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rushthatspeaksEither for lack of energy or for some other reason.
-- Honestly, just about any writing about music, but I have been meaning to write an essay on why Jenny Hval's Apocalypse, girl was the best album of 2015 since 2015. The problem being that said essay, which I actually have fairly well planned-out, is about ten thousand words of over-detailed verbiage beginning with the note that Hval got her master's degree with a thesis on Kate Bush and going from there through, I am afraid, every single song on the album, when it is an album I am ninety percent certain no one I know has ever listened to (possibly in most cases that should be 'heard of'), and which Ruth, who gets the less experimental parts of it inflicted on them on a fairly regular basis, I believe thinks is merely kind of okay. Also, I do restrain myself from recommending 'Sabbath' as a song about genderqueer experience, because it's not that I'm overinterpreting, as anyone in direct lineal descent from Kate Bush is not someone you can overinterpret (Hval's other parent was Laurie Anderson, it was a helluva fling, I find it impossible to picture) but because I may be reading my own personal experience into the text too much for the song to wind up saying to other people the things it says to me about gender. Except what if it does?
Why I have not written this: because no one wants to read it, and at 10k words I should probably be trying to get paid for it, except that, as I said, I am pretty sure no one wants to read it.
-- that essay I keep mentioning about how John Crowley's The Translator is the good twin or as one might say the better angel of Tim Powers' Declare, which boils down in some ways to 'Tim Powers seems to be seriously arguing here that the entire concept of human free will is a terrible idea and should be done away with immediately, and Crowley is using exactly the same metaphorical conceit to argue the exact opposite', except that to have the correct citations etcetera I would have to reread Declare.
Why I have not written this: in case it's not clear from the description, I hate Declare with the fire of a thousand burning suns.
-- that essay about how Norman Cohn's In Pursuit of the Millennium, a scholarly text about millennarian heretical Christian sects in Northern Europe, is the book that explained to me lo these years ago exactly where, culturally speaking, the ideas of the soi-disant Third Reich actually came from, how they are promulgated, and what social conditions they are intimately tied to, also the basic roots of anti-Semitism in Europe in general, so basically much of what I have needed to know about the wars of the twentieth century, and in fact Cohn is so good at his job that I reread the book earlier this year and it does assist in figuring out what the actual fuck is going on right now and why.
Why I have not written this: this one would also be like 10k long, and also I actively lose sleep worrying about whether anybody in the alt-right neo-Nazi Trumpian/Brexity insanity movement is a self-aware follower of the ideas behind the heresy known as the Free Spirit, because if so we are all even more boned than we previously were, and the ideological links between various heresies and modern popular culture have been amply proven by better critics than I am. This incredibly specific worry is not necessarily one anyone else needs to have, as it also makes me sound like I believe Martians are sending me messages through my dental fillings, and anyway there is nothing that could be done about it if it is the case. (A one-sentence summary of the Free Spirit: somebody actually managed to find a plausible-sounding Christian-church-if-not-Christ-consistent theological justification for completely psychopathic behavior, one good enough that it requires effort and thought to argue with, worse than the prosperity gospel, it's pretty close to 'my eternal salvation rests on me doing at absolutely all times whatever happens to cross my mind and not following my slightest whims may damn me', though the justification for why is outside the scope of this sentence.)
-- I have managed to write some about some of my favorite books over the years, but I haven't written any about Joanna Russ, or much about Naomi Mitchison, or Patrick Leigh Fermor, or Sylvia Townsend Warner, or, or, or. And I basically haven't written about comics at all.
Why I have not written this: I used to manage to write reviews here, and I miss doing that, and I can't recall the last time I had enough energy to string enough thoughts together. I'm only managing to write this now because I am operating on an odd combination of four hours of sleep in the last forty-eight, the one caffeinated beverage per week I occasionally permit myself, having gone to an extremely good and very strange movie earlier in the evening, wildly shifting barometric pressure, and playing too much early Velvet Underground after getting home. I would describe it as tipsy, honestly.
Which is also why I'll actually post this, I guess.
