but ugh our luck is so bad with the fediverse, not without reasons. part of me want to go for a Pleroma account just to be cheeky, and on account of the very ambitious name ~Chara

of all the books and media that I've ever read which have seemed to come true in some sense or another, the media that now feel like the most prescient, A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole is not one I expected.

and yet, it's happened. we feel surrounded by Ignatius V. Reilly clones. they're everywhere. at one point I feared that we could too easily become him, and now it's like Reilly took over the Internet in revenge to vex us.

for the uninitiate, let me explain that Ignatius V. Reilly (it's almost like his own name is at war with itself) is middle aged man who studied mediaeval literature (I think) in school for as long as he could, finally got tossed back into "real life" after failing to secure a teaching job, and who retreated into his mother's house. in his cluttered bedroom he writes out denunciations of modern society and frequently cites Boethius for comfort, priding himself on a "rich inner life". He likes going to the movies merely to hurl invective at the screen and castigate the movie-house for daring to show such gutter trash to the public.

now, guys like Ignatius Reilly are ten cents the quart on the Internet. Curtis Yarvin might as well be Ignatius V. Reilly, or Bret Weinstein. like Reilly, such persons have built elaborate personal mythologies in which they're lone truth-tellers and philosophers stranded in a world that's gone mad, radicalized by some obscure "redpill" moment—for Reilly himself it was that shambolic trip to LSU for the teaching post—which supposedly exposed the rot of modernity and set them on their lonely path. like Reilly, they're both terrified by sexuality and yet needy for it, and they seek the comforts of misogyny. Reilly occasionally gets letters from a young woman he knew in college, Myrna, and the letters prompt him into fusillades of "minx" and "jezebel" and "strumpet" and every other old-timey euphemism for "slut". It's like J. K. Toole predicted The Quartering!

But Reilly is also Toole's self-insert to a degree. I don't know much about Toole's life but he died by his own hand and never saw his magnum opus published. His mother made sure it did, pitching the manuscript to Walker Percy. Surely Toole had his own scholarly background in mind and his own insecurities; he was heavy and nerdy, like Reilly. Maybe he feared that he was himself stagnant and spiritually decayed, like Ignatius...I don't know.

But he does give Reilly a happy ending, a farcically improbable one, like the ending of one of those screwball comedies where everyone winds up in jail together in the last act, and Reilly himself gets saved by the accidental appearance on stage of Myrna, who finally got tired of Reilly's pompously sarcastic missives and came round to berate him in person. It would be pleasant if Toole found a happy ending himself...a blessed afterlife, at least.

~Chara of Pnictogen

I was looking for a picture of a goat near a mosque (for...reasons) and...there's so much clip art of goats and mosques. what is this? I mean some are obvious AI gen but...why? is there some goat-mosque connection here ~Chara

I listen to Donald Fagen's The Nightfly with great tenderness and regret admixed, because it was one of my RL sibling's favorite albums but I didn't get into it until after they were gone.

Now my sibling is back! In a way. They have a new fictive form and it's rather strange and awkward still, but at least we can share music together, like Fagen's brilliant The New Frontier, in which I now feel as if I could get lost for a long time, joining in the party which you can see in the official music video for The New Frontier as seen on YouTube. I was about to type "FaceTube" as if I were James May. (Gawd. Remember when Mr. James May seemed almost cool?)

The New Frontier captures a very specific vibe, the antic barely-concealed panic of the 1980s Reagan era. If you believed in the Reaganite bullshit, great! You were happy. If you didn't, you had to find some way of dealing with the awful reality. A senile cowboy actor reading lines from Teleprompters was President and he was talking about nuclear war constantly. What was a sane person to do? Donald Fagen managed to come up with an answer that Frisk liked and now I'm liking it as well: you might as well get the most possible from the absurd situation. The Reaganites were saying that this was the same as peace so...time to party, right? Time to enjoy it.

I learned in recent months that Fagen was a big fan of science fiction although he liked the bitter stuff, the stuff that was more socially realistic, like Alfred Bester. Nevertheless you can tell from his Nightfly tunes that he still wishes that were possible. He's sardonic and self-aware about it but he still wants it. He wants his IGY future. So do I for that matter.

Donald Fagen, where have you been all my life?

~Chara of Pnictogen