#elizabeth sandifer

[haveyoureadthisbook-poll]

[areadersquoteslibrary]

A BACKWARDS WAY OF WORKING OUT THE VALUE A 'SOCIAL CONSTRUCT' HAS IN ARGUMENT, this quote following a subjective account of Marx's theory of labor-worth: "The reader needn’t accept this account. The point is that it is neither a vulgarly objective account nor a vague and subjective one. It admits that value is a mental construct, but one that is ‘real’ because it has a real social basis and real social effects. Value, for Marx, is neither a thing nor an essence, neither quality nor spirit. It is a social reality because of what humans actually do. (This argument applies to most things leftists call social constructs—a phrase that does not mean “nebulous and unreal,” but rather “best understood in terms of lived experience than in woolly metaphysics.”)

- Elizabeth Sandifer, with Jack Graham,

'No Law for the Lions and Many Laws for the Oxen is Liberty: A Subjective Calculation of the Value of the Austrian School',

From the Book 'Neo-Reaction: A Basilisk'

[femmchantress]

Elizabeth Sandifer’s prose is always such a delight (source)

[1000rh]

We all know what’s to be done. Nazis have been the go-to example for people arguing why sometimes violent resistance is necessary for decades. But in the absence of a credible resistance […] the knowledge of what we should do is fairly useless. We’re not doing it, and I am to say the least skeptical that screaming “for fuck’s sake, just bash the fucking nazis’ skulls in already” for the next 350 pages would magically kickstart a mass uprising.

– Elizabeth Sandifer, Neoreaction a Basilisk (2017)

[mimeparadox]

If there was ever a classic Doctor Who story Elizabeth Sandifer made me feel keen about watching, it was "Paradise Towers"; now that I'm halfway through it--has Tubi always had classic Who?--I have to say, this is really quite fantastic.

[the-october-country]

"When they hear my bowstrings tightnin' Angels gay, devils frightnin' C'mon fire and midnight lightnin'

To the garden gancy

Hail the wayward werewolf howlin' Haints and shades and goblins growlin' Fiends and demon deevs a-prowlin' When I break and fancy

Shine the merlin moonbeam eye Set my dancin' feet to fly O'er the dark and dervish sky I go like the raven"

This is another one @owlpockets turned me on to, and I discovered a wonderful interview about the album, by Mike Devlin at Music Matters Review, which speaks about the goddess imagery of this song towards the end.

And with that in mind, Elizabeth Sandifer's piece on Eruditorium Press thoughtfully explores the complexities of Carter as a trans songwriter working in a mythic mode, and deserves to be read alongside discovering her songs, though a trigger warning applies as the piece extensively discusses posthumous misgendering both in general and in the context of Carter's life and work.

[txttletale]

Could you say a bit more about your thoughts on zygon inversion?

the whole two-parter is about how refugees (the zygons) who are being settled by the british government, and how some of them are Good Refugees who just want to assimilate and be Normal Human (read: British) People and some of them are Bad Refugees who join a scary terrorist group that use this fucking banner:

it is, i think, completely impossible for anyone with even the slightest understanding of european political discourse to not immediately scan this as being, if not a 1-1 to metaphor exactly, about as damn close to being About Muslim Immigration as it gets, playing on the everpresent fear of the european white supremacist right that asylum seekers and refugees from west asia are all secretly suicide-bombers in waiting. and this episode takes the liberal stance on this, which is that yes, obviously some of them are insane violent evil militants who just want to kill people, but some of them are The Good Ones, and we should figure out a way to find and punish The Bad Ones without impactiung the Good Ones Too--this is, broadly, the liberal stance on immigration in the UK, and it is obviously also prima facie accepting of islamophobic ideas! jack graham did a great piece on it.

the doctor's little speech at the end of the zygon inversion essentially boils down to 'war is bad, you just want war because you're an arrogant idiot who won't be affected by it'. which would be all very well and good in an episode like the frontier in space, where the confrontation is between two competing imperialist powers full of bluster and bravado and jingoism--but in talking to UNIT and the zygons, he's textually equivocating between refugees who are unhappy with their mistreatment at the hands of the British government and the British government agency mistreating them (yes, i know UNIT is nominally plurinational but that is not the portrayal of them we are getting here.) the fundamental problem with the scene is that bonnie (as elizabeth sandifer has pointed out) is only there to say vacuous nonsense that basically amounts to "i love war and violecen and i think its good" so that the doctor can heroically say, "actually, itsNot good." she's written as such an embarrasing caricature for the doctor to knock over that it imo makes the whole speech profoundly unearned.

of course, peter capaldi sells it, like he often sells garbage he's given to say! it's even a moving speech against war, when taken out of context--but taken in context, it's just equivocating between the oppressed and their oppressors and treating them both as equally responsible for making peace, and i think that's morally repulsive.

