What happens when you give stupid people tenure and they then teach even stupider people who get tenure who then have to play the race card to get tenure teaching utter cretins how to play with their own feces? The answer is you get an interview of this sort published in the LA review of books-
CHARLES SHAFAIEH: Your debut book is, in a way, a pedagogical lesson, in which you see epidemiology not just as a science but as a mode of reading. Can you elaborate on what this method entails?
ANJULI FATIMA RAZA KOLB: Imagine that the clinical scene is like close reading a text.
Why? 'Close reading' is a metaphor- a recent one- whose appeal arose specifically because of great advances in Medicine. Sadly, it was a stupid metaphor. Doctors who make a deep study of diseases are better able to cure patients. Professors who do a deep study of a text end up babbling bullshit of an increasingly paranoid type.
Bodies really do develop medical maladies which need to be carefully studied. Nothing similar can be said for literary texts.
When you look at a patient, at their tissues and their pathology, you’re doing a deep dive.
No you are not. Diving is invasive. Medicine has developed minimally invasive methods of diagnosis.
It bears similarities to New Criticism, which is very focused on the text
but which turned out to be useless. Still, it was a way to keep a Credentialist Ponzi scheme going with reference to texts people know no longer enjoyed reading or bothered to learn by heart. By contrast, they would learn the lyrics to songs they liked. But no 'New Criticism' was required to unravel their meaning even though- like 'American Pie'- that meaning was quite subtle and contextual.
— the patient — at hand and studiously avoids the context that produced it.
These cretins studiously avoid common sense because they teach a shit subject.
With epidemiological reading, to produce a medical narrative you have to be
smart and have had a good STEM subject education whether self-acquired or inculcated at University
conscious and attentive both to local and distal determinants.
Nope. You just need access to a good enough simulating device for the best available Structural Causal Model. What COVID showed was that relatively simple models run by amateurs outperformed more sophisticated models used by Institutions. Consciousness and Attentiveness and Empathy and everybody braiding each others hair while offering gratuitous rape counselling is utterly useless.
There’s pressure not to seek the cause of disease in some kind of humoral dysfunction or errancy internal to the body.
That pressure arises out of the fact that 'humoral dysfunctions' don't exist. It is also pointless to cast of djinns or demons or stick pins in wax dolls.
Instead, you need to look at environmental and migration factors as well as at the relationships between animals and humans.
Very true. To understand why Grievance Studies burgeons we need to look at the relationship between low I.Q peeps and the neighbor's cat which is ILLEGALLY surveilling them.
It reminds us that there are causes that can be incredibly important to human health at six- or seven-degrees distance from where you think you need to look.
Nobody cares where this silly woman thinks she needs to look. This is because she teaches a shit subject.
We’ve learned a lot about this in the last year, for example, in thinking about zoonotic diseases and how they cross over to humans.
But everybody already knew that! Under which fucking rock was this woman living when swine flu and bird flu and so forth were in the news? I went to a primary school in East Africa. We were taught about zoonotic diseases and the teacher would mention the Kikuyu and Swahili names for specific instances. African pastoralists had known all about all them for over three thousand years! Indeed, the Indian caste system was a primitive 'pathogen avoidance theory' relating to occupational groups with different types of domesticated animals.
Another name for epidemiological reading is the tripartite reading method of postcolonial studies,
Fuck off! PoCo is stupid shite!
in which you have to work comparatively, in a historicist mode (paying attention to the many contexts in which a work was written and read),
PoCo shite, historically, has been a complete failure. Does anybody think Mamta reads Spivak or that Parsis think Homo Baba is a smart guy?
and toward the political present.
In which PoCo is a target for the ridicule only of senile, semi-literate, Hindutva hooligans like myself.
This is not a coincidence.
It is a stupid lie. Epidemiology is respected. PoCo is shat upon.
Epidemiology, as a discipline, was born in the high era of imperialism, with the establishment of the Royal Epidemiological Society in the 1850s.
But, the 'high era of Imperialism' was the sixteenth century when the Spanish and the Portuguese pretty much divided up the world between them. The 1850s was the high era of industrial capitalism and coincided with the triumph of Free Trade and laissez faire economics. Imperialist mercantilism was put on the back foot.
Of course, the study of epidemics has taken place for centuries. But during the cholera outbreaks in the mid-19th century that reached around the world, it became a discipline with a journal, a society, and a set of principles — principles not dissimilar from those of postcolonial critique.
Fuck off! Epidemics are real things. Epidemiology turned out to be very useful. PoCo shite may have had some slight salience when the Left Front still ruled Bengal but, now the Commies have beaten to a pulp by Mamta's goons, it is simply a joke
It’s useful to borrow from this imperial science when describing the literary world that arises in connection with it.
