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He Says It’s Like All My Birthdays Come At Once

@paperwisp

…by which I can see he means, precisely, that he feels he is going to die.
They/Them

wheres that one quote about the guy obsessively downloading media and staying up all night to do it and saying "its like all my birthdays have come at once" and its about like.. attachment in the digital age where archiving is easy as fuck. i havent given enough consideration nor read enough on the topic to have well formed opinions but the wording of it is so good it plays in my mind without warning

FOUND IT

"Experiments in attachment. My friend has just had his PC wired for broadband. I meet him in the cafe; he looks terrible - his face puffy and pale, his eyes bloodshot... He tells me he is now detained, night and day, in downloading every album he ever owned, lost, desired, or was casually intrigued by; he has now stopped even listening to them, and spends his time sleeplessly monitoring a progress bar... He says it's like all my birthdays have come at once, by which I can see he means, precisely, that he feels he is going to die."

—Don Paterson, The Blind Eye: A Book of Late Advice

writing tips

  1. cultivate the no-mind, a state of emptiness in which you can easily become a vessel for creative forces outside of your control or understanding. The Buddha nature is the first step to being a writer
  2. cultivate your own style by reading other people who do what you want to do and living eternally in their shadow. Your voice should be a totally unique imitation of people you will never measure up to
  3. you'd be surprised how far a solid pushup bra will get you. how do you think steven king got so big? honkers, baby
  4. anyone who edits your work is a parasite in your perfect body. You should make them roll around in shit like a dog for your approval
  5. they don't all have to be winners. Most writers never write anything good, and I'm told they live just fine; there's a sort of submissive dignity to it
  6. "write drunk, edit sober" is 20th century advice. Best practices in the 2020s include amphetamines. Crank, ice, what have you
  7. Don't write around the dialogue tags "said" and "asked". You will sound like a Hardy Boys novel the entire time. If you're doing a Hardy Boys novel ignore this advice and only this advice, as it would be a disaster to write a Hardy Boys novel without tweaking off your tits
  8. An important principle of ancient Greek drama was hubris - that humans' pride would leave them with no choice but to defy the will of the gods and be destroyed by their own actions. While obviously things have changed a lot in the last 2000 years, hubris is still an indispensable part of the writing process today. If you don't have hubris, cultivate it
  9. You're going to find money very difficult to come across, even in exchange for your best work. According to every expert in the field I've talked to, the solution to this is simple: destroy capitalism
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Its obvious to me when people who post about canaries in mines have never met a canary. Like yeah the miners had a special device to revive the canary because canaries are one of the most adorable creatures on the planet and they make adorable little chirping sounds and honestly probably loved the sounds of machinery and people talking so it was probably loud and friendly with the workers. Whatever though maybe meet a canary sometime and youd understand

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If you see this animal every day at work, and it sings to you during your hardest bouts of labor, you will be distraught if it dies. Even if you know this creature is meant to die in lieu of you, you still hear it when the labor is at its hardest and your muscles are struggling against the weight of your work. It is so small, smaller than your soot-stained hands and louder than the death that follows you. You dont want it to die. The same as a woman does not want her candle to run out ; she knows that is the point, its flame is meant to burn the wick and melt the wax ; but she is not indifferent to its wasting away. She may even save her favorite candle as not to burn it too quickly. Now imagine you are that woman, and there is a way to rebuild your favorite candle that you love the smell of and the way it flickers. Would she rather throw her candle out? Or would she rebuild it? That is a canary to these miners. Would you allow an animal to just die when it has been singing for you? It reminds you that it is alive, and you are too. Its stop of song signifies the lethal danger you are in. Why abandon it? Is the miners' love for a little bird really that surprising?

Why does this read as though written by a coal miner of the era in which a canary was needed.

