#scratch deleuze

[tiktaaliker]

tbh im a big fan of the ohio worms. big big fan of Guys who Are Not Doing Well

oh MAN let me tell you about how much the ohio worms suck (i say this with so much love in my heart btw)

first of all, i actually managed to dig up the worm event history doc i had made back during blaseball beta that lists almost every single good or bad or cool thing that happened to the ohio worms spanning from season 13 (our first season in active play) up to season 23, along with relevant links to reblase! tbh i need to update it to include before sibr links and add stuff that happened after s23 lol. but here's a link to it if youre interested in that.

as a tldr, here's some of the really funny things that happened to the ohio worms contributed to my conviction that the sim hated us in particular:

we had a team mod that gave the team a small stat boost whenever we ended the season as last in our division. it was only proc'ed 3 times because we weren't good enough at being bad. it WOULD have activated a 4th time in season 19, except the turntables rule made every win negative so we were at the top instead of the bottom. so we got NOTHING

we had the lowest average percent chance of passed wills in elections out of every team. so the sim kept picking the things that very few worms fans actually voted for which often ended in REALLY unfortunate situations, like boosting a player that got traded away in the same election, or moving a player to a spot they were already at, or boosting defense. we kept infusing defense on pitchers (which is entirely useless since pitchers didnt even contribute to defense) it was a real problem. we also kept getting things in the elections that were either completely useless or actively detrimental

speaking of defense, one thing that the worms was REALLY good at was defense! we had one of the strongest defenses in the league, which in theory is great. except that defense wasn't actually all that useful in a meta where the best players just hit home runs all the time

one of our only good pitchers at the time, rivers rosa, got bit by sharks so many times that we had to pull her off the roster into the shadows. it was devastating.

because of the configuration we chose for our stadium, we didn't get an option to clean our stadium for a reallllyyyy long time. this was a problem because filth added to eDensity, something we already had problems with considering we had extra championship wins adding to our weight (none of which were actually won in normal gameplay btw, it's just that all of the breach teams started out with at least 3 championship titles because the conceit is that they were already ascended). we were extremely heavy which was part of why our players kept getting attacked by consumers so often. well it WAS going to work in our benefit after a while, because we eventually had enough items on our players to prevent attacks (shout out to xandra pancakes and her steel chairs) and scratch deleuze got the cluttered mod, making her UNSTOPPABLE while on our home field. but then we finally got the option to clean our stadium in the renovations and all of our filth........ GONE..........

we actually once sunk ourselves on semi-purpose. we had this whole campaign to get 4 gifts from the gift shop from other teams because people had started dumping coins into us receiving a chorby soul replica with a chorby's soul item, presumably as a joke initially because chorby's soul is a one way ticket to having your entire team eaten alive by sharks. but we thought that if we could use a different gift to give our players items to protect themselves then we could actually progress the plot a bit in the process (we had a mod that made items contribute more to our eDensity, so we were the only team who could actually use the chorby's soul item to break the gates to blaseball2 (long story)). the other two gifts were because our 3rd place option was for one of the dynamic duo, and we wanted to have BOTH liquid friend and uncle plasma replicas because we knew that Something Would Happen if a team had both on the team and we wanted to find out what it was. Well it turns out that having both of the dynamic duo meant that they would punch the shit out of any consumers so we were effectively immune while also FINALLY breaking the blaseball2 gate. and this would be the end of it except one of the players from the boston flowers stole our chorby's soul and THEY got eaten alive by sharks because they did not in fact get both liquid friend and uncle plasma replicas. whoops!

we fought tooth and claw to improve our team. it was a real struggle, but we very slowly and very surely managed to get our players and lineup good enough that we were FINALLY able to make it to the championship in season 23. we didn't win, but surely we'd be able to get it next time! except we didn't get to, because during the next season the sun collapsed into a black hole and ate the league. and when the main seasons started again at season 1 all the players were reset and reshuffled into the teams so the worms were back to sucking again

during one of the short circuts, the worms won a blessing in the election that transformed the team into THE OHIO PEANUTS. the fans (myself included) were EXTREMELY hype about this because we got honey roasted as a team mod, which was exciting! um. nothing came from this and we got kicked out of the postseason by the spies (as always).

speaking of that the houston spies were like... the ultimate enemy of the ohio worms in that i think they knocked us out of the post season over half of the times that we qualified

when blaseball started back again for real, the worms proceeded to suck real bad, do nothing significant, and won no blessings. in the final election, a different team won a blessing that incinerated one of our players, Johnnyboy Aster. on the official blaseball twitter, the commissioner did a standard "in memorium" tweet except that the commissioner referred to Johnnyboy using he/him pronouns. this is VERY significant because this is the first time a player has EVER been referred to using any pronouns other than they/them by anything official or official-adjacent. and then the next tweet was the announcement that blaseball is over forever lol. i like to think that both johnnyboy aster and the entire splort of blaseball was killed by a gender reveal party

[sexofword]

Islands

"To dream of islands, whether with joy or in fear, is to dream of pulling away, of being already separate, far from any continent, of being lost and alone, or to dream of starting from scratch, recreating, beginning anew”

Deleuze

Yes Gilles, but what of you were born on an island?

