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>Soliciting Jenny From Thebes thoughts, lyrically

>Okay so obviously this is the album that dropped on Friday that everyone is paying attention to, so I should feel free to ask everyone what they think about this one.

>The thing about this album is that I am more or less opposed to it in principle.

>Legasequels and retreads and an obsession with lore is fantasy nerd shit and I won't have any of it.

🙁

>Stories are mental dances and don't have to be repeated.

sure

> And I think Darnielle more or less holds the same position I do—in an interview he called stories "an infinite state of play," which has always stuck with me.

ok

>Part of the power of a song like Source Decay is that it explicitly sets up a mystery you can't solve; you catch the intolerable minutiae that obsess the narrator—a train out of Bangkok in 1983, a hostage dropped from a plane—and you walk the floors with them and you feel what they feel, but the darkness between the lines finally fills your vision and there's nothing to reach for at all. It's unsatisfying, but so is life. That's part of Darnielle's gift: to fill out whole worlds with a few sensory details and a couple devastating lines.

agree, except i don't think it's unsatisfying

>So, like. The Jenny songs I think are particularly badly suited for Darnielle to fill in their backstory, because even in the originals you barely catch anything but flashes of color and light. Jenny doesn't even have to be real for the original song (or Night Light) to work; she's a symbol.

right, in particular she's reduced to a manic pixie dream character imo

>The only way you can successfully elaborate the raw material into something bigger is if you preserve that fundamental mystery at the heart of her.

well, the mystery is at the heart of the manic pixie dream symbol but it seems pretty explicit in John's comments and lyrics that the point of the album is to reject that understanding of Jenny qua mere symbol held by the narrator and some fans by giving her her own life and story on her own terms.

now the mystery is not anathema to that project, and at the risk of signaling i don't fully understand the text i think there's still a lot of gaps and mystery around what's all going on with Jenny, the mayor, the people she takes in, etc.

>Has he done this? I honestly find it hard to say. The namedrops of every song off All Hail West Texas made me roll my eyes, but Darnielle is not a dumb guy; I think he knows how corny they are.

my friend said the same thing, that he groaned whenever this happened, but i don't understand why. of course those texts will tie into this one: it's the same discographic universe

>The intention is clearly to bind the stories together under a single narrative framework, which I usually roll my eyes at, but I think because Jenny is such a mysterious character the originals don't lose anything.

i don't think the originals lose anything either

>She may have met these people before, taken them into her house, but it doesn't straightforwardly solve any of their problems, or any of hers. And there is also the suggestion that the story we're witnessing is only one of several possible futures—"dig up the first revision, who had less to lose," "it's one of several iterations, it gets hard to keep track." At points this becomes less suggestion and more demonstrable fact—the narrator of "From the Nebraska Plant" tells us that the Kawasaki is in a wreckyard, but "Jenny III" ends with her picking them up as they cry.

yes, and i think what's critical here and what gets missed a lot with John's song writing is that he isn't the singer isn't narrator, they are playing the part of the narrator, and these narrators are not fully reliable, nor fully informed, they contradict themselves and each other, they make assumptions we know or suspect to be wrong.

>So what do you think? Are the new songs successfully mysterious in the same way that the originals were?

yes i think they are successfully mysterious but i think the kind of artistic project is a very different one, John tries to do something new with each album, tries to tread new ground, and in this album the new ground is paradoxically the first time he's returning to this character and letting her have her own story on her own terms, to a degree. i think this album emphasizes the incompleteness of the prior songs like Nightlight, raising new questions while dismantling the Jenny-as-manic-pixie-dream-symbol which has previously turned me

off some of the earlier songs she appears in.

to tease out an assumption: does withholding a vote actually function as an incentive to politicians, given their more prevailing incentives of bribery, party discipline, et cetera.

"holding them accountable" after voting for them. hmm.

the promotion of a not yet possible. the language of possibility in elections.

the tactical harm to bloody hands,

building credible power partly symbolically rejecting the credibility of the neoliberals whose overall project is a foreclosure of the possible,

voting for the dead. my first election since Belle passed away. i don't want her voice silenced. I'll vote for her maybe, write her name in for president or doctor or dictator or Tribune.

