Preface to the Korean Edition of “The Magna Carta Manifesto”

This chapter from Peter Linebaugh’s Stop Thief: The Commons, Enclosures and Resistance opens with aristos’ charming spin on the human right to rest. But Linebaugh isn’t one to go on in defense of laziness. Near the end of this short piece, he invokes bookish Reds who once insisted a “Communist is a mere bluffer, if he has not worked over in his conscious­ness the whole inheritance of human knowledge.”[1] Linebaugh has surely put in work on that score. The fact that his essay is a preface to the Korean edition of one of his earlier books stands as a tribute to his worldliness. Linebaugh goes wide in this chapter (as ever) though he begins in bed…

Of the aristocratic and stylish Mitford sisters, Jessica provides us with the Lazy Interpretation of Magna Carta beloved by sluggards everywhere. As a lovely communist (two of her sisters were fascists) she was disowned by her family and fell from the social peaks of English aristocracy to the Dickensian depths of the Rotherhithe docks in London in 1939. Unable to pay the rent she and her husband lived in fear of the process-server who they avoided by going in disguises which the process server soon came to recognize. “Esmond had a theory that it was illegal and in some way a violation of Magna Carta to serve process on people in bed.”[1] So they stayed in bed all day and then all night, and again all the next day, and all the next night under the covers, before deciding to immigrate to America. (Tom Paine, too, thought that independ­ent America was a realization of Magna Carta).

Read more

Come and See*

From Thomas Hardy’s “Departure”

“How long…

Must your wrath reasonings trade on lives like these,
That are as puppets in a playing hand?–
When shall the saner softer polities
Whereof we dream, have sway in each proud land
And patriotism, grown Godlike, scorn to stand
Bondslave to realms, but circle earth and seas?”

***

***

Read more

Nobody Knows His Name: A Note on Adam Scheffler’s “Heartworm” (& “Googling Myself”)

“Piss expressively.”

The onomatopoeic first line of Adam Scheffler’s poem, “Advice From a Dog,” hints at his virtuosity and his modesty. This guy ain’t too proud to pet and be petted. Another one of his openers make you wonder if he’s about to give himself too much credit: “She said my butt was a piece of art…” Not to worry:

…my greatest asset, if
you will, although come to think of
it she didn’t say it was good art
only a “piece” of it, as if it’s
not complete without her hands
on it…

Scheffler is careful about intimacies. I doubt he’ll ever go Lowell. There won’t be lines from a begging (or pegging) partner’s correspondence in his poems. Nor does this nice Jewish boy suffer from Maileria. He’s no wannabe macho.

Read more