A note on: The sex lost in Porn - an article on Versopolis

The theme of August on the European Review of Poetry, Books and Culture is sex and pornography. http://www.versopolis.com/column/656/the-sex-that-s-lost-in-porn

I have the same attitude toward a plot of the usual type as a dentist to teeth.
I built the book on a dispute between people of two cultures; the events mentioned in the text serve only as material for the metaphors.~
This is a common device in erotic things, where real norms are repudiated and metaphoric norms affirmed.                       Viktor Shklovsky, Zoo

It is impossible to track the increased frequency of masturbation through human history into the 21st century. But it is likely that it is at its most frequent in human history. It has to be. Even the most self-loving ancestor of ours, be they 100,000 or 10,000, or 200 years in the past, could not have possibly imagined the kind of sexual stimulation that immediate and unlimited access to pornography provides the average person. There are, of course, more humans than ever before, the world population has doubled since 1970, and in western societies, more people are without a partner than ever before, in context. These are grounds on which we must think of pornography and its ubiquitous but resolutely underground presence.

....

Pornography wants waste. It may be just watched. It may be something other to those who make it. It may tax the senses of those who use into ineffectiveness. It may permeate mainstream ideas and culture, though far less than people say. It may be a force for whatever moralising or shifting nihilism that breezes through too much theoretical consideration. But what it is, in all it’s remove, vivacity, anger, necessity, absurdity, sorrow and energy is a mirror. Perhaps literally, a computer screen reflecting the figure of human, spread legged or hunched over, trying not to see themselves and their own desire, placing it elsewhere, in pieces, in the past, into the excess of other bodies. Pornography need not insist upon itself then, it is the fantastical growth from the part of ourselves we are as ready to deny now as in anytime during our western past. It is an answer, not a question.

Published : my essay The Online Empire : on sex and poetry on Versopolis

Nice to have this essay on sex and poetry published, forever locked onto the internet, readable in perpetuity, appropriately, by Versopolis, and the european review of poetry books and culture. It was written for my book Aletta Ocean's Alphabet Empire, which is tangentially about pornography and will feature in an upcoming volume of my selected essays too. 

http://www.versopolis.com/long-read/604/the-online-empire-on-sex-and-poetry

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"The whole business of eroticism is to destroy the self-contained character of the participators as they are in their normal lives.            Georges Bataille

You can never discover for yourself what you’ve been given. Bodies and knowledge, both. The primary purpose of this book is to worry about the division between the experienced and the perceived, and what is lost between that ever expanding gap.

Bataille suggests that you try to imagine yourself changing from the state you are in, to one in which your whole self is completely doubled. He means this to be a disturbance. He reminds us, you would not survive this process since the doubles you have turned into are essentially different from you. Each of these doubles is necessarily distinct from you as you are now, as while you’ve split into two new versions of yourself, you cannot be the same, twice over. A kind of procreation is what he is suggesting and the metaphor is about writing, I think. To mark the pages then release them is to indulge oneself, fundamentally, in a productive onanism. Cells dividing, with some of that division escaping you. No wonder it feels sad, a let down, to release things into the world......"

Performing at the Science Museum

I took Josh Alexander, the filmmaker, my friend, along to this strange evening at the Science Museum. He and I are going to make a film/poem together. He is quite brilliant, and wonderful company, very dry, very gentle mannered. We were kindly invited by the equally wonderful Sophie Mayer, as I am part of her anthology (ed with Sarah Crewe) called Glitter as a gender, which was being celebrated as part of a Late Night opening at the museum, about sex. I performed in front of the amazing Exponential Horn installation. A massive 30 foot amplification horn. In a dark room. It was an atmosphere of speed dating and champers in the museum, and I went on at 7, so the people were in and out, of staying and going, and of listening. I wore a Plague Doctor mask and a hoodie. I mumbled some weird stuff about speed dating in between humming like Glenn Gould. I got told off for shouting into the horn. No one really listened to me. All the better, perhaps, as Josh filmed me, they seemed not to know I was performing, and slouched, undefended as I went on. Josh and I both work in a museum. The event briefing we had to attend early on, with its false happiness and energy and air of strange bovine threat lingered in the strange ursine nature of my performance. This will be a night that gives something for the film, but weird to live in. Nice to be asked though.

Cristine Brache - Monger Tours

http://mongertours.com/ an incredible representation of the work of Cristine Brache, the homeland of international ballers, all housed up in annn website. the interplay between text, image, net tech and the actual tonality of the engagement with the grime of the international fluid scene is remarkable. especially priding to me is this piece, http://mongertours.com/iknow.html, which includes lines from my poems. Click through all the chapters, watch the videos, all amazing poetry art video.