there's our catastrophe

May 8

Anonymous asked: Have u read 1000 years of non-linear history? thoughts? U post about delueze and guatarri quite a bit and 1000 years is in that vein....

I post about deleuze and/or guattari because I’m trying to learn about them, though, not because I’m an expert! anybody else got thoughts about 1000 years of non-linear history by manuel de landa? I have to admit that nothing about it particularly grabs me, but I’m totally open to being persuaded otherwise…

May 1

“Are you sure your dad won’t mind me coming?” I asked.
“‘Course not,” she said grinning. “He’ll be delighted to see I’ve got a community service project.”
I stared at her and felt my guts slowly going cold.
“A what?” I said.

YOU GUYS ada told me to read this australian kid’s book like seven times and then cracked it gloriously when I was like “what? you’ve never told me about it” and reminded me of the various times and then shamefacedly I read it and it was really good! thanks ada <3. it’s about a young girl called Rowena, mute since birth, who has to enter the regular school system after the government shuts her specialty school down. (all the use of “said” in the passage above refers to sign language. occasionally Rowena will have to do something like turn on the light so she can say something, and we’re reminded that she’s not speaking with her vocal chords.) she has all these problems to do with people not getting how she communicates and being dicks about it, and also to do with grief over the loss of her mum and her best friend, and also to do with her dad being an incredibly eccentric and overly friendly guy with an obsessive fondness for country music and satin cowboy shirts and also some more serious issues like alcoholism and his own grief. not everything is okay in the end but some things are. plus it’s a book that’s legit entertaining and readable and won’t make you feel like the reader is assumed to be doing a community service project. highly recommend.

“Are you sure your dad won’t mind me coming?” I asked.

“‘Course not,” she said grinning. “He’ll be delighted to see I’ve got a community service project.”

I stared at her and felt my guts slowly going cold.

“A what?” I said.

YOU GUYS ada told me to read this australian kid’s book like seven times and then cracked it gloriously when I was like “what? you’ve never told me about it” and reminded me of the various times and then shamefacedly I read it and it was really good! thanks ada <3. it’s about a young girl called Rowena, mute since birth, who has to enter the regular school system after the government shuts her specialty school down. (all the use of “said” in the passage above refers to sign language. occasionally Rowena will have to do something like turn on the light so she can say something, and we’re reminded that she’s not speaking with her vocal chords.) she has all these problems to do with people not getting how she communicates and being dicks about it, and also to do with grief over the loss of her mum and her best friend, and also to do with her dad being an incredibly eccentric and overly friendly guy with an obsessive fondness for country music and satin cowboy shirts and also some more serious issues like alcoholism and his own grief. not everything is okay in the end but some things are. plus it’s a book that’s legit entertaining and readable and won’t make you feel like the reader is assumed to be doing a community service project. highly recommend.

Mar 30

tanacetum-vulgare:

Damn, I just discovered this book in trying to track down an obscure article I never knew the source of before…. and I wish I had a chance to track down a copy and use it for my paper but I don’t. Oh well, future reading list I guess. Pun not intended.

We live in a world saturated by futures. Our lives are constructed around ideas and images about the future that are as full and as flawed as our understandings of the past. This book is a conceptual toolkit for thinking about the forms and functions that the future takes. Exploring links between panic and nostalgia, waiting and utopia, technology and messianism, prophecy and trauma, it brings together critical meditations on the social, cultural, and intellectual forces that create narratives and practices of the future. The prognosticators, speculators, prophets, and visionaries have their say here, but the emphasis is on small narratives and forgotten conjunctures, on the connections between expectation and experience in everyday life.

In tightly linked studies, the contributors excavate forgotten and emergent futures of art, religion, technology, economics, and politics. They trace hidden histories of science fiction, futurism, and millennialism and break down barriers between far-flung cultural spheres. From the boardrooms of Silicon Valley to the forests of Java and from the literary salons of Tokyo to the roadside cafés of the Nevada desert, the authors stitch together the disparate images and stories of futures past and present. Histories of the Future is further punctuated by three interludes: a thought-provoking game that invites players to fashion future narratives of their own, a metafiction by renowned novelist Jonathan Lethem, and a remarkable graphic research tool: a timeline of timelines.

Contributors. Sasha Archibald, Susan Harding, Jamer Hunt, Pamela Jackson, Susan Lepselter, Jonathan Lethem, Joseph Masco, Christopher Newfield, Elizabeth Pollman, Vicente Rafael, Daniel Rosenberg, Miryam Sas, Kathleen Stewart, Anna Tsing

Jan 6

“Sunday evening, February 13, 2005, is a sweet night for Usher. He’s at the annual Grammy Awards ceremony. Usher is up for eight Grammy Awards, and he wins three. But the awards are not the only reason the night has so much meaning for him.
Queen Latifah does the intro for his big Grammy number. “You take some of the sleekness of Sam Cooke”, she begins “Some of that deep soul of James Brown. And some of the funky street smarts of Prince.” Put them all together, she says, and “you got one hell of a man…It’s time to get caught up with the man - Usher!” Caught up - that’s the cue for Usher to sing his hit “Caught Up”, from the smash album Confessions. We hear the boom of drums and bass, followed by background chanting and a hint of synth. Usher appears bathed in fog and blue lights. He dances from stage to stage. He leaps. He kicks and struts. He does a split, then a back flip. Offstage, Usher doesn’t look big - he’s only 5 feet, 9 inches tall. But on the Grammy stage tonight, in his crisp black suit and hat, he’s the biggest man around.”

from Chapter 1 “Showman” Todays Superstars: Usher 2006 p. 4

This is an excerpt from the amazing book Liz picked up for me the other day on Usher. I have no idea why the Maribynong Library was throwing out this gem.

