#postmodern literature

[f--e-u-e-r-t-r-u-n-k-e--n]

Sick of it all. Sickness. Collection of notes.

Sickness is a language

Body is a representation

Medicine is a political practice

— Bryan S. Turner, The body and the society

"What I lack is words that correspond to each minute of my state of mind."

— Antonin Artaud, The nerve meter

"Desmesurado enfermo Bárbaro limpio de rutinas y caminos marcados No acepto vuestras sillas de seguridades cómodas Soy el ángel salvaje que cayó una mañana En vuestras plantaciones de preceptos Poeta Anti poeta"

—Vicente Huidobro, Altazor.

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked" —Allen Ginsberg, Howl.

"First, we believe that the world must be changed. We desire the most liberatory possible change of the society and the life in which we find ourselves confined. We know that such change is possible by means of pertinent actions". —Report on the Construction of Situations

"In his 1954 book Mental Illness and Personality Foucault combines the subjective experience of the mentally ill person with a sociocultural historical approach to mental illness and suggests that there exists a reciprocal connection between individual perception and sociocultural development. (…) what I call a historical phenomenology that combines the subjective experience of the mentally ill person with a sociocultural historical approach to mental ill-ness." —Line Joranger, Individual perception and cultural development: Foucault's 1954 approach to mental illness and its history

"The former, a lovely maiden in the broad daylight, rocked its cradle, endowed it with a charm and glory of its own. Presently it fell sick, lost itself in the darkness of the Middle Ages, and was hidden away by the Witch in woods and wilds: there, sustained by her compassionate daring, it was made to live anew. (…) Are we quite sure of what has been so often repeated, that the gods of old had come to an end, themselves wearied and sickened of living; that they were so disheartened as almost to send in their resignation; that Christianity had only to blow upon these empty shades? (...) By a vow my mother made in her sickness my youth and my life are bound for ever." —Jules Michelet, La Sorcière.

"At the point of departure, then, one may place the political project of rooting out illegalities, generalizing the punitive function and delimiting, in order to control it, the power to punish. From this there emerge two lines of obiectification of crime and of the criminal. On the one hand, the criminal designated as the enemy of all, whom it is in the interest of all to track down, falls outside the pact, disqualifies himself as a citizen and emerges, bearing within him as it were, a wild fragment of nature; he appears as a villain, a monster, a madman, perhaps, a sick and, before long, 'abnormal' individual. It is as such that, one day, he will belong to a scientific objectification and to the 'treatment' that is correlative to it." —Michel Focault, Discipline and Punish

Nastasya was overcome with a fit of laughter. She was given to laughter and when anything amused her, she laughed inaudibly, quivering and shaking all over till she felt ill. "And have you made much money by your thinking?" she managed to articulate at last. "One can't go out to give lessons without boots. And I'm sick of it." "Don't quarrel with your bread and butter." "They pay so little for lessons. What's the use of a few coppers?" he answered, reluctantly, as though replying to his own thought. —Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment.

"What I’d felt there was true, no doubt about that. The experience had revealed to me, in a brutal way, the unreality of this world, the realized abstraction which is the Spectacle. The whole metaphysical – and thus total and filled out all the way to the existential sphere– dimension of this concept had appeared clearly to me in this private mode of disclosure, and could appear as it really is, as something really strange, posing a problem the essence of which is absolute foreignness, only insofar as it is lived as an experience, as a phenomenon. Habit makes phenomena be forgotten as phenomena, that is, the supra-sensible – must I add that Hegel’s famous affirmation too took on a kind of dazzling conreteness, the power of a revelation? And yet, habit is precisely the characteristic means of commodity metaphysics, its manifestation, which never manifests anything but the forgetting of its character as a manifestation… That’s how the bulging intuition of Absence also reveals that it’s already transcended as such, since it presents itself as a manifestation of the forgetting of the manifestation as such, meaning as the revealing of the commodity mode of disclosure, as the revealing of the Spectacle." —Tiqqun, Phenomenology of Everyday Life

"17.- Sense is the element of the Common, that is, every event, as an irruption of sense, institutes a common. The body that says "I," in truth says «we." A gesture or statement endowed with sense carves a determined community out of a mass of bodies, a community that must itself be taken on in order to take on this gesture or statement.

50.- Empire exists "positively" only in crisis, only as negation and reaction. If we too belong to Empire, it is only because i is impossible to get outside it .

