#alt crit

[days-of-reading]

Jeff Nunokawa, Notebook

[no-lotus]

brief thoughts re "alt lit + politics"

feel confused re why people think alt lit / net art / weird twitter /etc etc / this socialnetwork we're all vaguely aware of and a part of is somehow apolitical, or "doesn't care" about politics. frankly, everyone "cares about politics," given the proper definition of / sense of "politics," i think.  so i guess it depends on what your definition of "politics" is, and what you define "political action" as. like most things, it's simply a matter of perspective. personally, when i think "politics," called to my mind are some lyrics from BARR: The song begins abruptly,  ♪♪"And it's political [But] politics is not necessarily just guerilla fighters, prime ministers And who cheated in the primaries It's also who am I in relation to you Who are we in the way we can see ourselves In relation to the other kids The ones in the magazines, and the ones who miss out on stuff"♪♪ if you can accept a definition of politics as something more related to "who i am in relation to you" and less related to "who cheated in the primaries," i think you will maybe have an inkling about what i am driving at.  anyway, i see a very large percentage of my net art / alt lit / etc peers more or less CONSTANTLY STRUGGLING with identity politics, notions of the "self," in their writings, to the extent that i would almost include such consciousness of political personhood as a main, genre-defining characteristic of [whatever / "alt lit" / net art / etc]; and, again, i feel very confused why nobody else seems to be picking up on this, and instead continuing this sort of lazy dismissal of a diverse group of humans' art: it's "apolitical."  to make a long story short in what i'm rapidly perceiving is a completely vexed and complicated topic to write about in a brief Tumblr post, i would be hesitant to call any human or what they produce "apolitical" or "apathetic about politics" (even regardless of whether they themselves self-identify as "apolitical," which, to be quite frank, in most cases you can simply interpret this as either 1. ignorance or 2. that person trying to portray a certain "brand" of themselves to you, an "apolitical brand" [which, portraying a certain brand of yourself is ITSELF a political action, can't you see?—think, "who am I in relation to you // Who are we in the way we can see ourselves"] anyway, of course some artists are "pulling it off" with more political candor and fervor and consciousness than others, but even the smallest voices are political voices, too, and even "apolitical" voices are political voices, too, and it pains me to see lazy criticism like "alt lit doesn't care about politics" or "this is just pointless absurdism" disenchant an increasingly large body of work which I hold dear and important to myself, and from which I have learned an awful lot—including an awful lot of political insight (and, make no mistake about it, i mean here the "good kind" of political insight: the kind teaching tolerance, respect, patience, etc). idk does any of what i'm saying make sense even

[thetsaritsa]

don't take this personally, but I'm bored of left-aligned poems

[rhys-nixon]

Read my review of Spencer Madsen's new book 'You Can Make Anything Sad', published through Publishing Genius. 

[baroquespiral]

Tumblr "social justice" thoughts

>My privilege may make me more comfortable engaging with Tumblr "social justice" discourse, not less. >Seeing as I have like ALL the privilege, I'm only writing this because people with less privilege than me have recently been critiquing the "Tumblr social justice" memeplex, specifically from their position of disprivilege.  These are people who seem to know the system quite well, as opposed to the odd "female/black/gay equalist/real justice blogger" or whatever.

>"Tumblr social justice" as I've experienced it is one side of a weird split in the "radical" left between economic and environmental issues on one hand and race, gender and other social issues on the other.  Groups like Adbusters take hardline stances on the environment, the economy and class while being incredibly problematic (the "post-autistic movement"); "SJW" will often take Ontario NDP-esque "environmentalists are elitists" positions borrowed from the right, and just ignore class for whatever reason. >Virtually the only people on the left committed to a principled investigation of all these topics are Marxists.  I don't know how to feel about this.

>"SJW" is a functionally valid term.  Not every person from an oppressed position in society who talks about their oppression on the internet does so using the common terminology or principles ("x"-ism = power + privilege, etc.) identified with "SJW".  On the other hand, at this point it's clearly loaded and problematic. >It doesn't seem fair that the movement commonly known as "social justice" should need a label, but the way a lot of people tend to identify their particular views and opinions with entire demographics, or the entire range of non-bigoted thought, often seems unhelpful.

