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bleuetfane · 7 months

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happy birthday to oscar wilde, irish writer, poet and critic, born on this day in 1854

excerpt from the soul of man under socialism, 1891

#quote #bleuetfane #quotes #oscar wilde #the soul of man under socialism #socialism #irish literature #english literature #socialist literature #political literature

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mitskey · 2 years

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— Ilya Kaminsky, excerpt from a poem in 'Deaf Republic'

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hornyforpoetry · 10 months

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Reading journal // "1984" // George Orwell

Genre: Dystopia, Political fiction, Social Science Fiction

Year of publication: 1949

Read between 03/07/2023 - 06/07/2023 (European calendar)

Review: I wouldn't know what to say about this book because the book itself doesn't tell us much. Even the things the book tells us may or may not be true. We don't know if Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia really exist. We don't know if Big Brother exists or not. We don't know if all of Winston's thoughts themselves are true or not. We don't know anything, we just choose to believe what the book tells us. If the book says it is, then it is.

The first thing I can say that struck me is the absolutely predictable ending. We are told from the beginning how the book will end. In ourselves we were probably hoping for something more. Perhaps that is why it is so frightening, that the human being, pessimist or optimist, expects anything but the predictable.

I was able to see some similarities between life inside the Party and contemporary life. You couldn't help but compare them, considering that the novel suggests the idea of the future. However, how did Orwell predict the future? He didn't, he says so in the book. All he did was read the past. From the past you can learn the future, because history is repetitive.

Orwell suggests what the future would look like if totalitarianism took over the entire human race. He died in 1950 of tuberculosis. Probably if he had managed to live another 10-20 years, the book would have looked different. He could not have predicted the shock the world went through when it learned of the Nazi horrors in the 1960s, the rise of the human rights movement. For someone who had caught WW2, the atomic bomb seemed like the end of the world in the 1950s. In my opinion, WW2 awakened in people the true sense of humanity, something that Orwell could not have guessed, because it had never happened before in history. There is something fiercer than atomic force, and that is the lack of humanity.

He guessed, however, that in the future, constant surveillance through technology will be possible. The universal currency is not labor, but information. And with information, you can change history as you wish. The past, the present, the future, Big Brother, in all kinds of guises, rewrites your history as he pleases.

The discussion about the general truth caught my attention. Two plus two makes four? I thought of Dostoevsky's anonymous protagonist from "Notes from the Underground". He used to say "Even without my free will, two with two will make four. Damn the free will!". It seems that Orwell read Dostoevsky and wanted to combat his hypothesis. I can see him saying "Even without my will, two with two I still don't know how much he does". It's amazing how current this book is, even though 1984 is a long time ago.

I try to imagine a future without art and without soul and I only see a desolate desert. The Party can destroy everything, including thinking, but can it destroy beauty? Is there beauty beyond human thought? Is there that beauty that lies outside the mind, in the outer reality? We have no way of knowing, since we have never lived except in the inner reality. I like to imagine that there are things that are beyond my powers of understanding. How wonderful it would be if beauty were beyond any human understanding. Good books always make me think of beauty. Probably because this is the thing I am looking for the most. I am looking for the truth about beauty, and it is probably right in front of me. It is always obvious and waiting for you in the corridor, while the bullet flies behind you.

Rating: 10/10

Summer Reading Challenge

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millliondollarbills · 1 year

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The Human Condition — Hannah Arendt

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smashing-yng-man · 1 year

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#stephen king #twitter #reading #literature #banned books #2023 #library #libraries #books #novels #politics #us politics

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mysharona1987 · 11 months

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Charles Dickens only wishes he could come up with a villain as audacious and selfish to use the term “youth apprenticeship.”

#politics #liberals #books #libertarians #consveratives #capitalism #charles dickens #literature #child labor

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icarus-archives · 1 year

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lesbian pulp fiction from the 1950s

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prokopetz · 5 months

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I've remarked in the past that first-wave literary cyberpunk's skepticism of body modification is typically rooted in concerns about capitalist intrusion upon bodily autonomy and ownership of human bodies, with the "prosthetics eat your soul" stuff developing later in order to allow authors to continue to write about angsty cyborgs without any political subtext which might be uncomfortable for mainstream audiences.

(Which is not to say that "prosthetics eat your soul" is, itself, apolitical, of course – it merely exchanges a potentially uncomfortable political subtext for one which able-bodied audiences found more palatable!)

While this is true as far as it goes, I think it's also important to recognise that, while first-wave literary cyberpunk did have all that bodily autonomy stuff, it was almost invariably being written by able-bodied authors who treated it as a metaphor for the artist's loss of intellectual freedom under the corporate state, rather than as a topic worth exploring in its own right. Like, give credit where credit is due, but don't give those guys too much credit; they largely weren't taking disability rights issues seriously, either.

