QUOTES

The panic of coming upon a transvestite in the bois de boulogne. it was not the spectre of homosexuality, but the distortion of signs that spread terror. not the fact of mistaking one sex for another, which is close to vaudeville, but the game of signifying woman out of nothing, the signs of woman without woman. Only the feminine can surrealize it's effects in this way without bringing upon it's self that ridicule which immediately threatens masculine values when they attempt the same. besides, the masculine version of the transvestite has become passe; it was merely an appendage of homosexuality

"COOL MEMORIES” JEAN BAUDRILLARD



Culture is the meaning of an insufficiently meaningful world.

“THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE” GUY DEBORD


Just as you don’t really know what to make of his having assumed the name “Rrose” Rrose Selavy might easily have been the name of a transvestite or a whore around St. Denis.
WHY DUCHAMP An essay on aesthetic impact
GIANFRANCO BARUCHELLO & HENRY MARTIN

But not all can enter. Each should follow where the pulse of his own heart leads.
But our pounding heart drives us down, deep down to the source of all.
Then these curiosities become realities – realities of art which help to lift life out of it’s mediocrity.
Paul Klee (1879 – 1940)
MODERN ARTISTS ON ART (Ten Unabridged essays)
Edited by Robert L. Herbert
Published by Prentice-Hall Inc 1964

When he walked by, Darling was smoking, and a slit of abandon in the woman’s hardness of soul chanced just then to be open, a slit that catches the hook cast by innocent looking objects. If one of your openings happens to be loosely fastened or a flap of your softness to be floating, you’re done for.
JEAN GENET. OUR LADY OF THE FLOWERS
Published by The Olympia Press 2004

“And in the meantime?” asked the Marquis.
“In the meantime,” said Abrenuncio, “play music for her, fill the house with flowers, have the birds sing, take her to the ocean to see the sunsets, give her everything that can make her happy.” He took his leave with the wave of his hat and the obligatory sentence in Latin.
GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ. OF LOVE & OTHER DEMONS
Published by QPD 1995

Cocteau had not yet seen No Exit he went to see it later with Genet and discussed the production with him in most warmly enthusiastic terms. Generosity of this sort is common enough among writers, but I have seldom observed it in playwrights. Genet arranged for Sartre to meet Cocteau of evening at the bar of the Hotel Saint-Yves, on the Rue Jacob, which was then a popular rendezvous for certain types of persons.
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR. THE PRIME OF LIFE
Published by Penguin Books 1962

ANARCHISM
Anarchy came into English in mC16, from the fw anarchie, F, rw anarchia, GK – a state without a leader. It’s earliest uses are not to far from the early hostile uses of DEMOCRACY (q.v.): “this unleful lyberty or lycence of the multytude is called an Anarchie” (1539). But it came through as primarily a description of any kind or disorder or chaos (Gk – chasm or void). Anarchism, from mC17, and anarchist, from lC17, remained, however, much nearer the political sense: “Anarchism, the Doctrine, Positions or Art of those that teach anarchy; also the being itself of the people without a Prince or Ruler.”
RAYMOND WILLIAMS. KEYWORDS
Published by Fontana Press 1988

But she regretted nothing, she had freely chosen to sacrifice her life to art. Her nails were ugly, an artists nails. However short she cut them, they were always smeared with a little cobalt or indigo; fortunately they made nail polish very thick nowadays.
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR. SHE CAME TO STAY
Published by Fontana 1975


Paul Eluard, Louis Aragon, Rene Char and many others in a surrealist chorus of attack against Cocteau, an attack that had a clear homophobic thrust and conflated Cocteau with the figure of the hermaphrodite. Breton having already excluded Cocteau from his elite group in 1926 for daring to write novels, pursued a highly personal vendetta against him as an “unnameable” pederast throughout the 1930’s.
JAMES S. WILLIAMS. JEAN COCTEAU
Published by Manchester University Press 2006


