#cursed to make everything excessively allegorical

[katakosmos]

i wish i could write those funny fanfictions with perfect characterizations, but my style is just too different 😥

[soverane]

i love the xianzhou chapter so much bc a dominant theme overarching its many storylines (if not its main storyline) is life and death, allegorized in extremes in the forms of aeons yaoshi and lan, respectively.

rebirth. resurrection. reincarnation. past lives. - concepts that 'break' the convention of life and death as a linear, absolute reality. so plutonian. destroying the old to make way for the new. dragon's head (devour) and dragon's tail (excrete). ok NOT TO MAKE THIS AN ASTROLOGY THING BUT—yaoshi and lan remind me so much of the taurus-scorpio axis of abundance and destruction. the taurean energy that revels in wealth, pleasures, luxury, ABUNDANCE*, that borders on excess if no balance is found. the scorpionic energy that ruminates in excavation—excavating, unveiling, digging, searching, zeroing in, HUNTING* for the usually hidden truth of things, secrets, roots. and if scorpio cannot move past the loss, the pain, or the mourning that comes with the destruction resulting from digging for the truth, or 'excreting' the things that are no longer beneficial to achieving one's higher self (in this case, the next life/reincarnation)—if there is a resistance to change or a refusal to let go, there can be no transformation, no true rebirth. alternatively, rebirth will be inevitable, but it will be a painful process for those who still hold on to the old/past.

*yaoshi also strikes me as some fictional metaphor for jupiter, which, yes, unsurprisingly, symbolizes ABUNDANCE (still talking in astrology-speak i'm rambling). literally abundance is jupiter's whole deal. and bc of this, jupiter tends to be viewed as a 'good' planet who is always on our side, bc what's so bad about abundance? who doesn't want things like prosperity, luxury, expansion, etc.? here's where it gets extra interesting and how i like to understand yaoshi as an aeon: jupiter does not discriminate between 'good' and 'bad' things (with 'good' and 'bad' as defined by whoever experiences the power of jupiter). jupiter does not 'choose'; in astrology, he will MAGNIFY and EXPAND whatever he touches... so if jupiter ends up touching an area of one's life (what we call 'transits') that involves death, pain, or suffering... well, he might just bring 'suffering' to a whole other level. this is how i like to interpret yaoshi's intentions. i... don't think yaoshi attempted to 'spite' or 'curse' the xianzhou natives by giving them the inability to die. perhaps in his eyes, everything he sets his eyes on must be 'blessed' with growth, growth, and more growth. perhaps he has no other concept of anything else. hence, mara. hence, the ambrosial arbor. hence, no 'death' bc 'death' is 'loss' or 'lack' or 'absence' which contradicts yaoshi's whole deal, which is 'more and more and more.'

*i have less thoughts to ramble about with lan but i will say that lan, not unlike mars in astrology, is very ruthless, very relentless. unstoppable, until he hits his target. he reminds me of the grim reaper as a metaphor for the inevitability of death. "you can run, but you can't hide." bc lan will keep on chasing. i don't think it's in lan's nature to stop or give up the hunt. he will keep on. mars in astrology is all about what we do to get what we want and how we do it. mars is stamina and drive. mars is passion. mars is also anger. mars is ferocity. mars is persistence and perseverance. lan, i imagine, can embody all of these things.

"what about grief? what about pain? seemingly inalienable experiences that come with the cycle of life and death?"

i honestly don't know if either of these aeons have any concept of pain resulting from loss, or fear of loss. i don't know if yaoshi is yaoshi bc he 'fears' loss or death—if he is even capable of processing fear. i don't know if yaoshi has any concept of grief. i can say the same thing for lan! again, they're aeons, not humans! their moral compasses, if they have one, can be veryyyyyy different from ours. they might not even have ANY CONCEPT WHATSOEVER of grief and pain! but it's interesting to think about!