[pint-o-beans]

Who is your favorite blaseball character?

oh my god that's a great question. it might be Millipede Aqualuft? There were a lot of great interpretations of them (mostly along the otter/water spirit continuum) and even if they were a little late to get a ton of fan work I just loved everything about them. Scratch Deleuze also holds a strong place in my heart, our sweet lil momma possum

[caligulalotus]

Scratch Deleuze in A6 or Rosales Darkness in C1

i don't know if you were looking for possum scratch but i adore them

[whales-are-gay]

Sorry btw to drop card discourse into your inbox it’s just been on the mind and you have good taste

no worries, it's just. very interesting that we're having this conversation here on tumblr, but on twitter where most of the blaseball community is people won't even acknowledge it.

[pikatzke]

Scratch Deleuze of the Ohio Worms

[tiktaaliker]

i aaamm curious about your blaseball guys,,,,, yap away

OH HI HELLO YES. OHIO WORMS.

so. um. a very important thing to know about the ohio worms is that they sucked so bad and had the worst luck imaginable. when the team first joined the league our players were so awful that we managed a partytime speedrun (aka we set a record for being mathematically eliminated from thr playoffs the quickest. and that record was never beaten. go worms!). I could go into more detail about this because i personally find it REALLY fascinating and the worms rotten luck is part of why i love the team so much, but I'll spare you from the essay on mathematically proving that the sim hated the worms, and for now and talk about other stuff lol

another very important detail about the ohio worms is that in blaseball this -> 🐌 is a worm. Out of keyfabe this was because the actual worm emoji wasnt available to all devicies. In keyfabe this is because the Comissioner doesnt know what a snail is

ANYWAYS. Heres some of the guys from the ohio worms that i think about a lot c:

^ old art but i still like it. pictured left to right is lenny crumb, scratch deleuze, and patchwork southwick

Lenny Crumb is usually depicted as a snail or worm with a pastry for a shell! He's one of our original players from when the Worms first joined blaseball. He was our first in rotation, and hit a home run at our first ever at-bat! If you've listened to the legend of lenny crumb from the garages world tour album, its about this guy c:

Scratch Deleuze is another worms original. Usually depicted as an opossum. I love scratch so much its unreal. Scratch was one of our best batters and was really widely beloved among worms fans (including me). She actually spent a really long time elsewhere; i think she might hold the record for most irl time stuck elsewhere, if not then it was def up there. She also got the cluttered mod in one of the later seasons, which worked GREAT because we had the filithiest stadium BY FAR and the mod made her play better in stadiums with high Filth levels. Also her pregame ritual was eating spaghetti <3

PATCHWORK SOUTHWICK MY BELOVEDDDDD. i have an unhealthy obsession with mediocre pitchers in blaseball and patchwork was the best of them. So without getting too in depth on player stats and fk stats and all that stuff because it was REALLY complex, but the main thing thats relevant here is the ruthlessness stat. Ruthlessness was a stat that impacted how often a pitcher throws strikes instead of balls. It was EXTREMELY important and every really good pitcher in blaseball (at least up through mid-expansion before i thiiink stats got reworked a bit and ruth wasnt as important anymore) had a maximum ruth. Patchwork meanwhile was EXTREMELY fascinating because their ruthlessness was jusssst good enough to make them a viable pitcher but also shitty enough to make any game they pitched in the most dire and stressful experience imaginable. Patchwork liked to load up the bases with walks and then strike out three batters in a row. Practically every noteworthy game in worms history had Patchwork as the pitcher. A running joke in the ohio worms was "I WANT TO GET OFF PATCHWORK SOUTHWICK'S WILD RIDE" for a reason. I love themmmm and i personality hc them as a scarecrow being possessed by a committee of ghosts c:

^ more old art lol. Kaz Fiasco and Pitching Machine

Kaz Fiasco waz an original worm who is commonly depicted as a mothman-adjacent creature. When the glitter weather first started appearing (which had a chance for players to randomly received items. Kaz got 2 hats which he had on at the same time. Iirc i think his first hat he got in the first ever glitter game in the entire league! He ended up being feedback'd over to the Sunbeams in exhange for Iggy Delacruz (riv), which i think was extremely fitting. I personally headcanon that the only recipe that Kaz is able to make is party cheese salad, and I would go into other teams channels temporarily just so i could let them know about this whenever kaz joined a new team.

