rejectamentalist manifesto

Let Ahimaaz rejoice with the Silver-Worm who is a living mineral / For there is silver in my mines and I bless God that it is rather there than in my coffers.

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 23:51:00 +0000

Ecstatic poem, annotated, call-&-response.

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Fri, 25 Nov 2011 22:53:55 +0000

Proposal for two new verbs

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 15:13:00 +0100

Faced with institutional pressure to sign off on violent reaction, to side with power against justice, the great majority of self-styled radicals ‘working within the system’ quan. A very few, though, have the guts to fraser.

Gilad Schalit is showing signs of malnutrition. What have his captors done to him? Such shocking...

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 18:34:24 +0100

Gilad Schalit is showing signs of malnutrition. What have his captors done to him? Such shocking revelations must mean fresh scrutiny of those who have held him.

How could it not? What kind of power, after all, would deliberately starve even the youngest captives, according to chillingly cynical calorifico-political calculation, as a matter of publicly stated policy?

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Tue, 18 Oct 2011 12:58:41 +0100

Advertising standards

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 13:06:07 +0100

Butter. Because natives won’t exterminate themselves.

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Sun, 11 Sep 2011 04:18:32 +0100

Dunkleosteus is not extinct. It has evolved with wit & with...

Mon, 05 Sep 2011 06:36:54 +0100

Dunkleosteus is not extinct. It has evolved with wit & with cunning.

Enthusing over the delicious taste of strawberries when the government shits on a spoon & tells you it's jam

Sat, 03 Sep 2011 19:18:00 +0100

Delicious jam:

Gaddafi himself has on occasion cut a rather comical figure, with his eccentric dress sense and insistence on greeting dignatories in a desert tent…

…the eccentric colonel, where some wonder if he may now make his last stand. There he would hold court in a huge Bedouin tent…

…eccentric tendencies. He dressed flamboyantly, insisted on sleeping in a Bedouin tent…

…the eccentric despot… In the center of the complex, surrounded by lush vegetation, stood Gadhafi’s Bedouin tent…

Gaddafi himself, when he wasn’t the dramatic figure of iconic evil, was a murderous eccentric who pitched his tent in the gardens of the Elysée…

Shit:

A letter from an MI6 official to Mr Koussa stated “No 10 are keen that the Prime Minister meet the Leader in the tent. I don’t know why the English are fascinated by tents. The plain fact is that the journalists would love it.”

Celebrity to Asians - well done you on the not-terrorism

Thu, 25 Aug 2011 21:16:00 +0100

More incisive politics from one of the UK’s most fêted writers.

The good thing that came out of the riots was a renewed sense of community. “How does one put this without sounding gross … it was terrific to see the Asian communities on telly and not to have to think about terrorism, and not to have to think about the thing I’m always thinking about… do they want to kill Jews?”

Kudos indeed by the way for not sounding gross, &, yes, what about our pain? Which of us White Folk has not long been strung out by our obligation to wonder whether brown people want to ostentatiously kill Jews?

(Jacobson does always speak for victims. Recall his wise intervention about the flotilla hellbent & merciless in its intent to deliver letters to Gaza. With Alice Walker yammering on about Palestinian children, what, insisted Jacobson, of the real victims, the heavily armed Israeli soldiers? Bringing mail, or in Jacobsonian idiom, ‘a cargo of intention … freighted with political sympathy and attitude’, would have been ‘a provocation’, the flotilla ‘half inviting a violence’. They were, to put it another way, asking for it. How refreshingly Jacobson cut through the cant, Walker’s ‘language of outraged moral purity’, her delight in ‘feeling good about herself’. & snap to you too, Hedy Epstein! You & Hajo Meyer. All Holocaust-survivor this, unarmed-civilian-that, solidarity-against-oppression the other. Such fucking drama queens.)

Anyway, you know Asians? Isn’t it brilliant that we’re not forced to assume they’re terrorist Jew-killers any more? That was some tiring shit right there.

Such images are never about the animal. They are always excuses to depict buildings in the...

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 12:30:06 +0100

Such images are never about the animal. They are always excuses to depict buildings in the background. A terrible lubriciousness for architecture, zoologically disavowed.

Except where those animals will not stay still. Defy their depicter. Walk right up to that unmentionable and sniff it. The guilt, but oh, the relief.

Of course it would be pigs.

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Wed, 17 Aug 2011 12:30:05 +0100

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Tue, 16 Aug 2011 12:30:06 +0100

Praeteritio & political priorities

Mon, 15 Aug 2011 21:28:00 +0100

(Parenthetically, just as a muttered aside, pootling around online, swallowing bile, following links to those who, popping the collars on their threadbare contrarianism, foppishly defend primetime white supremacism, one grows tempted - sorely fucking tempted - to articulate a position whereby hate for them is the indispensable political grundnorm. But we must keep perspective. It would be a waste of time, a dereliction. If one man in particular were to demand attention, on that & many occasions, by the toddler’s method of screaming & smearing himself with shit, he would be a vacuity, a swaggering irrelevance, a malefic clown, a bleating pantomime sidekick spite-monger. He would have no agency, would be flotsam tossed as mindless as bladderwrack in & by the choppy froth of reaction. He would be a function of Evil at its very laziest, its least imaginative. Or as if, rather ironically, the result of industrial action in Hell, extruded from the vats by devils on a work-to-rule. For these reasons, rejectamentalist manifesto would never pay such a one any mind.)

There has been universal condemnation of David Starkey’s extraordinary outburst on Newsnight,...

Sat, 13 Aug 2011 08:49:00 +0100

There has been universal condemnation of David Starkey’s extraordinary outburst on Newsnight, in which he blamed Jews, or ‘a culture of Jewry’, for Britain’s woes.

‘I’ve just been rereading Julius Streicher. … His prophecy was absolutely right in one sense. … But it wasn’t Jew-on-Gentile violence. … What has happened is that a substantial section of the chavs … have become Jews. The Gentiles have become Jews. A particular sort of conniving, secretive, nihilistic usurious culture has become the fashion. And Gentile and Jew, boy and girl, operate in this language together, this language which is wholly false, which is this Eastern European Yiddish that’s been intruded in England, and this is why so many of us have this sense of literally a foreign country. …. It’s not blood, it’s cultural. … Listen to David Miliband, an archetypal successful Jew. If you turned the screen off so you were listening to him on radio you’d think he was Christian.’

It is uncontroversial of course that such explicitly racist statements are beyond the pale. The fascist right is delighted, but no mainstream commentators have anything but condemnation for these remarks.

Oh wait, my bad.

Smash, Grab, Run

Tue, 09 Aug 2011 00:59:00 +0100

Let the minutes unleash

The bullets Brixton wishes

Barbed wire is the ivy on my walls

Acrid cordite like mist in autumn

Dissolves the harsh street into pellucid cameos

Think how the striking truncheon outpaces thought

How the burgeoning Molotov cancels discussion

And for just this once in my black British life

Exploded the atoms in me into atoms of power

Let each viewfinder’s instant exorcise

The pictorial myths complacency devises

Each hurtling brick aimed to smash this enchanter’s glass

Aimed to loot the truths for so long packaged in lies

I am the hundreds of putrid meat in English prisons

In derelict houses, in borstals, the millions of condemned meat

Who let the grim minutes unleash their canned grime.

Dambudzo Marechera

No object of any dignity in any jewellery drawer would allow...

Tue, 02 Aug 2011 00:57:24 +0100

No object of any dignity in any jewellery drawer would allow itself to nestle randomly against its neighbours. But, mute, dumb, without motile power or mind, they do not choose their dioramas. Accordingly, their only option is to retrofit symbolic coincidence from the scenes they must motionlessly enact.

The majority of trinkets, tchotchkes & ornaments make themselves religious references. Back-project minor cults & orders whose teachings they abruptly illustrate. Here, four pieces perform the Parable of the Wise Procrastinator, from the Gospel According to Jonah’s Great Fish.

The punditocracy knew who was responsible. It wasn’t pretty to see the righteous...

Thu, 28 Jul 2011 00:07:00 +0100

The punditocracy knew who was responsible. It wasn’t pretty to see the righteous certainties of Islamic savagery crumble in the face of mere truth. The efforts to continue to apportion blame where all blame must lie have been fervent but disappointing. The attempt to defend Breivik as a paladin of The West displays a regrettable lack of savoir faire: one may indulge such strategies, but one does not speak of it at table. Insinuations that multiculturalism is to blame feel a little oblique. Insistences that yeah but still Islam is the enemy have the whiff of fire-fighting.

We’ve come to a pretty pass if court experts are going to allow bagatelles like irrefutable proof that they are talking bullshit to undermine the baiting on which their livelihoods depend. Fortunately, we can build on by far the most ambitious of the rhetorical strategies deployed in rearguard defence against the terrorist’s white Christianness: the impressively ex nihilo insistence that the Muslim-hating fascist learned his craft from Muslims, ‘adopted the language’ of jihad. In fact the perfidy is worse even than that.

Avant-garde physics is open to the idea that the future can affect the past. It is not disputed that Breivik technically did it: the question, surely, is who is going to have made him do it?

Europe awake. Yestermorrow there will was be going to have been Jihadi retrocausality to contend with.

Elements

Sun, 24 Jul 2011 00:07:19 +0100

The earth elemental manifested in a form combining indolence & destruction. Even its evicted victim had to say well played.

Static, or what scientists term ‘poised’, fire.

In the pugilist science created to beat up the air, kerchiefs loosely tied serve roughly the same purpose as boxing gloves. Injuries to the fists are, nonetheless, common.

The - not silver! - lining to the tragedy is transmutation. That such-&-such a place is...

Sat, 09 Jul 2011 01:57:00 +0100

The - not silver! - lining to the tragedy is transmutation. That such-&-such a place is ‘paved with gold’ is bastardised gibberish of course; but it is a folk-memory of alchemico-urban aspiration. Sufficient footfall does render a surface potent. Streets become alembics. Most matter remains stubbornly not-gold, but minor alterations are feasible. Dead favourites, for example, become jewels.