A Brooklyn Culture Mafia

[beiser]

I don’t think these things are evenly distributed —it’s very possible for there to not be enough trans awareness in general, and yet for it to exist in a strange fever pitch among certain populations.

I think one of the best and most incisive pieces of satire over the last decade came from Clickhole, with their piece “I’m not saying I hope my child is transgender, but I would hit it out of the park.”: https://clickhole.com/i-m-not-saying-i-hope-my-child-is-transgender-but-i-wo-1825123840/

 

[beiser]

There was a certain cursed strand of early-00s American liberal discourse where Time was constantly reporting on “The Search for The Gay Gene,” which was a holy grail of sorts because if being gay was genetic, it couldn’t be a choice. This was exactly as dumb as it sounds, libs clutching at the bit to make gayness trivially genocidable, it was ultimately unsuccessful, which is entirely unsurprising given that such a gene would surely be selected against. But the principle was that people who were gay and hence, “born this way” were the crucial wedge. It of course doesn’t really matter for the discourse that they’re outnumbered about 4:1 by bisexuals, who do have a choice.

You see a recapitulation of this by the majority of authors about transness—a focus on people who know from a very early age that they would like to transition, and along with that, a kind of platonism—transness is always discovered, never learned or constructed, it’s always preexisting yet sometimes dormant.

There is a genuine fault-line here between “truscum,” who genuinely believe that only those who have the classical syndrome, along with associated dysphoria, should be allowed to be trans. Generally this is considered a “bad move,” and “unacceptable,” although it seems to me like the defensible position in the rights discourse.

The adoption of the narrow rights-discourse with a broad understanding of transition is a dead end. The only acceptable end-state will be to declare that frankly, anyone should be able to transition for any reason; this is what it means to live in a liberal society. If gender is something that can be controlled by technoscience, we should let it be.

 

[sus]

is there a big liberal public image complex on trans people? or is the belief that there is only perpetuated in niche social/intellectual communities like the titular one here to keep the wheels spinning?

I think there's a "discord" layer, made up of trans communities where participants have skin in the game/are motivated to get the details right—protean party lines and subcultural turf battles, a big psychic soup of identities and egregores trying to figure themselves out. And then there's a slimmer "media" layer, mixed grifter-benevolent, who have built professional lives and a higher calling around protecting and advocating for the cause to the public; their interest is in winning a cultural battle. This is the blanket: it covers up the mess, presenting a clear, unproblematic party line to unify around, to enforce, etc.

Mind you, absolutely none of this is specific to trans issues—this is just how representation works. There've always been feminisms accusing other feminisms of being unproductive; "Uncle Tom" is a lindy designator, etc.

 

[beiser]

“discord layer” is an especially good descriptor given that it probably is mostly on Discord.

 

[sus]

Returning to the subject at hand, some Ariana Reines lines

I just read /
Something John Perry Barlow /
Wrote. He used to write lyrics /
For the Grateful Dead. His work /
With the Electronic Frontier /
Foundation and former career /
As a cattle rancher make him into /
An intriguing kind of statesman.

What I read was a eulogy for the woman
He loved more than any other. A friend
Is going to his birthday party
Tonight. I don’t have the required
Gland to assimilate the Grateful
Dead, but something real must
Have been going on there, and I really
Like John Perry Barlow, a gentleman
And scholar, a man of affairs and
Learning, a short man. I like his writing.
The woman he loved
Cynthia Horner
Died suddenly
On an airplane
In her sleep.
In his eulogy
John Perry Barlow
Describes his happiness
With Cynthia; her boundless
Kindness, tolerance, and sense of fun.
She was a woman
Who was truly game, he wrote.
I read another essay by him
On nerve.com about all the women
He loves, and it had lots of
Mystical intelligence in it.
And I liked it.
I am such a shitty
Woman.

And ah, testimonials

TESTIMONIALS — Ariana Reines

www.arianareines.net

 

[luka]

That's prose, inert prose, with line breaks.

 

[shiels]

In a fight we take the appropriate combative stance against our enemy, build battering rods, guard, shed unecessary bits and nuance, adopt a role. Adopt modes of persuasion which amplify some of our experience and conceal others. everybody in any argument understands this at the personal level and it happens at the macro level too

 

[sus]

One film I think is very good—despite/in part because it's so painful and emotionally turbulent to watch—is Von Trier's Nymphomaniac. I think that film is in large part about the line between women's sexual power, and their lack of power in other domains. The limits of sexual power.

 

[sus]

I still can't think of a good "hierarchies of desire" take like Shiels wants and I'm disappointed. I guess it's on you to write it, Shiels.

 

[catalog]

I read all that (the ariana reines poem) and i liked it. It sort of reminds me of some of Charles bukowskis poems a bit, some of his tend to have that kind of structure. But I do prefer bukowskis stories/novels to his poems, the poems do sort of seem to be no different to his prose, except shorter and with line breaks. Does reines do prose or is it just poetry?