Pitching Machine is not an original worm by technically. During the first election Worms were a part of after being part of the league for less than a full season, we somehow ended up with Pitching Machine (REALLY good pitcher, extremely popular, involved in Major Plot Events) which is great! ....except with the way trading worked, PM ended up in our batting roation. Surprisingly enough, Pitching Machine was also a pretty good Batting Machine! PM was a beloved worm to the point where we intentionally wasted a will during one election to steal it from ourselves (long story). The song Not That Bad by the garages (also on the world tour album) is about pitching machine's time on the worms c:

I actually have quite a few more ohio worms players i want to talk about, but honestly i'd need to dedicate an enire post JUST for vess sundae and roz darkness, my two all time favorite blaseball players ever, and also its almost 1 am and i have work tomorrow. but i can and will talk more about blorbos from my splorts later

[the-chomsky-hash]

[B. Deleuze's book is a theater of a new philosophy - cont'd]

4. As for the drama - in the book itself - it has, like Sophocles' Oedipus, three moments.

a. First, the insidious expectation of signs: murmurs, creaky oracles, blind soothsayers who talk too much. The high kingship of

the Subject (I, unique, coherent me)

Representation (clear ideas that I look through)

is undermined.

Under the monarchical, solemn, calculating voice of Western philosophers who wanted to reign

unity

analogy

resemblance

non-contradiction

who wanted to reduce difference to negation (which is other than A and non-A , we are taught from school)

In this voice constantly held, we can hear the crack of disparity. Let's listen to the drops of water trickling in Leibniz marble. Let's see the crack of time scratch the Kantian subject.

– Michel Foucault, Ariane s'est Pendue, review of Différence et Répétition by Gilles Deleuze, in Le Nouvel Observateur, no 229, 31 mars - 6 avril, 1969

[bluntforcefem]

ohio worms time >:) this is a rundown of the first irm for all (checks hand) thirteen players i’m writing irms for. ves sundae already has two concepts, so both of those will be outlined here. the rest is between me and god (not conceptualized yet)

lenny crumb - ohio state reformatory. normal guy who leads the ghost/paranormal tours at the reformatory & summoned a ghost in the cathedral off hours to play blaseball for nyr. said ghost doesn’t remember jack or shit about nyrself besides being rude and how to play blaseball so ne steals lenny’s pronouns and the first half of nyr name

vessalius sundae v1 - cleveland play house. middle-aged performer who unofficially retired from the stage to become the artistic director for the play house. lived in sarasota fl for some time in the early parts of her career, but moved back to ohio when she was about 30 to be closer to home. joining blaseball was an accident but she’s having fun in the spotlight again

vessalius sundae v2 - dietsch brothers. works at the ice cream counter and the chocolate counter interchangeably. cognitohazard who looks like other blaseball cognitohazards’ original form. has gotten the employee of the month title exactly once

patchwork southwick - lake erie frozen lighthouse. there’s a couple of these but i’d like to imagine in the blaseball universe at least one is just... perpetually frozen, because for the fucking life of me none of the websites i looked at told me if the one i liked WAS always frozen. it is now. lighthouse keeper who either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care that their lighthouse is Like This. has a cat. the cat is a ghost. this also goes unaddressed.

xandra pancakes - world’s largest horseshoe crab. realass roadside attraction btw i want to go see it. xandra emerged from the shadows the same election that luis came to the worms, so there’s a “we stole this fake crab from baltimore” kind of vibe going on. crab heist. xandra “carcinized” from the experience and now hosts drag shows at the giant horseshoe crab statue

scratch deleuze - elmore tombstone derby. dlerby, if you will. avid participant in the motorized casket race, and has recently incorporated design elements referencing the dead ohio worms as some kind of memorial. she’s also responsible for dragging the entirety of the worms to turn the stadium into a haunted house attraction every october

cantus hojo - toledo botanical gardens. artist who works with glass & creates sculptures to be seasonally displayed across the gardens. occasionally helps out with the gardens, but has largely lost time for that since joining blaseball; very loudly misses it. some of her creations can be found across the worms’ stadium.

muse scantron - neonworks of cincinnati / american sign museum. makes custom neon signs & helps to repair older ones; since coming back to blaseball from the black hole, they’ve had a pretty long backlog they’re still working through. however, they’ve still managed to find the time to decorate the stadium and their teammates’ livelihoods or homes with custom neon signs on request. they’re reportedly “pretty happy” they got sent to the shadows, as it gives them more time to work on the job they actually enjoy doing

susananana portmanteau - moonville tunnel. train conductor ghost with an accompanying ghost train that picks up “residents” from all parts of ohio who want to try moving on. rumoured to originally be an amalgam of railway workers who died around moonville tunnel, but xe’s never said as much, so it’s anyone’s guess. keeps directing the train to go into lake erie, and frequently tries to aim it directly into the ocean closest to any given away game. xe’s fine. the consistent attack on lake erie means xe has a rivalry with patchwork southwick.

