…At the end of the novel, Lev creates his masterpiece. He paints his mother as crucified between himself, her son, the artist and his father, her husband, the activist. The entire novel has been about his own struggle, being torn between his love for his parents and community and his love and need for art. … More Reading for Pleasure Wednesday: Asher Lev
Also in Reeducation, it was important to suffer so as to prove one could feel pain (pain being the only actually admissible feeling). One could not feel pain and do something about it — that would be “impulsive.” One had to feel pain and “grieve” it, lament and suffer. I had always found that to … More Sur la souffrance
I had a realization about how Reeducation worked and what it killed via a comments thread on a different post. I could write a coherent post about that if I had time, and the comment is really just a pre-note, the thoughts in it are not well worked out at all. For now I am … More On Transference
Reeducation deauthorized. “You are not authorized to be a successful person. The degree of power you wield in your own life is highly inappropriate in a person of your background.” “You must disempower yourself. You must recognize that your happiness and integrity is an illusion based on denial. You are not authorized to live as … More Reauthorization. Stomping on Dat Whiteman.
It is the weekend, and we have found an interesting song. 18 July 1936 was the first day of the Spanish Civil War. There is a short 1938 film about it starring Juan Beigbeder, Raimundo Fernández Cuesta, Francisco Franco, Manuel Augusto García Viñolas, José Millán Astray, and Ramón Serrano Súñer, that I would like to … More Anda jaleo, jaleo
A: How unfair! I have gone through all of these contortions just because you asked, and now I am as destroyed as you so desperately claimed you wanted me to be — yet you are not giving me the award you promised! B: [Drunk on power.] Oh. I did not really care whether you did … More S/M or Torture 101
… a series of lessons in how to perfect absolute sadism toward oneself, particularly one’s intellectual self. No right to exist / to be who one was. No right to enjoy life. No right to think. No right to trust one’s perceptions. Academic and professional success reencoded as failure. No right to power in one’s … More Reeducation Was
Now I might really be over Reeducation, which was that in part because it involved not only becoming a professor in the United States and coming to live in the East. Today there are Mexicans working next door. Their voices sound like home. I realize once again how unheimlich it still is to me never … More Voice Four
“Books seem to me to be pestilent things, and infect all that trade in them…with something very perverse and brutal. Printers, binders, sellers, and others that make a trade and gain out of them have universally so odd a turn and corruption of mind, that they have a way of dealing peculiar to themselves, and … More Reading for Pleasure Wednesday, Bastille Day Edition: John Locke
A A major difference between myself and the persons I am expected to resemble appears to be that they never realized that they might be a contributing factor to a bad situation. I have trouble even imagining that anyone might not to consider that. I keep being told that if you tend to be a … More A. B. C. D. Errata. Footnotes.
coldhearted scientist وداد 