walking away from western thought & other fables

greetings.

it's a couple days past the first quarter moon. i guess i thought i could write and send a newsletter around the new moon eclipse, but other things happened instead. my soul is paying a toll.

has anyone read kentaro miura's manga berserk before? (please note, the anime series are but mere fractions of events taken place over the manga.) this is one of those series for people who have a stomach to tolerate ultraviolence and male violence against women/children that can be typical of certain genres of fantasy comics. The comic started at the very beginning of the 90s and has been continuously released since then. So anyway it's got diehard fans. Fifteen to twenty page chapters of it are released in a serial comics magazine for young men, and then the chapters are collected into volumes and published, and then those are translated into English for that market. Anyway, scanlations have been a thing since the late late 90s, early 2000s I would say (when more ppl/machinery/telecom/laws could afford bigger bandwidth to load the images with any quickness), and ... Ok I mean to say already that the author, Miura, he's taking these long hiatuses between chapters. Like three a year sometimes. So, I stopped reading Berserk maybe EIGHT or TEN years ago lol, and then got caught up on the last 100 chapters all day the other day. Read at home. Took a bus to the grocery store and read more chapters on my phone. Made dinner and read myself into bed. What a world. Berserk fans, you already know.

so before the eclipse, i was finding myself listening to & watching a lot of western philosophical stuffs. i'm not totally sure why. maybe because 'even' within 'western mindsets' there exist thoughts and beliefs that reject and critique total expansion & consumption as natural destinies of man, and i'm interested in pulling on that thread lately. you know, like the strains of pagan thought still surviving throughout the centuries of oppression and before the middle ages and what not. (another reason i enjoy berserk is how horrifying the depictions of its fictional catholic church are – like honestly depicting the brutality of its control – you just don't see the church portrayed for its true character like that in media).

so last newsletter I believe I linked to a youtube by a person named Cuck Philosopher, who made some enjoyable vids breaking down post-modern intellectual thought for the ppl, using pop culture references. i ended up watching all the person's vids and then it pointed me at this channel with a vid talking bout Christopher Lasch, The Alt-Left, and Capitalist Realism. I was like who? I was like alt-left tho??? And clicked it, readying myself for annnything. And I was like oh shit go in on neoliberalism as a future-trap. Mind you, I don't really read a lot of theory anymore. I still got academic fatigue, 7 years after a BA. Sometimes I see Che Gosset's instagram posts and feel both a jealous thirst for the knowledge within the books they be reading and delirious at the sheer amount of reading that seems to go down on the daily. I'm gonna have to start looking for these pop culture theory vids but not done by philosophical young white ppl, because although i may enjoy them for what they are, their lack of perspective or reference to Black critical thinkers/ of color is especially noticeable. I think I fux with Cuck Philosophy bc the dude will cite Black women thinkers when breaking down bullshit philosophy from contemporary philosophy dumbass white dudes/arguments.

i'm stoned. sigh. i wasn't stoned yesterday. you know it's great they made manga scanlation sites endless scrolls of the whole chapter. back in the 00s we had to click next page icons.
continuing on the thread of monk's western philosophy youtube train, a few weeks ago me and my boo spent an evening watching a donna haraway talk, Storytelling for Earthly Survival. Really sounds like an Allied Media Conference workshop, doesn't it. Donna Haraway is an Irish Catholic and I never knew that till 1) she announced it in the vid and 2) she couldn't stop laughing giddily at any perverse joke that would upset a Catholic grandmother. Jesus christ, speaking of Irish Catholics, there is a netflix 8-part documentary that's really brutal about abuse in the church in Baltimore. So weird that the eclipse happens and I'm fixating on Catholic abuse of power & shame hmmmmmm

ok back to Haraway. i liked the talk. she is an enjoyable academic storyteller. but i still wonder about her interactions with Anzaldúa and the intersectional feminist writers of the 1970s, who were writing about hybrid (cyborg) lives under the war machine in their own terms. mother cyborg and i agree, you can't tell us "cyborg manifesto" and "la frontera/borderlands" aren't talking to each other. i should state that i don't really know if there was formal interaction on haraway's part back then, i don't know because i haven't read or searched yet. if you know, care to share?

