patertoller

[patertoller]

“Smart people” who only consume “smart things” are just prisoners of their own self-image. “Intelligence” is less about just what you consume and more about the insights you can extract from whatever you engage with.

[patertoller]

An excerpt:

I have been thinking of the story as metonymic for the experiences of “girls in the 21st century” who are finding themselves and making themselves through the Internet [...]. For me the most interesting sign that appears in the story is Tammy’s sticker which reads “FUCK YOUR GENDER,” due to the lines which immediately follow it: “We all looked at the sticker in silence, absorbing its two meanings—at least two, probably even more” (72). Though the sticker has at least two meanings, it leads to one inevitable end—Tammy and Pip making out. This act causes the narrator to accept her hopeless fate, that Pip will never return her feelings of romantic love. Each of the story’s signs possesses “at least two, probably even more” meanings, and each sign in the story operates to shift the narrative in a specific way. In “Something that Needs Nothing” text can create a career (prostitution via the classifieds); encourage sexual trysts (such as the one in Tammy’s bedroom); give a daily sense of order to an empty existence (through Pip’s lists); enable a shy girl desiring male attention to receive it on the street (by wearing a hacked-up shirt with the word HONK on it); suggest the desperate loneliness of a junkie (the old apples offered by the girls’ neighbour); incite fear of the unspecified (the “and More” of Mr. Peeps’ sign); denote the ironic small-mindedness of a peep show patron who wears the galaxy across his chest, situating his rare location in a vast world, and yet pays money to watch an underage girl fondle herself in a back room in a strip mall; and, finally, language, words, are shown to present (potentially) the key to the young narrator’s freedom. 

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Titles like Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation or Debord’s Society of the Spectacle or Marx’s Capital are often called prophetic in their descriptions of the dynamics of the internet age, and justifiably so, but what’s often lost is the fact that these authors were also perfectly describing their own times, not just predicting ours. The indignities of the conditions in which we live may be getting more visible and in some senses more extreme, but they aren’t new, and to make a fetish of their supposed newness or exceptionalism only serves to render them unsolvable (or as solvable only by returning to a romanticized Before Times — a genre of solution presented just as often by liberal culture writers as it is by Donald Trump). I think we all would do well to get off of TikTok, but the purpose of a system is what it does, and so it’s also worth mentioning that phones are not an aberrant tumor that can be neatly excised while leaving the rest of the system intact; they’re just the newest and most visible manifestation of a deep, old sickness. If the Atlantic columnists were to snap their fingers and get rid of all this technology tomorrow, we’d still be a consumer population that values the cutting of costs, the maximization of profit, the alienation of human labour from value, the commodification of all being into pure product, the supremacy of the market. With those principles as our guide, we’d find our way back to iPhones and AI eventually.

Rayne Fisher-Quann, Machine Yearning

[patertoller]

The Temporary License of Literary Bratdom by Katy Waldman for The New Yorker, September 4th 2024

[patertoller]

On homosexuality in the byzantine empire

(Source unknown because this is a screenshot i took years ago)

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On drinking habits in ancient Egypt:

"Beer in the morning, beer in the afternoon and beer at night. A little wine thrown in for good measure. And after a hard day of cutting stones for the pharaoh, time and energy left for a bit of hanky-panky."

-- Out on the Tiles with Pyramid Workers, Melbourne Herald-Sun, 7th June 1993