52.-At first glance, Empire seems to be a parodic recollection of the entire, frozen history of a "civilization." And this impression has a certain intuitive correctness. Empire is in fact civilization's last stop before it reaches the end of its line, the final agony in which it sees its life pass before its eyes." —Tiqqun, Introduction to Civil War

"For Americans are finding more and more that they lack muscle and children, that is, not workers but soldiers, and they want at all costs and by every possible means to make and manufacture soldiers with a view to all the planetary wars which might later take place, and which would be intended to demonstrate by the over-whelming virtues of force the superiority of American products, and the fruits of American sweat in all fields of activity and of the superiority of the possible dynamism of force. Because one must produce, one must by all possible means of activity replace nature wherever it can be replaced, one must find a major field of action for human inertia, the worker must have something to keep him busy, new fields of activity must be created, in which we shall see at last the reign of all the fake manufactured products, of all the vile synthetic substitutes in which beatiful real nature has no part." —Antonin Artaud, To Have Done With the Judgement of god

"A study published in the May 2021 issue of the British Journal of Health Psychology looked at health-related guilt in relation to having chronic pain. (…) The research turned up three major themes that had been reported on in the previous research. These included the following.

-Management of chronic pain -Diagnostic uncertainty or legitimizing pain -How the person impacted others by their action or inaction. -The health-related guilt that many people with chronic pain experience is from coping with the condition and the decrease in quality of life that it often brings about. (…) Those who have chronic pain may feel guilty because they are unable to do things they want to do. They may feel that they are letting others down, or they believe they are doing something wrong or intentional. The guilt can lead to more issues, such as depression, making it something that should be addressed." —Steven H. Richeimer, The Impact of Health-Related Guilt and Chronic Pain

"No soy Pasolini pidiendo explicaciones No soy Ginsberg expulsado de Cuba No soy un marica disfrazado de poeta No necesito disfraz Aquí está mi cara Hablo por mi diferencia Defiendo lo que soy y no soy tan raro Me apesta la injusticia y sospecho de esta cueca democrática Pero no me hable del proletariado Porque ser pobre y maricón es peor Hay que ser ácido para soportarlo (…) ¿Van a dejarnos bordar de pájaros las banderas de la patria libre? El fusil se lo dejo a usted que tiene la sangre fría y no es miedo El miedo se me fue pasando De atajar cuchillos (…) Aunque después me odie Por corromper su moral revolucionaria ¿Tiene miedo que se homosexualice la vida? Y no hablo de meterlo y sacarlo Y sacarlo y meterlo solamente Hablo de ternura compañero." —Pedro Lemebel, Hablo por mi diferencia

"In late 2014, I was sick with a chronic condition that, about every 12 to 18 months, gets bad enough to render me, for about five months each time, unable to walk, drive, do my job, sometimes speak or understand language, take a bath without assistance, and leave the bed. This particular flare coincided with the Black Lives Matter protests, which I would have attended unremittingly, had I been able to. I live one block away from MacArthur Park in Los Angeles, a predominantly Latino neighborhood and one colloquially understood to be the place where many immigrants begin their American lives. The park, then, is not surprisingly one of the most active places of protest in the city.

I listened to the sounds of the marches as they drifted up to my window. Attached to the bed, I rose up my sick woman fist, in solidarity.

I started to think about what modes of protest are afforded to sick people – it seemed to me that many for whom Black Lives Matter is especially in service, might not be able to be present for the marches because they were imprisoned by a job, the threat of being fired from their job if they marched, or literal incarceration, and of course the threat of violence and police brutality – but also because of illness or disability, or because they were caring for someone with an illness or disability.

I thought of all the other invisible bodies, with their fists up, tucked away and out of sight. If we take Hannah Arendt’s definition of the political – which is still one of the most dominant in mainstream discourse – as being any action that is performed in public, we must contend with the implications of what that excludes. If being present in public is what is required to be political, then whole swathes of the population can be deemed a-political – simply because they are not physically able to get their bodies into the street.

(…) The Sick Women are all of the dysfunctional, dangerous and in danger, badly behaved, crazy, incurable, traumatized, disordered, diseased, chronic, uninsurable, wretched, undesirable and altogether dysfunctional bodies belonging to women, people of color, poor, ill, neuroatypical, differently-abled, queer, trans, and genderfluid people, who have been historically pathologized, hospitalized, institutionalized, brutalized, rendered unmanageable, and therefore made culturally illegitimate and politically invisible." — Johanna Hedva, Sick Woman Theory

"I’m all for the death of capitalism, but what the hell was this? Sick, pained, expensive, sensitive: these were not words that inspired any revolutionary fervor in me. My anarchism had always been a thing of life, vitality, and beauty. When I think of it energetically, I feel strong rivers of red force, unbridled kinetic power moving reality. It’s a verb, something you do.