i guess there's a debate between ursula leguin and haraway. sharing it here for anyone who's interested. i find myself not really stanning for leguin. there's all these white women thinkers & writers from the 70s and shit who contributed to theory and blah, but i'm very hesitant to trust their works because of these feelings, like oh the financial stability of the upper classes. that's what that sounds like. at least with leguin. child of an anthropologist and a family who "summered." i feel like it's easy for that sort of kind hearted stable educated & progressive middle class upbringing to never be critiqued as a problematic backdrop, while someone like Tiptree who served in the CIA & was the child of victorian high society becomes more of an obvious moral dilemma or some shit. aren't they just a generation apart, too? anyway, reading sandra cisnero's house on mango street last year was like a shocker back to something i was missing.

i was very happy when the >ect podcast picked apart that infernal xenofeminist manifesto. although it seems that since i last listened to them and now they currently have an episode with a representative of the xenofeminist collective. so. another i don't know. i haven't listened to it yet and i'm still scoffing at the time a representative was on a panel (via vidchat) with Rasheedah and Anthony Monteiro, and the rep was like afrofuturism and time travel why i did not know such work was going on i am so intrigued??? which is like, okay, bodies of thought and art and culture ARE geographically significant and no one can know everything, but how are you gonna be some new hot herald being widely spread over some field of radical?? philosophy and be brand new to the work of the Black thinkers you're sharing the panel discussion with? We are so lucky in Philadelphia to be surrounded by a tradition of radical speculative Black thought I guess!!! so idk my spidey senses are still not feeling xenofeminism like that. maybe i'll listen to the >ect podcast episode and chill on the delicious haterade.

My damie Alexis sent me over this @serviceappreciation-relevant article about plastic bags. It has beautiful photos and traces the history/origin of the plastic bag and its dominating presence in our consumption-based lives. It's another good little meditation on the mess that violent & power-hungry landowners got us in!

Then the Weather Channel (remember when that jawn first came out???) is doing a series on climate change called Exodus. The "about" page goes in, and then the articles themselves, especially the ones about perfect little white conservative community towns getting WRECKED in climate change, really hit me with a sense of ecstatic dread. The website with the article on the plastic bags turns out to be a web magazine with an issue called Earth, Wind & Fire and focuses on the state of this industrial steel town & its inhabitants in Braddock, PA. Read that back to back with Emergence Magazine's national geographic-like take on the disappearing natural sacred etc etc and you might be needing a nap.

guess whaaaaat...

There's...
a

N ~ E ~ W

All That's Left story

~~~~~>on my website.

"This is a living story, about dispossessed cyborgs and their many borders. This tale will change over time and become a different memory for each of you. Stories are either categorized as PROTOTYPE or SERIAL. Prototype stories were released from 2012~2015 in zine and audiobook form. Serial stories are brand new rewrites debuting in 2018."

The new story, Real Work You Deserve, is a serial story.

I'm a bit scattered and exhausted to summarize it for you. I'm proud of this one!! Samuel Delany says to start the story where it really starts, so this is my attempt to reorient the tale from a critical juncture. Kay before she is made to have a prosthetic body. If anyone would like to write some snappy quote about it for me to use, be my guest. Also if you have any thoughts you'd like to share with me about the story, please write me!

Shout out to Cutty who I'm 98% sure was the one who came up with that horrifying slogan when designing an in-world predatory ad for the 2nd ATL zine. <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 They're dropping new stories soon too so be on the lookout for "Cutlass" on those underground reading lineups, ok?

Ok my poor little back hurts and i've been going through a lot of emotional upheaval, so I will leave you with this:

Rivers Solomon, author of An Unkindness of Ghosts, just sent out a patreon update about speaking with NK Jemisin at their first Worldcon (where the Hugo scifi awards are given). They shared NK Jemisin's acceptance speech and it is so many yeses.


love & kindness to you all
monk


[writer's note/suggestion to try: i made myself write "enjoyable" every time i wanted to use "good" as a descriptor of media]