#jason paragin

[celery-juice]

thank u for the warning abt john dies at the end, that one has been struck from the list

oh pal its no problem. i could rant about that fucking book for hours. what really drives me insane is that it has such good reviews universally, and no one even mentions all the bigotry?? it almost convinces me i read a different book. i stuck with it for a good long while, i started imagining the protagonist as the most pathetic guy ever and very much embraced that he sucked to get through it. still couldnt do it

the main love interest straight up bullied the main character in hs but hes like "shes hot so i still want to fuck her." she doesnt make any decisions. when the sort of zombie apocalypse scenario starts theres a moment where someone on their team turns, of course, and everyone freezes but she picks up a gun. and i was like "hell yeah some character development!" cause all she'd done so far was cry. but then she just hands the gun to the narrator and asks him to take care of it please, and he thinks about what stupid hot bitch she is.

theres 2 black characters, one is an angry cop, the other is the inciter of the aforementioned apocalypse. hes the one who was going to rape the underage girls, and apparently dresses in extremely exaggerated jamaican clothing and puts on a clearly fake exaggerated jamaican accent. also hes a drug dealer who lives in a trailer. he dies pretty immediately, pretty sure the other guy does too but i cant really remember.

BTW david wong is a lemony snicket-style pseudonym for jason paragin

EDIT: totally forgot that the white main character says the n word lol

[loosiusgoosius]

This is not to say anything bad about Jason Paragin. Both he and Tamsyn Muir have a beautiful, encapsulating, and enthralling grasp of the English language. One just uses it to describe the entwinement of two souls into one in the most intimate of ways and the other uses it to describe two drunk men in their mid twenties pissing off a dilapidated water tower.

I took too long to read it and Harrow the Ninth got returned and now I have to wait

[baberihamlincoln]

THOUGHTS ON SOMETHING IMPORTANT

I rarely make petty posts about little things in my life but this is such a major event in my life that I have to share it. It is late, but early, and I work at 4AM.  My shift starts in less than five hours and even in my sleep deprived mind I know where my priorities lie and I have to get this off of my chest because I have been thinking about it for, like, exactly a year now and ranted about it to everyone I love and care about-  but it's reached a point where I have to rant about it to everyone I know, too. Because everyone I care about is actually sick of hearing it, which I fear is because they don't understand why it's important, which is depressing for an entirely different reason . . . anyway, three people have made a major impact in my life this year and all of them are fictional. 

Amy, John and David Wong. There is genuinely no better book than John Dies at the End. If you have not read it already, I don't know why, because there is a strong likelihood I have given you a copy. This has to be the fifth time I have had to order this book on Amazon because every time I get it in my hands,  someone comes along and needs it more than I do. My cousin Sarah had told me about JDATE one time at her boyfriend's apartment. And she raved about it pretty manically and I didn't really understand what she was saying but looking back at it now, that's exactly how this book is meant to come into your life. A tiny white woman hunched over her knees in a giant computer chair is meant to screech vague gospel, the advertisement for John Dies at the End supposed to be incoherent and make little sense. That's the magic of it. It's not a book, it's an experience. A lifestyle. It opens doors to other worlds, man. JDATE is currently a trilogy, standing at three, fantastic books, centred in the small town of [UNDISCLOSED] where terrible supernatural things keep happening and only two, young, drop-outs really know what's going on. Yet at every turn, people keep doubting their abilities. Or maybe they loathe them for it due to their financial class. It depicts a very accurate struggle with depression, an unhealthy relationship with childhood trauma and (most importantly) the heroes of the story are the people you look over in everyday life. They're you! They're fantastic. I have never read anything more finely tuned to reality! EVER! And this could be seen as sad. You could be shaking your head and rolling your eyes and holding a glass of fine wine and scoffing "Abigail, what a low bar. What a poor taste in literature. Why attach yourself to something like David Wong's JDATE? Why something so vulgar and modern and stupid? Why not delve into translations of Nabokov? Why not meditate on the use of the stream of consciousness in Woolf? Bleh, Bleh? Bleh, Shakespeare?" Because, you IDIOT, you FOOL, you patronizing FREAK - John Dies at the End doesn't pretend to be anything more than it is. A hunk of text doesn't have to be a giant Joyce puzzle to be profound, and a reader doesn't have to have more than the basis of a story to get that it's alive. JDATE is simple, yeah, but that's what makes it so complicated! It's a sliver into the mind of a very real twenty-year-old man, rotting in the town he was raised in, saving the damn planet and being forgotten on a daily basis. But then it's MORE than that, too. There's a struggle with addiction, there's a literal drug that acts as the 'Popeye Spinach' that saves each peril the character's face. David Wong is a pseudonym for Jason Paragin. He's also the narrator of the story. He is in the lower financial class, had a rough childhood and writes eloquently. Which seems like they're all unrelated, and they are, but I've met so many people who demean others due to their financial background that I found this fantastic. Because it's true, money isn't indicative of intellect. It's refreshing. 

The book grounds you. 