American Consulate, Freemen's Tribunate. an autonomous zone in the deep south, with Tribunes able to veto conscription, taxes, property transfers, elections of candidates to federal office (the Tribunes wield their entire electoral college delegation en bloc, the speakers of the house and Senate become acting Consuls? or first post the post in the college? the choice between evils played out at a higher ratio of power)

why Nietzsche? challenging the assumption that the transcendental unified subject of Rousseau, the subject of right, is necessarily at odds with social reproduction. this was the assumption on the part of socialists until being challenged by Nietzsche.

Nietzsche has burrowed a tunnel underneath socialist materialism, he's been materialist all along

on revenge acid horizon episode on Nietzsche and Kiwosski (spelling?)

💠 💠

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Utopian

Philosopher

Marquise of Swords

Anarchist of Hearts

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i really like the idea of cultivating love, in my spiritual practice lately I've been trying to reintroduce my childhood love of fantasy and wizards and gods and spirits to my daily life by casting spells, like ceremonial magic, and love spells in the sense of invoking habits of care and thinking of in my case my partner and our cats and friends and the working class and our gods and our ghosts, has been something in thinking and journaling about, idk it's much better than stereotypical love spell were one tries to cause love in someone else

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I'm engineering a love spell but it does something different, namely invoking, acting on, and making habits around my love for my boyfriend, our cat temple, my gods, myself, my blog, to store up and build around care.

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🏮🏮🏮🏮

workers' festival

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organize across unions to host Workers' Festivals: get local musicians to perform labor anthems, invite food trucks, hand out information about organizing your workplace and apartment building, host know your rights workshops, have a candidate forum for local candidates, make it queer friendly, migrant friendly, host it at a grange club or similar accessable location, organize collaborative art projects where community members write down our draw their idea of a better world and display and preserve the resulting art at Union halls.

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Self Harm is a kind of writing, a kind of speech, which tells us about how pathological subjects re-constitute ourselves in states of political exception, surviving and resisting our material contexts. by studying this literature, we gain a rad pov on subjectivity, resistance, solidarity, and love.

ransome

pathology

pathos

Ransome note

hostage

surrendor

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the way you just assumed you could lecture me about what my family is like made me very uncomfortable

⚶☿☍⚓︎♆☸︎✻♁☭✡︎

Xęphyrįåh Zēbåstįàn Ùrïęlångęlø Zęphyrįm Sëbąstián Xåçhäríàh Brümäīrę

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self injury, love, worship, gift, autotribite tribune tribunal ... scribe

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Keeper Secretary Operator Commissioner Tribune Ambassador Gift Host Guest Scribe

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herein

tarot notes

scribe app

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Scribe .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. Messenger Post Official ... Operator

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!Clean Toilet

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!Make Car Cat-safe

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found the headphones under the dresser! Frankie must have brought them there

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Prayed to the the Eyes 🧿, the bridges 🌉, and Saint Anthony (patron of finding missing items)

🧿🐏🧿💫🐋🎐🧿💦 🧿🪶🌀🦚

♂️⚡♂️🏛️♂️🌀🌬️🎐💨🌪️♂️🏮

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🧿🐏🧿🎐🧿💦🧿🦚

🌉⛩️🌉🌁🌉🛕🌉🏮

⚧️🗽⚧️🐘 ⚧️✒️⚧️⚕️

⛲🐉 ⛲🔱 ⛲ ⚓ ⛲🍇

♀️🌠 ♀️🐮 ♀️👻 ♀️🔮

🪐🪄 🪐🥚 🪐🔯 🪐👻

🌅🛞 🌅🦁 🌅🐓 🌅🐉

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🧿♂️⚧️⛲♀️🪐🛞

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rituals and surplus cathexis

‘it must take a great deal of life to hurt yourself like that’

rest

read up on libidnal economics; link Stanford entry in comments

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Marie Curie, radioactive saints and relics

Fiat justitia ruat caelum

i know for whom the willow weeps