My heroes didn’t go to General Assemblies to talk, they robbed banks and shot fascists. They burned down houses or construction equipment instead of engaging in sit-in’s or camping sessions. My anarchism is unapolegetically violent, even gleefully so, and I long for the acrid smoke of a riot like junkies long for meth.

Here appeared to be the quiet, soothing politics of the ill. Anarchist therapy. I was happy to see those confined to a hospital bed could display solidarity in their own way, but I walked away firmly convinced I’d taken a stroll through a world that had no bearing on mine.

Some people’s revolution involved care and love and feelings. Mine involved bullets and fire and blood.

Yet…something lingered, some subtle shift deep within my mind. I began to realize that just because the response of the ill to capitalism might be different from mine, that did not mean the exploitation they lived under was any less brutal." — Dr. Bones, Too Weird to Live: The Case for the Individual in a Sick Woman’s World

"And, left to themselves, men lived long before they understood that they all ought to, and might be, happy. Only in the very latest times have a few of them begun to understand that work ought not to be a bugbear to some and like galley-slavery for others, but should be a common and happy occupation, uniting all men. They have begun to understand that with death constantly threatening each of us, the only reasonable business of every man is to spend the years, months, hours, and minutes, allotted him—in unity and love. They have begun to understand that sickness, far from dividing men, should, on the contrary, give opportunity for loving union with one another." — Leo Tolstoy, Work, Death and Sickness

[jocrude]

This is gonna be a major schizopost but: Modernism is fundamentally progressive, Postmodernism is fundamentally conservative. Modernism, as an aesthetic movement, fundamentally comes from viewing a world shaped by industrial capitalist development and all its horrors and expressing what you see in art. Postmodernism cannot be distinguished from Modernism (apart from the time period people started using the term) except that Modernism is "serious", "sincere", whereas Postmodernism is "playful", "ironic." Modernism forces one to confront the horror of industrial capitalist society, raw and unprotected, postmodernism is a defence mechanism that uses jaded cynicism like a callus to get people used to living in a loathsome societal condition.

[emotinalsupportturtle]

I think I’m going to start reading the pretentious, annoying man book, infinite jest. mainly because I never back down from an academic challenge

[zutarasbuff]

Hello dear readers,

I recently provided my amazing batch of literature with the task of creating a “Postmodern literary magazine focussing upon the Pakistani settings”. My students have worked up on creating a literary piece consisting of poems, short stories, reviews, critical essays and an interview. It would be amazing if you could read their works and appreciate their craft for they have worked really hard, not merely for securing marks in their project, but to put their inner creativity at a display and work on the narratives that are pretty much Pakistani in their spirit, but depict their postmodern and cyberpunk-ish nature influenced by the global trends.

P.S: “The very title of the magazine; The Pakistani Pallette”, reflects a subtle wordplay where in the word Pallette the second L is an indicative of the French phrase “la mode” or “la modre” thus referencing to something that’s adapted from the modern.

Please go through it and let me know what you think of the amateur but highly talented writers in making.

[lady-illyria-the-magi]

29.10.2024

Today's studying/other organizing:

🌸 sign tenancy agreement to New Place (a dorm room but it's cheap and will do) ✅️

🌸 sign off current housing ✅️

🌸 sign off power (new place has it included) ✅️

🌸 inform the magistrate that i'm moving soon ✅️

🌸 return a book to the library so i don't get the "book is late" -fine ✅️

🌸 read 200 pages of postmoderni kirjallisuus (postmodern literature ecyclopedia)

🌸 revise korean FOR REAL i got a lesson on thursday and i'm cooked i barely know how to read and i should read okay-ish by now

[spaceintruderdetector]

1986- ''The generation I want to talk about hasn’t been named yet. In this essay I’ll call them the postmoderns, because it’s a nonjudgmental term, and because it fairly reflects their unspoken belief that all science fiction leading up to and culminating in their generation is — let’s face it — dead. All the postmoderns are talented, ambitious writers, steeped in the lore and history of the field, and the controversies of previous generations are old news to them, settled long ago and to their complete satisfaction. It’s only natural that they would want to seize control of the future of science fiction, to plot its directions and aims and goals — this is exactly what all previous generations demanded and, more or less, got.