Why not borrow the scalpel from the surgeon to cut upon the bodies of PoCo Professors to discover how exactly all their shit ends up in their brain?
It’s akin to working on a puzzle, when you realize that something from one place fits elsewhere.
What sort of puzzle would that be? A jigsaw? Does this cretinous woman really take out pieces from a completed jigsaw thinking they might fit some other place- like her own anus?
Of course they fit in this case — they were made in the same factory and with the same material.
So her idea of a good time is to buy identical, fully completed, jigsaws and then swop pieces between them while muttering about how PoCo is actually a wonderful Medical Science and everybody should get a PhD in 'Narrative Medicine' before being entitled to a job emptying bedpans.
As much as legible connections — across time, disciplines, and types of text — ground your readings, so do absences and gaps.
Ordinary people can easily learn to read. They don't anything to ground their reading. This lady has to shove jigsaw pieced up her ass so as to ground her reading. If she didn't do so, she might float off into upper space while slowly spelling out the words in her picture book.
I became really aware of absences when I started putting together syllabi to teach imperial and postcolonial literature toward the end of my PhD.
Because she be brown, the Academy has a duty to create an utterly worthless job for her. Otherwise, she won't be able buy jigsaw pieces to stuff up her anus and thus will be doomed to float off into outer space.
I felt that the story of decolonization, especially in the academic job market, was wrapped up in narratives of nation-building, of political consolidation, and heroic fulfillment stories.
Whereas, having fled Pakistan, people like her knew that decolonization was a shitshow coz dusky folk got to run things.
They were quite biblical, which sounds crazy in 2021.
Unless, like most Americans, you are a Christian and revere the Bible as uncreated Scripture and a sure path to eternal salvation.
At that time, I wasn’t finding my way to robust conversations about the absences, the holes, the silences in the archive of what was coming to be known as “world literature,” and the narrative of the failed state.
A 'robust conversation' with this pin-head would have involved saying 'you are a fucking pin-head you stooopid fucking pin-head' again and again till she floated off into outer space.
Beyond the work of my own teachers, there also wasn’t much theorization about how the World Bank functions as a neocolonial enterprise
This wasn't 'theorization'. It was stupid, false, propaganda worthy of Im the Dim.
or enough discussion about the War on Terror as a colonial war with techniques related to those used by the British and French empires.
Fuck off! The Brits and French set up a Civil Administration based on an elite cadre. The War on Terror was not colonial. It was ideological- like Vietnam.
What interested me then and now were stories that highlighted the insufficiency of gender politics
not to mention queer and transgender and disabled rights as well as environmental considerations
in the creation of the nation, such as Partha Chatterjee’s The Nation and Its Fragments.
You should hear what the Indian Nation says about that chatterbox.
The more research I did on these non-heroic stories which don’t cast decolonization as a teleological move toward perfection, the more absences became the highlighted spots in my own reading.
The more stupid shit this stupid bint did, the stupider she got.
Specifically, absences of people who were left out of nation-building stories.
I've been left out of Marvel Comic Book stories. On the other hand they have a Pakistani-American girl, ludicrously named 'Kamala Khan'.
As a second-generation child of partition,
She must be third generation- unless her skin care regime is notably better than mine.
of course it makes sense that I’m looking at rifts and fissures,
rather than getting a proper job or running a profitable business
but at the time they weren’t part of the dominant story of postcolonial writing and history.
Because stories don't matter. At fucking all.
These absences are not strictly negative spaces though.
Because there aint no such thing as 'strictly negative spaces' though there may be some strictly come dancing places.
They can be generative as objects of study,
if by study you mean talking vacuous or paranoid bollocks- sure
as in your reading of the redacted portions in The Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture.
why not read the redacted portions of the obscenities I am silently mouthing?
When you see a redacted page, you know somebody has deliberately suppressed information.
No shit, Sherlock!
But when you see an absence in an archive, books missing from a syllabus, or classes missing from a curriculum, it’s harder to ask questions about who that serves, who silenced those stories, and whose power that consolidates.
Unless the answer is 'the Nicaraguan horcrux of my neighbor's cat'.
Crucial to how I imagined this book was Saidiya Hartman’s
Hartman genuinely has slave ancestry. She is writing in her mother tongue for her own greatly accomplished people as well as those who admire and seek to emulate them. By contrast, Kolb is a deracinated careerist in a worthless field.
Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. She and other scholars who deal with archival sciences, in Black studies especially, show that it’s possible to read absences not as accidental but as deliberate suppression,
Coz the journal of a semi-literate alcoholic who writes 'Today I raped three niggers and beat five other niggers to death. I did the same thing yesterday and the day before. Wonder what tomorrow will bring?' ought to be widely published and praised- right?
and how to plumb that suppression in the service not just of new histories but also new futures.
