Hi everyone! It's been a while. :) I'm back in business now though, galvanized by the new news about how funding mandates here in Hell are set to change - and not before time. (Sorry guys!) Too often in the past, there was a sort of laissez faire attitude to tortures - those who were committed would make sure that they put the hours in with the knout and fork, but others, frankly, would leave hardly a back or buttock scathed if they could find a way to let time leak away by the watercooler or in the 'library' (yeah, I know!) Now, though, I'm glad to report that things are looking up. A message has come through the fiery adits from Lynn Gladden, our Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Naphtha and Bitumen, setting out the new Infernal Methods for Punishment Promulgation. Sure, there are glitches. Sadly, as Lynn doesn't try to conceal, '[s]ome of the funder mandates are not fully thought through.' (Ever feel let down?)  'The result can be confusing, but the funders expect action on the part of authors regardless.' The headline is good news here though. Readers of this log won't need reminding that those great thoughts which all the devils and demons hereabouts are always cooking up don't just fund themselves. Every hellish thought is paid for by someone, somewhere - and that means that these thoughts, obviously, are the property of those who paid for them. Some of the damned and lost do sometimes seem to me to have a slightly frustrating idea of what the 'soul' (their word!) actually entails. For the record, folks: 'having' a soul doesn't mean that all the thoughts in it are your private property? Like I always say: who's the sponsor? But things are on the mend. You can download our free Soul Data Extraction App  here. Get busy!

OK, this really is my last post for tonight. (This stuff is way too addictive!) I was talking to my line manager, over a (great) macchiato (we welcome the spotted and the unspotted here!) earlier in the week at a break-out in the Grant Application Awayday at the Tickell's Arms in Whittlesford, it's this really old place, obsolete in some ways, but it has character (apparently Enoch Powell used to sing Das Rheingold here in the 1890s!) and he mentioned a really, like, gross gap in the market for blogs and such. Apparently blogs are more or less finished, which makes me kind of sad  --  (*sighs*) --, since I've just discovered them and all, but my manager thought that there was still one pretty much unharvested feature about them. He pointed out that one thing we do all the time is to type our own names into search engines -- I giggled because I don't know how many times I've put 'Julian Limbo' into Google late at night when I've been really stressed out about the General Board's Strategic Review here at Lethe of our set texts in the Irreversible Perdition Tripos, especially when they were suggesting that one of them should be Willard Van Eugene Ormandy Quine's 'To Be Is To Be The Value Of A Bound Variable', which we folks in Hell pretty much regard as a sacred text, and not really suitable for undergraduates -- and he said that what bloggers had really failed to appreciate was that the quickest way to establish a readership was absolutely to play this narcissism, to fill their blogs with the names of individual particular people who would be bound to Google themselves, especially men, who are always hoping that they'll run into some impossibly glamorous and fatal female admirer on line, and they'll end up at your blog. And then he said that if you wanted to convert somebody, if you were some sort of hilarious out of date, I think 'Christian ironist' was the phrase he used, although to be honest he is a little but fill (oops bit full) of himself when he gets to reminiscing about his sophomore days, that that would be the way to go. He also said that the function of comedy was changing, that jokes used to be theone thing that you couldn't really take people to court for, and that that was kind of the point of them, but that the people who still thought that now had kind of missed a legal trick, and needed better advice. Sure hope he's wrong, LOL! even though I never really set much store by laughter, it always seemed kind of cheap. I'm more into Paul Celan (LOL I first wrote 'Clean') and that kind of thing, deeper sorts of thing, myself? So I won't append anyone's name to this post? But you have been warned!

Correction: Duh!

OK, so this is why you should never blog late at night! I just wrote 'Kenneth Dworkin'? Instead of 'Andrea Dworkin'!  Stand away from the keyboard, dude!

Fulmination updates on the Goldsmith/Sutherland standoff!!

