#angela nagle

[sammeldeineknochen]

Wenn wir einen Punkt erreicht haben, wo Faschistinnen anderen moralisch überlegen sein können, weil sie als avantgardistisch, gegenkulturell oder transgressiv gelten, sollten wir den Wert dieser abgestandenen und überholten gegenkulturellen Ideale möglicherweise ernsthaft überdenken.

Angela Nagle: „Die digitale Gegenrevolution“, S.130

[jujupepi]

Kill All Normies by Angela Nagle

“The rise of Milo, Trump and the alt-right are not evidence of the return of the conservatism, but instead of the absolute hegemony of the culture of non-conformism, self-expression, transgression and irreverence for its own sake – an aesthetic that suits those who believe in nothing but the liberation of the individual and the id, whether they’re on the left or the right. The principle-free idea of counterculture did not go away; it has just become the style of the new right.”

Finished the audiobook version of Angela Nagle's Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right. First of all, I appreciated the investigation into the development of the alt-right from a journalistic perspective. Much like Jesus and John Wayne, the author weaves together disparate figures, organization, and themes into a coherent narrative.

I am not an expert on this topic but I think it suffers from its narrow point of view. Nagle's thesis, as I understand it, is that the alt-right developed 1) as a reactionary backlash to Tumblr identity politics and 2) to appropriate the social capital of counterculture hipness. This feel truncated, probably by necessity.

One of the things that frustrates me most about Nagle's thesis is that she calls for the end of counterculture at large. The mere existence of the aforementioned social capital of hipness being appropriated by fascists is enough to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Hasn't counterculture been the cradle of queer liberation movements? Of the rejection of white supremacy? If not the cradle, then certainly nurtures and expanded in these environments. Counterculture broadens our imaginations and give us alternative pictures of life.

Nagle also seems to be preoccupied with creating a left that acts in a way that will guard against reactionary backlash from the right. I don't really have to say it but, eschewing neopronouns will not stop the right from attacking the left. This kind of mindset gives leftists the go-ahead to leave behind our most vulnerable.

I have some more quibbles, like her assertion that brown, Muslim, male protestors are given more leeway than white ones (I mean, have you seen what we let white men get away with?) but I don't feel the need to get much into them. Overall, I admire the examination of the evolution and tactics of the alt-right, but struggled with many of her conclusions.

[theonion]

Warning that it is one of the most visible symptoms of serious malnutrition, dietary scientists at Stanford University revealed Monday that humans who consume a proper diet should not be defecating. “In humans who correctly manage their dietary intake, 100 percent of food consumed is absorbed by the body, with any defecation whatsoever being a sign that the diet must be reassessed,” said research leader Angela Nagle, explaining that bodily waste is evidence of an inefficient and improperly functioning digestive system expelling harmful substances and also noting that healthy human beings should not be urinating.

Full Story

[fandomshatepeopleofcolor]

Seeing discourse online has reinforced my belief that every leftist is against ableism until somebody says watching something with subtitles is hard for them. In that case that person is racist for asking for a dub instead of swapping out their set of eyes for a pair that can read text better.

Leftism leaving the body once accessibility issues are brought up, sighs. I do remember back in 2019 during a DSA convention, where there was some discourse/debate regarding how to be respectful towards the disabled communities. Some clips of the convention leaked and predictably, Rightwingers seized it as an opportunity to make fun of the Left. However, what was even more shocking was how there were prominent leftist figures/pundits like Angela Nagle and Ben Burgis who kinda saw it as identity politics gone too far.

It's frustrating and sad to see how there is still internalized ableism within leftist circles, amongst other issues like rape apologism, racism and transphobia etc., etc. Esp when a large portion of the working class/working poor are disabled or would eventually become disabled later in life.

Here's a good essay on that 2019 DSA convention:

- mod sodapop

[klykcielewe]

Droga redakcjo! Dzień dobry :DD

Mam okropny problem, a nie wiem kogo lepszego można się poradzić niż szanownych Was...

Od dobrego tygodnia męczą mnie dziwne sny, w których pojawiają się ludzie, z którymi kiedyś chodziło się do szkoły niszczący mój ogródek. Najgorsze jest to, że za każdym razem jak depczą po moich petuniach słyszę zbijającą się doniczkę i nagle zrywam z łóżka tylko po to żeby zobaczyć jak zza okna spogląda na mnie ogromny kruk. Wtedy się budzę.