millipede aqualuft - ohio uni in athens. humans vs zombies admin who was participating in a game on the go and was in the wrong place at the very, very wrong time. just some college student. trying to recruit their teammates & other blaseball teams into trying out a leaguewide game on the field (it’d be fun i promise i prommy cmon)

kit ratoon - bill’s donuts. joined the worms’ shadows for a steady supplement to his income so he could pay off student debt, and never really expected to be dragged into active play in the middle of the worst season ever while making a donut delivery to the worms. they do make very good donuts, though.

scoobert toast - columbus park of roses. goes by toast. was visiting the stadium to discuss planting a garden outside the museum with the director there when pudge nakamoto died and they got the call to play. has spent the better part of their life tending to roses, but picked up the basics of blaseball just in time to receive the credit to the team modification. they’ve mostly spent their time since joining trying to grow roses around the stadium and thinking steadfastly about anything except the end of the world, because that’s entirely too out of their paygrade as a gardener. occasionally cut roses they touch turn to gold.

katy cornbread - jungle jim’s international market. employee at a decidedly more omegamart-esque blaseball version of jungle jim’s who joined the ohio worms shadows in season 19 in hopes that she could get the hell out of retail at the weird multiuniverse store with plastic sharks all over the place. got her wish in season 22 but got the subtractor mod in the s22 elections, and worried through the end of the world about being kicked off the team for unrun crimes and having to go back to jungle jim’s

ephraim ladd - i-80 rest stops. heyy look a guy who already has irm i only have to write one for him. formerly a statue that appeared at every rest stop on i-80 in ohio, identical each time besides extremely passable subtle differences, ladd now plays blaseball and all of his movements are telegraphed to the rest stop statues. unsurprisingly this has not made all of the rest stops being identical any less creepy

[waveridden]

oh also i was curious about this so re: the “fifty damn years” club and all of the players who have been playing nonstop since season 1, i started wondering if the expansion teams had significantly more people who had retained their original slots, and the answer is: not... really?

Flattery McKinley (Georgias)

Geraldine Frost (Georgias)

Lenny Crumb (Worms)

Rigby Friederich (Georgias)

Scratch Deleuze (Worms)

Vessalius Sundae (Worms)

Yurts Buttercup (Georgias)

Yusef Fenestrate (Lift)

with the firefighters/sthieves each experiencing a fax/voicemail, the georgias are now the recordholder for “most of their original guys who have never moved slots” with a grand total of four. mechanics aren’t even on this list - every single original-roster mechanic has left the roster at some point.

[mindthefool]

Evisceration Promenade

In quarantine, my creative process is an evisceration promenade: a public stroll without my organs and a quest for intimacy in isolation. Now, reader mine, I confess, there is a bit of a contradictory process going on here. I want to create intimacy in isolation, through the screen or in writing, but I also am insistent on becoming a stranger to myself in isolation. I am developing oscillation rituals between familiar and alien. 

Some days quarantine melts my center, some days it hardens. Some days I am puppet, some days puppeteer. When the world is reduced to one place, I find I do not stay in place. I hardly stay in space anymore, or at least I try my very best not to. I’ve long since reached the end of my drug phase, so I have to be much more intentional about finding methods of escape or adrenaline rites to enact when necessary or desperate. Drinking is a flawed strategy, I always end up drunk too early in the night because the winter took my 8pm and made it 4pm. Time is screwing with me so I screw with it back. We are not on the best of terms, you might say. 

My housing companions are keeping me alive and I lean on them like extra legs. Sometimes I feel wet, sticky fire on my skin and all my internal organs ache, longing to vomit, because my loved ones make me so anxious and angry, and everything is too tight and too loud, including the crowd of people I share a bedroom and a brain with. Sometimes I drown out the nervous voices of my brain family with the words of vindictive Artaud, or the sorceress Anzaldua, or the mid-bender brunch mood of Deleuze and Guattari. They all scratch a particular itch and it helps sometimes, but other times they can make me feel much worse, confronted with the peaks and valleys of creativity.

I have had to expand my subjectivity and proliferate it, to endure isolation. And no, this did not become an antidote to boredom or loneliness, I just met new selves who dwell in such states. We tolerate one another. We cohabitate in modes of peculiar familiarity. Sometimes I am eager to neglect and abandon certain selves. Their vengeance, though often frightful, is something to look forward to. Most events are. Any motion is interesting at the very least, if not entertaining, revelatory, or disastrous. 

The existential planes of thought and feeling are as bold as the walls of my room. Nothing is ever as simple as these walls and their promise to contain. It is a deceptive offering; they can hardly keep me within and I can hardly even see them anymore, even though I keep covering them with bright art to counteract winter. And what occurs amid the shifting, false walls is performance; a special quarantine theater which I’ve named the Evisceration Promenade.

