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WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU

lots and lots and lots and lots

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Recently on Unhelpful File Labels in the Archives:

On-Going Project. Folders were empty.

Well Written Articles, 1999. There were no articles in this folder. There were a lot of budget reports though.

Stuff. You are killing me smalls.

Section 569-055 Knowingly burning or exploding. This was just papers shoved between files, I have a lot of questions and zero answers.

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but really. I am yet again caught in the trap of wanting to write stuff similar to anything that I’m currently reading (and impressed by it)

which is okay usually. because it’s fun it’s inspiring you can branch out

also leads to some very fun style mash ups (re: that time when I was reading proust & platonov simultaneously and then somehow tried to adopt both of their styles in the same piece)

but sometimes bad for the identity

the intense urge to write bad queer young adult…

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the intense urge to write bad queer young adult…

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Communists and anarchists will spend all day talking about abstract concepts and structures like capitalism and the state, but willfully ignore the very real, tangible curse placed upon me by the foul necromancer

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"Nature Morte.", Joseph Brodsky (tr George L. Kline)

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aroace polycule

everyone unhinged about each other but platonically

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you’ve been creached.

you, reading this. you're a creature now. reblog to creature your followers

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@linguist-in-a-blanket

https://www.geoguessr.com/vgp/3007

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a typical teen drama with supernatural stuff where the main character is some kind of creature / creature hunter and also have a perfectly mundane love interest who doesn’t know about their extracurriculars

but also. the love interest has an incredibly popular blog about the mystical topic in question. not with the real one, just a typical fandom-y / obsessed with popular fiction about it / slightly horny type of thing. like, if we’re talking vampires, they have many opinions about the iwtv show or old drac adaptations.

the main character keeps finding their blog while doing their research and it keeps being incredibly frustrating.

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“Not all writing is cursed, but surely all of it is haunted. Literature is a catacomb of past readers, past writers, past books. Traces of those who are responsible for creation linger among the words on a page; Shakespeare can’t hear us, but we can still hear him (and don’t ghosts wander through those estate houses upon the moors unaware that they’ve died?). […] Of all of the forms of expression that humanity has worked with—painting, music, sculpture—literature is the eeriest. Poetry and fiction are both incantation and conjuration, the spinning of specters and the invoking of ghosts; it is very literally listening to somebody who isn’t there, and might not have been for a long while. All writing is occult, because it’s the creation of something from ether, and magic is simply a way of acknowledging that—a linguistic practice, an attitude, a critical method more than a body of spells. We should be disquieted by literature; we should be unnerved.”

— Ed Simon, from his essay “Who’s There?: Every Story Is a Ghost Story”, published in The Millions, August 18, 2021

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my friend texted the idea of dead queer celebrities eating the straights during a zombie apocalypse in our gc and then assumed that I would be the one to like it and was riGHT OBVIOUSLY but now I feel SEEN and UNDERSTOOD

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there’s a quote I saw in a post here, some time ago, that went:

“English is the only interesting thing that’s left in my life,” says Brodsky. “The need to find le mot juste starts out as a concern, turns into an obsession, and ends up as a way of life. These writers excel at the art of making virtue of necessity: out of a need to understand how the new language works, they turn into linguistic maniacs; out of a concern for correctness, they become compulsive grammarians.”

writing in english, for me, is one of the parts of the inner emigration: in situation where I cannot leave physically, there are some parts of me that can. my voice, my writing; everything I am able to write about — my politics and my queerness, interconnected and inseparable from my text — cannot be written — read — in my native language. so, I turn to english. I start to plot my stories in it, I hope to write original fiction in it, not just something that has already some connections to the language — fanfiction, that is, from fandoms that dictate the culture in my head.

and, obviously, I turn to the experience of immigrants before me: both physical and in language, their stories now painfully relatable.

but there’s a difference between that experience and these of a modern immigrants: where the focus point was of a language itself, the importance of style and form too high, now in my peers I see the opposite. so we see Nabokov, a master of the prose, who studied english in his childhood; while modern immigrants give their works clumsy translations, announce the gap between them and their language deliberately, and embrace autofiction. content before form. meaning before style.

at some point, it becomes an issue about class. good education of the imperial past versus the attempts of grasping the language in the process of emigration. the story about infatuation with the language versus the story that is told despite the language.

an understandable dichotomy, but one that I’m not sure how to apply to myself: with a lack of genius or a strong enough story to tell, with being middle class, I am neither end. privileged enough for the chance to know language well enough so it’s undistinguishable but not being enamored with it enough to be perfect at it; impacted by the real life events enough to want for my writing to conduct all of it — but not having the skill, the story for it to sing.

these are just facts, not a cry for compliments or self-flagellation. still; it’s interesting how my english is the language of the internet, not perfectly studied but understood intrinsically in the process of my submersion into the world, different from my own — from my escape to the social media, friendships, communication in the spaces distanced from my reality. yet another part of inner emigration: searching for a place to be able to breathe.

and now, it shows in my words— in my writing in ways unthinkable for the past, brought by the globalization. what a thought.

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yeah I love reading, says the person who stopped reading anything actually published a few years ago and keeps starting books just to immediately abandon them

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"Average person works for 8 hours a day" factoid actualy just statistical error. Average person actually works for 1.5 hours a day. Workaholic Georg, who works for 7921 hours a day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted.