rejectamentalist manifesto

‘To imply that those currently at the top - the Warren Buffets and Roman Abramoviches of this...

Sat, 17 Jul 2010 15:22:41 +0100

‘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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Fri, 16 Jul 2010 15:22:44 +0100

Seriously? This seems a little vague. ‘At least 20’...

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 15:19:00 +0100

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!

"I am livid that as a girl who doesn’t attract men, I am constantly made to feel as if I..."

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 14:38:43 +0100

“I am livid that as a girl who doesn’t attract men, I am constantly made to feel as if I shouldn’t even be around. We have always existed. We just never feature in novels written by men, who only create women they want to have sex with.”

- Virginie Despentes, King Kong Theory

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Wed, 14 Jul 2010 14:37:42 +0100

"Bourgeois culture is dying of a myth."

Tue, 13 Jul 2010 14:36:43 +0100

“Bourgeois culture is dying of a myth.”

- Christopher Caudwell, Studies in a Dying Culture

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Mon, 12 Jul 2010 14:35:43 +0100

‘Cragley’s home was bizarre not through a … mistake but because there had been no...

Sun, 11 Jul 2010 14:34:45 +0100

‘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

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Sat, 10 Jul 2010 14:09:57 +0100

Housebreaking in fantasy worlds

Fri, 09 Jul 2010 00:43:00 +0100

‘[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.

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Mon, 05 Jul 2010 10:36:43 +0100

A few points about, translations & interpretations of, & arguments with a standard exemplar...

Sun, 04 Jul 2010 10:35:00 +0100

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.

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Sun, 04 Jul 2010 01:50:42 +0100

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Sat, 03 Jul 2010 01:48:43 +0100

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Fri, 02 Jul 2010 01:47:43 +0100

Among all books

Thu, 01 Jul 2010 01:47:00 +0100

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, “This is the sort of rare book I mean. It’s Wells’s Island of Dr. Moreau. I first read it during the War. Found it in a dug-out. A Jerry dug-out at that. I was a great reader of Wells. Had read everything he’d written so I thought; but I’d never read that, and wondered for a moment if it were his latest. But only for a moment, for it was a Nelson’s Sevenpenny, and I knew enough about books to know it wasn’t a new publication. Later, I discovered it had been written many years earlier, and I was puzzled how I’d missed it. I read it and was fascinated by it. But it wasn’t like anything else of Wells’s. It stood by itself, not only among his other books ,but, I thought, among all books. It was in a way unique. That is what I mean by a rare book. And reading it started me off on my hobby: looking for similar rare books. They may be the one rare book of an author with a long list of what I call ordinary books to his credit: or they may be the one rare book of the very few an author produced; but they all have this in common; their authors never before or afterwards did anything like them; nor any other author either.”

“You’ve certainly hit on an interesting hobby,” Mark said; “at the moment I can think of only one of that unique sort of book. It’s The End of the World, by Geoffrey Dennis.”

“There it is,” smiled Ferris, pointing to a small volume at the end of the row: “it’s my latest find; a magnificent book.”

Mark nodded. “if all your others are as good you’ve got a marvellous collection.”

“Not all,” Ferris said; “one or two are pinchbeck stuff compared with the rest; but most of them, I believe, are not only this rare sort of book, but first rate as literature.” He ran his fingers slowly along the backs of the books. “Listen to these: Hazlitt’s Liber Amoris; Beckford’s Vathek; the Grossmiths’ Diary of a Nobody; Last and First Men, by Olaf Stapledon; Trelawny’s Adventures of a Younger Son; Canton’s The Invisible Playmate; Baron Corvo’s Hadrian the Seventh; Barbellion’s Journal of a Disappointed Man; Daisy Ashford’s The Young Visiters; Bram Stoker’s Dracula; Margaret Irwin’s Still She Wished for Company; Helen Beauclerc’s Love of the Foolish Angel; Donn Byrne’s Messer Marco Polo; Ollivant’s Owd Bob; Lamb’s Rosamund Gray; Paltock’s Peter Wilkins; Melville’s Moby Dick; Williamson’s Tarka the Otter; and Grahame’s The Golden Age. That’s the tally so far, and I’ve been nearly twenty years making it. That averages one a year. But I’ve gone years without finding one. Of course it’s a purely personal choice. It entails a lot of reading. But then I do a lot.”

……….

It is ‘in a way unique’. This is the differentia specifica of the new canon and each of its components: its stood-by-itselfness, be it however pinchbeck, among all books.

Two projects are immediately indicated.

The rigorous investigation of every one of Bell’s 21 rare books.
The rigorous consideration of what books each reader’s own rare-books shelf demands to bear. Because the new canon comprises several - it is to be hoped, indeed, a growing number of - microcanons (one for each convert to the paradigm), each of 21 volumes. (Overlap is inevitable & unproblematic.)

A start can be made on both projects.

On the Seathorpe list: There is no more breathtaking perspicacity on that ‘atrocious miracle’ (Borges), The Island of Dr Moreau. Of course it was found lying in the war’s baleful burrows. Where else could that text, Fabianism’s incomparable obituary, more rigorous & terrible a presentiment of the crisis by far than anything its cantankerously bureaucratic utopian author could consciously have formulated, be more appropriately found? There in that fissure - lying surely amid mud-like remnants of its reader - like a bad thing fallen out of the sky of Paschendale, a book-shaped rebuke.
On an alternative post-Seathorpe list: 20 will follow, but the inaugural title of a collection inspired by Bell’s hermetic rumination is clear. Quite obvious, in fact: but there are no rarer books, and the choice is not mere simpering nor trite indulgence in metatext. The book, of course, is Neil Bell’s Life Comes to Seathorpe.

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Wed, 30 Jun 2010 00:11:08 +0100

"I didn’t join the force just to drift aimlessly into the void."

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 02:00:22 +0100

“I didn’t join the force just to drift aimlessly into the void.”

- The Bed-Sitting Room

Diaphanisation

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 01:46:00 +0100

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 black & like writing.

Diaphanise other things. Make the body a window.

Diptych

Sun, 13 Jun 2010 01:25:51 +0100