[chicago-geniza]

& i am trying to tie this together with turn-of-the-century realist fiction--mostly eastern european, since that's what i know--about The Poor & Huddled Masses, which was meant to spur the reader to *action* through the discomfort produced by combining aesthetic shock value with emotional empathy, plus the 'call to action' (the reader cannot be complacent about the characters' tragedy, oh no, it is a Social Tragedy, ergo, they are empowered to intervene & complicit until such time as they stand up from their overstuffed armchairs & *use* that power). see bolesław prus's "the waistcoat" as a classic example from polish positivism! but what happened with many of these stories is that they didn't have the intended effect. they didn't produce the outrage that dispassionate, "documentalist" descriptions of poor people's living conditions did (or even works like 'what is to be done?'). rather, the characters' pathos transformed a social commentary into...a story that provided catharsis, & once reached, middle-class readers dried their eyes, set their newspapers aside, & stopped thinking about the plight of those pesky paupers dying of consumption in the tenement across town. & i am thinking of this attempt to synthesize political writing with "bourgeois" 19th-century novel *form*, & which attempts were received more or less in accordance with their authors' aims. everything in prus's story was perfectly believable--& then you get y.l. peretz's "bontshe shvayg," which is NOT realist at all, but it starts out tricking you into thinking you're about to read another tear-jerking tale of woe. then it veers into the folklorically exaggerated: bontshe's suffering is tremendous. he is job of the shtetl, g-d's most cursed creation. his misfortunes are framed as unbelievable excess--and that is peretz's rhetorical trick, see! he reverses the device. perhaps the scale is a *little* out of proportion--he's writing in the mode of a nachman tale now--but the *shape* of his trials would be recognizable to any poor jew in poland or the russian empire at the time. if they weren't bontshe, they certainly knew a bontshe. *fictional* bontshe bears this with utmost humility & dies alone in a mendicant's hospital. even g-d marvels at his meekness & offers him all the rewards of heaven for his suffering on earth. bontshe, humble as always, requests a roll of white bread. i think that the allegorical form is what makes peretz's story successful--it treads the line between humorless didacticism & the attempts to write politically using a realist form that focuses on individual emotional experience and/or interpersonal emotional relationships. the problem, i also think, is that public education (at least in the US) has degraded to such a degree that many people--through no fault of their own--don't know how to parse stories that aren't either didactic or strictly realist. whenever i taught "bontshe shvayg," most--if not all--of my students read it literally, i.e., they thought it was a fable about the moral obligation to endure suffering & indignity. not sure what to do with all of these thoughts but i am trying to work through something about--the body/aesthetic empathy/attempts at political writing in a 19th-c. realist package with iowa school MFA influences, whether about class or a politics of identity (oh no...sally rooney)/the Very Literal Moment in fiction/the concept of suffering/my crusade on behalf of allegory (lol)

allowed 2 blog because i am in the bathroom, so:

- back 2 earlier post re: un-realism, what is considered "believable" (endurable suffering), the scope of literary realism, & i am thinking of how this connects to empathy in its original use (Einfühlung), an aesthetic term, which described a way of relating to visual art (projecting one's feelings into shapes; where pathetic fallacy meets synesthesia). "empathy" is a calque of the german ("in-feeling"), & i am thinking about schulz's idea of text as dynamic 'midrash' on the fixed form of the image, often subverting/transgressing the apparent interpretation. i am thinking about bodies as fixed forms, & Representation, & aesthetic empathy as a projection of the reader/viewer's emotions onto a static image. narrative interiority has the *potential* to destabilize that process, but only insofar as it "exceeds" the limits of believability, i.e., the reader's capacity for empathy--that is to say, their capacity to imagine human suffering in the realist mode (something that could happen in real life, to a real person); their *willingness* to believe that amount of suffering exists "in real life." it's *so* extreme that to project their own emotions--their "petty" suffering--into the pages of that character's interiority feels, to use a discursive term, like 'appropriation.' to use an affective term, it might just feel uncomfortable. surely the gulf is too great, & anyone who experienced suffering on that scale would also experience, like, the shrimp colors of human emotions? something no *normal* human could ever experience? surely the banality of evil--even such excessive evil it seems "unsurvivable"--doesn't imply a corresponding banality of emotional experience with which the common reader could...empathize? surely it transforms you into something other than human, passion-bearer or monstrous vermin? in some ways it reminds me of the way people talk about certain kinds of disabilities: "if i were you, i'd *kill* myself." the fixed form of the body & the feelings projected into it: aesthetic empathy. how the novel form disrupts that; what people do when confronted with the fact that they *can* empathize with the emotional experience of a character whose *lived* experience they nevertheless find unbelievable.

