with feeling

We begin again.

I was going to buy a nice theme for this blog, but I couldn't find any nicer than the one it already has. By which I mean that the ones I looked at were really ugly & dated, not that I particularly like this one. I'll try to there is no try there is only do come up with a nice header, one day soon.

I'm (sort of) in a better place than I was last time I posted. My internet connection was out for so long, and with so little activity on the part of my telecom provider (which is currently filing for bankruptcy, & I'm sure pensions and severance packages for their workers will be the first thing the court sorts out) that I ended up getting the Public Utilities Commission involved. Despite being only one family in a rural context (instead of a whole block or street in a more populous setting), we ended up with a bulldog of a representative who forced Windstream to install a magic "bandwidth magnifier." You think I'm kidding, but nobody had heard of the thing, including the tech people they sent repeatedly to my house, but my download speed went from 3 Mbps to 10 Mbps. Which probably seems pretty mediocre to people in actually developed countries like Latvia and Kenya, but I live in the dissipated banana republic known as Real America™️, so it's Christmas every day now. I was able to watch the last episode of Inside No. 9 Season 4 (I await Season 5 on tenterhooks)! And Vera! And the latest season of Stranger Things! I stopped watching all my formerly-favorite trashy British reality tv shows, though (my most favorite was Can't Pay We'll Take It Away, but I watched a lot of those terrible neighbor/bad landlord shows too), because it began slowly to occur to me that they were extremely racist & classist and that the British persons they depicted being evicted and shamed weren't actually fictional characters despite having charming accents. Well, you win some you lose some. Apologies to all nonfictional inhabitants of the British Isles. (Can someone tell me why dumb British people hate Polish people? I mean: They're white. Can you imagine how excited Donald Trump would be if a bunch of white Polish people wanted to immigrate to the US? I also saw a handsome-looking older male Brexit protestor holding a sign that said 'POLISH SCUM GO HOME' in a Guardian article photo. Are Polish persons not 'home' everywhere, in Europe? Much like British persons? I find this confusing.)

My internet connection is still kind of finicky, I should say; when it works, I get decently normal speeds. But the "working" part is still an issue — there are continuing weather-related issues, heavy rain kills it, the wiring still disconnects every time a drunk hillbilly pisses off his front porch into the wind, etc. But it could be, and has been, worse. I try to be grateful. Seriously!

Also, I paid off all my credit cards. All of the motherfuckers. All the way down to $0. At one point one of the creditholding banks sent me a (paper!) letter alerting me that a larger-than-usual balance payment had been made in my name, and was I aware of it, and was it me. Holy shit. It was at that specific moment that I developed an intense, unflagging, harder-than-average hateboner for the United States' consumer debt-based economic pyramid scheme, where my impulse purchases (and other, more empathy-deserving people's desperate-to-survive necessity purchases) are translated into the bingo chips international finance uses to gamble with. Not that I'm bitter. But. I'm bitter.

I got a part-time job at a local health-food store to pay off my debts, like a former child-genius character in a crappy Japanese slice-of-life comic (to be fair, Japanese characters usually get jobs in all-nite convenience stores & meet the quirky loves of their lives, but all my local convenience stores are fully-staffed and also I'm beginning to feel like the love of my life is my mattress) (not in a dirty way; in a sleepy way) (more on this later). I'd never worked retail before & was embarrassed to start, but lol a hoe gotta make sum $$$. It actually wasn't bad. I had a pretty nice time working four days a week in a mostly-undemanding context, & when I vacated the job so its former occupant could return from maternity leave I was sad to once again have to purchase facial unguents and glass bottles of magnesium taurate on my own initiative. I'm not sure where else I can get paid for doing basically nothing but putting stuff on a limited number of offbeat store shelves & helping old people and illiterate hipsters pick out supplement regimes that are unlikely to be effective, but I intend to look into it.

On the other hand, I recently had to have a (major chewing!) tooth extracted because of a failed, massively-abscessed root canal (still on antibiotics for it) (the tooth cost almost $3000 out-of-pocket to root canal 7 years ago) & I also recently discovered that my crippling, life-ruining, SSRI-resistant "clinical depression" was actually "severe iron deficiency anemia." My iron levels are less than half what they're supposed to be. Which is not to say that one can't be both depressed and iron deficient, or that one thing is a 'real' problem and the other isn't, but. When one's cells are literally suffocating, lying in bed all day sleeping looks less like an emotional pathology and more like a strategy for survival. I'm hoping the iron pills work well for me, and I don't have to have any infusions. I don't like infusions. Not even in my teacups.

