jay_walk

Interesting information for the day:
http://passionsjustlikemine.com/influence-liter.htm

(when actually I was just trying to find out what his type of glasses is called)

Everything I have read in the last five years, there's been a phrase somewhere to remind me of one of those songs. Caliban is half a person... Nice to know it's not just me, Morrissey is conspiring with everything I read.

"-is that clever?
Everybody's clever nowadays"
I will never get these echoes out of my head.

Allright then, I shall now go watch versions of The Importance of Being Earnest.

I love allusions, references, quoting, stealing, etc.. Because you put all the meaning of the whole referenced work into those few words. Intertextuality = favorite literary device. Especially if it makes no sense, the less logical sense it makes the more true it will be to someone, or to everyone in different ways.
Morrissey: "I'm almost quite speechless now, it's a very historic place and obviously it means a great deal to me... to be sitting here staring at Oscar's television and the very video that Oscar watched The Leather Boys on."
Yeah, like that. I wish I'd even dare come up with that kind of thing that seems like it'll make sense to me and nobody else. But Morrissey proves it can be done, quoting confusing lines from obscure plays and having people like it and understand a meaning.

There's a lot of things I need to find out about & opinionate about, but for now I found out about this:

http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2006/09/voice_from_the_.html

and that's where the recording in Rubber Ring is sampled from.

My interpretation:

Apparently, before knowing that, people had tons of different impressions about what it might mean, naturally. It had sounded to me like brainwashing, for one, and because of the old-loudspeaker-recording quality, like brainwashing in an old dystopia. Something they might play at sleeping people in Brave New World or at completely broken people in the Miniluv, or at constantly at masses of people permanently on government-issued drugs. Obvious that I'd assume such a thing, most things remind me of old science fiction.

"You do not want to believe" is awesomely non-specific. It also echoed in my head after I wrote about postmodernism for a week and read Dorian Gray. (Morrissey is of course closely connected to Wilde in my brain. "Everybody's clever nowadays"). Do not want to believe anything, and consider everything. Do not want to believe what's assumed, do not want to believe what someone is telling me. Paradoxically, a voice that sounds like brainwashing telling me to not believe makes me question not believing, too.
You are sleeping. I took this as a comment on people not thinking for themselves and not believing for themselves. Believing = convictions one knows to be true, probably self-generated. "Every thing to be true must become a religion" (- De Profundis, I read half of it today.)
"You are sleeping. You do not want to believe" = You're going along with what the recordings are telling you; you don't want to think more deeply.

Rather amazing how many associations my mind turns up at a generic statement in a generic medium. Which leads me to the next thing: the electronic voice phenomenon. Pareidolia. Involuntarily ascribing a lot of very specific meaning to things. In that case, random electronic signals not only sound like words in various languages, but they also interpret those words to the relevant context- as statements about the afterlife. I'd love to get a random sample of static and see whether I can hear voices in that too, I don't think I've ever heard words, or if I have heard voices between radio stations I would have assumed they're stray radio broadcasting.
I am rather curious for example how long they waited before they heard words in the noise; how immediately the voices answered.
It doesn't really make sense the dead should talk so cryptically in so many languages.
I do not, of course, believe it's the dead talking, except in the sense that everybody collective mental concept of these people or dead souls in general is projected onto the sounds, and thus all that remains of the dead (the concept of the entities of the those persons in people's minds) can be said to be talking to them.
Which is about the same thing i think of deities' existence.


The word "toti" (very end of second part) especially fascinated me. I thought it might be a form of "totus" - "all", but they interpret it as "the dead", german stem with a latin plural affix. It's just a creepy word somehow, that. The faux-latin, the german word "Tot" being inherently creepy already.
And words, and the way we don't so much recognize a word but the general form of a morpheme matched to the general meaning of a morpheme: I don't recall exactly what the Italian word for eight it, but I know the general direction of it: octe, octo, occe, octa, otta, something like that, and I would recognize it and probably a lot of people who so much as know one indogermanic language would understand my attempts. Without formally knowing what the exact root word is, and with a lot of these words sounding objectively vastly different in different forms&languages. The mind's ability to intuitively recognize pattern and meaning is immense. And mostly useful, and the part about accidentally hearing ghost's voices is fascinating and not really harmful.


As for the song, Rubber Ring is of course amazing, I don't think I need to tell anyone who has listened to The Smiths obsessively how true it is.