Eg from bukowski:

the Mexican fighters

watching the boxing matches from Mexico
on tv while sitting in bed
on a cool November evening.
had a great day at the track, picking 7
of 9, two of them long shots.
no matter, I am watching the fighters
work hard now, showing more courage than
style
as in the front row two fat men talk to
each other,
paying no attention to the
boxers
who are fighting for their very existence
as human beings.
sitting in bed here, I feel sad for
everybody, for all the struggling people
everywhere, trying to get the rent paid on time,
trying to get enough food, trying to get
an easy night's sleep.
it's all very wearing and it doesn't stop until you
die.
what a circus, what a show, what a
farce
from the Roman Empire to the French-
Indian War, and from there to here!

now, one of the Mexican boys has
floored the other.
the crowd is screaming.
the boy is up at 9.
he nods to the referee that he is
ready to go again.
the fighters rush together.

even the fat men in the front row are
excited now.
the red gloves fiercely punch the air and the
faces and the hard brown
bodies.

then
the boy is down again.
he is flat on his back.
it's over.

the god-damned thing is over.

for that boy, there is no knowing where he is
going now.
for the other boy, it's going to be good for
a little while.
he smiles in tune with the
world.

I flick off the tv.

after a moment I hear gunshots off somewhere in the
distance.
the contest of life continues.

I get up, walk to the window.
I feel disturbed, I mean about
people and things, the way of
things.

then I'm sitting back on the bed, with many
feelings passing through me that I can't quite
comprehend.

then I force myself to stop thinking.
some questions don't have answers.

what the hell, I had 7 for 9 at the track today, that's something
even in the midst of a lot of
nothing.

what you do is take whatever luck comes your way and pretend
you know more than you ever
will.

right?


We watched both parts of nymphomaniac recently and it is good, but by the 2nd half of part 2, where she's going to see that guy, it starts to get a bit much. The bit on the train in part 1 is the best bit.

 

[luka]

Craner will tell you that Bukowski's poems are completely devoid of any merit but as soon as you put it into relationship with the thing Gus posted it suddenly looks like a masterpiece.

 

[luka]

With the Bukowski you have a deliberate shunning of poetic language in favour of something closer to everyday speech, the everyday speech of a Working Stiff what the hell. Which you might find corny god damned or maybe you might buy into or maybe it has an appealing period charm.

The other thing is not as coherent, it doesn't maintain a consistent coherent tone and register. There's not a speaking voice. It slips into this very strange anti-voice, Wikipedia entry language, very impersonal and rote, something which, if more developed could be interesting stylistically.

So the first two lines, so far, so 'American Laconic', we are all familiar with it. It's a writing cliche, that tone. Then it slips into this weird thing "his work... an intriguing kind of statesman." It's unnaturalistic, no one would ever say that, and no one would ever think it. It's not a thought, it's an anti-thought, a platitude, an empty verbal formulation, completely redundant. It reads like a sentence in an obituary for a man without qualities. You wouldn't get anything like it in a Bukowski poem where, as I say, the voice is consistent, even if you consider it spurious, as most people do.

 

[luka]

and the Bukowski, as cliched and as willfuly lazy as it is, does give you a sense of a man engaged with the world around himself, and emotionally caught up in it, sharing it's sadnesses and it's triumphs. There's observation and there's empathy and there's sympathy. I don't think it's a bad poem really. It's human. The two fat men talking hits the same note as Audens poem about Icarus plunging into the sea while the peasant ploughs his field, oblivious to the grand tragedy just outside his cone of vision. You get a sense of our complicity in the violence of the world, and also a sense of how we are the victim of that violence. It has a moral weight to it, even if, troubled, it tries to shirk it off at the end, as we all shirk it off, necessarily.

Compare that with the ugly narcissism of I am a shitty woman.

 

[sus]

Yeah, I liked the book-length but I'm having a difficult time defending this passage. I think it's more interesting in the overall narrative of Coeur, but it's difficult to defend that sorta thing.

 

[sus]

I'll have to think on it, perhaps revisit the poem.

 

[mvuent]

i tried cumtown and chapo and they were just a total joke - absolute steaming dogshit especially cumtown. unbelievable how those chumps are coining it in

i listened to cum town pretty much every day during the second semester of my junior year. you're right it's extremely bad but also the best thing this cultural sphere has produced.

 

[sus]

it's a way to hang with the boys, right? everyone being Extremely Stupid

 

[linebaugh]

I've heard you approach cum town like a grind house film. Ive been listening to it alot recently, some bits are really funny, but Ive only ever used it to zone out while working so I dont know how much Id enjoy it if I tuned in purely for its own merit- ill also listen to bill simmons in the same scenario, and I know that isnt great.

 

[mvuent]

Ive only ever used it to zone out while working so I dont know how much Id enjoy it if I tuned in purely for its own merit

yeah same. just while i was doing my "job" raking leaves and driving around campus aimlessly in a golf cart.

there's an episode where nick recounts how, for a while, his entire life consisted of working at some soul crushing tech support call center, then going home and prank calling the exact same call center. one of them comments "what a stupid existence". it seems like a good lifestyle.

 

[sus]

Cumtown is the Beckett of bro culture: its “appeal lies in the fact that it… amounts to a status opera. Though a good deal of the content is nonsensical, the status interactions are not.” Nick Mullen is a master craftsman of the theme-and-variation, setting up comedic tree trunks that branch into incessant tags, every possible iteration of a punchline (black John Wick) riffed through. It’s enough to remind ya of the Terence Tao vision of progress in mathematics.

The lockerroom talk acts as the form’s content: in other words, the ‘cast works as a highly sophisticated treatment of highly unsophisticated material, the Goldberg Variations of excrement jokes. Now compare Red Scare, its polar opposite: high prestige material treated in an unsophisticated manner—a worldview inconsistently stamped and low-energy. There’s something emblematic about gender and styles of maturity here, the ‘casts like two groups of unisex middle-schoolers too precocious for their own good.