Ones where kids have to read journals about how many niggers or kikes or honkies the sociopathic author killed on each day of his utterly horrible life.
Reading Hartman really taught me how serious it was not just to name absences but to theorize them.
And reading this shite teaches us that those who teach worthless shite are worthless shitheads.
It’s also useful to think about absences in spatial terms,
as opposed to what? Absence is defined in spatio-temporal terms.
such as with gaps in a disease map: why is one block of cluster deaths on a map far away from another one,
because the disease is absent or unrecorded in the intervening space.
and what happens in that interval between them?
the disease is absent or unrecorded. D'uh!
Figurative language can also become a subtle means to conceal.
This cretin uses figurative language to conceal the fact that she is as stupid as shit. She may have a Doctorate but has no business teaching 'Narrative Medicine' because she is utterly ignorant and imbecilic.
Take the pathologization of communists during the McCarthy era or the Mau Mau in Kenya.
Both campaigns were successful and both America and Kenya were better off as a result.
Framing the spread of their or anyone else’s ideas as an “epidemic” eliminates the speakers’ political agency as well as their humanness, in stark contrast to how Empire describes its citizens.
Fuck off! Saying Trumpism is an epidemic hasn't eliminated shit. My diatribes against PoCo shite hasn't arrested that spate of diarrhea.
The naturalizing metaphor of epidemic is a different kind of redaction or censorship. In the Anthropocene, we know that natural disasters are not exclusively natural, that we’re engineering them wittingly and unwittingly.
We know that coz we have eyes in our head though, no doubt, Sciencey guys have clarified matters with respect to parts of the world we are ignorant of.
But instead of saying that a person, company, logging operation, or timber camp was responsible for the spread of cholera, the colonial record says it’s unclean Hindus,
who were persons
then unclean Muslims,
who were persons
then the working classes of Europe,
who were persons
and so on.
As a matter of fact, epidemiologists did identify certain water supply and other such companies in precisely this manner. There was a 'profit motive' for religious events and pilgrimages which did spread diseases. But it was also known that labor contractors bringing in indentured workers could spread diseases. Indeed, Dr. Pranjivan Mehta- Gandhi's first major financial supporter- protested this (he was a barrister as well as an M.D) in Burma. He was wrong. Germs spread diseases. Balancing chakras or doshas and so forth does no good whatsoever.
Instead of saying that there is a specific and profit-driven market in exotic animals,
and a specific and profit-driven market for Islamic Terror
combined with global monoculture and the non-protection of species that may be responsible for the spread of COVID-19, our major news outlets blamed the wet markets and exotic (i.e., disgusting) dietary habits of Chinese people, circulating fake photos of bat soup. The figure essentially blocks the possibility of responsibility on the part of greedy agents for whom the public and public health are last on their list of concerns.
Not for long. Everybody now thinks 'gain of function' research funded by guys like Fauci was the culprit.
To your point, it’s a way of discrediting or obscuring what are oftentimes extremely clear motives in rebellious, anti-colonial, or insurgent acts of violence.
Which is why nobody bothers with it. The truth is obvious. Murderers and rapists like killing and raping. They aint protesting anomalies in constitutional law or specific applications of actuarial science.
On the other hand, it is only by a thorough study of Socioproctology can we solve the urgent problem of the neighbor's cat shitting all over my little back-garden.
The theoretical genesis of this for me is Ranajit Guha’s “The Prose of Counterinsurgency,”
which is utterly vacuous shit. The guy ran away from India and became a British citizen more than 60 years ago. He pretended he knew about Naxals and thus was taken as a 'native informant' by Cold War cretins. Seriously, there was a time when ambitious guys in Naval Intelligence, or Marine Lieutenants seconded to the Indian Army, would try to make sense of his shite so as to write a dissertation and get a cushy teaching job at the NDU back home.
in which he points out that many uprisings in the colonial record in India were characterized as hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, earthquakes, and epidemics.
As opposed to twerking competitions. Still, all those 'uprisings' were quickly dealt with one way or another.
I decided to run with the latter. The natural-disaster mode of translating insurgency refuses to recognize the political demands being made.
Yet, it is the political demands which are addressed one way or another. Either the rebels realize they got no fucking power- political or economic or religious- or else a deal is done. It is a different matter that the deal may not stick.
Kolb doesn't get that metaphors aint reality. Mummy may say 'Baby is an Angel' or 'Baby is an utter terror!' but this doesn't mean she actually treats the baby as anything other than a baby.
It couldn’t be more important to stress that the colonial record continues to legitimate certain kinds of political claims and to suppress, obscure, and silence others.
