a monstrous creature known as Mothman. This full panoply of phenomena accompanies some long-term, narrow-distribution waves; in others the window opens wide enough to admit only UFOs.”


On the other hand, the experience of deja non-vu – T.’s thinking it was one bar, when it turned out to be another – might be a variant of the window area – call it the “tinted window” effect. We’ll be following this story closely, and bringing our readers late breaking bulletins if anything happens – or, more critically, if anything doesn’t.

“The raccoon penis is a reminder of his hustler times at truck stops across southern America - the pendant is a sexual talisman in the southern states…” – The Observer.


Umm. The British still don’t quite, shall we say, understand primitive peoples outside their island. But LI does like the idea that the good bourgeois in the Red States, after fixing up the raccoon stew, have just that special use for the thang bone.

While the Observer goes on to celebrate the cult genius of a writer, JT Leroy, who seems to be spooning out the usual mixture of prostitution and transvestitism – closing that infinitesimal gap between Jerry Springer and William Burroughs – LI has been reading another Stephen Wright novel, Going Native.

Stephen Wright has not had a large output: Meditations in Green, M31: A Family Romance, and Going Native across a stretch of thirty years. The first novel won the Maxwell Perkins award, the very name of which has an antique air of virtue – one imagines a mix of John O’Hara and John Cheever going off to teach creative writing, for all eternity, in Iowa. Surely one of the hells designed for writers in some religion or other.

Wright was interviewed by Contemporary Literature in 96, after Going Native came out. Here is what he says about coming back here, after serving in Vietnam:

“Q. I was struck by your comment, "It was the big event." That remark reminds me of Hemingway and Mailer.
A. I think it is still the big event. I think it explains everything going on politically, culturally, and economically. I think it's pretty pathetic, actually. I can't even think about it for too long without getting infuriated. Why did we have all these years of this Republican crap, and this whole turn to conservative nonsense, and the kind of gloom and mean-spiritedness that is pervading the country? I don't even know when it's been like this before. It comes from being pissed off. I think it starts with "We lost a war." I just feel like saying, "Let's grow up." I mean, really! I've reached a point where I think that this is in many ways a pretty gutless country. You know, Americans like to think of themselves as one of the finer examples of the human species on the planet--that we represent everything that's good and fine and true in the human character. But what I see around me is a lot of gutlessness on every level. I think what we're going through is a very bad, long, and troubled adolescence, and I think Vietnam was puberty. I just hoped it would end sooner. It doesn't even seem as though it's going to end. “

And this is what he says about writing:
Q. Tell us what you aim for in your writing.
A. I forget where Virginia Woolf says this, but it's the best explanation, something that I agree with 100 percent. She says something to the effect that the good reader reads for vision and power. And that's it. Period. It's not for politics, it's not for social mores, it's not to fulfill some thesis you're working on in your head or to justify your way of life--that's a bad reader. A good reader reads for vision and power. And vision and power is in Charles Dickens as much as it's in Samuel Beckett. The technique is irrelevant. All this stuff about considering that writing is advancing or going somewhere, and then you have to discard this and attach that--it's all nonsense.”

Is there any question as to why LI loves this writer? Later in the interview Wright makes the interesting point that he is influenced by TV and David Hume – and that seems to work. Imagine a Humean horror show, in which the horror is the disconnect between cause and effect separating characters into victims – trying desperately to knit those categories back together, or ignoring the rip altogether – and travelers – who exploit that disconnection – and you get a fair sense of Going Native and M31. Then read the final chapter in M31, when the sky lights up with ectoplasmic space ships over DC. Or read, as a piece of sheer movement, the crack chapter in Going Native. This is CD, who, with Lateisha, is the centerpiece of the chapter:

