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placeholder for J. Gordon Faylor's "Polastra Slicks"

Placeholder for "a lesson in bliss" by r McNaught

Freud part sucks and was literal torture, I skipped it

So far this is way, way more of a banger than I expected

This immediately feels rather goddamn strikingly like Invisible Committee But 1841, which is certainly praise for Balzac, despite being a blistering condemnation of very nearly every single other thing in existence.

I've grown quite a lot since I first read this and still consider it a fundamental and vital text to my understanding of what I'm doing and want to revisit it with the knowledge and experience I now have

a bit like having recorded all your conversations with the intention of going back to extract everything of significance

discovering that there was nothing of significance, flustered, you keep digging, constructing a labyrinth of insignificance

this guy ceaselessly talks as if culture or mythology doesn't exist and generally making claims he started the book by proving he knows better than to make them and it's pretty tiresome

On pg 32/33 Bern Porter proposes the concept of a high-viscosity liquid fidget spinner as apex stim toy (kept on bedside table) and I would be eager to see this realized

stand-in for "report of a surveyor" by john latham

It was a good thing that I raised egoistic masturbation to the dignity of a cult!

second book ive read (first being girard’s Things Hidden) that makes a great case that we are non-metaphorically in Hell

When there are no adequate words to formulate a problem, that means not only that the question is difficult and delicate, but that the reality struggling to come to adequate expression has not yet fully reached the light of day in the realm of a determinate culture.

stand-in book for paige k. bradley “drive it all over me”

pelagius eremita’s II books: first book is pure heat, book ii kinda awkward and totally thirsty, desperate, prayers to bug mary to bug jesus to bug your good angel so he shows up for you cuz you’re worried about something some dude maybe did

my reaction to this books train of thought is transitioning from 'ok i guess if youre approaching this suite of power imbalances with a very weird and rigid set of analytic concepts and a very specific cultural position then---' to 'what is actually happening? should i... not be reading this linearly?'

"wrongful power" is another term casually dropped that made me say "woah" out loud when i read it

these are like skyscraper-words with how much there is to unpack in them

hand on my heart: i am reading this with as open a mind as i can muster. i welcome it to convince me.

and towards that end: i really wish this had, like, any citations. i'm curious about the point it's making about abortion being a 'right to privacy' and wish it would elaborate.

these early identifications with "moral authority" bode, uh, poorly, though.

(stand in for "Kee MacFarlane" by Peter Sotos)

“Tabloids and lynch blogs thrive on finding the next victim to publicly shame—no surprise there. What’s interesting is how otherwise rational academics joined forces with them.”

(unmedicated reading going slow)

absolutely excellent, of obvious practical interest to everyone who took it upon themselves to actively censor andersson’s research. we’re blessed that he continued doing this vital work in the face of hypocritical and insincere outrage

profoundly depressing.
a completely accurate, ruthless, relentless, pitch-black criticism of human beings

need a breather maybe

kittler (and im sure others) exhaustively describe right art pulls from the military, but fend here is the first time i've really seen discussed what the military pulls from art... aside maybe from interactions with spirituality/occultism described by bruce elder and then mostly parapolitical writing

i was honestly dreading reading the negarestani contribution and am surprised and delighted that it makes a lot of sense and feels extremely relevant

actually getting whiplash from how the quality of insight in this anthology plummeted at the andrea phillips and matthew poole articles, which are both absolute information pollution

every single prediction gioscia makes in this is not merely, but *aggressively* wrong, in a way that is really fucking brutal to read. unlike "The Sequel to Cities", to compare it to some other fucking book nobody else has read, gioscia has a soul, good insights, and meatier argumentation to see where his rationale went wrong

the vast majority of the time, it's because he's too optimistic about human behavior :(

kind of just wanting to power through this

i really didnt fully appreciate that i was signing up to read 5 peter sotos books straight-shot in a row with this one, which is frankly grueling for even me

wow dave hickey's intro for this book is some truly fucking terrible writing