Field Notes

An informal record of my media consumption, field notes to return to at a later date.

• March 16, 2025

  Lit, Political | Empire of Normality, Burnout Society

  Robert Chapman, Byung-Chul Han, revolutionaryth0t

  Stumbled upon this video which discusses the broader problems behind designing for averages and largely sources from Empire of Normality by Robert Chapman. Extremely relevant in today's political climate, still! Conservatives often mistake their everyday discomfort for a lack of "normalcy," blaming "woke" ideologies and other groups they consider outliers. However, most of our fundamental systems—from psychiatry to corporations to the culture industry—have always been structured around enforcing concepts of normalcy. These people who feel uncomfortable in society often blame progressive movements for disrupting "normalcy," while failing to recognize that the very concept of "normalcy" they're defending might be what's causing their discomfort in the first place; it isn't real, Chad, and the unrealistic expectations you're holding yourself to will either kill you or turn you into a fascist. It's difficult to imagine how imposing an even stricter system of normalcy could create rather than restrict meaning for individuals. The only people who benefit are those advocating for such systems, who consider themselves intellectually and morally superior for fitting within the supposed "normal distribution", and use it as justification to amass power over others.

  
  

  Tangential, but these ideas of normalcy also seem to fuel our current obsession with biohacking/self-help/optimization culture, which operate on implicit assumptions about biological ideals ranging from optimal hormone levels, exercise regimes, sleep patterns, and productivity systems. I find these ideas fascinating alongside Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han, which argues we've moved from Foucault's disciplinary society (external control) to an achievement society (internal control). In this way, the Empire of Normalcy has shifted from institutional enforcement to voluntary self-surveillance. We're not told "you cannot" but rather "you can do better", enforcing systems of normalization that exhaust and depress subjects rather than liberate them -- creating the very discomfort that people mistakenly attribute to those pesky outliers and deviations from normalcy. If only we could all just fall in line - then we'd have a perfect society, right?

• March 15, 2025

  Lit, Music | The Starlight on Idaho

  Denis Johnson, othercast

  “The Starlight on Idaho” is a short story from a larger collection of Johnson's work, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden. Pairs partiuclarly well with this melancholic synth instrumental from electronic musician othercast.

• November 15, 2024

  Game | Felvidek

  Jozef Pavelka, Vlado Ganaj

  Incredibly charming JRPG inspired indie release set in a fictonalized 15th century Slovakia. I can't rave enough about how beautiful this game's art style is. It achieves the sensation of both being wonderfully nostalgic and new - reminiscent of Hylics but still in a league of its own. Excited to play more and continue to update this entry!

• February 14th, 2023

  Lit | By Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept

  Elizabeth Smart

  A ravenous and engulfing tightrope dance between memoir and poetry, Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station eventually settles down alongside the genre prose poetry. The novel is inspired by her love affair with the poet George Barker as well as her grappling with the victims of their crossfire: his wife, their children, and her own children. Divided into ten sections, power struggles between feelings of enchantment and disillusionment of reality create the friction-turned-fire intensity in this cult classic, dark romance. Each paragraph of poetry within the novel moves the narrative through primordial images and heightened feelings that come together to paint a landscape; Smart uses Biblical imagery, anapestic meter, grand emotion, and an elegant lyricism to each sentence to fuel the narrative in a speeding, trainlike fashion, always giving the sense that the train is about to crash while remaining unclear who exactly the conductor is. Smart successfully takes a non-standard approach to crafting a narrative within the novel. In particular, by way of invitation unto unstable regions that, with trust and time, form a pathway of linear motion created from juxtapositions of love, faith, denial, and betrayal, while giving remnants of what are already known about humanity’s epic battle between nature and order as landmarks along the way. Through angels and saints, forests and reflective pools, Babylon and Grand Central Station, the narrator wades through her own version of her love affair: a heroic, fated version of events that must battle against the teeth of the unforgiving natural world.

  “How can she walk through the streets, so vulnerable, so unknowing, and not have people and dogs and perpetual calamity following her? But overhung with her vines of faith, she is protected from their gaze like the pools in Epping Forest. I see she can walk across the leering world and suffer injury only from the ones she loves. But I love her and her silence is propaganda for sainthood.”