swinging between dimensions

INTJ | she/her | 20 uni student majoring in physics. studyblr and occasional bujo too!

[txttletale]

niceys positive anon!! i don't agree with you on everything but you are so clearly like well read and well rounded that you've helped me think through a lot of my own inconsistencies and hypocrises in my own political and social thought, even if i do have slightly different conclusions at times then u (mainly because i believe there's more of a place for idealism and 'mind politics' than u do). anyway this is a preamble to ask if you have recommended reading in the past and if not if you had any recommended reading? there's some obvious like Read Marx but beyond that im always a little lost wading through theory and given you seem well read and i always admire your takes, i wondered about your recs

it's been a while since i've done a big reading list post so--bearing in mind that my specific areas of 'expertise' (i say that in huge quotation marks obvsies i'm just a girlblogger) are imperialism and media studies, here are some books and essays/pamphlets i recommend. the bolded ones are ones that i consider foundational to my politics

BASICS OF MARXISM

friedrich engels, principles of commmunism

friedrich engels, socialism: utopian & scientific

karl marx, the german ideology

karl marx, wage labour & capital

mao zedong, on contradiction

nikolai bukharin, anarchy and scientific communism

rosa luxemburg, reform or revolution?

v.i lenin, left-wing communism: an infantile disorder

v.i. lenin, the state & revolution

v.i. lenin, what is to be done?

IMPERIALISM

aijaz ahmed, iraq, afghanistan, and the imperialism of our time

albert memmi, the colonizer and the colonized

che guevara, on socialism and internationalism (ed. aijaz ahmad)

eduardo galeano, the open veins of latin america

edward said, orientalism

fernando cardoso, dependency and development in latin america

frantz fanon, black skin, white masks

frantz fanon, the wretched of the earth

greg grandin, empire's workshop

kwame nkrumah, neocolonialism, the last stage of imperialism

michael parenti, against empire

naomi klein, the shock doctrine

ruy mauro marini, the dialectics of dependency

v.i. lenin, imperialism: the highest stage of capitalism

vijay prashad, red star over the third world

vincent bevins, the jakarta method

walter rodney, how europe underdeveloped africa

william blum, killing hope

zak cope, divided world divided class

zak cope, the wealth of (some) nations

MEDIA & CULTURAL STUDIES

antonio gramsci, the prison notebooks

ed. mick gidley, representing others: white views of indigenous peoples

ed. stuart hall, representation: cultural representations and signifying pratices

gilles deleuze & felix guattari, capitalism & schizophrenia

jacques derrida, margins of philosophy

jacques derrida, speech and phenomena

michael parenti, inventing reality

michel foucault, disicipline and punish

michel foucault, the archeology of knowledge

natasha schull, addiction by design

nick snricek, platform capitalism

noam chomsky and edward herman, manufacturing consent

regis tove stella, imagining the other

richard sennett and jonathan cobb, the hidden injuries of class

safiya umoja noble, algoriths of oppression

stuart hall, cultural studies 1983: a theoretical history

theodor adorno and max horkheimer, the culture industry

walter benjamin, the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction

OTHER

angela davis, women, race, and class

anna louise strong, cash and violence in laos and vietnam

anna louise strong, the soviets expected it

anna louise strong, when serfs stood up in tibet

carrie hamilton, sexual revolutions in cuba

chris chitty, sexual hegemony

christian fuchs, theorizing and analysing digital labor

eds. jules joanne gleeson and elle o'rourke, transgender marxism

elaine scarry, the body in pain

jules joanne gleeson, this infamous proposal

michael parenti, blackshirts & reds

paulo freire, pedagogy of the oppressed

peter drucker, warped: gay normality and queer anticapitalism

rosemary hennessy, profit and pleasure

sophie lewis, abolish the family

suzy kim, everyday life in the north korean revolution

walter rodney, the russian revolution: a view from the third world

[starkey]

