Sublime

“The best explanation for why the zany, the interesting, and the cute are our most pervasive and significant categories is that they are about the increasingly intertwined ways in which late capitalist subjects labor, communicate and consume.”4 They are the material through which we can have perceptions and share judgments that seem most closely re

The whole point of reparative reading is that people derive sustenance in mysterious, creative, and unforeseeable ways from work not necessarily designed to give it, and that the transmission is nontransferable and ungovernable; the whole point of reparative making is that it is reparative for the maker, which guarantees nothing in particular about

realized that I agree with the messages in the medium of the book. I think they are true. I think they encourage the best parts of human nature—that a life with lots of episodes of deep focus is a good life. It is why reading books nourishes me.

Cultural blind spots can show up as centrisms: couple-centrism, heterocentrism, eurocentrism. Nonmonogamy, extramarital sex, and open relationships all define themselves by what they aren’t, thus implying that they’re some exception to the “normal” relationships that “normal” people have.

Throughout history, a romantic aura has surrounded those who were ready to sacrifice their lives for a cause they believed in strongly. A romantic aspect can emerge solely by breaking rules. Criminals, whores, and antiheroes, for instance, who defy and break societal rules have been the subjects of generations of legend and literature (think Balzac

the problem was that Freud’s perspective, and the social theory inspired by it, didn’t recognize that culture is never a whole. Rather, culture is always a patchwork of intuitions and practices.