the contenere postmortem is coming, soon & with full sentences from me

see excerpted here some reflections on pretty dollcorpse - tangential, sorry, i just really do need to talk about this album

it's held so close to my heart

& every interest/ project of mine is built around all my other interests/ projects; read:

I was also helping my friends translate the French rap project Pretty Dollcorpse. It came out in October; I listened to it at a friend’s urging in November, and it quickly rose up the ranks as one of my favorite releases of last year. I can recommend it with no holds barred, but please do note that the project was realized as the contending and conversation of two artists with their respective traumatic experiences — child sexual abuse, juvenile prostitution, gender dysphoria, and homophobic bullying, to name the most prominent themes. The “doll” motif emerges to signal the breakability, breaking, and subsequent (and almost antithetical?) corpsification of an object meant to be — but is not quite — cute/pretty. Here inserting a Sianne Ngai excerpt with diction that resonates:

“... commercially manufactured dolls were made almost solely of hard materials, with easily breakable, finely painted bisque heads mounted on bodies made of wood, pewter, steel, and even “electroplated sheet metal.” Like the fully jointed, highly ornate, talking Big Beauty advertised by the American Mechanical Doll Works Company in 1895, most of these dolls were also mechanical or machinelike and easily breakable — which is to say, by contemporary standards, not particularly cute.”

Ngai also discusses the human construction, manufacturing and imposition of cuteness in/of/onto objects — which typically involves giving them face, making them humanlike and thus cute(r) but not-human in a way that often prevents cuteness from being fully realized, a violent and dominating gesture — via the example of Francis Ponge's "L'Orange". For some context, here’s the first paragraph of "L'Orange" translated:

“Like the sponge, the orange aspires to regain face after enduring the ordeal of expression. But where the sponge always succeeds, the orange never does; for its cells have burst, its tissues are torn. While the rind alone is flabbily recovering its form, thanks to its resilience, an amber liquid has oozed out, accompanied, as we know, by sweet refreshment, sweet perfume - but also by the bitter awareness of a premature expulsion of pips as well.”

In the poem, the coercive bestowing of face — humanlikeness — is, against conventional expectation, actively disempowering and humiliating; it is an ordeal that makes the anthropomorphized orange “lose face.” It never really does "regain" face, if it had a face at all in the first place. It’s violent, in a way, especially because cuteness (via face) is constructed → imposed and its assignation is not consented to by the orange/ analogously lifeless object similarly unable to consent e.g. doll. “With its exaggerated passivity, there is a sense in which the cute thing is the most reified or thinglike of things, the most objectified of objects or even an “object” par excellence.” When uncanny life is bestowed onto the forcibly-made-cute thing for its makers to commodify it however they see fit, the objectification that comes with being a humanized-but-not-human object can be of greater(?) injury.

This is where we go back to Pretty Dollcorpse, and I’m thinking of the lines “Pour cette merde, on meurt, de toute façon, on était déjà morts/ Déjà morts bien avant l'heure” and “Ça m'enrichit quand tous ces gueux s'la touchent en m'guettant nécroser” in particular. Translation: “For this shit, we die, anyway, we were already dead/ Dead way before the hour came” + “It gets me filthy rich when those beggars jack off to my necrosis.” Children have restricted — if not a complete lack of — exercisable autonomy; for some in abusive environments or on walks of life structurally consigned to disposability, this is akin to a lack of life, something-like-death. Then when you have your sense of barely-self and what little you can exercise of that childhood autonomy trampled all over by something so personally violating like sexual abuse and the forcible commodification of your body, it can be a “death” that keeps you dying over and over again, reinforcing that not-life-ness of oppressive childhood over and over. As a kid, you’re denied autonomy and personhood in a way that renders you property of the Family — property of adults — an object; then broken, with breakability perceived of you, you become a doll, imbued with commodified purpose you didn’t ask for, and becoming-doll is becoming-dead again, just more(?) injuriously in a way, a slow, necrotizing process. You’re forced to live out your commercial purpose and monetary value, and purchasedness and/or purchasability defines your entire not-life not-death unending process of dying. (Woah sounds like a certain someone talking about boughtness! Consult Contenere Pg13.)

the long-awaited frenchiel collab CONTENERE is out now on itch dot io for FREE

otherwise not much to say - currently at work on a postmortem, around 6k words in, we love these dolls so sincerely & completely

this is a story about depolicing the boundaries around flesh & what materials can constitute flesh (vs. the air-quoted “flesh” — flesh within or bordering those aforementioned boundaries) and #transcendingflesh as in crafting your flesh — in its most expansive definition — to fully and desirously embody, in modes that can include being of or adjacent to “flesh” and/or non-“flesh”, in an infinite variety of ways

which is to say it's transgender

you should make lesbian art with your friends - bricklay your corner of the yurispace underground

it's fun, most of all

also read present perceptual consciousness while you're at it - that's dolly senior over there - or dollylover? anything is possible i love playing with dolls

1 of my favorite installations is greer lankton’s It's All About ME, Not You because it really was all about her

(“trapped in (her) own world in (her)/ head in (her) tiny tiny/ apartment”) & not at all about any of the rest of us, & in that defiance &/through ego|centrism — in “artificial nature/ total indulgence/ dolls engrossed in glamour and self-abuse/ the vanity/ the junkie/ the anorexic/ the chronic masturbator” — there is such admirable anger

i admire anger so much because i’ve tried to be sincere with/in my anger for/in my work for so long & yet i’ve consistently failed i return

to begging & hurt too often like the small thing i once turned myself into & now regret having done so

∴ of the very few early poems of mine that i still think somewhat hold up my personal favorite to return to is "my own private nonexistence" → 1st lines go “too much begging in my poems i’m sick/ now, i say of it | decoy to hear me my bio/

-organized mess | orthogonal in all my/ repositories all tributaries to all”

– 1st time i let myself 'flip out' poetically (lol) so to speak - 1st time i resisted the easy impulse to have the poet fall to the ground, pathetic, hands reaching for an elusive something, at the end of "her" poem

i really really was sick

of how i had started resorting to apologies & laments as facile bows-on-top of/for my poems - i was/am sick too, in its literal meaning, all the time

so (buddhistly?) i tried to get myself used to the idea of death at a certain point – & that does wonders, wouldn’t you know, for the 'wanting' part of wanting to do things - i guess i thought if i really could die at any given moment i wanted to have been a poet who was a bit firmer with their voice

i wanted to have been poetically angry

for a change a poem saying “"i" - even the constructed i yes - am a mess, this is what my mess is” + letting said “mess” of pain/anger situate with/in itself or themselves without resorting to the relatable → submissive-author frames of hurt & sorrow – which are as real as pain & anger yes but for me

they exist as dilutions of the more offensive but perhaps more truthful - more base - intensities of pain & anger? how else to word this

i've realized i sometimes need to be a bit angrier / saying all this because i've been thinking about glamor-(ous/ized) pain as expression of sick transfeminine anger

"[divine] wants to die with dignity" ... "just as that air-force lieutenant went into combat in his dress uniform so that if the death that flies overtook him in the plane it would find and transfix him as an officer & not a mechanic, so divine always carries in her pocket her oily grey diploma for advanced study" ...

& that made me think of greer again - love greer