>There is no strict set of rules.  Everybody tries to act as if there is one which is a noble project.  Everybody also tries to acknowledge their own hypocrisy which is also noble, but sometimes they don't succeed.  For example re: cultural appropriation, I've never seen a definition of this applied consistently.  White people using AAVE is appropriative but white people rapping rarely is.  Wearing a culture's clothes is always appropriative but making and selling their food rarely is.  Being Buddhist is appropriative even though it's a soteriological religion that makes universal claims, Drawing, cosplaying or being obsessed with anime is only appropriation in a couple of specific forms that are "OK" to look down upon - some big-name "SJW's" are worse weebs than me (e.g. fireworkcomic draws left-to-right manga not set in Japan where everyone still has Japanese names for some reason).  It's one thing when people critique problematic things and admit that they participate in others, but another when the things people say make you an "objectively terrible person" are not necessarily worse than the things they do.  Which seems to happen often.

>This may be unavoidable at some level, but a lot of these contradictions seem like problems it could benefit the movement to look at and at least try to solve, more for its own peace of mind than in the interest of an abstract "coherence".  Which it might be easier to do if the movement/opinions within it could be treated as such - as an often highly abstract attempt to represent and deal with a set of underlying problems in society - rather than ~basic human decency~ or a set of obvious things that everyone should know by default. >People seem more interested in letting the community check everyone's privilege for everyone else than in checking their own privilege relative to each other. >This may have to do with the "whatever reason" people ignore class - e.g. class privilege is the one shared by maybe the largest slice of the "social justice" community

[rap-game-albert-camus]

theforgetfulsurf: i actually have a question for you

Meta Knight: ok

theforgetfulsurf: alt lit translation - how do you think that would be received?

Meta Knight: hmm...like in what sense

theforgetfulsurf: specifically, translating a seminal french novel into 'alt lit'

mostly cos i can't get away from the style i've developed even though im translating

Meta Knight: hmmm...im not sure. idk much about translation. it's weird to think about alt lit as, like, a language. what novel?

theforgetfulsurf: l'étranger/the stranger, albert camus

i think it kinda fits, like, i read it as basically about this guy who's super detached from society, isn't really feeling anything, and albert camus was super into 'absurdism' and i feel like that's a part of the lineage of 'alt lit'

Meta Knight: oh damn

ya im familiar with camus

i can see that

working

p well

maybe

theforgetfulsurf: i figured i'd give you a run-down in case

i'm really not sure and i've only translated a little bit so far

but i feel like regardless of whether it 'works' its a worthwhile endeavor

i just wanted to get the opinion of someone who's, like, 'higher up' in the community, foul as that phrase is, but like, you have a bigger view of the community that i have because... yeah idk that

Meta Knight: well for what it's worth i think it sounds cool. idk about the intersection of translation and alt lit in general, but camus seems like a great place to start...i can see him as an influence to a lit of alt lits Heros today, like Tao Lin, whether theyre conscious of his influence or not. and if anything it'll be a fun experience for u

theforgetfulsurf: i think that intersection would be interesting to explore, at least, and i feel like pushing the 'genre' (to whatever extent alt lit is a genre) is something that should continually be done, not that it isnt, but im not really pushing it personally, and the influence is def there - i wondered about translating his essay on absurdism instead particularly as there are no really lengthy looks at alt lit im aware of - and i mean my french could use the practice. that said, if i translate too much french like that i will probably fail my a level but i guess this is a place to use #tinlad

woah essay

Meta Knight: lol

yeah i was thinking about the myth of sisyphus too

actually that and the stranger are like two of my favs so it seems kind of serependitious to talk about this lol

theforgetfulsurf: agh pressure

[baroquespiral]

Ottawa Santa Claus Parade "Liveblog"

So, attempting to fulfill my promise from last year that I would liveblog the Montreal Santa Claus parade, here's this thing.  It's kind of not the thing I promised, because a) I wasn't in Montreal for the weekend of the Santa Claus parade, b) I didn't have an electronic device with functioning internet on me at the Santa Claus parade I did attend, in Ottawa, and in fact haven't had time to post this for three days since I've been busy as fuck with schoolwork, so it's not exactly a "live" blog.  But I'll be posting it like I would be if it were - in one post, so as not to clog up anyone's dash. Things I learned this weekend: Ottawa's Santa Claus parade is nothing like Montreal's. 

It's Ottawa's first real snow of the year, right in time for the Santa Claus parade.  Fucking magical. Sadly it's also slowing down the bus and I already got out a bit late, so I find myself getting there a little late.  I get off at the parade's destination and there's already like, a carriage trailing off down some side street like it's finished the whole damn thing.  So maybe I missed some of the cooler stuff. Just parked there though is this thing.