This crazy fool thinks that 'the colonial record' has some magical power. If, currently, a poor woman in Pakistan is being gangraped it is because some 'colonial record' held by the India Office Library has suppressed her screams and made her plight obscure to her fellow villagers. Indeed, the fact that I may have been raped by the neighbor's cat too has been suppressed by some such document or, more sinisterly, by its absence.
Where power lies determines exactly what we call something,
No it doesn't. I can call Putin a pussycat and demand that he comes and eat the nice dish of Whiskas I've put out for his din-din. But I have no power to effect any such thing. The good people of the Russian federation refuse to call Putin an pussycat, though no doubt some think him a cunt.
and this naturalization habit has shaped the discourse around non-Europeans and nonwhite people since at least the Peloponnesian War.
Utterly false. Neither the Roman nor the Byzantine Empire discriminated between White people in Anatolia, the Levant, or North Africa. Indeed, there were Arab origin Roman Emperors- e.g. Phillip the Arab and Heliogabalus.
It’s not just an effect of racism or xenophobia but also deeply ineffective political science.
Like PoCo shite.
It matters how a polity or a government argues for its continued existence and fights for legitimacy in spaces like the United Nations
No it doesn't. Arguing for continued existence in the U.N or the League is utterly useless. Communist China didn't get UN membership till 1971. But it had whupped America's ass in Vietnam while keeping North Korea Red.
by avowing a very particular European ontology as being the only possible position from which to articulate legitimate political claims.
Nonsense! After 1918 European political 'ontology' was American. Empires disappeared. Republics or Constitutional Monarchies of a strictly National character prevailed.
The first thing we have to do is
breathe in, then breathe out- not recognize some stupid paranoid shit unless what we are breathing in is ganja smoke.
recognize when speech is called something else and when the biopolitical state
as opposed to the geo-economic state or the theo-genomic crate or the neo-thymotic plate
pretends that speech is not happening,
actually, that is what generally happens when I drink too much at the Socioproctology Institute's Christmas and start describing my horrendous sexual self-abuse.
or that a semiotic event is not a semiotic event but is instead some kind of mystery.
Semiotic events include derisive farts or, more sadly, satirical sharts which force you to retire from the august proceedings of the Socioproctology Institute's governing body.
This rhetorical move exonerates Empire from any responsibility.
No. The fact that the thing does not exist exonerates it from any responsibility for getting you preggers with its metaphysical baby. But the same is true of the Nicaraguan horcrux of the neighbor's cat.
It also treats these historical events as shocks.
Rather than cocks.
You astutely point out how surprised Empire always is by everything it purportedly studies,
even though there is no fucking Empire anywhere still, this crazy bint, thinks it is constantly getting lots and lots of surprises- and not just on its birthday. No doubt this has something to do with cocks.
whether that is terrorism or viruses. I wouldn’t be surprised if Malcolm Gladwell or Steven Pinker write yet another misguided historical analysis, this time entitled Shocks.
Or if Kolb starts raving about the Empires' cocks jizzing on her face when nobody is looking.
Imperial ignorance is precisely a studied habit of shock.
coz Imperial cock keeps jizzing on it's face and, after a certain point, Imperial sapience says to Imperial ignorance- 'dude, face facts. You iz one big fat homo. That's why your face is constantly dripping with jizz. Don't clutch your pearls in indignation. Everybody has already told you the same thing. This news can scarcely have come as a big shock to you.'
That brings me back to really ethical and important conversations that happened in the wake of the Trump election
The Women's March? Pussyhats? Three of the founders left because of anti-Semitism. Another 'woke' own-goal.
and also after the shooting in Atlanta in March.
Thanks to which we have three-strikes Biden and prosecutor Harris.
There’s a real impulse, especially on the left, to evaluate surprise as a kind of barometer of your awareness of how racist, white supremacist, misogynist, homophobic, and exploitative things have been.
Because the Left is as stupid as shit. They get terribly upset when they discover Hitler hadn't really opened nice Summer Camps for Jews who wanted to explore their sexuality while learning to play the bongo drums.
The gesture comes back to Cassandra in Greek mythology — that if you have been paying attention, none of this should surprise you.
Cassandra made accurate but unpopular predictions. These cunts talk vacuous bollocks. If you have been paying attention it shouldn't surprise you at all that the neighbor's cat, which has been surveilling you on behalf of the PTA, is raping you in your dreams which is causing you to get preggers with Neo-Liberalism's metaphysical baby. Wake up sheeple! You don't seriously believe that was a big bowel motion you just had? It was a metaphysical baby which you flushed down into the sewers where it will be brought up by Patriarchalist alligator-people.
And yet everything in the Western imperial narrative ideology
which only exists in this lunatic's brain
in which we exist is programmed to produce these shocks because it is also programmed to convince us that things are right in the world.