[spiderwoven]

sometimes i get the uncanny notion that elizabeth sandifer is my parallel-universe, slightly more academically disciplined, slightly more unhinged, elder millennial instead of gen z alter ego

[fatalism-and-villainy]

I would love to hear more of your opinions on Francis Dolarhyde

Anon, I am so sorry this took me two weeks to answer. I had the whole thing formulated, but it took awhile to track down the scenes/quotes that supported this argument, so here we are.

My initial response to this was “I don’t have many thoughts on him,” but that’s not actually true. I don’t have many thoughts on him as a character - I’m pretty okay with what he’s doing in the story and how he slots into Will and Hannibal’s dynamic, but he’s not one of the cast members who compels me the most.

But what I do find compelling about him is how his character is stylistically handled.

One of the most striking things about him, to me, is what Bryan Fuller said on one of the DVD commentaries for season 3, about the sequences at Dolarhyde’s house demonstrating the horror of cinema. And it’s really true - the horror of the scenes at his house, when he rehearses and relives his murders, is communicated visually through the close-ups on his film projector. For example, in episode 11, when Reba is at his house and he watches - unbeknown to her - footage of Molly and Walter, there are close-ups of the film spinning in its reel:

And this kind of visual focus on the projector and film is pretty frequent in the scenes at his house. It’s all about the film! Hannibal frequently features this kind of close-up object focus in its cinematography, but it’s telling that with Dolarhyde, the main other kind of technology we see it with is the tattoo needle shown upon his introduction.

The film, and the voyeurism it represents, is part of the technology of his becoming, just as his Red Dragon tattoos are. And his long introductory sequence also features the artsy sequence wherein he seemingly gets bound by the film and transforms into the projector.

His bestial nature is linked to his voyeurism and its monstrous appetites.

I also think about Dolarhyde in the context what Elizabeth Sandifer has to say about him, in her episode-by-episode commentary on Hannibal: that NBC!Dolarhyde “exists in constant tension with modernity.” Commenting on the effect of Dolarhyde retaining the job at the film processing plant that he has in the original Red Dragon novel, she says:

Inasmuch as it’s an object worthy of scrutiny, it speaks to Harris’s consistent fascination with turning modernity into monstrosity. But in 2015, nearly thirty-five years later, his connection to film is dated—a connection less to modernity than to early 20th century modernism. (Hannibal himself, of course, presents similar issues.) He is a technological monster, yes, but he is rooted in the hauntological qualities of technology as opposed to any futuristic ones.

And I just love that. Like, it’s fascinating to me that even though the film processing plant is no longer the means through which Dolarhyde is discovered, as in the novel, there’s something about it that just felt intrinsic to his character to Fuller&co. As an adaptational move, it turns the mundanity of his profession into a sort of retro technophilia, kind of reminiscent of that quote that goes around sometimes about how out-of-date technology acquires a new aesthetic resonance when it’s removed from its zeitgeist.

Hannibal is very deliberately out-of-time. Hannibal the character is surrounded by the signifiers of 19th century aestheticism, and Dolarhyde, in turn, becomes representative of the aestheticization of the late ‘70s. And that shift in temporality reflects the narrative turn in the utility of film in this arc - his videos are no longer a plot element, but rather a way of aesthetically and psychologically rendering his character. Rather appropriate to the fact that Will’s 3B arc, in turn, constitutes him shifting focus from the question of how Dolarhyde is choosing his victims to the question of the degree to which he himself shares Dolarhyde’s appetite.

