straight girls who identify as “rotten women” (腐女)

the meat of the story is a bit grim, but this fact^^^ isn’t: “”Irony is the glory of slaves” is the quotation Seth likes. See also Nüshu, the same story from a very different angle

via jamie kenny, yr go-to source for the chinese underbelly

kerze

Over at Popular, Tom’s reached 1997 and Elton and Lady Di — his essay is of course excellent, and so are many of the (currently) 120+responses, especially Phil Sandifer’s, which is all about Blake and a haunted political unconcious. I’ve been superbusy all week, so my (very late, very long) comment is way down the pack; so I’m reposting it here also. Continue reading “kerze”

model this

“Wittgenstein was insisting that a proposition and that which it describes must have the same ‘logical form’, the same ‘logical multiplicity’. Sraffa made a gesture, familiar to Neapolitans as meaning something like disgust or contempt, of brushing the underneath of his chin with an outward sweep of the finger-tips of one hand. And he asked: ‘What is the logical form of that?'”
(Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, pp. 58–59)

Faintly recall from student days long ago that N.Malcolm was hard work and unrewarding as a philosopher (trans.: I was a confused and unsatisfactory philosophy student, esp.as far as Anglo-Am Analytical etc goes). But this is a good story, and — whether or not LW drew the correct conclusions at length — Sraffa’s intervention was strong, and Wittgenstein was right to be impressed and unsettled. I’m tempted to argue that music — all music, from Blobby to Boulez — is making much the same gesture to all other intellectual activity: here’s something you can’t do. That might be too strong — other things are always going on in music (including rapprochement, or attempts at same), and of course the various forces and layers never aggregate to a single decisive intent or content anyway — but it’s definitely an element I value in music, and don’t see well grasped in its discussion.

ipsos custodies

Of course It helps no one to say that — as a child watching pop on telly — I always found him cold-eyed and creepy.

I was brought up not to mock strange people — not to point at them in the street or to gang up tease them at school. The only two fights I ever got in I was defending the weird kid against the popular bully — even though I wasn’t really friends with the former (no one was) and on the whole got on fine with the latter. (I was also rubbish at fighting, so these interventions weren’t exactly of consequence…)

But in this instance I think this completely fritzed with my antennae. Continue reading “ipsos custodies”

“The proper position of women in the movement is prone”

There are moments when those who most puff themselves up as warriors against empire suddenly seem its most plausible — not to say effective — secret hirelings.

chomolungma’s share

When I first read about Mallory and Irvine years ago — there was a plaque in a church to the latter, and I used to gaze at it as a child — I was fascinated and intrigued by the idea that two people could just vanish off the side of a mountain. The clouds came down, and when they disappeared, the climbers had disappeared too: a ghost story, really.

I’ve read enough about Everest since to get a sense of how unimagineably and breathtakingly vast it is: and now I think what strikes me, really, is that so little does actually vanish. Everything’s still there, of course; but the curious fact is that everything gets seen — it just doesn’t always get reported.

“wait long enough by the river…

… and the severed heads of your foes* will bob on by, biting hilarious and inadvisable chunks out of one another”

This is by no means a kind or a healthy post.

*Where “foes” means people who have vaguely and quite variously annoyed you sometime in the past