Also, my aunt that unexpectedly died of surprise cancer a few posts down? Her husband also died, about three months ago, of incurable surprise melanoma. Now I really have no white family to speak of. One good uncle ensconced in Texas, but we only manage to see him about once every three to five years. The rest of them are reliable racist Trump voters and good racist Christians, and if I saw the lot of them set ablaze I wouldn't waste the piss to put them out. That sounds (and is) harsh, but you don't know my family. Thank your stars.

Hmmm, I do have some book reviews! I think my next post (don't laugh) is gonna be about my computer, though, because I've also experienced an important life journey there, too.

I also also have some new Clarke-related podcasts to listen to, unexpectedly.
Good times online.

(Why does everything I type look chilly and sarcastic? Does that ↑ look chilly and sarcastic to you, or is it just my bodyful of slowly-dying cells making me think that?)

i can't think of a cute title

Oh, Reader. I've had a time (another one). My family is doing much better! My mother was given ten days' worth of some kind of intravenous super-antibiotic sent to an area hospital through a high-speed space tube from the future & got all the way better (much, much better than she's been in years), and then it turned out my dad had come down with a clutch of bad-but-not-as-bad-as-we-thought syndromes — hyperthyroidism, early-stage high blood pressure, and a cranial nerve palsy partially caused by a novel vein structure in his brain (?). Not completely sure about that last one, I was pretty tired when the doctor was trying to explain it to me. He has to take medicine every day and wear special nerd glasses, but otherwise there's no good reason he won't live to be 128. Thank you for your support.

The real obstacle to a state of current & continuing bliss on my part is that my phone and internet services keep going out. First, they both died very romantically together. For two weeks. Then the phone came back and the internet slowed to a mid-90s dialup crawl barely suitable for checking email. Now the DSL has come back at normal pissy strength, and the landlines are unusable. We've made multiple calls and had multiple friendly servicepersons come out and look at the lines, but nothing's helped. Our latest ticket has been guaranteed to be resolved by the phone company by August 10 (of 2023, one imagines). I cannot help but believe this is some kind of CONSPIRACY by "THE GOVERNMENT" to SILENCE ME for my criticisms of VARIOUS DEEP STATE ACTORS TO BE NAMED LATER and THE INTERNATIONAL LINUX CONSORTIUM. Oh, wait, I didn't PUBLISH the LINUX POST yet. THAT MEANS THEY CAN READ MY MIND!!!!!!

Another important consideration re: my posting habits is that I need a new hobby because I have to stay home in order to save money. Forever, probably. In the March/April fiscal frame, I (more or less) had to buy a new computer & pay for my cat to have her teeth pulled... but I also bought a new iPod, a USB SuperDrive, a new Wacom tablet, a massive area rug for my bedroom floor, a taller desk, a bunch of expensive makeup shit including a $70 blush brush, some whimsicle Etsy decor, and $150 dyejob that completely washed out in eleven days. I also ate at least one meal at a restaurant every single day in the months of May and June. I took money out of my savings account to buy stupid stuff. (I also got fatter.) I don't have any idea what I was thinking, except that I apparently believed I could hasten the advent of the Apocalypse if I spent enough money. If only, Reader.

So I will be amusing myself, in the house, alone, for the foreseeable future. That means either levels of masturbation consistent with a regular presence in /pol/, or keeping up the blog. I know I keep saying that I'm going to start posting more any time now, but stuff was/is always happening to me that's out of my control and has traditionally kept me away from my computer — and when I have had free time I wanted to exist in a pure state, totally vacant of all thought (on my part). That ends immediately, if I want to pay off my Sephora card (and my Lowe's card) (and put money in my savings account again). 😿

This is a list of all the posts I have in draft stage right now:

• I just read an enraging article about "cultural appropriation" in Tablet magazine that has left me yearning to create new adjectives to describe how stupid it is
• When white people write something critical of a "culture of victimization," they are about to show their asses to the entire solar system
• I also just read a sinister pro-Brexit (?) essay published by improbably-named British author Paul Kingsnorth in The Guardian in 2017. Seriously, this is one of the worst articles I've ever read in my life, mostly because it's proximate to many things I believe myself. I'm trying to triangulate a response that will help me clarify my own thoughts and find a nice tree to climb the man is insane
• Comically overpriced skincare
• Linux for the normie-adjacent + why I went back to Apple even though it's still annoying
• The Séance by John Harwood vs. Advent by James Treadwell
• A deconstruction(ish) of Robert Aickman's short story The Swords, plus bonus content
• I still have 18-month-old politics posts written that I've never published because I'm waiting on my own slow ass to pick through my millions of stateless links and find sourcing for my claims
• There are literally thousands of links
• Spread out over multiple services
• I'm not kidding

 We'll see which of them I get to first.

