Reading Wednesday
Sep. 24th, 2025 07:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Just finished: Antifa Lit Journal Vol. 1: What If We Kissed While Sinking a Billionaire's Yacht?, edited by Chrys Gorman. There are some really good stories in here and one good poem, and I'm cautiously optimistic for the future of the journal? I'm thinking a lot lately about didacticism in art and its purposes, and of course about writing dystopian fiction while living in a dystopia. There's the sort of "this thing that is happening is bad and you should be upset about it" kind of classic dystopia, and there's the hopepunk variant of "here are some people fighting against the bad thing?" but I think we ought to be pushing past both of those tendencies. To what end? I don't know. I'm thinking a lot about Rhinoceros by Eugène Ionesco, which sadly I have never seen staged but is one of the most brilliant explorations of fascism in the way that it weirds it and adds something new and useful to our understanding of fascist psychology, and thus our ability to resist it. (It is unfair, of course, to critique something for not being Ionesco.) So I dunno how to do that, I am a hack and a fraud. Anyway, there were a couple of really standout stories—one about a house contents sale, one with a retelling of Fall of Jericho, one about a group of church ladies resisting ICE, and of course the title story.
Currently reading: Gothic Capitalism: Art Evicted from Heaven and Earth by Adam Turl. Adam is a Marxist artist and critic whose work I really enjoy, so when they came out with an actual book that I can recommend to people, I was all fuck yeah. This examines the relationship of art to capitalism and resistance, drawing on Benjamin, Fisher, Brecht, and so on. It gets points right off the bat for explaining uneven and combined development, which the Historical Materialism crowd is always on about, in a way my never-went-to-grad-school brain can actually understand. I just finished the bit on the ways in which conceptual art arose in rejection of the commercial art market and then almost immediately got subsumed into it. Anyway, it's really good.
Currently reading: Gothic Capitalism: Art Evicted from Heaven and Earth by Adam Turl. Adam is a Marxist artist and critic whose work I really enjoy, so when they came out with an actual book that I can recommend to people, I was all fuck yeah. This examines the relationship of art to capitalism and resistance, drawing on Benjamin, Fisher, Brecht, and so on. It gets points right off the bat for explaining uneven and combined development, which the Historical Materialism crowd is always on about, in a way my never-went-to-grad-school brain can actually understand. I just finished the bit on the ways in which conceptual art arose in rejection of the commercial art market and then almost immediately got subsumed into it. Anyway, it's really good.