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@@ -11,12 +11,30 @@
 \def\booktitle#1{{\it\dq{#1}}}
 \def\essaytitle#1{{\it\dq{#1}}}
 \def\journaltitle#1{{\it #1}}
+\def\movietitle#1{{\it #1}}
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 \long\def\Q#1{{\leftskip=1in\parindent=0pt #1\par}}
 \def\cbrk#1{\vskip 1em \hfil #1 \hfil\nl\vskip 1em}
 \def\dinkus{\cbrk{* * *}}
 \def\ld{…}
+\def\textsuperscript#1{$^{#1}$}
+\def\ae{æ}
+
+% --- design
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+
+\_def\_printchap #1{\_vfill\_supereject \_prevdepth=0pt
+    \_vglue\_medskipamount 
+    {\_chapfont \_noindent % \_mtext{chap} % \_printrefnum[@]\_par
+    \_nobreak\_smallskip
+    \_noindent \_raggedright #1\_nbpar}\_mark{}%
+    \_smallskip\hrule\_smallskip%
+    \_nobreak \_belowtitle{\_bigskip\_bigskip}%
+    \_firstnoindent
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+
+% --- go
 
 {\tt\parindent=0pt\parskip=0pt
 From the Library of the \hfil New Museum of \nl
@@ -264,1109 +282,202 @@ Thanksgiving Day, November 22, 1979.\par}
 
 \vfill
 
-\bye
 
-\chapter{Die Young Kennedy Jean}
+\chap Die Young Kennedy Jean
 
 With Marilyn Monroe so close to JFK already, we can further illuminate the proximity by a careful look at the last name, Kennedy. As you know, \e{i} and \e{j} are close to each other because of an allophonic relation and an alphabetical one. One angles off by sound, the other by swift economic succession in anybody's memory of the Roman alphabet. The second relation occurs when we move from \e{j} to \e{k}, and here it is from the \e{j} in \e{J}ohn to \e{k} in \e{K}ennedy. The \e{j} in Marilyn's hidden name, \e{J}ean, moves in the place of the \e{k} in \e{K}ennedy, producing the following substitution: \e{J}ennedy.
 
 \e{Jennedy} can then be easily transposed into \e{Jeannedy}. The extra \e{n} can either be a part of the name Jean as in Jeann(e) or part of the \e{nedy} at the end of Ken\e{nedy}. Without the \e{n} in \e{nedy} we get the following letters, \e{edy}. Recombined we obtain \e{dye}. \e{Dye} is a homonym of \e{die}. \e{Jean} \e{die} is thus a derivation from these unravelings. It is in the name Kennedy even before Norma Jean ever met a Kennedy. By retaining Kennedy or Jennedy, it could be read as: Jean end, or as the participle for die or dye, jean dying\slash dyeing. Thus \e{Jennedy} gives us \e{Jean die}, \e{Jean dye}, \e{Jean dying}, \e{Jean dyeing}, and \e{Jean end}. The elimination of the \e{y} for \e{Jean end} is necessary in light of the idea of a Jean who will die, of a Jean whose life will terminate, will end. The \e{dye} or \e{dyeing} resonates with Marilyn's practice of \e{dyed} blonde hair, not to mention the fact that she \e{died} young.
 
-Since the word \e{youth} occurs so often with the Kennedys and Marilyn (either in her own apprehension of aging or the public's estimation that she was \dq{youthful} when she died), I propose \e{Jean} is an angle thrown to \e{young} and vice versa. \e{Jean\slash young} crisscrosses with mutual attraction. Young people wear jeans. N. Jean was very young, especially when Jean was her surname before she was bestowed with the pseudonym Marilyn. As well, the Kennedy's/Je(a)nnedy's were young. A young Kennedy, a young N. Jean, jeans worn by young people, young people in love with a Kennedy are some of the constellations arising from Jean/Kennedy/young. Furthermore jeans worn by old people are incongruous, they're usually wearing slacks and other dry-cleaned articles.
+Since the word \e{youth} occurs so often with the Kennedys and Marilyn (either in her own apprehension of aging or the public's estimation that she was \dq{youthful} when she died), I propose \e{Jean} is an angle thrown to \e{young} and vice versa. \e{Jean\slash young} crisscrosses with mutual attraction. Young people wear jeans. N. Jean was very young, especially when Jean was her surname before she was bestowed with the pseudonym Marilyn. As well, the Kennedy's\slash Je(a)nnedy's were young. A young Kennedy, a young N. Jean, jeans worn by young people, young people in love with a Kennedy are some of the constellations arising from Jean\slash Kennedy\slash young. Furthermore jeans worn by old people are incongruous, they're usually wearing slacks and other dry-cleaned articles.
 
 Did the young Jean wear young or new jeans, fading them with wear as she was fading into her thirties? We were shocked to find out one morning, when we were about to put on our jeans that Norma Jean had just died, and then mourning set in. If we had decided to wear a young pair of dark blue jeans at the time, then the days that they took to fade would have approximated the days that Norma Jean would have faded from public attention. This fading of our jeans would have cast them into a lighter color, a dyeing of them, so that they would no longer be young. Yet the fading of Norma Jean from public attention is not true. Whatever is happening is not dyeing as demonstrated by the pleasure that countless Americans feel when they let their young jeans fade.
 
-A more technical note: \e{j} and \e{y} are similar to each other by being at once semivocalic and semiconsonantial. A \e{young jean} is a near rhyme. The diphthongs \e{ou} and \e{ea}
-are nearly symmetrical inversions of the vowel series
-a-e-i-o-u (with the exclusion of \e{y}, although \e{i} tends to replace its phonic character). \e{A} begins the series, but here
-an \e{e} is needed for \e{e} is first in j\e{ea}n. Taken as a unit, ac orea
-inverts an upper mouth articulation to a lower mouth one
-with the ou unit in young. J(ea)n turns into y(ou)ng. The
-important point is that this upper mouth vocalic unit is opposed in a kind of glottal counterpoint to the lower mouth
-vocalic unit: jean to young. The two nasals (n and ng) are
-only differentiated by the glottalized nasal ng, otherwise
-they're nearly identical. Young (new) jeans worn by young
-people. Young Norma Jean wearing young (new) jeans.
-Young and old are caught in an imaginary opposition at
-the level of jean/young, Jean/young, principally when
-jeans get old, they wear down, they're worn (down), the
-very worn in Norma. (The m in morn becomes a w in
-worn.) Jeans are not on a non-young Jean.
-
-John and young too are highly similar, not only in circumstance, but in phonic affinity. The young John and the
-young Jean both died, ended young. Young Kennedy ended young. Young Jean dyed worn, mourn(ed) young.
-
-39
-Australis
-
-From mid-November to the end of December 1979 I lived
-in Melbourne, Australia. During my stay there I wrote the
-following impressions.
-
-The first stop over from New York was in Los Angeles.
-I checked into a motel that had color television, a treat
-since I could hallucinate what my invisible Australia might
-have in store. A Peter O'Toole movie was on, fixing my attention because of his blondness and British origin. He
-could have been Australian since his fairness and accent
-evoked what was by then of intense curiosity for me. On
-another channel, Tab Hunter, another blonde, appeared in
-a Poe-based movie (derived from City Under the Sea). The
-movie's seascapes confirmed what would probably be seen
-en route. Poe, if you recall MS. Found in a Bottle, thought
-that the North and South Poles were great whirlpools. The
-story in question took place on a ship sailing past "New
-Holland," an archaic term for Australia. It encounters a
-massive and ghostly ship, having on board ancient mariners. As they near the southernmost part of the carth,
-the whirlpool plunges them into its "gigantic amphitheatre" and the last words written in this abyss were "the ship
-is quivering---oh God! and---going down!" The other
-
-41
-THE AGE OF OIL
+A more technical note: \e{j} and \e{y} are similar to each other by being at once semivocalic and semiconsonantial. A \e{young jean} is a near rhyme. The diphthongs \e{ou} and \e{ea} are nearly symmetrical inversions of the vowel series a-e-i-o-u (with the exclusion of \e{y}, although \e{i} tends to replace its phonic character). \e{A} begins the series, but here an \e{e} is needed for \e{e} is first in j\e{ea}n. Taken as a unit, \e{ac} or \e{ea} inverts an upper mouth articulation to a lower mouth one with the \e{ou} unit in y\e{ou}ng. J(\e{ea})n turns into y(\e{ou})ng. The important point is that this upper mouth vocalic unit is opposed in a kind of glottal counterpoint to the lower mouth vocalic unit: jean to young. The two nasals (\e{n} and \e{ng}) are only differentiated by the glottalized nasal \e{ng}, otherwise they're nearly identical. Young (new) jeans worn by young people. Young Norma Jean wearing young (new) jeans. Young and old are caught in an imaginary opposition at the level of jean\slash young, Jean\slash young, principally when jeans get old, they wear down, they're worn (down), the very worn in Norma. (The \e{m} in \e{m}orn becomes a \e{w} in \e{w}orn.) Jeans are not on a non-young Jean.
 
-movie was a BBC production, replete with English accents.
-A car salesman's cowboy hat reminded me of a similar
-variant on the head of a New York male model in an
-advertisement for Qantas airlines.
-
-On board the LA-Sydney flight I sat next to four
-young Maori men. My ultra-blonde Aryanism (I had tinted
-my hair months ago) would be a perfect contrast to the
-dark Maoris. White European meat mirror-inverted with
-black Micronesian meat. Superman was the on-board
-movie. My immediate Maori neighbor enjoyed it greatly.
-(He exchanged his proper name with me, even though he
-uttered it unintelligibly.) How strange to let that cinematic
-event enter their minds before stepping onto their sandy
-soil, their lonely beaches and originally natural jungles!
-When Lothar's evil became so monstrous, Superman's
-efforts to defeat it became just as excessive. Superman
-then reversed time to undo Lothar's meddling and so saved
-Lois Lane from death. This reversal of time (while I was
-approaching the International Date Line) was prompted by
-the spirit of Jorel-Marlon Brando who chastises his son's
-presumptuousness. When that scene occurred Brando's
-face was floating in space. An eternity of stars in outer
-space can only be the eternity of movie stars ("'stars never
-die"), with Jorel-Marlon Brando being in either place.
-
-After stopping off in Pago-Pago the Australian accents around me were increasing, shading my enthusiasm
-for the phonetic differences heard in my East Village
-apartment when I fell in love with a boy from Melbourne.
-
-Sydney finally appeared through the portals, unbelievable in its mass of tiny lights, its phenomenality distinct
-from its past National Geographic reproduction.
-
-Immediate impressions. Large ads for out-of-the-way
-
-42
-Australis
-
-Australian locales. Big and colorful like their American
-equivalents. Currency exchange showed Australia's coins
-to be heavy and thick and its bills depicted historical personages totally obscure to me. Like the colored ads, the
-money celebrated something, all in green, blue, red and
-orange. The reversal of street directions happens when
-everything that is on the leftside in the U.S. becomes rightsided here. "Very disorienting" as the Australians would
-say. No tipping, a puzzling relief from mentally calculating
-15% all the time on my territory. Different cigarettes (I'll
-still inhale Marlboros), candy bars, newspapers, magazines.
-Foreign, strange, but still accessible because English is
-spoken here, although Australians tend to revere a "proper English accent.
-
-Australians practically look the same as Americans.
-There are differences, but nearly imperceptible. The media prototypes are both Australian and American, America
-having saturated this country with its Madison Avenue
-imagery while Australia inserts and re-edits its own versions.
-
-My flight to Melbourne featured nearly all businessmen,
-thus a commuter flight. Sunlight, male pilot, male cargo,
-Australian frontier below, avoidance of gazes, no discussion with any businessman neighbor mandated intense
-paranoia. The few stewardesses couldn't relieve the apprehension. At least they diffused it mometarily when they
-gave us apples, biscuits and coffee.
-
-From the plane Melbourne seemed flat and yellowish,
-its dwellings spread out over a vast, arid plain. On the
-ground, I noticed the proverbial gum tree, a prehistoric
-species growing amidst industrial objects. My friend's black
-leather jacket and the Mercedes-Benz spelled recent ciphers
-when we drove down a highway on one of the earth's oldest
-
-43
-THE AGE OF OIL
+John and young too are highly similar, not only in circumstance, but in phonic affinity. The young John and the young Jean both died, ended young. Young Kennedy ended young. Young Jean dyed worn, mourn(ed) young.
 
