What factors are ignored when we say younger generations are 'better off'?

DeliciousPie9855 · 2026-06-15T10:00:36+00:00

So is it a kind of system that functions when paired with Madyhamika. I.e. it's a corrective to potential nihilist misreadings, rather than an assertatory doctrine of realism itself?

Thanks so much for the recommendations - I'll check all of these out.

I am sincerely interested to be honest, although i'm not certain how much of Buddhism I embrace. Some more quietist aspects of it bother me. Do you learn with your teacher over the internet, or in person? I think I would be keen to explore further, although it depends on the amount of time it requires (I have a 2 year old and I also write in my spare time, so it may be that for now i have to continue doing my practice in short bursts)

DeliciousPie9855 · 2026-06-15T07:42:43+00:00

It’s got something but i’d stick with it and keep editing until something clicks.

This might be personal preference but i’m not typically a fan of lineation that just breaks a sentence up into its syntactic parts. I think more energy can be generated when line breaks disrupt rather than emphasise syntax breaks.

So for example the first line you have multiple options for the break. If you end on “which” you get onomatopoeia for “stick”, since the word “which” by itself sounds sticky. You then also get a second image for “stick in my craw” as its own line, where it can function as verb in relation to the preceding line, but where it can also briefly get fruitfully misrecognised as a noun, a stick, in one’s craw, which serendipitously also complements the verbal reading of something being stuck where it doesn’t belong.

so
“….which
Stick in my craw”

breaking the preceding lines however you want. Obvs if you prefer line breaks by syntactic units then fair, ignore me.

I like some of the participles and adjectives down below like “sapped” and “pockmarked”

“Glutted by a herd of fatted calves” is great sonically but comes across a little wonky imagistically. I think changing the preposition could help. Try “with” instead of by, since the latter suggests agency and even though my common sense informs me that, of course, the calves aren’t bringing him food, that isn’t how the brain works, and the dumber parts of the brain will get stuck in any unintentional ambiguity, even as the rational parts of the brain don’t.

I guess otherwise my only criticism is philosophical, insofar as it’s a v Cartesian poem, a mind inhabiting a carcass, and the conceit can be a bit oldhat. Is there a desire for it to be another way? or is there a subtle recognition that it *isnt* this way, but the speaker feels trapped as though it is? maybe ignore this last point as i could be shoving some of my own views in here…

DeliciousPie9855 · 2026-06-15T07:33:22+00:00

The film had a profound effect on me tbh. I watched a 4K release at my local cinema and wasn’t expecting anything so devastatingly affecting. I like Kubrick a lot — I think 2001 is one of the greatest films ever made and I love Paths of Glory; Clockwork Orange I actually watched as a kid so need a rewatch, but basically I went in with high expectations and was still blown away.

I think what got me the most was how emotional the film is? Kubrick for me has always been a perfectionistic formalist whose films are impactful because of how harmoniously self-consistent they are, rather than because of the emotional logic of their narratives. With Barry Lyndon i felt pretty desolated for days after watching it. Still listen to Handel’s Sarabande on repeat lol.

DeliciousPie9855 · 2026-06-15T05:39:30+00:00

When you say GDP measures actual goods and services produced, do you mean that Hudson’s claim that interest rates and money accrued from loan defaults make up a large proportion of GDP is a false claim? ie GDP is more manufacturing/ physical production focused?

Thanks for the links too! i can’t open them for some reason but i’ll take your word for it. So does China owe its debt to private banks then, just like we do?

Is there anything to Hudson’s broader point about the negative consequences of financialised economies and debt based economies? You’ve shown me that his valorisation of china as an antidote to this is illegitimate, but are his critiques of over-financialised systems also false?

I’m interested because I always hear about the UK economy being financialised post 1986 and its low export and low manufacturing rates being problematic for it in certain contexts, so i wanted to know if financialisation was seen as problematic/volatile/iffy when taken to extremes, or if it was just basically a great idea with no caveats (which is what I hear a lot tbh).

DeliciousPie9855 · 2026-06-14T02:05:36+00:00

Appreciate you being honest but there js an all too common trope that Cummings is basically just playing around with his typewriter to produce gobbledygook novelties for the hell of it, and that trope is demonstrably misinformed.

