Mexicoboros

Mexicorama by Lance Wyman, at Visual-Poetry
(Via Becky)

Tattooroboros

"Winston Churchill’s mother had a tattoo of a snake eating its tail (the symbol of eternity) on her wrist" —Dwight Garner, review of Bodies of Subversion, NYT

Telemachoboros

—You horrid old man, stop provoking me! 
—Youth reproaches old age with reproaching it its youth. It reminds me of a snake biting its tail. 
 —Louis Aragon, "The Adventures of Telemachus" 



 (Via Damion Searls)

Weekend Ouroboros: Mary-Kim Arnold Edition

Back at the beginning, in the early years of M. and me - before we imagined it would be possible to have a life together - he would say of us: the end built into the beginning, a snake devouring its own tail. 

Later, I told him: but you misread the symbol. It means eternity. It means life. Rebirth. 

It is the same, of course - cyclical. We are always beginning and ending. It matters, I think, where you choose to look at it. 

—Mary-Kim Arnold, "This Chill"

Weekend Almost-boros

—NYT

Weekend Ouroboros - jewelry edition

(Hannah Clark Jewelry)

Via the Khongster

Hump-day Ouroboros

Becky writes:

I thought of you the other day, when, in my presentation on Jean-Luc Nancy's Corpus, I used an ouroboros to illustrate the below claim of Nancy's:

"As the all-signifying of a sense whose sense is body-building, the body is the end of the signifier as well, the absolute crasis of the sign, the pure sense of pure sense, hoc est enim corpus meum, with the hoc designating here a total absence of exteriority, a non-extension concentrated in itself, not something impenetrable, but rather its excess, the impenetrable mixed with the impenetrable, infinite intussusception, the proper devouring itself, all the way to the void at its center."

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Now stare at this Ouroboros, via L.G. Thos.:



(Via.)

Weekend Ouroboros

Batman, Stephen, d. 1584. A booke of the coppies : of letters, libells & outher inventions of men : manuscript, [before 1584]. MS Eng 1015. Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.

(Via Sarang)

Orlandoboros?

Or at least an entry in the Invisible Library:

Then when the door was shut, and he was certain of privacy, he would have out an old writing book, stitched together with the silk stolen from his mother's workbox, and labelled in a round schoolboy hand, "The Oak Tree, A Poem." In this he would write til midnight chimed and long after. But as he scratched out as many as he wrote in, the sum of them was often, at the end of the year, rather less than at the beginning, and it looked as if in the process of writing the poem would be completely unwritten. —Virginia Woolf, Orlando

(From F.S. Sam)

Huidoboros

They have abandoned me here in the middle of a river which tilts on its axis, which runs in circles, bending back upon itself like a warped wheel or a snake which bites its own bewitched tail.

—From Huidobro's "The Seven Oaths of the Poet" (at 50 Watts)

Wild idling

For reasons unclear even to myself, I am reading a bit of Ian Fleming's Live and Let Die. I just ran across the Ouroboros sighting that Bill alerted me to back in 2008.

These confirmedthat the yacht had put in at irregular intervals over the previous six months and that she always tied up in the Port of St. Petersburg at the wharf of the 'Ouroboros Worm and Bait Shippers, Inc.,' an apparently innocent concern whose main business was to sell live bait to fishing clubs throughout Florida, the Gulf of Mexico, and further afield.

On the occasion of that post, Levi commented that he hoped Fleming was a better spy than he was a prose writer...

Q: How can I recommend L&LD to Levi?
A: Tell him there is a full three pages of straight quotation from one of his favorite travel writers, Patrick Leigh Fermor.

It's true! It includes this footnote from the author: "This [The Traveller's Tree], one of the great travel books, is published by Harper & Brothers, at $5.00"

Also, Bond's sensory intake at the beginning, as he's being driven into Manhattan from Idlewild (quoted yesterday), is remarkable.