Oh! Also, I changed my layout. I found some instructions about how to unfold excerpted posts (although it doesn't cover other template formats, so I'm stuck with this sort of basic one for now), and I copied & pasted it, and now Sea Rabbits exists in like mid-2015 instead of LiveJournal purgatory. Also I changed my Blogger profile a little. I'll find or buy a new header soon. With a rabbit on it. I like rabbits.

ETA: Fixed a link & went back to my old userphoto because Blogger does something terrible to userphotos and that's the only one that still looks okay post-terribleness.

begin again

My mama is in the hospital battling MRSA-complicated pneumonia for the third time in six months; my dad was recently diagnosed with ocular sarcoidosis (probably, we don't know for sure) (other, much worse things were excluded, so it's either ocular sarcoidosis or "a weird, scary, specific thing your body does that doctors can't explain"). Your continued patience is appreciated.

I'm sad I blogged about Jordan Peterson. I would delete the post, if I deleted posts. Peterson's "ideas" and sniveling sympathy for wounded entitlement are so unoriginal as to border upon the cliché; even his name sounds like it came out of an airport paperback. I don't want to get that on me. Watching ostensibly sane adults line up four abreast to excuse the malignancy of this prick, who's kept up nights by visions of feminists & transpeople stealing the magic beans of self-actualization from innocent, kingly North American bigots — just in case it turns out he goes Mainstream — is nearly as excruciating as looking at Cletus Safari photojournamalisms of rusted-out, abandoned steelworks whose blank-eyed degenerate gaze is meant to indict anyone who enjoys flavored coffee. & as though finding yourself at a cultural or economic disadvantage is a quality reason invest in a worldview informed by irrational prejudice, right? This is of course why we all excuse the anti-American animus that exists in Middle Eastern & South American countries that have been excoriated by acts of enlightened Western humanitarian warfare haha just kidding. Also, I initially thought Peterson was LARPing Joseph Campbell for an audience too vapid to read even works of popular academic criticism, but it turns out Joseph Campbell was also an evil racist anti-Semitic prick whose own patriarchate sympathies were only tempered by his belief in the Sacred Feminine. Fuck him too.

It isn't fair for Jordan Peterson to think he has the right to write the story of my (or anyone's) life based on notes he took while observing reading someone's observations of lobsters, or creating psychomaps of fairytales (which are themselves a fallen form of art, irreparably tampered with by paternalistic capitalists who altered their form and function). The fact that some people think he might have a point goes farther than any amount of evo-psych ouija-board "science" to suggest that the Enlightenment's primary achievement was aiding monkeys to understand how important it is to comb their hair. (Or hide it under a powdered wig.)

Tomorrow night I'll be back with a post that has nothing whatever to do with goddamned Jordan Peterson.

of things unknown (but longed for still)

EDIT: Fixed a duplicated link & added a new Jordan Peterson fandom article. Because who doesn't want to read more things about Jordan Peterson's Svengaliesqe hold on White North America's precious reserve of pathetic male morons?

I made a new layout! Sort of! I bought a background at CreativeMarket & stuck a rabbit on it in PS — but Blogger destroyed its children's-book majesty by reducing its resolution, and now it looks like a bunch of wavy blobs on a fuzzy dark blue background. Obviously Blogger is trying to make me give up my love affair with the elderly LJ-style old-timey c. 2008 layouts and choose one of the new ones. YOU'RE GOING TO HAVE TO TRY HARDER THAN THAT, BLOGGER.

Actually, no it isn't. I'll pick one of the new ones later. I tried them a few months ago & thought they were fine, but also felt they encouraged a surfeit of image posts. Maybe I can make something work for my hectic "once every eighteen months" posting schedule.

I was going to write about Jordan Peterson, last night. Does anybody need me to write about Jordan Peterson? Everybody's writing about Jordan Peterson. He's a brainless prick who makes millions of dollars every year off other, even more brainless pricks. Peterson hates transpeople. He seems suspiciously jealous of housewives. His primary contributions to the Principles of Western Thought are: 1.) women are best served by being receptacles for men's penises and feelings, and 2.) (white) men built the world and deserve to be the exclusive beneficiaries of its wealth & wonders. I think those are very odd concepts to carry into the marketplace: "Hey, gals, queers, and brown people, why not participate in your own oppression? Things would go so much more smoothly that way! Everyone would be so much happier! Especially straight white men, who of course are the only group that in congregation amount to "everybody.'" Then again, I don't make $100K a month in donations from butthurt social media trolls who yearn for the state of holy matrimony so they can have someone to officially oppress, so maybe no one should listen to me.

