Friday, May 7, 2010

Is there a point where what we consume is savored ad nauseum?

The Beach Boys - Do It Again - 1968

Wednesday, May 5, 2010

This Is Called Remnant-a-Porter

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Introduction To The Apocalypse. I found it on the Communal Shelf (ha-ha) at my place of employment. It's I'd say, a pamphlet-to-be-passed-around. Passed around in alot of places would be a start. Not the least of which among these places to start is "at work". It's also available as PDF in many places on the Web. Though Introduction To The Apocalypse is insurrectionary, it rejects direct armed assault on the state (though it doesn't reject being armed). It rejects the state-proscribed conception of Climate Change as nothing more than a catalyst for the next Carbon Boom (though the imminence of climate crisis and the possible extinction of many many species including ours is acknowledged as a determinant for future human ways of existing). It also advocates for many acts of sabotage, which already exist in innumerable small instances--cigarette breaks, surfing the web at work. The task then is take these acts and make them potent and many, to "generalize" them amongst everyone.

This is actually actually a very optimistic book, in fact as optimistic about human relations as a book can be.

The section "Communisation" starts with a quote from Walter Benjamin on a story from the Hassidim:

"The Hassidim tell a story about the world to come that says everything there will be just as it is here. Just as our room is now, so it will be in the world to come, where our baby sleeps now, there too it will sleep in the other world. And the clothes we wear in this world, those too we will wear there. Everything will be as it is now just, just a little different."

And it's this "just, just a little different" that will affect a social change, and be social change. So perhaps this reference to a kind of mystical language, or the very least an ineffable change in the way life for humans (and others) is, can be a way to supersede and unbind ourselves from what binds us apart. Again this book is, despite it's reference to the Apocalypse, or rather a Apocalypse as percieved in the dying out of Capital through the depletion of those resources that constitute it's manufacture, or actually now it's conjuring.

The primary evolutionary advantage of humanity is that the social relationships that provide the food, clothing, and shelter necessary for reproduction can be reconfigured endlessly and changed immediately, rather than held hostage to the slow march of natural selection.

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A Century Of Clouds by Bruce Boone. Bought this at Unnameable Books, along with Imaginations by Williams, Reason, And Other Women by Alice Notley, and Never Without One by Diane Ward.

Relationships are formed and recalled with a kind of digressive articulateness, informed by many articulatenesses, as a writer recounts the wake from some friendships that reaches into other relationships. These relationships (systems? maybe) can be altered by interventions that are sometimes gentle assertions, sometimes having to be a pain in the ass, as in a volleyball game of professed socialists that becomes a power game as a result of one of the male players essentially being a ball-hog; the game becomes removed from the context of a larger gathering, and thereby faclilitating the kind of assertion of power structures these socialists thought they were correcting. So the narrator intervenes in the game, joining the game first but then taking the ball, but not taking the ball, just holding onto the ball until some others are willing to talk about this undercutting of equanimity in the volleyball game.

I responded as much to Boone's Afterward as to the text itself, where he writes:

What else but the winds of a strong emotion are capable of propelling you into eternity? To construct an invisible mechanism that succeeds in prodding readers into the fabrication of their own ecstatic destiny is, paradoxically, to make them genuinely feel.

It's a kind of record and analysis of ecstasies at that, composed of actions and direct interventions into what most take for granted-- that human relationships are based on power. But human relationships can be based on mutual joys, sorrows, ecstasies, sadnesses. One person can record this, but many are a part of that record.

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This Is Called Sometimes To Fabricate [In] The Existence Of Dreamsicles Real Talk