-geological bodies. He chose classical music on the radio as 1
-smiled to the atemporality of everything in my view.
-
-Knowing that Antarctica is nearby puzzles those who
-live in the Northern Hemisphere. South and North are just
-as arbitrary as the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure's mental
-image of a tree with arbre. Beyond the clouds that the
-plane flew over from Sydney to Melbourne lies that continent my "Gold Order of Latitude Zero" (a document
-testifying to my crossing the equator) displays as one consolidated and confused with Australia. It is from a very old
-map reproduced in a corner on the document. A few days
-after my flight a New Zealand Airlines tourist charter
-crashed into Antarctica's uninhabitable, life-terminating
-cold. At this point in Roman calendar time, my death had
-failed by being warm in Melbourne.
-
-While driving into Melbourne from the airport my
-companion pointed to a purple-painted locale called the
-"Crystal Ballroom' a punk-rock hangout for Melbourne's
-vampires of London/New York consumables. We also
-drove past an amusement park that featured a human head
-whose mouth served as the entrance, its artificial teeth
-ready to devour us Jonahs in search of non-work-time enthralldom.
-
-On my first night in Melbourne I went to a gay disco
-called "Babes." I had not washed my hair knowing that fluffy blonde hair is a criterion of attractiveness in such places.
-I wore a green and black New Wave ensemble hoping that
-the Melbournites would want that typically New York item.
-The disco played songs that weren't as current as the ones
-played by New York's WBLS, but they were very close.
-DJ's here only play "new' songs. A TV movie was concurrently showing, thus reducing everything to an intense
-
-44
-Australis
-
-scopos or gazing. There, the music and fashions exemplified
-America's and Europe's high circulation of their texts onto
-foreign, receptive territory. Australia duplicates the process with the Bee Gees, Olivia Newton-John, Playboy and
-Playgirl models onto nation states in the Northern Hemisphere.
-
-Because Australia is racist in its immigration policies,
-there were no blacks within sight. Usually in New York at
-such a similar place you see plenty of black and Latin people. The paradox is in the music, the black man's contribution to the white man's pleasure. Donna Summer was
-played and danced to, probably resung on the white audience's lips even when there was no black skin within sight.
-ust as America's imaginary opposition oscillates from
-black to white, so does Australia's from Italians and
-Greeks to its fair, Northern European (mostly British or
-Irish) extractions. Here it's more or less an opposition of
-brunette, rapidly tanable bodies to blonde, less tanable
-odies.
-
-In Australia Mediterranean peoples are much sought
-after, ecither in government immigration policies or in the
-perennial impulse of Northern Europe that seeks its origin
-in Greece and Rome. Australia is a European prosthesis,
-ike Italy and Greece are. Italy's shoe-like shape (reproduced in many cafes in Melbourne) and Greece's multiple
-peninsulas that add up to an even larger one confirm Australia's half-island, half-continent problem. Italy could be
-an island cut off from the rest of Europe like Greece could
-be as well, nearly detachable picces of land. The Latin
-word paene, almost, is joined with insula, island. These al
-most islands are also identical to analmost island, Australia.
-Australia's duplication of England makes the small
-
-45
-THE AGE OF OIL
+\chap Australis
 
-island a much larger one, nearly a continent, compensating
-for England's diminuition.
-
-Traveling from England to Italy or Greece is also like
-traveling to Australia, even if the distance to Australia is so
-much greater. Australia has a Mediterranean climate although the scasons are reversed. When England is cold,
-Italy and Greece are warmer, Australia even warmer. For
-what is northern, Australia inverts the hemispheric designation to southern, just as Italy and Greece are in comparison to Northern Europe. Australis is Latin for southern,
-made, of course, into the major proper name for this
-former colony of England. Leisure, cultivated in those two
-Mediterranean climes, is also cultivated here. Life is easy
-here, a cliche acting as relief from the hard-working
-Protestant England when its citizens vacation in Italy,
-Greece or Australia.
-
-During Christmas time some perverse Australians
-could have celebrated it with a beach party. I can imagine
-a portable color TV set on a beach playing White Christmas. The final scene when the stage opens up to reveal falling snow would have been reversed by 100°F temperatures
-and a blazing sun overhead. Of course their Xmas picnic
-turkey will have been *"cold" and not "hot."
-
-During the first few evenings I drank a great deal of
-white wine, not beer. I felt that beer was too typically an
-Australian toxin, even though "white wine" evoked my
-assimilation of dry weather, white skin, European propriety and connoisseurship. Before I left for this country I
-had heard of their beer drinking. "Those Australians and
-their beer," groaned an English woman at my recently vacated job. In Melbourne there is an unusual juxtaposition
-of landmarks on one if its central streets, Swanston Street.
-
-46
-Australis
-
-On one end of it stands a sign in bright large letters, "CUB."
-with the U lowered and slightly overlapping the C, confusing me into thinking the C was a G. I read it as "GUB"
-for several days until I saw it as an abbreviation for "Carlton United Breweries." "Gub, gub" resembles a sound that
-fish make or the "glub, glub" involved in drinking, a comic
-strip onomatopoeia.
-
-Below this sign are the words "Victoria Bitter."" Opposite this is the other landmark, a large monument entitled
-"The Shrine of Remembrance." It is quite imposing and I
-believe echoes the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. With a beer
-advertisement opposing a shrine to the some 60,000 "Anzacs" or dead Australian war veterans, I was alerted to the
-detail that on the "Day of Remembrance" the celebrants
-drink beer, perhaps Carlton Draught. Remembering the
-dead is appropriately extended into the ingestion of beer.
-Anzacs were "drafted'" and their deaths are remembered
-by drinking "draught," a word once spoken is identical to
-"draft," a detail that always confuses me.
-
-Beer is often symbolic, in substitutive fashion, of the
-the body's expulsion of urine. Beer is called "piss," getting
-drunk is "getting pissed." Everyone has to urinate yellow
-urea after several glasses of beer. The ""Anzacs" must have
-pissed a great deal in Europe together in their all-male
-encampments. Lavatories for men are the only places
-permiting them to see their genitalia, but the urine is
-the most visible factor, since shame only meets the curious
-man who dares stare at a male organ other than his own.
-Urine is thus seen, not the cock. Men who drink beer then
-drink the urine, and on this day, the urine of the dead, only to propel them into closer contact with the befallen victims of war.
-
-47
-THE AGE OF OIL
+From mid-November to the end of December 1979 I lived in Melbourne, Australia. During my stay there I wrote the following impressions.
 
-The "Victoria Bitter" (printed right below the "CUB™
-motif) also condenses a variety of other motifs. "Victoria"
-is the state where Melbourne lies. State and taste are anagrams of each other. The state of Victoria taste(s) bitter.
-Beer is bitter and so are memories of war dead. 'Victoria"
-is from Queen Victoria, England's former "Queen Mother"
-for well over half a century, the century that witnessed
-Australia's colonization. Australia's ambivalence is expressed neatly here. Either they're bitter about the Queen
-that authorized their transplantation or they're bitter
-about being on a soil that is also their mother, a "Queensland." This soil is a rock, a big rock, and the mother is a
-rock. The primordial opposition of good objects to bad objects in the child's initial symbolic universe applies to its
-nurturing mother, a mother, a queen or rock one can love
-and also be "bitter" about. Australia's aridity is what its
-citizens can be bitter about. And after 1901, the time of
-Queen Victoria's death, Australia gained its independence,
-even though it is still aligned to its mother state/taste.
-
-Where does all this urine from Australia's beer go? It
-goes into the vast sea surrounding this continent/island.
-And seawater is bitter, salty, just as urine is too. (Beer, no
-doubt, is often drunk with salty popcorn or pretzels.) Victoria's land is surrounded by a bitter substance, seawater.
-Like beer, seawater foams. Maternally evocative scawater is
-undrinkable, but beer isn't. Furthermore all those soldiers
-or Anzacs went by ship to Europe at the time of World
-War 1. Beer-scawater-urine enters in these derivative, dilatory ways into the Australian unconscious. To drink bitter
-draught while remembering drafted war dead is to drink
-the saltwater they touched, either when alive or when their
-wounded or dead returned over a vast, salty ocean. And
-
-48
-Australis
-
-those buried in Europe shall not return from their cemeteries save through a soil that has conquered their flesh,
-the decomposition drifting to the land, the mother, the
-"Victoria" that gave birth to them, the mother bitter over
-the saltwater separating her from the children that cannot
-return to her womb of soil.
-
-Smoking in Australia appears entirely suited to this sundrenched, dry land. A bushfire is substitutively repeated
-everytime an Australian lights his or her cigarette. The
-desert-like climates here make tobacco into the sensation
-of dryness itself. Tobacco parches your lungs, just as the
-desert parches you, dehydrates you. Smoking is a depriving
-of oxygen and water, all for the fire of leaves, a fire inside
-the bodies that mimics the dryness of land outside the envelopes of skin.
-
-"Camels" need to be smoked in the desert, and Australia has its "Great Victoria Desert." "Marlboros™ arc
-smoked by cowboys, men who ride horses on arid land, a
-land that is wild, untillable. "Longbeach" makes the sand
-of deserts or beaches "long," stretched out, vaster. And
-the water at a beach (a backdrop for their ads), as has been
-indicated, is undrinkable. In these ads, it is usually men
-who dry their throats, this was at least observed in a
-"Longbeach" ad where a woman swims while a man
-smokes. If this woman swimming had wet, red hair, if she
-had been a "redhead," her hair would have then been too
-wet to light the cigarette the man was contemplating to
-smoke, since '"'Redheads" are a brand of matches that light
-nearly all of Australia's cigarettes. On the package of Redheads, a woman's face is framed by the book's remaining
-red color field. Each match also has a red tip of sulphur,
-resembling of course the cigarette that will be lit soon after
-
-49
-THE AGE OF OIL
+The first stop over from New York was in Los Angeles. I checked into a motel that had color television, a treat since I could hallucinate what my invisible Australia might have in store. A Peter O'Toole movie was on, fixing my attention because of his blondness and British origin. He could have been Australian since his fairness and accent evoked what was by then of intense curiosity for me. On another channel, Tab Hunter, another blonde, appeared in a Poe-based movie (derived from \booktitle{City Under the Sea}). The movie's seascapes confirmed what would probably be seen \e{en route}. Poe, if you recall \booktitle{MS. Found in a Bottle}, thought that the North and South Poles were great whirlpools. The story in question took place on a ship sailing past \dq{New Holland,} an archaic term for Australia. It encounters a massive and ghostly ship, having on board ancient mariners. As they near the southernmost part of the carth, the whirlpool plunges them into its \dq{gigantic amphitheatre} and the last words written in this abyss were \dq{the ship is quivering---oh God! and---going down!} The other movie was a BBC production, replete with English accents. A car salesman's cowboy hat reminded me of a similar variant on the head of a New York male model in an advertisement for Qantas airlines.
 