Z moim ogródkiem w rzeczywistości nie dzieje się nic złego ale ta wizja jest naprawdę przerażająca. Co jeśli jednego dnia naprawdę tu przyjdą i podepczą moje pomidorki? A co z krukiem? Co chwila mam wrażenie, że mnie śledzi...

Proszę o pomoc, naprawdę nic z tego nie rozumiem!

Pozdrawiam, okrutnie paranoiczny czytelnik.

Witaj, okrutnie paranoiczny czytelnik!

Niestety, wygląda na to, że została na Ciebie rzucona klątwa. Kruk to forma często przyjmowana przez duchy. Prawdopodobnie zazdrosny sąsiad, lub ktoś, kto żywi do Ciebie urazę wynajął go, żeby Cię nastraszyć.

Masz 2 wyjścia w tej sytuacji: możesz spróbować zdjąć klątwę, lub przeciągnąć demona na swoją stronę. Jeśli uda Ci się zidentyfikować osobę odpowiedzialną, znachorka Angela powinna być w stanie pozbyć się kruka (chyba, że to ona go przywołała, wtedy masz problem). Trudniejszą, ale i bardziej opłacalną opcją jest próba oswojenia ducha. Najlepiej zacząć to robić w snach. Nawet jeżeli przez większość snu go nie widzisz, to on najprawdopodobniej je kontroluje. Spróbuj nauczyć się śnić świadomie i mówić do demona. Kruki nietrudno do siebie przekonać, jeżeli obiecasz im odpowiednie łapówki, jednak uważaj; one nie lubią, kiedy się im rozkazuje. Po dalszą pomoc polecam zwrócić się również do cheerleaderek i znachorki Angeli.

Życzymy powodzenia w zdejmowaniu klątwy! Redakcja

PS Może Cię zainteresować twórczość Edgara Allana Poe, jeśli już się tak nie stało. Osobiście najbardziej lubię jego wiersze, ale wiele z jego opowiadań, też jest wartych uwagi.

[grandhotelabyss]

what was the experience of going from no internet (atleast in its modern form) to it suddenly dominating everything in one's life?

I enjoy the genre of question in which I am implied to be a touring carnival exhibit, The World's Oldest Living Man. "Do you remember when you had to wind up cars with a crank before they'd drive? Was the world really black and white or does it just look that way in the movies?" (I'm not mad at you, anon; I'm just teasing.)

Anyway, I may be in the minority here, but the really rough patch was the intermediate period between the last decade the world was mostly analog (the 1990s) and the first decade it was mostly digital (the 2010s), despite the socio-political chaos (wokeness vs. populism and then the pandemic) caused by the latter. If you were extremely online in the 2000s, which I sort of was, and the monoculture still reigned, and even in some respects seemed like it would reign forever, everything felt sort of hallucinatory and unreal, a bright waking nightmare; this is what Fisher's writing captures well, the disappointed cyber-utopian's dazed horror at a permanent zombie mainstream. Before that, in the analog days, counterculture and mainstream culture were more stably sealed off from each other, and you didn't necessarily expect them to bleed into each other, but also thought you could make a go of it in the counterculture if you could find your way there. (I didn't start going online until I was 18, in the year 2000, when I went to college.) Whereas now, it's all one thing. Pace Angela Nagle, there are no normies left to kill. The Boomers can't stop fiddling with their phones at the restaurant table while I keep mine politely in my pocket; they read their ebooks while I still only read (at least anything serious) in print; and they've seen memes I've never even heard of. Perhaps we're all hallucinating these days, but we're in it together.

Now certain shifts from the old world to the new are a little overstated. Remember, television killed your elders' attention spans before the internet came along, and my parents' generation were the first that happened to, back in the '50s. Everything McLuhan said about TV is 10 times truer of the internet, but it was true of TV too. Then there was talk radio and the print underground, which is how I and my father before me learned all the conspiracy theories before "online" came along. I do not speak of pornography, but it was there, and one knew where. I grew up on MTV and comic books, so I've never had much of an attention span to speak of. I like books, though. I don't think they'll ever disappear; I think the internet will disappear, and books will be all that survives of us, which is why I insist, no matter how online I am or ever will be, on writing books, real-life paper books, for our successor empires—human, robot, or alien—to ponder over in the lone and level sands.