OK, so I blogged to soon (!). It seems that a response has already been made - far better and far cooler than I cold have come up with (did come up with!) myself -- the man himself has just tweeted, just as a fact, that 'Keston Sutherland hates conceptual poetry'. This is clever. It's often struck me that it's something that we in the UK just don't get - that it's completely pointless to start all these arguments and stuff. After all, what is an argument but a kind of plea for attention? And I should know (LOL) -- as a subterranean worker I am just deluged with tweets and emails from lost souls whose only real motive is that I in some way authenticate their sad existences. In fact, it's almost as though these days my job mostly *is* to answer communications from lost souls -- the actual work of punshing them is left by the wayside. OK, I'm sounding like a real 'Luddite' now! It's not like things really were any better in the days when all the punishing had to be done by hand -- it was -- literally! --  bloody hard work, as I know from my own experience, and anyone who thinks it was easy or who feels nostalgic for it should try a few weeks even of, you know, light flagellation of the simonists. Okay, I've kind of got away from the main point here, which is that we Brits should take a .pdf out of Kenneth Goldsmith's hard drive and 'lighten up' a little. (Also, and I know this is slightly apart from the main point too, but I've come to feel pretty militant about getting these little details right, which someone like Sutherland just sweeps past in his really broad-brush analysis - conceptual poetry is a rich and diverse movement, and I get a little frustrated when it seems to be reduced to Kenneth Goldsmith and Kenneth Dworkin.) What are we trying to prove, after all? It's not as though Goldsmith is going to read the hndreds of thousands of things that are tweeted about him day in day out by the millions of American households who 'follow' (yeah, I'm new here!) his work? You might as well imagin him reading this blog in person (not that I mean to imply that he is a person!) and meeting, in this small corner of the pixelcosmos, a mirror to fix him with a cruel and petrifying stare, almost as though it were a question of his eternal salvation or perdition. LOL!

https://twitter.com/kg_ubu/status/330038612622200832#

I have to admit I get a little concerned sometimes when debates and discussions in poetry take place without enough respect. Prime example? The latest 'theses' nailed to his door (!) by the bad boy of late modernism, Keston Sutherland. Now, far be it from me to deny that Mr. Sutherland is a clever chap. He clearly has a way with words. But what he doesn't seem to realize is that an avant-garde takes time, thought, and above all, yes (boo!) money to put together. When someone like Kenny Goldsmith has been putting in the hours with potential sponsors and donors year after year at the coal face -- and, let's face it guys, there's only so much rubber chicken you can eat! -- it's just lazy and disrespectful for someone like Sutherland to think that all this careful work can be overthrown just by a few specious aphorisms on a blog. Christian Bok made this point in a great tweet lately, and the word he found for Sutherland -- 'fulminates' -- captures it nicely. It's not that I don't think that Sutherland is right about the reality of the subject or the soul, if that's what he's trying to say (not always sure what he is trying to say). Hell, I'd have to agree with him -- after all, it's my job to ensure that the things (souls, that is) are distributed to their proper circles in a cost-effective and appropriate manner. But the fact is that it's just embarrassing to see all this stated so aggressively in public -- as though modernism had never happened. 'J.C.' in the TLS has some great points to make here, especially about how it was OK for James Joyce to behave badly in Finnegans Wake, but isn't it time we all, you know, grew up now? Calm down, dear!!! LOL. OK, back to the day job at the ferry crossing!


http://afieryflyingroule.tumblr.com/post/49378474736/keston-sutherland-theses-on-antisubjectivist-dogma#

mood-tracking-app-paves-way-for-pocket-therapy

"Few people appreciate just how intimately their own telephones understand their souls," remarks Dr. Brian Cerberus, an Yves Klein Funded Fellow in the Centre for Hot Devices at the University of Lethe. "Souls often suffer from costly disorders, and the new smartphones - which sometimes know more about what is really going on inside a lost soul than its own friends and family - are a great way to help put some of this right." His colleague, Dr. Polly Morfusspova-Siti, gurns in compliance. "Harvesting this data can help us to deliver fully grant-supported real-time punishments even to the most distant corners of Hell," she points out. "In today's time-poor inferno, deleting soul-sicknesses needs to be conducted without the hidebound - and, actually, quite confusing! - intervention of human beings." The app is currently under development, but is likely to be rolled out live across all circles of Hades the UK by 2017.

 http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/mood-tracking-app-paves-way-for-pocket-therapy