The thing that really bothers me about Jordan Peterson — aside from the fact that he lives at the top of the slipperiest slope in the Whole Universe, at the bottom of which lies Death — is that he doesn't seem to have any command of the material he's claimed authority over, and nobody cares. He's like the Dan Brown of mythography. He's much, much worse than Dan Brown, actually, who embodied the sacred blood of the Living Lord in the person of a female cryptographer. That's not nothing. That's letting your little light shine, is what that is. I apologize to Dan Brown (although the attempt to use the female body as the unsullied seat of holiness is neither a feminist nor a novel practice; but I really do appreciate the effort). Peterson despises "postmodernism," and blames it for unlawfully shaking the monkeytree of white male privilege — but postmodernist deconstruction is the only lens through which his viciously absurd characterizations of world myth could actually work. "Superordinate" mythological artifacts, bro? Where the fuck did they come from?

Peterson thinks "chaos" is female, and that order & hierarchy are male. What the fuck does that even mean? When he refers to some property or group of properties as "chaos," does it mean "that abundance of formless biological constituents from which life emerges, in the womb and in the wild"? Or does he mean "feminists holding signs and shouting at me"? I think that distinction could be important. I also have a problem understanding how men can qualify as agents of order when Peterson also believes they have to be coaxed out of committing violence by having continual legal access to women's slimy untrustworthy vaginas at all times. Despite their innate competence and command of order, apparently, men are not fully in control of their thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. They are, you might say, not as fully human as women, whose natural impulse is to tame our innate chaos and become silent supportive infant-fondling agreeable housewives. Now, I’m no professor, but even in its deformed native context that shit looks like it’s exactly ass-backwards.

It’s magical thinking of the most objectionably fanfictional order to suggest that any group of people embody chaos as a function of biology, of course, but if we’ve absolutely got to do it, the only choice for the job is men. Women’s bodies operate like clockwork. We are attuned to the moon and the tides. When we’re healthy, we work as well as a calendar — a decaying and artificial construct men devised to count the days we mark naturally with our bodies. Our wombs are advanced ecosystems that are so stable they can (and do) grow people. Men, on the other hand, are an ad hoc arrangement of hormones and impulses; there's no male birth control available because male bodies don't operate in regular, predictable cycles. Men are agents of violence and destruction. Men are incapable of avoiding physical harm even when they want to; their protuberant genitalia damage vaginas even during consensual sex. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Jordan Peterson.

I'm in my feelings, a little. I don't actually think men are innately chaotic, of course. I don't think women are sacred microcosms of the planet. I don't think men and women are even fundamentally (or practically) different, to be honest. I do think that if enough men insist on making women their enemies, we will have no choice but to destroy them. 😘

Here are some other people who have written about Jordan Peterson, professionally and/or humorously:

• The Intellectual We Deserve @ Current Affairs, Nathan J. Robinson
• Current Affairs’ Comparative Mythology Exam @ Current Affairs, Lyta Gold (fave)
• Is Jordan Peterson The Stupid Man’s Smart Person? @ Maclean's, Tabatha Southey
• Jordan Peterson, the obscure Canadian psychologist turned right-wing celebrity, explained @ Vox, Zack Beauchamp
• Jordan Peterson, Custodian of the Patriarchy @ The NYT, Nellie Bowles
• Wonksplainer: Who Is Jordan Peterson And Why Is He The Worst? @ Wonkette, Robyn Pennacchia (h/t BBB)
• Jordan Peterson Somehow Worse Today Than Yesterday @ Wonkette, Robyn Pennacchia (h/t BBB)
• Jordan Peterson & Fascist Mysticism @ NYR Daily, Pankaj Mishra
• Reconsider the Lobster @ The Times Literary Supplement, Kate Manne
• The religious hunger that drives Jordan Peterson’s fandom @ Vox, Tara Isabella Burton (ETA)
• Two Ways Of Responding To Conservatives @ Current Affairs, Nathan J. Robinson (ETA)
• Jordan Peterson’s Flimsy Philosophy of Life @ Psychology Today, Paul Thagard (ETA)

& here are a couple of Crooked Timber posts (one of which links to Beauchamp's Vox article, and maybe also to Bowles's piece in the NYT, I can't remember). Crooked Timber is great, actually. Lots of straight white men there. Probably hardly any of them are even rapists.

call when you want, but there's no one home (moron redux)

Aaaaand... did you see this incredibly dumb thing Dave Chappelle said a couple of days ago?

