2023 book list

1. Kafka’s Letters to Milena
2. Eros the Bittersweet
3. The hero with a thousand faces
4. Sexual personae 
5. Invisible cities
6. Lolita
7. The stranger
8. Crime and punishment
9. The brothers karamazov
10. The sexual politics of meat
11. The second sex
12. Erotism: death and sensuality
13. Wuthering heights
14. The enchantments of mammon
15. 48 laws of power
16. The art of seduction 
17. The nose
18. Ways of seeing
19. Leaves of grass 
20. Jitterbug perfume
21. The fisherman 
22. No longer human
23. My year of rest and relaxation
24. Delta of Venus
25. Women who run with the wolves 
26. Hollywood Babylon 
27. Primitive mythology
28. Ways of seeing
29. On the genealogy of morals 
30. Brave new world
31. Escape from freedom 
32. The murder of roger ackroyd
33. A natural history of the senses
34. The Eros of everyday life 
35. Dubliners 
36. The castle
37. The trial 
38. The myth of Sisyphus
39. The night circus
40. Simulacra and simulation 
41. Society of the spectacle 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOea3Jxgc-M

"Photography also converts the whole world into a cemetery. Photographers, connoisseurs of beauty, are also — wittingly or unwittingly — the recording-angels of death. The photograph-as-photograph shows death. More than that, it shows the sex-appeal of death.

[...]

We no longer study the art of dying, a regular discipline and hygiene in older cultures; but all eyes, at rest, contain that knowledge. The body knows. And the camera shows, inexorably… Peter Hujar knows that portraits in life are always, also, portraits in death. I am moved by the purity and delicacy of his intentions. If a free human being can afford to think of nothing less than death, then these memento mori can exorcise morbidity as effectively as they evoke its sweet poetry and its panic."

- Susan Sontag, Portraits in Life and Death

“A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another...

[...]

One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object -- and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.”

- John Berger, Ways of Seeing

"A perfect game. Hold square and fap.

must play!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

- Edotope777, user

Consider the Camera Obscura from Fatal Frame. As memorable iconography in video games as any, it is your means of defense, your means of interfacing, nearly half of your verbage in a given Fatal Frame/Project Zero title. You are hounded by restless, malevolent spirits; their only release from undeath is death itself, by flash, by objectification in the most literal sense. Gekijōban Zero, a loose adaptation by director Mari Asato with a screenplay based on a novelization by Eiji Ōtsuka, takes this framework and expands it along lines more quiet, tender; the Camera becomes not just death and release, but memorial, not just defense, but embrace, something to recognize the red thread that binds trouble twinned souls together.

In Motion Gravure Series, the Camera is taken a step further in a different direction, becoming a scathingly unintentional satire of early digital cinematography and photography, a parody and unraveling of gravure as industry, of the objectification of women's bodies that it sells itself as, through uncanny, sexless, digital death. The cold, eerie synths and clicks of the soundtrack, the warped, contorted focal points of fetish, the never-nude knockers slack and shrunk and enlarged and elongated all by dual shock control, the unfamiliarity of the unmoving faces against the shifting backgrounds and bodies. It is a death. Not of careers, not of erections, not of the women themselves we hope, but of these women in these moments, an entrapment of their souls and physical forms in a cage of DVD-R pixels, a strange ritual sacrifice where they accept cum tributes for digital devils.

"Hell on earth [...] this is Bloober Team Silent Hill"

- ludzu, user

"You enjoy all the killing, that's why!"

- Liquid Snake, MGS

"You enjoy all the cumming, that's why!"

- Punished Snake, MGS

"Don't stand there looking so smug! You're the worst person in this room! You come"

- Vincent, SH3 

STAY AWAY !!!

spirit they’ve vanished

https://youtu.be/zKU2iS4OMq0

“Listen with your mind, not your ears. The beautiful buzzing fills your head, like the resonate buzzing of insects in a prehistoric forest.  

This song awakens something encoded deep into human DNA, a memory of where life began, in the hazy, deep, and dark forests of our ancestors. It is utterly amazing and beautiful to imagine this untouched, pure world.”

the boyish urge to go then, you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky like a patient etherized upon a table

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table;

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,

The muttering retreats

Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:

Streets that follow like a tedious argument

Of insidious intent

To lead you to an overwhelming question ...

Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”

Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,

The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,

Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,

Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,

Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,

Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,

And seeing that it was a soft October night,

Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time

For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,

Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;

There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

There will be time to murder and create,

And time for all the works and days of hands

That lift and drop a question on your plate;

Time for you and time for me,

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

And for a hundred visions and revisions,

Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

And indeed there will be time

To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”

Time to turn back and descend the stair,

With a bald spot in the middle of my hair —

(They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”)

My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,

My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin —

(They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”)

Do I dare

Disturb the universe?

In a minute there is time

For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all:

Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

I know the voices dying with a dying fall

Beneath the music from a farther room.

               So how should I presume?

And I have known the eyes already, known them all—

The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,

And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,

When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,

Then how should I begin

To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?

               And how should I presume?

And I have known the arms already, known them all—

Arms that are braceleted and white and bare

(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)

Is it perfume from a dress

That makes me so digress?

Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.

               And should I then presume?

               And how should I begin?

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets

And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes

Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? ...

I should have been a pair of ragged claws

Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!

Smoothed by long fingers,

Asleep ... tired ... or it malingers,

Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.

Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,

Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?

But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,

Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,

I am no prophet — and here’s no great matter;

I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,

And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,

And in short, I was afraid.

And would it have been worth it, after all,

After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,

Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,

Would it have been worth while,

To have bitten off the matter with a smile,

To have squeezed the universe into a ball

To roll it towards some overwhelming question,

To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,

Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—

If one, settling a pillow by her head

               Should say: “That is not what I meant at all;

               That is not it, at all.”

And would it have been worth it, after all,

Would it have been worth while,

After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,

After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—

And this, and so much more?—

It is impossible to say just what I mean!

But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:

Would it have been worth while

If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,

And turning toward the window, should say:

               “That is not it at all,

               That is not what I meant, at all.”

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;

Am an attendant lord, one that will do

To swell a progress, start a scene or two,

Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,

Deferential, glad to be of use,

Politic, cautious, and meticulous;

Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;

At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—

Almost, at times, the Fool.

I grow old ... I grow old ...

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind?   Do I dare to eat a peach?

I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves

Combing the white hair of the waves blown back

When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown

Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

 the only flavor of boba i order is honeydew

strawberries 

 insomnia