“the pen becomes a sort of blind-man’s dog, to keep [a writer who is writing for their own wellbeing] from falling into the gutters”

-Henry Adams quoted in The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind by Ivan Illich and Barry Sanders, p.82.

In the _Confessions_, Augustine realizes that hubris must inevitably end in failure; he must, therefore, eschew the things of this world. Bute autobiography is born out of hubris, it requires that the self be woven into the very design of material society. In [Benjamin] Frankoins case, his autobiography grows out of the hubris of America’s emerging pwoer - its myths and ideals - a power that actually thrives on mistakes. […] Autobiography amplifies that power: since a person is literally creating a new being, he can smooth out the rough transitions in his life, clean up the mistakes, to produce a polished and attractive literary self. The writer presents his life as he thinks it should have been. Thus, every autobiography is in some ways a declaration of independance, as the writer bids farewell to his baggy historical self, embracing a new, tidy, authorized and public one. It is an act of willful liberation.
[paraphrasing rest: benjamin franklin invented autobiography where his fictional self became fact. He measures himself against the american constitution throughout that text. Constitution is vital to this narrative when the story of self is shifting. To show it is constituted, turned by values, not whimsy]

Ivan Illich and Barry Sanders, The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind, pp.76-7.

With the alphabet both text and self became possible, but only slowly, and they became the social construct on which we found all our perception as literate people.

Writing the history of the self is as difficult as writing the history of the text.

Ivan Illich and Barry Sanders, The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind, pp.72-3.

Louise Braithwaite

The strange mood of our time where nothing really makes any coherent sense. We live with a constant vaudeville of contradictory stories that makes it impossible for any real opposition to emerge. Because they can’t counter it with a coherent narrative of their own. It means that we as individuals become ever more powerless. Unable to challenge anything, because we live in a state of confusion and uncertainty. 

Adam Curtis, Shorts: Oh Dearism II

From downtown alleys where horses clip by
And muggy alcoves by the cut
Feel the smoothness of the palms in your hands
And take him to work.

Take a man to bed
And he will say things between the sheets
He cannot say in the cold day
When he becomes a ringleader again
Feel the softness of the belly bared to you,
And take him to rest.

Take a man to the taverns
Where the sun shines on the lake
Get him drunk, tell him stories
About camps and netting and surrounding
Loneliness growing with each passing tiny set of feet
With fool’s gold and curious trickling mystique
And take him to memory lane.

And he will breathe brick dust in his lungs
And feel canal water in his veins
And he may drink to his oblivion
Or stumble home with a wife
As they choose
Without any particular forethought.
They will take a man.

Laura Jane Round, ‘Take a Man’ in Lumpen issue 006, winter 2020

Francoise Gilot, Magic Games, 1978. 

Commons scholar Peter Linebaugh describes the street in 18th-century England as part of the urban commons: a vital place for sport, theatre, trade and encounter, a space joining producer and consumer, where social and economic life were inextricable. The wave of enclosures in the late 18th century (a large-scale process of privatisation, closing off and fencing in) affected urban infrastructure as well as common lands. The street moved from a place for lingering and negotiations to its primary role as a thoroughfare. Alongside this transformation, Linebaugh notes in his book Stop, Thief! (the meaning of “traffic” changed from commodity exchange to vehicular motion on the roadways linking forever speed, avarice, and congestion?

The term ‘traffic still refers to trade, but is now synonymous with illicit and exploitative practices. This slippage in meaning makes me wonder if the removal of trade from the streets, the common and vernacular, might be considered as another fundamental form of enclosure (at least in England, where I write): the separation of the worker from the means of distribution. Something relinquished that could yet be recovered, by changing how we think and act with infrastructure.

Kate Rich, 'Feral Trade, or How I Became a Grocer’ in Dark Mountain issue 23, Spring 2023, p.59.

schadenfreudist:

Memory, and time, both immaterial, are rivers with no banks, and constantly merging. Both escape our will, though we depend on them. Measured, but measured by whom or by what? The one is inside, the other, outside, or so it seems, but is that true? Time seems also buried deep in us, but where? Memory is right here, in the head, but it can exit, abandon the head, leave it behind, disappear. Memory, a sanctuary of infinite patience.

Is memory produced by us, or is it us? Our identity is very likely whatever our memory decides to retain. But let’s not presume that memory is a storage room. It’s not a tool for being able to think, it’s thinking, before thinking. It also makes an (apparently) simple thing like crossing the room, possible. It’s impossible to separate it from what it remembers.

Etel Adnan, Night (via The Marginalian)

gatheringbones:

[“Straight culture’s orientation toward heteroromantic sacrifice is also influenced by socioeconomic class. Respect for sacrifice—or sucking it up and surviving life’s miseries—is one of the hallmarks of white working-class culture, for instance, wherein striving for personal happiness carries less value than does adherence to familial norms and traditions. Maturity and respectability are measured by what one has given up in order to keep the family system going, an ethos that is challenged by the presence of a queer child, for instance, who insists on “being who they are.” Queerness—to the extent that it emphasizes authenticity in one’s sexual relationships and fulfillment of personal desires—is an affront to the celebration of heteroromantic hardship. As Robin Podolsky has noted, “What links homophobia and heterosexism to the reification of sacrifice … is the specter of regret. Queers are hated and envied because we are suspected of having gotten away with something, of not anteing up to our share of the misery that every other decent adult has surrendered to.”

For many lesbian daughters of working-class straight women, opting out of heterosexuality exposes the possibility of another life path, begging the question for mothers, “If my daughter didn’t have to do this, did I?” Heterosexuality is compulsory for middle-class women, too, but more likely to be represented as a gift, a promise of happiness, to be contrasted with the ostensibly “miserable” life of the lesbian. The lesbian feminist theorist Sara Ahmed has offered a sustained critique of the role of queer abjection in the production of heteroromantic fantasies. In Living a Feminist Life, she notes that “it is as if queers, by doing what they want, expose the unhappiness of having to sacrifice personal desires … for the happiness of others.” In the Promise of Happiness, Ahmed argues, “Heterosexual love becomes about the possibility of a happy ending; about what life is aimed toward, as being what gives life direction or purpose, or as what drives a story.” Marked by sacrifice, misery, and failure along the way, the journey toward heterosexual happiness (to be found with the elusive “good man”) remains the journey.”]

Jane Ward, The Tragedy of Heterosexuality

Jane Ward, The Tragedy of Heterosexuality