The Evisceration Promenade is a stubborn habit, documented delicately in writing and video. Evisceration Promenade is a mode of embodiment that functions at the degree of intensity where it becomes an objectification, a mechanism for receiving cosmic impulse. I find that it is a matter of befriending my organs, not transcending my body, for this can be dangerous and distracting. Activities that are almost transcendent but too inadequate and incomplete to achieve such an eventful climax, are those that simultaneously chisel and broaden consciousness. 

Reader, please know, I do not gain consciousness by departing from my body, nor do you by departing from yours. Instead, I connect to all that I am not, by honoring my capacity to confront such forces; honoring the impossibility of being eternal; and surrendering to becoming. Becoming is necessarily a process that occurs in in-between space, in oscillation, and in proximity to limits. When I befriend my organs, they become receptors of divine messages and the impulses they receive channel into my voice, a chorus of the cries of organs. 

Performance— a deceptively public art— is a mechanism for survival in isolation. The promenade claims movement as its imperative and evisceration refers to the drawing out of sputtering organs to brave the light and the air for the first time ever. When enacted together, these two gestures or rituals (a public stroll without organs) achieve a special embodied objectification (a result of outside gaze + relation to the organs as external friends). This particular embodied objectification allows one to name and redirect shadows, as Artaud suggests, a critical survival strategy when you’re stuck in a house with your own madness as your only companion. Organs inside the body never experience light. Once removed, they make shadows, like growths that collaborate with sun.  My partner put it rather eloquently in a text message on the matter, “Evisceration is to make painfully public the private… the sudden act of isolating a piece from itself… isolation is then, the reverberation of the first torn intensity.”

The circumstance under which I create performance requires simultaneous and contradictory impossibilities. I eviscerate: I have no organs because I am an object in relation to other objects, including the relation between self and the Body Without Organs. I promenade: I move through an externalized public because I observe and document assemblages and their components. My organs are my audience; my nerve-juice, joints, bones, tissue and blood are my friends and do not belong to me. If I held myself superior to them, I’d be trapped in subjective interiority that cannot be sustained while also trapped in a house.

Antonin Artaud states that theater exists only in the moment where impossibility begins to occur. In the pandemic, theater as it was known to me, became impossible: assembling crowds is impossible, standing closer than six feet to people is impossible, conversing with uncovered faces is impossible. Therefore, the theater that I am interested in, quarantine theater, began at the moment when the art form was banished to the untouched margins of possibility, where I await to meet it for the first time. 

Truthfully, I feel as though I am making theater for the first time, which may come as a surprise to you. In quarantine, I must conjure an audience myself and weave it into my compositions, which requires great, reckless fortitude of the imagination. I must also conjure stakes high enough to put me in “danger,” for the actor experiences true affects in imagined situations. To believe that I am in enough danger to require enormous risk, while trusting I am safe enough to take them, I must ritualize entering into and parting from states of fight or flight. Deleuze and Guattari might refer to this as injecting doses of caution, the key strategy to interacting with the Body Without Organs. The BWO is a force that produces desire as it resists organization and the functional conformity of an organism. “The BWO howls: They’ve made me an organism! They’ve wrongfully folded me! They’ve stolen my body!” It is a body with no belonging or form, one that acts upon its violent desire for formlessness and “expresses the pure determination of intensity, intensive difference.” The disorganized body is encountered in pursuit of a dismantled self. It is dangerous. Deleuze and Guattari prescribe “injections of caution,” for the “human body is scandalously insufficient” so if handled thoughtlessly, the BWO can override the organism and destroy it.  

Reader, my dearest, I have known it all along. Artaud knew it too. Impossibility and insufficiency are tools of the theater. Artaud opens his book The Theater and its Double with an essay called “The Theater and the Plague.” Timely, I think. The text pursues similarities between the bubonic plague and performance. Both pose disasters that must either be settled in death, or satiated by some remedy. He describes the agonized social psyche of the plagued era: the invasive imagery of dead people in heaps, loved ones blistered and passing one by one, the dreaded familiarity of various moans and groans that spurn or welcome death, the false privilege of escape into seclusion, the fear of dropping dead unexpectedly like the neighbor did yesterday. 

Today, our plague kills millions, with a particularly brutal fondness for the most vulnerable people, abused by power structures and neglected by those privileged with resources. Many people rightfully fear this plague, and many others act as though it does not exist. Outside the house there is life-or-death risk bursting from the orifices of strangers and all they touch. Inside the house too, there is the risk of ever-approaching psychosis or of suicide. 

Artaud writes, “The state of the victim who dies without material destruction, with all the stigmata of an absolute and almost abstract disease upon him, is identical with the state of an actor entirely penetrated by feelings that do not benefit or even relate to his real condition.” My favorite challenge of quarantine theater is that of enacting impossibility, rather than representing it. 

