Tomorrow

Posted on May 27, 2009 | 1 Comment

Tomorrow he’ll be better, X promises me, tomorrow he’ll be sober and less stupid. He’ll renounce his unseemly emotions in the English way. In fact he’s renouncing them as we speak, he says. He’ll be cooler. It’s obscene isn’t it, he says, this kitsch of his, when there are struggling starving people in the world, when Aung San Suu Kyi is under house arrest, etc. I’ve discredited myself, he says, or something inside me has discredited itself, that much is clear, tomorrow I’ll be better.

This entry was posted in Kitsch, Writing. Bookmark the permalink.

One response to “Tomorrow”

  1. notesfromaroom | May 27, 2009 at 10:44 am |

    I take for myself the scorn lavished on any kind of pathos: formerly, in the name of reason (‘In order that so ardent a production, Lessing said of Werther, not do more harm than good, do you not suppose it required a brief, cool peroration?’), today in the name of ‘modernity’, which acknowledges a subject, provided it be ‘generalised’ (‘True popular music, the music of the masses, plebeian music, is open to all the impulses of group subjectivities, no longer to the solitary subjectivity, the highfalutin sentimental subjectivity of the isolated subject…’ Daniel Charles, Musique et Oubli)
    […]
    It is no longer the sexual which is indecent, it is the sentimental — censured in the name of what is in fact only another morality.

    — Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse (trans. R. Howard)

Leave a comment