[A Pleasurable Headace] she ain't no human being
It’s another short one this week I’m afraid. I’ve been spending the last week or so looking at (like really looking) at some of my favourite newsletters, the things they do well and how I’d like to evolve this newsletter moving forward. It probably means more longform writing from me up top - essays, reviews, that kind of thing. I am still brewing on it.
Links
Defund the Queen
https://tribunemag.co.uk/2021/03/defund-the-queen
“Although the disgraced Prince Andrew is no longer receiving his £250,000 salary as a ‘working royal’, according to the Express, he is still getting handouts from the Queen via the Duchy of Lancaster, which as we’ve seen is the property of the Crown, not the Queen as a private citizen. So Andrew is still receiving state funding. The monarchist Max Hastings, writing in the Times, argues that ‘Andrew must be permanently removed from the family’s books.”
Sigh.
===
The Energy Can’t Last: On the Grimy American Fringes of Jeremy Saulnier
Roxana Hadid has a thorough and excellent analyis of Jeremy Saulnier’s current filmography, with a particular emphasis on landscape and his character’s place in them.
“Saulnier tracks the Ain’t Rights from overhead as they drive into a lush and unforgiving landscape, leaving the rugged shoreline behind to vanish into dense forests of towering evergreens. “I won’t live until I’m 70,” Tiger had said when Tad asked about their future plans, and that foreboding only gets more and more intense as recognizably polite society disappears.”
===
Triggering the Right: The Role of Language in the Culture Wars
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2021/03/triggering-the-right-the-role-of-language-in-the-culture-wars
Simon Mair shows how language can produce a completely different reaction to the same political policy. Includes this doozy:
“Naming neoliberalism and capitalism is the first step in breaking capitalist realism’s hold over us. By using historically specific terms, we are implicitly highlighting that the economy as we know it today had a starting point. This is useful because it drags the idea of the economy into the realm of time. No longer is the neoliberal capitalist economy something outside of the cycles of birth and death that govern all life. Instead it is something that began. And things that begin are things that can end.”
===
Meeting the Darkhad, the soul guards of Genghis Khan
https://supchina.com/2021/03/18/meeting-the-darkhad-the-soul-guards-of-genghis-khan/
A modern scholar meets the Darkhard. Who are they?
“As Genghis Khan lay on his deathbed, a shamanic priest came to him to perform the rites of cindariin hurrcag — the ritual to capture a fragment of the soul for posterity in this world. The shaman plucked a white hair from the forehead of a camel and placed it in the Khan’s mouth; the hair absorbed the Khan’s last breath, and with it, a part of his soul. The shaman — along with 1,000 guards — pledged to protect the soul of Genghis forever.”
===
Empire of fantasy
https://aeon.co/essays/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-oxford-school-of-fantasy-literature
Maria Sachiko Cecire on the origins of modern literary Fantasy at, where else, Oxford. There’s some good discussion here too around the genre’s use of an idealised past and its connections to the colonialism of the time.
===
I am off to bask in the smell of cut grass before the hayfever consumes me. We cannot have nice things.