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The Spine and Its Tingle

@thespineanditstingle / thespineanditstingle.tumblr.com

Fashion, History, Science, Nabokovia. Now with 300% more shitposting.

There was a young man from Peru

Whose limericks stopped at line two

There once was a man from Verdun

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There once was a man from the sticks Whose limericks stopped at line six. They were fine till line five Then they took quite a dive — But the problem is easy to fix If you just ignore the last line, it doesn't even follow the rhyme scheme oh god I've really lost control of this thing I'm so sorry...

There once was a man

From Cork who got limericks

And haiku confused.

deathandsensuality-archive-deac

Alexander McQueen FW21 by Sarah Burton / Tracey Emin, “I was too young to be carrying your Ashes”, 2017-18.

One of the great problems in the theory of fiction from Aristotle to Auerbach has been the relationship between fictional art and life: the problem of mimesis. The formalist approach to this problem, far from being a lapse into pure aestheticism, or a denial of the mimetic component in fiction, is an attempt to discover exactly what verbal art does to life and for life. This is most apparent in Victor Shklovsky's concept of defamiliarization. Shklovsky's concept is grounded in a theory of perception that is essentially Gestaltist. (And behind the Gestalt psychologists are the Romantic poets and philosophers. In the English tradition, there are passages in Coleridge's Biographia Literaria and Shelley's Defense of Poetry which clearly anticipate Shklovsky's formulation, as we shall see in chapter 6.A, below.) “As perception becomes habitual," Shklovsky notes, “it becomes automatic." And he adds, “We see the obiect as though it were enveloped in a sack. We know what it is by its configuration, but we see only its silhouette." In considering a passage from Tolstoy's Diary, Shklovsky reaches the following conclusion:

Habitualization devours objects, clothes, furniture, one's wife, and the fear of war. "If all the complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been."
Art exists to help us recover the sensation of life; it exists to make us feel things, to make the stone stony. The end of art is to give a sensation of the object as seen, not as recognized. The technique of art is to make things "unfamiliar," to make forms obscure, so as to increase the difficulty and the duration of perception. The act of perception in art is an end a itself and must be prolonged. In art, it is our experience of the process of construction that counts, not the finished product.

Shklovsky goes on to illustrate the technique of defamiliarization extensively from the works of Tolstoy, showing us how Tolstoy, by using the point of view of a peasant, or even an animal, can make the familiar seem strange, so that we see it again. Defamiliarization is not only a fundamental technique of mimetic art, it is its principal justification as well. In fiction, defamiliarization is achieved through point of view and through style, of course, but it is also accomplished by plotting itself. Plot, by rearranging events of story, defamiliarizes them and opens them to perception. And because art itself exists in time, the specific devices of defamiliari-zation themselves succumb to habit and become conventions which finally obscure the very objects and events they were invented to display. Thus there can be no permanently "realistic" technique. Ultimately, the artist's reaction to the tyranny of fictional conventions of representation is a parodic one. He will, as Shklovsky says, “lay bare" the conventional techniques by exaggerating them. Thus Shklovsky analyses Tristram Shandy as primarily a work of fiction about fictional technique. Because it focuses on the devices of fiction it is also about modes of perception—about the inter-penetration of art and life. The laying bare of literary devices makes them seem strange and unfamiliar, too, so that we are especially aware of them.

—Robert Scholes, Structuralism in Literature: An Introduction, 1974.

re: the $1 trillion coin there's an old Donald Duck comic where Duckburg has a liquidity crisis because all its coins are in Scrooge's money bin. The government prints a single bank note the size of broadsheet newspaper with a denomination of one gorillion dollars and forces Scrooge to exchange one gorillion dollars of coins for it. They claim that really he is just breaking a bill for them since the face value is the same as the coins. The government distributes the money to the Duckburgers.

Scrooge tries to spend the bill but of course no business can provide change for one gorillion dollars and they all refuse to sell him anything. Only one duck in the world can: Flintheart Glomgold. Scrooge asks to buy glue factories or silver mines from Flintheart, but Flintheart of course declines because what's he going to do with the gorillion dollar bill, buy something from Scrooge?

Meanwhile, in Duckburg people are spending coins in stores, vending machines, and parking meters. All of which Scrooge owns. He flies back from South Africa to find the Money Bin full of coins again. Scrooge uses the gorillion dollar bill to cover up a broken window.

Anonymous asked:

any funeral fragrance recommendations? xoxo

funereal fish ok.. i’ve been thinking how slay lily of the valley is in a goth context bc it’s so out of style and is associated with young virginal innocence and isn’t sweet or sexy at all so it’s like scary courtney love in a little girls communion dress.. so i’d go with a really high quality LotV like

my friend is a basic witch so he said lutens de profundis, which is always the first to come to my mind when i think of funeral perfume bc of . how it’s marketed. chrysanthemum is the funeral flower.

also my friend reminded me that luca turin said iris silver mist also from lutens is what u wear to a poet’s funeral

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