Previously:

It is torture to read a novel not just because nobody in it goes to the bathroom, spends every night watching TV, or surfs obsessively on their phones, nor just because the novel was permanently discredited by David Shields’ Reality Hunger as a Victorian form that has not evolved. (I’ve never been the same.)

Sean Tejaratchi (q.v.):

Another screamingly funny visual pun that hasn’t gotten old in a year and a half as rotating desktop wallpaper.

Literature and novels (cf.):

1. can’t produce a visual pun

2. do not acknowledge motocross ever existed

3. never feature characters who set up rotating desktop wallpaper, check their phones in bed, have specific iPhone models, use emoji, sit on Twitter all day arguing with “Nazis,” take shirtless photos for Instagram, use Instagram, use any service like Twitter or Instagram, use any such service as frequently as they are designed to be used, retweet, DM, PM, favourite, like, block, misspell and mistype constantly in instant messaging, have multiple instant-messaging services, send dick pics via instant messaging (not SMS), know what SMS is, accept that SMS exists, that’s what it’s called, and that it’s a 20th-century technology that never gets mentioned in literature and novels, go to the gym, stand in line at the off-brand grocery store after work three or four times a week, have a commute, do the laundry, leave laundry in a pile unsorted, iron shirts, iron trousers, screenshot (v.), PVR Game of Thrones, torrent Game of Thrones, sit on the phone with a cable “provider” disputing a charge, have Spotify going in the background all day literally every single day of the year (or Bassdrive), walk the hound, Swiff (except in Super Sad True Love Story), file a GDPR data request with Facebook, delete their Facebook, ever have a Facebook at all, live in a world where Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or even the Internet exists, used the Internet for more than two decades, watch YouTube constantly, inhabit a world where YouTube exists, have tediously unremarkable shit to do at work every fucking day, buy new chinos at H&M, shop for basically anything, with multiple stops at different stores all coming up bupkes, used to be on Friendster, ride a dirt bike, want a girlfriend but are just paralytically incapable of talking to females, blow three or four other guys a month, hate their gay-married husbands, hate their coworkers, get shitcanned, pay tittystreamers for attention and basically prefer that now, get a boner at the gym, show their boners at the gym, get the AIDS well into the 21st century, have three different “dating” apps on their specific iPhone models, and those are just the gay ones, seethe, post to Twitter and Instagram about how racist their adoptive White countries are, smoke-bomb gay-pride parades, have a “browser” on their “laptop,” have tabs open in their browsers, open a new tab in their browsers, download a PDF they’ll never actually look at, go to church, can’t believe doctors still use fax machines, read books without noticing they never resemble any part of their lives whatsoever, all the way down to spending the entire last quarter of the 20th century never mentioning the fax

As such, David Shields is and was correct: “Literature” really is a Victorian form that hasn’t changed one iota even if its stories are set in outer space.

Someday you’re gonna die. Imagine having spent your life reading literature and novels. Either this desktop wallpaper goes or I do.

Saving Beauty by Han Byung-Chul surprised the shit out of me with the most arresting opening pages I have read in 30 years.

The smooth is the signature of the present time. It connects the sculptures of Jeff Koons, phones, and Brazilian waxing. Why do we today find what is smooth beautiful? Beyond its æsthetic effect, it reflects a general social imperative. It embodies today’s society of positivity. What is smooth does not injure. Nor does it offer any resistance. It is looking for Like. The smooth object deletes its Against. Any form of negativity is removed. […]

The artificial skin of [a] smartphone keeps it smooth at all times…. Smoothness is not limited to the outside of the digital apparatus. Communication via a digital apparatus also appears smoothed out, as it is mostly polite remarks, even positivities, which are exchanged. “Sharing” and “Like” represent communicative means for smoothening. Negativities are eliminated because they represent obstacles to accelerated communication.

