Category: New publication

Crypto currents

I have a little review up at Entropy Mag, a venue I really admire. “Jae-in Doe” might as well be essay of this year as well!

Reader reception ought to be a big part of a materialist literary criticism. More specifically, we should be monitoring the ideology of literary culture, and that’s not just the ideology articulated inside literary texts, but how these literary texts get deployed by reviewers, the press, and the academy. What political lines do such deployments serve?

Nowhere does our literary culture betray itself as an organ for western capitalist imperialism better than in that bugbear “totalitarianism.” What hath Hannah Arendt wrought?! That signifier is how liberals merge two into one: they conflate Nazism and revolutionary socialism in the 20th century together. One of these delivered the world from the other. That historical reality alone ought to suggest that this conflation is an irresponsible thing to do.

And it only ever seems to demonize communism rather than fascism. (At least fascists are still pro-capitalist.) Even Arendt herself was bashed by other intellectuals for applying her concept to Israel. Nazi Germany and non-western states are the only politically correct targets.

(And now people want to merge two into one again, and subsume totalitarianism into terrorism. How will we ever keep our account of the enemy straight with all this blending?)

Anyway, I happened to have been reading a lot of Jewish mystical texts and Benjamin and phenomenology last year. It was fortuitous that LICHTER, a really enjoyable short book if that wasn’t clear in my review, was put out by NYRB Classics. I love this outfit and their cool covers, but it’s funny that their back copy for THE SEVENTH CROSS, a novel set in Nazi Germany, and deals with Nazism and only Nazism, nevertheless must use the T-word.

The story of this novel’s production, how it slipped by the censors in socialist Romania, is of course a perfect candidate for the T-word cottage industry in the literary press. And indeed after glossing other reviews in the respectable venues, I tried to offer a modest alternative take.

Unexpected advice

My debut fiction, fewer than 200 words, is up in the Winter issue of Shantih Journal. It’s a beautiful production and I’m super excited.

In the past I was often looking up writing prompts and finding them all unhelpful. This changed when I tried putting two different writing prompts together, which I’d now recommend for anyone. The trick is pick one that assigns a form and then one that focuses on the content.

In this case, one said to tell a story about the layout of your childhood home and all the people who inhabited that space with you, except to directly invert their characteristics. The other was something called a Fibonacci sonnet, that is, the word count of each sentence follows the Fibonacci numbers, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, etc., up to your desired F-number then back down to 1. I kept things simple with an F9 degree “sonnet” plus a coda.

I don’t trust the idea of “prose poetry” for the most part, mainly because I don’t trust my own judgment about such things. But the word count constraint had me focusing on prosody and sound patterns and music in a way I’ve never had before, even while trying to do legit verse. I insist this is a prose microfiction, but I’ve never felt more like poet.

 

No one should starve again, post script to a new interview

I’ve added my first interview (as an interviewee) to the interview section.

It says I have a flair for all things Communism, but there was no space to talk about the ideas of communism, and I didn’t have the fortitude to inflict such an agenda on the interview.

It’s good to simply recall what Adorno says in MINIMA MORALIA. The reason we do what we do is lost in the complexity of socialist organization and analysis. Adorno is constantly making dialectical moves so that the complex is made simple and the simple complex. He says:

Genuine feeling is only to be found in the crudest response: that no one shall go hungry any more.

We can and of course should go on about the eventual abolition of private property, money, the commodity form, the state, and the capitalist system from every square inch of the planet. But he gives us the fundamental imperative. He’s ready to check our fleeting utopian happiness with the constant acknowledgment of eternal human suffering. In that one statement, no one shall go hungry anymore, we appreciate the simplicity of the demand and the how dauntingly complex a task it is to make it a reality.

We can feed the world with the arable land that is left; only a proper distribution and control of resources is missing. Of course, topsoil erosion and global warming has locked us in for a crisis that, along with the reality of global distribution, makes the regressive desires of anarcho-primitivism and anti-civ pastoralism unacceptable.

But we do what we do ’cause revolution is not only possible but necessary. And besides, you gotta feed your comrades before you’re strong enough to destroy the reactionaries.