Unless you stop getting paid for being a blathershite and have to get a job waiting tables.
There’s this gorgeous moment in Rudyard Kipling’s Kim where he describes the dawn as “diamond bright,” and men, crows, and bullocks awake together. Kim “thrilled with delight […] this was life as he would have it […] new sights at every turn of the approving eye,” Kipling writes.
Enoch Powell said something similar on waking on an Indian Railway Platform. Dawn is indeed magical in the subcontinent. But so is 'godhulia'- the 'cow-dust' moment at dusk. The reason Kipling, who was in America when he wrote Kim, speaks in this manner is that Anglo-Indians- many of whom had had to pass exams in Sanskrit and the vernacular- had been writing like that for a hundred years.
Edward Said calls Kim a great example of the aesthetic and psychological pleasures of Empire, which I think means a kind of smug imperial coziness.
It was an aesthetic and psychological pleasure always available to Indians. Empire didn't matter in the slightest. There would probably have been more, not less, Whites in Kipling's Lahore had it remained under a Sikh king.
That coziness tells us that regardless of what is happening on the plantation in Antigua, there’s also a beautiful pageant taking place at Mansfield Park — and that this is as it should be.
While these two cretins are enjoying this cozy chat, trillions of very poor Pakistani and Palestinian women are being raped by imaginary cats who get them preggers with NeoLiberalism's metaphysical baby.
These insights, which I’m borrowing from Said’s Culture and Imperialism, tell us a lot about how the narratives of historical progress are designed to throw us back on our heels in moments of surprise so that we can say, “Oh my God, I didn’t know that a respiratory disease was going to kill 50 million people globally. I didn’t know that in the developed West, this type of thing could happen!”
But we do know that Said was shite, Guha was goo & Kolb is a cretin.
That coziness you identify is so explicit in the audacious, beatific opening paragraphs of The 9/11 Commission Report, which you analyze through the same lens as any other text.
Because this woman is as stupid as shit. Everybody else just read the thing. This woman had to 'analyze' it.
Shock, too, plays such a huge role in that narrative, which in hindsight is bizarre considering, for one, how airplane hijacking used to be such a common tactic.
So, the shock was simulated- at least on the part of those paid to prevision and prevent such things.
Joseph Slaughter published a great essay last September about plane hijackings and the way that cultural phenomenon was once associated with being “on the side of human liberation and decolonization.”
Coz hi-jackers and Carlos the jackal and PLO bigwigs had playboy lifestyles and powerful protectors behind the Iron Curtain.
This also brings to mind insurgent histories that deal with the disruption of colonial infrastructure, like the IRA’s S-campaign (or sabotage campaign),
which failed. Many many more Irish people joined the British Army or worked in Britain supporting the war effort than indulged in that foolish and spiteful campaign.
or the anti-apartheid attacks on power stations and transport lines following the Soweto uprising,
which failed equally miserably
and even the rolling dockworkers’ strikes in Long Beach.
which disrupted Obama's Imperial reign or Brown's dynastic rule- right?
Just as epidemiological reading’s connection to the literature of Empire doesn’t fit by accident,
or at all
the targeted disruption of transportation infrastructure is not a coincidence.
Because something which is targeted is, by definition, not coincidental. What will Kolb's next great discovery be?
Commercial and human transport are
situations where goods and people are moved from one place to another. They are not 'sites'. A transport hub is a site. But such hubs can exist even where there is no State power of any kind.
sites or mobile archipelagos
An archipelago can't be mobile. It becomes an island the moment it detaches itself from a landmass.
of imperial and neoimperial power.
or non-imperial power or no power whatsoever.
These networks of trade are what made Empire profitable,
No. Empires were only profitable if colonies raised more in revenue than their own cost of administration and defense. When this ceased to be the case, the trade network remained in place. London and Amsterdam and so forth are still hubs in a trade network though their Empires have long vanished.
so it has deep symbolic resonance as well as practical and strategic significance. Consider the unintentional blocking of the Suez Canal, too. That it prevented $10 billion a day in global trade is fascinating.
Not particularly. Turnover in currency markets is 6 trillion a day.
The 9/11 Commission Report begins:
Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States. Millions of men and women readied themselves for work. Some made their way to the Twin Towers, the signature structures of the World Trade Center complex in New York City. Others went to Arlington, Virginia, to the Pentagon. Across the Potomac River, the United States Congress was back in session. At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, people began to line up for a White House tour. In Sarasota, Florida, President George W. Bush went for an early morning run.
That’s not how you have to begin that story.
Yes it is if that is what you are paid to do.
It is a choice to present the world as peaceful and as it should be, which tells us that the hijackings happened to interrupt the beauty of our world.