In a paper about Tadeusz Kantor, Heidi Gilpin writes that such a challenge is precisely the function of theater. Theater manifests contradictions and utilizes them as affective materials that serve a sort of collective surrender to the ambivalent insistence of “life’s appetite,” which Artaud defends as a characteristic of the inherent evil of the universe. 

Kantor’s work is centered around the bold, sneaky ties between performance and death. The importance of representing death in theater is reinforced by the fact that it cannot be represented. But when an audience does experience a spectacle of disappearance and enactments of death, they are confronted with the inadequacy of representation, and furthermore must reimagine their personal relationships with possibility.  Since theater happens when impossibility begins, Kantor raises the necessity to witness death. It is the same necessity which I encounter more and more frequently: that which Artaud names as cruelty, and that which I outline as the shifting distinction between speaking the unspoken and raising the unsayable. 

Theater has a very important task in the face of impossibility and the unsayable. It can be accessed through the enactment of incompleteness, or insufficiency, in addition to repetition. Gilpin offers examples of repetition from psychoanalysis that function similarly to the repeated experience of witnessing disappearance in theater, which makes possible the impossible through self-referential, partial enunciation of that which is absent. 

Repetition is a consequence of failure. It is an action performed from the desire to control past events, to overcome failure, but true repetition is impossible. In performance, the tight activity of repetition and its oscillating manipulation of memory, which eventually licks open scar tissue, fulfills the desire of the audience to view becoming. This particular form of becoming faces Artaud’s cruelly, or necessity of life. Gilpin names it as “a desire to witness survival mechanisms at work.”

The desire to witness trauma reenacted and inadequately confronted, is connected to the spiritual inclination of theater to raise the unsayable. It is a measured injection of release toward the vast hazard-loaded landscape of the BWO. Artaud, in his section about the plague, elaborates upon my reflection, “... the action of the plague that kills without destroying the organs and the theater which, without killing, provokes the most mysterious alterations in the mind of not only an individual but an entire populace.” 

Quarantine theater is Artaud’s theater that dispels evil. It is not made to rouse chaos, but to redirect it; “naming and directing shadows,”  to reduce the frequency of mind spirals, sinking nihilism, claustrophobic grief, and other apocalypse-imposed madnesses. I have spent recent months inquiring about theater as a mechanism for survival. My writing honors performance as a source of life in isolation. It works as medicine, it is a worthy spine to wear through ambient collapse. During Evisceration Promenade, many things that had never known light before have now grown shadows; their gestures are unrecognizable and complex. 

The other day, one quarantine roommate took it upon themselves to reflect back to me some observations they made about my behavior when I am creating during quarantine. I am glad they shared their study with me, for it delighted me greatly. They described the way I move erratically through the house, often bursting into rooms where people are consumed in quiet activities and I announce: THAT I AM HAVING AN EXPERIENCE, AN ARTISTIC BREAKTHROUGH, MAKING UNPRECEDENTED THEORETICAL COMPOSITIONS, FALLING INTO UNCANNY FRIENDSHIPS WITH THIS AND THAT WRITER. Or, on unfortunate occasions: A DREADFUL, INSURMOUNTABLE CREATIVE BLOCK AND IMMENSELY SPECTACULAR DESPAIR IN REGARDS TO MY WORTHLESSNESS AS AN ARTIST, STUDENT, AND PERSON. My roommate giggled as they told me all of this, and I cackled relief, in awe of the accuracy. They carried on, describing the daily inconsistencies and the conspicuous cloud of mood I invariably don. And I carry on too, careful not to lean too far into the trope of tormented genius, but parading my guts around my ever-shifting house as the  fantastical, untethered prodigy that quarantine has taught me to be. 

References

Artaud, Antonin. The Theater and its Double, Trans. Victor Corti. London: Alma Classics, 2010.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, vol. 2. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Gilpin, Heidi. “Lifelessness in Movement, or How Do the Dead Move? Tracing Displacement and Disappearance for Movement Performance,” in Corporealities, ed. Susan Foster (New York/London: Routledge Press, 1996), 106-128.

[woozapooza]

Anybody else ever have that fantasy where you’re an English professor and you teach a course on the desert island trope and the syllabus looks something like this:

“Desert” Islands

Professor Woozapooza

“Dreaming of islands—whether with joy or in fear, it doesn't matter—is dreaming of pulling away, of being already separate, far from any continent, of being lost and alone—or it is dreaming of starting from scratch, recreating, beginning anew.” - Gilles Deleuze

Primary Texts:

Homer, Odyssey 5, 9, 10, 12

Either Ibn Tufail, Philosophus Autodidacticus, or more likely Ibn al-Nafis, Theologus Autodidacticus (I haven’t read either of these, but the latter sounds more interesting)

Shakespeare, The Tempest

Defoe, Robinson Crusoe

Excerpts from Ballantyne, The Coral Island

Golding, Lord of the Flies

An episode or two of Gilligan’s Island

Lost 1.1 and 1.2

Secondary Texts:

Julia Bell, “Why Writers Treasure Islands”

Gilles Deleuze, “Desert Islands”

Tom Conley, “The Desert Island”

Probably something from Sandra Silberstein, Islands in History and Representation (I haven’t read a word of any of the essays in this book but I skimmed the table of contents and it looked potentially relevant)

Other stuff, idk what

And then the final essay assignment would be to compare two of the primary texts. I feel like the island theme could inspire some cool artistic projects as well but idk exactly what that would look like.

