Phizog

warm
sun
on a
sad
phizog

Beeves and Homan

Hogshead cheese on Melba with mustard, relish and chutney, and an After Eight to aid digestion, awl of spine, jurypost and cataract. It is darker than coal outside my bedroom window, the selfsame window I gaze through like a monk in a cloister, knees crooked in supplication to Beeves and Homan, whom I have never met, and probably never will. These are dark days indeed, so Beeves and Holman said, darker than soot and bootblack. I will hang a sprier from the hook in my ceiling, and moor it in place with Burgees, Claxton and Mulberry, just to be on the safe side, which I never am, never.

A Most Dangerous Method

Sabina Spielrein

Cuckold of Jung

In excelsior glorious, Cooper’s iron slewed from shoulder to hip, forging steel from animas-ex-animus, an unlikely bedfellow, alchemy, dross-pot and pestle.

Houellebecq, Michel, Houellebecq, Michel

Michel Houellebecq’s writing is like a Sisyphean boulder careening down a slipper slope. His novels, which I first discovered some years back with The Elementary Particles, remind me that literature can be intelligent, absurd and sensual, a trinity of riotousness, smart-aleckness and philosophical chicanery. Houellebecq writes like a whirling Dervish on PCP, never once stopping to look backwards or over his shoulder, but with ferocity of language that is peerless, exhuming the absurdities of ontological nonsense from the graveyard of literature. No one since Beckett and Celine has written with such irreverent incaution, such passion for language and the glory of the incongruous. Read him and enrapt in the passion of what can be done with the novel when it is done right, (whirling and spinning, but always in control) if done at all.

Houellebecq, Michel

Michel Houellebecq

tHE pHILOSOPHY oF kITING-tO tHE 10tH pOWER

Bread ends and livery sausage, Quaker oats boiled to placental mush, spooned into the scullery of my mouth with a tuning-fork. Day-old bread is a luxury, as weeks, sometimes months pass unnoticed as the food in my larder turns bootblack-black, frostbitten toes curled into necrotic wingtips. Philosophy pays 5 cents less than a turnip-cart of advice, which amounts to nothing, nil, zero to the absolute tenth power of one. Sheep’s brains siphoned through curd-cloth into a rusty tin cup, the sort used by almsmen and derelicts. I think I’ll eat my foot today, the left one, as I’m a much better hopper on the right. Or fly a kite, perhaps, made from garbage bags and coat hangers scotched together with mason’s tape; kiting acumen to the tenth power of one, maybe higher.

tRIPTYCH fREUD

The triptych Freud: grandson, Lucien, grandfather, Sigmund and first wife, Kitty, an oedipal slap-up-meal of Dora’s, wolf-men and O’s.

tHE gRANDSON fREUD

gRANDDADDY fREUD

kITTY fREUD

Andrew Tift, from the West Midlands, has won the much-coveted 2006 BP Portrait Award for three 'talking head' images of Kitty Garman (aka Kathleen Epstein).

ePISTEMIC jIGGERY

If I’m correct the soul can be found behind the pineal gland next to the basal-ganglia, which is a knotted mass of sinew, tendon, to keep the neck from flopping, and bone. Now if the soul, as Aquinas says, is a substantive form, a calescence of substance, form and agent intellect, than I could very well be mistaken, as this raises a number of difficulties, the least of which is the notion of intellect, cognition and epistemic jiggery.

hYPOTHALAMIC aLCHEMY

cRUMPLED bROADCLOTH

This pre-avocation I have for skeletal imagery; a faint simulacrum within an image, the body within the image of the body, the disembodied body. The inside-out of the inside, a cock’s neck wrung, bled and turned inside out, an inversion of vertebra, collar and cervix. The skeletal becomes the outside-in, a coat worn like a bony carapace, Kafka’s back turned inside-out, a rotting apple shored in soft tissue. When a bone breaks, gives into to the wreckage of age and time, the inversion begins, the inside becomes the outside, the wreckage worn like a threadbare coat, an apple rotting in crumpled broadcloth.

mRIDEATHmASK

oNE2tHREE

iNSIDEOUT

photograph by Larry Berman

vENTRILOQUISM*

I’m giving serious thought to taking up ventriloquism, even though I can’t talk with my lips pressed tightly together, much as I try, and can’t stand having anything on my lap. I do, however, have a fondness for tailor’s dummies, as I find the little fellows quite charming, and those high stools that ventriloquists are trained to sit on, magnificent indeed, and uninterrupted applause, especially from people in nice cloths and convertible automobiles, red one’s if I had my choice, which I don’t of course, for reasons that must seem quite obvious, the cars are not mine, or the nice cloths for that matter. I am practicing talking with my lips pressed tightly closed as we speak, well as you speak, as my lips are pressed tightly together, and as I have yet to master the ventriloquist’s act I might as well be the dummy, or a red car, a convertible if I had my choice, which I don’t.

fREUD lETTUCE aND bACON*

mEATHAWKER'S aPRON*

The sun has yet to arch above the housetops. Perhaps I live on a gray street in Corinth where cowslip flourishes and cowbirds twitter. Or perhaps I have been meddling in the dictionary again, meddlesome-lexicographer that I am. Madhatter me, I imagine a world never to my liking just the same. Meathawker's apron, strings pulled cinching; labiumice biting through windowsills, the gloomy-glomming bow-bowing. In vine-verities, transubstantiate the clotting-glottis with tallow-white biscuits and deepest pomegranate-red watereddownwines: in glottis-veritas. Quixote’s mandrill’s not so funny after all. This, so he fears, is all he has left to look forward backwards to, silly little crones’headless fool.

mARROW vOICES*

deep
in the bone
the howl of marrow
kill-saw’s hollow
ringing

gRANDDAD'S cOUCH*

Lucien Freud*

pREPUCE-lIGULAS*

Gilbert and Sullivan smoked crack, prepuce-excreta-ligulas scorched clear through to eyeteeth and jawbone; silly fucking librettos, enough to send you screaming, ears burning, to the nearest exit, crack-ash stuck in the folds of your trousers, tie knotted in a sheepshank-bolo; the prelates of penance, or the nickelodeon, all that cacophony and tympana, flutes, oboes and French horns, not a penny-whistle or a pocket-comb and wax paper in the lot.

cOMMON sENSE aND fINITUDE*

Freud spoke about the childish need to repeat to ensure a constancy of object, act and mother. By repeating the child feels safe, although the act of repetition carried into adult life becomes an act of repetition for the sake of repetition, a nausea-nauseous-ad-nausea. Obsessive compulsive disorder is the act of repetition taken to its most absurd imprecation. My own experience with the devil-repetition, this stick in the eye, this discontinuity of object, act and place, has been a constant struggle to maintain a sense of safety, a safeness that in its illusion is elusive, unattainable and childish. The most indelicate feature of OCD is the self-awareness of its absurdity, the dissonance it creates in the mind, thoughts thought forward, backwards and with little regard for reason, common sense and finitude. However I suppose things could be worse, I could be limbless, headless and syphilitic, so I best count my blessings, and count and count and…