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finally some good fucking food

SCIENCE FICTION IS GOOD ACTUALLY

having a good time, a little less rigorous than i remember. unreflective use of the words 'modern', 'secondary nature'. a little all over the place in terms of feeling just like a series of thoughts without a building point. but, still good. really like the idea of hyperreality, about SF as a metatextual mesh w culture itself.

absolutely addicting, and real nabokov vibes but less icky.

patrilineal tracings of primate biologists feels a little suspect to me; like her configuration of the field of biology itself as reproducing a familial-esque patriarchical relation of father-children; i think that's the joke, that she's treating these human scientists with the flat presumptuousness with which scientists have historically traced out families of primates? but it's hard to tell how into it i am

finished P1 "Nature as a System of Production and Reproduction" and feeling that haraway is dense but not unclear! pleasant surprise. primatology as a troubled area that breaks the nature vs. civilization binary is so cool. love the revelation of the transition from a biology interested in personal development (controlling the individual) to one interested in systems development (population control)

butler was kinda just fucking around but haraway. is not

foucault has been by our side taking down freud and lacan and the fact that she turns to critique him herself is an actual plot twist in a non fiction book

also turns out gays love halloween because butler told us to

freud portion was easier to consume. i do love the take that homosexuality is as constructed as heterosexuality; excited to see where this takes her vis a vis organizing within feminist movements, and also queer ones. it's weird to see that revelation come about by extending freud, sort of subverting/re-utilizing him instead of rejecting him outright. hm.

glad i read foucault's history of sexuality first so i vaguely am following this work. there's something deliciously uncomfortable about butler building on foucault by saying here is no utopian escape from gender hegemony, deferring to subversion and play instead. using parody/play to denaturalize gender norms smacks of suvin's cognitive estrangement, too ... spicy

struggling to grasp the novel’s relation to eros. not super getting that the novel is a reality (happy ending) + fiction (lovers strife in book)+ reader-seeing-both triangulation, on how that feels at all like lover + beloved + distance? maybe the reader observing the distance and the distance itself are conflated here. is dramatic irony as delicious as love? i would hate for it to be as simple as that

the way carson talks about eros being a connective tension between the real and the ideal reminds me of how suvin conceives of SF being a connective tension between existing historical conditions and a utopian horizon. not sure if random pattern recognition or meaningful juxtaposition

im losing my fucking mind

did not very much find 'intricacy' chapter very compelling. i think the questions of like "why did god make nature so intricate and weird' just falls flat compared to previous chapters about the wonder/horror of nature being so intricate and weird, the striving to get to that wonder/horror. like the problem of evil, just a little old school.

really compelling how imperative knowledge is to seeing nature? god? the present? - anne dillard drops factoids, horrible, about insects and amoeba, etc. she names trees by their species. i think there's interesting play with the idea of estrangement here (probably suvin's fault) - this paradoxical way in which losing a since of the human scale by engaging nature is "anti-estranging" to ... reality? god?

essay on The Present is exciting stuff. i like the idea that consciousness facilitates observing the present and self-consciousness obliterates the senses. the artful connection of self-consciousness to non-innocence is good, too. it seems to live in a city (self-conscious in windows, other ppl) is to sacrifice the present/innocence

hey i'm trying to understand this book but i just don't have. the educational undergirding for it. reading is muddling the conception of the 'horizon' and 'novum' that i had before, which is probably good. there's a lot of nuances i'm absorbing though they make little impact. do understand delany's quibble about how suvin focuses on "comparison to the now" over "pointing to the future" and i think i agree with it?

trying to catch drops from a hose ...rough but good. i like his thoughts about meaning as context, and how science fiction troubles the potential of meanings in this way. liked thoughts about sf “thingifying” the metaphorical. not sure how much i find myth to be resonant

drinking from a hose here. world-reeling bombs in his notes like: the idea of a textus that each SF novel interacts with; the iteration and re-iteration of the basic idea that meaning is producted by sort of a recursive context, the idea itself transforming as he spells it out in weird little stories and in book excerpts and in straight prose. definitely floundering but having a grand old time !

y'all i'm so excited for the new hellboy movie

'about 5,750 words' is a very cool essay. i liked the take that content cannot be opposed to style, but 'the message is the meaning' as it were. the 'subjunctive case' of SF being a particular to the genre as opposed to fantasy and realistic fiction - the 'has not happened' (as opposed to 'could not have happened' and 'could have happened') is a very cool framework, esp. alongside suvin's 'horizon'

first essay - a bit (unromantically) interested in the economic forces that drive SF writing, maybe practical to the point of uninteresting ... i do think there’s indications of a point about fan interactions in comics, SF, etc as opposed to the protections of High Art (sf vs poetry is the thrust), but he just comes off a bit uncharitable to his own fans, too