-the match's ignition.
-
-Marlboro commercials on Australian media have the
-same cowboy imagery that their American equivalents
-have. Australia and America can share the common mythology of horsemen, cattle rustlers, outlaws. For lack of a
-better mythology, Australians half-guiltily consume what
-appears to be a dominant force in their country, the oversaturation of American symbols as opposed to their own.
-
-The Australian woman is in a highly male-affectionate
-culture. The frontiersman had to live in male coteries in
-order to advance Protestantism, capitalist sedentarization,
-etc. into the Australian wilderness. The 19th century Australian and American gold discoveries also aided the homosexual anal drive of which this cowboy culture (reinforced
-by its excessive American importation) still feels the pressure. San Francisco, largely male homosexual, has a lot of
-"golddiggers™ as does Sydney. Both America and Australia
-have the frontiersman mythology, enforced by gold-mining, sodomization via sunlight, and an aggressive imagery
-that excludes the nonwhite native. Men together massacred
-what inverted their mirror-stage plenitudes, the aborigine,
-the Indian. Women, in a culture that valorizes these traces
-of nineteenth century activity, are still effaced in the latter part of the twentieth. Men or "mates" are still content
-to fraternize to the exclusion of women in their pubs
-("drink more beer" becomes in the vernacular "suck more
-piss"'), and women still accept exclusion. Men only need an
-absolute woman, a Queen (or an island) to pursue their intentions in male-to-male affiliation.
-
-The sun's strength on this island is intense. Its strength
-is a symbol for the Father. Not being able to see it directly
-testifies to its prowess, otherwise one becomes blind, blind
-
-50
-Australis
-
-in the eyes, substitutive and displacable with one's testicles.
-Australians know the sun's power here. Rituals of tanning
-and skin protection ward off the omnipresence of the star
-while also admitting to the delight over its mastery. Sodomization by the sun evidences itself in a submission to its
-omnipresence, as in the instance of a woman in an ad
-where her derrier is pointed to the very thing that will
-make her more golden or blonde. I tend to stay away from
-too much sun because it's so hard for me to tan with ease,
-unless I'm methodical, but then that becomes tiresome.
-Even my name Duncan Howard Smith can become totally
-anagrammatized into Can't Do Hard Sun Whim, an observation that unsettled me before I came here.
-
-Australia's animals convey its ultra-archaic, absolute
-otherness. Mammals, like the platypus and the echidna, are
-unusual because they lay eggs, yet are still within the phylum Mammalia. The kangaroo, a marsupial (they carry
-their young in pouches or traces of pouches while nursing
-them), and a very large one at that, made Sylvester the
-cartoon cat mistake it for a gigantic mouse. On the same
-cartoon series, The Bugs Bunny Show, the Tasmanian Devil
-becomes the most ferocious animal in the minds of its
-young viewers. The animals here support the common
-opinion that Australia is exotic, strange, nonmundane.
-They tend to fall into the characteristics of science fiction
-denizens or some clever novelist's conjuring of an imaginary realm. A '"'wombat™ sounds like such a fantastical
-construction.
-
-A wilderness TV show edified me as to the peculiarities
-of Australian wildlife, namely its freak of evolution, the
-marsupial. The show's narrator conjectured that these
-pouch-bearing animals came from North America, across
-
-51
-THE AGE OF OIL
+On board the LA-Sydney flight I sat next to four young Maori men. My ultra-blonde Aryanism (I had tinted my hair months ago) would be a perfect contrast to the dark Maoris. White European meat mirror-inverted with black Micronesian meat. \movietitle{Superman} was the on-board movie. My immediate Maori neighbor enjoyed it greatly. (He exchanged his proper name with me, even though he uttered it unintelligibly.) How strange to let that cinematic event enter their minds before stepping onto their sandy soil, their lonely beaches and originally natural jungles! When Lothar's evil became so monstrous, Superman's efforts to defeat it became just as excessive. Superman then reversed time to undo Lothar's meddling and so saved Lois Lane from death. This reversal of time (while I was approaching the International Date Line) was prompted by the spirit of Jorel-Marlon Brando who chastises his son's presumptuousness. When that scene occurred Brando's face was floating in space. An eternity of stars in outer space can only be the eternity of movie stars (\dq{stars never die}), with Jorel-Marlon Brando being in either place.
+
+After stopping off in Pago-Pago the Australian accents around me were increasing, shading my enthusiasm for the phonetic differences heard in my East Village apartment when I fell in love with a boy from Melbourne.
+
+Sydney finally appeared through the portals, unbelievable in its mass of tiny lights, its phenomenality distinct from its past \e{National Geographic} reproduction.
+
+Immediate impressions. Large ads for out-of-the-way Australian locales. Big and colorful like their American equivalents. Currency exchange showed Australia's coins to be heavy and thick and its bills depicted historical personages totally obscure to me. Like the colored ads, the money celebrated something, all in green, blue, red and orange. The reversal of street directions happens when everything that is on the leftside in the U.S. becomes rightsided here. \dq{Very disorienting} as the Australians would say. No tipping, a puzzling relief from mentally calculating 15\% all the time on my territory. Different cigarettes (I'll still inhale Marlboros), candy bars, newspapers, magazines. Foreign, strange, but still accessible because English is spoken here, although Australians tend to revere a \dq{proper} English accent.
+
+Australians practically look the same as Americans. There are differences, but nearly imperceptible. The media prototypes are both Australian and American, America having saturated this country with its Madison Avenue imagery while Australia inserts and re-edits its own versions.
+
+My flight to Melbourne featured nearly all businessmen, thus a commuter flight. Sunlight, male pilot, male cargo, Australian frontier below, avoidance of gazes, no discussion with any businessman neighbor mandated intense paranoia. The few stewardesses couldn't relieve the apprehension. At least they diffused it mometarily when they gave us apples, biscuits and coffee.
+
+From the plane Melbourne seemed flat and yellowish, its dwellings spread out over a vast, arid plain. On the ground, I noticed the proverbial gum tree, a prehistoric species growing amidst industrial objects. My friend's black leather jacket and the Mercedes-Benz spelled recent ciphers when we drove down a highway on one of the earth's oldest geological bodies. He chose classical music on the radio as I smiled to the atemporality of everything in my view.
+
+Knowing that Antarctica is nearby puzzles those who live in the Northern Hemisphere. South and North are just as arbitrary as the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure's mental image of a tree with \e{arbre}. Beyond the clouds that the plane flew over from Sydney to Melbourne lies that continent my \dq{Gold Order of Latitude Zero} (a document testifying to my crossing the equator) displays as one consolidated and confused with Australia. It is from a very old map reproduced in a corner on the document. A few days after my flight a New Zealand Airlines tourist charter crashed into Antarctica's uninhabitable, life-terminating cold. At this point in Roman calendar time, my death had failed by being warm in Melbourne.
+
+While driving into Melbourne from the airport my companion pointed to a purple-painted locale called the \dq{Crystal Ballroom} a punk-rock hangout for Melbourne's vampires of London\slash New York consumables. We also drove past an amusement park that featured a human head whose mouth served as the entrance, its artificial teeth ready to devour us Jonahs in search of non-work-time enthralldom.
+
+On my first night in Melbourne I went to a gay disco called \dq{Babes.} I had not washed my hair knowing that fluffy blonde hair is a criterion of attractiveness in such places. I wore a green and black New Wave ensemble hoping that the Melbournites would want that typically New York item. The disco played songs that weren't as current as the ones played by New York's WBLS, but they were very close. DJ's here only play \dq{new} songs. A TV movie was concurrently showing, thus reducing everything to an intense \e{scopos} or gazing. There, the music and fashions exemplified America's and Europe's high circulation of their texts onto foreign, receptive territory. Australia duplicates the process with the Bee Gees, Olivia Newton-John, \e{Playboy} and \e{Playgirl} models onto nation states in the Northern Hemisphere.
+
+Because Australia is racist in its immigration policies, there were no blacks within sight. Usually in New York at such a similar place you see plenty of black and Latin people. The paradox is in the music, the black man's contribution to the white man's pleasure. Donna Summer was played and danced to, probably resung on the white audience's lips even when there was no black skin within sight. ust as America's imaginary opposition oscillates from black to white, so does Australia's from Italians and Greeks to its fair, Northern European (mostly British or Irish) extractions. Here it's more or less an opposition of brunette, rapidly tanable bodies to blonde, less tanable bodies.
+
+In Australia Mediterranean peoples are much sought after, ecither in government immigration policies or in the perennial impulse of Northern Europe that seeks its origin in Greece and Rome. Australia is a European prosthesis, ike Italy and Greece are. Italy's shoe-like shape (reproduced in many cafes in Melbourne) and Greece's multiple peninsulas that add up to an even larger one confirm Australia's half-island, half-continent problem. Italy could be an island cut off from the rest of Europe like Greece could be as well, nearly detachable picces of land. The Latin word \e{paene}, almost, is joined with \e{insula}, island. These almost islands are also identical to analmost island, Australia.
+
+Australia's duplication of England makes the small island a much larger one, nearly a continent, compensating for England's diminuition.
+
+Traveling from England to Italy or Greece is also like traveling to Australia, even if the distance to Australia is so much greater. Australia has a Mediterranean climate although the scasons are reversed. When England is cold, Italy and Greece are warmer, Australia even warmer. For what is northern, Australia inverts the hemispheric designation to southern, just as Italy and Greece are in comparison to Northern Europe. \e{Australis} is Latin for southern, made, of course, into the major proper name for this former colony of England. Leisure, cultivated in those two Mediterranean climes, is also cultivated here. Life is easy here, a cliche acting as relief from the hard-working Protestant England when its citizens vacation in Italy, Greece or Australia.
+
+During Christmas time some perverse Australians could have celebrated it with a beach party. I can imagine a portable color TV set on a beach playing \movietitle{White Christmas}. The final scene when the stage opens up to reveal falling snow would have been reversed by 100°F temperatures and a blazing sun overhead. Of course their Xmas picnic turkey will have been \dq{cold} and not \dq{hot.}
 
-the Bering Strait through Asia, then Indonesia, and finally
-Australia. A land-bridge connected Australia hundreds of
-millions of years ago to Indonesia, and as they propagated
-on this southernmost continent, the land-bridge severed
-itself from Asia. Thereupon the marsupials adapted to the
-variances in temperature, terrain and flora, coming up with
-the bizarre species people so often associate with Australia.
-As metaphor for Australia's status, the Australian artist
-just might exploit its rarities of climate and geography.
-Evolving into totally eccentric and other paths would be
-the aesthetic credo, rather than assimilating the cultural
-resources of more industrialized nations and urban milieus.
-Nature has made the oddities of fauna in this locale just as
-the Australian artist could make totally odd and perfectly
-indigenous creations, by-products of an environment
-found nowhere else.
-
-Australia's geological age has often been asserted to me.
-Since its hills are more weathered and its flora and fauna
-reflect millenia of evolution, rather than the recent evolution of species in Asia and North America, everyone points
-out these as indicia of great antiquity. Antediluvian it is,
-and the 1770-1980 span is such a tiny fraction in time.
-This notion of Western time is what in Australia, at least
-in its aboriginal horizon, cannot be tenable. Aborigines
-have a term, "the Dreamtime," for the interval when no
-man had consciousness on this land. The transformation of
-an ancient landscape into rectangular grids and a chronos
-that begins from a Mediterranean idol's birth seems ridiculous and arbitrary here. "Yahweh" was not uttered in
-Melbourne, but abroad. Australia revives Europe on a soil
-no one can trace back to a self-present orgin, nor can Europe do so in its Mediterranean postponement. The age and
-
-52
-Australis
-
-alterity of this continent/island haunts the computer card
-facades of modern skyscrapers. The ratio of the West shudders before the nonhistorical sedimentation of a country
-that has now been given a "proper" name. Marble foundations dig into a mother's flesh, a mother whose name they
-have borrowed from another rock, England, with its "Victoria."" The birth of culture in Australia has begun over the
-past two centuries, although those sensitive to that contemporaneity know that "Australia" has never had its perfect beginning, its first youth. Europe began exhausting its
-culture at the moment it underwent imperial expansion. In
-so doing, Europe could not assert a universal intelligence
-up against cultures far more eccentric to its claims of absolute sovereignty. At the time of Australia's colonization,
-Europe was violently repudiating its loss of a full speech,
-of a culture self-affectionately moving toward its origin, its
-youth, its alphabet. And "Australia" had to be named,
-vocalized in Roman letters, all for another origin to reign
-when no origin had ever taken place.
-
-53
-On the Current Symbolic Status of Oil
-
-Oil, a highly treasured possession in industrialized countries, resonates vast and intricate meanings. This presentation will deal with oil and its attenuations in our daily lives.
-Bear in mind that these meanings are not in access to consciousness, but say that which is not being said: the same
-thing, here oil, is then shown in its (auto)difference.
-
-What is different in our autos, our selves? What is now
-different to ourselves, our autos?
+During the first few evenings I drank a great deal of white wine, not beer. I felt that beer was too typically an Australian toxin, even though \dq{white wine} evoked my assimilation of dry weather, white skin, European propriety and connoisseurship. Before I left for this country I had heard of their beer drinking. \dq{Those Australians and their beer,} groaned an English woman at my recently vacated job. In Melbourne there is an unusual juxtaposition of landmarks on one if its central streets, Swanston Street. On one end of it stands a sign in bright large letters, \dq{CUB.} with the \e{U} lowered and slightly overlapping the \e{C}, confusing me into thinking the \e{C} was a \e{G}. I read it as \dq{GUB} for several days until I saw it as an abbreviation for \dq{Carlton United Breweries.} \dq{Gub, gub} resembles a sound that fish make or the \dq{glub, glub} involved in drinking, a comic strip onomatopoeia.
+
+Below this sign are the words \dq{Victoria Bitter.} Opposite this is the other landmark, a large monument entitled \dq{The Shrine of Remembrance.} It is quite imposing and I believe echoes the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. With a beer advertisement opposing a shrine to the some 60,000 \dq{Anzacs} or dead Australian war veterans, I was alerted to the detail that on the \dq{Day of Remembrance} the celebrants drink beer, perhaps Carlton Draught. Remembering the dead is appropriately extended into the ingestion of beer. Anzacs were \dq{drafted} and their deaths are remembered by drinking \dq{draught,} a word once spoken is identical to \dq{draft,} a detail that always confuses me.
+
+Beer is often symbolic, in substitutive fashion, of the the body's expulsion of urine. Beer is called \dq{piss,} getting drunk is \dq{getting pissed.} Everyone has to urinate yellow urea after several glasses of beer. The \dq{Anzacs} must have pissed a great deal in Europe together in their all-male encampments. Lavatories for men are the only places permiting them to see their genitalia, but the urine is the most visible factor, since shame only meets the curious man who dares stare at a male organ other than his own. Urine is thus seen, not the cock. Men who drink beer then drink the urine, and on this day, the urine of the dead, only to propel them into closer contact with the befallen victims of war.
+
+The \dq{Victoria Bitter} (printed right below the \dq{CUB} motif) also condenses a variety of other motifs. \dq{Victoria} is the state where Melbourne lies. \e{State} and \e{taste} are anagrams of each other. The state of Victoria taste(s) bitter. Beer is bitter and so are memories of war dead. \dq{Victoria} is from Queen Victoria, England's former \dq{Queen Mother} for well over half a century, the century that witnessed Australia's colonization. Australia's ambivalence is expressed neatly here. Either they're bitter about the Queen that authorized their transplantation or they're bitter about being on a soil that is also their mother, a \dq{Queensland.} This soil is a rock, a big rock, and the mother is a rock. The primordial opposition of good objects to bad objects in the child's initial symbolic universe applies to its nurturing mother, a mother, a queen or rock one can love and also be \dq{bitter} about. Australia's aridity is what its citizens can be bitter about. And after 1901, the time of Queen Victoria's death, Australia gained its independence, even though it is still aligned to its mother state\slash taste.
+
+Where does all this urine from Australia's beer go? It goes into the vast sea surrounding this continent\slash island. And seawater is bitter, salty, just as urine is too. (Beer, no doubt, is often drunk with salty popcorn or pretzels.) Victoria's land is surrounded by a bitter substance, seawater. Like beer, seawater foams. Maternally evocative scawater is undrinkable, but beer isn't. Furthermore all those soldiers or Anzacs went by ship to Europe at the time of World War 1. Beer-scawater-urine enters in these derivative, dilatory ways into the Australian unconscious. To drink bitter draught while remembering drafted war dead is to drink the saltwater they touched, either when alive or when their wounded or dead returned over a vast, salty ocean. And those buried in Europe shall not return from their cemeteries save through a soil that has conquered their flesh, the decomposition drifting to the land, the mother, the \dq{Victoria} that gave birth to them, the mother bitter over the saltwater separating her from the children that cannot return to her womb of soil.
+
+Smoking in Australia appears entirely suited to this sundrenched, dry land. A bushfire is substitutively repeated everytime an Australian lights his or her cigarette. The desert-like climates here make tobacco into the sensation of dryness itself. Tobacco parches your lungs, just as the desert parches you, dehydrates you. Smoking is a depriving of oxygen and water, all for the fire of leaves, a fire inside the bodies that mimics the dryness of land outside the envelopes of skin.
+
+\dq{Camels} need to be smoked in the desert, and Australia has its \dq{Great Victoria Desert.} \dq{Marlboros} are smoked by cowboys, men who ride horses on arid land, a land that is wild, untillable. \dq{Longbeach} makes the sand of deserts or beaches \dq{long,} stretched out, vaster. And the water at a beach (a backdrop for their ads), as has been indicated, is undrinkable. In these ads, it is usually men who dry their throats, this was at least observed in a \dq{Longbeach} ad where a woman swims while a man smokes. If this woman swimming had wet, red hair, if she had been a \dq{redhead,} her hair would have then been too wet to light the cigarette the man was contemplating to smoke, since \dq{Redheads} are a brand of matches that light nearly all of Australia's cigarettes. On the package of Redheads, a woman's face is framed by the book's remaining red color field. Each match also has a red tip of sulphur, resembling of course the cigarette that will be lit soon after the match's ignition.
+
+Marlboro commercials on Australian media have the same cowboy imagery that their American equivalents have. Australia and America can share the common mythology of horsemen, cattle rustlers, outlaws. For lack of a better mythology, Australians half-guiltily consume what appears to be a dominant force in their country, the oversaturation of American symbols as opposed to their own.
+
+The Australian woman is in a highly male-affectionate culture. The frontiersman had to live in male coteries in order to advance Protestantism, capitalist sedentarization, etc. into the Australian wilderness. The 19\textsuperscript{th} century Australian and American gold discoveries also aided the homosexual anal drive of which this cowboy culture (reinforced by its excessive American importation) still feels the pressure. San Francisco, largely male homosexual, has a lot of \dq{golddiggers} as does Sydney. Both America and Australia have the frontiersman mythology, enforced by gold-mining, sodomization \e{via} sunlight, and an aggressive imagery that excludes the nonwhite native. Men \e{together} massacred what inverted their mirror-stage plenitudes, the aborigine, the Indian. Women, in a culture that valorizes these traces of nineteenth century activity, are still effaced in the latter part of the twentieth. Men or \dq{mates} are still content to fraternize to the exclusion of women in their pubs (\dq{drink more beer} becomes in the vernacular \dq{suck more piss}), and women still accept exclusion. Men only need an absolute woman, a Queen (or an island) to pursue their intentions in male-to-male affiliation.
+
+The sun's strength on this island is intense. Its strength is a symbol for the Father. Not being able to see it directly testifies to its prowess, otherwise one becomes blind, blind in the eyes, substitutive and displacable with one's testicles. Australians know the sun's power here. Rituals of tanning and skin protection ward off the omnipresence of the star while also admitting to the delight over its mastery. Sodomization by the sun evidences itself in a submission to its omnipresence, as in the instance of a woman in an ad where her derrier is pointed to the very thing that will make her more golden or blonde. I tend to stay away from too much sun because it's so hard for me to tan with ease, unless I'm methodical, but then that becomes tiresome. Even my name \e{Duncan Howard Smith} can become totally anagrammatized into \e{Can't Do Hard Sun Whim}, an observation that unsettled me before I came here.
+
+Australia's animals convey its ultra-archaic, absolute otherness. Mammals, like the platypus and the echidna, are unusual because they lay eggs, yet are still within the phylum \e{Mammalia}. The kangaroo, a marsupial (they carry their young in pouches or traces of pouches while nursing them), and a very large one at that, made Sylvester the cartoon cat mistake it for a gigantic mouse. On the same cartoon series, \e{The Bugs Bunny Show}, the Tasmanian Devil becomes the most ferocious animal in the minds of its young viewers. The animals here support the common opinion that Australia is exotic, strange, nonmundane. They tend to fall into the characteristics of science fiction denizens or some clever novelist's conjuring of an imaginary realm. A "wombat" sounds like such a fantastical construction.
+
+A wilderness TV show edified me as to the peculiarities of Australian wildlife, namely its freak of evolution, the marsupial. The show's narrator conjectured that these pouch-bearing animals came from North America, across the Bering Strait through Asia, then Indonesia, and finally Australia. A land-bridge connected Australia hundreds of millions of years ago to Indonesia, and as they propagated on this southernmost continent, the land-bridge severed itself from Asia. Thereupon the marsupials adapted to the variances in temperature, terrain and flora, coming up with the bizarre species people so often associate with Australia. As metaphor for Australia's status, the Australian artist just might exploit its rarities of climate and geography. Evolving into totally eccentric and other paths would be the aesthetic credo, rather than assimilating the cultural resources of more industrialized nations and urban milieus. Nature has made the oddities of fauna in this locale just as the Australian artist could make totally odd and perfectly indigenous creations, by-products of an environment found nowhere else.
+
+Australia's geological age has often been asserted to me. Since its hills are more weathered and its flora and fauna reflect millenia of evolution, rather than the recent evolution of species in Asia and North America, everyone points out these as indicia of great antiquity. Antediluvian it is, and the 1770--1980 span is such a tiny fraction in time. This notion of Western time is what in Australia, at least in its aboriginal horizon, cannot be tenable. Aborigines have a term, \dq{the Dreamtime,} for the interval when no man had consciousness on this land. The transformation of an ancient landscape into rectangular grids and a \e{chronos} that begins from a Mediterranean idol's birth seems ridiculous and arbitrary here. \dq{Yahweh} was not uttered in Melbourne, but abroad. Australia revives Europe on a soil no one can trace back to a self-present orgin, nor can Europe do so in its Mediterranean postponement. The age and alterity of this continent\slash island haunts the computer card facades of modern skyscrapers. The \e{ratio} of the West shudders before the nonhistorical sedimentation of a country that has now been given a \dq{proper} name. Marble foundations dig into a mother's flesh, a mother whose name they have borrowed from another rock, England, with its \dq{Victoria.} The birth of culture in Australia has begun over the past two centuries, although those sensitive to that contemporaneity know that \dq{Australia} has never had its perfect beginning, its first youth. Europe began exhausting its culture at the moment it underwent imperial expansion. In so doing, Europe could not assert a universal intelligence up against cultures far more eccentric to its claims of absolute sovereignty. At the time of Australia's colonization, Europe was violently repudiating its loss of a full speech, of a culture self-affectionately moving toward its origin, its youth, its alphabet. And \dq{Australia} had to be named, vocalized in Roman letters, all for another origin to reign when no origin had ever taken place.
+
+\bye 
+
+\chap On the Current Symbolic Status of Oil
+
+Oil, a highly treasured possession in industrialized countries, resonates vast and intricate meanings. This presentation will deal with oil and its attenuations in our daily lives.  Bear in mind that these meanings are not in access to consciousness, but say that which is not being said: the same thing, here oil, is then shown in its (auto)difference.
+
+What is different in our autos, our selves? What is now different to ourselves, our autos?
 