‘He had come into the room to either retrieve an object or relate something important to Lateisha, neither of which was apparent to him now; he returned to the bathroom to see if what he had lost could be found there. Then he was back, staring at the clothes at his feet and a strange pair of black briefs. Men’s. Holding the article daintily aloft between two curled fingers, he searched through the house. Latisha was nowhere to be found. In the kitchen he checked and rechecked the locks on the windows, then became absorbed in cleaning the panes with a homemade mixture of ethanol and the juice of four lemons purchased weeks ago as a preventative against scurvy. He stood at the back door for the longest time. He swept the floor. Passing through the living room, he was diverted by the black oak out there on the lawn. There was a man hiding behind the trunk. While he waited for the man to show himself again, he took his pulse. The beat seemed rapid, rapid but not excessively so, already perhaps steady and strong, certainly lacking the telltale squishy note of a perforated chamber or malfunctioning valve or clogged artery. He had to stop the smoking tomorrow. He couldn’t go on like this.”

To LI’s mind, the crack cocaine here, is almost peripheral – or, rather, operates to amplify the zoo trance in which humanoids can spend their days, in whatever cages they find themselves in, the electric work of habit laying down lines of automatism that track through every environment, under the clothes and down the arteries, the brain’s spatter of constant channel changing as one day is piled up on top of the next in aimless, wobbly piles until we dump the whole thing in a hole in the ground or burn it and put the bone splinter ashes in an urn.

Which sounds like a gloomy magic trick, and is certainly not all there is to Wright or the human condition. The vision and power are the rings of light around even such as CD. So pick up one of the guys novels and read it, will you?

LI was never a Maoist. Although we have a lot of contempt for the way the Western powers, for decades, subvented the Nationalist fascist forces, who were as bent on mass murder as Mao, but less successful at holding power, we’ve always thought Maoism was rural idiocy’s revenge on Marx. However, according to this scolding article in the NYT, have to credit Mao’s heirs with an activity that contains at least a true relic or two of good old Marx, not to mention Adam Smith. They are destroying the American constructed international IP standards.

We love it. IP is a misnomer – intellectual property is what Adam Smith called monopoly. In the nineteenth century, there was a gradual acceptance of the need for very limited monopolies of intellectual products – books, music, designs. However, the sponsors of monopoly were very clear about what this entailed – the capture of an economic gain through a state supported monopoly does not and should not have the characteristic of ‘property rights” – it is a lease, rather, and it is founded on that rarest of justifications for capitalist activity, ‘fairness.” You will notice that fairness only comes out of the mouths of economists when it favors the class for which they labor – the propertied classes. Otherwise, you hear the word efficiency. One thing a state monopoly does is create massive inefficiencies – hence, the price of those drugs still under patent.

As is the way of state monopoly, the monopolists invest some of their profits in the political market, buying senators, representatives, and presidents. These investments have created such absurdities as the extension of copyright to close to a century, sponsored by the late, unlamented Sonny Bono.

China, however, has taken the healthy view taken throughout the nineteenth century by Americans – IP is a rip off. So they have coolly ripped off American designs, copyrights, etc. Good for them. It is unfortunate that other countries in the third world aren’t strong enough to do the same. Nothing would please us more than to see some African country manufacture, at a much cheaper price, every drug that is now under patent in the U.S. Pull the completely corrupt system down to the ground, pour gasoline and piss on it, and light a bic.

Libertarians often talk of the state as a perpetual enemy. Marxists have an attitude to the state summed up by Lenin’s promise to make the state vanish.

LI used to accept this as a basic principle. We don’t any longer. We have a new principle: all beasts are beasts of circumstance. The state, in itself, is neither good nor ill, and its existence does not reflect some terrible flaw in human nature or history.

This doesn’t mean that the state isn’t a beast, at times, and the worst of beasts – a pennyante beast, a heart picker, a bad faith bad conscience. Clyde Habersham’s article in the Times this morning is about the familiar breath of the American beast – the racism, revanchism, and willingness to lynch that is encoded in U.S. attitude towards crime. Habersham compares the prospects of Martha Stewart, getting out of jail proclaiming her innocence, and Marc La Cloche. LA Cloche, of course, is a nobody. No politician will be inviting a man on welfare in the Bronx to dine with him or her. But they are both convicts. La Cloche, convicted of armed robbery, did eleven years in prison. He turned himself around. He learned a trade – barbering. The state taught it to him.

