Quotes I wanted to have added to Andrea
Pitzers interesting remarks on "frills":
TRLSK,New Directions ed.:
page 19: "An old man naked
as far down as I could see peered at me from a balcony, otherwise there
was no one about. I sat down on a blue bench under a great eucalyptus,
its bark half stripped away, as seems to be always the case with this
sort of tree. Then I tried to see the pink house and the tree and the whole
complexion of the place as my mother had seen it. I regretted not knowing the
exact window of her room."
page 41: Then, as I let my eyes roam around the room, I caught
sight of a couple of framed photographs in the dim shadows above the
bookshelves./ I got
up and examined them. One was an enlarged snapshot of a Chinese stripped
to the waist, in the act of being vigorously beheaded,
the other was a banal photographic study of a curly child playing with a pup.
The taste of their juxtaposition seemed to me questionable, but probably
Sebastian had his own reasons for keeping and hanging them so.
By coincidence,a friend
just sent me images of hermaphrodites and someone else, his comments
on a movie ("FUR: AN IMAGINARY PORTRAIT OF DIANE ARBUS). We don't need to be
Freudians to associate images about beheadings, shaving, unpeeling
and stripping as being (sometimes) references
to castration anxiety. In ADA, Van's "Mascodagama act" with maniambulation
and reversals "terrified children" and had something devilish in it (a
woman's head and attire on top, after reversions of can-can frills,
allows a man to appear in her stead)
Anthony
Stadlen: Saussure's key notion, accepted uncritically by so
many, seems to me itself arbitrary. One doesn't have to postulate supernatural
players of games above or beyond our world to notice profound links between
words, and between words and things, in a given language, and also between
languages. Why should these links have been devised above and beyond our world
rather than by generations of men and women living in our
world?
JM:
Words as signifiers retain a mysterious core which corresponds, perhaps, to an
equally mysterious kernel of unfathomable signalled "reality" . Language,
syntax, discourse adds another dimension, still. But I agree with A.S when he
inquires why such echoes should not be considered
here in their dependence of the "generations of men and women
living in our world."
J.