Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
id845553161
There’s nothing wrong with reading those texts. But for me, the question is, “What am I reading?”
id845553147
We live in a period where acquisition, obtaining lots of money, is seen as beautiful, and moneyed people are said to “live beautifully.”
id845553135
If I have them, I’m better than those who don’t have them. That’s the rubric of capitalism and its aesthetic. My point is to trace how this enters the novel as common sense.
id845553913
Who created the “rule” that, in a novel, the main character goes through a process of transformation?
id845553946
that’s the dominant view of what a novel must do in this Euro-American moment of novel-writing: the process of transformation. That rule is repeated in every self-help book, TV program, whatever.
id845554063
a joke that Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o made when he visited Toronto. I was chairing a panel with him and a couple of other writers. Someone in the audience got up and asked him, “Are you Marxist or something?” He said, “Marx didn’t invent the working class, you know. He just described it.”
✏️ Hand in hand with the whole “two things can be true”… or maybe it’s more about the whole, one can ascribe to a philosophy or ideology or party or so on, without being entirely defined by it. I can use marxism to help describe things, and even ascribe to marxist though, without having to say that I’m 100% marxist. 🔗 View Highlight
id845554268
Marx’s work has had a great effect on me and is fruitful for describing the world that I live in and the history that I come out of. It isn’t sufficient, but then again, I’m not looking for a Judeo-Christian Bible
id845554256
’m looking for things that help me describe the world.
id845554299
Marxism is a method, not a prescription
✏️ Things can be of a time, and can be used to describe things, or a method of how to do things, but something written a few hundred years ago is not necessarily going to be the answer to what ails us now. It guides us, but it’s not the cure-all. It doesn’t have to be, nor could it realistically be. Especially one that’s written about a certain place, at a certain time, by a certain person with a certain lens. The world and humanity are both extremely complex and diverse things. 🔗 View Highlight
id845554355
I must take into account how we live now, what social arrangements exist now, and how and if I might use that method to think them through.