the typing of the dead

pomes ect

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ok lets do this

ps does anybody speak arabic

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Meanwhile, searching for ‘“blaze of truth” .pdf’ still isn’t doing the job—maybe jihadis use .epub files? .mobi? .lrf?

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So I’m wondering how much this is a thing, and at what point it became one: by this I guess I mean, pretending to be a Middle Eastern poet of antiquity in order to recover in an ironized way a lyric context unavailable to you as a post-everything American.  

fig.1

fig.2

 Matthew Rohrer’s Translations from Hafiz (fig. 1) are fine, I guess—I like them a lot, in fact!—and appreciate their studied casualness in making the milieu work takes more craft than I have at this point, and likely ever will—poetry isn’t even my side side hustle. But one rather wants something more uncanny when trying to make an ancient speak to our contemporaries: this reeks a little of the parloud game, of getting bored somewhere in the first five pages of the cantos. But—funny!

Anthony Madrid, meanwhile, in his book of alleged ghazals (fig. 2), is a pain in the ass to deal with. Tremendous flights of humour; many boring sections. The assumption that the political incorrectness of pretending to be a Sufi mystic-cum-love poet in some way mitigates the political incorrectness of writing poems about wanting to bang young chicks, an interesting piece of logic I don’t want to bother unpicking. Suffice it to say that I’ve been uneasy about this sort of behaviour—wherein one gestures to one’s self-awareness of the line one is transgressing, as if this were in itself sufficient cover for transgressing it—since someone I dated for a minute refuted my claim that “now some of yall might say this song is sexist / just cuz I ask the girls to rub on their breastsesses” constituted anything like an apology on Pharoahe Monch’s part, and then decided she didn’t want to sleep with me.

I’m not sure what Madrid’s claim to be writing ghazals means (I despair that there’s a “lady, if you have to ask …” at the bottom of it) other than that he’s writing two line stanzas or verse-paragraphs or unrhymed couplets, like every other American poet on an off-day—seriously, who started this shit—it needs to stop— 

[waaty]

i am so ready for revived ff7 fandom

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auden quote goes here

www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/06/08/battle-lines-jihad-creswell-and-haykel

When I posted this facebook—with the same quote as above, which I lifted off the lithub email, I’m sorry—someone asked me if I was mocking it or in awe. This seemed a valid question. I find myself wanting rather to be able to answer it, to be able to have a read on it. Were this a poem composed in English one would want to query a lot of it. Earthquakes don’t shatter brains, as a rule: the reader is being asked to mentally complete the first line into something like “like an earthquake would, if it were a sort of earthquake that took one’s head for the ground.” There’s no way “cracked then broke” doesn’t require a comma in a register this elevated.  I was lost for a while as to what kind of violence they were doing that ‘drilled’ was the right word; on balance I think the referent of ‘They’ the first time is the bullets, but that bullets ‘scatter’ limbs is perhaps an overstatement. And so on.

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Lazy new historicist take: it’s weird to be told something is widely available on the internet, and be unable to find it. It’s weirder that the article makes such a meal of the conservatism of the poetic form, and yet the translations are presented as free verse without specific comment about the translator’s procedure.  One assumes the authors are the translators; one assumes they are the authors of the infelicities catalogued above. But the authors get to posit them as definitive—they  get to punt the feeling of reading something in monorhyme into the long grass. This seems unhelpful when the article gets to conveniently pre-suppose the continuity of form and intent—they are aesthetically conservative and they are politically conservative. This is to some degree an unfair simplification, yes.

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In ‘Disappearance of the , Apperance of the’ Ron SIlliam cites John Skelton, a 16th(?)-century practitioner of monorhyme in English, when he’d trying to limn why literary progress meant, for a long time, moving away from linguistic features obviously there for their own sake, and towards mimesis. Silliman’s early naïve Marxism is rather charming: what he wants to prove is that the tangibility of the world as an object of literature is a capitalist assumption, that the market is the object-condition, I think that’s what I mean, I forget my jargon, for “the possibility of realism.”

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Monorhyme in English today wouldn’t feel conservative so much as entirely off the grid. One would assume that any practitioner was Doing A Thing. One would assume quotation marks were involved.

Furthermore, the old poetry is alive and well in the popular sphere. Among the most successful television programs in the Middle East is “Sha‘ir al-Milyoon” (“Millionaire Poet,” but also “Poet of the People”), which is modelled on “American Idol.” Every season, amateurs from across the Arab world recite their own verse in front of a large and appreciative studio audience in Abu Dhabi. Winners of the competition receive up to 1.3 million dollars—more than the Nobel Prize in Literature, as the show’s boosters are fond of pointing out. Last year, the program had seventy million viewers worldwide. The poems recited on “Sha‘ir al-Milyoon” are highly conventional in form and content.

