A Bitchy Theory of the Grotesque

OK, so, Grotesque = grotto-esque, ok? And a grotto is, like, a cave, right? So this theory of the Grotesque, is, like, rooted deeply in all that is cavernous. Get it? So when I'm like, Ur totally Grotesque, I'm really saying that you totally crawled out from a cave, like totally primordially, ok? Like, I don't mean this as an insult or anything, I mean, there's something very endearing about simple life forms, but I'm also, like, Hello?? Like, excuseme, regression isn't something we intersubjectively constructed!! It's totally forrealz For Realz. I mean you need to just take a look in the mirror to see the deep regression into the Grotesque, like, my definition of the Grotesque not urs. Whatever. The word "gross" has, like, etymological roots in the Grotesque? So maybe take a hint? 

Our Whole Life

Our whole life a translation
the permissible fibs

and now a knot of lies
eating at itself to get undone

Words bitten thru words

meanings burnt-off like paint
under the blowtorch

All those dead letters
rendered into the oppressor's language

Trying to tell the doctor where it hurts

like the Algerian
who has walked from his village, burning

his whole body a cloud of pain
and there are no words for this

except himself

— Adrienne Rich

otherly

From At Home in Unhomeliness: An Anthology of Philippine Postcolonial Poetry in English (2007) ed. J. Neil C. Garcia: 

Let us pursue the domiciliary analogy in its conventional form: postcolonial poets writing in the language of colonization may be seen as guests residing in the house of English, which obviously isn't their original home. Their situation is therefore—as we have already noted—one of unhomeliness. And yet, it's clear that, by the tragic irony of colonial history, they now have to live in this new house, which admittedly exercises its own powerful claims on their imaginations, on their affections, even as it continues to remind them of their loss of original innocence, their "existential" displacement. They write in English, and yet do so not as residents but as "guests," behaving as Others in the house of the English Self. They deform, fragment or sabotage the traditions of English poetry, infuse it with alien rhythms, twist its structures, disrupt its sense and sensibility, adulterate its music, refract its optics, register, in each and every utterance, the fact of their double alienation from both their old and new identities. In other words, by writing in English, they may be said to insist on the fact that they exist pendulously in the chasm between the antipodes of the "purity" of a precolonial past and the "contaminations" of a colonial present. Readers of this kind of poetry will most likely never mistake it for anything other than creolized, mestizo, ethnic, minority, and yes—in the conventionally political sense that many Western or Western-trained critics understand it—most unmistakably "postcolonial."

wisdom is overrated

There is so much on my mind that I can only reach for rings of donuts and load Buzzfeed, that bane of at-home productivity.

The thing with working from home is that I am within walking distance to actual food that I can prepare myself for free, but would rather open a pack of keropok and eat mango-and-cream sorbet (fantastic dessert, by the way) directly from a tub. Why.

Am reading Northanger Abbey and can identify with the ironist Henry, but I also feel that I am projecting too much of prior social experience onto Catherine — her use of The Mysteries of Udolpho as an interpretive tool to understand the events taking place in Northanger Abbey, for example. I can relate to her tendency to mediate real life with textual life, and this takes place on two frontiers: in books and in film/TV. (Unfortunately Catherine's refictionalisation of her world, after defictionalising gothic tropes from reality, only reaffirms the uncomfortable truths derived from textual life. That sucks.)

I felt like the Barefoot Contessa because I tiptoed to my potted rosemary plant without footwear, intending to snip off some stalks for a gin and tonic with meyer lemons, please forgive my pretensions. Also, this is probably where the similarities between Ina Garten and me end. She does not have to return to public housing.

I need to ease myself back into writing full sentences, because no one speaks with punctuation in daily conversations anymore. It is unfortunate that whenever I hear someone below 25 speak with semicolons in their sentences, the only thing on my mind is how class-conscious they sound. My own self-aggrandising follow-up to this is that we are all at a certain age where our minds are structured by a sublimated form of class anxiety, so it doesn't matter: we are all proletarian whenever it's convenient.

Recently I have been thinking about how complex amorous relations are, and how they occasionally manifest the appearance of being complete and utter bullshit. Of course I stand corrected. This is not a popular worldview because it's obviously detrimental to the human race, assuming there is anything worth perpetuating. Also if relations take the shape of something trite (and consequently, vulgar and repulsive) there surely has to be some minutest grain of reason that might justify its existence? What validates a relationship anyway? Zizek's all like, "if you have reasons to love someone, you don't love them" which is true. It's a supra-rational activity. Let's all have fun with that.