epoetica

epoetica: an electronic literature symposium organized by davin heckman

my participation was grounded in the exploration of mallarmé's 'pour un tombeau d'Anatole'.

chris died before i could close out my comments.

googlegoth

the death of a scene

how to be goth

fire up a gothic match





Though you probably can't stand goth music, you tolerate going to clubs because of the occasional Ministry and Misfits that they play and the hot people in vinyl and chains. Not that you'd ever have the social skills to date one of them, but eh, *something's* gotta fuel those masturbation fantasies, right?

What kind of goth are you?

gothic fakes

Gothic is about the denial of depth and the insistence on the surface - on the mask rather than the face, the veil rather than what lies beneath, the disguise rather than what is disguised." (from Sedgwick)

"Gothic... possesses no original." Spooner, 32

The very notion of 'mock gothic' is... an oxymoron, because one cannot mock what is always already mocking itself. (35) (camp, and the misfits.)

(unchained melody: 9:23am)

"the legacies of the past and its burdens on the present

the radically provisional or divided nature of the self

the construction of peoples or individuals as monstrous or 'other'

the preoccupation with bodies that are modified, grotesque or diseased...

Gothic has become so pervasive precisely because it is so apposite to the representation of contemporary concerns...

we should perhaps be careful of assuming that the Gothic simply reflects social anxieties in a straightforward manner - as a genre deliberately intended to provoke horror and unease, it plays to audience expectations and therefor is rather too self-conscious to illuminate our most secret fears..."

"There is no 'original' Gothic; it is always already a revival of something else."

Catherine Spooner

- Gothic as 'the passionate overthrow of reason' coming from 5th century Goths' overthrow of Rome

- Gothic as a retrospective architectural term for medieval structures embellished with pointed arches, grotesque angles, gargoyles, stiff elongated figures and elaborate detail... ignoring the clean lines and proportional curves of Classical styles.

"[A Gothic text should comprise] a fearful sense of inheritance in time with a claustrophobic sense of enclosure in space, these two dimensions reinforcing one another to produce an impression of sickening descent into disintegration..."

Chris Baldick

(etymological/historical tensions between definitions: gothic as transcendent spiritualism or corporeal horror?)

:Gothic text: past as a site of terror, injustice that must be resolved, evil that must exorcised. 'the past chokes the present, prevents progress...'

:Gothic (Revival) architecture: the past is imbued and invested with nostalgia and idealism.

Perhaps it is only secure cultures that produce Gothic texts...

it is only a society that has stopped believing in ghosts that is able to turn them into the stuff of entertainment.

liminal inks

Written on the Body - ed. Jane Caplan

I've been getting all these new tattoos lately, and wanting more and more.

("is it the pain or the art?" dad asks.
"bit of both." and then the whole healing process - the crustacean ink, the itch.)

the tattoo is "an indelible insertion that is both visible and out of reach... an exchange between interiority and exeriority, 'a paradoxical double skin...'" (xiii)

infidel(ities):

You shall not gash yourselves in mourning for the dead: you shall not tattoo yourselves." (Leviticus)

much in the first few chapters about the etymology of the tattoo - the (disputed?) relation between 'stigmata' and what we think: ink.

stigma.

brian summed up (a part of it) well : tattoos are so temporary. disregard all the warning speak of permanence. these drawings die with me (except for: see Roald Dahl: Skin). unlike the paintings (crap paintings) that go nowhere except for into corners, the boxes of photos, of letters and books and books and books of drawings. art on the body to do nothing with but burn when body burns.