ASK TREESHIP whats your favorite gilmore girls episode

also, unregistered, why did you ask me that question of all people?

treesh to what extent is your character determined by your irish ancestry? do you identify as irish in anything more than a bare factual sense?

i don't really identify as irish in any important way, no. the catholic component of "irish-catholic" influenced me though, as i've described. my family were never really into being irish the way some irish-american families are. the only reason i have an extremely irish name is because i had like 30something cousins so most of the family names my mom liked were already taken.

what's your favourite mineral?

salt probably

sry, correct answer was "red lemonade"

do you think you are actively trying to disinherit your irishness because irish american culture is associated in the popular imagination with a value system antithetical to your own?

ime, the popular imagination doesn't give a rat's patoot about 'irish american culture', bcz the number of americans who share some measure of irish descent includes at least a quarter of the population and considered collectively they share little or nothing in the way of a common culture that is not also shared by americans generally.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Irish_people_of_Chinese_descent

i) 25% of a population is not too great to have an identifiable culture*
ii) the popular imagination is not founded empirically

* White Population
223,553,265
72.4% of the total U.S. population in 2010.[3]

yeah that's not right. 25% might be of irish descent but some of their ancestors came in the 19th century and some came later. also the popular imagination is not founded empirically. btw i don't give a rat's patoot.

to nakh's question, it just never seemed like a big deal to me. however, i used to date someone who was deeply into her boston irish roots and i think she was suspicious of how little i identified with being irish. can't prove this though... i forget the specifics of conversations, but i think maybe i said something once about not liking the association between irish american culture and drinking and she interpreted it as something.... what makes you ask this?

treesh are you a ginger

because GINGERS DO HAVE SOULS

i have dark hair but a few flecks of red in my beard.

have you read joyce? did you identify with him more than kafka or proust or tolstoy or whatever

oh yeah. joyce is my favorite author.

or more specifically, i love dubliners, portrait, and ulysses. i have no comment on finnegans wake, which i haven't been able to get into (not for lack of trying). it seems like it could be your kind of book though. you seem to love language for its own sake more than i do. i'm kind of a sentimental reader and the reason ulysses works for me is that i was really invested in the characters of stephen and bloom.

without seeking to reduce that to a simple ethnic affiliation, do you think that is entirely coincidental to your shared irishness?

i don't really think so, no. i think it has to do with joyce's authorial perspective, which is at once panoptic and narcissistic. his way of thinking was ideally suited to the form of the novel, i think. this did have something to do with his being irish -- cf. portrait of an artist, obvs -- and the jesuit education that submerged his humanistic consciousness in austere aristotelian (i think) theology, but that's something that has nothing to do with me.

feel the need to say here that i am not that interesting, and there are other posters whose background it would be more fruitful to investigate. still interested in hearing what unregistered has to say about my response to his question though.

welcome back to illx treeship dog

:)

do you have a cat?

do you think this is because joyce's concerns with nationality pertain too specifically to the exigencies of his time and class, the awakening of national consciousness after yeats synge, the prior century's failed attempts at irish nationhood and the consequent fixation on 'betrayals' (parnell etc), the need to recognize rome as a tyranny as powerful as london, and that none of these really have anything to do with middle class life in america in the early 21st century? and that since joyce was fixated on the paradoxical identity of being irish and bourgeois under english dominion, why should someone living in a time and place with minimal class consciousness and labile and essentially meaningless ethnic or subnational identities care about such things when they can happily avoid them?

treesh you are more interesting than you realize

it's possible that not all of that interestingness is visible to you because you are consumed with simply being treesh

harbl: i don't have a cat but i have a dog, a 2 year old golden retriever named georgie.

nakh: 1.) thanks. 2.) i think class identities -- which may be invisible, and different from the familiar marxist categories, but still play a role in structuring social reality -- are fundamentally different from "subnational" identities like irishness is for white americans in 2013, because the latter really are insignificant, not "overlooked". none of my grandparents were from ireland. but to answer your question, yeah, being irish-american for me has nothing to do with being a colonial or poscolonial subject so i don't personally relate to joyce's politial preoccupations. i understand that stuff is key to understanding the man and his work though.

also harbl, if i had a cat it would be named bartleby. you can get away with more syllables in cat names than dog names because you don't have to call them all the time.

yeah i just call my cat buddy or cat. she doesn't even know her name.

From the 'Ask Nilmar/Nakh' thread:

Is the Nilmar I Facebook friended actually you?

― Treeship, Monday, August 12, 2013 2:57 AM (2 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I would like to hear more about how this panned out.

I mean, I'm assuming the answer was 'no', but who was it you Facebook friended?

I think I remember someone telling a story on ilx about how they set up a fake James Franco Facebook account and the real Tao Lin messaged then asking if they were still meeting up for lunch as planned? I would like to hear the story of how Treeship befriended the real Nilmar Honorato da Silva through a series of comic misunderstandings, if such a story exists.

Unforch that is the real nakh

Or else nakh ilx verzh is the real nilmar

lynchian switch . Swyntch.

treesh have you read 'remainder' by tom mccarthy

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2008/nov/20/two-paths-for-the-novel/

no but i read that article when it was first published. it argues that the opposition between "postmodern" fiction that takes liberty with both form and narrative plausibility and more conventional "realist" fiction is a false choice, right?

is remainder worth picking up?

also, semi-related, i just woke up from a dream where a hot new novel was getting lots of critical buzz but the novel was just a chocolate cake that readers were instructed to eat. it was sold in bookstores, however, which distinguished it from cakes sold in bakeries. there was a lot of discussion about whether this was "really" a novel just because the author said it was and in the course of the dream i at first passionately defended it but then was convinced to change my mind and denounced it.

treesh you should absolutely read remainder

was the author of the chocolate cake novel tao lin?

I think it was jonathan franzen even though irl i think he hates anything that could be perceived as a "stunt"

treesh what do you think of this assertion by brian eno

I’m becoming increasingly anti-sport. I think sport is encouraged by governments to channel what would be male revolutionary energy into totally pointless activities. Sport is a great technique of social control.

disclaimer: i think treesh is the best ilx nom de plume (i believe it was hoos first used the contracted form) and it is possible that i ask you more questions than i otherwise would in order to able to say 'treesh', i would probably name a cat or a housing development treesh

i don't think there's much need of "distraction" from revolutionary politics as there aren't really any major emancipatory movements in britain and america for angry young men to become involved with. certainly nothing for governments to worry about. the left is dead as two of my marxist friends are always saying. one of the great advantages of our phase of capitalism -- from the perspective of those for whom the system works best -- is that everything is so complex and intertwined it's never really clear who the enemies are. anger wouldn't be useful right now, when the parameters of the conflict are so hazy.

or at least not that kind of anger that demands immediate, cathartic release of the sort people find watching sports.

how's your workout program going?

as if a nation of rioting angry disaffected young ppl is better than a nation of tv-sports-watching-couch-zombies

not so good dylann. need to get back to asap as i am still paying for a gym membership.

describe your gym

it's amazing and i can't really afford it. there's a pool, for one, which i appreciate. personal trainer appointment is included every six weeks to tweak your program according to your progress and goals. every four months a cute nurse will take your body composition using a machine so you can get a more nuanced sense of your progress than just height and weight would provide. or at least the one i had for my initial consultation was cute. there are all kinds of fitness classes that i should take advantage of but don't because i've just been coming straight home after work and drinking beer the past few weeks.

exercise for me requires a certain mindset -- being "pumped up", or in the moment enough to be able to push through difficult patches -- which feels really unnatural for me most of the time. that's the biggest hurdle.

describe the nurse