knife

A classic concern of so many apparently insecure people is spelling and punctuation and there's endless little quizzes and assessments you/they can make of someone by how they invoke little squiggles on the screen, like reading tea-leaves but discrete and soulless. A favorite is the so-called Oxford comma. I suspect its favored status as a means to evince education or something half-comes from the gilded name-dropping, like, would anyone give a shit if it was called the Cleveland comma?

fwiw I use this comma because I love adornment and extra squiggles, but the facebook-level comics advocating its utility note the ambiguity that can arise from not using it: we invited the strippers, jfk and stalin. Here it's not clear whether it's a string of three coordinated nouns: [the strippers] and [jfk] and [stalin] or whether it's an 'appositive': [the strippers] namely [jfk and stalin]. Already it's dumb casual whateverphobia of tarting up those 20th century men as frivolous and absurd women, which doesn't offend me so much as it causes me vicarious embarrassment.

But spelling and in this case punctuation is just fashion, stilted table manners and utensil placement, and expressing an opinion on the Oxford comma can only be (consciously or not) a means to convey the most superficial veneers of your education. The jfk thing above is about as compelling and funny as being an absolute card at the banquet by using a steakknife to butter some bread.

Also, it's fun to by-your-logic the exact opposite conclusion. The ambiguity between coordination and appositives is only found sentence-finally. Anywhere else, the appositive meaning is traditionally indicated by yet another comma: The strippers, jfk and stalin, were invited.

In fact, the use of the Oxford comma can create it's own coordination-appositive ambiguity because the second, Oxford comma on it's own makes for potential appositive readings, anywhere in a sentence: my dad, the pope, and jane were invited/we invited my dad, the pope, and jane. In both instances there is ambiguity between: [my dad] and [the pope] and [jane] versus [my dad namely the pope] and [jane]

the Oxford comma can introduce ambiguity anywhere, but not using it can only introduce ambiguity sentence-finally.

But even by-your-logicing this shit is a dumbass game. The real opinion to have is: who gives a shit, ambiguity is fine, you'll be fine

puppets

I'm not a critic and don't really have the background or vocab or chops to talk about this idea that I have, but I might as well give it a shot.

I few weeks ago I got really high and watched Whit Stillman's Last Days of Disco. I've enjoyed Metropolitan and Barcelona in the past and had a time with this one too. But there's this thing I've noticed when I'm high and watch a movie about educated people. Like the movie A Single Man, the Tom Ford Colin Firth movie about a gay professor in the 60s, I just couldn't take it serious while high. What I imagined was a somber portrayal of deep longing and loneliness, I could only see as an indictment of a phoney milieu, po-faced sincerity like a thin veneer over pea-brained nothing. Empty gestures sorta miming erudition or intellectual restraint. Maybe that's what they were going for, but I doubt it. And if I watched it sober, who knows what I'd think.

So, Last Day of Disco. The movie follows a number of well-heeled, upwardly mobile young people in advertising or publishing in manhattan in the 70s. They talk about fancy subjects and use multisyllabic words in a dry way that has all the trappings of wit, but again I was high and could only see it as empty, and in fact an intentional coldly cynical evisceration of the pretenses of this type of person, or of a whole caste/class/whatever

***

I think animals have emotions of sorts, I'm not some old-timey cartesian who thinks they're mindless automata, but I also don't think they have the same rich inner lives that humans have. And a stupid exercise I do is: I see a picture of a dog with its mouth open and it looks like it's got this big smile on its face, but I know the dog is not actually smiling so I cover the mouth with my hand to see just its eyes, entirely emotionless, blank, empty, and mute.

***

When I watched Barry Lyndon, I went into it with this idea, gleaned from who knows where, that Ryan O'Neal was not a good actor and Kubrick knew this and used that to create this effect of a soulless forward-moving striver, a pawn of history, and that this was a brutal cynical take on, I dunno, humans, aristocrats, hollywood actors, etc etc. And I'd like to interpret Last Days of Disco this way, like a sort of ecce homo, but not of a frail and flawed and humble subject, but of a denatured, dessicated, lobotomized striver class, playing a certain filigree role in as part of the superstructure to some brute base. The height of wit or culture is just profoundly stupid and we're just watching marionettes go through motions barely comprehending the horror of their situation.

