flâneur

brunella k

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on the atlas — 395

highlights — 5962

  • It has taken me most of my life to understand that, to see how and why those of us who are born poor and different are so driven to give ourselves away or lose ourselves, but most of all, simply to disappear as the people we really are.
    A Question of Class by Dorothy Allison
  • It shamed me that the only thing my family whole-heartedly believed in was luck and the waywardness of fate.
    A Question of Class by Dorothy Allison
  • The stories I told about my family, about South Carolina, about being poor itself, were all lies, carefully edited to seem droll or funny. I knew damn well that no one would want to hear the truth about poverty, the hopelessness and fear, the feeling that nothing I did would ever make any difference and the raging resentment that burned beneath my jokes.
    A Question of Class by Dorothy Allison
  • Better, far better, to be one of the mythical poor than to be part of the they I had known before.
    A Question of Class by Dorothy Allison
  • We were not noble, not grateful, not even hopeful. We knew ourselves despised. My family was ashamed of being poor, of feeling hopeless. What was there to work for, to save money for, to fight for or struggle against? We had generations before us to teach us that nothing ever changed, and that those who did try to escape failed.
    A Question of Class by Dorothy Allison
  • The poverty I knew was dreary, deadening, shameful, the women powerful in ways not generally seen as heroic by the world outside the family.
    A Question of Class by Dorothy Allison
  • The poverty depicted in books and movies was romantic, a backdrop for the story of how it was escaped.
    A Question of Class by Dorothy Allison
  • No, we had been encouraged to destroy ourselves, made invisible because we did not fit the myths of the noble poor generated by the middle class.
    A Question of Class by Dorothy Allison
  • It is surprising how easy it was to live that life. Everyone and everything cooperated with the process. Everything in our culture—books, television, movies, school, fashion—is presented as if it is being seen by one pair of eyes, shaped by one set of hands, heard by one pair of ears. Even if you know you are not part of that imaginary creature—if you like country music not symphonies, read books cynically, listen to the news unbelievingly, are lesbian not heterosexual, and surround yourself with your own small deviant community—you are still shaped by that hegemony, or your resistance to it.
    A Question of Class by Dorothy Allison
  • I did not know that I was hiding, blending in for safety just as I had done in high school, in college. I did not recognize the impulse to forget. I believed that all those things I did not talk about, or even let myself think too much about, were not important, that none of them defined me.
    A Question of Class by Dorothy Allison
  • even a life spent inside a sphere of activity as stupidly professionalized, autonomized, and inaccessible as that of the professional contemporary novelist is a life from which one can extract the totality of global economic social relations, something someone’d probably only choose to do if they wanted to unautononize themselves back into it, then, it stands to reason, yours too, no?
    Everything's Fine
  • as art’s fairly pass/fail: either you want to keep it in your life or you don’t
    Everything's Fine
  • it is precisely this spirit that is why, along with a lot of the obviously terrible dogmatic bullshit Marxists often do, the tradition is, like many of its rivals, home to incredibly creative and surely diverse attempts by its various thinkers to think about their concrete realities using abstract intellectual tools they picked up from people who lived in totally different times and places, something evident in the fact that the vast majority of the world’s Marxists are not attractive young writers fucking their way through bourgeois Western social circles, but workers of all types in communis…
    Everything's Fine
  • the Marxist tradition is itself an eclectic synthesis of other intellectual traditions, and it’s been flexible, as it’s adapted; not all flexibility has been good, but neither have all situations, and when it comes to the goal of ending class struggle and not just giving up on it, it’s a little too rigid to totally break, a fairly spine-like quality many have had opinions about, historically.
    Everything's Fine
  • if they continue to read novels or political theory in which the real contradictions they encounter in their real lives are neatly resolved on the level of content or form, it’s not their desire to live in a world without these contradictions that’s the problem, nor is the writing that resonates with that desire responsible for ensuring they act on it: they just have to go out and do stuff, something only they can decide to do.
    Everything's Fine
  • Everyone’s too busy to volunteer, it’s said, and no job site I know of has any listings for “professional revolutionaries,” a phrase used by noted go-out-and-do-stuff guy Vladimir Lenin in his 1902 work What Is To Be Done?, a book I won’t spoil, except to say, it involves a group project.
    Everything's Fine
  • To this, what can one say besides, she’s a Marxist! What could be a cheesier ending to the history of class struggle than communism?
    Everything's Fine
  • And ain’t that also . . . tea
    Everything's Fine
  • Tea . . . one thinks
    Everything's Fine
  • One of the virtues of thinking historically is you know things can change, often because people want them to: if Sally Rooney really wanted a normal life, she’d retire; instead, she’s toughing it out as a professional novelist
    Everything's Fine
  • how did a local author, concerned mainly with the world immediately around her, become the Anglophone literary world’s youngest international rockstar?
    Everything's Fine
  • Please just be normal, we say, reacting to a left turn in our internet essay, as if our idea of normality weren’t just fungibility, socially applied.
    Everything's Fine
  • — and the exchange-value being the “quantitative relation, the proportion, in which use-values of one kind exchange for use-values of another kind.”