Asimov's v10n08 (1986 08) : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

[thewomanwithmissingfingers]

I think it's a mistake to lose one's sense of death, even one's fear of death. Isn't death the boundary we need? Doesn't it give a precious texture to life, a sense of definition? You have to ask yourself whether anything you do in this life would have beauty and meaning without the knowledge you carry of a final line, a border or limit.

White Noise, Don DeLillo, 1985

[rememerance]

Complete meaninglessness makes no sense therefore expresses meaninglessness in an ineffective way. Meaninglessness aways needs chains of meaning to glue it up so that it shall be seen, even tho it is no longer pure. Pure meaninglessness unfortunately cannot be experienced, as the humans are limited to experience through constructing meaning which is instantly destructive to any pure meaninglessness presented (to be argued). Yet if you glue meaningfulness altogether in a meaningless way, pure meaninglessness can be presented, yet it simply can't be experienced purely, as meaninglessness can only be experienced purely through a state of meaninglessness (to be argued). But it's not true, as the act of trying to comprehend pure meaninglessness through the eyes of meaningfulness is no matter what meaningless. So can any attempts out of meaning ever really do any harm to pure meaninglessness? Is there any meaninglessness more or less pure than the other? Can pure meaninglessness not be experienced purely? Probably experiencing meaninglessness with the attempt of figuring it out, of comprehending it is the best way of experiencing it, as it adds more meaninglessness. So is experiencing meaninglessness through meaninglessness then more meaningless? They seem to me very equal, simply two different experiences. The former is like a smoker trying to smoke a bench and fails, and then realises that it is surely a bench that cannot be smoked no matter what; the latter is a smoker knowing that they can't smoke a bench as they came to appreciate the bench not to smoke it, so they just appreciate the bench as it is, which is their goal, which then is perfectly fulfilled and sątisfied through their attempt of no attempt. Both are satisfied as long as they both understand they are not here to smoke anything.

Now talking about smoking, why is it so necessary to use the verb "smoking" in front of "cigarette", as it sounds almost like emphasising it unnecessarily as what else can a person be doing with a cigarette in their mouth smoking? The word smoking is literally absolutely excessive and therefore meaningless, so instead of saying "They are smoking a cigarette" why not just say, "they are doing a cigarette", which makes more sense and saves some meaning. However meaning does not need to be saved as it is not limited. But since we live in a physical world where every traditional resource is limited therefore I developed this habit of saving. Yet again, trying to substitute words like "smoking" with "doing" in front of words like"cigarette", rather than saying that it is for saving something, it is actually cutting off some excessive unnecessary meaning.

Yet it is very intresting to notice, that when squeezing more than necessary meanings together you dont get more meaning, instead you get meaninglessness, just like "smoking a cigratte". Yet next time when I need to say "smoking a cigratte" I will still say “smoking a cigratte" instead of "doing", because I am afraid of being called a werido. But if you are not afraid, I do highly encourage you to do so, as that demonstrates your integrity and courage of cutting off shit, which is actually very important. At this point if you wonder, I do have realized that you could say "doing a cigratte" without being called a werido, which however, is less formal than "smoking a cigarette", which is super funny. How is excessive meanings squeezed together resulting meaninglessness more formal than the opposite? Which I figure is because they believe it is more clear, which I can't disagree more for obvious reasons.

[grandhotelabyss]

Italian doesn't generally loom large in world literature after the Renaissance, so what do you make of the fact that two of the most celebrated novelists of the postmodern period, Eco and Calvino, were Italians? You've written before about DeLillo's immigrant background — do you think there's something there? Is it just the Catholicism?

Somebody or other—I wish I could remember who; Clive James maybe—said that the modern Italian genius went into music, primarily opera, rather than other forms of art. My working-class paternal grandfather and his brothers and sisters were all named after opera characters, but the names were anglicized upon arrival in America. Thus my own namesake, Uncle John—I'm not sure I ever met him—was originally called Ernani, after the Verdi opera based on the Hugo play. I have never read-seen-heard either play or opera, despite Paul Berman's crediting it—the play, anyway—with the aesthetic origins of romantic terrorist totalitarianism in his Terror and Liberalism (another of the Bush-era political books I read back between 2001 and 2008, as discussed here).