Jesus Christ, what a dumbass. How, exactly, does Dave Chappelle know the precise length of time Abby Schachner stayed on the phone with the large orange pervert? Was it a conference call? Is he judging her by the length of time he stays on the phone with unprosecuted masturbating sex-offenders? Perhaps, during the incident, Schachner thought the big orange comedian — with whom she believed she might be working, like, professionally — had just gotten into the house after a nice long normal relaxing workout, and hung up as soon as she discerned the tell-tale fapping noise of fingers on foreskin amidst all the gasping and wheezing? And how, in any case, is this a question of personal responsibility on the part of the victim? Who the fuck is this idiot, Paul Ryan? How does Dave Chappelle manage, with such resolution, to avoid drawing a line between "a woman, as an eternally-potential victim of sexual assault, has a responsibility to mitigate her exposure to predators" and "a black American, as an historically-persecuted minority, has a responsibility to mitigate their resemblance to the sort of person a police officer might feel compelled to murder"? I feel as though it might be just a simple failure of empathy: "racist law enforcement officials" is an oppressive group to which Dave Chappelle decisively does not belong, but "diseased male assholes who regard women as fuckholes with whom they are perpetually at war" is a label that might fit a little more comfortably.

Women are criticized for believing that all men are potential rapists, and then also criticized for not accepting the hard, obvious fact that all men are potential rapists. We're evil, hysterical basilisks until the exact moment we are required to become innately defenseless weaklings so their alibis will stand up in court. Get fucked, Dave Chappelle.

P.S. — I wonder if Chappelle has ever met Andrew Sullivan? Sully has some very interesting made-up ideas about hormones that he might find very compelling.

P.P.S — I don't expect comedians to be inoffensive, of course. Nor to I expect comedians, or indeed humans of any variety, to agree with all my political positions. I do expect adults of all professions to be able to prosecute a complete thought, though. I also generally prefer that a professional comedian at least make visible efforts in the direction of regurgitating actual jokes when on stage. If I wanted to be pointlessly offended, I would patronize an "offendian."

the art of war

My duskglass.net strategy approaches the target from two different vantage points. First, I will examine the novel's language and culture using a critical method based in whatever I am thinking about at the time. Then, I will identify other manifestations of Uskglass-like characters in books that are not Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. Also, there's a trebuchet (no there isn't).

The Uskglass parts aren't as hard as the other stuff; I think Clarke's character is such a deep-myth relic that other interpretations of it are relatively common. Uskglass has some direct (that Wikipedia image is an abomination) precursors (that Wikipedia image is also an abomination) in traditional British literature, but I'm currently pursuing antecedents in other cultures — early work has indicated possible involvement by Classical mythology, and maybe even some shady Yahweh influences. These parts are not only less than but also much different from the sum of their accumulation, of course. The transmitted object is not the clean, stable lines of some hypothetical story-symbol, but an atmosphere of mystery. Eventually the mystery usurps, and then erases, whatever was intended to be signified in the first place — and then the story itself becomes an expression of unnameable mystery. Nobody cares about that kind of thing but me, probably; I don't mind. I'm not working for tips. Vague antiquities aside, one of my favorite semi-Uskglasses appears in a recent YA novel called Archivist Wasp, in the person of a seductively nameless ghost who severs the novel's protagonist from the narrative of her own existence and initiates her transformation into the World Savior. Look at this:

The ghost was sitting in her only chair, surrounded by mismatched stacks of paper in various degrees of fire-damage, water-damage, unidentifiable staining, mildew, and general dissolution. It appeared to be reading her field notes.
“Get your boots off my table,” she snapped, and did not quite squirm under the look it fixed her with, or under the ensuing silence as it went back to reading.
Force of habit, she found herself studying it. It was all she could do not to pull out her notebook and start sketching it on the spot. Its clothing was basic and dark, something like a uniform but not one she recognized from any ghost she’d seen before. The gun and sword were in its belt. The ghost turned pages with a trained precision, a spring-loaded sort of predatory grace in which no fraction of any movement went wasted. Between its person and its clothing there was no color to it anywhere; it was all pale and dark, with those gray eyes. Its face was sharp, guarded, possessed of an icy and immaculate calm. Its posture was miles better than hers. It hadn’t moved its boots.
Usually Wasp didn’t find silences awkward and felt no need to fill them with pointless chatter, but this, this was unendurable.
“I didn’t know you could read,” she said.

And:

The ghost cut its eyes at her, pure scorn. “I see they were mistaken.”
It dropped a mocking little bow before her and walked out, trailing what remaining bonds of salt and blood she’d not yet broken, which it had snapped at whim.