[icedsodapop]

There should be studies about post-leftists, aka people who possess reactionary politics under a leftist veneer. Think dirtbag leftists, think tankies, think the class reductionist leftists. Think of public self-proclaimed leftists Glenn Greenwald, think Matt Taibbi, think Aaron Bastani, think Lee Fang, think Jimmy Dore, think Angela Nagle, think Ben Burgis, think redscarepod hosts.

[gothicprep]

you know, for all the ink that’s been spilled over woke this and woke that, it’s surprising to me that tumblr’s role in creating this sort of online culture remains under-discussed. angela nagle is the only academic I can think of off the top of my head who’s ever taken this idea seriously.

to use kind of a dumb example without any emotional stakes – you’ve probably seen multi-image instagram posts that argue in favor of a specific political cause. sometimes people make these on twitter too. thing is, they have the exact same tone and aesthetic as the powerpoint presentations that people used to make on here in the early 2010s for the same purpose.

idk, it’s just weird to me that commentators have been beating this dead horse to the point where they’re having a snowball fight with its cremated ashes, and still make such a huge oversight.

[destiel-vs-anything]

destiel vs kill all normies by angela nagle

[dustedmagazine]

Listed: Jordan Martins

Jordan Martins is a musician, organizer, educator, and visual artist whose works have been shown in Chicago and Brazil. While he has played steel guitar and other instruments for years with the singer / songwriter Angela James, his first solo album, Fogery Nagles, was released by the Astral Spirits label in the fall of 2023. In his review for Dusted, Bill Meyer wrote, “Fogery Nagles arrives, seemingly out of nowhere, but just at the right time.”

Sarah Davachi — Cantus Figures Laurus

I’m a sucker for long-form droney music in general and as of late I’ve been bathing in organ music of this kind as much as possible. I had really enjoyed Davachi’s other works but fell fully under her spell with this box set of works from the last few years with over four hours of heavy tones unfolding in various ways. I like to listen to this as loud as possible to feel these sounds as vibrations. There are several shorter tracks that focus on a particular palette or tonality, with the later tracks being from live recordings of longer performances. Even though the set is a compilation joining these sets of works together after the fact, I love this body of work as a sequence of experiences.

Caetano Veloso — Araça Azul

It’s hard to pick a favorite Veloso record, but if I had to it would be the utterly unique Araça Azul, recorded in 1972 when he returned to Brazil after being exiled by the military dictatorship years prior. The record is markedly outside of the original zeitgeist of the Tropicalia movement — less ecstatic, hopeful, collaborative, and postmodern in the mixing of styles — but at the same it’s maybe the purest expression of the experimental range of sounds and poetry that the movement ushered in. There are other musicians playing on some tracks, but the whole thing feels like a single creative brain tinkering with ideas and sounds until they take enough shape to be a “song.” There’s a fundamental collage approach that I love — where he engages in field recordings, musique concrète, dissonant orchestrations overlapping on simple folk melodies, and transformative and ballsy covers of classics by singers like Monsueto and Milton Nascimento.

Angelika Niescier, Savannah Harris, Tomeka Reid — Beyond Dragons

I had the good fortune of seeing this trio play at Elastic in Chicago this past spring. When they finished their set, my wife leaned over to me and said “THAT WAS HOT SHIT” which is maybe the most accurate thing to say about these players and this music. Niescier’s compositions are somehow tight and specific while simultaneously giving each player ample room to flex and explore with abundant space around the components of each piece. I love their ability to charge into a piece full steam with an almost aggressive sense of urgency and then allow their interactions to gradually fragment and dissolve into textural interplays and quiet call-and-response improvisations.

Paul Franklin— solos on “Together Again”

A friend hipped me to a video of Paul Franklin soloing over the Buck Owens classic “Together Again” and I’ve since gone down YouTube rabbit holes watching as many clips as I can find (and I see other people in the comments on the same journey). Franklin is a Nashville legend who has played pedal steel on hundreds of recordings since the seventies. As a member of the Time Jumpers, he plays as a sideman to Vince Gill at local venues in Nashville covering classic country songs, often playing this tune which originally featured Tom Brumley playing a quick steel solo that used some very innovative voicings at the time. Franklin’s playing is so technically brilliant, but it also illustrates the ways in which the instrument can be psychedelic and disorienting, even in a conventional setting. His solos always follow a basic architecture but there’s subtle variations, improvisations and flourishes in every version where you can see him trying to find new ways of cracking it open. My favorite clips are the ones where he goes out on a limb and the audience is noticeably giggling as they experience the sonic floor drop out from under them like they’re on a carnival ride.

