anorthite

Finalllllly sitting down at a ridiculous hour after letting the Read and Want to Discuss stack pile up to insurmountable heights for months. Now I can't remember all the really *important* and *insightful* things I wanted to say. This is genuinely a dismal selection of books and I did read more but then had an enormous slump in every possible way, so here we are. Next time I will be sure to write about more cheerful topics like geology, divine retribution, and maps.

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Creating my own Z-list leftist thinkpiece for the substack inside my brain.

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STILL no "things I am reading pt. insanity" has been produced, will be complaining to management. Hence no "year in review" for 1) not like the others reasons, 2) I don't have energy, 3) it would be deranged. Spoiler alert though: all the books I've read recently have been like ... tantalizing glimpses at the Subject I want but not enough of the real thing. Cue endless moaning about how nobody has written the perfect book/is rotating the same cube in their mind that I am rotating.

Anyway, this book is in essence about the way we in secular modernity are seeking elements of of Durkheim's sacred in our own lives, and so it's pretty appropriate that I read it in pretty much the most non-substance-affiliated altered mindset possible, which was: all in one day, starting at 5 am when the dog woke me up, and finishing on a 6 hr road-trip with a migraine while listening to Mahler.

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Finally got an icon, so that's nice. The cloaked Entity is me, and all the little creatures scuttling by are the dozens of quotes and scene fragments for a stupid essay about John Brown (but really about America because isn't it always) that I am writing in my mind. Fortunately, this essay hinges on my picking up AND completing Herman Melville works and so they are going to have to continue scuttling for quite some time.

Undeveloped anecdote that made me think of all this: my dad and brother have gotten indoctrinated into the great ritual that is college football, and they spent all Saturday watching The OSU/UofM game. What was funny (to me) was that they muted the entire tv whenever the ad break came on -- isn't that part of the game, if you take college football out of its looming commercial context, what are you looking at, etc. etc. Anyway.

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I feel in my soul that there's something wrong with the Maverick chorus that has nothing to do with the harness-and-military-lite backflips and flamethrowersness of it all. This has resulted in kpop choruses that are good (synonymous with kpop choruses that I enjoy): a demonstration.

Your chorus needs:

• an A part; this should be the catchiest part of the chorus. if you're insisting on bending the knee to the "i'm a *noun de jour*" trend this is probably where that happens
• a B part specifically a melodic B part, to give us a break from being shouted at by men
• to be short enough that it doesn't feel like the A and B choruses are two separate back to back choruses or a prechorus/chorus situation
• to be long ENOUGH (very specific but really I mean it needs to go somewhere and arrive somewhere, not just repeat/circle around into itself)

Why would anybody mess with this great formula? I don't really know in general but kpop-bgs-specifically: you need to squeeze in a very strenous dancebreak for Reasons, you have to "sing" it all together to give the dozen member precious vocal time making repetition and brevity important, yelling looks cool? Not really sure anyway that's for further study where I track the dark cb trend in its current rather played-out state from circa 2016 and hold "blood sweat and tears" culpable as expected.

Anyway good and bad choruses are demonstrated below by the predictable victim boy groups.

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In "Entertaining Ourselves to Death," a surprisingly good Media take, Neil Postman categorizes the bulk of 24 hr television news programming as consisting of pseudoevents or context-free information. Where the purpose of news is entertainment and not information, news gets molded to fit the medium, instead of vice versa, and it becomes full of modules that consist of time but not necessarily substance.

My brother sent me a paper about Snapewifism and I just have to say I hope there are some grad students sloshing through the mires of twitter right now collecting the sort of awful figures that appeared within. Also I saw a tweet thread about Barbs and pseudo-religion and I think that the equation of religion and fandom is just ... such a weird and trivializing way to write about fandom, even though I know loads of people have done it. Also in terms of rpf it's just Wrong (deadliest sin). 
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note --> --> omg I should do this for music except for the fact that I'm a Terrible person when it comes with having a sense of time and remembering to do stuff.

Things I am reading roundup by a things I am reading delinquent.

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 "H is for Hawk", Helen Macdonald --> (temporarily) abandoned. The author is miserable, T.H.White is miserable, T.H. White's hawk is miserable. This depressed tripartite requires the reader to act as stable fourth pillar; the reader is also sort of miserable at the moment, and so unable to serve. Macdonald may have felt pressure to beef up the emotional journey component of the narrative here, but I want more hawk minutia. Will return at a happier moment.

"Nothing is True and Everything is Possible", Peter Pomerantsev --> completed. Huh. This guy has made a name for himself as a sort of specialist soothsayer on the spread of Russian political surrealism into Western "post-truth" politics, and this book seems likely have been structured so as to avoid retreads of previous subject matter. Surkov is such an enormous and diabolical character, and so compellingly sprung straight from the Russian literary tradition, that the other weird cults and case-by-case Orwellianisms discussed can't possibly compete. The documentary where I heard about Pomerantsev, "HyperNormalisation" (Curtis 2016), was, imo, a much better format choice and wove in better accessory content. The narrative has to centre around Surkov, not only because he is the architect, but because it's necessary to explore his existence solely as a character of his own creation in order to tell the story at all.

"I'll Be Gone in the Dark", Michelle McNamara --> completed. Unfortunately, even though this book is intended as a broader statement on the injustice of cold cases and the ecosystem of researchers addicted to them, I reread because the huge amounts of sensory and temporal detail make this book truly scary. Since this fear is both not the author's ultimate intent and not capable of contributing much to society, I felt guilty for rubbernecking, but I also had a really freaky dream about someone crawling around on the fire escape outside my bedroom window, which did even things out a bit.

Reading right now: "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire", Edward Gibbon
"The Rise of Rome", Anthony Everitt
"Against Interpretation", Susan Sontag
"Nervous People and Other Satires", Mikhail Zoshchenko