[webittech]

Mr. Robot's new season has business as usual—epic hacks, innovativeness in the midst of mayhem Elliot is back, so too is the high-wire filmmaking and haywire plot.

Mr. Robot appears to know we as a whole need CliffsNotes now. Pause, what's Stage Two once more? How does this character realize that character? Its Season 3 debut to a great extent tosses gatherings of people a bone with some table-setting, reintroducing us to the principle players as they get the pieces in the fallout of different Season 2 turns. Keep in mind, the FBI caught Darlene, Elliot got shot, Angela consented to enable the Dark Army, to control blackouts ran widespread in NYC, et al. So fight the temptation to interruption and make a beeline for Wikipedia, and Sam Esmail and co. will remunerate you with adequate in-scene updates.

In view of the previous evening's first hour ("eps3.0_power-saver-mode.h"), everything still is by all accounts rotating around the dismal Stage Two on a large scale plot level. As we adapted late last season, Elliot (well, actually Mr. Robot) conceived an assault with Tyrell and the Dark Army where E-Corp's paper records will vanish through huge blast, in this manner finishing his revolutionary objectives to pulverize the advanced shackles keeping up riches imbalance. It turns out the femtocell Elliot modified for Darlene (that Angela sneaked into a FBI transitory camp) didn't seek to catch proof of the agency's snooping, rather it was implied for hacking E-Corp. What's more, now Mr. Robot/Elliot/Tyrell/the Dark Army trust they can fill a high rise with hydrogen and cause the transformers inside to light the circuit—Elliot's Batman-like no-murder ethos be cursed. (As an aside: that was tech consultant Ryan Kazanciyan's most loved S2 hack, and it took seven days in addition to deal with, as he let us know on our on-break Decrypted podcast. Kazanciyan has effectively laid out his work from S3 debut if intrigued.)

This being Mr. Robot, obviously things will just turn out to be more confused than that. The debut makes it clear Elliot and Mr. Robot have diverse objectives, and few out of every odd real player has all the earmarks of being mindful of that. Anticipate that S3 will truly commute home how confounded life can get when everybody from your youth closest companion to an omniscient pioneer of a universal hacking ring appears to be mindful of your condition to changing degrees and tries to use it in quest for their own particular advantages. Phew.

Be that as it may, in case despite everything you're following alongside Mr. Robot after a hit-and-miss S2, odds are plot isn't the main (or even the most essential) thing keeping you around. Also, fortunately, in view of screening some of this current season's initial scenes, the show keeps on conveying on a ton of different fronts regardless of whether its story can feel extended now and again.

Seek imagination, remain for Cannavale

Quickly, the show's novel visual pizazz invites watchers back. Power-blackout stricken NYC looks especially troubling and enables bits of neon (from BBQ to shop lights or hacking rivalry scoreboards) extremely pop right off the bat, building up a shading palette not at all like whatever else on TV. Esmail keeps on discovering camera points others don't, as well. One especially remarkable grouping begins our vantage point with a tight shot on Whiterose inside an E-Corp atomic office, step by step raises us skyward to look downward on a dull NYC building, at that point flawlessly transports us into the retina of one Elliot Alderson (all while a Julie Andrews' rendition of "Shrieking Away" cunningly scores it). On the off chance that the stylish keeps you viewing, there's no indication of Mr. Robot's creative filmmaking backing off here.