Nicholas Britell— “Unto Stone We are One”, funeral “March Song of Ferrix,” season 1 finale of Andor

I sometimes dabble in the questionable array of new Star Wars projects and absolutely loved Andor’s vision of a bureaucratic fascist space empire, not spending a second on jedis and lightsabers, instead examining the interrelationships of imperial occupations, military contractors, and resistance movements. The last episode is masterful in part because the tension of the entire season simmers to a boil during a funeral procession with working class miners playing junky space orchestral instruments. The score of this funeral march by Nicholas Britell is a haunting, yearning motif that steadily builds but the stroke of genius is how perfectly out of tune the instruments are! Such a simple and surprising choice does such heavy lifting in terms of adding a sense of materiality to the setting and imbuing the dramatic build up with a subtle unease beneath the gorgeous arrangements.

Terry Riley— Music for The Gift

A very early work by Riley experimenting with tape loops, with an approach that is uncannily prescient in the way it does a live remix of a jazz quartet as they improvise around tunes. The fact that this particular quartet was Chet Baker’s (with trombonist Luis Fuentes, drummer George Solano, and bassist Luigi Trussardi) is a surprising interlocutor in all of this: it would maybe seem more fitting to for this to involve an unorthodox voice rather than a more straight ahead, idiomatic jazz player for these out-of-the-box experiments. But I think the music works precisely because of the nimble-swinging of the group as Riley cuts up and repeats their melodies and phrasing back onto them in a slurry of loops that piles up and interacts with their improvising in unexpected ways. The clarity and charm of Baker’s playing is a perfect fit. Peter Margasak wrote a great piece about it for Sound American that you can find here.

Macie Stewart and Lia Kohl— Recipe for a Boiled Egg

Two of my favorite improvisers in Chicago. They are so emblematic of what I love about the creative scene here in the ways that they endlessly collaborate across a range of genres and scenes, whether improvising or composing, playing songs or deconstructing forms. This is a biased pick because they recorded this at Comfort Station, the small and idiosyncratic multidisciplinary art space I run in Chicago. The thing that first drew me to Comfort Station was the building’s unique vibrant acoustics and the porousness of sound that you get with an old building directly facing a busy street. Macie and Lia lean into that context in stunning ways on this recording, narrowing in on their voices and their bowed instruments reverberating and inviting in sounds from the outside world instead of recording in the controlled environment of a studio. You can hear ideas take shape as each listens, responds, builds, grows, dissolves into the other’s playing, with a recording quality that grounds them to a particular time and place.

Olivier Messiaen — “Louange à l’Éternité de Jésus,” from the Quartet for the End of Time

This is probably the single most impactful and cosmic piece of music I’ve ever encountered. Messiaen wrote all the movements for the Quartet for the End of Time while he was in a Nazi POW camp, and the entire work is on another level. But the sixth movement — just piano and cello — brings me to my knees every time I hear it. The first time I heard it was somewhat random and personal: during my freshman year of college, my mom was coincidentally the staff accompanist at the conservatory of the university I attended. And I would often borrow her car to run errands while she was rehearsing with music majors preparing their senior recitals. On one such occasion I was tip-toeing back into her studio to return her keys and heard a bass player (bass majors often adapt cello pieces for their senior recital) bowing the opening notes of the melody which seems to ask for a dissonant response from the piano. Instead, I heard my mom play the slow, pulsing major triad chord that entered in response, settling the piece into a hypnotic journey. I felt like the floor gave way in an instant and I had never experienced anything like it. Susan Alcorn has adapted it for solo pedal steel in a really unique way melding the harmony and melody together, and Atomic included it on their 2018 release of covers, Pet Variations, playing with deep restraint that the piece calls for while also letting the energy bubble up restlessly.

Jeanne Lee — Conspiracy

It’s hard to find a better expression of vocals and poetry integrated into a free jazz setting than this brilliant 1975 record, with Jeanne Lee leading a killer ensemble including Steve McCall and Sam Rivers among others. I had never heard Lee’s work before coming across this album when it was re-released by Moved-by-Sound in 2021 and I was struck by how much sparseness there is (somewhat similar to some of Caetano Veloso’s delicate moments on Araça Azul even), and how simple utterances give way to grooves and freakouts with the rest of the players wrapping around Lee’s command of the sonic space. If I’m being honest, I think these kinds of approaches to free form improvisations can often collapse into a kind of cheesiness or ham-fistedness, and this record NEVER once gets close to that, everything feels so purposeful even when the exploration is at its outer limits.

