u/four_ethers2024

​

This Jason Arday situation has made me sadder than I thought it wouldThis Jason Arday situation has made me sadder than I thought it would

This situation has actually made me a lot sadder than I thought I would be, as someone who has been Black in America and now in Britain, and I've been crying for several minutes. This is an evil country, and we live in an evil world.

I have a few other black friends in my life who also struggle with mental illness and whose life experiences have shaped them in a way where they are perceived by others as "difficult", "dangerous", or "crazy."

It's not safe out here for any of us, but especially for the black people who have the added stigma of being black and wrong at the same time.

White people want us dead, they want us to suffer in every possible way, and someone doing something unethical that is ultimately harmless gave them the opportunity to remind us they would hunt us for sport if they could.

I am angry for every friend and loved one I know who isn't understood because they don't fit into any neat narratives about blackness, even for other black people, and I'm DISGUSTED at all the black people who dared fix their mouth to blame this man for white people doing the same thing they've always done with black people, as if we lived in a racial Utopia where white people trusted us or allowed us to suceed and maintain employment before he lied.

In manys, we can be so cruel to one another, and to kick a black person down when they are already facing public harrasment reveals that some black people are more invested in maintaining their proximity to power and respectability.

This is the same shit some people did with Cynthia Erivo when she was being bullied on the Internet earlier this year. Several people blamed her and said she deserves this for choosing to "align herself with whiteness", or for playing a Mammy role for Ariana Grande. As if all of us have forgotten what it's like to be the only black person in a white heavy workspace, and the heightened demands made on us to be perfect, agreeable, and compliant.

Anyway, like I said, we live in an evil, evil shitrag excuse for a world, and the worse thing about it is there is nowhere that is safe for us, even countries in Africa are dangerous if you're gay, trans, bi etc. We are stuck here with people that truly want us dead and would find a way to even make us suffer in the afterlife.

The question for me is truly: What do we do and where in the world can we go?

This situation has actually made me a lot sadder than I thought I would be, as someone who has been Black in America and now in Britain, and I've been crying for several minutes. This is an evil country, and we live in an evil world.

I have a few other black friends in my life who also struggle with mental illness and whose life experiences have shaped them in a way where they are perceived by others as "difficult", "dangerous", or "crazy."

It's not safe out here for any of us, but especially for the black people who have the added stigma of being black and wrong at the same time.

White people want us dead, they want us to suffer in every possible way, and someone doing something unethical that is ultimately harmless gave them the opportunity to remind us they would hunt us for sport if they could.

I am angry for every friend and loved one I know who isn't understood because they don't fit into any neat narratives about blackness, even for other black people, and I'm DISGUSTED at all the black people who dared fix their mouth to blame this man for white people doing the same thing they've always done with black people, as if we lived in a racial Utopia where white people trusted us or allowed us to suceed and maintain employment before he lied.

In manys, we can be so cruel to one another, and to kick a black person down when they are already facing public harrasment reveals that some black people are more invested in maintaining their proximity to power and respectability.

This is the same shit some people did with Cynthia Erivo when she was being bullied on the Internet earlier this year. Several people blamed her and said she deserves this for choosing to "align herself with whiteness", or for playing a Mammy role for Ariana Grande. As if all of us have forgotten what it's like to be the only black person in a white heavy workspace, and the heightened demands made on us to be perfect, agreeable, and compliant.

Anyway, like I said, we live in an evil, evil shitrag excuse for a world, and the worse thing about it is there is nowhere that is safe for us, even countries in Africa are dangerous if you're gay, trans, bi etc. We are stuck here with people that truly want us dead and would find a way to even make us suffer in the afterlife.

The question for me is truly: What do we do and where in the world can we go?

I know writers like Frederic Jameson and Terry Eagleton are of the opinion that post-modernist art is ineffective as a critque of, or commentary on our current world, and I know there is a wealth of work in this vein about postmodernism, also DFW has spoken about this ad nauseum.

What I would like to know, instead: who are the writers that speak more favorably about postmodernist art (literature, film, architecture, music, poetry, etc) and offer a definition or assessment of its qualities and the purpose they serve?

Thanks in advance x

This is a response to the post about the head of this department from a few days ago...

Who are authors, or which novels, would you say make the same demands on the reader as slow cinema does on the watcher, creates the same contemplative effect, offers the same trancendental reward?

Following on from the W.G. Sebald post in here recently, who are some other writers that have a knack for well crafted, sumptuous descriptive passages?

​

Especially passages about a natural or urban landscape, and less so about action or internal states (unless there's an interplay between the external and the internal involved).

pretty much as the title says 🙂

Edit: I wrote this when I was very sleepy so didn't go into too much detail but here we go:

My main reason for this post is (obviously) because I'm a writer who is slowly honing their craft again after years of not writing. There are a lot of trends I've noticed that I suspect are taken for granted as a natural form of expression that I instinctively want to move away from: like being overly confessional, or sentimental; and this hypersubjective interiority which is present in so much contemporary media, especially via social media.

Maybe because I like a challenge, or maybe because I'm simply a contrarian allergic to doing the same thing as everyone else (especially when I can see that the trend of psychoanalysing everything is basically just glorified pattern seeking), I'm really curious about how much I can show as a writer without that access, with what happens to the story when the characters becomes mysteries to us, and which contemporary writers suceed at this in a way many filmmakers are still able to do (like Haneke, Ruben Östlund, Rick Alverson, Jane Campion, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, etc).