‘To imply that those currently at the top - the Warren Buffets and Roman Abramoviches of this world - are the very best, the nec plus ultra of humanity, is a kind of hate speech toward the species. Dignity demands that we refute it.’
- Richard Seymour, The Meaning of David Cameron
Seriously? This seems a little vague. ‘At least 20’ victims? You can’t even be bothered to be exact? All in this neighbourhood? All children you knew?
What evidence is offered for this serious accusation?
Should we be concerned that your daughter has neither memory nor knowledge of this presumably notorious local hecatomb? (That is alleged to have occurred during her lifetime, you having even then been part of ‘a bunch of us parents’.)
Where are the bodies?
Are no eyebrows raised by the lasciviously drawn-out description of the grotesque & sadistic lynching? Do suspicions occur at the rote kitsch of your dutifully cited greedy-lawyers & incompetent-bureaucrats tropes?
Was it really unsigned paperwork that undermined this case? Or did you have no case?
Was he by any chance a loner? Stuck to himself? Never fit in?
From beyond the wall of sleep continues a remorseless campaign against a miscarriage of justice. Krueger is innocent.
Free the Elm Street One!
Virginie Despentes, King Kong Theory
Christopher Caudwell, Studies in a Dying Culture
‘Cragley’s home was bizarre not through a … mistake but because there had been no plans to follow at all. At some point … Cragley had read all the valley’s novels (most of them English Victorian, with James and his lust for the Europeans a freak and a fraud), and decided that people then, and only then, knew how to live. So he … moved to a hut which he modelled, despising the mythical author’s vulgarity while applauding his sense, after the shack in Walden. Then, with a base setup, he began his magnum opus, which grew without plan or even an organizing principle, from one descriptive paragraph to the next: a tower from Charlotte Brontë’s Thornfield Hall, kitchen from Wuthering Heights, staircase à la Miss Havisham, and on and on to the formal gardens of Middlemarch. … The house grew like the sloughed-off skin of a snake that had grown confused, thinking itself now a butterfly, now a cicada twisting its way at wrong right angles out of the brittle shell. Thrusting out or retreating to an unguessable center, the finished thing was a nightmare.’
- Neal Bell, Gone To Be Snakes Now
Housebreaking in fantasy worlds
‘[T]he viburnum sprig had enormous philosophical significance. It was “in excess” in our world. If I had taken a branch from any forest in America and brought it here, I would not have changed the number of branches on earth. But in bringing that sprig of viburnum from Saint Beregonne’s Lane I had made an intrinsic addition that could not have been made by all the tropical growths in the world, because I had taken it from a plane of existence that was real only for me.
‘I was therefore able to take an object from that plane and bring it into the world of men, where no one could contest my ownership of it. Ownership could never be more absolute, in fact, because the object would owe nothing to any industry, and it would augment the normally immutable patrimony of the earth …
‘My reasoning flowed on, wide as a river, carrying fleets of words, encircling islands of appeasl to philosophy; it was swollen by a vast system of logical tributaries until it reached a conclusive demonstration that a theft committed in Saint Beregonne’s Lane was not a theft in the Mohlenstrasse.
‘Fortified by this nonsense, I judged that the matter was settled. My only concern would be to avoid the reprisals of the mysterious inhabitants of the street, or of the world to which it led.
‘When the Spanish conquistadores spent the gold they had brought back from the new India, I think they cared very little about the anger of the faraway peoples they had despoiled.’
- Jean Ray, ‘The Shadowy Street’/’The Tenebrous Alley’
‘[I]t remains a mystery where this surplus originated.’
- Marx, Capital Vol. 3
Capital accumulation as: a pioneering sortie into a magical realm; a theft that is not a theft; regrettably generative of opaque angers.
A few points about, translations & interpretations of, & arguments with a standard exemplar of the stenchful & emetic.
- Para 1: On Weaponised ‘Good Faith’. ‘Many US policymakers … genuinely felt … was a noble thing …’ &c. i) No evidence is adduced to support this contention. ii) The countercontention here - that many US policymakers genuinely did not give a genuine rolling fuck about nobility or any such genuine horseshit but genuinely considered this genuinely mass-murderous action to be in their interests & thus, genuinely, desirable - would surely seem at the very least equally plausible. iii) If the original contention has any truth, given the extreme & obvious facility of human animals at self-justification, it is irrelevant. Depredations are no less depraved if their perpetrators persuade themselves to genuinely believe their own anything.
- Para 2: Dissidence Is a Bolt-On. ‘Chomsky took up a sideline in political writing in opposition to the Vietnam war’. The casual sniggering baiting viciousness of this traducing of a lifetime’s rage & contumely-attracting bravery does not, though it aspires to swagger, rise above the pettily vile.
- Para 3: He Knows What He Likes. ‘[F]avourite Chomskyan themes’. Analysis & critique is driven by personal predilection, not by anything worth analysing or criticising.
- Para 6: Turn Your Frown Upside-Down. ‘It is a cripplingly bleak philosophy.’ That this, for chest-hollowingly vast numbers, cripplingly bleak world deserves a few smilier thinky-thinks is implied; but is not, & could hardly be, argued.
- Para 7: Analysand Be Damned. ‘[T]he irony that he owes his considerable success to the system he despises. Does it bother him, perhaps, that he has lived the American dream?’ The eyebrow-raised faux-cleverness of the final sentence, its case that this lifetime’s radical oeuvre is an Oedipal hissy fit, relies for any effect on readers not pausing over the truly epically idiotic - if calculated - preceding sentence.