Bacchus is chiefly known as the god of wine, although he originated as the god of fruit, trees and fertility but there were other attributes that might have made him appealing to Solomon and his admirers. While absolutely central to the understanding and worship of nature, Bacchus shares notable characteristics with his other aspect, Dionysus, which would have been known to Solomon’s circle. Dionysus was “effeminate” having been disguised as a girl during part of his childhood, and bisexual.
COLIN CRUISE. LOVE REVEALED SIMEON SOLOMON AND THE PRE-RAPHAELITES
Published by Merrell 2005


She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellowed to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.
LORD BYRON. LOVE A KEEPSAKE
Published by Unirose Ltd 1977


Some people go to priests, others to poetry; I go to my friends and to my own heart. I seek among fragments and phrases, something unbroken. I to whom there is more beauty in the moon and trees. To whom the touch of one person is all, yet sometimes, cannot hold even that. I who am imperfect, weak and so unspeakably vulnerable.
VIRGINIA WOOLF. THE WAVES
Published by Penguin Books 1969

HEDDA (loud and clear). Yes, that’ll suit you, won’t it, Judge? The only cock on the dunghill –
(A shot is heard from the rear room. TESMAN, MRS ELVSTED AND JUDGE BRACK start from their chairs).
TESMAN Oh she’s playing with those pistols again.
(He pulls the curtains aside and runs in. MRS ELVSTED follows him. HEDDA is lying dead on the sofa. Confusion and shouting. BERTHA enters in alarm from the right).
TESMAN (screams to BRACK). She’s shot herself! She shot herself in the head! Fancy that!
BRACK (half paralysed in the armchair). But, good God! People don’t do such things!
HENRIK IBSEN. HEDDA GABLER
Published by Eyre Methuen 1974



Germans, Americans, Italians and others think they’re buying themselves enchantment as they pour Marks, Dollars and Lire unto the blue carpet of the Mediterranean in which fish die from petrol, where the beaches are filthy by the first day of Spring, and where you need to go armed with a box of plasters if you walk barefoot on the sand at night.
FRANCOISE SAGAN. WITH FONDEST REGARDS
Published by Allison & Busby 1988



He was a skilful man, of sixty and upwards, he wore powder, and shaved his pale face smooth as a pumpkin. He and papa emerged from the room together, and I heard papa laugh, and say as they came out: “Well I do wonder at a wise man like you. What do you say to hippogriffs and dragons?” The doctor was smiling and made answer shaking his head – “Nevertheless, life and death are mysterious states, and we know little of the resources of either.” And so they walked on, and I heard no more. I did not then know what the Doctor had been broaching, but I think I guess it now.
J. SHERIDAN LEFANU. CARMILLA.
DAUGHTERS OF DARKNESS Lesbian Vampire Stories
Published by Cleiss Press Inc 1993



The Spectacle presents itself simultaneously as society itself, as part of society, and as means of unification. As a part of society, it is the focal point of all vision and all consciousness. But due to the very fact that this sector is separate, it is in reality the domain of delusion and false consciousness: the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of universal separation.
GUY DEBORD. THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE
Published by Rebel Press no date



Scorpio must tear the veil from life, regardless of the cost, to quiet his restless spirit, suddenly released from it’s former preoccupation with earthly needs alone, as he cries out: “I DESIRE!”
LINDA GOODMAN. LOVE SIGNS
Published by Pan Books 1980


Objet petit a, the object-cause of desire. A quite ordinary, everyday object that, as soon as it is “elevated to the status of the Thing,” starts to function as a kind of screen, an empty space on which the subject projects the fantasies that support his desire, a surplus of the real that propels us to narrate again and again our first traumatic encounters with jouissance.
SLAVOJ ZIZEK. LOOKING AWRY AN INTRODUCTION TO JACQUES LACAN THROUGH POPULAR CULTURE
Published by MIT press 1991



BEVERLY: Yeah? Laurence, Angela likes Feliciano, Tony likes Feliciano, I like Feliciano, and Sue would like to hear Feliciano: so please: d’you think we could have Feliciano on?
MIKE LEIGH. ABIGAIL’S PARTY
Published by penguin Plays 1986