Anyway, I've only read one novel apiece by Eco and Calvino, so I'm not an expert. If I had to guess, however, and with The Leopard also in mind, the answer may be that Italy was almost a "Third World" country in the early and middle 20th century: underdeveloped, given to authoritarianism, harried by theocracy, battled over by the superpowers, beset with nationalists and communists and extremists of every stripe, paranoid and often rightly so. It may therefore have encouraged the writing of postmodern fiction due to a similar set of cultural and political conditions as inspired Latin American writers like Borges, Carpentier, and García Márquez in the same period. I don't think this applies to DeLillo; he may have had the slanted perspective of the immigrant's child and the visionary authority of Catholic aesthetics, but he wrote from the heart of the empire, not its periphery, and was given to a kind of oracular futurism, not to fabulism or intellectual satire.

I really need to read If on a Winter's Night a Traveler because I'm revisiting David Mitchell right now, and it was his inspiration for Cloud Atlas (the one Calvino I have read is Invisible Cities). To anyone who hasn't seen it, you may want to check out my epic review of Eco's Foucault's Pendulum.

[gentlehumofanxiety]

Сплетаемся в объятьях братских. Крепкие руки крепкие тела обхватывают. Целуем друг друга в уста. Молча целуем, по-мужски, без бабских нежностей. Целованием друг друга распаляем и приветствуем.

[untitledpablo]

Novel: The Underachiever

I’m excited to announce that my novel The Underachiever has been published by the New York-based publisher Spuyten Duyvil! Synopsis: A critically acclaimed author who has already published two successful novels finds himself haunted by dissatisfaction and paralyzing self-doubt. Desperate to match the literary brilliance of Cortázar, Pynchon, and Nabokov, the unnamed writer embarks on a creative…

[f--e-u-e-r-t-r-u-n-k-e--n]

It's the same thing that happens with people who ask for more representation from Disney. Support your local theaters. Support experimental plays, listen to weird music. Go to the museum. If they want something strange from the factory of normality they will always receive the norm. Or the most digestible way to show attempts to shake up how we understand our relationships. Now AIs will be the ones that generate art, narratives and consequently will shape how we think and imagine things. How we imagine relationships and our identities. Does the social media algorithm seem out of control? Disney and Hollywood were that first algorithm. You can't rewrite that industry. You have to get out of there. Read poems. Watch impossible to understand 3-hour movies projected on the collapsed wall of an old hospital. Play a role-playing game where you play a sock tormented by the heat death of the universe. Listen to songs in extinct indigenous languages ​​accompanied by drums and laughter. Run down the avenue as if you were about to find your way out of the throat of a horrible, huge python.

The algorithm does not guess you, it creates you. Just as Disney and Hollywood created us.

AIs are not the new era. They are the new tool of an old process.

[embersalcove]

Reading Gravity's Rainbow and I got to the second chapter of part 1 and I am fully expecting things to get more weird.

I'm expecting Pirate to fully stop a V-2 by giving it a right hook by part 2.

[jasmine-and-irises]

Edwin Morgan, Opening the cage. 14 variations on 14 words — «i have nothing to say and i am saying it and that is poetry», 1966.

(arrangement of John Cage’s words)

source: from Concrete Poetry Britain Canada United States, a Tate Images collection. <https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/morgan-opening-the-cage-14-variations-on-14-words-i-have-nothing-to-say-and-i-am-saying-it-p80714>

transcribed:

i have to say poetry and is that nothing and am i saying it i am and i have poetry to say and is that nothing saying it i am nothing and i have poetry to say and that is saying it i that am saying poetry have nothing and it is i and to say and i say that i am to have poetry and saying it is nothing i am poetry and nothing and saying it is to say that i have to have nothing is poetry and i am saying that and i say it poetry is saying i have nothing and i am to say that and it saying nothing i am poetry and i have to say that and it is it is and i am and i have poetry saying say that to nothing it is saying poetry to nothing and i say i have and am that poetry is saying i have it and i am nothing and to say that and that nothing is poetry i am saying and i have to say it saying poetry is nothing and to that i say i am and have it

[louisduffelbagg]

He speaks in your voice, American, and there’s a shine in his eye that’s halfway hopeful.

[lady-illyria-the-magi]

28.10.2024

Current reads + my loyal study friend, lip balm and a dark purple/red lipstick because i am a goth, after all.

Elo ja anergia (environmental/posthumanist philosophy)

Postmoderni kirjallisuus (literature history of postmodern literature in the broader time span sense)

Actually it's really interesting reading two post-isms on the same go. Same base problem: western modernism. Two different ways out or coping with it.