 To begin this discussion of oil, the idea of the car
 needs to be explored. The car, so important to America's
-image of itself, is its autos, the Greek word for self. The
+image of itself, is its \e{autos}, the Greek word for self. The
 American self or ego bears its reflection within the image
-of its citizen and his/her car. The word ego here is crucial.
-Reverse the letters and you have goe or without the ¢, go.
-Goes and egos are then anagrams, perfect redistributions of
+of its citizen and his\slash her car. The word \e{ego} here is crucial.
+Reverse the letters and you have \e{goe} or without the \e{e}, \e{go}.
+\e{Goes} and \e{egos} are then anagrams, perfect redistributions of
 the letters in those words. In a car one goes, drives, and in
 light of the above, the American ego has a car that lets
-him/her go(e). Indeed I go sounds like ego.
+him\slash her go(e). Indeed \e{I go} sounds like \e{ego}.
 
-The ego holds onto an object, and the common image
-for that object is one's self-reflection. How many times
-have we seen commerecials for car wax where the end result
-of scrubbing a car begets a sheey surface, a mirror for the
+The ego holds onto an object, and the common image for that object is one's self-reflection. How many times have we seen commerecials for car wax where the end result of scrubbing a car begets a sheey surface, a mirror for the car's proud owner? The sheeny, mirror-like car is then the owner's pride, for his neighbor has a not-so-sheeny car.  The not-so-sheeny car owner will then want his car to be as sheeny as his neighbor's, thus making the dull car mirrorlike as well, reflective of the second party's beaming face.
 
-55
-THE AGE OF OIL
+Egos become aggressive when counterparts threaten the units of this \dq{I} or ego with its objects. Cars, often used in aggressive situations, form an indigenous part of America's mythologies of strength, endurance, risk, mastery. The game \dq{chicken} shows this aggression perfectly.  Either party must liquidate the other, a fundamental condition of the ego when it witnesses a treatening counterpart. Car races affirm this facet of the ego, the car that gocs faster than other competing egos: \dq{I \e{goe} faster than that other \e{ego}.} Large car companies, such as General Motors and the Ford Motor Company, vie with each other for mastery over the car profit market, just as they compete in another specular battle against non-American car companies such as Toyota or Volkswagen. The car as ego will automatically take place in these struggles for specular mastery. Examples abound: showing off a new car by driving around the block, driving and passing another car on the highway, killing oneself or killing another ego/car goer, demonstrating that suicide or murder are conditions for both the ego and the car.
 
-car's proud owner? The sheeny, mirror-like car is then the
-owner's pride, for his neighbor has a not-so-sheeny car.
-The not-so-sheeny car owner will then want his car to be
-as sheeny as his neighbor's, thus making the dull car mirrorlike as well, reflective of the second party's beaming face.
-
-Egos become aggressive when counterparts threaten
-the units of this "I" or ego with its objects. Cars, often
-used in aggressive situations, form an indigenous part of
-America's mythologies of strength, endurance, risk, mastery. The game "chicken" shows this aggression perfectly.
-Either party must liquidate the other, a fundamental condition of the ego when it witnesses a treatening counterpart. Car races affirm this facet of the ego, the car that
-gocs faster than other competing egos: *"I goe faster than
-that other ego." Large car companies, such as General Motors and the Ford Motor Company, vie with each other for
-mastery over the car profit market, just as they compete in
-another specular battle against non-American car companies such as Toyota or Volkswagen. The car as ego will
-automatically take place in these struggles for specular
-mastery. Examples abound: showing off a new car by
-driving around the block, driving and passing another car
-on the highway, killing oneself or killing another ego/car
-goer, demonstrating that suicide or murder are conditions
-for both the ego and the car.
-
-On another note the non-car driver compares himself
-to the car driver. Either too poor or proud to have a car,
-they resent the imposition of cars on their daily routines as
-car drivers resent the courtesies they must extend to the
-pedestrian. I goe in a car vis-a-vis | goe on foot.
-
-Cars, as everyone knows, are powered by oil, a condition that powerful interests have aligned Western countries,
-
-56
-On the Current Symbolic Status of Oil
-
-America in particular, to for many decades. Oil is the law
-for a car's operation, and the law, or as the French would
-say, la loi, is oil. The loi/law of oil is thus necessary for the
-American car to go anywhere. And where will the ego goe
-without oil, without a car? Heretofore the loi has always
-been cars driven by oil. This is witnessed by the failure of
-steam driven and electrically powered cars to have any success on the internal combustion machine market, the present-day oil powered cars made in Detroit. Without the loi
-of oil (conditioned by car companies and oil companies),
-there would be the likelihood of no oil, no oil for egos to
-goe on. This is the supreme threat to America's ego for
-without it nothing will goe, unless America's interests
-liquidate the aggressive, oil-hoarding counterpart. Goe over
-there. .
-
-Within the car there is a radio, and within the word car
-there is the anagram RCA. Originally a company aligned to
-the technical innovation of transmitting sound over distances, RCA became equatable with the radio. And nearly
-every car has a radio or RCA (letterally) within it.
-
-Cars and radios are thus in intimate connection, rhetorically a metonymic one. What is interesing is that cars
-are powered by oil just as radios, in association, are powered by oil. Both are in conjunction with oil, cars burn
-oil while radios play oil, that is, records, made of oil or vinyl, are played over the apparatus of a radio. The car that
-burns oil reproduces the radio that plays oil, here records,
-an oil-derived product. Even the word radio has two essential letters for car.
-
-Again without oil our cars or RCA could not goe. The
-loss of oil to power our cars is as threatening as the loss of
-oil jvinyl/records for our RCA, our popular music, played
-
-57
-THE AGE OF OIL
+On another note the non-car driver compares himself to the car driver. Either too poor or proud to have a car, they resent the imposition of cars on their daily routines as car drivers resent the courtesies they must extend to the pedestrian. I goe in a car \e{vis-à-vis} I goe on foot.
 
