kmichaelwilson.bsky.social
Historical Chinese literature, poetry, and philosophy. Co-host Rereading the Stone podcast https://bsky.app/profile/rereadingstone.bsky.social
book reviews & discussion of Ming-Qing literature, science fiction, etc. https://www.patreon.com/kmichaelwilson
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no one who criticizes David Graeber on social media has actually read what they're criticizing
there are no exceptions to this rule
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no one who criticizes David Graeber on social media has actually read what they're criticizing
there are no exceptions to this rule
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lol just straight up naming it "cyberpunk novella" isn't helping your position
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it's not written in classical?
in fact, you might be surprised a how similar the dialogue is to contemporary spoken Chinese languages
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Previous thread being referenced:
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this story is kind of mashing them together!
that is to say, it's asking the question: what if a couple is fated to be "hated mates" due to evils committed in a previous lifetime?
What then, hot shot?!
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what do I mean?
I guess we're seeing here a weird structural conjunction between "fated mates" stories in a more recognizable sense (as exemplified most clearly by more conventional scholar-beauty 才子佳人 novels)
& karmic inter-lifetime notions of fate
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yeah I was shocked, even expecting a raw approach to storytelling
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Especially when it comes to the kind of Ming and Qing literature I want to foreground, this is some messy, messed up literature, reflecting a deeply dysfunctional, ultimately irredeemable society—just like our own! It's very relatable, everything is fucked! 😍
That's the spirit to bring, I think
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Still, we're not looking for "inspiration" per se
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It's amazing, but also perhaps a sign of how dire our times really are, that the model of masculinity to emerge from Ming and Qing China, societies with at times almost ubiquitous female disfigurement (viz., foot binding), still appears often more robust than that coming out of contemporary ideology
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The fact that gender issues have been so prominent in political imaginary, especially of late, makes it all the more critical to seize and preserve alternate models, I think
We simply cannot let illiterate people attempt to dictate human nature; they know nothing, of themselves or of the world
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so the overall vision emerging is that, in all the historical literature I'm dealing with, gender divisions are aligning in complex ways with genre distinctions, while a degree of fluidity is also on display, suggesting that whole matrices of possibility remain unexplored and undeveloped
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I think basically in Ibis (1985) one is witnessing not only one of the first attempts to do "kink in space," but really one of the first serious attempts to import any contemporary romance dynamics into sci-fi
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So when people are like, "What's up with your Typebar Magazine article? Is that related to the other stuff you're working on?" I might answer, "Yes, it kind of is related!"
www.typebarmagazine.com/2024/08/29/s...
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This is how I was able basically to write my dissertation on a quasi-romance novel (Hongloumeng 紅樓夢, Dream of the Red Chamber) without ever considering the logic of genre and tropes with any real analytical clarity
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It's kind of an interesting space, in that not only is Chinese literature marginalized in the humanities, so too is the category of romance
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Your second tweet I don't follow as well. What do you mean?
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if this all sounds pathetic, it is
that's why conservatives gravitate toward historical losers like the Nazis
Nazism is repulsive, it's not "masculine" at all
Rape, to reiterate, is a failure of masculinity, a failure to appeal physically, mentally, and emotionally
Rapists are repulsive losers
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~226
if I added more hero stories + xianxia stuff, we might be talking 400 or so, but I'm tempted to keep them separate
debating
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oh no, gender checking in the courtroom
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oh no, gender checking in the courtroom
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Okay, I'm going to make breakfast, so my tweets become less devastatingly critical