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30 May, 8 tweets, 8 min read
It's Sunday, so I should do my weekly "Jugend" run. Today I only got through January of 1899. But first the cover and titlepage from the volume. Lovely embossed stuff, plus bugs and peacock on your head, plus Pan. 1/ ImageImageImageImage
Lots of good Julius Diez in this stuff. I was a bit puzzled by Baubo's daughter riding the pig but evident Baubo does that on Walpurgisnacht. 2/ sothebys.com/es/auctions/ec… ImageImageImageImage
I assume the limited color palette is dictated by limits of print technology. But it makes for very charming, if lurid, effects. 3/ ImageImageImageImage
We have a Käthe Kolwitz. Not such a great one. More Diez. Mixed pickles. 4/ ImageImageImageImage
Society ladies, dissolute mask-wearers and a really great hallucination. 5/ ImageImageImageImage
Fantasy stuff. The Orientalist harem has great orange and green. Böcklin kind of fairy stuff. Merpeople. 6/ ImageImageImageImage
More ladies and bears. And pan. And ladies. 7/ ImageImageImage
More Diez. And I like all the bicycle jokes from this era. Peleton as Wild Hunt. That's it for me for tonight. I had a hard day of research into serious stuff. Real hat-on-a-twig stuff, if you know what I mean. 8/ ImageImageImageImage

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More from @jholbo1

John Holbo Profile picture
2 Jun
I surely didn't know about Tulsa, growing up, but the single thing I have learned in the last few years, that most shocked me and also fundamentally altered my view of the landscape, was the prevalence of 'sundown towns' across the US. 1/ sundown.tougaloo.edu/sundowntowns.p…
James Loewen, who wrote the book, remarks on that page: "When I began this research, I expected to find about 10 sundown towns in Illinois (my home state) and perhaps 50 across the country. Instead, I have found about 507 in Illinois and thousands across the United States." 2/
There are a lot of small to mid-sized towns and cities in the US with nearly all-white populations. Loewen expected to find they were a mix: some 'sundown towns' where African-Americans were excluded by law and threat of violence, but some all-white by chance. 3/
Read 25 tweets
John Holbo Profile picture
1 Jun
I gave a lecture once in which I riffed on the democracy of the dead, per Chesterton vs. the democracy of the non-existent, á la Parfit. I whipped up a few illustrations to go with. Later a pro-life person emailed and asked to use the baby one and I said ok. ImageImageImage
Oh - hey, I totally forgot. I also talked about paradoxes of identity and preference satisfaction for the same lecture. Suppose as a child you really want three scoops of bubblegum-flavored ice cream but, alas, it is not to be. Image
Later do you have a reason to satisfy that desire just because you are still the same person, even you you no longer want bubblegum-flavored ice cream? (I was going through a Jim Flora phase, as illustrator.) Obviously you do not still have a reason. Image
Read 5 tweets
John Holbo Profile picture
1 Jun
Modern US politics is culturally driven by negative partisanship. Discourse, in that context, is shame and contempt-driven. The rhetorical goal is to sting the other side by exposing them as scoundrels and traitors to liberal democracy and American high ideals.
The right has some success at this - CRT, 'Woke'. The left has more. No one on the left, or in the middle, seriously worries maybe Trumpists are holding the high moral ground. I mean, srsly: Trump. Matt Gaetz is going to lecture me? Marco Rubio? The right lacks moral cred.
Hence the right is regularly stung by accusations of racism, Trump is a con man, 1619, R's are an antidemocratic, Q-addled 'basket of deplorables', the sedition caucus, voter suppression. Conservatives genuinely are infuriated by these charges. Why? (You do the math.)
Read 7 tweets
John Holbo Profile picture
1 Jun
New OBZ pages! Z's made a friend! (Or has he?)

More than ever you see the influence of Nietzsche on Dr. Seuss in these pages. But also the influence of Plato on Nietzsche - the quality of the teacher-pupil relationship in philosophy. onbeyondzarathustra.com/obz-gdfd-p2-01 Image
And yet: is not Seuss' famous, titular Cat also a seducer, in the Socratic mode, terrifying yet entrancing?

At any rate, it's interesting that Nietzsche foresees the rise of modern 'Cinema' culture ... Image
... also the way in which said cinema culture, which should be the basis of fierce life-promotion, may decline into decadent spectatorship! Cf. 'Goethean man', a.k.a. the 'Catilinist in the Hat', in "Uses and Abuses". ImageImage
Read 5 tweets
John Holbo Profile picture
31 May
Hence my term ‘metaphysical McGuffin’ for cases in which the sheer, arbitrary inexplicability of it produces an absurdist aesthetics: Groundhog Day, Exterminating Angel, Being John Malkovich, Kafka’s Metamorphosis. It sits at the crossroads of comedy, horror & thought-experiment.
The Quiet Place is more to the horror side, obviously, but one way to produce a nightmare aesthetic is to have a thoroughly illogical what-if that is just a bald ‘given’ like in a dream when you just ‘know’ something that, upon waking, makes not a lick of sense.
Cf. "Brazil", as a style of dystopia. Often - "1984" - the author tries to give you a sense of what dynamics plausibly led to this. But the conceit of a ducts-gone-wild infrastructure refuses that line of thought. Why ducts? No answer. You just have to accept the premise.
Read 9 tweets
John Holbo Profile picture
29 May
A couple days ago I was listening to @SykesCharlie podcast about 'what went wrong in WI', i.e. how did a state R party that was rather resistant to Trump the first time out go completely nuts. 1/
I mean, when all this is over I fully expect Ron Johnson to publish 'If We Did It', a hypothetical account of how Trump supporters would have staged the insurrection - if they had been involved. If there even had been an insurrection. 2/
I think a somewhat neglected factor is the psychology of the gerrymander. Trumpism is most virulent south of the Mason-Dixon for obvious reasons. But WI is stand-out for its extreme, shameless gerrymander politics. 3/ jsonline.com/story/news/sol…
Read 25 tweets

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