It's real. It's the dirt. 

It is as real as dirt. 

It's clean, though. 

And that’s not all. Wong, this fictional character, goes on to write a book called Fancy Suits and Futuristic Violence. And that’s incredible, and that’s Wong’s calling, and I think that’s what he chooses to do with his life but we don’t know because we don’t know the end of the FUCKING story yet and It’s so good it’s incredible. 

Every single book in the series is brilliant because of the fact that you're experiencing it, or have at a certain point in your life. It's real. It's simple. It's fantastic. It was recommended to me by someone who is not alive to see how much I enjoy it and if you're going through a rough time in your life then you have to give it a read. If you're not, you should read it too. If you need a copy hit me up, I'll find one for you. I'm not going to edit this, because I think that would ruin it. This post has to be messy or it's not going to be effective.  But I am probably going to delete the post in a few minutes because I realize it's very early and I am likely just spewing nonsense from a dream I had last night. John Dies at the End. Best book you will ever read. And you don't even have to spend money on it, I'll give you every copy at my disposal. I hope I don't regret this post, because I'm so incredibly exhausted, but who knows what the future holds. This post may not be around for long, so HMU for your copy of JDATE while supplies last.

[motherboxing]

oh my god i just wanted to say THANK YOU for the blogging re: jason pargin wank!!!! i fucking HATED his article about the election, i don't know if you read/hate read it, but it's sO CONDESCENDING, and he's so fucking racist and transmisogynistic and fucking gross!! so so so so gross!!!! i mean i know this is a very side-eye-y criticism of a white bro who writes dick jokes for a living but mY GOD. anyway john cheese is A+ jason paragin is T for Troll and you are also A+, thanks for listening!!

Yeah, I really appreciate a lot of the stuff John Cheese has written about addiction and also creativity and writing and stuff! I hope my dislike of Jason Pargin doesn’t come across as totally grudgey, I dunno, like… look, I have family who are also from really rural, small-town, working-class communities in Illinois and South Dakota and etc, it is not a part of my family that I grew up immersed in but it is a part of my family that as an adult I’ve kind of struggled to understand because my mom really DID grow up in that kind of environment and obviously, she raised me, and like, whatever. I am not unsympathetic to the idea that a lot of rural poor and working-class white americans have a specific cultural experience and that in order to understand the current global situation we need to understand why and how these communities have become such a contested space in public discourse and etc. I just, like… I dunno, what I said to my girlfriend earlier I think was something along the lines of like, he seems to want everyone to understand the plight of the working-class white American man, but he doesn’t seem to want that guy to have to understand anyone else. Which definitely leads me to believe that he hasn’t unpacked NEARLY as much of the racism and misogyny and transmisogyny and xenophobia and, yes, even classism! and etc etc etc that he was brought up in as he thinks that he has.

Like, the mere fact that when people told him they were uncomfortable with him having built a career around a pseudonym that clearly conveys a cultural/ethnic background that is not his own, he responded with, basically, a bunch of stuff about how he’s colourblind or whatever and he felt totally comfortable just adopting this online persona of, essentially, an Asian man, without even THINKING about the implications of that, and then when his writing provoked violent responses from racists he was like “oh I must be doing something right!!!!” but like… obviously he was never going to be at immediate risk from those racists! Because they could ultimately just look at his face and realize that he is not an Asian dude! So he always had that out! But ACTUAL Asian writers do NOT have that out, and the racist sentiments that his writing stirred up made a lot of their lives more difficult, and he just like… clearly didn’t think that was a problem? I dunno. It makes me feel pissy. 

Several people I know have talked about how people who are white and not multiethnic or anything - like, those kind of WASP types, you know - often have this freedom to move around in these cultural spaces, because they don’t experience the real minority stress that actual racial and ethnic minorities experience… like, it’s a documented fact that someone like Jason Pargin stands to gain from pretending to be Asian, while, for example, an actual Asian writer who writes in the same genres and field(s) as Jason Pargin might SEEM, on a surface level, to have the same advantages as a white guy pretending to be Asian, but ultimately their experience of ACTUAL, real life, interpersonal discrimination and racism, the ways minority stress and racism and etc manifest in their lives, etc, put them at a disadvantage to someone like Jason Pargin, who can reap all the benefits of tokenization without any of the adverse effects. And. I dunno. It just makes me angry! I really dislike that guy! I see his actions as indicative of this white/straight/dude/etc/etc idea that being marginalized in some way is ultimately just a bargaining chip and nothing more. Like all those of us who are marginalized in whatever ways (race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, you name it) get is ~~~~diversity scholarships, and not ALSO a lifetime of being told we are basically dirt. It’s a super fucked up understanding of the politics of difference and the Other that does not take into account cultural, social, etc power dynamics, and I think that’s offensive and dumb because obviously without those power dynamics, the Other does not really exist! 

ANYWAY this turned into a whole rant, whatever, my point is fuck Jason Pargin, I do not like that guy, and John Dies At The End was overrated anyway.