I think the strange, out-of-time quality of Dolarhyde’s use of film - rather than modern digital technology - can also be taken to reflect the level of artistic distance through which we ourselves see the show. Violence on Hannibal is very stylized, very refracted through an aestheticized lens. It’s made beautiful to us. The datedness of this form of technology, the way it renders the projector and film themselves as aesthetic objects, keeps us at a remove from the violence itself. Instead, it reorients us towards point of view, and interpretation. Towards how things are seen, rather than simply the fact of their occurrence.

Geoff Klock, in the oft-cited book If Oscar Wilde Ate People, notes the significance of “seeing” in the show (113). The question “see?”, as Klock notes, bookends the first and last episodes of the show, posed first by Garett Jacob Hobbs and then, on the cliff, by Hannibal. And of course, Dolarhyde himself poses this question, when confronting Chilton with pictures of his crimes: “Do you see?”

Being able to see the aesthetic and artistic qualities in murder, and to see beyond its immorality, is thematically central to the show, in Klock’s argument. And to me, Dolarhyde embodies that concept perhaps more so than any of the show’s other villains (save, perhaps, Hannibal himself). As noted in the film Manhunter, sight is the main sense through which Dolarhyde perceives the world. The two pieces of iconography associated with him on the show are the broken mirror in his house (and of course, his habit of arranging the mirror shards on his victims’ eyes) and the film projector - demonstrating his fractured view of himself, and the consequential control he asserts over the images of his victims, and the way he uses them to transform his view of himself.

Essentially, the show links the potential for violence to a sort of interpretive capacity that is metaphorically associated with sight, and Dolarhyde is a character very associated with sight. And the cinematic and stylistic framing of his psyche has a lot of fascinating implications as to the show’s aesthetic rendering of violence.

[annihilate-this-week]

“The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory is that conspiracy theorists actually believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is chaotic. The truth is that it is not the Jewish banking conspiracy or the grey aliens or the 12 foot reptiloids from another dimension that are in control. The truth is far more frightening: nobody is in control. The world is rudderless.”

—Alan Moore, quoted in The Last War In Albion by Elizabeth Sandifer

[albiandreams]

I've been somewhat obsessed with Paul Schrader's The Card Counter lately, so I got some of my thoughts on that film, the photos that inspired it, and the violence of white feminism out on my blog:

[sporadiceagleheart]

It's Friday Y'all know what that means time for one of my Rachel Joy Scott Friday edits Sarah Elizabeth Armstrong, Sarah Elizabeth “Sadie” Ollis Armstrong, Ruth Eleanor Ollis Yenter, DEATH 27 Dec 1988 (aged 78)Ruth Elizabeth Armstrong Sizer, Dr Sarah Elizabeth Reidhead Armstrong, Sarah Elizabeth Armstrong, Sarah Ann Armstrong, Hachikō “Hachi or Chūken Hachikō” Ueno, Rex the Dog, Girl Dog, Milo, Rando the Dog, Spike, Lassie, Lassie Jr., Max Dog, Greyfriars Bobby, Buster Boy, Toto AkA Terry, Barney “The Cemetery Cat” Sampson, Sneaky Pie Siamese “Sneaky” Cat, Grumpy the Cat, Room Eight, Grumpy Cat, Suzy Cat, Simon The Cat Allen, Tippy The Cat, Slick Cat Chidsey, Morris the Cat, Susan Hayward, Cat, Tom Hanks (Cat), Syrka, Panther Cat, Sylvester Bachman “Syllie” Cat, Edle Lee “♥♥” Hecht Cat, Mr. “Bootsie” Boots-Cat, Nagi cat, Gilbert Cat, Snookum White McStay, Butters “The Bean” Bozwick, Danie Cat, You'll Do Lobelia, Rachel Hannah Morin, Rachel Marie Sobkoweak Jackson, Rachel Marie Johnson Janous, Rachel Lauren Lavalley, Rachel Ann Schrette, Rachel Joy Scott, Rachel Erin Rollings, Rachel Dawn Freeman, Rachel Frances Reid, Rachel Elizabeth Payne, Rachel Karin Hurley, Saffie-Rose Brenda Roussos, Saffiatu “Saffie” Bockarie, Leonard “Len” Saffie, Sarrafino Joseph “Saffie” Flammia, Lillie Estelle Lawson Greene, Effie Frances Sandifer Mayhew, Ewing Roy Mayhew, John Atkinson, Courtney Boyle, Kelly Marie Brewster, Georgina Bethany Callander, Olivia Paige “Ollie” Campbell-Hardy, Megan Joanne Hurley, Nell Jones, Sorrell Jenny Leczkowski, Eilidh MacLeod, Chloe Ann Rutherford, Nevaeh Alyssa Bravo, Jacklyn Jaylen “Jackie” Cazares, Makenna Lee “Kenna” Elrod Seiler, Jayce Carmelo Luevanos, Maite Yuleana Rodriguez, Layla Marie Salazar, Eliahna “Ellie or Elle” Torres, Rojelio Fernandez Torres, Alejandro "Ale" Vargas Jr., Ava Jordan Wood, Tristyn Tyne Bailey,