Jeff Koons, arguably the most successful living artist at present, is a master of smooth surfaces. Andy Warhol also professed his commitment to beautiful, smooth surfaces, but his art still had the negativity of death and disaster inscribed into it. His surfaces are not entirely smooth…. In Jeff Koons’ work, by contrast, there exists no disaster, no injury, no ruptures, also no seams. Everything flows in soft and smooth transitions. Everything appears rounded, polished, smoothed out. Jeff Koons’ art is dedicated to smooth surfaces and their immediate effect. It does not ask to be interpreted, to be deciphered, or to be reflected upon. It is art in the age of Like. […]

His smooth sculptures cause a “haptic compulsion” to touch them, even the desire to suck them. His art lacks a negativity that would demand distance. It is the positivity of smoothness alone that causes the haptic compulsion. It invites the observer to take an attitude without distance, to touch. An æsthetic judgement, however, presupposes a contemplative distance. The art of the smooth abolishes such distance. […]

Hegel… limited the sensual in the arts to “the two theoretical senses of sight and hearing.” They alone have access to meaning, while smell and taste are excluded from the enjoyment of art. The latter are only susceptible to the “agreeable,” which is not “the beauty of art.” […] The smooth only conveys an agreeable feeling, which cannot be connected to with any meaning or profound sense. It exhausts itself in a “Wow.”

Yes, dear God, unprompted he starts talking about the Citroën DS.

In his Mythologies, Roland Barthes points out the haptic compulsion which is triggered by the [then‑]new Citroën DS.

It is well known that smoothness is always an attribute of perfection because its opposite reveals a technical and typically human operation of assembling: Christ’s robe was seamless, just as the airships of science fiction are made of unbroken metal. The DS 19 has no pretensions about being as smooth as cake icing, although its general shape is very rounded; yet it is the dovetailing of its sections which interest the public most: one keenly fingers the edges of the windows, one feels along the wide rubber grooves which link the back window to its metal surround.

There are in the DS the beginnings of a new phenomenology of assembling, as if one progressed from a world where elements are welded to a world where they are juxtaposed and hold together by sole virtue of their wondrous shape, which of course is meant to prepare one for the idea of a more benign Nature. As for the material itself, it is certain that it promotes a taste for lightness in its magical sense. […] Here, the glass surfaces are not windows, openings pierced in a dark shell; they are vast walls of air and space, with the curvature, the spread and the brilliance of soap bubbles[.]

The book is poorly typeset (with a credit to the typesetter) and deteriorates into a conventionally incomprehensible book about “cultural theory.”

And here is a baffling endnote (with endless permutations of Ä/an/ae):

Cf. Wolfgang Welsch, Ästhetisches Denken…. Welsch interprets anaestheticization, or anaesthetics, not as anaesthesia, but as non-aesthetics, and tries to find positive aspects in it.

Now apply this lesson to an ongoing bugbear of mine, consensus gay culture, and to the near-impossibility of photographing the male nude.

• The only points of interest with, on, or in these undifferentiable granite-smooth musclegays are the textures of wangs in underpants.

  

  I’m sure they’re crashing bores in real life, and cannot do anything with those muscles.

• Now consider someone who is not a gay, which fact may be apparent at a glance.

  

  As with the musclegays, the skin illustrations are a zero, but everything under the mildly rumpled ribbed T‑shirt suddenly becomes of interest.

Smooth removes any form of negativity.

The Times’ John “Hob” Koblin describes how, in its risible house style, “L.G.B.T. [sic] Households are Now Nielsen Families, and Advertisers and Producers Get a Valuable Tool.”

1. Same-sex couples earn significantly more money than their straight counterparts

   No, they do not.

   To keep lazy-bordering-on-dishonest hacks like Koblin from being lazy or dishonest, nearly ten years ago I read all the research on lesbian and gay earnings and incomes and put everything together in a readily-Googlable place. No journalist has any excuse whatsoever for failing to locate that page.

2. Koblin cites the Treasury paper that details how rich married same-sex couples are. The Treasury paper controls for fewer variables and is concerned with married couples and is but a single data point.