The Fall of the House of Usher and Ecocriticism - Peter Barry

[takemetodragonstone]

sometimes a relationship with your father is like “my father is a malignant presence, a bully, and a liar” and “I’m better than you” and “let me out. I don’t want to be you” and “I just do what my dad tells me” and “I can see through you” and “why did you never ask me?” and “he sees everything” and “you have a hard time finding a happy medium between worshipping him and wanting to kill him” and “he loves me. he does. it’s just a wrong kind of love expression” and “fuck dad, he can kick me as many times as he wants” and “pass me the fucking shotgun” and “dad, please. /what have you got in your fucking hand?/ i don’t know, love?/ love? you come for me with love?” and “there’s nothing you could say to me now that I would ever believe” and “are you a cunt?” and “he never even liked me” and “I can’t forgive you … but it’s okay. I love you” and “it’s what dad would do” and “you hated him./ I loved him” and “maybe the poison drips through” and “he was so terrifying to us” and “when he let you in, when the sun shone … it was warm in the light” and most importantly, “he made me breathe funny”

[dirchristophernolan]

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

[byjoveimbeinghumble]

reflecting on the fact that ARRIVAL, a movie primarily about womanhood, features foreign life coming to earth to be received by the woman, and INTERSTELLAR, a movie primarily about manhood, features the man plunging into the void to search for foreign life

[star-h0pper]

arrival (2016) is such a good movie because it turns the typical alien invasion story on its head. at the beginning, ian quotes louise, saying, "words are always the first weapon drawn in war" and it reinforces the idea that this is a war story, an invasion. and then the aliens insist that they are giving the humans a weapon. only, it's not a weapon. it's a gift. and we think that louise's daughter is already dead. she's not. they gave her the gift of knowing her future. and we don't see hannah die, because it's already happened even before she is born. and louise knows. she knows how it ends. and still, "despite knowing the journey and where it leads, i embrace it. and i welcome every moment of it."

[dailyflicks]

ARRIVAL (2016) dir. Denis Villeneuve

[multimemes]

[skullvis]

First Time Watching CURE (1997) mood board.

[f-arelos]

r.s., self portrait against red wallpaper / chungking express

[tinymintywolf]

blorbovember day 6: memory

ouuugh i need this show back immediately i miss her

[birdmans]

succession (2018–2023) / gone girl (2014) dir. david fincher

[physicstudies]

MFER

[birdmans]

I studied the back of her skull. I tried to read her thoughts. For once I didn’t feel like I was staring into the sun. I’m rising to my wife’s level of madness. Because I can feel her changing me again: I was a callow boy, and then a man, good and bad. Now at last I’m the hero. I am the one to root for in the never-ending war story of our marriage. It’s a story I can live with. Hell, at this point, I can’t imagine my story without her. She is my forever antagonist. We are one long frightening climax.

[ananke-xiii]

no thoughts just shiv roy in italy. in that dress. smoking a cigarette. while her mother tells her "you're my onion".

[physicstudies]

I GET IT

[annakarenina]

Frances Ha (2012) dir. Noah Baumbach / Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton / The Frost by Mitski / Ask sent to @taylortruther

[wasco]

maybe my friends can be the great loves of my life

seven - Taylor Swift // Dead Poets Society (dir. Peter Weir) // A Little Life - Hanya Yanigahara // Lady Bird (dir. Greta Gerwig // The Orange - Wendy Cope // Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (dir. John Hughes) // The Perks of Being a Wallflower - Stephen Chbosky // dedication on a bench // The Miseducation of Cameron Post (dir. Desiree Akhavan) // dorothea - Taylor Swift // Close (dir. Lukas Dhont) // Frances Ha (written by Noah Baumbach, Greta Gerwig) // The Perks of Being a Wallflower (dir. Stephen Chbosky) // The Long and Short of It - Richard Siken // The Goldfinch (dir. John Crowley) // Graceland Too - Phoebe Bridgers

[mybruisedankleneedsakiss]

about failure and success and the monstrous vacuum in between

Mieko Kawakami, Breasts and Eggs // Whisper of the Heart 1995, dir. Yoshifumi Kondō // please, please, please let me get what I want by The Smiths // White Nights by Fyodor Dostoevsky // Whiplash 2014 dir. Damien Chazelle // Mieko Kawakami, All the lovers in the Nights // Frances Ha 2012 dir. Noah Baumbach // Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea // Steve Jobs 2015 dir. Danny Boyle // Shoko's Smile by Choi Eun-young // Shoko's Smile by Choi Eun-young // Shiva Baby 2020 dir. Emma Seligman // Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke // Evening Wind, Edward Hopper // Ocean Vuong, Time Is a Mother// Dead Poets Society (1989) dir. Peter Weir // Educated, Tara Westover