Well-meaning people keep asking me my pronouns. I am taking this as a sign to once again change my gender presentation and start actually dressing femme and not just androgynous. Now I only have to learn about fashion and maybe then I’ll be a bit happier
I’ve always wondered why people were so ready to convert. Like, if I was some ancient Roman and some guy came up to me offering a new god that’s even better than the old ones and much easier to worship, I wouldn’t just immediately fall for it. It just seems like a scam.
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My favorite memory of the two Pathfinder games, and I mean this unironically, is doing that infamous quest in Kingmaker right near the start where you have to fight swarms. Level 1 combat against enemies immune to weapon damage – you have to actually consider your options and possibly accept turning down the difficulty. That interplay of character options and enemy immunities is, in my opinion, the core gameplay of CRPGs.
Anthropology has a lot to answer for. Back in the 90s, a transphobe named Serena Nanda turned the gaze of the university onto the issue of gender in India and we are still living with the consequences. With the power of imperial knowledge-making behind her, she has laid down the dogma that only (educated, middle-class, white) Westerners claim to be trans women while those Indians we call hijra are actually a third gender. All the cis academics since agree with her and even the Indian courts cite her, so it must be true, right? So if you see photos of a protest with signs like “Hijras are women” or Indian trans women saying that they’re trans women, you can rest assured that’s that just our malign colonial influence. The exotic truth, on the other hand, is safely preserved in the centers of power of the Anglophone world thanks to the daily labor of cis academics everywhere – preserved from the colonial force of white trans women who threaten to extend their reach everywhere.
Bluesky is almost acceptable in terms of transphobia, but they should remove the part where you’re put on a new list of evil trans women every day
I’m feeling very depressed this evening and I genuinely cannot tell whether it is because of dysphoria or because I lost at some meaningless video game
I miss him. We could all do with some more hatred for mainstream popular culture. Otherwise, what’s even the point of being a communist?
If I had some time, I’d try and find out where our “common sense” notions of art come from. Like art being subjective, which is taken to mean that it is something like a kaleidoscope where no two people can be sure to see the same thing in it and every statement about it is just based on fleeting, un-shareable impressions. Obviously that’s nonsense, but if you try debating people on the internet over whether something is well-written or if it negotiates a certain theme, they bring out clichés like this. Or the idea that art is produced by an individual in a semi-mystic, almost unconscious act which broods no further analysis or introspection – though just as often you see this as a strawman attributed to an author’s opponents. In any case, I assure you that no notable Romantic ever believed this and that the concept of “genius” has never meant this in any serious author. These are just common sense clichés that come from nowhere and are seemingly everywhere.
I was about to say that this account cannot be real, it’s obviously fake for hitting so many stereotypes and controversies at once, and then I saw that she’s posting videos and everything. Sometimes reality is crueler than our imagination.
The Matrix chat is already going so strong that Element is unable to display all new messages after a few hours lol
Someone I followed on Twitter once joked about starting the “Transsexual Review of Books” and I keep thinking that should be a real thing so that the idea of trans literature could become institutionalized (and so we no longer have to search in the most desperate places for any intelligent discussion, obviously).
I hate you for showing this to me
The idea of “chat rooms” is strange and new to me, personally, but I’m trying it out now.
Yeah, Malcolm Harris is correct that both of these “sides” are terribly unconvincing and unhelpful, while Marxism provides resources for thinking about art as a commodity and as something that resists commodification (dialectics!). I just think that one could press Lorentzen harder on the disparity between the ideals he espouses and his lack of literary and theoretical sophistication.
This is maybe a bit inside baseball, but Christian Lorentzen’s review essay about some recent sociological books about literature production is upsetting me. This is because he’s aiming at the right issue, which is that these books follow a reductive, cynical and capitalist theory of literature under the guise of empiricism, but what he puts up against that is just nostalgia for mediocre post-war “intellectuals” and second-rate romanticism. Like, he states that publishers consume literature instead of producing it (because novels apparently just spring fully-formed from the secret source of writers) – how naive is that! And his whole pose of defending intellectualism from the cynical rationality of career academics rings hollow to me when he’s putting CIA-funded antisemites on a pedestal while writing a Substack on the side. You can’t act like you’re defending literature from the vagaries of our times when your political analysis is that blind. Basically, he’s a smug git and I never want to hear from him again.
There’s a new essay of literary criticism making the rounds. I’m upset about it because I think it’s very bad and I don’t know what to do about that
I’ve got a question for all of you: What’s the best way to run a leftist reading group? And where to start? For context, this is going to be a small number of young people who do not habitually read, so my academic instincts are useless here. Someone suggested reading during the meeting, which is maybe more approachable but I don’t see how would this work logistically (do we read out loud? Do we wait for the slowest reader to finish and then talk?). And I need to suggest a text. Presumably, people would get intimated by Capital, so something introductory with short chapters might be better. Any ideas?