Mayday Duo: “How I Became an Anarchist” and “A Theory of Everything”
Heresies: Anarchist Memoirs, Anarchist Art, by the late Peter Lamborn Wilson is a book in two parts. First comes reminiscences, rants and raps about anarchist theory and (in)activism. The second half of the volume consists of essays on Symbolism, alchemy and anarchism in the arts. (Your editor is hot to run the pages on Gauguin!) What follows are two chapters from the first swatch of Heresies…
How I Became An Anarchist
When I was 12 or 13, I wanted to be a cartoonist and I worshiped Krazy Kat, greatest of all comic strips: surrealist, mystical, Romantic slapstick about perverse love (across not only gender but species) and criminal anarchy: quantum weirdness and genderfuck written in slang poetry and drawn with slapdash-taoist panache by African-American artist George Herriman.
On Richard Wolin’s “Heidegger in Ruins”
This short sprint to the starting gate of a review of Richard Wolin’s solid “Anti-Heidegger,” his recent polemical book Heidegger in Ruins (Yale University Press, 2023).
Fifty years ago, Walter Kaufmann had already reduced Being and Time to bare life, noting how abusive Heidegger’s German was; how evident but unremarked the bleak mood during and after Germany’s World War I defeat, reappearing as Heidegger’s mood of “anxiety” (think: trench warfare) and as a requirement for authenticity; how close to plagiarism were Heidegger’s views on being-toward-death, considering Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich.
Kaufmann is droll and incisive on the academic resistance to criticism of Heidegger even in Heidegger’s own time. After declaring that classical scholars found Heidegger’s reading of a fragment of Anaximander to be untenable; that Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant “was widely repudiated by Kant scholars”; and that professors of literature considered Heidegger’s readings of Hölderlin, Rilke, and Trakl, among others, way stations to the destruction of German literature, Kaufmann concludes: “Even so (emphasis added, SC; read closely!), some who know their Kant are awed by the erudition of Heidegger’s classical interpretations; Nietzsche scholars find his Rilke essay stimulating and profound; and Rilke scholars bow before his Nietzsche exegesis.”[i]
Apocalypse
..I went to a friend’s Eid party and left within five minutes, because the moment I got there I knew I was in no state to be there, to be around people, the truth is I’d been spiraling out for at least a week, one night I relapsed, went out drinking with Christian and tried to buy coke at three in the morning and asked him if he would ever fuck a trans woman, to which he said no, but Harvey told me that was a lie, or wasn’t true (something that’s not true and a lie are two different things), and the next day Xylea came over to take care of me, she brought over cute little Daiso items and a cactus and held me in my bed and told me I was a beautiful person, and I told her I was in love with her, to which she said nothing, or almost nothing, and then the next day, or the day after that, I burned our friendship to the ground,
How to Cope
Stare at flowers.
Not the snap-necked daffodils or the hyacinth your husband flattened with the car.
Take in the unblemished blossoms left.
Remind yourself that future thoughts
and prayers probably won’t be for your town
and if your town, not your kid’s school.
And if they are, statistically your child
would be scared but safe, hiding in a closet
under mops or climbing from a window, running
dazed toward the expressway to flag help.
I wish they would show the pictures of the dead
This is the news photo used to illustrate the mass killing of five in Texas. AP photo.
Yet another mass killing happened yesterday in Cleveland, Texas, when Francisco Oropeza, age 39, took his AR-15 style semiautomatic rifle and killed five people, including an 8-year-old child, after parents had complained Oropeza was keeping their baby awake at 11 p.m. shooting his rifle in his front yard. There have been more than 160 mass shootings in the U.S. this year, and this is the 19th shooting that killed more than four people, not including the shooter.
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.
Far Gone (A Levin Compaction)
The 1000 pp. Novel: (1960-70)
Verse VII
Stanza B
It was a far out bar Maxs Drop Dead Inn.
You know who drank there?
Men and Women
“Men and women are Images, hanging ghosts in the air, faces painted on the wall, masks no face can enter, the rules of a game getting explained over and over again to everyone and getting explained by getting played. They are images, but they are not immaterial (nothing is immaterial): they determine who produces what, who lives what life, who is punished for breaking what rules, who can be raped with impunity, who can be beaten with impunity, who can be killed with impunity.”
..One time, Xylea said, a client was supposed to go down on me and cum on my feet, but he kept trying to fuck me, and so I started going on a long rant about Aileen Wuornos (the lore of Aileen Wuornos, the litany of her crimes, crimes like a Dadaist poem, a poem written in the flesh about the goddess Medusa and about men and about the abyss) and then when he tried to stick his dick in me I stabbed him, and he looked up at me like what the fuck, and I was like why do you think I was telling you about Aileen fucking Wuornos, retard?
Democracy in the Streets (Saturday Night in Tel Aviv)
Tonight there were much more than 150 thousand demonstrating in Tel Aviv alone. If Tel Aviv has a population of about half a million, and over 150 thousand people were holding flags in the center of the city and shouting in union “democracy,” what does this mean? This is not just about certain rules being crammed down our necks every day, or about politicians who should be in jail. This is about the concept of democracy, and to my mind it should not be only an Israeli issue or even just an issue for Jews around the world. It is about the danger to democracy all over the world. My Hungarian friends, my Polish friends, my Italian friends, and my American friends all know the terrible threats to democracy being faced and the delicate freedom to protest that can disappear in a moment. Tell the world to pay attention to the freedom we have and guard it carefully!
Taking Bad Bunny Seriously
First, some facts about Bad Bunny, in case you think he’s a rowdy pet. He’s Billboard’s artist of the year and Spotify’s most-streamed artist for two years running—an amazing feat for someone who sings in Spanish. His reach is global, but his songs are local, rich with Puerto Rican slang. (I’ve heard him introduced as “Ba-Boney” on Spanish-language TV.) He looks like he was born in a baseball cap, but he sometimes performs in a dress. He chose his stage name because, as he told the late-night host James Cordon, “even when he’s bad, he’s cute.”
“Old Violin” & Hate Songs
Anger is an energy. Per Johnny Rotten and Richard Meltzer, though I couldn’t recall where/when Meltzer mused on animus in rock ‘n’ roll attitude so I asked him for a steer…
I’m sure—I know—I’ve said it…and things much like it…in lots of places over the years, but I couldn’t give you a GPS on it…it’s just in multiple creases and cracks in the rock-roll road.
I’m sure I’ve said, specifically, that SECOND-PERSON HOSTILITY is an omnipresent aspect of rock all the way back to its Delta Blues origins, much deeper than anything as benign as “attitude”: I dislike, detest, abhor YOU. Add gender hostility to the package (usually, but not always, as “misogyny”) and you got one throbbing heap of reliably functional HATESTUFF.
Anger isn’t quite the same…no…but…well…good luck in your search.
The Rose named Laetare
Dear Family and Friends,
Thilus just came back to us today, taking THREE MONTHS to get from Jacmel to Port au Prince.
He is 2 years old, his belly is tight like a drum and nearly bursting from an enormous and sick liver,
he has grey and flaking skin, he is weak and exhausted.
Jacmel is usually a FEW HOURS from Port au Prince by car. A little bit more by bus.
But not when your bus and everyone in it is KIDNAPPED crossing Martissant, on roads totally controlled by thieves,
and especially if there is no one on earth who can pay your ransom.
Twenty Years After
This piece, which Oliver Craner originally posted at his personal website last summer, offers a deep reading of Iraq’s post-invasion trajectory. Craner’s piece isn’t definitive. He gives a little too much credence to canny purveyors of the given such as journalist George Packer. Still, Craner’s account of Kanan Makiya’s journey beats what’s been on offer in most think pieces tuned to the 20th Anniversary of “shock and awe.” I commend, in particular, Cramer’s return to The Rope — Makiya’s own attempt to reckon with what happened in Iraq. The Rope, which refers to the one used to hang Saddam Hussein, tells the story of a Shiite militia-man whose life comes down to one sectarian betrayal after another. The anti-hero of the book — an orphan who looks up to his uncle as more than a mentor — will find out (before the book’s end) the uncle was behind the murder of the militia-man’s father. Iraq in a nutshell? It’s important to add, though, The Rope isn’t simply a fable. As Craner notes, Makiya’s fiction was founded on real events such as…
Levin Speaks of Rivers
on hearing dexter gordon
and the sam rivers trio
at zellerbach
Willie Pep: Knockaround Guy As Boxing Genius
Willie Pep got locked up a lot, mostly for gambling in the streets and driving too fast, which did nothing to dim the luster of his legendary boxing career. He was the people’s champ, and the people, too, gambled and went over the speed limit and got locked up.
Leave Me Alone
Pictures
..A series of drawings in a sketchbook. In the various pictures, Leila is drawn in blues and purples, while the girl she loves is drawn, usually, but not always, in reds and pinks. Sometimes the girl she loves looks a lot like Leila, but her (Leila’s) face is more angular, she’s a little taller, she’s got a femme fatale look to her while the girl she loves is more conventionally pretty, Leila has a heart tattoo on her right thigh while the girl she loves has a butterfly tattoo in the same place, Leila has big tits and the girl she loves has small tits, or medium-sized tits, usually they are both wearing a slutty little dress, both girls are haunted but Leila is undeniably more so. In the first few pictures, Leila is walking alone on the beach, smoking. In both pictures she’s smoking, actually, and in one she also holds a gun. Like some kind of femme Mersault, a thotty existentialist. She stares out at the horizon, and yet her gaze is rapt, as if she’s staring at nothing, or into the abyss. In these pictures, she is heartbreakingly alone, as if she’s arrived at the end of the world, like the girl in La Jetée.