June 22, 2023
The drama of Ellsberg’s life is also the drama of a political life as such.
April 12, 2023
Emahoy, herself a subject of Western imperialist violence, synthesized from the periphery.
On Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou
February 9, 2023
It’s one of the most gorgeous and mysterious things ever to happen on an electric guitar.
On Tom Verlaine
December 12, 2022
“There is a life here”
On Bernadette Mayer (1945–2022)
I had arrived at the all too probably named Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute past its ostensible heyday. Founded in 1974 by Waldman and her “spiritual husband” Allen Ginsberg, the school had the reputation of a mountain retreat for the Beat Poets, and their friends in the New York School, and their friends in the Black Mountain school, and their friends in the New Narrative school.
Our Godard
On Jean-Luc Godard (1930 – 2022)
Godard always seemed to be asking What is a movie? What can it do? knowing that he would never find a satisfying answer, forever in pursuit of what was still beyond the grasp of his own prodigious powers.
Introduction
For better or worse, dead people do rule
For better or worse, dead people do rule. They rule because we love them, and they rule because, like many people over 65 today, they were late to retire and reluctant to surrender their reign.
The red-pilled among us might argue that the Pleats themselves made me trans.
Miyake’s Layers
The point was that middle-class radicals had to engage in struggle from where they stood already.
You Don’t Want to Know This?
November 29, 2022
On Hans Magnus Enzensberger
Why should one not have readers? Was there any merit in being difficult or obscure?
He designed a fridge-magnet poem-kit (which, I believe, has now had a software program based on it). He wrote a skeptical book about Europe in 1987, before Europe was really a subject (Ach Europa! was the wonderful title of the original; Europe Europe in English). He wrote a children’s book, an opera libretto about a runaway Cuban slave, a world-best-selling math book (The Number Devil), a partial memoir (Tumult).
November 16, 2022
Mike Davis’s Specificities
Repetitious and reductive appeals to the universal never satisfied him
The US working class was forged, for Davis, through its compounded historical defeat, which gave it a distinctive contradictory, battered, and lumpy form that could not be evened out through appeals to abstraction. Most importantly, the cycle of defeat and accommodation had separated the official labor movement from the Black working class, which he saw as the only possible “cutting edge” for socialist politics.
October 13, 2022
Facts, in Latour’s view, don’t exist “out there,” waiting to be discovered or understood.
On Bruno Latour (1947–2022)
September 16, 2022
Miyake’s Layers
Contemporary fashion often seems to be in mourning for itself
Yesterday’s Pleats are in tomorrow’s seafood (microplastics, it seems, tend to proliferate in mollusks like scallops, mussels and oysters, fancy girl food and treif alike). Of all the myriad toxicities of microplastics, I was most tickled to learn that they are estrogenic and lower sperm count; the red-pilled among us might argue that the Pleats themselves made me trans.