Whereas the truth was that trillions of Pakistani American were being raped by imaginary cats and then were flushing their metaphysical poo-babies down into the sewers where that spawn of Neo-Liberalism would be brought up by Patriarchalist alligator-people.
You also criticize the opening of Donald G. McNeil Jr.’s New York Times piece about cholera, which reads, “SUNDARBANS NATIONAL PARK, Bangladesh. Two hundred years ago, the first cholera pandemic emerged from these tiger-infested mangrove swamps.” This inappropriately menacing language is not just poetic, you argue. It has material consequences.
Like what? Did readers of the NYT start foaming at the mouth? Did they burn down the Bangladeshi Consulate? No. There were no material consequences whatsoever. Pandemics must have some source of origin. But cholera is now easily treatable. Also, it is unlikely that blokes with cholera are incessantly pooing into our water supply.
These minor occurrences can turn into terrible violence that hurts people.
But, it is equally likely that peeps reading this shite will suddenly tear off their own heads and shove it up their own poopers to achieve a like felicity as blathershites.
We’re talking about ideology and mood — the mood that’s produced when America is described as peaceful
which it is for most Americans including those Pakistani-Americans who show no great desire to return to their ancestral homeland.
versus when it’s described as a place where ICE agents knock on your door,
which they are welcome to do because you- like the vast majority of Americans are a citizen
where you have to take six trains and a bus because you live in an outer borough
and because you keep sucking off people on those trains and buses and have a shit sense of direction anyway
and your name is not written down in a log because you’re undocumented.
Though you would be plenty documented in your own country.
I’m thinking about Karla Cornejo Villavicencio’s chapter on 9/11 in The Undocumented Americans here.
That lady was genuinely undocumented. Why is this privileged bint trying to jump on that bandwagon? Is it coz the Spaniards came and stole her ancestral land and imposed their own religion. Nope. That was the Arabs.
The Commission Report uses textual and literary moods that produce love and affection for certain kinds of characters and spaces,
nope. The guys writing it had that love and affection already as did most of their readers.
and suspicion and hatred for others.
Perfectly justified- in this case.
This is so simple, but even I forget this over the course of a day.
Coz you don't want to leave America for Pakistan.
To whom we are sympathetic and whose humanity we recognize happens in hundreds of thousands of tiny moments, regarding which pronouns and adjectives we use, what direction we point our eyes in classrooms, and who inhabits what spaces on a train.
I suppose this lady does get some funny looks on planes or trains. The solution is simple. Buy a crucifix and a MAGA hat.
When you’re asked to conjure a picture of something that has happened, what fills in the blanks is what you already know and to what you’ve been exposed.
Which is why studying stupid shite at Grad School is going to cause you to conjure up a pretty cock-eyed picture of the world.
By reinforcing the logic that things are as they should be, or, as in Kipling, that “this is life as we would have it,”
in other words, other people are real and not just projections of your paranoid ideology
causes a naïve reaction.
No it does not. It causes people to make a success out of worthwhile life-projects.
It makes catastrophe feel like the breaking of an everyday peace, instead of a revelation of an ongoing emergency in which we have participated.
But the first shot which starts a war really is different from the umpteenth shot on its 500th day. Why pretend that crazy Muslims were always trying to kill innocent Americans? More importantly, why do so if you happen to be Pakistani-American?
The more often a metaphor is used, the more often it becomes connected to that which it describes, to the point that it becomes commonplace. The metaphor then loses its poetic power by becoming cliché but gains operative potency in its material consequences. The decades-long description of “Islam” as a “disease,” for example. For many, the two can’t be uncoupled.
This, apparently, is indeed the case for this foolish woman. Thankfully, the vast majority of American Muslims aren't at all like her.
That’s right. I’m interested in what on the surface doesn’t look like hate speech, that which circulates endemically before it becomes epidemic.
That may be a fitting description of PoCo shite. These guys hate having to teach what is essentially a hymn of hate directed at the hand that feeds them.
Poets know that the best metaphors are the ones that trip you up a bit and then fall into place perfectly.
Shite poets- sure. Good poets actually have something sensible to say. The best metaphors point to novel structural causal models.
These blaming metaphors do the opposite. They become more and more fluent to the point that they’re not even flowing as figural language. We don’t think we’re comparing one thing to another; it’s just what we call that thing.
That's what happened to these cretins. First they were complaining that society was post colonial. Now they just say that the Empire is still out there and it is raping trillions of Pakistani Americans by using imaginary cats.
I use the phrase “the disease poetics of Empire” to describe the big phenomenon at which I’m looking in the book.
Though there are no Empires left on earth and 'disease poetics' never existed. Nazi type propaganda- sure. But that wasn't poetics at all.