This sort of contempt for the subjects (again something I might just be making up and misinterpreting, who knows) reminds me of Lars von Trier using some sort of brechtian artifice to make a similar point in Dogville or Todd Solondz putting his characters in brutalizing situations (though his characters seem to have some sort of internal life, however fucked up).

Maybe I've got it all wrong and Stillman's stuff is sincere and sophisticated, but it's funner to see it as a scathing trick played on the characters and a good chunk of the audience. Disco was never this white, never this straight, and the characters were enjoying probably an ultra watered-down gentrified version of it, tamed and sold to them by those who know their marks. This delusion the characters share might be hinted at at the end of the movie where there's this surreal dancing-in-the-streets montage of regular people discoing on subways and stuff. Maybe it finds its modern incarnation in Pride or Drag or Burning Man, no clue. The last days of Pride. I'd watch that

psyops

a classic fun wikipedia page is the one on different shibboleths. Most of these hinge on the fact that pronunciation (phonetics, phonology) is locked in early in native speakers and it's exceedingly rare and difficult to adopt a nonnative language's pronunciation without flaw in adulthood. Morphosyntax, word order, and other stuff might be hard to acquire as an adult, but they're vastly easier in comparison. This is why you often hear hypercompetent nonnative speakers still have accents and it's rare to nonexistant to find someone who can perfectly pronounce a language they learned as an adult but who sucks at the morphosyntax.

Pronunciation-based shibboleths work, but imagine you had a shibboleth that was lexical, word-based but one that could pronounced in any old way. It'd be way weaker. Which brings me to the thing where people rail against how being suitably woke/pc/whatever changes every five minutes. This isn't wrong, but the constant shifting of correct words seems to be the result of using a shibboleth system that isn't based on pronunciation. Or at least the speed of the shifting seems to be the result of this.

For a variety of dumb reasons we exist so much in text on the internet and pronunciation is not gonna cut it as a means to distinguish the in-group from the out-. Marginalized people rightfully want a way to know who's down and who isn't, but we're in a bind because the medium only allows for shitty shibboleths. We/they have to keep everything changing because cooption can happen just as fast. Anyone can cop a new word on the internet. I don't need to know how to pronounce latinx if all I have to do it type it.

Rapidly changing the terms seems like a fine defense mechanism in this light, but it is still a bummer because it makes being down such an immaterial bore. It's way harder to fake other things, eg pronunciation, but more importantly: showing up with your physical body and doing real shit irl. This is basically not possible with quarantine mandates.

***

I got real high the other night was thinking about psyops, who to trust, is brace belden cia, etc, lol. I do this half-intentionally because I find it entertaining, but I also think these are real questions. And you can devote a lot of thought and energy to them without really getting anywhere. Is any given thing presented in the media a psyop to keep us pacified, or not? Maybe I think the chapo guys are earnest and funny and flawed in a trustworthy way because they've been precisely calibrated to neuter any nascent potentially insurrection-y types (I don't consider myself an insurrectionary type, but maybe they know more about me and my ilk than I do).

There's no way to know, but these are frets that only the weakest Left would ever grapple with. Frets about psyops or even sheepdogs only really have teeth when there is no ground game physical shibboleths to trust. It's relatively easy to fake a podcast or campaign like Warren's. It's really hard to fake irl action, still possible, but the barrier's higher

post

Trying to post again, I have a few lined up, but I want to do them justice. A few thoughts: Since I've been working at home, the days just bleed into each other nearly indistinguishable, it's become clear how absurd it is that we work 5 out of 7 days. That's so much time, just to make money for others.

It also makes me realize how much this absurd 5/7 day workweek is only made bearable by otherwise having a life. Instead of breaking from work and meeting friends, eating out, exploring, I break from work and my environment is identical. The amount of working is so unnecessary and I feel depressed by it