#politics and literature

[smashing-yng-man]

[mysharona1987]

Charles Dickens only wishes he could come up with a villain as audacious and selfish to use the term “youth apprenticeship.”

[icarus-archives]

lesbian pulp fiction from the 1950s

[prokopetz]

I've remarked in the past that first-wave literary cyberpunk's skepticism of body modification is typically rooted in concerns about capitalist intrusion upon bodily autonomy and ownership of human bodies, with the "prosthetics eat your soul" stuff developing later in order to allow authors to continue to write about angsty cyborgs without any political subtext which might be uncomfortable for mainstream audiences.

(Which is not to say that "prosthetics eat your soul" is, itself, apolitical, of course – it merely exchanges a potentially uncomfortable political subtext for one which able-bodied audiences found more palatable!)

While this is true as far as it goes, I think it's also important to recognise that, while first-wave literary cyberpunk did have all that bodily autonomy stuff, it was almost invariably being written by able-bodied authors who treated it as a metaphor for the artist's loss of intellectual freedom under the corporate state, rather than as a topic worth exploring in its own right. Like, give credit where credit is due, but don't give those guys too much credit; they largely weren't taking disability rights issues seriously, either.

I'm saying this because I've noticed an increasing tendency in certain circles to characterise modern self-styled "cripplepunk" incarnations of the cyberpunk genre as in some sense reactionary – i.e., like they're merely rolling back the clock to before cyberpunk sold out. The fact of the matter is that the golden age of disability-aware cyberpunk literature never existed, and folks who are taking a hard look at that aren't trying to "turn back the clock": they're giving the literal text of this shit the attention it deserves for possibly the first time.

[hussyknee]

I woke up to the news about Refaat Alreer. I still feel cold. Imagine seeing someone talking on your TL every day, narrating what the genociders are doing, counting the dead and telling their stories, amplifying his colleagues in Palestinian activism and academia, advocating and pleading endlessly for a ceasefire, delivering blistering witticisms about Zionist propaganda and then...he and his whole family are dead.

Two of my favourite tweets by him, calling out the craven Western media for never naming Israel.

It feels like a funeral today. My whole TL full of his students and Palestinians mourning Refaat alongside writers and journalists and academics from all over the Global South. The only people who matter to us is us.

Meanwhile, Zionists are attacking us under our mourning tweets, circulating the tweet where he laughed at the monstrous lie of Hamas cooking a baby in an oven during Oct 7th, one of the lies that fuelled the slaughter that eventually killed him too.

This was his last tweet.

USAmerican disability activist Imani Barbarin's tweet today was partially motivated by Refaat's death.

I need to go offline for a while.

I leave you with Refaat's last poem that was his pinned tweet for over a month. When a storyteller dies, generations are robbed of universes. When a poet dies, the world loses a piece of its soul.

You can find Refaat's book "Gaza Writes Back" in my gdrive folder of Palestinian literature. I don't know where the royalties will go now, but please also try and find it in a bookstore or library.

[strykerlancer]

— Margaret Atwood, from “Power Politics.”

[ruger35mm]

the look all the blue haired communist give you when they try their “i’m a non-abled intersex trans woman suffering from a plethora of diseases” excuse to get out of labour :

Why are these people, those who do no or refuse hard or meaningful labour, the face of these economic revolutionary parties?

[thebanishedreader]

Oh, what the hell, Florida.

Heyyy so I just looked at my spreadsheet of banned books and...

There are 1,402 BANNED BOOKS in the state of Florida ALONE.

To put that in perspective, on that very same spreadsheet, the number of banned books in California is: one (1).

If you guys have been following this (very new) blog and my posts, then you will know that the number of banned books in Colorado is: eight (8).

In Arkansas, it's four (4).

So. Just to reiterate, to repeat.

As of June 2023,

THE STATE OF FLORIDA HAS BANNED 1,402 BOOKS.

NEARLY HALF OF ALL BANNED BOOKS THIS YEAR, AND NEARLY THE TOTAL AMOUNT OF BANNED BOOKS IN 2022 IN TOTAL.

FLORIDA. HAS. BANNED. 1,402. BOOKS.

Please read banned books. Support libraries. Support authors. And please, please please please please, for the love of everything, stay safe. I love each and every one of you. Stay safe.

Support the American Library Association here.

[tygerland]

Yukio Mishima as Saint Sebastian, 1968, by Kishin Shinoyama.

[typhlonectes]

[flukeanalgesics]

I want my life to revolve around dying to learn everything about science, politics, literature and music so that I can argue with people with extra intellect and extra delusion (that would be me)

[marylinasblog]

what can I say about being a woman

[mysharona1987]

[thenotoriousscuttlecliff]

Yes, leave politics out of all witing, it will just make the work dated. This is why no one reads or adapts Dickens, Wells, or Orwell these days. By like that nice Professor Tolkien, who never inserted any politics into his fantasy series influenced by his traumatic experience in the First World War and hatred of industrialism.

[finalgirlfall]

Neoliberalism denies society's power to shape human subjectivities, instead imagining a free-willed, autonomous individual unaffected by material circumstance. It also decontextualizes and dehistoricizes human agents and their objects, in effect de-culturing the world in a way that allows commodities (and, according to Olivier Roy, religions) to be sold and consumed transnationally by diverse individuals in sundry places. At its core, then, it depends upon a fancifully imagined human subject that is completely unfettered by its history and social locations. Neoliberalism, write the anthropologists Jean and John Comaroff, "re-visions persons not as producers from a particular community, but as consumers in a planetary marketplace: persons as ensembles of identity that owe less to history or society than to organically conceived qualities."

Sean McCloud, "Haunting Desires: Agency in an Era of Possessions," in American Possessions: Fighting Demons in the Contemporary United States (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2015), 107.

[lupusmaxima]

2023/12/06

my personal exam period aesthetic 🫡 (thanks to my class schedule i didn’t have time to study for my communist politics exam… so wish me luck)