Olaibi — Mimihawasu

Although I had heard her playing on works by Japanese band OOIOO, this is a musician/project that I hadn’t heard of by name until someone I follow on Instagram posted that they had passed away this October (coincidentally on my birthday). Something in the way they eulogized her touched me deeply and I listened to all of her records in the days after (and often since). Maybe it is because my exposure to her music was immediately tied to her recent death, but there’s something so profound, tragic, beautiful, frail, intimate and loving about her music all at once. I wish I had heard her more before her passing, but I’m grateful that in the wake of her death this world of sounds has entered my life.

[930am]

since i said i wanted to read at least one book a month here are 12 books i would like to read next year (in no particular order):

1. since yesterday: the 1930s in america by frederick lewis allen

2. public enemies: america’s greatest crime wave and the birth of the FBI, 1933-34 by bryan burrough

3. blood meridian by cormack mccarthy

4. crime and punishment by fyodor dostoevsky

5. the brothers karamazov by fyodor dostoevsky

6. the death of ivan illyich and other stories by lev tolstoy (i have a short story collection)

7. the three body problem by cixin liu

8. project hail mary by andy weir

9. the jungle by upton sinclair

10. kill all normies: online culture wars from 4chan and tumblr to trump and the alt-right by angela nagle

11. allergic: our irritated bodies in a changing world by theresa macphail

12. invisible women: data bias in a world designed for men by caroline criado perez

[prasa-koval]

12) American Affairs - amerykański kwartalnik polityczny założony w lutym 2017 roku przez Juliusa Kreina.

Jego projekt został opisany w Tablet jako: „gęsta, technicznie wyrafinowana forma neohamiltonowskiego nacjonalizmu ekonomicznego, promowana w różnych formach przez Michaela Linda, Davida P. Goldmana i samego Kreina”, w oparciu o twierdzenie, że „krótkowzroczna amerykańska elita pozwoliła, aby rdzeń produkcji kraju — klucz zarówno do powszechnego dobrobytu krajowego, jak i bezpieczeństwa narodowego w obliczu merkantylistycznych Chin — został wydrążony”, tak jak „produkcja i wiedza techniczna przeniosły się do Chin i Azji, kapitał krajowy napłynął do nieproduktywnych wykupów akcji lub schematów technologicznych (Uber, WeWork), a Ameryka stała się krajem z dwupoziomową gospodarką usługową, z bankierami, konsultantami i inżynierami oprogramowania na górze, a powitalniami Walmarta i kierowcami Ubera na dole”. Od momentu założenia w 2017 r. American Affairs stało się znane z dogłębnych artykułów na temat polityki handlowej i przemysłowej, krytyki finansjalizacji, orędownictwa rodzinnej opieki nad dziećmi, dodatki i wydatki na infrastrukturę, a także za łączenie prawicowych i lewicowych krytyków neoliberalizmu. Oprócz polityki publicznej zajmował się również teorią polityczną i krytyką kulturową. Został scharakteryzowany w New Statesman jako „heterodoksyjny dziennik polityczny”, prezentujący na przykład konserwatywne argumenty na rzecz większej roli państwa obok lewicowych argumentów przeciwko polityce tożsamości i otwartym granicom. Do godnych uwagi artykułów należy „The Real Class War” Kreina, który „przyciągnął uwagę zarówno lewicy, jak i prawicy w listopadzie 2019 r., wywracając do góry nogami rozmowę na temat klasy w prawyborach Demokratów”, według New Statesman.

