It's almost time for 2010, which, as you know, we have declared to be "The Year of Repressive Desublimation." Let's start things off early, with a little something from "I'm Learning to Share!" - the "blog" that's always way ahead of me. Here's a "post" about John Stanley, for example, whom we just mentioned the other day. This one is about a comic book called KOOKIE. As ILtS puts it, "It was one of many examples of the then-prevalent trend of co-opting the Beat movement into the mainsteam via wacky beatnik characters." Sounds like repressive desublimation to me! On the other hand, the beatniks are pictured - spoiler alert! - strolling to someone's house, which is burning down, to roast marshmallows in the white-hot embers. Now, as you may recall, the New York Times says that repressive desublimation "reroutes unruly and rebellious instinctual energies into politically harmless sybaritic indulgence, escapist entertainment and spiritual delusion." But it seems to me that KOOKIE may be a harrowing pathological critique rather than a defanging through slyly superficial appropriation - if anything, it makes me afraid of beatniks. They don't seem "harmless"! They want to roast marshmallows over my home's smoldering remains!