(via moniquemallo)

they really make that night come alive

Nov 11

this is not another edition, it’s a different book with the same title

Anonymous asked: Do you have some recommendations for like, five or so non-fiction books that you consider to be seminal? Maybe a sentence or two about each of them. Thank you.

idk what seminal means in this context? like seminal for leftist theory? I don’t know if I necessarily believe that reading “foundational” works is more helpful than reading later, descendent works; also I’ve probably been influenced more by excerpts, conversations, essays, and fiction than by actual non-fiction/theory books I’ve read cover to cover, I read a lot more fiction than anything else

having said that, off the top of my head, the five non-fiction books that have influenced me the most could be:

caliban and the witch by silvia federici. federici argues that witch-hunts are part of the process of alienating women’s labour under capitalism, and that we see them when societies are in the (inevitably violent) transition to capitalism, e.g mid-millenium Europe, the colonisation of the Americas, much of sub-saharan africa today.

the color of violence edited by the INCITE! collective, which is a series of great, awesome, nuanced essays about the theory and practice of ending violence against women of colour. it talks a lot about the collusion of white feminisms with racist state institutions and the limits of state-based strategies aimed at ending violence against women. it’s incredibly important reading for anybody who is interested in theorising the state.

this bridge called my back edited by cherríe moraga and gloria anzaldúa, an actually-foundational text in intersectional/women of colour-centred feminism, sadly out of print but you can download most chapters at the link.

the history of sexuality vol. 1 by michel foucault, which was really important to me in clarifying the reasons for my discomfort with the centrality of confessional narratives to a lot of feminist discourses (i.e. that there’s not enough acknowledgement that the confession shapes, rather than simply describes, subjectivities, and that the demand to confess is a form of domination)

the making of the english working class by e.p. thompson, which is another book about the early stages of the rise of capitalism, very detailed, full of interesting stories. this one didn’t have a single unified takeaway message for me like the others, and it’s interesting partly because of that. it goes into so much detail, shows that there were a lot of revolutionary platforms in the past that are strikingly different to what we see today, that there were a lot of ways things could have gone and we should remember that because otherwise we forget that history is contingent, and get trapped in unexamined ideas of what the world is like.

you can download all of those at the links above, except The Color of Violence, which I kind of want you to buy.

Nov 9

“The missing link between Scott’s anarchist calisthenics and the day when breaking a big law might matter is the real movement which abolishes the present state of things — about which Two Cheers for Anarchism says nothing. Though it shares a family resemblance with the passive-aggressive rebellion that interests Scott, revolutionary politics requires the drawing of lines of antagonism through the here and now. Not just through the designation of illegitimate authorities, but also the identification of comrades and contestation across the divide. It’s the difference between a politics and an opinion.”

Los Angeles Review of Books - Anarchish: On James C. Scott’s “Two Cheers For Anarchism” (via ahipstory)

fight! fight! fight!

on the one hand, this whole review is devastating and hilarious

on the other hand, malcolm harris has the douchiest bio imaginable

so now I don’t know who to barrack for

(via ahipstory)

Nov 8

sodawound asked: My mum has told me not to buy any Ursula le Guin as shred one of her fave authors and has everything and will lend to me... But can't find them or remember or something. Very frustrating!!!

I have hardly any ursula le guin books because I borrowed most of them from the library and the books of hers I do have I keep lending to people or giving away. I love that your mum loves ursula le guin!!! mums 4 eva. my big brother who is also some kind of ultraleftist got me into ursula le guin at an early age, she has seriously been the biggest influence on my worldview. my brother is one of the few sci fi bros I love. maybe you should just get ursula le guin books and then you can lend them out. in our house we have a lot of doubles of some books and it’s cool because we can lend them out but still have them for reference. lending lending lending. lend everything, live in a lending-based economy

Oct 17

Anonymous asked: where is your user pic from?

it’s from a nineteenth-century book on hand shadows, which you can read on project gutenberg. I think I found the book because sodawound linked it? It’s weird that all the pictures are of just hands except for “camel” where you can see that it’s being made by a child wearing a turban. “A bird in flight” is the only hand shadow I can reliably do. I don’t really care about birds but I care a lot about shadows, shadow meanings, traces, making meaning from absence, gleaning it from what’s unspoken.

Oct 16

sodawound asked: there's a pub in the suburb adjacent to mine that i dont go to so much anymore because it gets all loud and you cant find somewhere to sit and people hit on you but the beer is PRETTY GOOD. anyway, the bar is been built supported by all these leather bound books, and there's these other encylopedias and stuff on the walls and once i went there and started reading a book from the shelf while waiting for a friend and then a staffmember told me not to do that :(. ITS A BOOK. ITS FOR READING.

>:(

there's our catastrophe

work is its own cure. you have to like it better than being loved. ⚑ ♀

work is its own cure. you have to like it better than being loved.

⚑ ♀