You guys rlly don't realise how much knowledge is still not committed to the internet. I find books all the time with stuff that is impossible to find through a search engine- most people do not put their magnum opus research online for free and the more niche a skill is the less likely you are to have people who will leak those books online. (Nevermind all the books written prior to the internet that have knowledge that is not considered "relevant" enough to digitise).
Whenever people say that we r growing up with all the world's knowledge at our fingertips...it's not necessarily true. Is the amount of knowledge online potentially infinite? Yes. Is it all knowledge? No. You will be surprised at the niche things you can discover at a local archive or library.
online communities are so strange because people slip away so easily. you can be on here for years, folding people you've never met into the fabric of your daily life, and then they disappear, leaving only ghost posts scattered across tumblr behind. or their blog stays dormant, for weeks, months, years, until you're only still following them because you remember that they love sunflowers or they were kind to you when they didn't have to be or the last thing they posted was sad and raw and you still worry about them sometimes.
and sometimes they come back when you least expect it, years later, even, and there's this sudden rush of relief like there you are, there you are, even though you barely knew each other.
there's a strange kind of love to it. i don't know you and i want to hold your hand across miles and time zones and oceans. i can still see the imprint of you in this community you left. you don't anyone will notice or care when you're gone, but we notice and we care and we wish you well.
i hope you're all okay out there. i hope the sun is shining on your face and you are breathing deeply. i miss you.
"In bringing together Kurt Cobain's 'most poignant lyrics and journal fragments' to demonstrate the ways in which both writing and reading about melancholy can be life-affirming, Saint-Aubin has created a wonderful memorial not only to Cobain's troubled genius but especially to his profound humaneness."
Neil Nehring, author of Popular Music, Gender, and Postmodernism: Anger Is an Energy
The year 2019 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of Kurt Cobain, an artist whose music, words, and images continue to move millions of fans worldwide. As the first academic study that provides a literary analysis of Cobain's creative writings, Arthur Flannigan Saint-Aubin's The Pleasures of Death: Kurt Cobain's Masochistic and Melancholic Persona approaches the journals and songs crafted by Nirvana's iconic front man from the perspective of cultural theory and psychoanalytic aesthetics.
Saint-Aubin discusses Cobain's writings independently of the artist's biography, positioning these texts within the tradition of postmodern representations of masculinity in twentieth-century American fiction, while also suggesting connections to European Romantic traditions from the nineteenth century that postulate a relation between melancholy (or depression) and creativity. In turn, through Saint-Aubin's elegant analysis, Cobain's creative writings illuminate contradictions and inconsistencies within psychoanalytic theory itself concerning the intersection of masculin-ity, masochism, melancholy, and the death drive.
By foregrounding Cobain's ability to challenge coextensive links between gender, sexuality, and race, The Pleasures of Death reveals how the cultural politics and aesthetics of this tragic icon's works align with feminist strategies, invite queer readings, and perform antiracist critiques of American culture.
Arthur Flannigan Saint-Aubin is professor of French at Occidental College, where he teaches courses in Francophone literatures and seminars on the theory and practice of translation. His books include The Memoirs of Toussaint and Isaac Louverture:
Representing the Black Masculine Subject in Narratives of Mourning and Loss.
sherlock holmes deduces you are trans before you've figured it out yourself and refers to you with those pronouns and then when you look confused is like "ah...had you not arrived at that conclusion yet?" and wafts away in his dressing gown to smoke seventeen pipes, leaving you in a gender crisis