Esteem
Each personal tragedy, a brick. A bad game of Tetris.
Misplaced Lens Cap
Xuebing Du
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taylor price

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todays bird
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$LAYYYTER
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Product Placement

ellievsbear
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year

pixel skylines

JBB: An Artblog!
NASA

Love Begins

oozey mess
cherry valley forever
we're not kids anymore.
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@beforeafterrobots
Esteem
Each personal tragedy, a brick. A bad game of Tetris.
Revenge
Utakemebackto99 - Asian Women & John Coltrane
Smashing
Revenge
“Now I don’t need to earn a living, I have a girl called Lolita who earns it for me. In short I’m an old pimp and I have a girl who’s on the game… Oh, don’t write that… What do you think, Véra? All right, do as you like.”
— Vladimir Nabokov (tr. Brian Boyd), ‘Interview with J.-F Bergery for Arts (Paris)’ (1959), in Think, Write, Speak: Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews and Letters to the Editor (p. 273)
The excessive use of online social media platforms and resulting, inevitable cognitive offloading, seems to result in a kind of totalitarian dementia. A terminal forgetfulness, terminal in that it includes forgetting how to forget as well as how to remember. In place of these two elementary processes of thought has risen the benign avatar of misremembering. Not knowing as a socially acceptable and recognised form of knowledge. To emit feeling is enough.
Baudrillard’s Transparency of Evil refers.
She them
Summertime goddess on a beach walk her skin is a metal detector
Seven semesters and a trimester from being a fresher
You’re just mouse in maze sketched by Mam Ester
Time to leave the nest
Heaving chest
Play the heteronormative mensch
For a place at the table but got blown away by the north wester
Hot desk to REM but no temple
No not yet
Life gave you lemons darling get a blender
Only appear microscopic under a specific kind of lense
She’s them have you met her
Cisc gender and a mixtape for a temper
Open book closed legs
Perfect ten
But too proud beg
Can I borrow a pen
And a penny for your thoughts on the concept of debtors
New tech
Same old spinal cords barely held together by stretched flesh family and blood pressure high as hemp
Before satellites motion sensors and Soweto there were settlers
Trail of protea petals went cold skip the electric fenced off ghetto touch wood hedging bets bend time into an echo
Back and forth through the trap door flash camera smile watching my shadow sweat thinking sanity’s just a matter of tempo
Wrecking ball for rent hired scribbler no tears to wet your Rizzla you made your bed
Kept it all inside a long hard copy ledger made of lead
When your done pushing my buttons then I’ll enter
.. your soul you’re so frontal lobe dorsal in your moral code seesawing coals walking and chewing at the same time all told traffic jam we all want gold lick paste learn to love the choke hold when did we get to Rome wander off map car towed foreclosure woe inspired tomes
Happiness is bitter-sweet
I hate me
Found the first traces of glucoses in a cave
Wink and miss me syncopate
Couldn’t take the hint
fit the Reef in a kitchen sink
Desalinate my tear ducts with your speech
“Stylistically, Lucette’s inner monologue varies from the model of “Ulysses” to that of “Anna Karenina.” From the shortest fragments like ‘Legs and arms’ and ‘These steps are something’ and the French puns (dix marches, dimanche), Nabokov switches back to description: ‘While dragging herself up she had to hang onto the rail. Her twisted progress was that of a cripple.’ Nabokov argued in the “Lectures” that Joyce overemphasized the verbal: we think in images as well as in words. Descriptions in literature have the advantage of conveying both, and in fact can feel more natural than an exaggerated stream of consciousness. Here as never before, Nabokov shows us what he means: we are in Lucette’s tormented head, and then we see her on the deck, over the rail, diving from ‘such a height,’ going in with hardly a splash and cruelly resurfacing. (Anna almost stands up after her leap between the wheels.) If Joyce leans heavily on verbal texture at the expense of visual substance, in this passage Nabokov gives us both. […] Nabokov beats Joyce at his own game by experimenting simultaneously with two layers of narrative: he gives us two counterpointed monologues and inner states. We see the illustrated thoughts of the dying girl, and hear the old man’s interrupted narration. The presence of Violet, the typewriter, Van’s reshuffled notes, his presumable emotional state all force us to visualize this other layer simultaneously: old Van is still not quite able to narrate this one unspeakable event, but tries to concentrate on details and force himself through, echoing the anguish of the dying girl. A film is able to do this quite simply by means of delineated flashbacks, but Nabokov employs no such ready-made markers to differentiate between temporal levels. The Nabokov-trained reader must follow the cues and catch both temporal layers – and distinguish the narrator from the author besides. Nabokov tries to shake the ornamentalism of “Finnegans Wake” by motivating his verbal acrobatics through the narrative, and keeping such dense passages in “Ada” highly emotionally fraught. If Nabokov succeeds, the reader is too enchanted by Lucette, the darkly romantic Veen world, and Nabokov’s pyrotechnics to balk at meta-literary strategies. The magic and the reward should occur on two levels: the seduction of the plot, and the intellectual and aesthetic pleasure of recognizing the craftsman’s mastery.”