-- Honestly, just about any writing about music, but I have been meaning to write an essay on why Jenny Hval's Apocalypse, girl was the best album of 2015 since 2015. The problem being that said essay, which I actually have fairly well planned-out, is about ten thousand words of over-detailed verbiage beginning with the note that Hval got her master's degree with a thesis on Kate Bush and going from there through, I am afraid, every single song on the album, when it is an album I am ninety percent certain no one I know has ever listened to (possibly in most cases that should be 'heard of'), and which Ruth, who gets the less experimental parts of it inflicted on them on a fairly regular basis, I believe thinks is merely kind of okay. Also, I do restrain myself from recommending 'Sabbath' as a song about genderqueer experience, because it's not that I'm overinterpreting, as anyone in direct lineal descent from Kate Bush is not someone you can overinterpret (Hval's other parent was Laurie Anderson, it was a helluva fling, I find it impossible to picture) but because I may be reading my own personal experience into the text too much for the song to wind up saying to other people the things it says to me about gender. Except what if it does?
Why I have not written this: because no one wants to read it, and at 10k words I should probably be trying to get paid for it, except that, as I said, I am pretty sure no one wants to read it.
-- that essay I keep mentioning about how John Crowley's The Translator is the good twin or as one might say the better angel of Tim Powers' Declare, which boils down in some ways to 'Tim Powers seems to be seriously arguing here that the entire concept of human free will is a terrible idea and should be done away with immediately, and Crowley is using exactly the same metaphorical conceit to argue the exact opposite', except that to have the correct citations etcetera I would have to reread Declare.
Why I have not written this: in case it's not clear from the description, I hate Declare with the fire of a thousand burning suns.
-- that essay about how Norman Cohn's In Pursuit of the Millennium, a scholarly text about millennarian heretical Christian sects in Northern Europe, is the book that explained to me lo these years ago exactly where, culturally speaking, the ideas of the soi-disant Third Reich actually came from, how they are promulgated, and what social conditions they are intimately tied to, also the basic roots of anti-Semitism in Europe in general, so basically much of what I have needed to know about the wars of the twentieth century, and in fact Cohn is so good at his job that I reread the book earlier this year and it does assist in figuring out what the actual fuck is going on right now and why.
Why I have not written this: this one would also be like 10k long, and also I actively lose sleep worrying about whether anybody in the alt-right neo-Nazi Trumpian/Brexity insanity movement is a self-aware follower of the ideas behind the heresy known as the Free Spirit, because if so we are all even more boned than we previously were, and the ideological links between various heresies and modern popular culture have been amply proven by better critics than I am. This incredibly specific worry is not necessarily one anyone else needs to have, as it also makes me sound like I believe Martians are sending me messages through my dental fillings, and anyway there is nothing that could be done about it if it is the case. (A one-sentence summary of the Free Spirit: somebody actually managed to find a plausible-sounding Christian-church-if-not-Christ-consistent theological justification for completely psychopathic behavior, one good enough that it requires effort and thought to argue with, worse than the prosperity gospel, it's pretty close to 'my eternal salvation rests on me doing at absolutely all times whatever happens to cross my mind and not following my slightest whims may damn me', though the justification for why is outside the scope of this sentence.)
-- I have managed to write some about some of my favorite books over the years, but I haven't written any about Joanna Russ, or much about Naomi Mitchison, or Patrick Leigh Fermor, or Sylvia Townsend Warner, or, or, or. And I basically haven't written about comics at all.
Why I have not written this: I used to manage to write reviews here, and I miss doing that, and I can't recall the last time I had enough energy to string enough thoughts together. I'm only managing to write this now because I am operating on an odd combination of four hours of sleep in the last forty-eight, the one caffeinated beverage per week I occasionally permit myself, having gone to an extremely good and very strange movie earlier in the evening, wildly shifting barometric pressure, and playing too much early Velvet Underground after getting home. I would describe it as tipsy, honestly.
Which is also why I'll actually post this, I guess.
