(26 min) | This time I’m reading #18: Notes for therapy, which you received in written form on Sunday. I also include, as always, a little eXtra conteXt. I will warn that due to the list format this one might be slightly easier to read, but who am I to stop you from consuming this while folding your laundry/watching paint dry/walking aimlessly around your kitchen? Whatever you do is the right thing.
With the Seinfeld essay, I thought that was kind of the point with Seinfeld, that they're a bunch of jerks and them going through their lives fucks things over for the people around them. It's pretty explicit when Larry David is strongly involved with the writing, like the episode where they get the Pakistani restaurant owner deported just by forgetting to give him his mail, or of course the final episode where they're on trial for being huge thoughtless jerks and end up in jail. That said I think there's a tension between Larry David, who clearly and seethingly hates the bourgeoisie, and Jerry Seinfeld, who's more conservative. I find the tension between the two writers really effective though - politically very different, and just very different in terms of their craft.
Also it's good to see someone rate the Jacobin, as someone who tried to run a Jacobin reading group in my city at one point. And they do indeed have some pretty good breakdowns of the arguments for socialism, I recall they had an article called something like the four stages of capitalism? Which I've totally forgotten both the title and the author, but I'm pretty sure they published it as a pamphlet too.
I love hearing you talk about writing/how other people's writing affects you!
Release the book tracking note!!
With the Seinfeld essay, I thought that was kind of the point with Seinfeld, that they're a bunch of jerks and them going through their lives fucks things over for the people around them. It's pretty explicit when Larry David is strongly involved with the writing, like the episode where they get the Pakistani restaurant owner deported just by forgetting to give him his mail, or of course the final episode where they're on trial for being huge thoughtless jerks and end up in jail. That said I think there's a tension between Larry David, who clearly and seethingly hates the bourgeoisie, and Jerry Seinfeld, who's more conservative. I find the tension between the two writers really effective though - politically very different, and just very different in terms of their craft.
Also it's good to see someone rate the Jacobin, as someone who tried to run a Jacobin reading group in my city at one point. And they do indeed have some pretty good breakdowns of the arguments for socialism, I recall they had an article called something like the four stages of capitalism? Which I've totally forgotten both the title and the author, but I'm pretty sure they published it as a pamphlet too.
Otherwise, I wish there were English versions of Paul B. Preciado's columns for Libération to link you to, not so much for the queer theory aspect which, he's a pleasure to disagree with as it's compellingly argued, but there's generally like 10 things where I'm like "fuck you Preciado" and 2 things I really, really agree with that he's the only person I've seen articulate (except me, drunkenly and ineffectively, to puzzled comrades at 2am). But he's just a really good writer and there are some touching and funny vignettes of stuff like life in quarantine, talking to his (very catholic, somewhat homophobic, but still loving) elderly parents on Skype, or like, being in his plastic surgeon's office and checking out the fake boob prostheses on display while the surgeon's out and when she comes back in again, "I am naked, holding a utopian breast". There's something I love about trans writing, much like psychoanalysis cares about language insofar as it's absurd (jokes, freudian slips, etc.) because it's only as important as it's unimportant, trans theory cares about gender insofar as it's absurd, in much the same way.