I really, really, really like Archivist Wasp. I was going to review a series of YA novels last year, which I thought would be both fun and perhaps surprising. I find the Millennialesque reshuffling of gender norms inspiring, so why not their vision of the bildungsroman? Haha, what a gullible fool I am. After attempting to survive about twenty different popular books, chosen for their genre themes from Amazon, I begged off without even really starting. The worst, most conservative, heteronormative, claustrophobic, depressing, old-fashioned writing in the world is currently happening in the realm of YA novels. All the genre's heroines are exceptionally-ordinary self-inserts who are constrictingly adored by boring (and often violent) hunks. It's hunk after hunk after sad-manbaby 1950s beefcake hunk in the Young Adult World, all rendered in a primary-color paint-by-numbers palette that would strike a frustrated mid-century housewife as uninspiring. But Archivist Wasp isn't like that! Is, in fact, exactly not like that. (The ghost's lack of a gendered pronoun is suggestive, is what I'm telling you.) It was one of two YA novels published in the last 30 years by someone not named Ursula K. Le Guin that didn't make me want to kill myself. I highly recommend it, both for the Uskglass mirror-content and for itself. Best DRM-free $10 you'll ever spend. I hope there's a sequel. (That's a joke.) (Most YA novels are half-a-book's worth of content spread out into 34876 commemorative volumes.) (I would indeed be very happy to read Archivist Wasp: The Second, however.)

Well. I've also been doing a lot of reading, for the last couple of years, that pertains (in my imagination, at least) to JS&MN's literary contexts. Probably my most favorite of the contexts are written by Robert Aickman, who until very recently I believed to be a lesbian operating under a pseudonym. Aickman was not a lesbian, it turns out, but rather a very large, fluffy British cat that, in the 1950s and 60s, gained access to, and somehow learned to operate, a typewriter. I've read nearly everything Aickman ever published; I had to import hard copies of The Late Breakfasters (favorite) and The Model (not a favorite), but I read those, too. The Late Breakfasters is much different than the rest of Aickman's work, most of which he self-identified as "strange stories" because of some German mood-word that the late Mark Fisher was also interested in, and which I don't understand at all but will try to deal with later. Breakfasters has some weird-fiction attributes in common with the rest of Aickman's canon, but I believe it's primarily intended to be a social satire (?). Like Animal Farm, maybe (?), but with people. People Farm? Maybe. It's full of political and cultural details I don't get, or even understand how to unpack, but which Aickman presents in a way that makes them seem both ludicrous and performative. So... satire, right? Who knows. I identified hard with the novel's protagonist, Griselda. I consider that my life has mostly been an attenuated escape from the Geoffrey Kynastons of the world, and a simultaneous, resolute flight toward Louise. Although, unlike Griselda, I was never privileged to actually fuck Louise; I've only ever read about her in books. Still, it's maddening to imagine that she exists in the world somewhere, and I can't get to her. I'm going to keep looking. (I do realize.)

Despite the buildup, this excerpt isn't from The Late Breakfasters. I have discovered that it's hard to excerpt the book and have it look suitably meaningful, because the story is so involved with its own conditions and symbols. This is from "Bind Your Hair," a very strange story that appeared in Dark Entries:

The next morning Clarinda had to admit to herself that she was very depressed. As she lay in bed watching wisps of late-autumn fog drift and swirl past her window, she felt that inside the house was a warm and cosy emptiness in which she was about to be lost. She saw herself, her real self, for ever suspended in blackness, howling in the lonely dark, miserable and unheard; while her other, outer self went smiling through an endless purposeless routine of love for and compliance with a family and a community of friends which, however excellent, were exceedingly unlike her, in some way that she did not fully understand.

omg it me

More when I find it.

it felt good to be out of the rain

Well, I think we can all agree that if there's one thing I'm good at, it's not posting on this blog. My last six months have been filled with the typical medieval bestiary of Debbie Downer life events — many of which have been related to severe health crises, for both myself and others — that I always feel slightly guilty writing about online, as if I'm attempting to elicit the sympathy of strangers to collect donations for a shady religious charity. There is definitely something coercive about saying, I or someone I love almost died! to people who don't know you in person. I don't know why! But it always makes me feel uncomfortable when I read other people's explanations of dodged fatality. I empathize with people who have gone through awful things, obviously, but I suppose I have somehow acquired a puritanical dedication to suffering in silence myself. Maybe it's all those English fantasy novels. Still: I got better! My mother got better! My father got better! Then my mother got better again! We're all better. (Mostly.) (92%) We are as well as modern medicine can make a person, which is good enough to write blog posts with.

I've already written a post about "politics," but it turned out to be so full of poison and despair that I'm never going to let anyone see it. I'm currently taking it apart into two posts; one is about the failures of American cultural liberalism, and the other about well-off essay-writing white people who would like to reclassify poor white men as a minority group (when white people call for an 'end to identity politics' and they aren't being 100% disingenuous, this is what they're talking about). Writing about both of these things makes me angry, of course, but the "white people suddenly trying to invade the spaces to which minorities historically retreated for self-protection, because those minorities managed to make their own exclusion look like a fun party" part passeth all understanding. White people, what are you doing to us? What are you doing to yourselves?

