Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
Indeed, if “Ulysses” is the great modernist novel most inspired by a desire for humanistic inclusion, then “Journey” is its antithesis: a stream of misanthropic consciousness, almost unrelieved by any warmth or fellow-feeling. I say almost, because Celine does have some weaknesses, notably for children. As Bardamu puts it, when his concierge’s nephew is dying: “You never mind very much when an adult passes on. If nothing else, you say to yourself, it’s one less stinker on earth, but with a child you can never be so sure. There’s always the future.”
“Whether or not Marx’s vision of communism is “the inherent capitalist fantasy,” Žižek’s vision—which apart from rejecting earlier conceptions lacks any definite content—is well adapted to an economy based on the continuous production of novel commodities and experiences, each supposed to be different from any that has gone before. With the prevailing capitalist order aware that it is in trouble but unable to conceive of practicable alternatives, Žižek’s formless radicalism is ideally suited to a culture transfixed by the spectacle of its own fragility. That there should be this isomorphism between Žižek’s thinking and contemporary capitalism is not surprising. After all, it is only an economy of the kind that exists today that could produce a thinker such as Žižek. The role of global public intellectual Žižek performs has emerged along with a media apparatus and a culture of celebrity that are integral to the current model of capitalist expansion.”
John Gray
“His death does separate us. My death will not bring us together again. That is how things are. It is in itself splendid that we were able to live our lives in harmony for so long.”
Simone de Beauvoir with Jean-Paul Sartre
Willy Loman moves us because he dies the death of a father, not of a salesman.
Harold Bloom
2016 Music Round-Up, with Spotify playlists
Anohni - Hopelessness
Blood Orange - Freetown Sound
Bon Iver - 22, A Million
Christine and the Queens - Chaleur Humaine
James Blake - The Colour in Anything
Kendrick Lamar - untitled unmastered
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Skeleton Tree
Radiohead - A Moon Shaped Pool
Shura - Nothing’s Real
Tegan and Sara - Love You to Death
Honourable Mentions: AlunaGeorge, I Remember; Anna Meredith, Varmints; The Avalanches, Wildflower; Banks, The Altar; Carly Rae Jepsen, Emotion Side B; Chairlift, Moth; Chance the Rapper, Coloring Book; Childish Gambino, “Awaken, My Love!”; Christian Löffler, Mare; David Bowie, Blackstar; Ezra Furman, Big Fugitive Love; Francis and the Lights, Farewell, Starlite!; Gabriel Bruce, Come All Sufferers; Gold Panda, Good Luck And Do Your Best; Hælos, Full Circle; Hanna Järver, Närke; Jenny Hval, Blood Bitch; Jessy Lanza, Oh No; Kate Tempest, Let Them Eat Chaos; Katy B, Honey; Kaytranada, 99.9%; La Femme, Mystère; Leonard Cohen, You Want It Darker; Michael Kiwanuka, Love & Hate; Moderat, III; NAO, For All We Know; Nite Jewel, Liquid Cool; Nite-Funk, Nite-Funk; Noname, Telefone; Poliça, United Crushers; The Range, Potential; Rival Consoles, Night Melody; Roman Flügel, All The Right Noises; School of Seven Bells, SVIIB; Skepta, Konnichiwa; Solange, A Seat at the Table; Tinashe, Nightride; Tove Lo, Lady Wood; A Tribe Called Quest; We got it from Here…Thank You 4 Your service; Warpaint, Heads Up; Young Thug, Jeffery
Top 10 Songs
Blood Orange - Augustine
Chance the Rapper - Summer Friends
James Blake - I Need a Forest Fire
Kendrick Lamar - untitled 07 levitate
Let’s Eat Grandma - Eat Shiitake Mushrooms
NAO - Adore You
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - I Need You
Nite Jewel - Running Out of Time
Sia - Waving Goodbye
Tegan and Sara - Stop Desire
Honourable Mentions: See the full playlist - 50 songs by 50 artists
Top 10 Gigs & Raves
John Talabot, Axel Boman, Âme, Marcus Worgull, Endian; January 1st, Studio Spaces E1
Miyagi; March 5th; The Pickle Factory
Grimes; March 10th; O2 Academy Brixton
Maybeshewill; April 15th; Koko
Christine and the Queens; May 3rd; Camden Roundhouse
Chairlift; June 9th; The Garage
Tegan and Sara; June 22nd; Koko
Florence + The Machine, Kendrick Lamar, Jamie xx, Poliça, Blood Orange; July 2nd; Hyde Park
Chance the Rapper; November 22nd; O2 Academy Brixton
Honourable Mentions: AlunaGeorge (May 27th, Emo’s Austin); Kolsch, Joris Voorn, Craig Richards, Samuel Kerridge, Talker (June 18th, Fabric); Shura (July 7th, New Slang); Nite Jewel (September 17th, Jazz Cafe); Gabriel Bruce (October 11th, Moth Club); Four Tet, Daphni, Joy Orbison, Ben UFO, Josey Rebelle, Pangaea (October 14th, O2 Academy Brixton); Skream (October 28th, Village Underground); Anna Meredith (November 23rd, Scala); Girl Band, Goat Girl (December 8th, Scala)
The Gallery
#NowPlaying Goodbye, Leonard - 50 Favourites by Alexis Forss
(Source: Spotify)
“Yes, if we all worked to beat Barry, and got behind Lyndon and pushed, radicals and moderate Republicans, Negroes and Southern liberals, college professors and Cosa Nostra, cafe society and Beatniks-for-Johnson, were we all then going down a liberal superhighway into the deepest swamp of them all? For Johnson was intelligent enough to run a total land, he had vast competence, no vision, and the heart to hold huge power, he had the vanity of a Renaissance prince or a modern dictator, whereas Barry might secretly be happier with his own show daily on radio. If Goldwater were elected, he could not control the country without moving to the center; moving to the center he would lose a part of the Right, satisfy no one, and be obliged to drift still further Left, or moving back to the Right would open schisms across the land which could not be closed. Goldwater elected, America would stand revealed, its latent treacheries would pop forth like boils; Johnson elected, the drift would go on, the San Francisco Hiltons would deploy among us. Under Goldwater, the odds were certainly greater that nuclear war would come, but under Johnson we could move from the threat of total war to war itself with nothing to prevent it; the anti-Goldwater forces which might keep the country too divided to go to war would now be contained within Johnson. Goldwater promised to lead the nation across the edge of a precipice, Johnson would walk us through the woods, perchance to quicksand itself. Goldwater would open us to the perils of our madness, Johnson would continue our trip into the plague. Goldwater could accelerate the Negro Revolution to violence and disaster - Johnson might yet be obliged to betray it from within. And what a job could be done! Who in such a pass should receive the blessing of a vote - the man who inspired the deepest fear, or the man who encouraged us to live in a lard of guilt cold as the most mediocre of our satisfied needs?"