I can't decide if the site listed on here is more disingenuous or more genuine than the average.  It says it's "not a place for anger or hate, nor will this be a place that will exude the aura of Political Correctness ( somehow we will walk that fine line)", there's no obvious far-right or even regular Christian weirdness (the most Christian image is a Santa Claus, which is oddly… politically correct), the video that plays on the front page is of a Jewish guy who makes a fairly reasonable case.  It almost seems like it was made by some actual well-meaning people and a '90s web designer who were somehow convinced that the War on Christmas was ever a thing.  Or like it's trying really, really hard to give you that impression. For the record, every festive greeting I heard at the parade was "Merry Christmas".

It's kind of from a distance, but this thing looks pretty.  This thing reminds me of the Montreal parade which I stumbled upon last year entirely by accident on a five-minute walk from my Concordia residence to get breakfast cereal.  That was a truly great experience.  It felt like magic - like a scene from Susan Cooper's Dark Is Rising Sequence.  It felt like a living secular ritual.  It felt like in-your-face disproof of everything the kind of religious assholes (read: people who are both religious and assholes) who make "Bring Back Merry Christmas" sites say about their belief systems being necessary for there to be any meaning or wonder in life.  I'm serious.  Out of the blue, for an hour, my day was interrupted by ancient twinkly melodies in the clear cold air and children and grown-ups singing and other children and grown-ups watching and grown-ups lifting children on their shoulders and following them as they tried to get closer to these floats with all these beautiful shapes and symbols, trees and candy canes and spirals and balls of glittery-painted wood or who knows maybe it was fucking plastic but it sure didn't look like it.  All slowly bobbing or floating - that's how it looked when they moved, the word "float" was accurate for once - down the street that they've completely cleared all the cars out of.  And every now and then something would be sort of dumb but then the next thing would be totally amazing in a way I couldn't possibly have predicted, but would totally dig liveblogging. While a bit cheap, at least this float is unironically displaying those raw symbols that, saturating a context like they did in the Montreal parade, can create something weirdly sublime.  Like, objectively pretty as many of the Montreal floats were - and as Christmas symbols are, I find, by default - a lot of them wouldn't have stuck out to me, say, at a mall Santa's workshop.  But in the context of each other, and of this crowd that was so totally, unironically into it, and the music and the noontime sun and the cold air...

One admittedly great thing about the Ottawa parade though is it's for a good cause.  It's not just a Santa Claus parade, it's the Help Santa Toy Parade, that raises money and toys for poor kids.  Seeing this - presumably a big bin of all the toys raised - made me happy.  It would have been cool to put them with actual Santa in his actual sleigh but I guess making a sleigh that big would be hard (although it would take care of all your float design worries in one concept).

While we're on things that made me happy, here's a Christmas doge:

But almost immediately, stuff starts to go downhill.  We get this thing:

Place is called Stanley's Christmas Village and the most "Christmas" it can come up with is a bear in a hockey jersey?  I'm having fun imagining him as the Kanye bear's loser brother or something though.  The Highschool Dropout who never Graduated. Later on, I'll realize that this is actually comparatively epic, what with the sort of totem pole nutcrackers and all.  But ATM I'm comparing it against Montreal, and… it gets D's. The best MADD can do is attach antlers to their car:

I'm noticing the prominence of the logos and names of the sponsors vs their actual decorations/floats here, something that was never a problem in Montreal. Obviously this shouldn't be as objectionable with charitable groups like MADD, but the whole parade is already a charity event, and the problem isn't so much that this is detracting from the event's sense of unity - I'd love to see a wider range of floats - than it's detracting from what makes it special - this is by no means the only time you'll see a MADD van.  The only thing that's special about this one is these antlers, which are… aesthetically baffling: like they can clearly have only been made for a car/van/truck, which would clearly only use them in events like this, and yet somehow they look like they were designed for something else, which I can't figure for the life of me what. (The red nose was a nice touch though.)

Still, I guess, even Stanley's Christmas village deserves to advertise - it's a small business that may not always get this kind of opportunity.  Welp, here's the Coke float:

http://tinypic.com/player.php?v=2cmu061%3E&s=5#.UpXAp6Vgwy4 The rendition of Jingle Bells they're playing here sounded much worse in my memory than it does in this shitty recording.  I dunno.  I still recall some sort of particularly obnoxious rock version, and now it sounds like… reggae? Similarly, my camera was not able to capture the absolute radness of these guys' jackets:

Or what exactly the heck was going on here:

PONE

OK, now I'm just confused.  Who associates beauty queens with Christmas… or with Volkswagen?

