The Learned Pig

Art – Thinking – Nature – Writing

Tag: theory

  • The Second Body

    The Second Body

    At 6 a.m. on a Thursday morning in November it was completely dark outside, but the butcher’s shop was strip-lit and the raw meat area was full of busy young men. It was difficult to see exactly what they were doing – the men were large and they were moving quickly in a small crowded…

  • Wolf yollez

    Wolf yollez

      ‘We’re not far from wolves.’ – Deleuze and Guattari, ‘1914: One or Several Wolves?’   Human-canine relationships are some of the most conceptually disordered and uncertain of interspecies relationships, precisely because the history of domestication is so long and so complex. The type of canine perspective offered by contemporary writers such as Donna Haraway…

  • from Parchment, Scalpel, Rock: Howling

    from Parchment, Scalpel, Rock: Howling

      a wolf is a tunnel into the earth …… full of teeth (and what should I call a sideways stalag mmm-/t-ite?) not just the wind howling through the steppes’ hollow torso? a zero-sum game? an eremophage without organs? the little bumps ‘become’ horns……the horns become penises the penises teeth …… the teeth : skeletons…

  • Foxing

    Foxing

    Slip like quiet fire through woods on velvet feet (bad fairies gave foxes their foxgloves to transform them into silent hunters)i. I hear a mouse think under a foot of snow, and making a springing high-dive pounce to catch it, such that my tail waves vertically, joyfully, ludicrously, in the air above me.    …

  • A Hole at the Core

    A Hole at the Core

    I re-encounter the incised apple indirectly, in the mirror-image. Glancing across rows of burnished half-pint beer glasses, their reflections bounced back and forth on opposing glass surfaces, it is on display: residue from an earlier foray into bar preparation, when my back was turned to Carlsberg drinkers and finickerty Guinness drinkers, who verily pour the…

  • A Dys-Praxic Sketchbook

    A Dys-Praxic Sketchbook

    I used to think that the only skill I had was drawing. It was only much later that I realised that it was simply the only skill that I had experienced difficulty in acquiring and yet had not given up on. It was also my only physical skill. Under most of the circumstances I encountered…

  • The Chernobyl Herbarium

    The Chernobyl Herbarium

    Chernobyl and Plant Life: Silent Witnessing It is incredibly difficult to talk and write about Chernobyl. No serious book on the subject has been able to dodge the task of thinking about the conditions of possibility for thinking in proximity to this theme or this scene. Still before commencing, a work on Chernobyl must first…

  • Isomorphology

    Isomorphology

    For interdisciplinary artist Gemma Anderson, drawing is a mode of knowing and seeing. While drawing is often understood in terms of isolated observation, by sharing the process with a community, for Anderson, it becomes a type of agency for collective knowledge and critical vision. Drawing therefore functions as a bridge between public and private, between…

  • Table of Contents (in the Form of a Sonnet) for an Imaginary Post-punk Poetry Chapbook

    Table of Contents (in the Form of a Sonnet) for an Imaginary Post-punk Poetry Chapbook

        1. underground cellars, Experimental Trajectories. 2. La volonté de rupture ou la beauté radicale. 3. extensive rehearsals make (even) le moins que parfait perfect. 4. I Could Not Handwrite Any Longer. 5. the TYPEWRITER becomes an ACCORDION. 6. The Poet(ess) as a Cultural Machine. 7. Converting Ulysess into a quilt—A kind of Steve…

  • A Pervert’s Guide to the Apocalypse

    A Pervert’s Guide to the Apocalypse

    The bold white title reads “Cool Photos”. I dutifully open the email to find yet another link to yet another photo essay from yet another intrepid, probably amateur photographer who has schlepped their medium format through the crumbling halls of Detroit. Or was it Pripyat again? Or some (now) generic computer generated image of the…

  • Multiverses 263-396: Another Worlds iz Possible

    Multiverses 263-396: Another Worlds iz Possible

    After John Bell, Momus, Heisenberg, Jonathan Swift, I Ching, Calvino, and Shrodinger   Multiverse 263 The Multiverse in which multiplication is always exponential across galaxies. For every status update posted on Facebook, another two are posted in alternative Multiverses.   Multiverse 264 The Multiverse in which falsifiability has been banished. All knowledge in Multiverse 264…