Or is that just me that has this fantasy lol

(yes, this is all an elaborate excuse to put Lost on a syllabus)

[nauseateddrive]

COLD BEER IN RONKONKOMA by RG Vasicek

Cold beer in Ronkonkoma. Traffic light in Albany. Electric tramcar in Prague. She is never everywhere always. Ignites a cigarette. Pulls up a chair. Interrogates herself. Asks big questions. Hard questions. Quantum equations on a memo pad. Solve for X. Might require a calculator. Call your brother. Your sister. Anybody. The bughouse is being fumigated. Better wait outside. In the rain. Just a drizzle. If you can handle that word. Perhaps it offends. The English language. What if everybody forgot it? In an instant. Would we speak French Czech? A squid language from the ice moon Titan? I defer. I beg to differ. She is persistent. Gets me into bed. I am bad at saying no. Humps me to impress her friends. Posts my ass on Instagram. At least she uses a filter. My ass is fetching. Gets many likes. A few comments. She is relentless. She wants an education. Seeks out the best schools. Seeks out the experts. If only to prove it is all unnecessary. The street is s better teacher. There are no grades. Live or die.Survival of the swankiest. Choose intelligent shoes. Never leave a quarter in the washing machine. Eat whole wheat bagels. Scratch that. Eat Everything bagels. You deserve everything. One day we must all die. She is getting very philosophical. I am getting nervous. How long before she says Deleuze and Guattari? How long before I say: Wonder Twins, activate! Spiral galaxies. Atomic tests. Underground detonations. Explosions. Splitting the atom. Craters in the desert. Two-for-one tacos on Tuesday. Thursday is Tuesday in disguise. Sunday has no imposters. A tunafish sandwich sounds good right about now. Unless it is from Fukushima. Or Chernobyl. Who wants open-faced sandwiches from Chernobyl? Are we getting somewhere? She is impatient. She wants to take a night train. A sleeper car. I say fine okay. There are guards at every border. Even in-between. Schenectady is impenetrable. A fortress-city. High castle walls. I sleep in nearby Troy. She stops believing in me. Says I am a figment. Maybe so. Who am I to argue. She calls her sister. Says hey Mr. Sister! The TV plays Dukes of Hazard. Here comes Daisy in her Daisy Dukes. I get tired of waiting. Storm out a storm door. A flimsy plastic thing. I feel night as a presence. A companion. I drive to a gasoline station. Fill up my tank. Feel a great sense of purpose. She is still at a house party. Party party party. I keep running into the law. A Sheriff from Guilderland. Cold in these parts, she says. Indeed, I say. She salutes me. Drives away. I get the impression she is Campus Security. Everything is deceptive. I need to remember that. After the house party, she comes to my apartment and comes. Never forget me, she says. I lay flat. I promise. She bends over me. I hold her ass. She whispers into my ear, Okay. Am I getting better? Not necessarily. Everything has a beginner’s curve. I am a beginner. She wears a wristwatch on her ankle. It is super sexy. Nobody has yet explained why. It just is. Turn on the TV. Amerika gets bigger and bigger. Replicated everywhere. TV distorts. Maybe? She must travel. She must find out for herself. She ignores my body. She enjoys my body. My mind is a machine. I gather information. I gather facts. Perhaps I am a detective. A cosmic detective. She has her plans. She has her practice. I am just along for the ride. If she will have me. Sometimes she has me. Other times I am left to my own devices. I must reinvent myself. Again and again. It is exhausting. There is no other way to live. The Tao. The Way. Lao Tzu. Bodhidharma. Henry Miller. Everybody has to figure it out. She, too, is a seeker. A bodhisattva. Sometimes we do it in the ox-style. Horseshoe crabs do it in the same way. It is ancient. Primeval. The Big Bang. We are gravity waves. We are particles. I am made of atoms. You are made of atoms. We are jiggling. The cosmic dance. Shiva. I am a New Wave dancer. I kissed Tanja on the dance floor. Janet. Everything is connected. Spooky action at a distance. Telekinetic beings. Telepathic. I feel your feelings. She feels my feelings.

