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PRIOR: "I look like a corpse. A corpsette. Oh my queen; you know you've hit rock-bottom when even drag is a drag."

Is this the greatest thing ever? Quite possibly. Yes!

PRIOR: "I look like a corpse. A corpsette. Oh my queen; you know you've hit rock-bottom when even drag is a drag."

Is this the greatest thing ever? Quite possibly. Yes!

Yum!

My essay on contemporary Pakistani literature as published in The Missing Slate:

http://themissingslate.com/2015/10/13...

An extended, maturer, better version published in 3:AM Magazine:

http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/in-sea...

Feedback appreciated!

Something I wrote for 3:AM Magazine on contemporary Pakistani literature, postcolonialism, and the nature of true art.

Feedback appreciated!

http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/in-sea...

"If meaning, the signified, was a passing product of words or signifiers, always shifting and unstable, part-present and part absent, how could there be any determinate truth or meaning at all? If reality was constructed by our discourse rather than reflected by it, how could we ever know reality itself, rather than merely knowing our own discourse? Was all talk just talk about our talk?"

"The whole point of reading, for a critic like Iser, is that it brings us into deeper self-consciousness, catalyzes a more critical view of our own identities. It is as though what we have been 'reading', in working our way through a book, is ourselves."

Two stories in, and I know I've hit gold with this book!

"In the early 1920s it was desperately unclear why English was worth studying at all; by the early 1930s it had become a question of why it was worth wasting your time on anything else. English was not only a subject worth studying, but the supremely civilizing pursuit, the spiritual essence of the social formation."

Hello Eagleton. We meet again.

"But the soul of others is darkness..."

"I've never been in love," the prince replied, quietly and gravely as before.

"I.... was happy in a different way."

The amount of misogyny in this one! Damn you Kazantzakis for ruining what should have been a rewarding read!

"But at times I was seized with compassion... A compassion not only for men but for all life which struggles, cries, weeps, hopes and does not perceive that everything is a phantasmagoria of nothingness. Compassion for the Greeks, and for the lignite mine, and for my unfinished manuscript of Buddha, for all those vain compositions of light and shade which suddenly disturb and contaminate the pure air."

Happy Birthday Kafka!

Ramadan Kareem Mubarak to all my Muslim friends on here! Stay blessed! <3

"The gods came down onto the naked bodies and the islands are set adrift, lost souls crowned with the tousled hair of palm trees in the wind."

Whoa, Camus! Whoa!

"Kant holds that each of us, while being a citizen of an empirically determinate civil order or political state, is also a citizen of a single world community - our attempt to realize on earth the idea of an ethical realm of ends in which all rational beings are accorded a dignity that is beyond price, and all the ends and maxims should harmonize in one systematic combination. This side of Kant's aspiration is...

"Ideas of reason generate a "dialectic" or "logic of illusion" because our faculty of reason has a tendency to treat the concepts it generates as if they provided cognitions of the objects that might be thought through them, even though sensible intuition of an object is an indispensable condition for any cognition, and ideas are such that no sensible intuition corresponding to them could ever be given in our...

Do I have any Madridistas among my GR friends? Or any culers? :D

"Kant's argument depends on taking seriously the idea that the subjective representations through which we acquire a perspectival awareness of the world are never more than seemings. They provide us with indispensable cognitive access to the objective world, but they themselves provide us with no sort of infallible knowledge of that world, nor do they even constitute part of that world."

"Empirically, space and time, and spatio-temporal objects in them, are real. They are not illusions; they are to be distinguished from what, empirically speaking, we call 'mere appearances' (dreams, hallucinations, mirages, and the like). Their empirical reality, however, does not consist in their being things existing in themselves, independently of the conditions under which we cognize them. It consists rather in..

"Before Copernicus, we thought that heavenly bodies moved but we earthly observers were at rest. Now we see that we observers too must be regarded as in motion. Analogously, before Kant we thought that our cognition depended on its objects; but now we must see that the objects we cognize must depend on our mode of cognizing of those objects."

According to Kant "even the unjust commands of a legitimate authority must be obeyed by its subjects (so long as these do not directly command the subject to do something that is in itself wrong or evil)."

But isn't obeying unjust commands and thus participating in the injustice wrong as well?

"He rose regularly at 5 a.m., having only a cup of tea and a pipe of tobacco for breakfast."

Parents lie. Having shitty eating habits can work out well for you! :P

A very happy International Women's Day to all the awesome ladies here on GR! <3

Ted Hughes is Sylvia Plath without the lyricism. He is equally insane, equally painful to read. Maybe even more.