Anyway. Since I've spent the last five-odd months sitting in hospitals and doctors' offices reading, with an increasing degree of incredulity, the articles in mildly-outdated American "news," "science," and "women's" magazines, I have prepared for you an overview of the intellectual landscape of the dying world of paper publishing. It's like the maps Tolkien put at the beginning of all of his Middle-earth novels, only pointless. This is a brief enumeration of some of my favorite topics, all of which were, are, and will be written about in the the most opaque, inhumane, and unimaginative ways possible:

• My Wife's Decent Salary Made My Penis Redundant
• Will You Get A Load Of All Of These Millennials Over Here
• Do You Remember That Time In The Recent Or Distant Past When Things Were Wonderful/Explicable
• Is The Entire Universe Going To Explode Next Year
• Impressionable Suburban Jamokes Are Frightened Of Various Mostly-Imaginary Threats, Here's Why You Should Worry Too
• Everything You Eat And Touch Is A Cancer IOU
• Will You Get A Load Of All Of These [Post-Millennial Generation Name] Over Here
• Have You Noticed That Some Emotionally-Crippled White Folks Act Like Assholes Online
• Look At Some Floodlit Photos Of Obnoxious Underweight Rich Famous People Who Are Promoting A Depressing Commercial Entertainment Product, They Are Such Adorable Nerds (Follow Them On Social)
• How To Dumb Down Your Feminism So It Doesn't Threaten Your Guy (He's An Hysterical Useless Baby That You Won't Ever Dump) (Not That We're Suggesting You Should Lol!!!)
• This Giant Faceless Tax-Evading Corporation Is Spearheading Symbolic Logo-Ridden Efforts To Combat Some Of The Starvation And Misery It Created (Here's How You Can Help) (Buy Stuff)
• Is It Okay If Fat People Exist
• This Repellant Irrational White Supremacist Fulfills Many Brainless People's Expectations About Conventional Physical Attractiveness: Does That Make Him/Her More Or Less Scary
• Could You Be Putting Even More Effort Into Your Pointless Job
• 10 Tips For Helping Women Shoulder Extra Cultural Burdens
• Cook All Your Own Food Which You Grew Yourself (In A Quirky Repurposed Pinterest Bucket)
• Let's Go Back To Training Men To Perform Outdated And Harmful Gender-Stereotyped Behaviors So Dumb Women Will Want To Fuck Them More
• Be Sure Your House Is Decorated Exactly Like All The Other Houses
• New Study Says Thumb Dexterity Is Down 12% Among Kindergarteners (Scientists Blame Recently-Discovered Undetectable Toxins) (The Word "Down" Is Defined Creatively)
• Pretending That Making Your Own Shampoo, Toothpaste, And Cosmetic Products Is A Fun And Necessary Activity
• Here Is A Fawning Interview With A Man Who Portrays That Character In A Popular Movie Or Television Show That Everyone Wants To Fuck
• Read An Over-Simplified Account Of The Isolation Of A Minor Neurotransmitter That Looks As If It Might Have Something To Do With Appetite Control (Will The Scientists Finally Give Us A Magic Diet Pill?) (No)
• Do These Difficult And Faddish Calisthenic Exercises So You Can Look Like A Photoshopped Celebrity In Your Swimsuit And Attract The Sexualized Beach Gaze Of Random Men
• How To Make Your Own Substandard Naked Feet Look Like An Extruded Plastic Nordstrom Mannequin's Pedal Appendages
• This Boring Well-Off White Couple's Desperate Expensive Quest To Breed Biological Children Will Make You Wonder How People This Stupid Were Able To Acquire That Much Disposable Income
• Acting Like The $350 Purse Is A Major Bargain Compared To The $7,438 Purse Which It Resembles (They Are Both Ugly)
• A Misinterpretation Of Poorly-Understood And Incomplete Scientific Data Suggests That Women Are Biologically Required To Pursue Cuddles, Babies, And Ice Cube-Sized Engagement Rings At The Expense Of Rational Thought
• This Plant-Related Superfood Has Been "Linked" To A "Reduction" In "Cancer Risk": 9 Unpalatable Smoothie Recipes Whose Greenness Conveys Awareness Of Global Injustice (Get A Transparent Travel Cup)
• We Rated 34 Brands Of Transparent Travel Cup And Will Coincidentally Recommend The One Sold By Our Biggest Ad Sponsor
• Profiling The Deeply Deranged Megalomaniacs Of Silicon Valley Who Are Titling At The Windmill Of Human Mortality (Like Alchemists, Only Dumber And Wearing Khakis)
• 10 Minutes Of Mindfulness A Week Will Literally Stop You From Ever Dying
• How To Tastefully Wear Your #NastyWoman T-shirt To Your Aggressively Soulless Corporate Workplace Without Annoying Any Important Men (Accessorize)
• Donald Trump: Is He Orange Satan, Or An Old Toddler? We Ask Poets, Chemical Engineers, And Your Mom

I left out all the articles I saw about Muslims, because I knew better than to read them.