By that, I don’t mean just the figural language that exists in imperial writing or discourse. I also mean the poiesis of disease in the construction of Empire. My favorite version of the idea of poiesis comes from Audre Lorde,
whose ancestors were slaves in a Republic, not an Empire
who says that to create poetry “lays the foundations for a future of change.”
Thought that change may be Trump or Biden standing by impotently as voting rights are imperilled.
It’s an utterly utopian, hubristic, godlike experience because it’s precisely not where figural language ceases to be figural; it’s where figural language literally produces a new life.
Though it literally does no such thing.
That newness can be a fresh perspective, a new insight. It can even bring new community into being.
Very true. Transgender metaphysical babies reared by sewer alligators are one such.
So the disease poetics of Empire means to suggest not just how Trump says “China Virus” and then there’s hate-motivated mass murder.
Chinatowns have been torched across the length and breadth of the United States. Amy Chua was fed to a cage full of actual Tiger Mommies while her students stood around and cheered.
It also means that saying “China Virus” literally reinforces the borders of Empire.
It literally doesn't because there literally aint no fuckin' Empire.
It results in the threatening of sanctions and, as with the Muslim ban, in changes to immigration laws.
No. Regulations changed. Laws didn't.
A text therefore must be read with and through its public life and circulation,
Which means in accordance with the actual Laws prevailing, not some crazy shit you pulled out of your arse
which reveals, among many things, the status of the various poetics it contains.
a purely subjective matter.
For example, you treat Roland Barthes’s harsh reaction to Albert Camus’s La peste as seriously and comprehensively as the novel itself.
Why bother? Everybody knows Barthes was wrong. The fact is Camus's Oran had to be captured by Anglo-American forces from the Vichy government. White Algerians understood that the Nazis were not a plague, they represented the European's best hope of retaining African territory in perpetuity. Sartre and Barthes thought that since Camus was from a backward shithole, he must be writing from their own Parisian perspective because to be a writer means to look at things with Parisian not pied- noir eyes- coz obviously no writer of French could possess anything so degraded.
You also choose Salman Rushdie’s oeuvre to examine not just due to his use of diseases poetics
but Rushdie isn't going to be examining this stupid woman's oeuvre because she has shit for brains
but because of how influential his writing remains, both in literary and sociopolitical contexts.
Where? Pakistan? America? Anywhere at all?
This is a pleasure for me as a critic and also extremely painful in that I made a commitment to thinking about the relationship between literature and power, which has held me, at least in this book, from writing about texts that I love.
She lurves Rushdie! This is a Mills & Boons romance waiting to happen. Good luck to her.
If you study this relationship seriously, you want to talk about books that made their way into the hands of policymakers, law defenders, and military personnel.
Not in a democracy, you don't. Policymakers quickly cease to make policy if those policies aint what voters- or, at least K, street- want.
I need to be reading the books Barack Obama picks up
They are books about the Law and Economics and Geopolitics. This woman is too stupid to understand them.
because they have outsize and often unseen impact on both politics and literary history,
Nope. The books reflect existing economic and geopolitical and technological trends. Otherwise they may as well be Mills & Boons romances
which evolves according to what is published but also according to what is read, assigned, and cited. If I want to understand neoimperial war, I need to read the books that Kathryn Bigelow used to inform her neocolonial perspective in Zero Dark Thirty.
The guys who won those wars did no such thing. The losers, maybe.
To do that is to honor the life of the text as it has existed in the world, and also to hold it accountable.
and to change its nappies and to take it to the park and to ensure it doesn't choose to study stupid shit at Uni.
Watching how a text circulates and accrues its meaning is very much like watching a meme go through the internet and explode or not.
Or watching a grumpy cat video go viral. But this is an activity which is wholly useless.
That circulation changes the meaning of the book.
Especially if your Book Club has invested in lots of boxes of cheap Chardonnay. Then micturation changes that circulation which changed the meaning of the book...shit... we were supposed to have bought a book and read it not just get blind drunk while watching grumpy cat videos.
When you look at famous books, it’s even clearer that their authors don’t get to determine what they mean.
Unless, like Camus, they want to.
For a decade after the publication of La peste, Camus defended what that allegory meant to him, which was an allegory of the Resistance under Nazi occupation in France,
that's not what Camus said. That's what Barthes wrongly claimed. Oran tried to fight off the invading Anglos. Vichy was a Nazi ally. Churchill would get very very drunk and harangue Eisenhower about how, now that the English speaking were united, their first target must be the French. Ike, in his slow plodding manner, would try to point out that the Americans thought they were going to be fighting Germans like they had in the last war. Churchill, recalling his ancestors exploits at Blenheim, was all like 'fuck them fucking froggie frog frogs now! Take down their pants and shove a baguette up their rear.' Ike ultimately relented because if you are going to fight anybody why not start easy by tackling those cheese-eating surrender monkeys rather than guys whose main work skill wasn't running away.
against Barthes and many other readers who thought it was something else. For me, it’s a novel describing the terror of Brown independence in Algeria and of Arabs.