On the other hand, one doesn’t point to Strictly Come Dancing as evidence of an unironic and earnest vogue for ballroom dancing among Welsh separatists.

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But, no, our jihadi poets are reaching for monorhyme because they need to underwrite their political conservatism by reaching for conservative forms, even in an ahistorical way. And they do this because they want to make a world real. Not, I guess, the same as wanting to make a realistic world.

“And, unlike the videos of beheadings and burnings, which are made primarily for foreign consumption, poetry provides a window onto the movement talking to itself. It is in verse that militants most clearly articulate the fantasy life of jihad.”

“Poetry is understood as a social art rather than as a specialized profession, and practitioners take pleasure in showing off their technique.”

“By casting themselves as poets, as cultural actors with deep roots in the Arab Islamic tradition, the militants are attempting to assuage their fears of not really belonging.”

What’s my claim? That this is an unfair use of literary criticism, one with the decks stacked in its favour — well, does that matter? Do we need to be fair to jihadi poets? Do we really need to psychoanalyse them? (I think on some level my feeling about this is that actually, no, I suspect most ISIS militants don’t give that much of a shit about poetry.)

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“The Caliphate of ISIS, as yet recognized by no other country, is a fantasy world of fluctuating borders where anything can happen, including the recapture of past glories.”

There’s a worrying slippage between claiming the poems articulate the fantasy life of ISIS and that ISIS, itself, is the fantasy. Lazy critical theory take: why do we assume that the poetry is the fantasy and the geography is real?—Here, some Lacanian hand-waving; Zizek on how fascism presents itself as a relaxation of the rules. There’s a piece of Bush-era phraseology wherein ‘a threat to our existence’ was mangled into ‘an existential threat’—in trying to get my head around this article I thought for a minute maybe ISIS actually are an existential threat, maybe the source of the disquiet I feel about them is that they present some kind of epistemological problem—then I realised this was deeply patronising and disrespectful of people elsewhere who are actually fucking dying.

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There’s another New Yorker article in the related, titled ‘All Possible Humanities Dissertations Considered as Single Tweets.’ —e.g., “I found a very small thing in an archive, but I can relate it to a big thing.”; “Truth-claims from our discipline cannot be properly judged without expertise that almost no one in our discipline has.”—One of them runs:

A supposedly fanatical, militant movement that readers have been taught to fear makes perfect sense to those who support it.

Well well well.

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I hope anyone reading found that as joyless and protracted a process as I did.

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[wondersmith-and-sons]

i think one of the reasons fandom is so unwilling to criticise itself is because its internalised the simplified whitefem logic of how female gaze=progressive, fandom=female gaze, therefore fandom=progressive and uses it in a way as to never examine the social constructs that the gaze was built upon, like what factors attractiveness/desire arise from. 

you could say that fandom is the female gaze in its most tangible, autonomous form - it’s media for women by women, without bureaucracy and hurdles and censorship, something that never had the chance to develop because mainstream media for women is usually controlled by men. there are very few creative spaces that offer the anonymity and autonomy of internet fandom where we can all truly let our freak flags fly. 

but that doesn’t mean female gaze is absolved of the issues that permeates typical forces of oppression. the female gaze is aimed at different directions, and it ranges from sexual attraction to escapist fantasy, but the female gaze when it becomes an en-masse multi-community movement has the swaying power to focus on certain characters, ships and narratives. and when it does, it paints a very telling picture of who and what it values. 

female gaze regards desire/attraction first, and in white supremacist culture this means the hierarchy of white dudes, then white women, then men of colour, then women of colour. looking at overall patterns in who gets written about and who gets shunned, female gaze in fandom patterns seems to be pretty representative of the social hierarchy that ranks most-to-least valuable/humanised people. 

introduction to fandom studies tells us about the values of fandom as mostly-female created space, but it rarely goes beyond that. the female gaze can be racist. it can be imperialist, ableist, transphobic, misogynistic, despite it being a  concept that aims to subvert the male gaze because it did not develop in a vacuum; it developed in a society that’s oppressive and marginalising, therefore it bears the capacity of being equally oppressive and marginalising just like all other forms of media. 

fandom as a manifestation of the female gaze may be more progressive than male-controlled mainstream media, but doesn’t mean it’s automatically absolved of the social issues it was born in. 

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[strongfemaleheroine13]

It’s true…. taylorswift

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[daisy-or-crazy]

We need a phrase for “no I don’t listen to that artist on my own, they’re not really my style, but I like them as a person and will def sing along with their music on the radio”

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