-over the car radio, the radio cryptically echoing the car it
-is contained in. We hear the radio with our ears, noting
-another similarity between car and ear. Ears hear the car radio. Also, ear is within hear. Since we have ended up identifying with our cars so much, we've also ended up identifying with the stars our ears hear, our popular musicians
-heard on music stations over the radio. Elvis Presley
-loved cars, which is inevitable since he was signed over to
-the record company RCA. America loves cars and loves to
-hear Elvis Presley. The lack of oil will then make loving
-cars and hearing rock stars an impossibility (since their
-voices are on an oil/vinyl record).
-
-Ears have wax in them. Wax too is synonymous with
-oil, as demonstrated by the title for a hit record called Hot
-Wax, now transformable into Hot Oil. There is already oil
-in our ears, the wax, enforced by the idea that there is oil
-in our cars, in our radios. To be close to the music played
-over the radio seems to be a condition we have already met
-up with because the wax/oil makes the distantly playing
-record much more interior and proximate. Popular music
-resolves this distance by using words in songs that are exchangeable with its listeners. We then presume the sung
-material to be our very own, our "feelings." Singing the
-record to oneself is an introjection, an interiorization of
-the distant singer. The singer is brought closer to ourselves,
-just as the unconscious idea is one of already possessing
-that record inside our ears, but as ear wax or ear oil.
-
-Around the time that cars and radios were assuming
-their egological power over American citizens, UFO's were
-being cited in great numbers. You could surmise this bit of
-common knowledge to be widespread around the beginning of the 1950s, the beginning of a wide scale introjection
-
-58
-On the Current Symbolic Status of Oil
-
-of records played on car radios. UFO?'s, or flying saucers,
-were also often cited from people's ears. I'll venture a correspondence that might illuminate these mutual car/radio/
-UFO phenomena. A flying saucer is a disco, the Spanish
-word for saucer or disc. A UFO is often described as a disclike object, resembling in many instances, a record. Since a
-record playing on the radio cannot be seen, a UFO can,
-though very rarely. To see a UFO, to be the lucky person,
-is also the desire, the delusion to see the disco, disc or record that we never see in a car when the radio plays that
-record/music we enjoy so much. And that playing record is
-a burning one, a condensation that accounts for the reported brilliance of UFO's, the UFO's that are brightly
-lighted, lighted as if on fire or burning. Granted the accounts of people who might have truly seen a saucer, it also bespeaks a delirious curiosity, at heart a desire to see as
-opposed to hear what those purely heard saucers look
-like. And their appearance is conditioned by the confusion
-of burning and playing, transforming the UFO disc into a
-bright, fiery object.
-
-Furthermore when a radio plays a song, we have no
-visual equivalent as to how that sound reached the ear, the
-car's radio or the radios in our homes. A flying saucer,
-seen by someone, is the visual transmission of a purely
-auditory stimulus. And with our reflexes reduced to staring (while driving) so much, the mysterious radio sound is
-perforce given its sheer visual support, a record that flies
-into our car. The quickness of the radio signal is also in relation to the UFO, that ultra-fast disc. Crazy as this idea
-might seem, it fits in with the craziness of the teenagers
-then who loved to listen to car radios as were those people
-called ""crazy" if they saw a UFO, or fou, the French word
-
-59
-THE AGE OF OIL
+Cars, as everyone knows, are powered by oil, a condition that powerful interests have aligned Western countries, America in particular, to for many decades. Oil is the law for a car's operation, and the law, or as the French would say, \e{la loi}, is oil. The \e{loi}\slash law of oil is thus necessary for the American car to go anywhere. And where will the ego goe without oil, without a car? Heretofore the \e{loi} has always been cars driven by oil. This is witnessed by the failure of steam driven and electrically powered cars to have any success on the internal combustion machine market, the present-day oil powered cars made in Detroit. Without the \e{loi} of oil (conditioned by car companies and oil companies), there would be the likelihood of no oil, no oil for egos to goe on. This is the supreme threat to America's ego for without it nothing will goe, unless America's interests liquidate the aggressive, oil-hoarding counterpart. Goe over there.\ld
 
-for mad or crazy. People who hear pop music go crazy like
-the people who sce UFO discs. A record, a picce of wax, a
-waxen disc, flies into my ear, a nonidentifiable object, a
-nonvisual object, the sound. Already crazy with a nonscopic sound in my car, the record/wax sound makes me crazier and the record/wax/disco/UFO makes me the craziest,
-since I'm really seeing what I can only hear. Incidentally,
-a major record and stereo equipment entrepreneur goes by
-the name ""Crazy Eddie."
-
-When cars goe or drive on tar, they drive over the asphalt on such roads. Without asphalt or tar, there would be
-no surface for a car to drive on, no tar or oil for a car to
-drive with and no tar or sound from the records heard
-over the car radio to listen to. A car travels along a road, a
-path,-a trail. These are the "grooves' on a road, associative
-with the "grooves™ on a record. Road equals record, since
-both are derived from oil, roads being made of asphalt and
-records composed of vinyl, derived as asphalt is, of oil products.
-
-The stylus that plays the record is the car that drives
-along the road. A record's turning motion allows the stylus
-to move. The turntable is powered by electricity, often a
-transformation of energy from oil. A stylus, besides being
-a writing instrument, is also related to a ship's prow, the
-edge that cuts through water. Every car has a hood, a
-"prow" of sorts. Ships travel as do cars, one on water, the
-other on land. Both are called "she."" The car/ship has a
-stylus, podium, prow that cuts along a path, and thus its
-mark or trail is made. The wake of churned-up water is the
-ship's path as the drippings of oil is the car's path. The oil
-drippings of cars are the indicia of a car's path (not to
-mention its tire marks). The record's sound from an LP is
-
-60
-On the Current Symbolic Status of Oil
-
-the index of a stylus' path. Sound travels on tar/oil/vinyl
-records as cars travel on tar/oil/asphalt. Thus a stylus
-traveling down a record groove is an allegory of a car
-traveling down a road.
-
-In another vein, without oil there would be no art. In
-art, there's the word tar, an anagram. Tar is derived from
-oil. Painters, of course, use oil to make their art. There are
-many kinds of oil, or many tars: vinyl, records, acrylic, etc.
-Artists need tar. Artist-musicians need tar/oil, the same
-kind of tar that's involved in the manufacture of records.
-Painters and musicians employ different art forms or they
-use different tar forms. Some of them can become a star
-after becoming successful with their art made of tar, such
-tar allowing them to goe far. The anagrams arts/tars/star
-are crucial to the symbols that determine an identification
-in our culture.
-
-With stars on tars doing arts, the lack of oil threatens
-their activity too. No oil means no arts, not a single star
-because of the lack of tars. Again without art or tars or
-star(s), what will that do to star(ing), what will happen to
-our sight, since no arts/star(s) will be able to be looked at?
-What films will we see and what car windows will we look
-through? As well, no ear wax/oil/tars/arts/star(s) over
-the car's radio also means an imminent crisis for our hearing. No records played or burned, no RCA and no car,
-means no sound heard as it means no oil for cars to drive
-on. Not being able to see and hear, taken in their sense as
-drives, is also a lack of the energy or oil to keep those
-drives goeing. The other drives, the oral and anal, also derive from this collapse of culturally shared images, pleasurewords, mythologies and lois. Thus an ego will then not
-goe without being driven by the four-wheeled drives of
-
-61
-THE AGE OF OIL
+Within the car there is a radio, and within the word car there is the anagram RCA. Originally a company aligned to the technical innovation of transmitting sound over distances, RCA became equatable with the radio. And nearly every car has a radio or RCA (letterally) within it.
 
-the apertures of our bodies, our bodies that have energy or
-oil along with the rims or sources from which to discharge
-that energy: the ears, the eyes, the mouth and the anus.
-Egos go(es) to drive with oil and aim at oil. Oil drives us
-from one state of oil to another state/taste of oil.
-
-To taste oil introduces oil's relation to the third gear of
-the oral drive, noting another phonic resemblance. America's addiction to tar is as bad as its addiction to the tar in
-cigarettes. Even low-tar or ultra low-tar cigarettes resonate
-with the desire to move away from tar, too much tar, too
-much oil. Low-mileage cars are really low in tar as some
-cigarettes are. Low-tar cigarettes are a "'rationing" of tar,
-like the inevitable "rationing" of oil when supplies get low.
-The oral drive, exemplified by smoking, is also present in
-the repetitive and pleasurable activity in listening to songs
-over the radio, on the jukebox, on one's stereo. Both smoking and listening involve tar/art and oil/vinyl records.
-Both are an inhalation, since with smoking one interiorizes
-tar and in the other, in listening, one can interiorize via the
-mouth the record's voice. Resinging a popular song that is
-played on oil is inhaling a cigarette that has "tar" in it. Introjection is an oral affair, and the record assures us of oral
-stimulation by the silent, but still vocalized, activity undergoeing when we listen, when we hear the wax in our ear
-that we cannot see. True, the car wax is invisible, the partition between seeing the ear's contents and the eye that is
-to accomplish that act is permanent, unless you were enterprising enough to have a photograph taken of it. Oil is not
-only in our cars, but in our ears, in our eyes (our stares),
-and in our mouths. A cigarette, believe it or not, is a small
-car, an i caret get, an [ get(te) a car, or simplified, an I get
-car. Car's thyme with tar could mean I get tar for cigarette.
-
-62
-On the Current Symbolic Status of Oil
-
-"I smoke cigarettes" can translate into either "I smoke I
-get cars" or "I smoke I get tars." With smoking, the
-cigarette's smoke is similar to the exhaust that comes from
-a car, the remains of burnt-up car oil are also the remains
-of burnt-up tar. But is the cigarette filter's passage of
-smoke the only '"'exhaust" when we, as smokers, exhale
-the "'exhaust" from our mouth? The exhaust of a car resembles cither the cigarette smoke that then passes
-through the lungs, throat and mouth, as an exhalation, as
-exhaust. Smoking a cigarette is then an allegory of a car
-burning oil as both of them spew forth "exhaust."
-
-Another attenuation of the oral/oil drive. The LP for a
-vinyl record could bear an i between the letters [ and p,
-producing lip. LPs are sung on our lips, our singing reproduces the singing on the record. Lip synch is LP synch, a
-truism to the argument that our culture is heavily involved
-in the introjection, the filling of an oral void, of records
-and oil.
-
-Also, introjecting oil is implicated in the confusion as
-to whether oil is water or not. Oil is not water, but then
-water is a liquid, just as oil is.
-
-The fourth gear in the "drive' is the anal drive.
-
-Oil companies have a lot of gold from all the money
-they've made. Gold and oil are nearly synonymous, since
-their prices affect the status of the world market so
-radically. Oil is precious, but more precious in its refined
-state. Black, crude, "dirty," the oil is originally shitty. Refined, made clean by oil refinery, sewage system plants,
-the oil loses its shittiness and becomes more valuable, like
-gold, and circulatable, rather than in its less valuable, "dirty," crude state.
-
-But if oil is shitty in its crude state and then valuable
-
-63
-THE AGE OF OIL
+Cars and radios are thus in intimate connection, rhetorically a metonymic one. What is interesing is that cars are powered by oil just as radios, in association, are powered by oil. Both are in conjunction with oil, cars burn oil while radios play oil, that is, records, made of oil or vinyl, are played over the apparatus of a radio. The car that burns oil reproduces the radio that plays oil, here records, an oil-derived product. Even the word \{ra}dio has two essential letters for c\e{ar}.
 
-in its refined state, a hit record, or one of the hits, here was
-once shit, since shit and hits are anagrams of each other.
-From crude oil equals shit to refined oil or vinyl equals
-hits as in the phsase "Top 40 Hits" (Shit), oil will always
-bear the meaning of its excremental status. Records, as
-texts, are involved in the problematic of being "extrinsic
-excrement" or "intrinsic ideality" (Derrida). Oil pollutes
-too, as in oil slicks or massive refinery plant fires. The dead
-remnants of prehistoric forests left their rich deposits behind so as to fuel our possessions. Oil is the manure of ancient forests just as it is a manure when "'crude" or "dirty"
-before it is cleaned and refined into the Top 40 Hits (Shit)
-vinyl LPs. The anal drive completes oil's four-wheel drive
-that helps the American (to) drive.
-
-Also the anality of oil is prefigured in the means to
-mine it. Drilling into the earth to yield the riches (Atlantic
-Richfield) withheld by resistant layers of crust obeys sadistic, coprophagic ideas. (Coprophagia is "feeding off dung.")
-For the ecarth to withhold its riches is much like the constipated retention of faeces that enemas or in similar
-fashion oil rigs relieve.
-
-Oil is gold and gold is shit. Thus oil is shit, either because it resembles shit (dark, untouchable, nauseating, hidden from view) or because its extremely valued state
-allows us to compare it with what is the least valued as
-gold is with shit. Gifts, and the symbology derived from
-them, obey oblative, anal drive ideas. Oil companies and
-oil rich countries give us oil, or they, in their withholding,
-retain the precious gift. This is sadism in its truest sense.
-Furthermore, concern over the profits oil companies make
-propels moral ideas as to a more proper distribution, another facet of the oblative character of the anal drive. The
-
-64
-On the Current Symbolic Status of Oil
-
-shit/oil/gold should be circulated in equivalent amounts,
-otherwise retention forces those lacking into accusations
-of hoarding, another anal motif.
-
-America's desire to ration its oil supplies demonstrates
-what attenuations the anal drive can goe to. Frugality and
-judicious use of oil are not without their sadistic connotations, a sodomy done to all, while elsewhere lurks the greater sadists, Arabia and the large oil companies.
-
-The unseen character of oil, its abstractness, after all
-this gross materiality, and its transformation into fire, energy, combustion, etc. is another important idea. I've alrcady
-tried to explain that with records/oil played/burned on an
-RCA/car, the unseen disc of vinyl returns in the form of a
-flying saucer. Oil's invisibility returns in the form of a
-disco/disc/vinyl record that flies into the car/RCA burning or playing the music. This music is the beat that goes/
-egos on, drives egos on. Oil is usually the fuel that our eyes
-do not see. Oftentimes it is a simple mathematical quota in
-terms of the car's registration that the fuel is low. It can
-also be the rapid calculation of gallons and fractions of
-gallons seen at the gas pump along with its calculation into
-a price at another adjacent window on the pump. Its abstract character is further testified by its facilitation of
-general movement from one place to another. Oil is simply
-energy, and that energy makes things happen, but energy is
-not the thing, the idea, it simply allows the thing or idea or
-event to take place. Like the crucial distinction in psychoanalysis between idea and instinct, oil is instinct, the drive
-to which the idea is "soldered." Oil determines the drive's
-energy as well as the object of the drive, the oil-related
-product. The record's idea, its music, is made possible by
-its oil/vinyl as are the housewife's errands made possible
-
-65
-THE AGE OF OIL
+Again without oil our cars or RCA could not goe. The loss of oil to power our cars is as threatening as the loss of oil\slash vinyl/records for our RCA, our popular music, played over the car radio, the \e{ra}dio cryptically echoing the c\e{ar} it is contained in. We hear the radio with our ears, noting another similarity between c\e{ar} and e\e{ar}. E\e{ar}s hear the c\e{ar} \e{ra}dio. Also, \e{ear} is within h\e{ear}. Since we have ended up identifying with our cars so much, we've also ended up identifying with the stars our ears hear, our popular musicians heard on music stations over the radio. Elvis Presley loved cars, which is inevitable since he was signed over to the record company RCA. America loves cars and loves to hear Elvis Presley. The lack of oil will then make loving cars and hearing rock stars an impossibility (since their voices are on an oil/vinyl record).
 
