#bakhtin is so full of shit

[discworldwitches]

a russophile won the booker prize and i ended up just sending my partner a rant about dostoevsky and bakhtin

[caltropspress]

The Fecopoetics of Odd Nosdam’s FLIPPIES SHIT TAPE

…the archetypal rules, the earliest and most systematic to which the child is exposed and in which he is trained, are those governing the definition and control of wastes. The behavior manuals of the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries return again and again to codes elaborated for management of the body’s products: urine, feces, mucus, saliva, and wind. 

—Stephen Greenblatt, from “Filthy Rites,” Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture

The terrestrial globe is covered with volcanoes, which serve as its anus. Although this globe eats nothing, it often violently ejects the contents of its entrails. And thou shalt eat it as barley cakes, and thou shalt bake it with dung that cometh out of man, in their sight. Smell my feces! Enjoy! Fundamentally, there’s something religious about the fact that we’re made of shit. The peremptory reason is, because they eat the ordure and excrements of the world, that is to say, the sins of the people, and, like dung-chewers and excrementitious eaters, they are cast into the privies and secessive places, that is, the convents and abbeys, separated from political conversation, as the jakes and retreats of a house are. Eat shit and die. Now I gots to take a shit… / Went to Mom’s house and dropped a load in the bathroom. That men should fuck in time of flowers, / Or when the smock’s beshit. She's just wilding out, so after I shits on the bitch. This struggle to preserve the advantages of practice and at the same time to defecate the emotions one has expressed already is one of the hardest I know. You had an arse full of farts that night, darling, and I fucked them out of you, big fat fellows, long windy ones, quick little merry cracks and a lot of tiny little naughty farties ending in a long gush from your hole. …friends and neighbors gather around, and…HOLY SHIT!!! Such gaudy tulips raised from dung. And we sing: Life is shit. / Life is shit. / The world is shit. / This is life as I know it. If collectors want something intimate, really personal to the artist, there’s the artist’s own shit. I was walking to the bathroom to take a crap… / Whether I'm constipated or have diarrhea, / I always come out with a funky fresh idea. And whan this sike man felte this frere / Aboute his tuwel grope there and heere, / Amydde his hand he leet the frere a fart. She answer'd short, I'm glad you’ll write, / You’ll furnish paper when I shite. …it’s like shit, there we have it at last, there it is at last, the right word, one has only to seek, seek in vain, to be sure of finding in the end, it’s a question of elimination. Enough now about holes. To degrade also means to concern oneself with the lower stratum of the body, the life of the belly and the reproductive organs; it therefore relates to acts of defecation and copulation, conception, pregnancy, and birth. Well, I wish you good night / But first shit in your bed and make it burst. What if at the last moment, when the banquet table is set and the cymbals clash, there should appear suddenly, and wholly without warning, a silver platter on which even the blind could see that there is nothing more, and nothing less, than two enormous lumps of shit. What’s that in your pants? Ahhh, human feces!

Sources [in order of appearance]:

George Bataille, The Solar Anus | Ezekiel 4:12, King James Version | Descendants, “Enjoy” | Gilbert & George | Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel | Ouiser Boudreaux, Steel Magnolias | Ice Cube, “Steady Mobbin’” | Earl of Rochester “By All Love's Soft, Yet Mighty Powers” | Notorious B.I.G., “Nasty Boy” | T.S. Eliot, “Letter to Robert Nichols, 8 August 1917” | James Joyce, “Letter to Nora Barnacle, 8 December 1909” | unknown sample, Reaching Quiet, “113th Clean” | Jonathan Swift, “The Lady’s Dressing Room” | The Dead Milkmen, “Life is Shit” | Piero Manzoni | Biz Markie, “T.S.R. (Toilet Stool Rap)” | Chaucer, “The Summoner’s Tale” in The Canterbury Tales | Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, “The Reasons that Induced Dr. S. to Write a Poem call’d the Lady’s Dressing Room” | Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable | Mikhail Bakhtin, The Grotesque Image of the Body and Its Sources | Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, “Letter to Maria Anna Thekla Mozart, 5 November 1777” | Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer | GZA, “Clan in da Front”

Images:

Gustave Doré, from Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (detail) | Gilbert & George Spunk Blood Piss Shit Spitm, 1996 | Biz Markie, “T.S.R. (Toilet Stool Rap)” (screenshot)