"Those Breakdown Days Are Done": Growing Up With the Bands We Grew Up With (The Nostalgia Trap, Part 3.)

That line hits me like a ton of bricks every time. I have cited it to therapists in outlining my goals. And it seems to be a theme of some of the music I’ve enjoyed the most recently, and about which I have complicated thoughts. (Content Warning: Discussion of Eating Disorders.)

Escaping the Prison of Contingency: Another Attempt to Pin Down the Utopian Impulse

What I am calling the Utopian Impulse is a hypothetical third drive, something to break the Freudian dichotomy of sex and death. What Marcuse called “The Great Refusal” and Mark Fisher called “the Specter of the world that could be free”, I view as expressions of the Utopian Impulse. I don't want to think of it as anything mystical, but I can't help but feel inflected by mysticism when I discuss it. It is a haunting spirit, a radical outside, an alchemical potential. (Image is taken from instagram user @prismattco.)

Edgar's Book Round-Up, April-June 2019

First of all, I realize June is not yet over. But I have read fifteen of the thirty books on my Goodreads goal, so it seemed like a good time to do another book round-up. It’s been a bit of an odd go, for reasons that will hopefully become clear, but we’ll see. Also worth noting is that most of the links do go to Goodreads pages; they are not subsidizing me, but it seemed more useful than anything else. (Image is The Magician King by Lev Grossman, which is mentioned but not pictured in the piece.)

Crafting a Healthy Masculinity: Part 1

Much has been written about toxic masculinity, much of it by much better scholars than me. What I would like to do in this piece, and subsequent pieces under similar headings, is analyze non-toxic manifestations of masculinity, discuss their functioning, and – as much as possible, without oversimplifying – present guidelines so that we can follow them in the future. There are, of course, pitfalls here and I want to acknowledge them at the beginning: just about everything we do has unintended consequences, and the suggestions that I make here will no doubt be liable to have them, too. Moreover, any behavior can be twisted into a toxic manifestation: you have to have the self-awareness to try to recognize that when it happens, and to accept the criticism when it comes up.

Rise Like the Fenix [sic]: On Seeing Refused in Lawrence, Kansas

On the 22nd of May this year, Edgar and I went with a friend (Erik, who played the Sheriff in the Crooked Man) to see the Refused play with Bleached and the Hives; while there we met with Alex (who is hard at work on the next episode,) and his fiancee. We hadn't even known that Bleached was there, much to Erik's delight, and I've never really listened to the Hives. The sole draw for me, in short, was Refused.