ulvir posted:

at least one of those two were 100% definitely and absolutely confirmed anti-semite and nazi though, let's be real

Lil Mama Im Sorry posted:

can you imagine how annoying this thread would be if Hitler would've wrote short fiction instead of painting?

Take the plunge! Okay! posted:

Don’t mention the coup

Tim Burns Effect posted:

are we doing "fascists write good" again?

Bilirubin posted:

Have you read China Mieville's Last Days in New Paris?

Of course not, this is the real lit thread, but your post is pretty on the nose for that book. Let's discuss!

Shibawanko posted:

The coup was clearly staged to result in death, he probably didn't think it would actually work, which is why so much preparation went into the suicide. In any case even his explicit motivations for the coup were more complicated than that, he saw the postwar ideology of "passive, victimised Japanese people" as a ploy by the Americans to treat Japan as their colony, and the language of the coup was mostly directed against that.

Real Japanese fascism exists but it's invariably strongly sinophobic or talks about killing all zainichi Koreans and things like that. I've read a lot of Mishima, including some of the untranslated "theory" stuff and it never strikes that tone, as far as I'm aware. The worst it gets is when he says things like how the inherent unity of Japanese culture prevents things like racial frictions from occurring and that the US is a false model for examining that sort of thing in the context of Japan. Japanese fascists also generally do not like Mishima and don't talk about him. Contemporary Japanese fascists are also usually pro-American.

Take the plunge! Okay! posted:

Yeah, that suicide was a hot way to die, especially for someone with a Saint Sebastian fetish, I agree completely on the entire sexual undertones being more important than nationalism front. BTW the Paul Schrader film is super cool and Philip Glass composed the soundtrack. I really like Mishima’s writing and I think the film really does him justice, especially Ken Ogata’s titular performance.

Take the plunge! Okay! posted:

Yeah, that suicide was a hot way to die, especially for someone with a Saint Sebastian fetish, I agree completely on the entire sexual undertones being more important than nationalism front. BTW the Paul Schrader film is super cool and Philip Glass composed the soundtrack. I really like Mishima’s writing and I think the film really does him justice, especially Ken Ogata’s titular performance.

rest his guts posted:

e: holy gently caress. I guess Mishima also

V. Illych L. posted:

fascism doesn't need a racial component, though racial thought fits it pretty well. what it does need is a sort of modernistic hyper-romantic view of an in-group and its heroic, violent destiny

which one must say that mishima had

VileLL posted:

possibly the single worst prose you'll ever see comes from by-the-book liberals doing introductions for fascists

"In fact, when not sounding like the best literature professor you will ever have, Pound could almost pass for a modern-day blogger."

"In attacking the clay icons of the literary establishment of his day Pound was even snarky, long before the word existed"

"He’s got the piratical bravado of an outlaw hacker"

i don't want to find quotes from the celine, but i remember the guy rhapsodising for half a page of footnotes about the unmistakable genius of celine including a fake name in a list of real people. trying to send him a copy of rabelais

Shibawanko posted:

I think that there's a meaningful difference between reactionary art and reactionary politics. The fascism that forms governments and murders people is not the same fascism as that of Mishima. It was just a fantasy he had, and I think he was perfectly aware that it had a lot more to do with sexy uniformed men's asses and self loathing than with something as vulgar as actually taking power.

This is I think also why Stalin was very lenient to even pro-White artists and let them do their thing. Art needs a reactionary component to really be art.

V. Illych L. posted:

i think you're underestimating the centrality of the aesthetic to the fascist political programme - in the words of walter benjamin, it's the aestheticisation of politics which is precisely fascism's main project

the beautiful death, for example, is a hugely recurring theme in spanish fascism. simply placing primacy on the beautiful society over something actually worth living in is the core of fascism - this is how they justified murdering all those people, because they contributed to the ugliness of material society

run-off-the-mill reactionaries had existed for a really long time, but fascism genuinely seems to have been a 20th-century invention - it seems like a reaction to the lack of clear meaning and direction, and to the social disintegration observed in the interwar period

fascism is basically politics as performance art, and it's hard for me to see mishima's doomed coup as anything but that

derp posted:

Okay which Mishima book should I read first.

derp posted:

Okay which Mishima book should I read first.

The Unholy Ghost posted:

I'm almost through Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, a book already cemented as my favorite novel of all time. This kind of complexity, absurdity and fantastic metaphorical imagery is my jam. I read up on the author and how he's so incredibly reclusive. Does anyone know for sure that he's not actually a group of people? It's kind of hard for me to believe that one person could write such an ingenious work and still be publishing such complex, relevant books even to this day (Bleeding Edge).

CestMoi posted:

derp posted:

What's so funny about it? If one person is good at writing surely it follows that multiple people would be better.

derp posted:

It's simple math. One skill plus one skill equals two skills. Imagine a very young but talented artist, and then add the experience of a very old man. Together, imagine what they could do! If only people weren't so isolated internally they could cooperate to create wonders.