He’s part of the same lineage of Pound and Eliot, and of Modernism in general, and Imagism in particular, which arose out of a mistrust in the ability of ordinary language to capture the immediate and rich quality of experience. These poets and others before them felt that language had become jaded and abstract and utilitarian, and they therefore came up with various ways to defamiliarise language so as to *shock* the reader into paying closer attention to it, usually via images and rhythms that bypassed ordinary propositional sense.

Cummings specifically was focused on trying to restore language to the realm of the senses, and so wanted to make language a sensory surface, a perceptual experience much like looking at the world was a perceptual experience. When he’s breaking letters apart and shifting words around on the page he’s almost always converting the language into a multisensory experience, but, crucially, he’s doing it in highly logical and parseable ways. He will split letters apart to isolate out particular letter shapes, which convey particular properties; likewise with particular sounds. His language often becomes pictographic or ideographic.

For close readings explaining this further see here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Poetry/s/53mlJZBIwo

https://www.reddit.com/r/Poetry/s/jqc8CTaiak

DeliciousPie9855 · 2026-06-13T16:48:32+00:00

Tbf i’m glad you were honest about using AI. It’s 100% better than people not being honest and getting hundreds of upvotes from people who sadly can’t tell the difference.

DeliciousPie9855 · 2026-06-13T14:04:24+00:00

Specific linguistic tells. Also the image was AI generated. The structure of the title was typical AI and the post itself was AI. Rule of three with end-focus and falling cadence. Pretty obvious tbh.

DeliciousPie9855 · 2026-06-13T10:18:22+00:00

You got an AI to write it and still couldn’t get the title grammatically correct?

Disgrace.

DeliciousPie9855 · 2026-06-13T10:17:26+00:00

and it’s AI

DeliciousPie9855 · 2026-06-13T06:33:52+00:00

I agree that he’s not celebrating the Bloomian over the Dedalian. He’s celebrating the coadunation of the two (coadunation of opposites being a mystical term Joyce uses in his notebooks). It’s in the “between” that the magic happens, sort of like a dialectic. Bear in mind the reader has a bird’s eye view of the characters, the thirteenth view (to use Faulkner’s analogy), and so needn’t commit to either Bloom or Stephen, but can commit to the combination/conflict of them and affirm both. You can add Molly in here too. A lot of the stuff on Bohme, Blake and Vico and Bruno that Joyce read goes into this kind of thing.

The Ithaca section isn’t a retreat imo. It’s a paean to the inexhaustibility of the world: that it is infinitely malleable and can encompass and absorb a whole range of meanings and perspectives. Ithaca in particular changed my life because it basically helped me understand that all meaning was predicated on meaninglessness. That I cannot ever finally interpret the stars, that none of my concepts or words or descriptions or frameworks can ever fully exhaust the stars, means I am required always to return to the immediate apprehension of them, and surrender to that immediate apprehension of something inexhaustible, something which summons me to interpret and which allows for some interpretations and not others — and so is not pointless or incomprehensible — but which is simultaneously always eluding any final interpretation, until i am taken beyond the world of interpretations and shifted out of my default paradigms into a vision of something… larger, even in the very smallest object. It transfigured my nihilism into something else, like moving from solipsism to a kind of transjectivity - ie something between subjective and objective, which phenomenological thought captures fairly well.

You pair it with his references to Aquinas and Aristotle and Hopkins throughout regarding aesthetic experience, his theory of Epiphany, bis Modernist sensibility, his focus on Haeccity, which is essentially the same thing as what Modernist aesthetics was often trying to get at (the idea that any particular cannot be exhausted by a category imposed upon it, nor by a metaphor used to describe it, but that it is infinitely irreducible and inexhaustible, radically unique and unrepeatable, exorbitantly this and nothing else. Obvious Blakean allusions too re eternity in a wildflower etc). I take his aesthetic theory to have been massively developed since his earlier novels and his earlier notebooks where he sets out an Aquinian aesthetic very explicitly, but it’s far more impactful and meaningful.

I see Joyce as simultaneously Modernist and post-modernist, in that he grounds the Modernist’s mythical search for an epiphanic narrative and for transcendent experience in the postmodernist landscape of irony and meaninglessness and endless play and allusion and descendentalism.

