Hari Kunzru Profile picture
Sep 17, 2020 12 tweets 4 min read Read on X
There's a new episode of Into the Zone out today. For 'It's Always Sunny in the Dialectic' I went to LA with @_hbraithwaite to eat at a place where your breakfast is a mantra: Image
We're living in difficult times. For some people, it's all about thinking positive Image
For others, not so much. This is Theodor Adorno, one of the pioneers of critical theory, who fled the Nazis and ended up in the world capital of positivity, Los Angeles Image
In this episode, I tell Adorno's story, which involves dialectics, twelve tone music and a sneaky fondness for road trips. And I clash him with his opposite, this guy: Image
To help understand Norman Vincent Peale, author of 'The Power of Positive Thinking', and ask whether positivity is always positive, I'm joined by @B_Ehrenreich
... and by Geoff Dyer, who takes me to peer through a wall in Brentwood to get a glimpse of where Adorno wrote Minima Moralia Image
So is positive thinking really positive? And is critical thinking negative? All this, and Thomas Mann in the new episode of Into the Zone. pushkin.fm/into-the-zone
Because fair use is fairly restrictive, you don't get to hear much of Adorno's own music in this ep, but there are some short pieces in the compendious ITZ playlist. Go to no. 78 and you'll be in the land of High Modernism open.spotify.com/playlist/0iESO…
Also a selection of positive sounds (Lonnie Liston Smith, - if you know you know), and a Japanese minimal ambient work by Chihei Hatakeyama, named after Adorno's Minima Moralia.
Spotify weirdly thin on Schoenberg but there's the (pre Serialist) Verklärte Nacht and a little atonal Sprechstimme. Maybe I'll have another look

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More from @harikunzru

Aug 7, 2023
This company Prosecraft appears to have stolen a lot of books, trained an AI, and are now offering a service based on that data blog.shaxpir.com/prosecraft-lin…
I did not consent to this use of my work. White Tears by Hari Kunzru this is a SHAXPIR project how does it work? WHITE TEARS HARI 2PI (about 324 pages) 81,010 TOTAL WORDS 428d PERCENTILE or all the books in our brary 87.99% VIVIDNESS GIst PERCENTILE or athe books in our brar 7.78% PASSIVE VOICE 428d PERCENTILE of all the books in our library 2.34% ALL ADVERBS 13th PERCENTILE of all the books in our library 0.74% LY-ADVERBS 20th PERCENTILE of all the books in our library 1.60% NON-LY-ADVERBS 15th PERCENTILE of all the books in our library clippings from this book We've analyzed hundreds of millions of words, from thousands or differ...
Pure gaslighting We're calling on the literary world to help us expand our catalogue. If you're an author or publisher, and you'd like to see your work included in our database, get in touch with us at…
Read 6 tweets
May 2, 2023
Writers in other fields should be paying attention to the WGA negotiations. Here's the current position on the use of AI. Union proposal: regulate us...
They want to be able to train models on your work, so they can get that Barton Fink feeling without needing to pay Barton Fink.
Read 8 tweets
Dec 16, 2022
Real canary in a coalmine stuff that Twitter has just suspended @atrupar
also Washington Post's @drewharwell
and (chef's kiss) @joinmastodon
Read 14 tweets
Jul 31, 2022
I've been traveling for a while, and some good book and music mail was waiting for me when I got back. I also bought some things in Paris. So, a thread of the TBR / TBListened pile
Gallimard are doing a series of political tracts. Badiou, political crime writer Didier Daeninckx and a collective of historians taking down Zemmour's distortions of French history
Two translations from @archipelagobks that I can't wait to read: @a_nathanwest's version of Hermann Burger's last novel Brenner and Maureen Freely's version of Sevgi Soysal's autobiographical prison novel Dawn.
Read 24 tweets
May 26, 2022
Uvalde should lay to rest the myth of the ‘good guy with a gun’ being an effective protection for anyone or anything.
TX has more guns per capita than any state in the US, US has more guns than any other country in the world.
Also US cops are trained to protect themselves with their guns, not the public prospect.org/justice/police…
Read 14 tweets
May 25, 2022
Carlson has same pseudo-decent talking point. But this is what mourning looks like - people angry and sad enough to want to do something, rather than pretending it’s like the damn weather.
There is a posture of learned helplessness adopted by US politicians in the face of this and many other problems. Words like ‘tragedy’ drain away agency.
These deaths are the result of policy. In other countries policy was changed and these events became vanishingly rare. See UK after Dunblane, Australia after Port Arthur
Read 6 tweets

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