[areadersquoteslibrary]

"There is some attraction and superficial plausibility in the idea that you can’t quantify human actors with statistics, etc. This is part of why this ideology is so attractive to people who are in vested in their own individualism, rugged or otherwise. But, of course, the cult of individualism is based on the idea that the behaviour of some humans can always be predicted. The individualist is, by definition, the guy who stands apart from the common herd. He (because it is a gendered subject) likes to wax ruefully about accepting the reality of what ‘humans’ are really like as a way of ruling out utopias—but he implicitly separates humans into the schlubs and the inspired. Even the superficially liberatory idea of ‘self-ownership’ espoused by many praxeological Austrians and libertarians is a coy way of conceptualising people as commodities, which is probably how these supposed lovers of liberty so often end up defending slavery. The excuse for this partiality to the rights and privileges of the ruling class, and the attendant indifference to those of the subject class (whatever the social content of these categories may be at any given time), is that private property is the basis of liberty. But this manages the impressive feat of being both a tautology and a contradiction. It’s a tautology because it assumes the point under question. It’s a contradiction because if private property, while conferring liberty on its possessors, also structurally curtails the liberty of the propertyless, then the concept of liberty becomes a luxury to be enjoyed by a few. From here the libertarian is inescapably pushed towards somehow justifying the inequity, towards explaining “Why yes, it is a luxury to be enjoyed by a few—and quite right too!” The justifications are easy to find. You need only look at the many and drastic specific inequities generated by capitalist society, generalise from them, and amputate history and context so that they appear to have no cause save for some primordial fact or another. The necessary amputation of context is especially striking in the case of the libertarians, because a whole host of the inequities they seize upon to justify hierarchy are based on the imperialism they profess to be against. It helps that one can be against today’s racist wars— though not on the grounds of anti-racism, except of the most specious variety—while quietly accepting and utilising the racial inequities inherited from the racist imperialism of the past. As usual, reactionary thinking is dependant upon amnesia."

- Elizabeth Sandifer, with Jack Graham,

'No Law for the Lions and Many Laws for the Oxen is Liberty: A Subjective Calculation of the Value of the Austrian School',

From the Book 'Neo-Reaction: A Basilisk'

[imissthembutitwasntadisaster]

THANK YOU, ELIZABETH SANDIFER READING PERSON. Always glad to see Elizabeth Sandifer appreciation on my dash* *on the blogs I follow by randomly checking their pages while logged out

I'm so sorry but unless I'm accidentally reading Elizabeth Sandifer without knowing it, in which case please let me know! Then I don't really know who that is, but I hardly look at authors names sometimes tbh 😅

[1000rh]

The cautionary tale […] is Angela Nagle’s appalling Kill All Normies, which takes the jaw-droppingly foolish methodology of simply reporting all of the alt-right’s self-justifications as self-evident truths so as to conclude that the real reason neo-nazis have been sweeping into power is because we’re too tolerant of trans people. From this spectacularly ill-advised premise Nagle makes the inevitable but even worse conclusion that the obvious thing to do is for the left to abandon all commitment to identity politics (except maybe feminism which, as a white cis woman, Nagle has at least some time for).

– Elizabeth Sandifer, Neoreaction a Basilisk (2017)

[chicago-geniza]

what kind of brainworms is it when you've had Reading Block for ages and the two titles that look promising enough to snap you out of it are Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch, and Elizabeth Sandifer's Neoreaction a Basilisk