Because time is an illusion and love is infinite

re: this post, would you perhaps be able to reword it? i understand the words you're using individually, and i think i might kind of get what you're trying to say, but it's just one very long sentence and so i'm having trouble parsing it! (wait--i just reread it. initial question canceled, mostly--now: what alternatives might we have available to us?) and what does this section: "it feels all too easy to jump from that to then just stymieing our ability to actually describe the textual violences necessary to the discursive construction of that normativity in the first place" mean, exactly? thank you as always for running this blog. :-)

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What I’m describing is a critical phenomenon wherein people will approach (usually canonical) horror texts which reify hegemony by ‘identifying’ with the monster who is generally figured in terms of alterity in some capacity; by extricating, for example, a queer narrative out of what is in fact a homophobic one, and treating this as something of a ‘reclamatory’ practice in which one ‘relates’ to that which the text figures as monstrous. The most common instance of this which I see is people’s discussion of Carmilla as an erotic lesbian romance; other examples include Dracula, or Frankenstein, or the socially currency invested in the idea of a ‘madwoman in the attic’ (ie. Jane Eyre).  

I don’t think this is like, a practice that we need to do away with entirely, lol – but I do think that a) there are marginalised writers + filmmakers who are making horror with actual teeth, with actual radical edge, and we don’t need to keep pretending like this approach of reclamation-through-identification with a monster in a v normative work is all we have available to us when politically subversive horror does very much exist, and b) this critical practice is often vvv limited in its discursive scope, and tends to lack the kind of materialist analysis that I would consider necessary in talking about literatures of alterity/marginality/violence.

When I talked about stymieing our ability to describe the textual violences necessary to the discursive constructions of that normativity in the first place, I meant that overfocusing on these texts as “reclaimed” articulations of an essentially queer (or otherwise ‘othered’) imaginary can inhibit our ability, as critics, to describe how those texts in fact do not think of their monstrous figures as worthy of a sympathetic or appreciative narrative. I mentioned Carmilla above – we can talk about Carmilla as erotically lesbian, sure, but how far down the line in talking about it as a Queer Narrative do we lose track of the fact that the text itself asserts the sexual norms of white Christian hegemony to necessarily succeed over the perversion of the corruptive, predatory lesbian, or as an Anglo-Irish work positing Carmilla as an Irish woman (and thus a contaminant threat to Anglo-Irish society)? At what point in adulating Dracula as articulating a particular form of queer, effeminate Jewishness destabilising and threatening Jonathan and Mina’s persistent heterosexuality do we lose track of Dracula as having grown out of the fear that the new waves of Jewish immigration in London’s East End were vampiric sources of contagion, or its possible relationship to the antisemitic smears that grew out of the Jack the Ripper murders? Or like, taking Bertha Mason (or ‘the madwoman in the attic,’ because truly, v few people using this phrase are actually thinking about Bertha Mason lol) as a kind of feminist paragon – at what point do we begin to overlook the fact that Jane Eyre is a v racist text?

These aren’t necessarily contradictory approaches – like, for example, you can talk about ‘identifying’ with Dracula as emblematic of British Jewish assimilation and the discontents thereof whilst also talking about Dracula as an antisemitic text, even if the analysis in the former isn’t especially coherent – but the focus of the ‘identification’ treatment is often incredibly limited in its scope, and those limitations can often be detrimental to one’s ability to talk frankly and honestly about what a text actually says and does. A very good example such limitations is that of Frankenstein; an identification with Frankenstein’s monster as an entrypoint for textual analysis obfuscates the way in which Frankenstein constructed a discursive template by which the ameliorationist argument against the immediate abolition of slavery could be argued for. (The linked post lays this out v clearly, but the cited source is Mary Mulvey’ Roberts’ ‘Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, and Slavery,’ in Dangerous Bodies: Historicising the Gothic Corporeal). What I basically mean is, when we talk about relating to, identifying with, ‘reclaiming’ the monster, we have to have a real grasp on what it is we’re trying to impose such a practice on, and what the actual substance of the source text has to say for itself. I’m not one for assuming a text as a body with a set of metaphysical properties that we as critics are tasked to find – I think the relationship between text and reader ought to be dialectical – but part of that dialectical process means situating the text in its material social context and responding appropriately.

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Chore Scorpion: I come from the toughest meanest place you can imagine. I want to be gentle, I want to die gently, but It seems that when life gets hard I have to get harder to match.

Building a bonfire. The photo did not have a photographer but had a patron: “There is something fascinating about the a structure designed with the intent to destroy itself. An interesting twist on “form follow function;” the architecture of imminent demise.”

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Giuseppe Penone, Albero porta—cedro (Door tree—Cedar) (2012) Original sapling exposed by carving away the log.