The Brothers Ouroboros

A Writer’s Diary is his miscellany of reactionary diatribes and editorials, over 1,400-pages long in the full two-volume edition, and for years I avoided it because I thought it must be insufferable. I assumed it was nothing but Dostoevsky riffing on the forgotten news stories of his time, devouring them to feed his extremism and intolerance. That turns out to be true as far as it goes, but I should’ve also realized Dostoevsky could never sustain his opinions without repeatedly coiling back and swallowing his own tail. —Kevin Frazier, Bookslut

(Via Excited Stoat)

Stout fellow

I came upon an article about Sigurd Snake-in-the-Eye, who "was born with the image of the ouroboros, a snake or dragon biting its own tail, encircling the pupil of his left eye." As far as I can tell, however, the snake served no literary purpose. —Glass-Bottom Blog

(Via Jenny D)

Circular plots

The plot wheels of Erle Stanley Gardner:




(Cf. Harry Stephen Keeler's "webwork" plot construction.)

*

You know, the chemist Friedrich August Kekule worked for twenty years
trying to figure out the structure of the benzene ring, and he
couldn’t do it. And then one night he was sleeping and he had a vision
of a snake swallowing its tail. So he told his students about it and
they said, ‘Not bad, you go to sleep and you wake up with that.’ And
he said, ‘Visions come to prepared spirits.’ The way Billy Wilder put
it was ‘The muse has to know where to find you.’ —David Milch, in this New Yorker piece<

Both hot links via Sam

Ourobourdain

Scott writes:

I just had a celebrity ouroboros sighting — Anthony Bourdain got an ouroboros tattoo in Malaysia on one of his No Reservations episodes a few years ago. It's on YouTube here.

He adds that for his specific ouroboros design, the tattoo artist is "incorporating Iban features into what might otherwise have been suspiciously hippie." (An ouroboros is considered suspiciously hippie?! Alas, he's probably right.)

Bourdain later appeared on the tattoo show Miami Ink (video here) to get a skull tattoo from tattooist Chris Garver. He shows the ouroboros tattoo and waggishly says for the camera that "it's supposedly about death and regeneration. It's a little too optimistic for me. I'm looking kinda for an antidote to that."

"Ouroboros Antidote" would be a good title for something. Or maybe the more literary-sounding "Antidote For An Ouroboros"…

Surely there must be some subconscious significance to Bourdain's choice of the ouroboros design, given that his career is based around both creating food and eating food, and that he decides to adorn his own flesh with a symbol involving an endlessly (self-) devouring mouth.

Ouroborges

Gilbert has managed, somehow, to push the genre’s built-in self-involvement to a whole new level. The truly special thing about “Eat, Pray, Love” is not its humor or its wisdom or its perky invocation of exotic local color — all of which are real, and often enjoyable. It’s that it is a completely inescapable vortex of recursion: a self-generating, self-sustaining, self-replicating machine of perpetual self-reference. It feels practically avant-garde in its determination to pull itself out of its own belly button. Its cover should have been an M. C. Escher painting of Jorge Luis Borges riding on a snake eating its own tail. —Sam Anderson, "Eat, Pray, Love, Rinse, Repeat," NYT Magazine

Windoboros

Click for exciting movement.

(Via.)

Shelf life

Nearly everybody smoked back then, and very few were attentive housekeepers. Drugs in particular caused many to lose track of key details. Take, for example, the couple on the third floor with the boa. They loved their boa, loved feeding it mice, loved the sight of its glistening scales wrapping around a table leg—but drugs made them distracted. They neglected their biweekly purchase of mice for long enough that the snake was driven to find his meals elsewhere. One day he just disappeared. Had he been stolen? Had he chosen to join the alligators in the sewers? The question was answered definitively a few months later. On the ground floor, a tenant, going to brush his teeth first thing in the morning, opened his medicine cabinet—and very nearly had a heart attack when the boa rippled over the shelf from a hole in the wall. To my mind, this illustrated an important principle of apartment living: What goes around comes around, although it may very well hit your neighbor instead. —Luc Sante, "My Dealing, Stealing, Squealing Neighbors," New York

Wazzzzup?

Via L.G. Thos., the Polish poster for 70s snake horror film Sssssss.

Oulipoboros & more

Levi asks: "Is N+7 an Ouroboros?"

(Harry Mathews says no; others say yes!)

*

"Jenny reads the paper":

He may have inherited his knack for industrial design from his maternal grandfather, a mechanical engineer who was one of the inventors of the Kit Kat candy bar and the machinery to mass-produce it.

*

Devin brings back evidence of the lost John Lennon/Dr. Who episode.

*

Bonus link: Levi's new SF reading list.