"So why are we convinced, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that sabotage is an unacceptable and ineffective tactic? One answer is that it threatens the very notion of private property—the bedrock of all of our social relationships. To commit an act of sabotage is to announce that you do not recognize the legitimacy of property rights; to expose the relationship between politics, morality, and the economic order; and to abandon the liberal illusion that discourse undermines (property-based) power relations" >>
<< "We’re in this very funny paradoxical moment in history, which is full of moments of dynamic hysteria, yet everything always remains the same. We get this wave of hysteria – angry people click more! – and those clicks feed the systems and nothing changes. It’s a rational machine model."
"To understand is not to condone. But if the ruling elites, and their courtiers masquerading as journalists, continue to gleefully erase these people from the media landscape, to attack them as less than human, or as Hillary Clinton called them “deplorables,” while at the same time refusing to address the grotesque social inequality that has left them vulnerable and afraid, it will fuel ever greater levels of extremism and ever greater levels of state repression and censorship." >>
<< "The future of virtual reality is far more than just video games. Silicon Valley sees the creation of virtual worlds as the ultimate free-market solution to a political problem. In a world of increasing wealth inequality, environmental disaster, and political instability, why not sell everyone a device that whisks them away to a virtual world free of pain and suffering?"
Double haiku on cracker-whiperer's death - I'm not grave-dancing I don't begrudge grave-dancers. Crackers denouncing grave-dancers can gouge their eyes out with rusty shitsmeared grapefruit spoons
"The U.S. ruling class deploys the military for three main reasons: (1) to forcibly open up countries to foreign investment, (2) to ensure the free flow of natural resources from the global south into the hands of multinational corporations, and (3) because war is profitable. The third of these reasons, the profitability of war, is often lacking detail in analyses of U.S. imperialism: The financial industry, including investment banks and private equity firms, is an insatiable force seeking profit via military activity." >>>
<<< "And so that’s really a trend that we see increasingly is that our response to climate adaptation by the richest countries is really to militarize our response to it. And that’s a real, as that quote you just read, that’s a real concern because it’s a kind of politics of the armed lifeboat. Where basically you rescue a few and then you have a gun trained on the rest."
"The result is a left-wing discourse that is increasingly anti-intellectual. It has to be anti-intellectual, because its members live in mutual fear. The set of views which might be the basis for cancellation are ever-evolving, in part because of the wide discretion this gives wealthy elites in their deployment of cancellation to eliminate voices they don’t like. In such a climate, the voices that can survive are the obsequious types with no real positions of their own. These people can adapt to ever-shifting discursive rules because they are more interested in having a career than in saying anything substantive. People with principled positions–even people who go to great lengths to avoid cancellation–are likely to run afoul of nebulous rules sooner or later. We end up with a “left” discourse populated mainly by people who are comfortable appeasing oligarchs while trafficking in left-wing aesthetics and tropes." >>>
<<<<< It was Krasznahorkai's *Baron Wenckheim'sHomecoming,* a novel I'd waited for with great anticipation, finally got the English translation last January 2020, my eyes do not have the stamina or my concentration the muscle both once did, between the tiny font and the Krasznahorkai triple freight train sentences, first no doubt bell of old
<<< "Every reader is a reader of crime novels. They want the criminal to succeed because they want to escape, and they want the police to catch the criminal because they want to restore order. The reader has the same attitude toward writing in general. She wants it to be free, and then she also wants to say that the third act was all wrong, or that the story didn’t deliver, or that this time around its heart wasn’t in the right place. But whenever a story seems off, that’s when you know that the author was truly free. A story isn’t a fucking chair. This isn’t Bauhaus."
1.5)lard boy's audience remains - i still wish to escape them by emigrating to what i think of as a more congenial country on the north american continent, to the province where some of my forebears lived for generations, but when or if that may be possible remains a matter TBD
2)there are technologies that will read an ebook aloud, overcoming the tiny print problem - with regard to lengthy sentences, however, one is on one's own
3)with regard to james tate, the poem today reminds me of a couple things i read yesterday
from wikipedia
Tate wrote his first poem a few months into college with no external motivation; he observed that poetry 'became a private place that I was hugely drawn to, where I could let my daydreams—and my pain—come in completely disguised. I knew from the moment I started writing that I never wanted to be writing about my life.'
from https://jamestate.net
Tate once said, in a Paris Review interview, "I love my funny poems, but I’d rather break your heart. And if I can do both in the same poem, that’s the best. If you laughed earlier in the poem, and I bring you close to tears in the end, that’s the best.”
0)with regard to this blogpost, i like today's buffet
ReplyDelete1)if i had a higher perspective i might be less happy that lard boy is gone - as mongo at the moment points out very well
https://beforenine.blogspot.com/2021/02/auf-nicht-wiedersehen.html
1.5)lard boy's audience remains - i still wish to escape them by emigrating to what i think of as a more congenial country on the north american continent, to the province where some of my forebears lived for generations, but when or if that may be possible remains a matter TBD
2)there are technologies that will read an ebook aloud, overcoming the tiny print problem - with regard to lengthy sentences, however, one is on one's own
3)with regard to james tate, the poem today reminds me of a couple things i read yesterday
from wikipedia
Tate wrote his first poem a few months into college with no external motivation; he observed that poetry 'became a private place that I was hugely drawn to, where I could let my daydreams—and my pain—come in completely disguised. I knew from the moment I started writing that I never wanted to be writing about my life.'
from https://jamestate.net
Tate once said, in a Paris Review interview, "I love my funny poems, but I’d rather break your heart. And if I can do both in the same poem, that’s the best. If you laughed earlier in the poem, and I bring you close to tears in the end, that’s the best.”