Three Monkeys Online

A Curious, Alternative Magazine

False signifiers and other smut.

Private Eye magazine honours the venerable English tradition of being suspicious of anything that has a whiff of intellectualism by having a section known as “Pseuds Corner“–a ragbag of postmodern blurbs, art catalog bumf, and Sunday columnists’ posturing. You used to get a tenner sterling if they printed your suggestion. I think the following would have a chance at publication. It’s from an interview with the appropriately named Alessandro Porco, who has published a collection, The Jill Kelly Poems named in honor of a famous (well, famous among a certain demographic) porn “actress.”The winning snippet would be:”PM[Interviewer]: Is it Jill Kelly as a woman, a porn actress, a representative of an ideal or an industry that you speak of in your work? Or is it simply an ode to an “anal queen”, as is suggested?AP [Porco]: Think of “Jill Kelly” less as a person and more as representative of a social space with its own native discourse, terms like “dirt-box” and “titty-bop” or phrases like “twiddle my twat” and “driving the Hershey highway” as part of its citizenry; but this exceptional space simultaneously allows for Gertrude Stein, the Renaissance, sound poetry, the practice of revisionist History, balladeering, and philology. And, in this sense, it’s a much more evolved locus — the kind of place I want to be, in fact, and the kind of place I want my readers to be, to experience, if only temporarily. (It’s easy to think of “Jill Kelly” as such, especially if one keeps in mind that her name itself is linguistic construct, a false signifier, a compound product of the performer’s two favourite characters from Charlie’s Angels.)” Still, you’ve got to at least half-admire anyone who succeeds in getting the phrases “titty-bop” and “native discourse” in the same sentence. Link via Rake’s Progress.