— Marijeta Bozovic, Nabokov’s Canon: From Onegin to Ada (p. 126–7)
acid in the spinal cord/friendly fire, cyber war/ black messiah bias in the dialogue/
Elucid
“Dianetics”
“Presently all were asleep again. It was a pity nobody saw the display in the empty street, where the auroral breeze wrinkled a large luminous puddle, making of the telephone wires reflected in it illegible lines of black zigzags.”
— Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin (p. 95)
Restaurant Review: Parc Fermé
One of the worst supposedly fine dining places I've been to in long long long time. The "Catch of the Day" fish dish with fried plantain and yams was bleach-bland and took over 45mins to arrive. Farm to table, in traffic, maybe. The service was slow and sulky. Our waiter, the second or third one, may have been semi comatose - just like the decor. All mawkish purples and matte maroons like a Sales House catalogue drizzled with an ageing pimp's moustache hairs. Unstuck from a wet band-aid. And that's the feeling of the whole place: boozy, burlesque, massage parlourly. There's a triptych of black-and-white A2 drawings hanging just above the boat-size oak wood bar. The first, I can't recall the other two, is a felt-pen, croquis head-shot of an urban wiseguy; an uncanny messiah; an ephemeral being with a squint selotaped beneath a spottie. He looked happily confused by the syrup stain of hyper-jouissant, 2000's RnB droning into the place like a gas leak. I was.
Oh yay
“We should not lose sight, however, of the positivity of the alien goggles evoked by the attacks on Beauvoir. Her ability to ‘make America seem like a lost planet’ [in “America Day by Day”] was intended as a criticism by Phillips, and yet the ability to conceive a tired reality as if for the first time has been a modernist fantasy going back at least as far as Baudelaire’s call for poets to see once again as children. Phillips’s phrase recalls the defamiliarization techniques that Russian Formalists earlier in the century identified as the very essence of the aesthetic. Indeed, such formalist influences can be detected in the work of Vladimir Nabokov, who published soon after arrival in the United States his own science fiction tale in the Atlantic Monthly. In “Time and Ebb” (1945), a ninety-year-old Jewish Holocaust survivor recalls from the vantage point of the distant future his arrival in the United States during World War II. The premise of the story is transparently an excuse for various exercises in defamiliarization. “Time and Ebb” is disarmingly admiring of 1940s America, in the sense that its narrator’s estranged perspective is enabled by the historical distance he perceives between himself and his object, which is described with nostalgic fondness. The dazzling effects of rendering the familiar iconography of drugstores and skyscrapers as doubly strange—for both the European boy freshly arrived in the United States and for the old man writing in the future—are typical of Nabokov’s American work in ways we will see recur in his masterpiece “Lolita.” In a similar way, the ability to see the familiar commodified landscapes of the United States with fresh European eyes, and thus to subject the tawdry and banal to a near-magical revivification, was always the secret to Saul Steinberg’s commercial success in the forties and fifties. So long as they were understood to function in a strictly aesthetic sense, estrangements of this type were generally welcome among the tastemakers of the US cultural field in midcentury, performing as they did a re-enchantment of American space at the very moment when it was being homogenized by the mass construction of shopping malls, highways, and suburbs.”
— Will Norman, Transatlantic Aliens: Modernism, Exile, and Culture in Midcentury America (p. 12–3)
"Newspaper work will not harm a young writer and may help him," as Hemingway put it, "if he gets out of it in time."
W Nelson
Gin Before Breakfast: The Dilemma of the Poet in the Newsroom
Spaghetti
The long read: It is sold as a force that can help us cope with the ravages of capitalism, but with its inward focus, mindful meditation may be the enemy of activism
The rhetoric of “self-mastery”, “resilience” and “happiness” assumes wellbeing is simply a matter of developing a skill. Mindfulness cheerleaders are particularly fond of this trope, saying we can train our brains to be happy, like exercising muscles. Happiness, freedom and wellbeing become the products of individual effort. Such so-called “skills” can be developed without reliance on external factors, relationships or social conditions. Underneath its therapeutic discourse, mindfulness subtly reframes problems as the outcomes of choices. Personal troubles are never attributed to political or socioeconomic conditions, but are always psychological in nature and diagnosed as pathologies. Society therefore needs therapy, not radical change. This is perhaps why mindfulness initiatives have become so attractive to government policymakers. Societal problems rooted in inequality, racism, poverty, addiction and deteriorating mental health can be reframed in terms of individual psychology, requiring therapeutic help. Vulnerable subjects can even be told to provide this themselves.