Try not to stress. The hacking aspiration and specialized detail that draws in such a dedicated Internet following returns also. We see Elliot discover a Def Con CTF (catch the banner) rivalry as yet occurring between worldwide aggregates in spite of the city being without control for seven days ("A CTF competition, programmer Olympics," Elliot considers. "The whole city is enduring a vitality emergency while they're here practicing their inward political agitation"). What's more, even in this first scene, Mr. Robot compensates the individuals who have taken after security news in the previous year—I can't think about another auto pursue that closures like that in late memory.

The show likewise keeps up its comical inclination (Alf slaughtered somebody on-screen a year ago, recall) in spite of just extending its dull, dim representation of society and human instinct. Elliot meanders the avenues in a Josh Groban shirt at a certain point; Whiterose still holds her partner's allegorical hands as she stuns them with pleasantry. And keeping in mind that Leon's affection for Seinfeld is mysteriously gone yet, new expansion to the cast Bobby Cannavale ventures in as a delightfully "excessively" fixer for the Dark Army this season.

Cannavale's character has an always disconnected quiet joined with a know-it-all conceit, kinda like that old Jason Sudeikis character on SNL (directly down to the Bluetooth headset) however all the more debilitating given Cannavale's partners here. At a certain point he traces the defective rationale of not getting a free shake for his unwaveringness card punch 'til the following visit, just to leave the clerk with an unpropitious tip. "It's not about the cash, it's the guideline," he advises her. "When we lose our standards, we welcome tumult." Given the surprising significance new characters tend to demonstrate later in Mr. Robot seasons, we'll be checking this person.

Be that as it may, in maybe its most entrancing convention, Mr. Robot has dependably been a judicious show with regards to building its reality in a way that uncovers facts about our own. S1 set up an Occupy-powered fight over imbalance some time before Bernie Sanders began filling fields over the US. S2 highlights government hacks, crypto-ransomware gone wild, alongside references to the division of uncouthness versus damaging force inside a certain eventual legislator. What's more, despite the fact that these seasons disclosed in 2015 and 2016 separately, the scholars' room concocted such ideas much further ahead of time.

In this debut, we get an expanded monolog from Elliot that reminds us the show will keep on having bounty to say in regards to the present regardless of whether it stays set in this semi-prophetically catastrophic form of 2015:

"They're having their way with us—they bundled our battle into item, transformed our plummet into protected innovation, broadcast an unrest with business breaks, repaired the realities at that point increased the cost, lobotomized us into their VR ghastliness appear," Elliot opines in one of his mark monologs while pictures of Antifa and Nazis, environmental change and Brexit montage-on by.

"Imagine a scenario in which as opposed to battling back we surrender, give away our protection for security, trade poise for wellbeing, exchange insurgency for mistreatment. Imagine a scenario where we pick shortcoming over quality?" he proceeds with, his discourse now joined with sound of Donald Trump expressing "these are not the general population that made our nation awesome, these are individuals pulverizing our nation" amid some battle occasion.

"This is the thing that they needed from the start: for us to purchase in on our most exceedingly terrible selves, and I simply made it less demanding for them. I didn't begin an upheaval, I simply made us sufficiently quiet for the butchering."

In indeterminate circumstances (regardless of whether you characterize them through the viewpoint of individual, political, worldwide prosperity or something unique totally), watching appears about calamitous destructions complemented by viciousness can be excessively dreary. This present reality creates enough uneasiness, as indicated by this line of reasoning, so why dedicate whenever to this? Such rationale got me out of The Walking Dead long back, and it'll likely make them skirt an apparently agonizing rendition of The Justice League later this fall.

The plot of Mr. Robot focuses on turmoil, decimation, and control, however now the show's plot might be the slightest of numerous watchers' worries. Mr. Robot likewise demonstrates the benefit of depicting reality through its way to deal with hacking, it indicates how workmanship can at present be found in even the darkest settings, and it requests that watchers ponder conceivably annoying true powers (from psychological sickness to disparity to autocracy to reconnaissance states and back once more) through a current idea analyze rather than one set in a world far, far away. So regardless of whether we'll likely need the Cliffsnotes again by the end, S3 of Mr. Robot at first hopes to have bounty to offer those hopping in for another 12-scene ride.