If by ownership you mean the ownership of the things that would allow you to reproduce your own existence, a separation from that, not bourgeois property ownership, it becomes a very interesting story. It is a story about migration out of family structures and into places like cities.
I think that there’s something really interesting there in Chris’s work about how the homosexuality that we either see or project onto the past—see in it our own projection onto the past—is like a vector for actual and potential forms of life and ways of building community that have anti-capitalist potential, almost less than the fact of the sexuality itself. But the way that those migrants see that within the family they are superfluous, capitalist production means they are no longer needed to maintain the farm, and that they must go survive some other way in the city, leads to a life where you encounter other people in a similar situation and experience forms of intimacy that, whatever sexual acts they may entail with other men, create the possibility of envisioning or living, in small ways, differently to the dominant ideal.
Posted 797 days ago.
I’m stuck on the hand, which makes no sense, I mean, except for the fact that it came out of nowhere. But it gets me where I need to be to set out for where I’m going, or so I’d think, and yet here I am, staring at the dam’ hand, unable to move past it.
Usually at this point I rip out what’s stuck, down to the studs, and rebuild it, but the whole edifice of this one is already terminally shaky; my hands have been writing one fix-it-in-post check after another that my fundament may well not be able to cash.
And I still have no idea how it exactly ends.
It’s possible, maybe—this volume has been the one I’ve most, I don’t want to say tightly, but, that I’ve outlined in the most detail, and maybe writing to the structure has distracted me from writing to, y’know, the story—that ol’ thing—but even as I set the thought down in words it clunks all hollow. I’m telling myself a story. This isn’t the problem, either.
Ah, don’t worry. I’ll figure it out. I always do. Right?
Here. Have a cover shot.
Posted 813 days ago.
But when I think of this history, it’s not the forces of oppression I center. Instead, I focus on the radical visioning of communities of color who were able to dream themselves into futures barred to them.
There’s a historical through-line here, too, from logging families in the multiracial, multiethnic community of Maxville in the 1920s in Eastern Oregon to current organizing by groups like the Portland African American Leadership Forum over the “right of return” for communities displaced by gentrification and discriminatory housing practices. The fact that Black communities exist here at all is incredible: we were never supposed to take root. That we did is due entirely to resistance, vision, and sheer force of will—and our ongoing commitment to care for each other in a place trying to destroy us.
Doing this work around the state has taught me that when you take the historical long view, the concept of justice becomes much simpler. The idea of “civil” discussions that give the same weight to all sides fades away. There are, in fact, really only two sides to history—the right side and the wrong side. We need to take the long view when thinking about our actions, and our work. What will be written of our actions (or our inactions) in 100 years? How will the future judge us?
Posted 843 days ago.
This is maybe a bit of an idiosyncratic view, but i’ve always understood the “point” of poetry to be in the demonstration that the image-arrangements or “argument” of the poem are already laying “in the language as such” in ways that are evidenced by their expressibility in rhyme and meter.
This is basically the old Emersonian point at the top of the page: a “poem” is when an argument is so much itself that it can simply appear, and take a metrical form as an indication of its always-already having been present in the language, but just not organized into a poem yet. What the poet does is notice the concatenation of the geometric “fact” of the poem’s possibility within a particular rhyme-and-meter space, and point that out. This is why I have always considered poetry to be a version of nonfiction: the poem is the words that are there where there is a pointer labeled “poem.”
Posted 928 days ago.
The mediocre, the false, the пошлость, can at least afford a mischievous but very healthy pleasure, as you stamp and groan through a second-rate book which has been awarded a prize. But the books you like must also be read with shudders and gasps. Let me submit the following practical suggestion: literature, real literature, must not be gulped down like some potion which may be good for the heart or good for the brain—the brain, that stomach of the soul. Literature must be taken and broken to bits, pulled apart, squashed; then its lovely reek will be smelt in the hollow of the palm, it will be munched and rolled upon the tongue with relish; then, and only then, its rare flavor will be appreciated at its true worth and the broken and crushed parts will again come together in your mind and disclose the beauty of a unity to which you have contributed something of your own blood.
Posted 938 days ago.
At first glance, it seemed an absurd way to make traffic safer, and Mockus was ridiculed in the press for pursuing it. But gradually, by making fun of drivers and pedestrians who didn’t follow basic rules and celebrating those who did, the mimes managed to transform the entire traffic culture of the city, successfully infusing Bogotá’s streets with common sense—or, rather, a sense of the commons.
The construction of the urban environment, a duty usually reserved for engineers, architects, developers, and the like, became, under Mockus’ mayorship, the responsibility of all urban inhabitants. His programs for Bogotá viewed citizens as political beings who are always already participating in the construction of their city, either with their good or bad attitudes.
“The mayor’s genius,” suggests Raymond Fisman, “was in recognizing that writing harsher laws or hiring more gun-toting policemen would be futile when confronted with a law-breaking culture. Instead he enabled Bogotá’s citizens to make change themselves.” Or as Mockus himself explains it, “Knowledge empowers people. If people know the rules and are sensitized by art, humour, and creativity, they are much more likely to accept change.”
Posted 946 days ago.
Rushkoff’s aim is partly for the reader to see these billionaires and their projects as absurd, even silly. Again, I can see the attraction in such an approach. I have found it difficult to avoid snark and sarcasm in my own writing about some of these characters. But it strikes me in this instance as missing the mark. For one thing, while it may be that their most grandiose visions are highly unlikely to come to fruition, their point may not be to achieve their most ambitious ends but to take advantage of the opportunities created along the way—opportunities that involve further privatization, increased wealth disparities, and social exclusions of the kind we already see. The spectacle is part of the grift. It is no accident that organizations such as the Seasteading Institute incorporate their opponents’ ridicule into their sales pitches. When the Netflix series Love, Death & Robots (2019 – present) did an animated short mocking “exit” strategies such as bunker-prepping and seasteading, the Seasteading Institute referenced the ridicule in its promotional materials.
Of course they would: being dismissed as quirky delusionaries is central to the narrative that tech escapists like to tell about themselves as misunderstood dreamers and unappreciated geniuses. It is, moreover, a kind of sales pitch sleight of hand. They count on us being too busy staring agape, laughing at the absurdity of the vision or lamenting the betrayal of tech’s emancipatory possibilities, to notice the conventional stench of extraction, dispossession, and colonial sleaze wafting in the air.
Posted 954 days ago.
The houses, many of which were sitting empty for years, have become FREE SPACES that hold so much more than a roof over our heads. They are home to anarchist libraries, food distros, parties, film screenings, dinners, constantly re-arranging affinities, intimacies, and an endless tide of batshit ideas and inciteful possibilities. To live inside walls slated for demolition is to live outside of this world and against it. We are doing this because we want to. We believe in Nothing and we believe in Everything because “we” is undefined and always changing.
Squatting public housing helps us bridge divisions prescribed by society. Together, long-time unhoused residents and younger folks trying to build a freer city can understand our shared enemies, violent state forces seeking only to cleanse the neighborhood of its poorest and most non-compliant residents in attempt to squeeze the last drips of profit from stolen land while it still appears to belong to the crumbling empire. We are our neighbors, we protect ourselves, we protect each other.
Squat the world! Fuck private property, fuck landlords, and fuck the State!
—Anarchist Network of Ungovernable Squatters
Posted 962 days ago.
A bit earlier today I crossed the nine-thousand word mark on the first draft of no. 41, which means I’m roughly about halfway through, give or take, the way these things usually go, and but it’s two and a half months or so into the writing of it; I won’t jinx the enterprise by saying anything about speed or weight or momentum, let’s just keep on with the keeping on of it. The idea is to be done with the volume and the season this year, so I’ll be brief and to the point—but here, at least, have a cover reveal. —See y’all in a bit.
Posted 969 days ago.
But some people will say that all this may be very fine, but that they cannot understand it on account of the allegory. They are afraid of the allegory, as if they thought it would bite them: they look at it as a child looks at a painted dragon, and think it will strangle them in its shining folds. This is very idle. If they do not meddle with the allegory, the allegory will not meddle with them. Without minding it at all, the whole is as plain as a pikestaff.
Posted 1037 days ago.