D'uh, Captain Obvious! Camus was a journalist and his book wasn't utterly shite precisely because journalists don't get paid if they are as stupid and unobservant as Professors.
The 9/11 Commission Report’s nomination for a National Book Award in Nonfiction is another case in point, though arguably its institutional and commercial success were among its appalling goals.
Whereas Osama's goals weren't appalling at all. This is moral inversion of a parodic kind.
The Report was written by a group of people who went to the same private schools and knew each other their whole lives.
As opposed to these two cretins who went to the same elite Universities which create a safe space for them because of their color or sexuality or colorless stupidity.
The commissioners, the historian Ernest May who was really its writer, and the National Book Award’s board of trustees are all boys with each other in this very American moneyed way.
As opposed to the very anti-Americanand stupid way in which these two are chummy
The contexts that we don’t even know are literary contexts continue to really interest me.
But what she doesn't even know is everything under the Sun.
I always tell my students
stupid shit you pull out of your arse
that reading the acknowledgments can tell you as much about how a book was made as anything else.
Which is why those acknowledgements exist. It is to explain who gave the money and who provided the materials and who did the editing and who was part of the 'focus group' so to speak etc, etc.
As we’ve discussed, none of that should be surprising — and yet it also is.
To these perpetually surprised cretins. Did you know that at least 98 percent of White people are still going to be White despite overwhelming evidence that being White is terrible for the planet? Isn't that shocking?
As a researcher, in order to have an ethical disposition toward what you’re working on, you have to be ready to be surprised.
In which case you won't really be surprised. Still, it's good to know that this researcher will evince surprise when she finds that a dirty old man who tells her to put her hand into his pocket so as to pet the hamster he keeps there is strangely deluded. There was no hamster in his pocket. There was a big hole there through which she could feel something which was curiously like a penis. How surprising! Who would have thunk it?
There’s no good work that can come out of a constant disposition of cynicism.
On the other hand, such a disposition can keep you from having to constantly wipe jizz off your fingers.
But we need more precise language for talking about what a surprise within an unsurprising context is.
Penis? Is that the more precise language these guys are groping for?
Because, to me, that seems somehow like the secret of existing and surviving.
Penis. I told you so.
I often get too optimistic about organizing and social change, or about health care.
Which is why this crazy biddy teaches 'Narrative Medicine'.
I can’t believe that in the midst of a global pandemic we haven’t achieved universal basic income and single-payer health care.
Because voters think 7 per cent inflation is bad enough. They don't want hyperinflation or a collapse of the Federal Government- yet.
That is a surprise to me. I really thought something might happen.
Because you studied worthless shit, not Econ.
To bring this back to broken histories and a historiography of absence: The one thing that I will give La peste, which as a novel I don’t love, is that it ends with the gesture that basically says, “And then we forgot again.” We’re good at forgetting.
Things which we didn't remember in the first place- coz they didn't happen. Sure. That's true enough.
Two major rhetorical gestures of the US government after 9/11 were “go shopping” and “never forget.”
Whereas when Bush's White House told Musharaff that Pakistan would be nuked back to the stone age unless it pulled the plug on the Taliban, no fucking rhetoric was involved. Still, Pakistan had the last laugh- unless they themselves go under to a more brutal Caliphate.
Forgetting, among other things, is a tempting form of healing.
Nope- not unless the trauma was imaginary.
It’s also a trauma response.
No. It may be a recovery response or a consequence of trauma. It is not itself a response to trauma.
That, to me, is the truest diagnosis of our social condition as anything else in La peste.
But you are as stupid as shit. You wouldn't know a true diagnosis if it bit you in the leg.
How we will tell the story of the pandemic in the future is an open question,
No it isn't. We already know that smart journalists will tell the story in a dramatic and compelling fashion. Meanwhile shitheads like Kolb will be teaching students of even lower intelligence and basic living skills.
but it’s one in which we can participate in right now — who we remember, what we forget or leave behind from a “before” that was already leaving out so many of us.
Kolb doesn't get that she was left behind by Higher Education. She may think she is a winner because she got tenure when a lot of smarter peeps didn't but those smarter peeps studied worthwhile subjects. They will do very well in the real world. She chose to study stupid shit. Within a decade she will have to grade doodles made by her moronic students out of their own lovingly curated feces. Perhaps that has already happened. At any rate, it is the next step on from teaching 'Narrative Medicine'. The fact is, severely disabled people may only be able to narrate their experiences by flinging their feces about. Kolb can be the first tenured Professor of fecal arts. Her parents must be so proud.
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