-by car fuel. Oil drives the car just as ideas are aligned to
-drives, the economic factors that account for the ideas'
-repetition, their persistence. There can be no idea without
-its concomitant energetic investment, no idea without the
-pressure that realizes it. Conversely there can be no energy
-without an idea attached to such a quantity-ridden abstraction, a notion prey to alinguistic, transcendental assertions. Oil neither escapes its idea, its conceptual, linguistic,
-presentational status nor does it escape its energetic quanta,
-its reducibility to simple distributions of affects. The word
-oil is just as important as its unseen combustions
-terious pervasiveness that organizes things while at the
-same time remains invisible to them.
-
-There is the vulgarity of those who stress pure, nonverbal ascensions into absolute energy, vibration, impulse,
-quanta, etc. They are at once giving an idea to a sensation
-(a sign too), this distribution of pressures that is never independent of representation, language, speaking subjects,
-discourse.
-
-The fad of jogging is a near mystical embrace of this
-idea of pure energy, but why would they be jogging but in
-a time bound situation where the deprivation of oil or energy insists that they have vitality, a lot of energy or oil?
-Joggers presume their freedom from oil at the very moment when their livelihoods are threatened by its absence.
-The fastest jogger inversely affirms a slowing down of the I
-
-its mys
-go in cars. One reminder: race and car. Eliminate the e in
-race and permute the rest of the letters into car. Joggers
-are in a race, a strange car race. Even the ger in jogger
-echoes car (c and g are both velar stops). Mania, here in the
-jogger, is close to mourning, where the oil-ideal (usually an
-ego-ideal) is now about to become lost forever to the
-
-66
-On the Current Symbolic Status of Oil
-
-historical specificity of driving oil-powered automobiles.
-
-Other movement manias, the discomania and the roller
-skating mania, are close to the problem of the disappearance of oil. Dancing in discos and roller skating obey the
-general idea of movement and lots of it. Disco music is the
-music that is in our ears whose ear wax is also the oil that
-constitutes the records played over sound systems. Hearing
-oil is also moving to it and being driven by it. Dancing and
-its euphonic embrace, this mania for the ego in perfect
-self-presentation, is only about to mourn the loss of what
-makes the dancers goe so energetically, the oil record or
-the car/ear oil/wax under question. When we dance our
-ears are driven by oil and when we drive our cars are driven
-by oil.
-
-0il as instinct will probably find its greatest threat in
-the future when no oil makes impossible libidinal contact
-with others. The freedom for a young man and woman in
-a car, flaunting parental admonitions against sex, to have
-that pleasure (and the car/RCA/radio music that serves to
-express that impulse) is threatened by no more oil. Goeing
-elsewhere for sex is becoming an archaism, at least when
-fuel, energy, oil is involved. Granted there will always be
-libido, drives and instincts, it's just that oil has tyrannized
-ourselves, our autos to the point where its exclusion would
-result in the deprivation of key ideas governing so much
-human intercourse. No energy (oil) is no sex, a thought related to Ernest Jones's observation that what the subject
-fears most is the loss of libido, aphanisis, an idea more
-threatening than the irreducibility of castration. Will no oil
-castrate the Western/American subject so radically as to
-force libidinal contact into retreat? Will the lack of oil dismiss representation altogether? An impossibility, despite
-
-67
-THE AGE OF OIL
+Ears have wax in them. Wax too is synonymous with oil, as demonstrated by the title for a hit record called \e{Hot Wax}, now transformable into \e{Hot Oil}. There is already oil in our ears, the wax, enforced by the idea that there is oil in our cars, in our radios. To be close to the music played over the radio seems to be a condition we have already met up with because the wax\slash oil makes the distantly playing record much more interior and proximate. Popular music resolves this distance by using words in songs that are exchangeable with its listeners. We then presume the sung material to be our very own, our \dq{feelings.} Singing the record to oneself is an introjection, an interiorization of the distant singer. The singer is brought closer to ourselves, just as the unconscious idea is one of already possessing that record inside our ears, but as ear wax or ear oil.
+
+Around the time that cars and radios were assuming their egological power over American citizens, UFO's were being cited in great numbers. You could surmise this bit of common knowledge to be widespread around the beginning of the 1950s, the beginning of a wide scale introjection of records played on car radios. UFO?'s, or flying saucers, were also often cited from people's ears. I'll venture a correspondence that might illuminate these mutual car\slash radio\slash UFO phenomena. A flying saucer is a \e{disco}, the Spanish word for saucer or disc. A UFO is often described as a disc-like object, resembling in many instances, a record. Since a record playing on the radio cannot be seen, a UFO can, though very rarely. To see a UFO, to be the lucky person, is also the desire, the delusion to see the \e{disco}, disc or record that we never see in a car when the radio plays that record\slash music we enjoy so much. And that playing record is a burning one, a condensation that accounts for the reported brilliance of UFO's, the UFO's that are brightly lighted, lighted as if on fire or burning. Granted the accounts of people who might have truly seen a saucer, it also bespeaks a delirious curiosity, at heart a desire to \e{see} as opposed to \e{hear} what those purely heard saucers look like. And their appearance is conditioned by the confusion of burning and playing, transforming the UFO disc into a bright, fiery object.
+
+Furthermore when a radio plays a song, we have no visual equivalent as to how that sound reached the ear, the car's radio or the radios in our homes. A flying saucer, seen by someone, is the visual transmission of a purely auditory stimulus. And with our reflexes reduced to staring (while driving) so much, the mysterious radio sound is perforce given its sheer visual support, a record that flies into our car. The quickness of the radio signal is also in relation to the UFO, that ultra-fast disc. Crazy as this idea might seem, it fits in with the craziness of the teenagers then who loved to listen to car radios as were those people called \dq{crazy} if they saw a UFO, or \e{fou}, the French word for mad or crazy. People who hear pop music go crazy like the people who sce UFO discs. A record, a picce of wax, a waxen disc, flies into my ear, a nonidentifiable object, a nonvisual object, the sound. Already crazy with a nonscopic sound in my car, the record\slash wax sound makes me crazier and the record\slash wax\slash \e{disco}\slash UFO makes me the craziest, since I'm really seeing what I can only hear. Incidentally, a major record and stereo equipment entrepreneur goes by the name \dq{Crazy Eddie.}
+
+When cars goe or drive on tar, they drive over the asphalt on such roads. Without asphalt or tar, there would be no surface for a car to drive on, no tar or oil for a car to drive with and no tar or sound from the records heard over the car radio to listen to. A car travels along a road, a path,-a trail. These are the \dq{grooves} on a road, associative with the \dq{grooves} on a record. Road equals record, since both are derived from oil, roads being made of asphalt and records composed of vinyl, derived as asphalt is, of oil products.
+
+The stylus that plays the record is the car that drives along the road. A record's turning motion allows the stylus to move. The turntable is powered by electricity, often a transformation of energy from oil. A stylus, besides being a writing instrument, is also related to a ship's prow, the edge that cuts through water. Every car has a hood, a \dq{prow} of sorts. Ships travel as do cars, one on water, the other on land. Both are called \dq{she.} The car\slash ship has a stylus, podium, prow that cuts along a path, and thus its mark or trail is made. The wake of churned-up water is the ship's path as the drippings of oil is the car's path. The oil drippings of cars are the indicia of a car's path (not to mention its tire marks). The record's sound from an LP is the index of a stylus' path. Sound travels on tar\slash oil\slash vinyl records as cars travel on tar\slash oil\slash asphalt. Thus a stylus traveling down a record groove is an allegory of a car traveling down a road.
+
+In another vein, without oil there would be no art. In \e{art|, there's the word \e{tar}, an anagram. Tar is derived from oil. Painters, of course, use oil to make their art. There are many kinds of oil, or many tars: vinyl, records, acrylic, etc.  Artists need tar. Artist-musicians need tar/oil, the same kind of tar that's involved in the manufacture of records.  Painters and musicians employ different art forms or they use different tar forms. Some of them can become a star after becoming successful with their art made of tar, such tar allowing them to goe far. The anagrams arts/tars/star are crucial to the symbols that determine an identification in our culture.
+
+With stars on tars doing arts, the lack of oil threatens their activity too. No oil means no arts, not a single star because of the lack of tars. Again without art or tars or star(s), what will that do to star(ing), what will happen to our sight, since no arts\slash star(s) will be able to be looked at?  What films will we see and what car windows will we look through? As well, no ear wax\slash oil\slash tars\slash arts\slash star(s) over the car's radio also means an imminent crisis for our hearing. No records played or burned, no RCA and no car, means no sound heard as it means no oil for cars to drive on. Not being able to see and hear, taken in their sense as drives, is also a lack of the energy or oil to keep those drives goeing. The other drives, the oral and anal, also derive from this collapse of culturally shared images, pleasurewords, mythologies and \e{lois}. Thus an ego will then not goe without being driven by the four-wheeled drives of the apertures of our bodies, our bodies that have energy or oil along with the rims or sources from which to discharge that energy: the ears, the eyes, the mouth and the anus.  Egos go(es) to drive with oil and aim at oil. Oil drives us from one state of oil to another state\slash taste of oil.
+
+To taste oil introduces oil's relation to the third gear of the oral drive, noting another phonic resemblance. America's addiction to tar is as bad as its addiction to the tar in cigarettes. Even low-\e{tar} or ul\e{tra} low-\e{tar} cigarettes resonate with the desire to move away from tar, too much tar, too much oil. Low-mileage cars are really low in tar as some cigarettes are. Low-tar cigarettes are a \dq{rationing} of tar, like the inevitable \dq{rationing} of oil when supplies get low.  The oral drive, exemplified by smoking, is also present in the repetitive and pleasurable activity in listening to songs over the radio, on the jukebox, on one's stereo. Both smoking and listening involve tar\slash art and oil\slash vinyl records.  Both are an inhalation, since with smoking one interiorizes tar and in the other, in listening, one can interiorize \e{via} the mouth the record's voice. Resinging a popular song that is played on oil is inhaling a cigarette that has \dq{tar} in it. Introjection is an oral affair, and the record assures us of oral stimulation by the silent, but still vocalized, activity undergoeing when we listen, when we hear the wax in our ear that we cannot see. True, the car wax is invisible, the partition between seeing the ear's contents and the eye that is to accomplish that act is permanent, unless you were enterprising enough to have a photograph taken of it. Oil is not only in our cars, but in our ears, in our eyes (our s\e{tar}es), and in our mouths. A cigarette, believe it or not, is a small car, an \e{i caret get}, an \e{I get(te) a car}, or simplified, an \e{I get car}. Car's thyme with tar could mean \e{I get tar} for \e{cigarette}.  \dq{I smoke \e{cigarettes}} can translate into either \dq{I smoke \e{I get cars}} or \dq{I smoke \e{I get tars.}} With smoking, the cigarette's smoke is similar to the exhaust that comes from a car, the remains of burnt-up car oil are also the remains of burnt-up tar. But is the cigarette filter's passage of smoke the only \dq{exhaust} when we, as smokers, exhale the \dq{exhaust} from our mouth? The exhaust of a car resembles cither the cigarette smoke that then passes through the lungs, throat and mouth, as an exhalation, as exhaust. Smoking a cigarette is then an allegory of a car burning oil as both of them spew forth \dq{exhaust.}
+
+Another attenuation of the oral\slash oil drive. The LP for a vinyl record could bear an \e{i} between the letters \e{l} and \e{p}, producing \e{lip}. \e{LPs} are sung on our \e{lips}, our singing reproduces the singing on the record. \e{Lip synch} is \e{LP synch}, a truism to the argument that our culture is heavily involved in the introjection, the filling of an oral void, of records and oil.
+
+Also, introjecting oil is implicated in the confusion as to whether oil is water or not. Oil is not water, but then water is a liquid, just as oil is.
+
+The fourth gear in the \dq{drive} is the anal drive.
+
+Oil companies have a lot of gold from all the money they've made. Gold and oil are nearly synonymous, since their prices affect the status of the world market so radically. Oil is precious, but more precious in its refined state. Black, crude, \dq{dirty,} the oil is originally shitty. Refined, made clean by oil refinery, sewage system plants, the oil loses its shittiness and becomes more valuable, like gold, and circulatable, rather than in its less valuable, \dq{dirty,} crude state.
+
+But if oil is shitty in its crude state and then valuable in its refined state, a hit record, or one of the \e{hits}, here was once \e{shit}, since \e{shit} and \e{hits} are anagrams of each other.  From crude oil equals shit to refined oil or vinyl equals hits as in the phsase \dq{Top 40 Hits} (Shit), oil will always bear the meaning of its excremental status. Records, as texts, are involved in the problematic of being \dq{extrinsic excrement} or \dq{intrinsic ideality} (Derrida). Oil pollutes too, as in oil slicks or massive refinery plant fires. The dead remnants of prehistoric forests left their rich deposits behind so as to fuel our possessions. Oil is the manure of ancient forests just as it is a manure when \dq{crude} or \dq{dirty} before it is cleaned and refined into the Top 40 Hits (Shit) vinyl LPs. The anal drive completes oil's four-wheel drive that helps the American (to) drive.
+
+Also the anality of oil is prefigured in the means to mine it. Drilling into the earth to yield the riches (Atlantic \w{Rich}field) withheld by resistant layers of crust obeys sadistic, coprophagic ideas. (Coprophagia is "feeding off dung.") For the ecarth to withhold its riches is much like the constipated retention of f\ae ces that enemas or in similar fashion oil rigs relieve.
+
+Oil is gold and gold is shit. Thus oil is shit, either because it resembles shit (dark, untouchable, nauseating, hidden from view) or because its extremely valued state allows us to compare it with what is the least valued as gold is with shit. Gifts, and the symbology derived from them, obey oblative, anal drive ideas. Oil companies and oil rich countries give us oil, or they, in their withholding, retain the precious gift. This is sadism in its truest sense.  Furthermore, concern over the profits oil companies make propels moral ideas as to a more proper distribution, another facet of the oblative character of the anal drive. The shit\slash oil\slash gold should be circulated in equivalent amounts, otherwise retention forces those lacking into accusations of hoarding, another anal motif.
+
+America's desire to ration its oil supplies demonstrates what attenuations the anal drive can goe to. Frugality and judicious use of oil are not without their sadistic connotations, a sodomy done to all, while elsewhere lurks the greater sadists, Arabia and the large oil companies.
+
+The unseen character of oil, its abstractness, after all this gross materiality, and its transformation into fire, energy, combustion, etc. is another important idea. I've alrcady tried to explain that with records\slash oil played\slash burned on an RCA\slash car, the unseen disc of vinyl returns in the form of a flying saucer. Oil's invisibility returns in the form of a \e{disco}\slash disc\slash vinyl record that flies into the car\slash RCA burning or playing the music. This music is the beat that goes\slash egos on, drives egos on. Oil is usually the fuel that our eyes do not see. Oftentimes it is a simple mathematical quota in terms of the car's registration that the fuel is low. It can also be the rapid calculation of gallons and fractions of gallons seen at the gas pump along with its calculation into a price at another adjacent window on the pump. Its abstract character is further testified by its facilitation of general movement from one place to another. Oil is simply energy, and that energy makes things happen, but energy is not the thing, the idea, it simply allows the thing or idea or event to take place. Like the crucial distinction in psychoanalysis between idea and instinct, oil is instinct, the drive to which the idea is "soldered." Oil determines the drive's energy as well as the object of the drive, the oil-related product. The record's idea, its music, is made possible by its oil\slash vinyl as are the housewife's errands made possible by car fuel. Oil drives the car just as ideas are aligned to drives, the economic factors that account for the ideas' repetition, their persistence. There can be no idea without its concomitant energetic investment, no idea without the pressure that realizes it. Conversely there can be no energy without an idea attached to such a quantity-ridden abstraction, a notion prey to alinguistic, transcendental assertions. Oil neither escapes its idea, its conceptual, linguistic, presentational status nor does it escape its energetic quanta, its reducibility to simple distributions of affects. The word \e{oil} is just as important as its unseen combustions terious pervasiveness that organizes things while at the same time remains invisible to them.
+
+There is the vulgarity of those who stress pure, nonverbal ascensions into absolute energy, vibration, impulse, quanta, etc. They are at once giving an idea to a sensation (a sign too), this distribution of pressures that is never independent of representation, language, speaking subjects, discourse.
+
+The fad of jogging is a near mystical embrace of this idea of pure energy, but why would they be jogging but in a time bound situation where the deprivation of oil or energy insists that they have vitality, a lot of energy or oil?  Joggers presume their freedom from oil at the very moment when their livelihoods are threatened by its absence.  The fastest jogger inversely affirms a slowing down of the \e{I go} in cars. One reminder: \e{rac}e and \e{car}. Eliminate the \e{e} in rac\e{e} and permute the rest of the letters into \e{car}. Joggers are in a race, a strange car race. Even the \e{ger} in jog\e{ger} echoes \e{car} (\e{c} and \e{g} are both velar stops). Mania, here in the jogger, is close to mourning, where the oil-ideal (usually an ego-ideal) is now about to become lost forever to the historical specificity of driving oil-powered automobiles.
+
+Other movement manias, the discomania and the roller skating mania, are close to the problem of the disappearance of oil. Dancing in discos and roller skating obey the general idea of movement and lots of it. Disco music is the music that is in our ears whose ear \e{wax} is also the \e{oil} that constitutes the records played over sound systems. Hearing oil is also moving to it and being driven by it. Dancing and its euphonic embrace, this mania for the ego in perfect self-presentation, is only about to mourn the loss of what makes the dancers goe so energetically, the oil record or the car\slash ear oil\slash wax under question. When we dance our ears are driven by oil and when we drive our cars are driven by oil.
 
