Friday Blog Roundup (2024/09/27)
Here's what I've been reading this week blogs-wise:
"If It's Free, I'll Take It", Morley Musick, n+1
n+1 is a goated mag, and this sort of dreamy article about the DNC wasn't even the only article I enjoyed from them this week. But the sense of hyperreality seems extra exigent right now.
The people sitting near me in the stadium kept commenting that the speeches represented “a brilliant choice” or that someone had said something “really smart,” responding to everything with a pundit’s meta-enthusiasm. Here politics was not appreciated for its content but for the impression one imagines it has on that almost unimaginable creature, the undecided voter. The spectral presence of that figure conditioned every moment of the proceedings, with its insistent soldier worship, its homages to small business and the joys of homeownership.
"The Antiquity to Alt-Right Pipeline", Tallulah Travezant, Working Classicists
Shoutout to classicists who are not only not evil, but anti-evil! Glad to find this blog, even it's currently Under Repairs TM.
I was particularly surprised by the accounts recommended to me because not only were they representative of extreme political beliefs, but I was being recommended accounts related to Greco-Roman history and which also promoted equally extreme sentiments. I found this surprising because many of these accounts had fewer followers than accounts run by more established academics and hobby-historians, yet they were constantly recommended on my timeline.
"notes on poetry: there will be singing", Anne Boyer, Mirabilary
This is an old article, but I rediscovered it, and I've been repeating the eschatonic Quixote-religion she constructs to myself all goddamn week.
And yet this is it, this life — the only party we got invited to. Marx told us as much about not getting to make our history under conditions of our choosing. If I'd chosen, it would be whenever a person could sit in a grove doing dialectics as an acolyte of the religion of Don Quixote, a religion which has only two commandments:
- be a shepherd
- live mad, die sane
"le mot juste jeudi" (to strike the iron before it freezes), Juliet, Cohost/@folly
Juliet's "le mot juste jeudi" series is always great, but I think his latest post instantly rewired me. I feel like "strike while the iron's hot" has forever been power-crept in my vocabulary.
In our vegetable world, the fear of the future is one of heat.
"Resourciv: Nothingburger Combo", Marcia B., Traverse Fantasy
Marcia's currently in the thick of making an immanent critique (her words) of the Civilization series. I'm constantly thinking about the (sniff) pure ideology of 4X games, so I like seeing her attempt to make different models of the world into recognizable video games.
Civilization and most games of its genre are about indefinite expansion. Although you certainly have obstacles in your way, the game is about overcoming those obstacles to continue expanding. What if expansion was not for its own sake, but was motivated by instabilities internal of and intrinsic to civilization?
"Bully, Coward, Victim: Roy Cohn's AIDS Memorial Quilt Square", Moira Campbell, Sacred Flesh, Broken Bones
How do you commemorate an evil person who was a victim of their own design? Moira looks at how the queer community has answered that question before, with regards to the gay hyperconservative Roy Cohn.
Thus, the other lesson of Roy Cohn’s square on the quilt. A vivid, visual representation of the bleak isolation of hyper-conservatism. The greying out of your own life, until it kills you and all that is left are the torn rags of a legacy.