VV(19) Kilroy part one

[Dave Monroe]

Okay, here's my in on this ...

--- Samuel Moyer <smoyer at satx.rr.com> wrote:
> Interesting link:
> 
> http://www.kilroywashere.org/

Interesting indeed, and given the various "Wot, No
...?"'s in Ch. 16 here, this immediately caught my eye
...

http://www.kilroywashere.org/01-Images/01-KilroyOnGlider.jpg

I imagine that "Kilroy" = "kill roy" = "kill roi" =
"kill the king" (Le roi est mort, vive le roi ...) is
a standard take here, but "qu'il roi," that that in
any way, shape or form scan somehow?  Let me know ...

But this struck me as well, betwixt graffito and
schematic ...

"The foolish nose hanging over the wall was vulnerable
to all manner of indignities: fist, shrapnel, machete.
 Hinting perhaps at a precarious virility, a flirting
with castration, though ideas like this are inevitable
in a latrine-oriented (as well as Freudian)
psychology."  (V., Ch. 16, Sec. i, p. 436)

Differentiating Freudian from "latrine-oriented"
psychology, first of all (and on the latter vis-a-vis
the former, see, I suspect ...

Brown, Norman O.  Life Against Death:
   The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History.
   Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1985 [1959].

"Heh, heh, he said 'Brown,' 'anal,'" not to mention
"The Excremental Vision" [pp. 179-201 ("heh, heh, he
said 'pp'")]).  But(t) ...

>From Lawrence Kramer, After the Lovedeath: Sexual
Violence and the Making of Culture (Berkeley: U of
California P, 1997) ...

"In relation to Beethoven, Schumann wrote, Schubert
was indeed a feminine composer, but in relation to all
other composers he was masculine enough.  Beethoven,
in this reading, is a violent figure--a
personification--of violence: one who feminizes but
can never himself be feminized....  Before this
Beethoven, Schubert is yielding, dependent, permeable.
 Yet this same Schubert can himself lay claim to the
name of the father if only one can forget (but one can
never forget) the figure of Beethoven behind him." (p.
5)

"Bluntly stated, my argument is that in our gender
identities, all of us--men and women alike--are
Schuberts, none of us a Beethoven.  Between the
sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries, the position
in which Schumann recognized Schubert became the
normative position of the subject in Western culture,
and so it remains today.  For both men and women, to
become a subject, to acquire an identity, is to assume
a position of feminity in relation to a masculinity
that always belongs to someone else.  The other is the
wielder and bearer of authority in all its forms,
social, moral and cultural; both pleasure and truth
are in his charge; yet no man, and certainly no woman,
can securely identify with this masculine
subject-position.  Instead, biological men are
directed to occupy a position that is simultaneously
masculine in relation to a visible, public, feminine
position, and feminine in relation to an unstated,
often unconscious position held by the figure (trope,
image, or person) of another man.  The same men are
directed to repress their knowledge that this doubling
of polarity by the dim, ever-looming figure of the
other man renders their own position masculine in
content but feminine in structure.  Every man who
commands is secretly a woman who pleads--and
blissfully obeys--but struggles not to know it." (pp.
5-6)

"The reward for maintaining this repression is the
fiction of unambivalent self-possession ....   In the
language of Jacques Lacan, it is the fiction of having
the phallus (note that there is only one).  To be
sure, this fiction is unstable, sometimes even
ridiculous.  But in social terms it translates--for
some men--into the privileges of a practical,
manifest, functional masculinity." (p. 6)

"For some men.  Not everyone with a penis is entitled
to even a fictitiously absolute masculinity; the
masculinity of some must wear its contingency visibly.
 Racial, sexual and social polarities cut across
gender polarities in complex ways and further deplete
the position of entitlement." (p. 6)

... and so forth.  Cf. ...

"She handed him the ivory comb.  Five crucified
Limeys--five Kilroys--stared briefly at Valletta's sky
till he pocketed it.  'Don't lose it in a poker game. 
I've had it a long time.'" (V., Ch. 16, Sec i., p.
443)

Or, for that matter ...

"... the foreplay is a game about who has the real
power, about who's had it all along [....]  It wasn't
always so.  In the trenches of the First World War,
English men came to love one another decently, without
shame or make-believe,under the easy likelihoods of
their sudden deaths, and to find in the faces of young
men evidence of otherworldly visits, some poor hope
that they may have helped redeem even mud, shit, the
decaying pieces of human meat. [...] while Europe died
in its own wastes, men loved.  But the life-cry of
that love has long since hissed away into no more than
this idle and bitchy faggotry.  In this latest War,
death was no enemy, but a collaborator. Homosexuality
in high places is just a carnal afterthought now, and
the real and only fucking is done on paper...." (GR,
Pt. 3, p. 616)

"Their 'liberation' was a banishment. So here in a new
location they have made up a hypothetical SS chain of
command--no longer restricted to what Destiny allotted
then for jailers, they have now managed to come up
with some really mean ass imaginary Nazi playmates
..." (GR, Pt. 4, p. 665)

"What the 175s heard from the real SS guards there was
enough to elevate Weissmann on the spot--they, his own
brother-elite, didn't know what this man was up to."
(GR, Pt. 4, p. 666)

"A precarious virility," indeed.  And on Beethoven's
putatively less precarious virlity, see ...

McClary, Susan.  Feminine Endings:  Music, Gender
   and Sexuality.  Mpls: U of Minnesota P, 1991.

http://www.linguafranca.com/9407/ross.html

http://www.geocities.com/jeff_l_schwartz/mcclary.html

http://home1.gte.net/esayrs68/McClaryFramesText.html

"The point of recapitulation in the first movement of
the Ninth is one of the most horrifying in music, as
the carefully prepared cadence is frustrated, drumming
up energy which finally explodes in the throttling
murderous rage of a rapist incapable of attaining
release."

And, of course, Beethoven's Ninth turns out to be my
favorite piece of music ever.  But maybe Stanley
Kubrick was on to something in A Clockwork Orange ...







__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Get personalized email addresses from Yahoo! Mail
http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/