tits andronicus

made an instagram for discussing sickness and disability on film. as if i needed more social media profiles to look after. excited about it as a little project though.

instagram.com/sick.cinema

so many poetry anthologies out there like the poetry pharmacy. poems to heal. poems to make you feel better. but im different. i personally would excel at putting together a book that would make you feel WORSE

very interesting to me that this summer we have Oppenheimer - big budget anti-nuclear film, making a record-breaking amount of money at the box office already for a number 2 opener, selling out images everywhere - and also that in Asteroid City we see nuclear tests happening in the background as a form of bleak humour - like, these characters are not going to be OK twenty years down the line. The film assumes we know how bad this is and lets us work it out ourselves... But it's still there. Made me pull a horrified face, like - oh god.

As nuclear treaties die and nuclear weapons proliferate I'm serious when I say that we do need more mass culture about how the bomb will kill us all. Keeping everyone fucking terrified of these things - reminding people that they exist and are terrifying weapons of mass death and genocide - is unironically a political good. How do we do this in a way that isn't exploitative? I don't know. There's been so much discussion of Oppenheimer not showing the Japanese and Korean dead, of it not showing the terrible effects on the native Los Alamos population or the population of the Pacific who were poisoned by nuclear testing. But I'm not sure it's better to introduce, say, a group of Japanese people just to watch them die in agony, especially as the film is about how disconnected people like Oppenheimer were from the mass death they caused. He can't even look at the photos. He's a coward. The film knows it. But it also enacts his looking away. For good and for ill. I don't know the answer! I'm not dismissing people who find it disgusting how it looks away! I'm also not dismissing people who would find the opposite exploitative and disgusting too!

an interesting response to it has been that we get anti-nuclear groups both praising the film and saying it doesn't go far enough to show the true horrors... We need everyone in the chain of command to remember that we need to keep these fuckers unexploded, untested, undeployed. Popular art and discourse can help with this. Is it an artist's responsibility? I don't know. If that's your chosen topic, maybe. How do we do it without exploiting the dead. Is a question you can ask.

today i went to a poetry workshop run by US poet CAConrad who didn't have us writing or anything but did give us some rituals to try out in our own time. they talked about this french surrealist poet i'd never heard of before called Robert Desnos. then i went to a bookshop I'd never visited before - Walden Books in Camden, it's basically somebody's house that's been turned into a secondhand bookshop - and among other things their very good and eclectic poetry section had a US edition of CAConrad'a Book of Frank, and a big English language edition of Robert Desnos that Arc Publications put out back in 2017. so now i have more poetry books.

always funny when internet discourse makes my personal mental illness worse

every photo my family sends me of poppy is more baby than the last one. how is it possible

AS IF an actor from the history boys walked into my library today while i was manning the security desk at the entrance to the building and gave me some severe fanfiction flashbacks as i gave him directions

yeah so antidepressants don't cure the ills of capitalism and modern society but my SNRI of choice does manage my OCD well enough that I'm no longer like. too anxious to eat or sleep or shower. pretty good actually

Not to blog too often about folk music literally nobody on this site cares about except for me but I’m having a great time with Jim Causley’s new album of Dartmoor songs. This one isn’t an old traditional song but was written by the 20th century Dartmoor singer Bob Cann, based on my googling the lyrics. Fascinated by how this one romanticises craftsmen and also talks about them living in total poverty…