I was forlorn today until...
01:18am, Mar 16, 2002: ... I found this.

From Madame Sosostris to the Money Shot:
A Secret History of the Facial...
04:43pm, Mar 10, 2002: The leap is all too easy — and the quote that follows makes it easier — but if you accept it means something, well, what the hell, precisely?

“Although few knew it at the time, Eva Carrière was Marthe Béraud, who had escaped adverse publicity in Algiers and pseudonymously formed an intimate relationship with [sculptor Juliette] Bisson, who took many of the photogaphs for [Bavarian psychologist Albert von] Schrenck-Notzing's Materialisationphänomene, published in 1913. Bisson was Eva’s Svengali, her influence… literally hypnotic, and Schrenck-Notzing was struck by the medium’s passivity, the most memorable evidence of which were physical examinations per rectum et vaginam... to check for concealed materials. Schenck-Notzing watched as Bisson probed Eva’s vagina; but he himself consented to feel her body only through her leotard...”

“A famous photograph shows a tangle of gauzy matter suspended from Eva’s bare breasts, alleged ectoplasm from which she moulded visible faces and body parts; another from 1913 shows her wearing nothing but a pained expression as she manifests a shrouded gentleman whose flat face some felt bore a striking resemblance to the King of Bulgaria. This theory was strengthened after the camera caught her head at an odd angle to reveal the back of a two-dimensional face bearing the word ‘MIRO’: part of the masthead of Le Miroire... Since paranormalist reasoning tends to be more sophist than Socratic, this evidence did not prove Eva was a fraud; rather it implied that some of her phenomena were not genuine. Schrenk-Notzing even speculated that these images were ‘ideoplasts’ — sharply recalled images (a habit of hysterical women, he argued) projected externally.” —Hellish Nell: Last of Britain’s Witches by Malcolm Gaskill, 4th Estate, pp.91-92

Penetrans ad interiora mortis
1:42 pm, March 2, 2002: or when is a bush not a bush... My favourite M. R. James just got bettah!

On the shoulders of...
1:41pm, Feb 24, 2002: Romantic poetry: a map of the self scrambling among the rock formations of the sublime. Music writing: a map of the self scrambling among the rock AND POP formations of the sublime.

Nicely put
1:39pm, Feb 24, 2002: Sometimes I wish *I* was one of Kortbein's pupils. I think.

Pop vs unpop: who will win?
11:38pm, Feb 19, 2002: I don’t suppose it’s the first byte-pop poem. I know it’s not the first poem with built-in footnotes. It might just be the first poem, though, to marshal its footnotes to tamp down unwanted byte-pop power. If the soundbyte impulse is a degenerate product of modernity, of the age of the gramophone, of short attention spans and poor grasp of rooted culture, well, you have to be very careful which sources you cite with respect, and which you feed on more slyly. So yes, Ovid, Dante, Webster, Baudelaire, Jessie L. Weston on the Grail myth, and Frazer’s The Golden Bough – but not perhaps the debt paid Bram Stoker’s Dracula by a phrase like “crawled head downward down a blackened wall”. Well, it’s not as if it’s a quotation, even when our Vampire Lord stands dark and potent over every line from “Unreal” (376) to “Dry bones can harm no one” (390). Ahem, what the Thunder actually said: “[Mrs Radcliffe] was the leading exponent of the Gothic novel, which relates terrifying adventures in lonely castles… [and] one of the first novelists to include vivid descriptions of landscape, weather, and effects of light” (Oxford Companion to Eng.Lit., ed.Margaret Drabble, 1985). No, Ann Radcliffe is kept out of Eliot’s footnotes. The closest he gets to admitting to Pop are the Tarot (46), which he confesses distorting for his own purposes, an Australian ballad he doesn’t bother naming or tracing (199), and the anecdote from the Shackleton expedition (360), which he also distances himself from. Actually of course the last is anyway another feint: whatever the source of “Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded”, it’s no tale of Antarctic explorers in the grip of hypoxic delusion. So who is the third who walks always beside you? Shackleton, exhausted high in a South Georgia mountain range, thought it was He who died for us all; and this is of course what Eliot wants you think too. But the byte-pop says something else, and a shadow is cast beyond the poet’s conscious will to proselytise and suppress. The core of Stoker’s Dracula: we defeat Him by partaking of Him.

“Poor Mr Wraxall! He set out on his journey to England on the next day, as he had planned, and he reached England in safety; and yet, as I gather from his changed hand and inconsequent jottings, a broken man. One of several small notebooks that have come to me with his papers gives, not a key to, but a kind of inkling of, his experiences. Much of his journey was made by canal-boat, and I find not less than six painful attempts to enumerate and describe his fellow-passengers. The entries are of this kind:

“24. Pastor of village in Skane. Usual black coat and soft black hat.
“25. Commercial traveller from Stockholm going to Trollhättan. Black cloak, brown hat.
“26. Man in long black cloak, broad-leafed hat, very old-fashioned.

“This entry is lined out, and a note added: ‘Perhaps identical with No. 13. Have not yet seen his face.’ On referring to No. 13, I find that he is a Roman priest in a cassock.

The net result of the reckoning is always the same. Twenty-eight people appear in the enumeration, one being always a man in a long black cloak and broad hat, and the other a ‘short figure in dark cloak and hood’. On the other hand, it is always noted that only 26 passengers appear at meals, and that the man in the cloak is perhaps absent, and the short figure is certainly absent.” (From ‘Count Magnus’, M. R. James, first published in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, 1904.)