Patrick Gwillim-Thomas > Recent Status Updates

Ah the ‘have your character crash down their apartment stairs due to an bad hookup, receive bodily trauma, and then be forced to call their real love interest to help’ plot development famous from Little Life. Enjoying the book so far!

It’s same quality so far. I lost the plot a bit for the first 100 pages just stakes got both too big and too messy and too many characters (which is the appeal don’t get me wrong), but feel a bit more in control now. I doubt we will get a return to ‘the grind’ of lit-rpg anytime soon though. We are in the late marvel stage of the series.

I am in Chicago and it’s February. Both also true in the world of this book. Truly a fated meeting

I really hope these moral conundrums don’t simplify as the series goes on

My new sex book for when I finish ‘want.’ I feel like I’ve already got all the argument from the intro; it’s a psychoanalytic standard I pick up from academic osmosis. The writing is good so even if it doesn’t develop I’ll enjoy the anecdotes.

Can’t believe this book isn’t more recommended

His earnest belief in the existence of global periods as having a clear identity gives time this great sense of thickness which I have generally strayed from as an area scholar. Also his claim that some cultural eras are genuinely more transformative and better for progressive politics than others is refreshingly discriminating. Things could have been better and these possibly-better visions (Beatles) are recycled.

Onto lecture 2

Never thought of digital nomad/network state/sovereign individual/ bog standard neoliberal there-is-no-society as per Silicon Valley as a Cold War hangup. But now he’s pointed it out, and linked it with the apple ad, I cannot unsee it. The specter of USSR bureaucracy haunts Silicon Valley and its faint terrestrial imprint is Europe.

Making me want to write again. Also finding I grasp his style better than I did when I read him in a blur of books as a teen

Okay yeah some interesting stuff on Marx still caring about Signifier-Signified distinctions when it comes to his critique of Philosophy and his critique of class (consciousness). Interesting for the Marx scholars out there but Karatani’s new analysis of value form has remained stagnant for 30 pages, he’s just proving it ‘solves’ Marx in more elaborate ways.

The theory on surplus value in industrial capital was easy to understand but a bit dissatisfying because of it. It still seems to be about the coercion and undervaluing of labor power, it just shifts that from the fight over the wage to the ‘creation of a lag between labor exchange and product exchange.’ Feels like much of a muchness.

Claiming that image is primary to body and sensation is bold but overall convincing if you redefine sensation as only an internal thing that stops us from focusing on mind-world conjunctions (images). The account of memory is good, definitely agree that memory is more about a hallucination that produces duration (a sense of depth) in perception (synthesis). Uncertain if this is alike to intellectual labor.

Brilliant