-the intimate congruence between its manufacture and the
-significations surrounding it. No sex, no art, no stars, no
-records, along with the absence of their energetic foundations, shows the profound anxiety we're goeing through.
-Its resolution appears to be intractably elusive, considering
-oil's complex impregnation into our culture's discourse,
-our intramental and socially exterior selves, our autos.
-How can our auto/ego let goe of oil?
+0il as instinct will probably find its greatest threat in the future when no oil makes impossible libidinal contact with others. The freedom for a young man and woman in a car, flaunting parental admonitions against sex, to have that pleasure (and the car/RCA/radio music that serves to express that impulse) is threatened by no more oil. Goeing elsewhere for sex is becoming an archaism, at least when fuel, energy, oil is involved. Granted there will always be libido, drives and instincts, it's just that oil has tyrannized ourselves, our \e{autos} to the point where its exclusion would result in the deprivation of key ideas governing so much human intercourse. No energy (oil) is no sex, a thought related to Ernest Jones's observation that what the subject fears most is the loss of libido, \e{aphanisis}, an idea more threatening than the irreducibility of castration. Will no oil castrate the Western/American subject so radically as to force libidinal contact into retreat? Will the lack of oil dismiss representation altogether? An impossibility, despite the intimate congruence between its manufacture and the significations surrounding it. No sex, no art, no stars, no records, along with the absence of their energetic foundations, shows the profound anxiety we're goeing through.  Its resolution appears to be intractably elusive, considering oil's complex impregnation into our culture's discourse, our intramental and socially exterior selves, our autos.  How can our auto/ego let goe of oil?
 
 Some further points.
 
-Having used the phrase "our oil" throughout the text,
-it appears to be a cryptic device since it works on a variety
-of registers. America's oil, the country's oil, or "our oil"
-works on a phonic level with the [ and r substitutive with
-cach other. Some Oriental people have difficulty learning
-the interval r, since both [ and r are liquids. Our oil can reverse into oul oir in light of the transposability of the liguids, thus proving the word our's proximity to oil. On the
-semantic level, our oil makes the phonic connection even
-more binding since we do believe that oil is essential to our
-selves, our autos, our properties, our cars, our records,
-stars, arts, etc.
-
-Iran anagrammatizes into rain. Rain is from the air,
-whereas oil is from the ground or oils are from the soil.
-But Iran is in a desert where there is little rain. Oil's difference to water is also implicated in the question whether
-the Persian Gulf has water, drinkable or nondrinkable, or
-oil within the waters of the gulf. Is the Persian Gulf made
-up of oil? Since, empirically, it's saltwater, our desire belives the Persian Gulf (as in the Gulf Oil Company) to be
-composed of oil, an immediate explanation for its oil-rich
-status. But Iran and its Persian Gulf neighbors are in an
-arid, desert-ridden land. They only have oil and saltwater,
-
-68
-On the Current Symbolic Status of Oil
-
-and none of them are drinkable. America, however, has
-water, fresh, drinkable water in great quantities but none
-of the great quantities of Persian Gulf oil, made into an
-even greater quantity because of the equation of the gulf's
-waters with the wealth of the oil near its shores. The rain
-or water in Iran is its oil that does not come from the air
-but from the ground, even in our delusion from the oil-rich
-Persian Gulf itself, the sea, the saltwater. Saltwater already
-has a mineral in it just as it could possess oil: oilwater for
-saltwater shows a mixture of mineral with water.
-
-I wrote this essay during the hostage crisis in Iran.
-Then, in 1980, nearly every American politician ran for office. "I ran" is a conceivable phrase to have been uttered
-by a presidential candidate in the *80s elections. "I ran
-against Iran" forms a neat cryptophor in the narration of a
-campaigning ego. And that ego will have to goe far on oil
-in a car to assert why Iran is something he (in specular
-opposition) is running against. *'l go" becomes the same as
-"I ran" (aren't some candidates joggers, an "I ran"?), but
-with Iran being the aggressively counterposed party, the I
-go/ego/l ran of an American presidential candidate will
-have to outdistance Iranian policy, a difficulty since the
-politics of oil make that running, going and driving a
-tremendous problem.
-
-Iran's oil anagrammatizes into the opposition no Israil.
-Either America gets Iran's oil at the expense of Israil/Israel
-or refuses Iran for the sake of Isracl.
-
-The Arab oil cartel is a cryptophor working against
-those cultures that have lots of cars but no oil. A cartel of
-oil rich countries makes Americans in particular angry over
-what will not let car(s) run on their needed fuel.
-
-America's president, (Jimmy) Carter, remixes into car
-
-69
-THE AGE OF OIL
+Having used the phrase "our oil" throughout the text, it appears to be a cryptic device since it works on a variety of registers. America's oil, the country's oil, or "our oil" works on a phonic level with the \e{l} and \e{r} substitutive with cach other. Some Oriental people have difficulty learning the interval \e{r}, since both \e{l} and \e{r} are liquids. \e{Our oil} can reverse into \e{oul oir} in light of the transposability of the liguids, thus proving the word \e{our}'s proximity to \e{oil}. On the semantic level, \e{our oil} makes the phonic connection even more binding since we do believe that oil is essential to our selves, our \e{autos}, our properties, our cars, our records, stars, arts, etc.
 
-tar, another cryptophor that would explain our current
-repetition of an oil-based economy. (His predecessor was
-car-related: Gerald Ford.) Carter/car tar cryptically advocates cars powered by tar, even though this man set up a
-Department of Energy. Its secretary, Mr. Schlesinger, is
-from the army; from the occupying forces to the question
-of "force" or energy in general, he is still in the same role.
-For force to be used against the cartel that will not let our
-cars goe needs someone intimate with force, energy, drives
-in general. If we were to "occupy™ or to "bese
-
-zen" Iran,
-for example, it would be true to the Freudian idea of economy, the economic factor in his metapsychology. To occupy Iran is the very thing that determines occupation,
-Besetzung, mistranslated by James Strachey as "cathexis."
-The cathexis of oil in our daily lives shows how much oil is
-on our minds. Our occupation with oil will lead us to occupy oil, to occupy the countries that have oil. The occupation of Iran is only the intramental equivalent of an occupation, a hyper-occupation (l"r'bt'rbcsct:ung). the same
-kind of energy that makes joggers and disco dancers goe so
-fast. James Schlesinger's position in the Energy Department makes him the Defense Department's chairman all
-over again, simply because he will advocate "occupation,"
-or oil, America's energy that is now about to loose occupations, to loose peace, to loose a machinery of signs, all to
-countries that America has to occupy for its occupation to
-continue. A beaten Iran will be occupied and the beat will
-run on and the occupation will continue its simultaneously
-pleasurable and unpleasurable drive.
-
-¥ * *
-
-Rock music is on vinyl records. Rock music/records
-
-70
-On the Current Symbolic Status of Oil
-
-enforce their oil-based status even further by the key word
-not a hard, nearly unbreakable substance like other rocks, such as granite, basalt,
-
-rock. Oil, because it is a liquid, i
-
-etc. But oil is from the ground, it is a mineral, a rock,
-though liquid. Rock music or rock records are really oil
-music or oil records or even just oily oil. The same goes for
-disco music with disco now a disco/disc and equivalent to
-vinyl/oil. Music is also equivalent to the record/disco/disc
-that contains such sound. Disco music really means disco
-disco, or disc disc or record record, even in the case with
-rock music, oily oil. Rock and disco's asserted difference
-in style is refuted by their mutual equatability with oil.
-
-The roll in "rock and roll" sounds similar to oil. Translated, rock and roll says "'oil and oil."" Sometimes the and
-in the phrase is abbreviated to just an n. Cryptically the n
-connotes negation, the no or not. Retranslated, "'rock 'n
-roll" equals "oil no oil," a truism since the record's materiality, its oil-relatedness, is not just its essence, its intrinsic
-ideality as opposed to its extrinsic excrement.
-
-New York rests on a rock, the firm bedrock of Manhattan that will probably not be beset by carthquakes.
-New Rock is an understandable transformation for New
-York, the york really royk, a closer approximation of rock.
-New (R)ock is also new rock 'n roll but as new rock 'n roll
-
-in New York. York can become work noting a near rhyme
-for York and work. New work and new rock all goe on in
-New York. Rock musicians come to New York to do new
-work on new rock 'n roll. With new it can become the anagram wen, similar to the verb to win. To win new work on
-
-new rock in New York is what the aspiring rock musician
-
-aims at, particularly a new record, a new oil/rock. New
-
-York manufactures the new rock, the new oil/record. The
-
-71
-THE AGE OF OIL
+\e{Iran} anagrammatizes into \e{rain}. Rain is from the air, whereas oil is from the ground or \e{oils} are from the \e{soil}.  But Iran is in a desert where there is little rain. Oil's difference to water is also implicated in the question whether the Persian Gulf has water, drinkable or nondrinkable, or oil within the waters of the gulf. Is the Persian Gulf made up of oil? Since, empirically, it's saltwater, our desire belives the Persian Gulf (as in the Gulf Oil Company) to be composed of oil, an immediate explanation for its oil-rich status. But Iran and its Persian Gulf neighbors are in an arid, desert-ridden land. They only have oil and saltwater, and none of them are drinkable. America, however, has water, fresh, drinkable water in great quantities but none of the great quantities of Persian Gulf oil, made into an even greater quantity because of the equation of the gulf's waters with the wealth of the oil near its shores. The rain or water in Iran is its oil that does not come from the air but from the ground, even in our delusion from the oil-rich Persian Gulf itself, the sea, the saltwater. Saltwater already has a mineral in it just as it could possess oil: oilwater for saltwater shows a mixture of mineral with water.
+
+I wrote this essay during the hostage crisis in Iran.  Then, in 1980, nearly every American politician ran for office. "I ran" is a conceivable phrase to have been uttered by a presidential candidate in the '80s elections. "I ran against Iran" forms a neat cryptophor in the narration of a campaigning ego. And that ego will have to goe far on oil in a car to assert why Iran is something he (in specular opposition) is running against. "I go" becomes the same as "I ran" (aren't some candidates joggers, an "I ran"?), but with Iran being the aggressively counterposed party, the I go/ego/l ran of an American presidential candidate will have to outdistance Iranian policy, a difficulty since the politics of oil make that running, going and driving a tremendous problem.
+
+\e{Iran's oil} anagrammatizes into the opposition \e{no Israil}.  Either America gets Iran's oil at the expense of Israil/Israel or refuses Iran for the sake of Israel.
+
+The Arab oil \e{cartel} is a cryptophor working against those cultures that have lots of cars but no oil. A \e{cartel} of oil rich countries makes Americans in particular angry over what will not \e{let car}(s) run on their needed fuel.
+
+America's president, (Jimmy) \e{Carter}, remixes into \e{car tar}, another cryptophor that would explain our current repetition of an oil-based economy. (His predecessor was car-related: Gerald \e{Ford}.) Carter/car tar cryptically advocates cars powered by tar, even though this man set up a Department of Energy. Its secretary, Mr. Schlesinger, is from the army; from the occupying forces to the question of "force" or energy in general, he is still in the same role.  For force to be used against the cartel that will not let our cars goe needs someone intimate with force, energy, drives in general. If we were to "occupy" or to "\e{besetzen}" Iran, for example, it would be true to the Freudian idea of economy, the economic factor in his metapsychology. To occupy Iran is the very thing that determines occupation, \e{Besetzung}, mistranslated by James Strachey as "cathexis." The cathexis of oil in our daily lives shows how much oil is on our minds. Our occupation with oil will lead us to occupy oil, to occupy the countries that have oil. The occupation of Iran is only the intramental equivalent of an occupation, a hyper-occupation (\e{Überbesetzung}). the same kind of energy that makes joggers and disco dancers goe so fast. James Schlesinger's position in the Energy Department makes him the Defense Department's chairman all over again, simply because he will advocate "occupation," or oil, America's energy that is now about to loose occupations, to loose peace, to loose a machinery of signs, all to countries that America has to occupy for its occupation to continue. A beaten Iran will be occupied and the beat will run on and the occupation will continue its simultaneously pleasurable and unpleasurable drive.
+
+\dinkus
+
+Rock music is on vinyl records. Rock music/records enforce their oil-based status even further by the key word \e{rock}. Oil, because it is a liquid, is not a hard, nearly unbreakable substance like other rocks, such as granite, basalt, etc. But oil is from the ground, it is a mineral, a rock, though liquid. Rock music or rock records are really oil music or oil records or even just oily oil. The same goes for disco music with \e{disco} now a \e{disco}/disc and equivalent to vinyl/oil. Music is also equivalent to the record/\e{disco}/disc that contains such sound. Disco music really means \e{disco disco}, or disc disc or record record, even in the case with rock music, oily oil. Rock and disco's asserted difference in style is refuted by their mutual equatability with oil.
+
+The \e{roll} in "rock and \e{roll}" sounds similar to oil. Translated, rock and roll says "oil and oil." Sometimes the \e{and} in the phrase is abbreviated to just an \e{'n}. Cryptically the \e{'n} connotes \e{n}egation, the \e{n}o or \e{n}ot. Retranslated, "rock 'n roll" equals "oil no oil," a truism since the record's materiality, its oil-relatedness, is not just its essence, its intrinsic ideality as opposed to its extrinsic excrement.
+
+New York rests on a rock, the firm bedrock of Manhattan that will probably not be beset by carthquakes.  \e{New Rock} is an understandable transformation for \e{New York}, the \e{york} really \e{royk}, a closer approximation of \e{rock}.  \e{New (R)ock} is also \e{new rock 'n roll} but as \e{new rock 'n roll in New York}. \e{York} can become \e{work} noting a near rhyme for \e{York} and \e{work}. New work and new rock all goe on in New York. Rock musicians come to New York to do new work on new rock 'n roll. With \e{new} it can become the anagram \e{wen}, similar to the verb \e{to win}. To \e{win new} work on \e{new} rock in \e{New} York is what the aspiring rock musician aims at, particularly a \e{new} record, a \e{new} oil/rock. \e{New} York manufactures the new rock, the new oil/record. The aim is then the record, a word within \e{York}, \e{ryko}(rd), \e{reco}rd. To win new work on new rock in New York ends up being a new record that wins more new work.
 