[spaceintruderdetector]

Bermuda Triangle Test Transmission Broadcasts 2009

Title: Courtyard Explorers Participants: Melanie Clifford, Howard Jacques, Alisdair McGregor. Description: Microphones strategically positioned outside the studio in the Resonance courtyard opening the larger, outside space of the car park for the performers to sonically and physically and mentally explore. Clues and queues coming from pre-discussed concepts including: Dichotomous is a sustaining exercise, memory exercise, the mythological, poetic, nebulous and gravitational influences of the moon, observational and imaginative description, leading sustaining exercises of observation of generated kinetic movement, ratio of outside to inside performers, incidental traffic and inevitable wind noise. https://archive.org/details/BermudaTriangleTestTransmissionBroadcasts-October1st2009

Title: Bicycle Wheels Participants: Howard Jacques, Franziska Lantz, Alisdair McGregor. Description: HJ & FL play and upturned bicycle, AMcG mixes and feeds in made earlier recordings of the same bicycle. Friction noises are generated from rotary gear clicks, bicycle pump, bell, friction contacts on wheel materials, scrapes and clicks on tyres and spokes. From the literal into strange abstractions. Flies by at speed. Bicycle recordings made also for use as soundtrack to the short film 'The Bicycle Revolutionary' See this link for the film: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjvuySpPSqo https://archive.org/details/BermudaTriangleTestTransmissionBroadcasts-October8th2009

15/10/2009 Second outing utilizing recordings and live playing of the used frame sussed bicycle; this time with MC replacing FL for upside down bicycle duet with HJ. AMcG on sound mix, treatments and recorded sound playback. Takes off with speed;;;>>> mock crash, spokes chimes meditation into zen sound gardening. Talking bicycle dream stream. Rotary rhythmic and primitive gamelan tonal percussive.

.https://archive.org/details/BermudaTriangleTestTransmissionsBroadcasts-October15th2009

22/10/2009 "Which is the Bermuda Triangle Test Transmission's investigation of Interiority." Sending out from the inside. Immersed in concentration. Slow and deliberating. Time re-establishes in the present moment again and again. Are we moving at all or are we static? It has perceivably slowed into contemplation concentration time. Readings on Gilles Deleuze/Interiority proceed. Sound re-animates the insistence of time. Hefty theoretical readings skip and flutter along followed by zen garden trio sound meditations. Acoustic and electronic interiorities then, while hypnotized In deep theoretical 'right in there' interiority payoff, a song is spontaneously cancelled. Rolling loud sound sounding like an abandoned sailing ship lurching on the waves is calmed by a melodic chord trance repeat pattern. Sonic gardening and more from our Interiority correspondent. Time is almost flowing normally again. Humorous animal type noises and real laughter! creaky, thumpy, clumpi, https://archive.org/details/BermudaTriangleTestTransmissionBroadcastsOct22nd2009

29/10/2009 Title: Dys Tanz Participants: Melanie Clifford, Howard Jacques, Alisdair McGregor. Description: Looking into the (radio) Dys Tanz . Punning on dysfunctional dance and distance. Eliptical orbits, differing distances and qualities inside and outside the studio again. Transparent layers moving like parallax. The Octopus Dance Band Practice material from earlier the same evening featuring Martin Harrison, Mick Hobbs, Mary Currie and Howard Jacques recorded in an hurry for use in the programme at Nolia's, Old Kent Road distanced by clock time and geography, unified through playback as withing track. Cooks up some big bass presence where distance becomes reduced but never removed, vignettes become density. Breaks back into contrasting layering patterning. Test confirms engineers found it easier to make closer present sounds than distant subtle ones though relative movements of elements was maintained intensely and various distances charted. The underpinning of traffic rumble and rush. Radio static invisible collage German language mystery broadcast. Traveling, traveling,    https://archive.org/details/BermudaTriangleTestTransmissionBroadcasts29102009

5/11/2009 Title: Indoor Pyrotechnics via the Dark Part of Halvard's Mind Participants: Melanie Clifford, Halvard Ja Kwez Description: Exploratory terrain again visited via the testing of SSB filtered Short wave band noise, Dark Part of My Mind Loops rhythm and noise, digital glitch shuffle. 5th November fireworks. Rough and agitational scrapings, buzzings, cracklings and amplitude shifts thoroughly test audience mettle. High and low end swoopings . Scratch loopage. Horror Firework safety information recollection. Underworld beats, bangs, whistlers and buzzes mix with electrical feedback conversationals.   https://archive.org/details/Bermudatriangletesttransmissionbroadcasts1112009

[whales-are-gay]

Related to the blaseball cards: worms have been in a weird space with the cards (re: scratch deleuze mostly) and it’s like. Ok. You avoided the problem of giving too much weight to specific designs by making one no one was really satisfied with?? It just seems like a shitty solution to a problem that could’ve been solved by not having big, detailed card art. Like I’m glad we don’t have to get into “is scratch a human or a possum” problem(which is its own can of worms but we only have so much room in this anon) but making them a mouse is the weakest answer imo.

YUP. by trying to appeal to everyone they end up appealing to no one.