Out of prison, he tried, naturally, to make a living with his new trade. Only to run into an inhuman bully with a title – New York’s secretary of state. Grinding the bones of an ex-con is probably considered good politics by this semi-human being, since nothing makes some faction of Americans happier than a little lynching in the morning. So the Secretary of State blocked La Cloche from getting a license to barber because he didn’t have the “moral character” for it – after all, he’d been in prison. He might just abscond with a few of your follicles.

The absurdity of this decision prompted a judge to overturn it – but, as is the fashion of petty tyrants, the Secretary of State appealed that decision.


“New York's secretary of state, who has jurisdiction in these matters, appealed the granting of the license and won. Mr. La Cloche's "criminal history," an administrative law judge ruled, "indicates a lack of good moral character and trustworthiness required for licensure."

In plain language, the fact that Mr. La Cloche had been in prison proved that he was unworthy for the trade that the state itself taught him in prison.

Where is Joseph Heller when we need him? That pretty much summed up the feelings of Justice Herman Cahn of State Supreme Court in Manhattan. Two years ago, he ordered the authorities to give Mr. La Cloche another look. They have every right to expect would-be barbers to prove their "good moral character," Justice Cahn said. But Mr. La Cloche never got the chance. His criminal record alone did him in, and that was unfair, the judge said.”

Do you think the Secretary of State of any state is going to set the bar so high for Martha Stewart? No way. She is, after all, white and rich.

The article refers to the Fortune society, which is an ex prisoner advocacy group. Go to their home page here.

Just another morning in Bush’s America.

We admit, LI has a few weaknesses. One of them is Li’l Kim, who is just the kind of sex goddess for whom we would do all kinds of things, those both fitting and unfitting a man, things that would stretch our capacities and permanently injure our character. We fell in love with Kimberly Jones a long time ago. It was one of those things – we were innocently strolling down a street in New Haven. The sun was shining – which was nice, since our Southern heart was still carrying refugee baggage from winter’s abysmal solar absence. Our first year in the North. So, we passed a poster. Just another music poster, nothing to stop for – but stop we did. This poster was for a Li’l Kim CD, and the woman was posed as she poses – those gorgeous legs parted, that sexy scowl on her face. Little clothing. It was fatum – this woman was the very ideogram of our libido, first traced, long ago, by an old flame, D., with whom we worked at a hardware store back when we were 20.

Unfortunately, as it turns out, Li’l Kim has a poet’s inability to distinguish those occasions in which fiction will serve our larger visionary purposes from those where it will get you thrown in the slammer – thus, her apparent misprisions to a grand jury.

According to the NYT story:“Ms. Jones faces a difficult challenge in the staid decorum of the court.

Two key defendants, both gunmen, have pleaded guilty in the case. Suif Jackson, 34, a rap music producer and manager, pleaded guilty on June 18 to illegal weapons possession and to participating in the shooting melee. He was sentenced to 12 years in jail.
Damion Butler, who ran a security service for rap musicians, pleaded guilty on Jan. 28 to similar weapons charges and to using a false passport. He faces up to 15 years in prison when he is sentenced.

Ms. Jones, who was indicted in April 2004, was never accused of any role in the shooting. But according to the indictment, she repeatedly told the grand jury that she did not know Mr. Jackson, did not recognize Mr. Butler and did not see either of them on the street outside the radio station during the shootout. According to the indictment, Mr. Jackson was a frequent visitor to Ms. Jones's home in Englewood, N.J., and Mr. Butler ran his security business out of an office in that home.”

Now some interested soul should have advised Li’l Kim that you don’t make easy to verify claims in front of a grand jury when the claims happen to be true only in an alternative universe. So on the face of it, if you hold narrowly to certain narrow legal doctrines, things look bad for our idol. But we have a great belief in the power of forgiveness. And we do completely buy Li’l Kim’s lawyer’s story: the poor woman was, obviously, not completely in her right state of mind when she misspoke herself, out of loyalty. We think Li'l Kim has learned from this experience, and we really think she will stay away from shooters in the future.