I may have to read it twice. Why has it taken me so long? Many thanks to Jon.
Here’s a bit about the late Mark Fisher. He committed suicide in 2017.
MARK FISHER’S “K-PUNK” AND THE FUTURES THAT HAVE NEVER ARRIVED, by Hua Hsu (The New Yorker)
If there was a single theme around which K-Punk’s eclectic energies organized, it was the future. Specifically: What happened to it? Fisher feared that we were losing our ability to conceptualize a tomorrow that was radically different from our present.
K-Punk attracted an avid readership, and, in 2009, Fisher published “Capitalist Realism,” a slim, powerful book about “the widespread acceptance that there is no alternative to capitalism.” Fisher saw signs of exhausted resignation in everything from the faces of his students to grim Hollywood movies set in the near-future (“Children of Men,” “Wall-E”) to “Supernanny,” a British reality show about parents unable to rein in their misbehaving kids. Fisher was interested not only in the political causes and cultural expressions of this exhaustion but in its emotional dimensions, too: the feelings of sadness or despondency that seem increasingly common across the political spectrum.
Here’s the reading tally for January and February.
- Capitalist Realism, by Mark Fisher
- Mysteries of the Middle Ages: The Rise of Feminism, Science, and Art from the Cults of Catholic Europe, by Thomas Cahill
- The Prague Cemetery, a novel by Umberto Eco
- Bavarian Helles (the beer style), by Horst Dornbusch
- Strong Towns, by Charles Marohn
- The Tragedy of Liberation, by Frank Dikkotter