   Koblin didn’t bother to respond when I laid out the facts and called him a liar. Remember, this is the newspaper that could not bring itself to admit that Annie Leibovitz was Susan Sontag’s lover, let alone that Ed Koch was gay.

3. “Our brands will be interested in this not just in terms of being more inclusive, but also to reach a more affluent audience,” said [Rachel] Lowenstein, who works at [a] media agency. “This is something that’ll be extremely valuable once it’s tradable in the marketplace.”

   Another reason I went to the trouble of reading nearly 80 research papers in full (which I expect is 79 more than Koblin has ever read over a lifetime) is to counter marketers’ habit of endlessly lying about the “gay market,” which always just meant the gay-male market and positively does not mean, in the Times’ perverse rendering, the EldotGeedotBeedotTee market.

   I expect a marketer like Lowenstein to lie to herself about how rich gay men and lesbians are, on average. I don’t exactly expect her not to lie to the public, her clients, or the New York Times, but I’m not surprised she did. (She wouldn’t even confirm her identity for me.)

4. Brian Fuhrer of Nielsen can be expected to report accurate findings about gay men’s and lesbians’ earnings and incomes (he sure knows where to locate them now), and to accurately report the incomes of participants in Nielsen’s survey cohorts. (He too wouldn’t even confirm his identity for me.) I expect people like Koblin and Lowenstein to keep on lying.

• Previously, I pointed out this Basque and issued an ultimatum: “Now tell me [he has] any distinguishing features whatsoever despite deriving from a distinct ethny and speaking a language unrelated to any other.”

  

• Here we have another musclegay (or at least that is his intended end stage).

  

  I issue another ultimatum: Locate any feature whatsoever that identifies nationality, place, or locality; language; or ethny (apart from “not black, Indic, or Oriental”). Indeed, locate any feature whatsoever, save for his attempt to deceive us into thinking he’s using an iPhone X or later (see deceptive vertical camera cutout in phone case).

• Next – and this is a more salutary example – regard this conventionally masculine phenotype (see jaw, bridge of nose).

  

  I’ll spot you a clue: He’s on a gay rugby team. Your task is to figure out where. (It could even be in South Africa, as the Jozi-Cats are almost entirely White, which tells you something about gay and rugby.)

Consensus gay culture is an actual monoculture that actually steamrolls over national, local, and personal ethnies, languages, cultures, and specificities.

Blue first. Obviously.

(Chris Labrooy)

GUEST: So we have a race war. But it’s a Twisted Metal race war. So we get all these identitarian groups – they have to build, like, a souped-up car with guns all over it. They fight in a tournament, and whoever wins gets to make a wish. And that’s how we solve all our problems.

So the White nationalists can have, like, I dunno, maybe some type of white sports car – no, they should have the fuckin’ Duke boys’ car from Dukes of Hazzard. That could be the White nationalists’ car.

HOST: The General Lee.

— Yeah, the General Lee. Then, you know, you’d have a Cadillac for the black nationalists – the WE WUZ KANGZ. Like, really go all out.

— The hood ornament being a big pyramid.

— Yes! So every identitarian group gets like a car that they get to race to the death. Then it’s actual unironic-wordplay race war. […]

And clowns – the ice-cream truck, obviously that has to be the pedophiles. So the pedophiles get the ice-cream truck, or the windowless van that says FREE CANDY on the side.

— Or remember the van that the man was driving that sent the fake bombs to CNN and to MSNBC? He had that giant Trump van?

— Oh, like really, the sky’s the limit. […]

You gotta get a driver and fight to the death and shoot each other with guns ’n’ shit. Like, think of the entertainment value.

— I’m thinking of it right now and laughing my ass off. I’m picturing like gun turrets on top of Trump vans and, you know, the General Lee and a giant Cadillac, and, you know, it’s basically The Running Man but Race War.