I don't actually have the time to reply to comments at the moment, assuming there might be any, but I (probably) will soon. Also I have lots of things to do online before I can get back to writing mean words about fantasy novels. Speaking of which! I am currently working on the review of a couple of feminist fantasy novels written by men, as well as finishing Carolyne Larrington's King Arthur's Enchantresses. After that, it's Simon Schama & Mark Fisher. After that, who knows? 

Thank you for your continuing forbearance, Five People Who Sometimes Read My Blogger Blog!

ETA: I JUST DISCOVERED THAT I HAVEN'T GOT A FEMINISM TAG WTF FIXED

even the cheese has got holes in it

Well, I thought I published this, like, two months ago. Whoops! I am not very successful at blogging; I only remember that I even have a blog when I want to complain about something. Relatedly, I have turned off comments so kind-hearted motherfuckers won't waste valuable time trying to think of something to say in response to my banality. (Also, I now hate this aesthetic passionately, and assume that I was drunk when I devised it. I'll deal with it later.)

I fixed up my blog a little! It's now pink, and features a mildly vaginal repeating pattern of poppies and poppy buds. So, neither a sea nor any rabbits, but at least the interface is visually acceptable. I had to sound unplumbed depths of moral fortitude not to include Comic Sans in my selection of custom fonts, but I managed to avoid it in the end; perhaps the urge only becomes irresistible once you've gone through menopause. I'm finding Blogger really reminiscent of mid-00s LiveJournal, though, both structurally and usability-wise — and I haven't been able to get my footnotes to work. That's a dealbreaker. Mama gotta have the footnotes. I'll keep working on it.

I don't have much to share today. I intend to post a long-ish essay about politics soon, but it's not finished yet and working on it would require me to do some online link-mongering, and also it is a depressing subject generally, so I'm putting it off until the pain of keeping my mouth shut drives me to overcome my aversion to reality. Also I don't feel like digging out any proper book reviews tonight. (I'm starting to be dissatisfied with the cover collages I put on the posts, too, have to look into that.)

I have been reading, of course, because I am alive. I gave up on The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry a couple of hours ago (I was about halfway through), because it was joyless and adorable and felt as though it had been constructed out of a commercially-produced postmodern-fiction erector set. It wanted to be Borges Revival very, very badly, but of course the primary obstacle to being Borges Revival is the desire to be Borges Revival. Borges Revival is like an orgasm, or the return of Christ; the more you want it to happen, the farther away from you it slips. I don't want to talk about The Manual of Detection at all, in fact, because it was both inconsequential and annoying, but I'm finding it impossible to just quit the thing, so shit on it here I go:

The Manual of Detection, Jedediah Berry A pseudo-mystery novel that gave the impression it had been assembled by a committee of mediocre professors of English during a brainstorming session in a writers' workshop. At gunpoint. During one obnoxious interlude, for example, the hapless accidental-detective protagonist is forced to participate in a poker game convened in a dive called "The Forty Winks" (the entire novel is arranged around a theme of 'magical' 'dream' 'imagery') with a couple of preciously Dick Tracy-adjacent twin gangsters; instead of money, though, the characters play for the right to ask each other questions. Or, rather, for the right to participate in a complex hierarchical information-gathering exercise — which is, amazingly, even more nauseating in context — and as if that wasn't bad enough, it becomes clear a little later in the book that the entire episode was confabulated specifically so Author could arrange to say, "They would not have taken Moore to the Forty Winks: too many questions to answer there." Because pastiche lol. This is what I mean when I say I hate postmodern fiction. And also that the only thing self-consciously postmodern writers care about is making sure you know they know you know they know how smart they are. I can feel myself turning into David Brooks, here, I have to quit.

I should say, in the spirit of full disclosure, that The Manual of Detection wasn't exactly poorly-written, and it had some attractive-looking sentences lurking within its inventory of pointless narrative signifiers — but Berry's talent was overshadowed at all times by his interest in devising an inorganic textual object. I think that if he'd leaven the Pynchon simulation with a bit of naturalism, or even some actual fantasy, I could be motivated to complete some of his novels one day.

Man, I feel a lot better.

For a change of pace — and because I am warming up the Hammond organ for a return to the Susanna Clarke fandom — I'll be reviewing a few non-fiction books here on the blog: Simon Schama's Landscape & Memory, Mark Fisher's The Weird and the Eerie, and Carolyne Larrington's King Arthur's Enchantresses. They're all moderately(+/-) complex works of popular criticism, so I may write about each of them a chapter (or so) at a time to give myself a reference guide for the future.

I feel as though the poppies have somehow affected the tenor of this post.
Next time, then.