Contrasts

Two contrasting offerings: the first for the sound of her voice here’s an interview with Sheila Watson from 1975.
http://www.thecapilanoreview.ca/ (scroll to the bottom of the page, you’ll also find Crawford Killian interview)
I can’t tell if it’s the tape quality as well as Watson’s voice, along with the pauses, hesitancy or simply the sound of Watson’s voice alone that’s appealing. I wasn’t so struck necessarily by what she said. I just found something particular in the quality of her speaking voice. Also, the gentle quality of the two voices questioning her, how they are sat back from the recording device. Voices these days when recorded have an equality which does not give the same listening inference that’s suggested here. The image of ashtrays on the table between them also springs visually to mind. Diluted orange squash in beakers with garish patterns — ok I shall cease with my 1970’s teleportation. I love the moment where she says “I don’t write, I haven’t written anything since 1957 … and then carries on about how much revision she does leading to her remark “I have an untidy mind ..” and latterly “stream of consciousness is a technique I abhor” On Joyce: “He does it. I wouldn’t”

Secondly in somewhat sharp and technological contrast, here is Mckenzie Wark on Beatriz Preciado’s Testo Junkie — read it until the end, the second half is very engaging.

Click here for entire piece: 

“Bodies are not such coherent things, then. They are fabricated in meshes of images, tech, laws, and so on. “We are not a body without organs, but rather an array of heterogeneous organs unable to be gathered under the same skin.” Pharma-porno gender is not just an ideology or an image or a performance. It gets under the skin. It’s a political technology, “and the state draws its pleasure from the production and control of our porngore subjectivity.”
But its capital and tech rather than the state that most interests Préciado. “These artifacts (us) can’t exist in a pure state, but only within our enclosed sexual techno-systems. In our role as sexual subjects, we’re inhabiting biocapitalist amusement parks. We are men and women of the laboratory, effects of a kind of politico-scientific bio-Platonism.” She usefully extends what is basically a Foucauldian way of thinking onto new terrain, where commodification and power meet.”