    Everything's Fine
  • art commodities, like books, have a qualitative use-value and a quantitative exchange-value, the use-value being the concrete thing a commodity does to satisfy a human need — where the “nature of these needs, whether they arise, for example, from the stomach, or the imagination,” says Karl Marx, “makes no difference”
    Everything's Fine
  • Well, playing it fast and loose with the fine print of the DFW contract, what to do here but smile kindly and ask, annoyingly: have y’all tried smoking less of it?
    Everything's Fine
  • Batuman’s essay dropped at roughly the same time as n+1’s own inquiry into the state of the novel, “MFA vs. NYC,” and with the literary world remembering how sick it is to have a named system to get mad at, to say nothing of two, so exploded a thrilling critical universe where even only tangentially related three letter acronyms could get their own spinoffs: the USA’s CIA, Amazon’s KDP, MTFs’ and FTMs’ HRT, PhDs, GPTs, GLPs, WFH, and all that fourth wave stuff — it’s a diverse cast, and everyone can pick their favorite: I’m partial to CFCs, those once ozone-destroying organic compounds now use…
    Everything's Fine
  • and with the literary world remembering how sick it is to have a named system to get mad at
    Everything's Fine
  • using the techniques of both mass production shoddiness and “Apple’s slick industrial-design hegemon,
    Everything's Fine
  • conspicuously busted
    Everything's Fine
  • so much like the thunderstrike of awe, squirmy terror, and relief a child would feel if she, say, just learned about the existence of sex at breakfast
    Pulp: More Album Review | Pitchfork
  • ‘Coming-of-age’ might usually be seen as a transitional period we’ve long since passed but here, Cocker seems to sandwich our palms, look into our eyes, and shake his head no—it’s one of those lifelong processes. To paraphrase the chorus, being grown-up has no discrete age or eon; it’s an art, or an act.
    Pulp: More Album Review | Pitchfork
  • the deliciously cheap and chintzy
    Pulp: More Album Review | Pitchfork
  • Pulp is a superflux of boils and pus, and keeps its gaze focused on them to ensure that the hard-to-watch gets seen, the tough-to-hear gets heard.
    Pulp: More Album Review | Pitchfork
  • Pulp’s gift for the queasy and sleazy often feels as if the band took the Leonard Cohen line about the value of dignifying what’s normally undignified, and made it their credo.
    Pulp: More Album Review | Pitchfork
  • Fables of lumpen households filled with lumpen, libidinal children end with them killed, abused, jailed in the ranks they were born to.
    Pulp: More Album Review | Pitchfork
  • His band’s hugest, most inescapable track is a class war cabaret that considers how long a Marxist can tolerate a rich girl pretending to be a prole if he really wants to sleep with her.
    Pulp: More Album Review | Pitchfork
  • With a sort of lothario suavity picked up second-hand from Engelbert Humperdinck, or Bryan Ferry, or Serge Gainsbourg, rare is the Pulp track without a dose of horny sotto voce muttering, sharp sexy inhalations, Cocker squealing like a hog in heat.
    Pulp: More Album Review | Pitchfork
  • This is a discography given to world-historical song titles like “Underwear,” “My Erection,” and “Can I Have My Balls Back, Please.”
    Pulp: More Album Review | Pitchfork
  • The first- and third-person narrators of Pulp tracks are chained to these premises, and not infrequently effecting some sort of sexual misdemeanor in their pursuit.
    Pulp: More Album Review | Pitchfork
  • Sex is Pulp’s thing: How one can get it, if there is more of it, and whether or not it can happen tonight.
    Pulp: More Album Review | Pitchfork
  • This is a monstrous understatement. If we were to print Pulp’s entire lyrical oeuvre in one reader-friendly manuscript, the lay analyst would find a songwriter not only locked in the phallic stage, but trapped in an entire phallic theatre.
    Pulp: More Album Review | Pitchfork
  • Across two decades—and nearly four now, with this new album—Cocker has become a laureate of genitalia and the brains that wire them; a psychodramatist of families and the thin-walled homes they live in; a reliable soap-operatist of the hormonal human condition.
    Pulp: More Album Review | Pitchfork
  • And was Jerusalem builded here, Among these[b] dark Satanic Mills?
    And_did_those_feet_in_ancient_time
  • As we pass through life, sometimes God shows us dopplegangers, bright or dark mirrors of ourselves, glimpses of how we might turn out if we zig or zag on the path ahead. Some of these people are meant as shining inspirations, others as terrible warnings, but they’re all our teachers.
    The Dilbert Afterlife - by Scott Alexander
  • Every child is hypomanic, convinced of their own specialness. Even most teenagers still suspect that, if everything went right, they could change the world. It’s not just nerds. Everyone has to crash into reality. The guitar player who starts a garage band in order to become a rockstar. The varsity athlete who wants to make the big leagues. They all eventually realize, no, I’m mediocre. Even the ones who aren’t mediocre, the ones with some special talent, only have one special talent (let’s say cartooning) and no more.
    The Dilbert Afterlife - by Scott Alexander
  • Being tragically flawed yet also self-aware enough to laugh about it is a young man’s game.
    The Dilbert Afterlife - by Scott Alexander
  • I am not necessarily trying to understand. I am attuning my mind to truth. I am teaching myself, through daily acts of attention, to want it.
    Backsliding, by Meghan O’Gieblyn
  • We find a focal point that appears to contain the good, we look at it, we wait, and over time, if we’re patient, our will becomes aligned with it.
    Backsliding, by Meghan O’Gieblyn
  • It is, granted, a very different kind of freedom from the sort that’s often celebrated: having as many options as possible.
    Backsliding, by Meghan O’Gieblyn
  • It’s about conditioning our will through continuous acts of attention, turning our minds each day to virtue, so that in decisive moments we are automatically “compelled” in that direction. “
    Backsliding, by Meghan O’Gieblyn