It’s a shame that the concept of liminality and liminal spaces sort of immediately became an annoying internet thing, all meaning dissolved in cliché, because the whole feeling of liminal spaces such as one encounters them in life and art is p beguiling. I’d like a better synonym You ever walk from a train station to a shipping department that’s clearly designed to only be accessed by car? The inbetween is the real life equivalent of glitching out of the level in a video game. It’s a very specific mood, and only one variety of the liminal.

Here’s something really odd: I knew a guy at school who was tall and good looking and charismatic and smart and essentially evil, and who kept a handwritten list in his pocket of all the girls he’d managed to cheat on his girlfriend with (surely difficult at 18, living a parents) And I don’t think the list was a *lie*, I’d definitely witnessed the draw he seemed to have on girls, but it struck me when *RFK Jr’s ex-wife said that he’d done that exact same thing*. A kind of psychotic separate convergence on that same completely bizarre idea/habit. How come?

Thinking of this piece the neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote before he died, on how he perceived smartphone use as essentially a neurological catastrophe.

He’s advocating for something like the opposite of mindfulness — instead, the problem is that we’re too stuck in the moment.


And I was thought of it when reading this Sarah Bakewell piece on Clare Carlisle’s new book.
We seem, more than ever, trapped in the shell of immediate sensation, immediate stimulation, now. So grounding yourself in your senses, in the moment, can be just another version of that.

I feel like people are so obsessed with just-so ideas about neurochemistry (easy tricks to boost your dopamine!) because, somehow now more than ever, we’re afraid of the unconscious, of what’s irrational in us, and want instead to just believe we’re mendable rational machines It’s still as offensive now as it is when Freud said it that the ego is not master in its own house, that we’re not fully cognisant of or entirely in control of ourselves; people want an easy trick in CBT or exercise or diet or medication or meditation because they fear the self.

I notice that David Foster Wallace and Doestoevsky seem to survive in this culture/in their reading lists among so much self-help non-fiction, and it’ll be exactly because they’re perceived/utilised as self-help. Fiction without utility is another deal altogether.

https://twitter.com/pinstripebungle/status/1956976358803882212

“Reading for pleasure”. That’s the thing. It’s somewhat like the purported issue of parents getting addicted to parenting videos, instead of just attending to their kids.
Abandon didacticism. Nourish yourself instead on poetry’s sublime pointlessness.

Ohhh everyone’s getting lead poisoning again. That’d be it, that makes sense.

https://twitter.com/sfchronicle/status/1937984198721118215

This stuff’s gonna sell like hotcakes

This is really interesting. David Bryne, talking about being neuroatypical, makes this point about how you can just get naturally better at socialising as you get older, and that’s more how it was for me. I find it so strange to look back on being a kid and having *no friends*…

https://twitter.com/lauren_wilford/status/1928099324430295094

…and instead only having bullies in school, so the whole thing’s Kafka on wheels, you know? Just hell. But now whenever I start a job in a new office I make friends fairly quickly, I’m p good at being funny, much better at reading boredom etc. …

There’s something kind of utopian and even innocent in the unabashed and direct intellectualism of the Sims recommended reading list that’s sort of been lost, I think. Now Silicon Valley’s just like “The Very Best of One Line Doestoevsky Quotes vol. 2” and “Stoicism for Companies: How Encouraging Your Employees to Not Have Emotions Can Make You Rich” and “a Warwick University professor who did loads of speed in 2008 and invented sci-fi nazism”

I have a sort of terror deep down in my bone marrow at Mr. Beast and his whole deal. A creature born through the pure logic of hyper-stimulation, an aptly satanic name, as if the Book of Revelation was mocking us, hollow and severe as a tornado, entertainment for the apocalypse You may feel Trump’s presidency will be followed by a leftist, this must be true. This is your old evolutionary survival instinct, lying to you to dissuade you from suicide. You know the truth. After Trump, the Mr. Beast presidency; the algorithms finely gamed to a supermajority.

The real life metatextual twist here is that avant-garde Marxist playwright Wallace Shawn was able to solve the financial woes of both himself and his revered short story writer wife by becoming the voice of the lovable dinosaur in the Toy Story films

https://twitter.com/thecinesthetic/status/1851169851387129965

I stg. He’s a great writer btw, as is Deborah Eisenberg, who’s his waitress girlfriend he refers to as Debbie throughout My Dinner With Andre.

Notice in the Simpsons (a show that is so often about the madness of crowds) that whenever an angry mob forms (this being the midpoint between the more familiar protest and riot), Moe Szyslak, the town’s misanthropic loner, immediately becomes the mob’s leader and voice What joins people is their hatred of people. That, or their excitement over monorails promoted through the medium of song