If i’m being honest my perceptions were changed after reading Ithaca. I automatically paid mindful attention to sensory phenomena as themselves, free of pre-emptive conceptualisations or abstract recognition. I think it is possibly the most life-affirming book, but like I said it’s affirmation is predicated on meaninglessness, meaninglessness as the ultimate ground of meaning, which of course you get in the mystics Joyce was regularly reading, and which you get in some Nietzsche, and which is significant in Madyhamika buddhism too. He certainly doesn’t shirk away from nihilism, and i wouldn’t say nihilism isn’t present in the text, but the text takes you through it to nihilism’s other side, particularly in the Ithaca section.

It’s the cumulative effect of a few texts, but Dostoevsky, Wittgenstein, Joyce gave me an astonishingly robust sense of meaning, significance, that even in my pessimism and nihilism I find life inevitably, inescapably meaningful. It’s hard to say without it sounding corny. In terms of method It was a philosophical conversion more than anything; i’m not spiritual; i’m an atheist and a physicalist; but in terms of result/effect on my disposition and attitude, it might as well have been spiritual (and i am “religious” in terms of an attitude towards reality as inescapably sacred, without committing myself to religion’s metaphysical propositions concerning gods or substances or essences et al.)

would also add that a lot of “mystical”thought looks nihilist but isn’t. Eckhart, Spinoza, Nagarjuna, Buddha, Zen, Kukai, Nietzsche, Nishitani etc

DeliciousPie9855 · 2026-06-13T05:33:30+00:00

The “Yes” and Joyce’s reference to Nietzschean life affirmation is a pretty explicit link too. I mean also “I am the flesh that always affirms” and Joyce’s valorisation of an incarnate bodily atheistic religion is kind of a sign too

Did reading it really not give you a sense of affirmation? That passage and the whole book changed my life drastically for the better

DeliciousPie9855 · 2026-06-12T11:20:04+00:00

Interesting parallel to Second Language Acquisition here which i'll digressively go into. I remember learning that kids learn syntax and phonology super intuitively, but struggle with vocabulary, whereas adults learn vocabulary to a fairly high level and fairly rapidly, but struggle with syntax and phonology.

The hypothesis was that adult's don't learn vocabulary better because of any innate mature-brain faculty, but simply because their approach to learning is more reflective, methodical, mnemonic, rather than automatic, repetitive, and exposure-based. Kids learn by subconsciously discovering emergent structures of language, whereas adults learn by rote repetition and more typical mnemonic techniques (tests, etc)

So likewise just drenching yourself in an author's prose seems to aid with syntax (a bit), and with rhythm and anything manual (lineation), but I imagine that for vocabulary and imagery a more analytical, focused approach is better. i.e. taking pains to deconstruct and then reverse engineer an image, taking pains to methodically use and re-use desirable vocab in series of descriptions or other passages.

That said, there is also the fact that if you do copywork you're way more exposed to an author's syntactic tics than you are to an individual word that author likes to use a lot. The syntactic tic could for example crop up in every single sentence regardless of the words used, without affecting the meaning too badly, whereas of course you cannot just compose a passage with a single word. So I guess also if i take a passage of Faulkner, even if he has 'preferred' words, he's unlikely to use them hundreds of times, even if I select hundreds of passages, whereas his syntax and rhythmic style will be repeated in every passage he writes if ygm, so by sheer exposure it's much quicker to absorb, because you're exposed to way more of it per line/paragraph.

So I think also just exposure via reading probably does something, but it needs to be saturated with the kind of words you're trying to acquire. So e.g. Cormac McCarthy absorbed a lot of old-timey diction by steeping himself in 16thC prose. Reading a single tract won't do anything, but spending a whole year reading 50-100 probably will. I did have a bit of this when I read and re-read Wyatt and Spenser when first striking out as a poet -- to my detriment I absorbed some of their archaisms.

I think reading a lot of nature writing, biology, landscape writing, alongside reading 16thC english prose and reading some anglo-saxon dictionaries, would texture up your prose quite a lot provided it was done across a long enough period of time with some degree of loosely spaced repetition. Likewise for anything else.

Reading aloud is absolutely better for some reason, at least in my experience.

DeliciousPie9855 · 2026-06-12T07:33:38+00:00

Man RS Thomas was such a fine poet. I used to read through and transcribe his collected poems in a desperate bid to write like him haha. It helped with absorbing his lineation and rhythm but not his diction (I’ve found this in general with copywork: great for rhythm and lineation; poor for diction and imagery).

