July 2010
15 posts
‘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
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Seriously? This seems a little vague. ‘At...
“I am livid that as a girl who doesn’t attract men, I am constantly made to...”
– Virginie Despentes, King Kong Theory
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“Bourgeois culture is dying of a myth.”
– Christopher Caudwell, Studies in a Dying Culture
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‘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...
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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...
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...
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June 2010
10 posts
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Among all books
From Neil Bell’s more-than-passingly strange Life Comes to Seathorpe (1946), an indispensible dissident paradigm for literary canonisation.
……….
“A pretty expensive one.”
“Oh, not that sort. Come over here.” Presently, when they stood beside a shelf on which were ranged about a dozen volumes, Ferris took one out, opened it, and said,...
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“I didn’t join the force just to drift aimlessly into the void.”
– The Bed-Sitting Room
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Diaphanisation
Few things are more pressing than the improvement of investigative techniques.
What enzymes & immersion will render transparent the corpus of an enspecimened quotidian? What will stain any no-longer-hidden structures? Its organs? The entrails of the world are blue, bones unbloody red. Filaments that tether everything might be trace-visible & in places bits & meat pieces could be...
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Diptych
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‘It’s disgusting, it’s...
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“(One wonders why, when something is nameless, it is always so much nastier?)”
– Joan Aiken, ‘Foreword’, in The Collected Ghost Stories of E.F. Benson
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A cruel flaunting
Section 67a of the San Remo Manual of International Law Applicable to Armed Conflicts at Sea! Of course!
Since the mass murder on the Mavi Marmara, who hasn’t been on tenterhooks to discover what legal justification Israel’s apparatchiks would take? What recherché citation proving uncontroversial uncontroversiality? The San Remo Manual, eh? Your move, rest of world.
But, many of the...
Freshness, originality, creativity
How degraded is the semi-official discourse of les clercs that sanctimonious poltroonery is treated - still - as important intellectual intervention & moral weightiness?
Because the much-garlanded Lion of Conscience comes down - & the regret at being forced to do so is palpable - on the side of thinking that the mass murder of peace activists trying to deliver wheelchairs was bad, bona...
Lessons learned
Not enough dead. Must - and will - do better.
May 2010
7 posts
‘I’m telling a terrible story
But...
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Key texts for a future philosophy
‘[I]f all matter in the universe except the nematodes were swept away, our world would still be dimly recognizable, and if, as disembodied spirits, we could then investigate it, we should find its mountains, hills, vales, rivers, lakes and oceans represented by a thin film of nematodes. The locations of towns would be decipherable since for every massing of human beings there would be a...
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“The sea is beautiful and spectacular. The ship is in the sea. The ship sinks...”
–
Jazireh Ahani (Iron Island) 2005
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Typically modern
It may seem at first illogical that a radical theory of rationalism and consciousness, fit to puncture ahistoricism & the nostrums of both right & Fabian simpering, should be, in inchoate form, outlined in the short introduction to a 1936 collection of horror stories.
‘The writer of the ghost story should be a rational man, otherwise he cannot build up the matter-of-fact...
April 2010
21 posts
Against ambulatory prisons! For sedentary ones!
‘Belgium’s French-speaking liberals, who proposed the veil law, argued that an inability to identify people who have hidden their faces presents a security risk and that the veil was a “walking prison” for women.
…Wearing the facial veil, known as the niqab, and the body-length outer garment, or burqa, widely worn in Afghanistan, could lead to fines of 15-25 euros...
Genealogies of enchantment
Now, predictable, disposable, eternal.
Kiss me...
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‘Europe’s airlines and airports...
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Prepitaph
‘Even if one cannot hew a house out of a granite cliff, one could perhaps hew the ruins of a house out of it at no very great expense, so that posterity would be forced to believe a palace had stood there.’
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg exorcises Hauntology two centuries before it is born.
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Conspiracies & theories
‘[W]hat this book is about is why perfectly intelligent people can believe perfectly ridiculous things’.
David Aaronovitch, 30/1/10, poses a question.
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‘There are entire societies where the default position is to believe in conspiracy theories, like in Pakistan or Iran. … But they’re also probably more easily dispelled, especially in places...
¡No pasarán!
The Cunning Stunts of Reaction
A limp controversy putters over the ostentatious deployment, in Kick-Ass, the movie of the comic of the fantasy, of the epithet ‘c*nts’ by an 11-year-old girl. The ‘debate’, whether it is outrage at the viralling of profanity or eye-rolling insouciance at the squares’ foofaraw, man, is about vulgarity.
Far less noted is the sheer national misplacedness of the...
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Fashion forward
Punk Flappers.
You’re welcome.
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It’s funny because it’s true! Awesome....
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The sad necessity of empire
‘If it’s Haitian people [ - who ‘drift with no purpose’ -] taking care of the money, they will only take care of their clan’.
Really the US has no choice but to take control. More control, that is. ’Can Bill Clinton Keep Corruption in Haiti in Check?’ Oh, can he can he? Because unlike the purposeless & drifting Haitians, American...