I was saying before how the "kids singing & dancing" element was cool in Montreal, but… this somehow seems misguided.  Pajamas aren't some sort of a special Christmas thing.  They're what middle schoolers like these wear to class. http://tinypic.com/player.php?v=2vl0d2r%3E&s=5#.UpXEj6Vgwy4 CHEO was my hospital until I stopped qualifying for it.  Here they are going hard: http://tinypic.com/player.php?v=4jb53m%3E&s=5#.UpXFw6Vgwy4 Now this thing is cool.  It's like a Santa Claus version of the Catbus:

While there may not have been any representatives of the Enigma Babylon One World Faith here to spread their political correctness and their devilish "Happy Holidays", there was this one explicitly Christian float.  It had nice music but was surprisingly bland looking: http://tinypic.com/player.php?v=a6u5j%3E&s=5#.UpXHPKVgwy4 Here's a shot of somebody blowing fake snow while it's actually snowing:

Remember when I was saying I'd prefer unique creations that don't obviously fit with the concept to your run-of-the-mill advertising that does half-heartedly?  Here's an example: the Shriners kicking it up a notch with their fleet of tastefully branded goddamn PLANES:

Or the post office, taking this parade down a decided turn for the Paprika:

For each of these things though there's a whole load of basically commercials on wheels with wreaths in the passenger seat windows or some shit, which I stopped photographing at some point because my fingers were killing me and I figured it would bore you guys. I'm noticing here also - and it's maybe just because the crowds are thinner, but also because the floats are skimpier/more conceptual at best, it's more obvious that everything here is motorized vehicles and nothing about the basic function of this big city thoroughfare has fundamentally changed.  That's a good thing in a way, a more honest thing if an uglier one.  There are all sorts of lefty/socially conscious people who would say categorically, I feel, that this is better, that it's always best to be completely upfront about all your shittiness, and without any respite for special occasions shove the ugliness of it in people's faces until we all snap and there's a Revolution - and/or apocalyptic justice.  (By this standard the dumb ads everywhere might also be better than the glorious Montreal parade prettifying the capitalist society it still tacitly endorses through Christmas itself, gift-buying etc.)  But Ottawa's a suburban ass town and not everyone recognizes the ugliness, aesthetic and otherwise of car culture, and it feels useful somehow to have a day where we'd all agree that it's awesome to even pretend that we have these surreal floating islands instead of SUV's. BASED SHRINERS STILL KILLING IT

Yes, I know you could compare these guys to the bear mascot.  But they look like they want to be here. Well, it looks like I've ultimately lost all my credibility as a Santa Claus blogger here, because somehow I either forgot or failed (I was trying to operate my cellphone with gloves at this point) to take a picture of the grand finale of the whole thing: the appearance of Santa Claus himself.  You weren't missing much though.  Santa's float literally featured one of those lawn inflatables that start to flop over after a week (or in this case, getting driven through most of downtown), and a team of eight tiny plastic reindeer that achieved the same weird visual effect as MADD's antlers (they don't look like they're made for a float but what else would you make them for?)  Ottawa's a smaller city than Montreal but most malls can afford better than this - which ironically, I guess, is probably one of the problems with a charity event, to the point of even necessitating all the advertising and shit in the first place. But anyway, for all you know I'm just being a Grinch and shitting on Ottawa's Santa Claus parade, which as assembled in this post minus the weird politics and Coca-Cola is a pretty nice collection of fun lo-res images of what Christmas can be - planes, dogs, clowns, Santa buses. Which I guess is the best experience I can give you in a Santa Claus parade liveblog, anyway, apart from my halfassed analysis. So, that's my present to you.  Hope you enjoyed. Merry Christmas. Happy American Thanksgiving. And happy holidays.

[athirdoption]

An OKAY tombstone

A tombstone that Reads "Okay...."

  The famous internet non sequitur, that neither follows nor can be followed.  The expression of hostility about a subject due to its essence which includes being outside of the framework of the individual rejecting it.  

The expression is one of isolation attempting to isolate the idea as something which cannot be predicated nor followed, "Okay..." unwittingly reveals the speaker through its projection as something incapable of being modified.  Always in the grand pause of isolation.