Yesterday I dropped by the Peninsular Mall basement to drop off my guitar for servicing. The place has remained largely unchanged for the last 10 years. Same shops with gundam and doraemon electric guitars, alternative/band clothing stores and cheap food. Same clientele as well: troubled looking kids wearing beat up thrifted Arctic Monkies shirts and $1 rings from Taobao. Except that this time, I was the washed up tio lugging his guitar bag around.
It’s quite surprising that it’s retained its identity for so long, considering how other malls have been gobbled up by real estate investors. Commercial rent has skyrocketed in recent years, causing a 20-year record high number of F&B closures. I hope that Peninsular and Fortune Centre will stay the same for the next 2 decades at least before their inevitable fate of becoming CapitaLand clone malls. For the time being, at least, the stores have stayed open by passing down costs to consumers. My guitar servicing cost $93, a $23 increase since my last visit in 2018.
After that I took the train to Kinokuniya Takashimaya, another old haunt of mine. The reason? I moved to reading pirated e-books in 2019 as a broke student. We had to read an average of 7 novels per course, which would add up to:
69AU = 23 courses
Total texts per course: 23 * 7 = 161
Assuming $20 per text: $3,220
Which is an insane amount for a student to pay for, on top of tuition fees. Interestingly, both professors and senior students recommended using free options like libgen and internet archive. If professors have to print out readings (the legality of which is suspect) and students have to pirate educational resources, doesn’t that indicate a flawed system? I wonder how much of academia relies on this bandaid solution of pirating texts. Most of us were annotating our texts on tablets. Paper texts were exceedingly rare, although I have to admit that dense theory texts are best understood on paper. Trying to understand Julia Kristeva or Spivak on digital would have been cruel and unusual.
Kinokuniya’s flagship store had very good footfall for a Friday evening. I was looking for a paperback on theory or literature or economics that would fit in one hand, no thicker than 2 inches and under $15. Most Japanese literature fulfills these conditions. I remember reading Tanizaki’s The Makioka Sisters and Motojirou Kaiji’s short story collection Lemon in the jungle, dirt and mud sometimes tracking onto the pages. Today I was looking for the same type of book. I still have an unread paperback of Woolf’s To The Lighthouse but the thought of reading yet another dead Western European author hit me like being handed a fork and pointed to some bird shit on the pavement.
I spent some time wandering around and performing some tachiyomi. Most of the books I picked up were peddling bullshit, but this book called Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism was pretty interesting. I read enough to get a grasp on the author’s main argument, but the writing was pretty bad and boring. The thesis is that corporate giants (usual suspects Apple, Google, Meta) act as feudal lords collecting “rent” a la medieval fiefdoms hence capitalism no longer exists. This just doesn’t make sense. Non-tech sectors eclipse them: the tech sector only accounted for 10% of American GDP in 2022. Obviously, it’s hard to pin down an exact number since tech is effectively integrated within all industries. The tech sector is more of a successful player within capitalism rather than a new form of whatever Varoufakis is positing.
While I don’t agree with the central thesis, the supporting arguments are pretty interesting. Surplus labour as “cloud capital” and tech giants as feudal lords are funny metaphors. Didn’t buy the book though. After browsing I ended up spending like a hundred bucks.
Edward Said, The Selected Works of Edward Said Edward Said, The Question of Palestine Tolstoy, Anna Karenina Dostoyevsky, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (my winner)
This shit would have cost me 10 minutes and zero dollars to pirate. But I’m not about to bring my tablet into a military vehicle and track engine oil and mud and grass all over it. I could have just walked away with the Dosto, but Said had me in a chokehold. Honestly I don’t know why I bought the Tolstoy novel. I guess the Macmillan Collector’s books just hit all the right buttons. Small, practical, cheap, no bullshit and they come with the little string thing you use to bookmark with.
Yummers
There’s something about the Big Three Russian Realists that make their novels so approachable. They largely use simple language, simple themes and have this kind of worldly and relatable tone to them. And they’re not as depressing as postcolonial novels.
Anyway, that’s the story of how rentier capitalism made me spend 100 bucks on WD-40, sweat resistant commie books instead of downloading them in 5 seconds. Say the final part with me now… ¡Viva Peninsular! ¡Viva la LibGen! ¡Viva los mecánicos de guitarra honestos y trabajadores !
PS: I don’t know if anyone actually reads this blog. I average like 1 view per year. But I’ll probably update all the titles with the relevant course codes soon. It sucks that you can’t display all the post titles at the same time. Adiós compañeros!
PPS: Two Palestinian children died from starvation yesterday. 200 Palestinians have been killed by starvation.