-aim is then the record, a word within York, ryko(rd),
-record. To win new work on new rock in New York ends
-up being a new record that wins more new work.
-
-A guitar immediately associates with oil. The tar in
-guitar separates itself from the other letters to produce a
-series of novel (but always already known) phrases. Gui tar
-becomes I gu tar or I ug tar or just gui tar. The gui resembles the French je, an echo of I, with the I already in gui.
-(This je-idea is still present in our memories of that language that constitutes sixty percent of our English language.) Je tar for gui tar is not far from the truth since a
-rock musician is really a tar musician. The guitar is a prized
-possession of a rock musician, a part of his body, his cgo.
-Guitar/je tar/l tar make possible the identification with
-tar, and intense as it is, the I tar fits quite neatly into I
-star, I artist on the tar/oil/vinyl record that wins or is won
-by a new rock/work record in New York, maybe on a
-"New Wave" idea.
-
-Furthermore the guitar is also an ug i tar or ugh, I tar.
-
-The ambivalent enterprise of playing a guitar and the identification with that playing flips into intense idealization
-and intense rejection. "Ugh" expresses hatred and the
-phrase thus goes, "Ugh, I hate to play a guitar" while its
-mirror inversion affirms, "I am a star (on the guitar)." The
-remix ug i tar resembles uglier, not without meaning since
-rock stars get uglier from their relative youth to their
-relative age, the transition being marked by the clichés of
-too much work, too much exposure, drugs, America's
-mythologies of the fatalities of stardom. The ego/goce is
-already buried in guitar when we think of the transformation | gu tar. I go tar or ego tar stems from guitar, the
-object of a rock star's ego. And that ego gets trapped in tar
-
-72
-On the Current Symbolic Status of Oil
-
-as it goes on records. A guitar on the record/tar is the ego
-tar(ist's) tar baby uglifying or asserting a rock star's ego.
-
-* * *
+A \e{guitar} immediately associates with oil. The \e{tar} in gui\e{tar} separates itself from the other letters to produce a series of novel (but always already known) phrases. \e{Gui tar} becomes \e{I gu tar} or \e{I ug tar} or just \e{gui tar}. The \e{gui} resembles the French \e{je}, an echo of \e{I}, with the \e{I} already in gu\e{i}.  (This \e{je}-idea is still present in our memories of that language that constitutes sixty percent of our English language.) \e{Je} tar for \e{gui} tar is not far from the truth since a rock musician is really a tar musician. The guitar is a prized possession of a rock musician, a part of his body, his cgo.  Guitar\slash \e{je} tar\slash I tar make possible the identification with tar, and intense as it is, the \e{I tar} fits quite neatly into \e{I star}, \e{I artist} on the tar\slash oil\slash vinyl record that wins or is won by a new rock\slash work record in New York, maybe on a \dq{New Wave} idea.
+
+Furthermore the \e{guitar} is also an \e{ug i tar} or \e{ugh, I tar}.  The ambivalent enterprise of playing a guitar and the identification with that playing flips into intense idealization and intense rejection. \dq{Ugh} expresses hatred and the phrase thus goes, \dq{Ugh, I hate to play a guitar} while its mirror inversion affirms, \dq{I am a \e{star} (on the gui\e{tar}).} The remix \e{ug i tar} resembles \e{uglier}, not without meaning since rock stars get uglier from their relative youth to their relative age, the transition being marked by the clichés of too much work, too much exposure, drugs, America's mythologies of the fatalities of stardom. The ego\slash goe is already buried in \e{gui}tar when we think of the transformation I \e{gu} tar. \e{I go tar} or \e{ego tar} stems from \e{guitar}, the object of a rock star's ego. And that ego gets trapped in tar as it goes on records. A guitar on the record\slash tar is the ego tar(ist's) tar baby uglifying or asserting a rock star's ego.
+
+\dinkus
 
 Ending this discussion evokes the ending of the Poe
-story, The Fall of the House of Usher. The narrator describes the ancient house breaking apart:
-
-.---my brain reeled as I saw the mighty
-walls rushing asunder---there was a long
-tumultuous shouting sound like the voice
-of a thousand waters---and the deep and
-dark tarn at my feet closed sullenly and
-silently over the fragments of the "House
-of Usher?
-
-There is much that applies to our discussion of oil in
-this little quote.
-
-To begin with, cars are like homes. They have walls,
-doors, windows. People can live in them or they can die in
-them, as did Roderick and his twin sister. This is confirmed by the example of mobile homes or vans, where the
-car/house equation becomes clearer. With car an anagram
-for RCA we cannot forget that Roderick Usher was a musician, and in our current situation, a potential RCA artist.
-(He played the guitar.) Change the story's title and you
-get, The Fall of the Car of Usher or with the car/RCA anagram, The Fall of the RCA of Usher. Nearly every house
-has a car in association with it. Also the radio is inside the
-car just as the RCA music plays inside the house. The
-strange name "Usher" evokes immediately those movie
-hall ushers that guide you to your seat to watch or stare at
-
-73
-THE AGE OF OIL
+story, \booktitle{The Fall of the House of Usher}. The narrator describes the ancient house breaking apart:
 
-the film, to stare at the stars, at art, the tar of visual impressions. The word Usher can be transformed into Rush
-with the ¢ omitted. Change the story's title again and
-you have The Fall of the Rushing Car or The Fall of the
-Car that Rushes. And the word rush is in the quote, "the
-mighty walls rushing asunder." Both the word go(e) as
-near-anagram for ego, and the verb, to drive, can be substituted for these verbs of movement (rushing, rushes):
-The Fall of the Car that Goes or The Fall of the Car that
-Drives.
-
-What is also pertinent is the quote "and the deep and
-dark tarn,"" knowing that "tarn" is similar to "tar," a word
-central to our discussion of oil. A tarn is a lake in a mountain in its denotative, dictionary meaning. But why tarn
-and net a lake for the fragments of "House of Usher" to
-close over? Tarn conjures up an image of a black pool, a
-pool filled with, and let's be playful, tar or oil.
-
-The rushing car or house closes over the tarn/tar. From
-one state of oil falling or closing over into another state of
-oil. There seems to be no escape from the pervasiveness of
-oil. We are "deep" in oil, fallen into it and closed over it.
-We are ending in oil, but the ending is not yet done, since
-the story can be read again, or restared at, after it has
-closed over into the tarn. But we're somewhat free of oil,
-since the narrator was standing by the "deep and dark
-tarn"' watching the fragments, any fragment, even this fragment entitled not "House of Usher" but "On the Current
-Symbolic Status of Oil." My fragment too closes over the
-tarn. We can only watch or stare at the art that will still
-need oil or tar to witness or "stand'' by that closing over.
-
-74
-Why Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend
+\vskip 1em
+{\leftskip=0.25in\rightskip=0.25in\ld---my brain reeled as I saw the mighty walls rushing asunder---there was a long tumultuous shouting sound like the voice of a thousand waters---and the deep and dark tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the "\e{House of Usher?}"\par}
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+There is much that applies to our discussion of oil in this little quote.
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+To begin with, cars are like homes. They have walls, doors, windows. People can live in them or they can die in them, as did Roderick and his twin sister. This is confirmed by the example of mobile homes or vans, where the car/house equation becomes clearer. With car an anagram for RCA we cannot forget that Roderick Usher was a musician, and in our current situation, a potential RCA artist.  (He played the guitar.) Change the story's title and you get, \booktitle{The Fall of the Car of Usher} or with the car/RCA anagram, \booktitle{The Fall of the RCA of Usher}. Nearly every house has a car in association with it. Also the radio is inside the car just as the RCA music plays inside the house. The strange name "Usher" evokes immediately those movie hall ushers that guide you to your seat to watch or stare at the film, to stare at the stars, at art, the tar of visual impressions. The word \e{Usher} can be transformed into \e{Rush} with the \e{e} omitted. Change the story's title again and you have \booktitle{The Fall of the Rushing Car} or \booktitle{The Fall of the Car that Rushes}. And the word rush is in the quote, "the mighty walls rushing asunder." Both the word \e{go(e)} as near-anagram for \e{ego}, and the verb, to drive, can be substituted for these verbs of movement (rushing, rushes): \booktitle{The Fall of the Car that Goes} or \booktitle{The Fall of the Car that Drives}.
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+What is also pertinent is the quote "and the deep and dark tarn," knowing that "tarn" is similar to "tar," a word central to our discussion of oil. A tarn is a lake in a mountain in its denotative, dictionary meaning. But why tarn and net a lake for the fragments of \booktitle{House of Usher} to close over? \e{Tar}n conjures up an image of a black pool, a pool filled with, and let's be playful, \e{tar} or oil.
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+The rushing car or house closes over the tarn\slash tar. From one state of oil falling or closing over into another state of oil. There seems to be no escape from the pervasiveness of oil. We are \dq{deep} in oil, fallen into it and closed over it.  We are ending in oil, but the ending is not yet done, since the story can be read again, or restared at, after it has closed over into the tarn. But we're somewhat free of oil, since the nar\e{rat}or was standing by the \dq{deep and dark tarn} watching the fragments, any fragment, even this fragment entitled not \dq{House of Usher} but \dq{On the Current Symbolic Status of Oil.} My fragment too closes over the tarn. We can only watch or stare at the art that will still need oil or tar to witness or \dq{stand} by that closing over.
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+\chap Why Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend
 
 Why are diamonds a girl's best friend? Diamonds, the most
 popular gemstone, are also the symbol for steadfast love. A