- Norman Mailer, In the Red Light: A History of the Republican Convention in 1964
The book may be marketed under false pretenses, which is all right with me. I have already seen (British) sales promotion materials which suggest that we have been ravenous for a new Heller book because we want to laugh some more. This is as good a way as any to get people to read one of the unhappiest books ever written.
“Something Happened” is so astonishingly pessimistic, in fact, that it can be called a daring experiment. Depictions of utter hopelessness in literature have been acceptable up to now only in small dose, in short-story form, as in Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” or John D. MacDonald’s “The Hangover,” to name a treasured few. As far as I know, though, Joseph Heller is the first major American writer to deal with unrelieved misery at novel length. Even more rashly, he leaves his major character, Slocum, essentially unchanged at the end.
Kurt Vonnegut’s review of Something Happened by Joseph Heller
One almost wishes to say to an author like Hemingway, “You have no duty, no responsibility. Literature, in a political sense, is not in the least important. When the sword is drawn it is mightier than the pen. Whatever you can do as a man, you can win no wars as an artist.”
Lionel Trilling
“Catch-22 is the debut of a
writer with merry gifts. Heller may yet become Gogol. But what makes one
hesitate to call his first novel great or even major is that he has only
grasped the inferior aspect of Hell. What is most unendurable is not the
military world of total frustration so much as the midnight frustration of the
half world, Baldwin’s other country, where a man may have time to hear his
soul, and time, go deaf, even be forced to contemplate himself as he becomes
deadened before his death. (Much as Hemingway may have been.) That is when one
becomes aware of the anguish, the existential angst, which wars enable
one to forget. It is that other death – without war – where one dies by a
failure of nerve, which opens the bloodiest vents of Hell And that is a novel
none of us has yet come back alive to write.”
Norman Mailer
“The imagination of possible destinies for friends and neighbors is a legitimate and sometimes irresistible pastime, but it is a wholly inappropriate concern when it comes to characters in a book. They exist not to enact a life but to help realize a form; they exist in and for a structure of meaning wherein character is merely one contributory item.” - Mailer (1972)
I can’t imagine Richard Poirier (1925-2009) would have been greatly taken with fan fiction and headcanons.
We left the decision on the future of the United Kingdom with the same people who came up with Boaty McBoatface.
Monday we will be celebrating the 240th anniversary of the Amexit.
I’d hate to be a party pooper, but as a Native woman, this all makes me seriously uncomfortable.
If the Hogwarts mascots were a lion, a snake, a badger, and a raven, all real animals, why do these new ones have to be religious creatures? Also, the Hogwarts houses all had fanciful made up names but these are legitimate names of creatures Indigenous peoples believed in. Doesn’t that seem a little ethnocentric to anyone?
And the whole “indigenous magic but i can’t say which tribe” bullshit? Seriously? No, it’s not like we aren’t all thrown into a cultural stereotype by white people all the damn time.
So glad I never got into Harry Potter, or this could have been heartbreaking.
If you ever wondered what cultural appropriation looks like, it looks kinda like this.
I don’t have any energy left to rant more about this entire shitbundle of “no, leave your hands outta my culture” that is Rowling’s new venture. So I’ll just second what other Native folks are saying.
(Source: BuzzFeed)
Waiting for the Barbarians
by Constantine P. Cavafy (trans. Richard Lattimore)
Why are we all assembled and waiting in the market place?
It is the barbarians; they will be here today.
Why is there nothing being done in the senate house?
Why are the senators in session but are not passing laws?
Because the barbarians are coming today.
Why should the senators make laws any more?
The barbarians will make the laws when they get here.
Why has our emperor got up so early
and sits there at the biggest gate of the city
high on his throne, in state, and with his crown on?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and the emperor is waiting to receive them
and their general. And he has even made ready
a parchment to present them, and thereon
he has written many names and many titles.
Why have our two consuls and our praetors
Come out today in their red embroidered togas?
Why have they put on their bracelets with all those
amethysts
and rings shining with the glitter of emeralds?
Why will they carry their precious staves today
which are decorated with figures of gold and silver?
Because the barbarians are coming today
And things like that impress the barbarians.
Why do our good orators not put in any appearance
and make public speeches, and do what they generally do?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and they get bored with eloquent public speeches.
Why is everybody beginning to be so uneasy?
Why so disordered? (See how grave all the faces have
become!) Why do the streets and the squares empty so
quickly,
and they are all anxiously going home to their houses?
Because it is night, and the barbarians have not got here,
and some people have come in from the frontier
and say that there aren’t any more barbarians.
What are we going to do now without the barbarians?
In a way, those people were a solution.