Poprzednikiem American Affairs jest Journal of American Greatness, krótkotrwały blog polityczny z 2016 roku, najbardziej znany z publikacji „The Flight 93 Election”, szeroko czytanego eseju o wyborach prezydenckich w 2016 roku autorstwa pseudonimowego autora Publiusa Deciusa Musa, później ujawnionego jako Michael Anton. American Affairs było początkowo uważane przez niektórych za „czasopismo protrumpowskie”. Po uruchomieniu zostało opisane przez New York Times jako „poświęcone nadaniu intelektualnego ciężaru i spójności amorficznej ideologii znanej, z braku lepszego określenia, jako trumpizm”. Jednak w sierpniu 2017 roku, po wiecu „Unite the Right” w Charlottesvile w Wirginii, Krein napisał artykuł opinii w The New York Times, publicznie przyznając, że żałuje głosowania na kandydata. Jennifer Schuessler z The New York Times pisze: „czasopismo stara się wypełnić pustkę pozostawioną przez konserwatywny intelektualny establishment bardziej skupiony na przeciwstawianiu się panu Trumpowi niż na zmaganiu się z odrzuceniem globalizmu i dogmatów wolnego rynku, które doprowadziły do ​​jego zwycięstwa”. Według The Washington Post czasopismo czyta wiceprezydent J. D. Vance.

Do czasopisma piszą m.in.:

Michael Anton

Robert D. Atkinson

Mehrsa Baradara

Thierry Baudet

Daniel A. Bell

Fred Block

Dan Breznitz

Christopher Caldwell

Oren Cass

Angelo M. Codevilla

Colin Crouch

Patrick J. Deneen

Ronald W. Dworkin

Fredrik Erixon

Nancy Fraser

Amber A'Lee Frost

Frank Furedi

Maurice Glasman

James K. Galbraith

David P. Goldman

Allen C. Guelzo

Ofir Haivry

Shadi Hamid

James Hankins

Yoram Hazony

Joseph Heath

Arthur Herman

John B. Judis

Eric Kaufmann

Joel Kotkin

Ryszard Legutko

Michael Lind

Edward Luttwak

Bruno Maçães

Noel Malcolm

Pierre Manent

Lawrence M. Mead

Bill Mitchell

Angela Nagle

David Oks

Eric A. Posner

R. R. Reno

Ganesh Sitaraman

Anne-Marie Slaughter

Matthew Stoller

Wolfgang Streeck

Cass Sunstein

Ruy Teixiera

Nick Timothy

Roberto M. Unger

Adrian Vermeule

Henry Williams

L. Randall Wray

Slavoj Zizek.

[prezentace]

ZDROJE

Booth, Paul, ed. A companion to media fandom and fan studies. John Wiley & Sons, 2018.

Duffett, Mark. Understanding fandom: An introduction to the study of media fan culture. Bloomsbury Academic, 2013.

Hellekson, Karen, and Kristina Busse. The Fan Fiction Studies Reader. University Of Iowa Press, 2014.

Hillman, Serena, Jason Procyk, and Carman Neustaedter. "Tumblr fandoms, community & culture." Proceedings of the companion publication of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing, 2014.

Jenkins, Henry. Textual poachers: Television fans and participatory culture. Routledge, 1995.

Jenkins, Henry, and Mizuko Ito. Participatory culture in a networked era: A conversation on youth, learning, commerce, and politics. John Wiley & Sons, 2015.

SUGGESTED READING/WATCHING

Nagle, Angela. Kill all normies: Online culture wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the alt-right. John Hunt Publishing, 2017.

STRANGE ÆONS. DashCon: An Extensive Oral History. Youtube, 2024

STRANGE ÆONS. How Did Tumblr Ads Get So Weird? (ft. An Ex-Employee). Youtube, 2024

STRANGE ÆONS. The Unlikely Birth (And Death) of SuperWhoLock. Youtube, 2024

Sarah Z. Tumblr’s Strangest Obsession: A History of the Onceler Fandom. Youtube, 2020

[ulkaralakbarova]