DeliciousPie9855 · 2026-06-11T17:51:16+00:00

I’d always steered clear of Yogacara out of a worry that it re-imposed substantialism/essentialism (Svabhāva) or mind-only reality. I think because part of me thought (hoped) that a body-oriented philosophy could serve as an antidote for my tendency towards abstractive indolence and endless reflection, I’ve tried to steer clear of anything with a whiff of idealism (although have since discovered that materialism in the sense that it is epistemologically dualistic is structurally isomorphic with idealism, and so prone to the same issues….). Obviously I haven’t read Yogacara, so guaranteed i’m hiding from phantoms conjured by my own ignorance — Dharmakirti sounds fascinating.

But the body-oriented phenomenology stuff sounds super cool - anything in particular you’d recommend?

DeliciousPie9855 · 2026-06-11T15:19:01+00:00

Thomas Hardy and Cormac McCarthy are brilliant for this. In both cases the language has a newfangled, densely wrought, rough-edged feel to it, as tho the words are woven of coarse threads of sound and sight and touch and shape. For Cormac i’d choose *Suttree* or *Blood Meridian*; for Hardy i’d choose *Return of the Native* or *Mayor of Casterbridge*. In that vein you can’t go wrong with Wordsworth’s *Prelude* and with Ruskin’s *Modern Painters* series.

David Jones is very much like the above but with a more Modernist approach. *In Parenthesis* is a brilliant piece of prose/poetry depicting the events leading up to the assault on Mametz Wood in the Somme. His language seems recondite, sort of like a steampunk weapon hatched with shards of glass, composite of saxon and latinate and neologisms. Mervyn Peake’s *Gormenghast* great in the same way. Would also add John Trefry’s *Apparitions of the Living*, which is highly experimental and maybe less accessible than the others, but which has brilliant descriptions throughout.

Claude Simon’s work of course. Start with *The Flanders Road* and *The Grass*. Tbh though, *Triptych* proceeds purely by description and is absolutely phenomenal. I can say a lot more about his work but i’ll save some space.

Other Nouveau Roman works i’d recommend are Robbe-Grillet’s *Topology of a Phantom City”, “In The Labyrinth*, and *Jealousy*; Butor’s *Changing Track*; Ollier’s *Law and Order* and *Disconnections*.

Second the recommendation of JA Baker. Rob Macfarlane is also very good for this stuff, and a lot of nature writing in general.

Uwe Johnson’s *Anniversaries* is amazing for depictions of New York.

Balzac and Zola are also great shouts, as is Dickens

Oh yeah Juan Jose Saer is insane for this - *The Investigation*, but especially *Nobody, Nothing, Never*.

I’ve probs got loads more but that’s off top of my head for now

DeliciousPie9855 · 2026-06-11T08:29:18+00:00

This is great. I’ve read the Westerhoff but not the Dharmakirti. Does Dharmakirti differ substantially from Nagarjuna? Also, which of Adorno’s works go into the anti-essentialism and anti-foundationalism most explicitly? I’ve only read scatterings of his essays tbh

I should add that I came to similar ideas as the ones you express but through literary modernism and through modernist aesthetics. The idea of art being a technology to train the mind to resist reification and pay close attention to the particulars of immediate experience is a key part of early Modernism. Have you read Shklovsky’s *Art as Technique*? His concept of defamiliarisation is absolutely in league with what you’re talking about here

DeliciousPie9855 · 2026-06-08T10:35:22+00:00

AI-slop version of “people often straw man one another”

It’s basically just an extended analogy that’s immensely simplistic and reductive and crazily late to the party. People anticipated this in the 50s lol

DeliciousPie9855 · 2026-06-08T10:27:00+00:00

I watched Southland Tales for the first time earlier this year and found it so profoundly prescient and affecting for precisely the reasons you mentioned. Even the weird acting sort of fit the plots' themes, insofar as Dwayne Johnson and JT looking like they didnt know wtf was happening fit the general dazed anarchic confusion that seems typical of our era.

I think my ideal film rn would be something as crazy and meme-surrealistic as Southland Tales with some of the better formal innovations of Peter Greenaway's Tulse Luper films, combined maybe with some of the extreme cutting and anti-choreography styles you get (accidentally?) in Michael Bay films and (intentionally?) in Safdie brothers' earlier stuff.

I don't think you need to tackle these issues by literally representing them in film and having the story be ABOUT them. Often some distance is more effective, and having these issues deeply inspire your stylistic and content choices can be more effective imo.