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Date: 2018-03-22 08:30 am (UTC)(...I think this might be the first time I've commented, so in order that asking about the relationship between heresy and nazis isn't my only comment: I love your book reviews! I've been reading them for years.)
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Date: 2018-03-22 09:27 am (UTC)From that, their beliefs: [complex bit of theological wankery that I don't want to go into, which, using ideas only slightly unacceptable to the Church of the time, hypothesizes that every human soul is not precisely a singular entity created by God, but contains within itself, is of the substance of, made of, part of, an actual spark of the Divine; if I were going into detail this would have Biblical citations and really thorough logic.]
If part of your soul is God, part of your soul is omnipotent, omnibenevolent, omniscient, etc. etc., so if you could get in touch with that part of your soul, you too could be omni-everything, you could be God.
What part of the soul is most likely to be God? Well, [long discourse on original sin that I am not summarizing], the bit that speaks out most strongly in reaction to this fallen world, of course.
So your strongest feelings about the world, what you like, hate, fear, that's Divinity in you, and by reaching out to that part of your soul, you can join that part of your soul more strongly and consciously to the rest of God, so that you become more and more part of God the more you do exactly whatever comes into your head. The weirder it is in the eyes of the world, the more likely it is to be Divine, because otherwise why would you have thought of it.
One of the adepts of the Free Spirit said that she had become so much a part of God, and God was so much of her conscious mind, that, to quote her directly, she "rode the Holy Trinity as though in a saddle".
They had a whole lot of extra logic about why Jesus would approve of this, too.
In practice, this cult was always being thrown out of everywhere as socially impossible to cope with-- they would lie, cheat, steal, murder, rob, rape, you name it. Recantations from them were pointless because they would just say whatever you wanted to hear and then carry on exactly the same way. They went underground; the men were itinerant preachers, and the women traditionally lived in beguinages, of which several very long-lasting ones are known to have been Free Spirit. An adept would take on new pupils as acolytes, who would obey their master unquestioningly for several years, while the master broke them down in pretty much the ways cults do now, isolation, sleep deprivation, involvement in crime. Then eventually they'd undergo initiation into full awareness of their own divinity and set off to collect pupils (and commit social anarchy).
The way they had to identify each other is an amazing touch and one I wouldn't dare include if this were a novel: they wore the habits of whatever mendicant orders were in their area, but they added small and inconspicuous patches of fool's motley, including actual bells.
Cohn cites this all impeccably, directly from the fourteenth-century German. Amazing, frightening stuff.
Anyway, I worry about some evangelical prosperity-gospel Jesus-was-white sect coming across their logic, because it's an ideological transmission of psychopathy. (You can't really hurt anybody, because either they're part of God, in which case how can what you do to them affect them in more than a temporary, passing way-- maybe it will even make them realize their own divinity-- or they're not part of God, in which case they're not real people, see?) It's exactly the kind of thing that would appeal to that fucking Dark Enlightenment crowd.
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Date: 2018-03-22 03:18 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2018-03-22 07:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-03-22 09:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-03-22 11:41 am (UTC)ETA — and now I’m sort of reminded of every time someone in the SW universe says “search your feelings.”
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Date: 2018-04-06 09:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-03-22 08:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-03-22 10:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-03-22 12:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-03-22 02:59 pm (UTC)Also, anything you have to say about Patrick Leigh Fermor.
I read Cohn back in the day, with intense fascination, and yes, the historical through-lines were both enlightening and disturbing.
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Date: 2018-03-22 03:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-03-22 04:27 pm (UTC)I would read it, both because I have heard Apocalypse, girl and because this kind of project would make me curious if I hadn't, and I think you should definitely try to get paid for it.
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Date: 2018-03-22 04:55 pm (UTC)I would so love even a sentence or two of yours on any of these writers. Flash non-fiction.
Nine
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Date: 2018-03-23 12:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-03-23 07:48 am (UTC)(Longtime lurking reader. Thank you for many books and many songs. I wish you energy, for the things listed or for anything else).
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Date: 2018-03-24 09:06 pm (UTC)