I'm saying this because I've noticed an increasing tendency in certain circles to characterise modern self-styled "cripplepunk" incarnations of the cyberpunk genre as in some sense reactionary – i.e., like they're merely rolling back the clock to before cyberpunk sold out. The fact of the matter is that the golden age of disability-aware cyberpunk literature never existed, and folks who are taking a hard look at that aren't trying to "turn back the clock": they're giving the literal text of this shit the attention it deserves for possibly the first time.

#media #literature #cyberpunk #tropes #disability #ableism #politics #capitalism #swearing

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hussyknee · 5 months

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I woke up to the news about Refaat Alreer. I still feel cold. Imagine seeing someone talking on your TL every day, narrating what the genociders are doing, counting the dead and telling their stories, amplifying his colleagues in Palestinian activism and academia, advocating and pleading endlessly for a ceasefire, delivering blistering witticisms about Zionist propaganda and then...he and his whole family are dead.

Two of my favourite tweets by him, calling out the craven Western media for never naming Israel.

It feels like a funeral today. My whole TL full of his students and Palestinians mourning Refaat alongside writers and journalists and academics from all over the Global South. The only people who matter to us is us.

Meanwhile, Zionists are attacking us under our mourning tweets, circulating the tweet where he laughed at the monstrous lie of Hamas cooking a baby in an oven during Oct 7th, one of the lies that fuelled the slaughter that eventually killed him too.

This was his last tweet.

USAmerican disability activist Imani Barbarin's tweet today was partially motivated by Refaat's death.

I need to go offline for a while.

I leave you with Refaat's last poem that was his pinned tweet for over a month. When a storyteller dies, generations are robbed of universes. When a poet dies, the world loses a piece of its soul.

You can find Refaat's book "Gaza Writes Back" in my gdrive folder of Palestinian literature. I don't know where the royalties will go now, but please also try and find it in a bookstore or library.

#refaat alareer #palestinian poetry #palestinian literature #gaza genocide #palestinian genocide #genocide joe #fuck joe biden #free gaza #free palestine #gaza writes back #us politics #us government #vajra chandrasekera #imani barbarin #hebh jamal #western imperialism #western hypocrisy #knee of huss #gaza news

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strykerlancer · 16 days

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— Margaret Atwood, from “Power Politics.”

#margaret atwood #Power Politics #words #poetry #literature #quotes #out of my collection #lit #abyss of words #quote

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ruger35mm · 4 days

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the look all the blue haired communist give you when they try their “i’m a non-abled intersex trans woman suffering from a plethora of diseases” excuse to get out of labour :

Why are these people, those who do no or refuse hard or meaningful labour, the face of these economic revolutionary parties?

#socialism #communism #feminism #feminist #feminist literature #radical feminism #radical feminist theory #terfblr #trans exclusionary radical feminist #radical feminists please touch #radical feminist community #radical feminists do interact #socialist revolution #socialist politics

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thebanishedreader · 7 months

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Oh, what the hell, Florida.

Heyyy so I just looked at my spreadsheet of banned books and...

There are 1,402 BANNED BOOKS in the state of Florida ALONE.

To put that in perspective, on that very same spreadsheet, the number of banned books in California is: one (1).

If you guys have been following this (very new) blog and my posts, then you will know that the number of banned books in Colorado is: eight (8).

In Arkansas, it's four (4).

So. Just to reiterate, to repeat.

As of June 2023,

THE STATE OF FLORIDA HAS BANNED 1,402 BOOKS.

NEARLY HALF OF ALL BANNED BOOKS THIS YEAR, AND NEARLY THE TOTAL AMOUNT OF BANNED BOOKS IN 2022 IN TOTAL.

FLORIDA. HAS. BANNED. 1,402. BOOKS.

Please read banned books. Support libraries. Support authors. And please, please please please please, for the love of everything, stay safe. I love each and every one of you. Stay safe.

Support the American Library Association here.

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tygerland · 10 months

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Yukio Mishima as Saint Sebastian, 1968, by Kishin Shinoyama.

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typhlonectes · 1 year

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#audre lorde #literature #feminism #race #politics #history

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flukeanalgesics · 2 years

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I want my life to revolve around dying to learn everything about science, politics, literature and music so that I can argue with people with extra intellect and extra delusion (that would be me)

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mysharona1987 · 9 months

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#politics #books and literature #discworld #democrats #republicans #woc #books #news #donald trump #Usa

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