And even if you must select a tiny, ultra-radical minority within the Black Bloc and pretend their views are representative of anyone who ever put on a hoodie, you could at least be up-to-date about it. It was back in 1999 that people used to pretend “the Black Bloc” was made up of nihilistic primitivist followers of John Zerzan opposed to all forms of organization. Nowadays, the preferred approach is to pretend “the Black Bloc” is made up of nihilistic insurrectionary followers of The Invisible Committee, opposed to all forms of organization. Both are absurd slurs. Yours is also 12 years out of date. And your comment about Black Bloc’ers hating the Zapatistas is one of the weirdest I’ve ever seen. “Whatever else we know, we know there isn’t time to bullshit”, to quote the late great Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. I was raised in the American area of a pervasive gas called anti-intellectualism and the only meaningful idea permitted was entrepreneurial capitalism or racism racism in the land-fill strained water running off the mountains or sexism sexism in my preparations for living better living through elemental carcinogenics like plastics they are a part of me but to me it’s queerness queerness has meant the development of an anyway bravery. Remember Bobby, the last Kantian in Nazi Germany? 8 the infinity symbol stood up straight. Mother Courage. How do you say a pox on the shoe lord who just evicted me? There’s pink glue between our vertebrae – I’m increasingly coming round to the Jonathan Meades view that the only school that matters is the school of talent and my definition of talent is anything that I wish I’d done myself (talent) or anything that is so good that I know I’d never be able to match it (extreme talent). I’m not suggesting this as a universally applicable tendency but it works for me because it’s something I recognise and don’t need to rationalise. For example, I really do wish that I’d thought of placing Black Beauty in Baghdad as a central feature of a poem about American foreign policy but I know that I’ll never be able to write something like Book V of the Faerie Queen, Book II of Paradise Lost, The Anathemata, Celan’s Aschenglorie …
- we would press the bleeding tissue on our horses faces / and mystify the names of the children in front of their pretty mothers;
- our mother died a virgin my eyelids are still black after the rain;
- and we would receive silence from god’s glands / and spread it on our faces; i feed my brothers with my own gleaming body and myself with dusty semaphores;
- I ran to the lake with my knees uselessly wet / people with torn eyes mostly walk around at night / shirley spat rain under my skirt;
- these love bites your family jewelries my son;
- sometimes i urinate rain even though i am not a catholic;
- you see me now as I was in your garden twenty years ago, as long as it is pretty he said;
- ‘I love pudding’ – me too, he cum; / those noises are insects tickling the mold on your tits / vinegar was injected in the cells, then a foxtrot.
But fuck me. Mega Shark vs. Crocosaurus is on The SyFy Channel! Croc am tearing up Orlando. Thank you Word. Croc’s … undocumented, probably. No, not probably: candidates are asked their position on sea monsters, on people being eaten in the night, people resorting to eating people, which we hear is starting to occur where food supplies have been consumed or decimated by the sea monsters’ fire-breathing progeny. I have always tended to work obsessively on one topic at a time. For the past 6 months, that topic has been ancient tragedy. According to Vernant and Vidal-Naquet, tragedy is the rendering spectacular of the political situation of the city. Seneca’s world is dark, paranoid, intense and claustrophobic. It’s a lot of fun! And there’s ‘smeared makeup’, an unpleasantness about Euripides. Nick and I were students together during the wild years at Essex University in the late 1980s. Before that, there was THE TANGANYIKI LAUGHTER EPIDEMIC.
[Note: Sources: David Graeber, as quoted in Jodi Dean, “David Graeber: Concerning the Violent Peace Police. A Response to Chris Hedges (nplusone)”, at I cite, 9 Feb 012; Sara Jane Stoner, “About a Sentence”, at Revolutionesque; JBR, but see Emmanuel Levinas, "The Name of a Dog, or Natural Rights"; Filip Marinovich, “NASTY PARHESSIASTES”, at Revolutionesque; Purdey Krieden, “Purdey Krieden on the Claudius App (2)”, at Bebrowed’s Blog, 9 Feb 012; JBR (I thank MS Word for changing Croc is to Croc am; strange strange strange …); Brad Liening, “Clash of the Titans”, at Revolutionesque; Simon Critchley, “Readings”, at The Believer, 6 Feb 012; JBR; Paula Cisewski, “THE TANGANYIKI LAUGHTER EPIDEMIC OF 1962”, at Revolutionesque]
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