ok so just to soothe my aching sickened soul id like to point out that catcher in the rye is about a boy dealing with intense depression and grief over losing his younger brother and this is why he fails out of school. he spends the book searching for deep human connections and grows increasingly frustrated that no one seems to understand him and everyone only seems to be surface level interacting. he just wants to feel seen and loved.
he also recalls, upon visiting his old teacher, the way that he was molested as a child. the entire point of this book is that holden caulfield is a boy struggling with depression and trauma and he wants to save other children from experiencing the harshness of the world that he had to experience when he was younger.
pls stop saying this book is pretentious and that he’s sociopathic. all that is doing is demonizing very common depression thought patterns and making people who suffer from trauma and mental illness seem like they are sociopaths. ty send post
shoutout to hedonism. get naked and eat cheese
How you, yes, YOU, can be both PUNK and A PRETENTIOUS BASTARD (dark academic) at the SAME TIME.
(yes, I do recognise that making a 'how-to' type list is basically the opposite of punk, leave me alone.)
Read poetry (I highly recommend John Cooper Clarke).
Be angry all the time, not at people around you, but at capitalism, social injustice, the government, and societal constructs.
Read Marx.
Doc Martens should be your best friend. Yes, they're expensive. But they're also high quality and will last you a lifetime (I've had a pair for about five years now, and they've literally grown with me).
Ratty blazers are cool.
Drink fruit juice, don't take drugs. In the beginning, the punk movement was very anti-drugs, so gangs of them would get together to drink fruit juice instead.
Only quote the insults from Shakespeare's works.
Wash your hair in beer. (Just trust me. My great grandmother washed her hair with beer, and she had great hair.)
Berets
Black velvet (whilst usually more goth) can definitely be adopted.
Know that 'modern' or 'new' doesn't necessarily mean 'better'.
Go to protests, talks, lectures, anywhere where you might be able to make a difference. Say something about anything you feel passionately about, don't stand for things you feel are wrong.
Take me to church talking about being disenchanted by organized religion and instead finding worship in the your lover and finding commune through esoteric rituals comprising of the very things considered unholy in the religion you were poisoned by on incident of birth…. hozier really did That
- Empty elevators - Old buildings - Puzzles - Planners - Deep meaningful conversations - Museums - Alone time - Any time between 12am-5am - Sarcasm - Earphones - Science - People who understand that our RBF doesn’t mean we’re in a bad mood - Big libraries - Book stores - The smell of books - Reading books - Buying new books - Books in general - Expanding our knowledge - Rainy days - Thunderstorms
i know this isn’t really original but im obsessed with how english words that refer to the bodily, the tangible, the elemental etc are so often of anglo-saxon/germanic origin e.g. (heart, blood, jaw, flesh) or observable phenomena, like adjectives describing light (glisten, gloaming, glitter, gleam, gloom, glow, dark, fire) or places (hearth, hall, hill), and the most stark, primal emotions or states (hate, love, life, lust, death) and of course fuck, shit, bitch, cunt etc– these often monosyllabic, consonant heavy words…and then you have the lilting, limpid romance/latinate, words like acquiesce and exacerbate and agrarian and pellucid and clemency and lucidity…and how maybe the secret of all great english language poetry is a textural balancing of the push-pull of the germanic and the romantic/latinate, a balancing of these two energies. like some of the most powerful moments in shakespeare are where the verbosity falls away and you have these plain utterances (“to be or not to be” or lear’s dying “look there look there”– all anglo saxon words) that are so powerful precisely because the language is so ornate elsewhere. i once came up with an elaborate wildly incoherent theory about this in the pub with some drunk american masters student who was dressed like harry styles
be up front and honest about the things you do not know
acknowledge the intrinsic value of others’ knowledge bases, even if they do not seem important to you from your institutional context
do not feign mastery where you have none
respect the gaps in others’ knowledge bases
be generous, not only with others
but also with yourself
you overwork yourself at the risk of legitimizing a culture of overwork
privilege voices and perspectives that have historically been left out of the academy
nothing is ever neutral or apolitical
support the progress of other scholars
collaboration over competition
sad, sad day.
“I have always felt that mathematics is a language like music. To learn it systematically, it is necessary to master small pieces and gradually add another piece and then another. In a sense, mathematics is like the classical Chinese language—very polished and very elegant. Sitting in a good mathematics lecture is like sitting in good opera. Everything comes together.”
— Sun-Yung Alice Chang
“It is June. I am tired of being brave.”
– Anne Sexton, ‘The Truth the Dead Know’