— Literal The Race War. And the double entendre is just beautiful. […]

— Well, you could also have like obstacles, like the Black Lives Matter shooter from Dallas and the guy from New Zealand. Like, all of them will come out at any given time and like try to take out some of the racers but not others.

— Yeah, like in Carmageddon, you’ve got like snipers on the roof. You could have like antifa – what car would antifa have?

— A Volkswagen Beetle. A 1970s Volkswagen Beetle. It’ll have a souped-up 454 big block in it, and the guy would have to sit in the back seat to like push on the gas pedal. Or remember the hippie buses? The Volkswagen hippie buses?

— Like the Mystery Machine.

— Yeah, exactly. Maybe that’s what they can have. Other than that, I can’t think of anything but maybe a Prius.

— Oh, no. Oh, shit. That’s the perfect car for antifa is a Prius. Because like antifa are a bunch of middle-class college kids with rich parents pretending to be communist revolutionaries, so the Prius is the ultimate thing. And then what they would do is just like, their special move would be to like launch an antifa person like onto the roof of your car and like hit your windshield with a bike lock. […]

— Only it would be like body odour and like bike locks.

— Yeah. So that’s a race war I can get behind is a Twisted Metal literal race war with different identitarian groups with souped-up cars. […]

— Somebody said “What kind of cars would our border brothers drive?” That would be one of those lowrider, like—

— Or an El Camino.

— Ooh, even better, ’cause the El Camino has the area for the turret in the back. You’d have the one or two people driving it and they’d have the gun turret in the back which lobs like avocados and –

— No, their special move in the El Camino would be a guy comes out with like a leaf blower and starts blowing everyone’s car away…. The front of the car would have a lawn-mower, like, blade on it to like run over people and stuff.

— So they wouldn’t even have to stay on the course, ’cause they could go veer off because they wouldn’t worry about getting stuck in the grass or the trees or anything ’cause they can mow right over it.

— Right. They’re also immune to water ’cause they can cross rivers. […]

— And basically like Linda Sarsour driving the Islam car. The White nationalists? Richard Spencer for sure – he’s trying to like dust the car while he’s driving to make sure that it doesn’t get too untidy.

And, I mean, the beaner car would just be amazing. That one would definitely be the best…. It would be like Voltron-style, you know, where the Mexicans could combine into a super-Mexican, and then get into the back of the El Camino…. The whole car could be a lawn mower. It could transform into a lawn mower.

— Well, that’s what I mean. You need a Mexican, not a Mexican’t.

Howard Beale Presents: The Race War

• LGBT shows up in a phalanx of identical lowrider ’98 Subaru Outbacks

  • Black Lives Matter forms a human chain in front of the Subarus’ phalanx of gunmetal-grey cowcatchers, sets off smoke bombs, forces toughest bulldyke to sign a list of demands, then transition

• Our gold sponsor, the Federal Reserve, appears as an animated hologram of an eyeball inside a pyramid

• Uncle Otto drives his own Duesenberg. (“Neo”-Nazis? Try O.G. Nazis!)

• Master of Ceremonies Bernie Sanders arrives in a silver-lamé ZiL limousine, with liveried driver packing an A.K.

• All the number girls are in burkinis!

• Who’s that special mystery guest in the burka? Just going by the silhouette, is she – or he – packing a machete?

• Infield sponsored by the Sackler family. Bring your own trailer!

  • “Hey, Brandine! BLM done finally showed up!”

  • Complimentary sewer and power hookups, free wifi, free propane (limit one canister per EBT/Veterans Administration health card)

  • A T‑shirt cannon? Not hardly! How ’bout an OxyContin cannon? (Maude Flanders still dies)

• NO HATE SPEECH!

(Via; q.v.)

Avuncular type designer Gerard Unger died last November 23. I was pleased to have met him.

One researcher basically walked out of a conversation with me mid-sentence to chat with “Dr. Unger.” As one would, of course. I was never able to fluently articulate the voiced velar fricatives in his name despite being a linguist.

While You’re Reading remains a triumph of explaining technical concepts to laypeople.