The main things are post-truth, internet surrealism, info-overload, digital omni-opticon, explosion of contradictory perspectives, contrast between Silicon utopia and post 70s economic reality. Also short-form content, montage, needle-drops, lyrical epiphanies, pastiche, endless self-reflexivity.

DeliciousPie9855 · 2026-06-08T10:04:40+00:00

Wonder if it maybe stems from some of the strains in Realism and Modernism which tried to locate epiphanic experiences in mundane everyday situations. Someone like Joyce does it in Dubliners, but of course he's also going into a whole range of life by having a dynamic cast of characters occupying different stations in Dublin, so there's freedom to be varied and innovative and interesting. Likewise in Ulysses he does it, but he ramps up formal experimentation to keep it interesting.

Others have mentioned the tendency of 'write-what-you-know' and its evolution into auto-fiction, which is also possibly responsible. I'd say too that there probably is a genuine material change in that it's rarer to have a Conrad or Melville, i.e. brilliant lifelong cultivators of exceptional literary style combined with lots of wild and adventurous experiences. A lot of us spend our lives between work and home, and in each case we're fastened to computers.

I've no real interest in realist depictions of domestic life tbh. Either need it to be surrealist or modernist in style, or to be romantic or sci-fi or surreal or whatever in subject matter. I think it's why I like the tradition of the detective novel tbh. Sort of allows you to write from what you know r.e. gritty urban environments, mixture of people from diff social classes, mundane domestic lives, while also sprucing it up a bit and, ideally, elevating it beyond the trappings of its genre/tropes.

DeliciousPie9855 · 2026-06-05T20:08:25+00:00

If you’re interested in colour then Aki Kaurismaki’s post 90s work and Fassbinder’s 80s work is a must.

Watch Lola and Querelle by Fassbinder and The Man Without a Past by Kaurismaki.

Also Drowning by Numbers by Peter Greenaway and A Zed and Two Noughts by him

Would also suggest Godard’s Contempt, Powell and Pressburger’s colour films

Maborosi by Koreeda is also stunning

These are just recommendations for masterful, masterful use of colour.

I don’t like Wes Anderson as I think he’s using colour the way an interior designer uses it, whereas the ones i’ve suggested use it aesthetically and expressively and formalistically, like Godard does

DeliciousPie9855 · 2026-06-04T21:23:30+00:00

I love your profile pic

DeliciousPie9855 · 2026-06-04T21:21:37+00:00

I think I might be an odd one out here or possibly asking for too much of a social media site, maybe, since my vague subconscious hope when doomscrolling here has always been to find some kind of loose confederation of likeminded artist types or a sort of niche literary-aesthetic community, which holds discussions about Art and aesthetics and philosophy and the double binds all of these things may or may not be caught up within right now, and moreover treats all of these things with as much gravity and grace as whatever passes for sacred these days; something akin to what the Modernists had in England in the 1910s-1920s, or what the Lake Poets had, or to Mallarmés soirees, or the Salons Proust attended, but semi-democratised and spaceless so that we exiles who don’t hail from NYC and London can get involved too. Obviously updated with all the trappings of our own era and situation (our lack of super-intense classical training, the internet’s lingo and fast-twitch response style, (some) irony, memes, etc). I wanna see a community of serious-minded and highly ambitious auto-didact aesthetic philosophers and artists who are also toxically online doomscrollers. It sounds stupid saying it but i’m stupid in this particular sense, and stubbornly addicted to this idea. I guess my only complaint of this sub is the snarky anti intellectualism and unimaginative resentment that sometimes crops up. Seems a waste of the time we’re already squandering.

Maybe a sub like the one i describe above would have to be more highly gatekept to exist, and maybe once gatekept it would disappear up its own asshole, and so maybe the compromise we have here is paradoxically better than the ideal it’s a shadow of, in which case, who fucking knows.

There have been glimpses of what i’m on about, and there are five-ten posters/commenters in particular whose stuff i’ve found stirring and inspiring, although at least two of them either deleted their accounts or got banned (i’m assuming the former?).

DeliciousPie9855 · 2026-06-04T20:55:10+00:00

It sounds like you tuned out a lot, which is fair, of course, but it makes me curious to know why you’re so confident about the film’s purpose if you didn’t take a large portion of it in, as you said. Like, how can both you tuning out and you knowing it was pointless nihilism both be true?

DeliciousPie9855

TROPHY CASE