J.M. Bourgery. Plate VI. Muscles and nerves of the neck and shoulder. Traité complet de l'anatomie de l'homme: comprenant la médicine opératoire. vol. VI. 1839.
ranked list of episodes of the high theory podcast listened to while caramelizing three pounds of onions: trace (derridean) > reality tv = plot > lust (medieval) > sextuality (early modern) = fandom > melodrama.
one (significantly longer) episode of why theory on seriality that asked great questions such as "is binge-watching tv an expression of the death drive?" and lasted just long enough for me to finish all of prep & cooking.
peeled, cored, sliced & caramelized ten apples while listening to an episode on prequels, which criticized the star wars prequel trilogy for being insufficiently dialectical & praised x-men: days of future past for being sufficiently hegelian.
made & ate eggplant adobo of dubious authenticity while listening to an episode on freud's beyond the pleasure principle. "you’re most drawn to the person that is actually undermining the conscious ways you have of taking pleasure and nonetheless providing you with satisfaction that is correlate to the drive."
putting away my laundry while listening to the episode on immediacy (with anna kornbluh), which raises questions such as how is watching american football like reading wordsworth.
In his lifetime the Black Death, a sorcerer travelling from China, had shifted the balance of Christendom and killed half the folk in England. But to Ursula’s Jackie it seemed that nothing new ever happened or ever would. The bell rang and the nuns went into quire. The bell rang and the serfs in the great field paused in their labour and crossed themselves, and then scratched themselves, and then went on working. The little bell rang and Christ was made flesh. One day the thought had risen up in him: Suppose I don’t ring my bell – what then? This thought had come on a summer afternoon when the noise of the grasshoppers was everywhere. For an instant the sun had seemed to smite him with a tenfold heat, he felt himself dissolving like wax, and the butts of the mown grass where he lay pricked him like a thousand daggers. What then? The end of the world, perhaps. The bell silent, Christ not made, the world snapped like a bubble. Perhaps. But also a beating.
Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Corner That Held Them (1948)
“Tact, like empathy, is based on a certain form of mutual understanding. But while empathy implies the idea of entering someone else’s mind inasmuch as it is linked to the presumption that ‘I know how you feel’, tact exists to create a form of bonding between individuals that is not based on the idea of intrusion but, conversely, on the respect for existing boundaries, and on a willingness not always to assume that one knows. While empathy requires resonance and proximity, tact is there to restore distance, and to accept the difference between the individuals involved in order to protect and preserve their dignity. Tact is based on an attention towards otherness.”
— Katja Haustein, “How to Be Alone with Others: Plessner, Adorno, and Barthes on Tact” (via mehreenkasana)
Can we say that between the prize and the story and Jamir Nazir, there is something perverse and disrespectful to other writers, because it
The entire saga and the evidence around it begin to feel, after a while, as though a confidence trickster had spun a parody, a joke in poor taste. From the point I flagged the story on X, I have constantly insisted that it was first and foremost an extremely badly written piece of fiction. I felt, and still feel, that the fact that the story fails as a piece of literature should’ve been the first thing noticed by Commonwealth readers and judges. If they could not do that, then we have a far more serious problem than any other issue that has been raised regarding the story and its writer. This is why I have one major concern here, with another subordinate concern trailing after it.
First is the writing. The rule of writing, beyond basic principles, is that you can do almost anything so long as there is some sort of coherence, an organising principle, in the story or idea being put forward. That is, its innate aim is achieved, and its parts come together in some way, even if the writer—in the case of avant-garde literature—is trying to upend and deconstruct language, narrative, and ideas.
There is none of these in “The Serpent in the Grove”, which is a difficult read based on not having achieved anything within its simplistic narrative. It is not very easy, on this score, to see how some people can frame the disharmony of the story’s sentences as evincing traits of an experimental narrative or ethnocentric iterations of Caribbean patois.
To wit, if a writer has to separately explain the metaphors he used in a story, regardless of how culture-based they might be, then he has failed. Have we (Africans) forgotten that we all come from postcolonies where the English language is constantly being refashioned to fit our hybrid identities and cultures? We should be able to tell the difference between linguistic sleights of hand and poor pastiche.
In Queen Christina, a film which has again been shown in Paris in the last few years, the make-up has the snowy thickness of a mask: it is not a painted face, but one set in plaster, protected by the surface of the colour, not by its lineaments. Amid all this snow at once fragile and compact, the eyes alone, black like strange soft flesh, but not in the least expressive, are two faintly tremulous wounds. In spite of its extreme beauty, this face, not drawn but sculpted in something smooth and friable, that is, at once perfect and ephemeral, comes to resemble the flour-white complexion of Charlie Chaplin, the dark vegetation of his eyes, his totem-like countenance.
Roland Barthes, 'The Face of Garbo' in Mythologies (1957)
“One of the strongest feelings I remember from my childhood is, precisely, of being humiliated; of being knocked about by words, acts, or situations. Isn’t it a fact that children are always feeling deeply humiliated in their relations with grown-ups and each other? I have a feeling children spend a good deal of their time humiliating one another. Our whole education is just one long humiliation, and it was even more so when I was a child. One of the wounds I’ve found hardest to bear in my adult life has been the fear of humiliation, and the sense of being humiliated. Every time I read a review, for instance — whether laudatory or not — this feeling awakes. To humiliate and be humiliated, I think, is a crucial element in our whole social structure.”
— Ingmar Bergman; Interviews with Ingmar Bergman by Stig Bjorkman
turnnoffyourmind
origamiaround
pixelskylines
stormborns
gummygunk
titsay
areudirty