A Los Angeles journalist befriends a homeless Juilliard-trained musician, while looking for a new article for the paper. Credits: TheMovieDb. Film Cast: Steve Lopez: Robert Downey Jr. Nathaniel Ayers: Jamie Foxx Mary Weston: Catherine Keener Graham Claydon: Tom Hollander David Carter: Nelsan Ellis Adam Crane: Michael Bunin Jennifer Ayers: LisaGay Hamilton Leslie Bloom: Rachael Harris Curt Reynolds: Stephen Root Flo Ayers: Lorraine Toussaint Cheery Lab Tech: Jena Malone Troubled Woman: Octavia Spencer Young Nathaniel: Justin Martin Bernie Carpenter: Kokayi Ampah Paul Jr.: Patrick Tatten Marisa: Susane Lee Mayor Villaigosa: Marcos De Silvas Harry Barnoff: Ilia Volok Julliard Conductor: Mike Nowak Angry Homeless Man: David Jean Thomas Uncle Tommy: Lemon Andersen Homeless Transvestite: Kevin Michael Key Barely Dressed Woman: Moya Brady LAMP Homeless Guy: Orlando Ashley Leon: Artel Great Shouting Woman: J.J. Boone LAMP Advocate: Annie McKnight Homeless Lady: Bernadette Speakes Leeann: Anna Levin Steve: Steve Foster Teresa: Vivian George KK: Kevin Cohen Courtney: Courtney Andre Detroit: Teri Hughes Linda: Linda Harris Bam Bam: Albert Olson Melissa: Melissa Black Mama Grouch: Valarie Hudspeth Darryl: Darryl Black St. Kiana: Kiana Parker Hazard: Hazard Banner Russell: Russell Brown Jackie: Jacqueline Sue West Ashley: Joyre Manuel Singing Woman: Lorinda Hawkins Annette: Annette Valley Patrick: Patrick Kelly Quiana: Quiana Farrow Globe Lobby Guard: Tony Genaro Atheist: Charlie Weirauch Cop with Tents: Wayne Lopez EMT #1: Joe Hernandez-Kolski Winston Street Cop: Noel Gugliemi EMT #2: Paul Cruz Homeless Man: Wil Garret EMT #3: Halbert Hernandez Construction Worker: Alejandro Patiño Homeless Woman #1: Karole Selmon Neil: Rob Nagle Cello Donor: Patricia Place Enraged Homeless Man: Ralph Cole Jr. Reception Nurse: Gladys Khan ER Nurse: Palma Lawrence Reed Laid-off Employee: Isabel Hubmann Homeless Woman #2: Bonita Jefferson Winston Street Prostitute: Eshana O’Neal Young Jennifer Ayers: Myia Hubbard Miss Little John: Iyanna Newborn Beauty Shop Girl: Bronwyn Hardy News Editor: Troy Blendell Jennifer’s Son: Nick Nervies Editor: Paul Norwood Sign Spinner (uncredited): Wally Lozano Film Crew: Screenplay: Susannah Grant Unit Production Manager: Patricia Whitcher Casting: Francine Maisler Art Direction: Greg Berry Producer: Gary Foster Author: Steve Lopez Director: Joe Wright Editor: Paul Tothill Costume Design: Jacqueline Durran Production Design: Sarah Greenwood Makeup Department Head: Ve Neill Producer: Russ Krasnoff Still Photographer: François Duhamel Production Coordinator: Robert Mazaraki Hair Department Head: Gloria Pasqua Casny Music Editor: Dominick Certo Director of Photography: Seamus McGarvey Set Decoration: Julie Smith Script Supervisor: Kerry Lyn McKissick Original Music Composer: Dario Marianelli Post Production Coordinator: Adam Cole Stunts: Shirley Smrz Stunts: C.C. Taylor Stunts: Hannah Kozak Hairstylist: Lisa Marie Rosenberg Stunts: Allan Graf Stunts: Jim Wilkey Stunts: Aaron Toney Stunts: Gregg Smrz Stunts: Todd Schneider Stunts: George Marshall Ruge Stunts: Chad Randall Stunts: Robert Nagle Stunt Coordinator: Scotty Richards Stunt Driver: Ed McDermott II Stunts: Marilyn Miller Stunts: Sean Graham Stunts: Jalil Jay Lynch Stunts: Kevin L. Jackson Stunts: Kofi Elam Stunts: John T. Cypert Stunts: Greg Wayne Elam Stunts: Chino Binamo Stunt Driver: Michael Caradonna Stunt Driver: Norman Epperson Stunts: Daniel W. Barringer Stunts: Greg Fitzpatrick Stunt Coordinator: Mickey Giacomazzi Stunts: Peter Weireter Stunts: Hollis Hill Stunts: Keith Woulard Stunts: Angela Meryl Stunts: Danny Wynands Stunts: Kortney Manns Stunts: Michael Maddigan Stunts: Kofi Yiadom Stunt Driver: Allan Padelford Stunts: Thomas DuPont Stunts: Jason Cekanski Stunt Driver: Scott Alan Berk Movie Reviews:

[cyclone-rachel]

books read in December 2023 and January 2024:

December:

Wayne Family Adventures vol. 1 by CRC Payne

Wild Spaces by S.L. Coney

Superman Smashes the Klan by Gene Luen Yang

Belichick and Brady by Michael Holley

Department of Mind-Blowing Theories by Tom Gauld

Woman World by Aminder Dhaliwal

Vern, Custodian of the Universe by Tyrell Waiters

Camp Zero by Michelle Min Sterling

Lone Women by Victor LaValle

Faux Paw by Jessica Kara

Joy Operations by Brian Michael Bendis

Junkwraith by Ellinor Richey

Kill All Normies by Angela Nagle

Pantheon by Hamish Steele

January:

NFL Confidential by David Molk

Pod by Laline Paull

The Long Con vol. 1 by Dylan Meconis

Night Bus by Zuo Ma

Big Game by Mark Leibovich

Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops by Shaun Bythell

Break Out by Joy Becker

Banned Book Club by Kim Hyun Sook

Layoverland by Gabby Noone

Rise of the Black Quarterback by Jason Reid

Of Thunder and Lightning by Kimberly Wang

Wayne Family Adventures vol. 2 by CRC Payne

Broken Faith by Mitch Weiss

Against Football by Steve Almond

Cosplayers by Dash Shaw

[grandhotelabyss]

Thoughts on the recent Jacobin piece on Joyce? Their classic “Is X actually a socialist/socialism?" argument. I think that Ellmann, through Pound, conclusively showed that while Joyce may have been an ambient socialist in his youth, he lived and died an apolitical bourgeois, but card on the table, though, I find Jacobin's cultural section to be dogshit. Overall thoughts on Jacobin, also?

Thanks, just read it—I thought it was bad, portentous, the kind of thing Joyce would righteously have made fun of. Like this:

“When he was with us,” Joyce’s school friend William Fallon once remarked, “he sometimes appeared to be peering into the future.” One thinks of the famous portrait of the young Joyce taken by his friend C. P. Curran in 1904, the year he set Ulysses, where he stands adjacent to a Dublin greenhouse, hands in his pockets, his legs wide apart, staring fixedly into the camera as though peering through it, beyond it. Quoting Walter Benjamin’s dictum that “it has always been one of the primary tasks of art to create a demand whose hour of full satisfaction has not yet come,” Gibbons adds that it is “through form that art addresses unresolved pasts, and gestures towards the future, beyond the horizons of things as they are.”

Meanwhile, Walter Benjamin to one side, here's Joyce's own explanation of his dreamy gaze in the photo:

In 1904 Curran was living at his parents' house just off the North Circular Road, near the Christian Brothers school on North Richmond Street. In the garden of that house that he took a famous photograph of Joyce standing with his hands in his pants pockets, a yachting cap on his head. Asked what he was thinking when Curran posed him, Joyce replied, "I was wondering would he lend me five shillings."

Then again, if I recall Jeffries's Grand Hotel Abyss properly, this blog's own namesake, Benjamin was a sponger, too, so the conjunction of the saturnine with the aquarian modernist may not be inapt.

Anyway, Gibbons is right to point to modernist form, but Joyce's form foreruns global capitalism, not global socialism, in this at odds with his populist earthiness. I think I best explained this tragic conflict within the corpus of the comic author in my essay on Ellmann's Joyce and my essay on Ulysses itself. (These essays are elaborate ways of agreeing with your "apolitical bourgeois" line.)

If Angela Nagle among others is right about the fate of Ireland today—that it's become a tax haven for the global corporations, its cultural patrimony replaced with their HR departments, a model colony of the 21st century—then Joyce's modernist form looks like a different kind of revolution than the one Jacobin has in mind.

What do I think of Jacobin? I think it's basically irrelevant. That particular style of Millennial socialism, flourishing from Occupy to Bernie to Chapo, feels like a vanished fashion, largely because too inattentive to the paradoxes above. The esoteric politics of Marxism is that, in their guise as the working class's tribunes, its expert-class exponents collaborate with big capital to exterminate the lower middle class, of which class Joyce was the 20th century's premier member. And the socialists revealed this in a way we will never be able to unsee in their agreement with scientistic totalitarianism during the pandemic. Geoff Shullenberger recently and rightly reflected, even if I wish I could get the part of my brain that comprehends these sentences drilled out,

Shullenberger is not coincidentally an editor at Compact, the currently more relevant socialist organ, because and not in spite of its (tempered) cultural conservatism, which better suits the mood of the moment. I'd rather read Compact's book critic Valerie Stivers on Joyce's Catholicism than anyone at Jacobin on Joyce's socialism.