The clamor. The calamity. A redness gone mute, golden, the grey now as copper, green now and flaking. So much as new snow. Neither cedars nor banyans. Spiky as breathing and anointed by tracers which harbor a story like the candles in the creche.

No part of this, really. No context. No text. Nothing to say that has not been, already. Even this, yes this. Even this.

Stop speaking. Stop, just stop.

Dolly lies in cotton. Waiting for the card, now. The spindle. The loom.

The seamstress and the stitch. The things we have lost. No gain in old lace.

To be waylaid in theory which is neither philosophy nor donkey but the ass or the mule.

When you write it, it becomes prescriptive, which is another way of saying the biopolitics of repression.

Stop making metaphors of other times, other struggles. Stop finding new ways to revel in what is still only theft.

Notes against the coming of this swollen future. Too late, and unbecoming, still yet we begin.

From the before, a coda, a meandering:

Jon Ossoff: “Trump lied us into war”.

This is not quite correct, in that, Trump could not be bothered to even pretend that he was lying.

He did not attempt to amass public support. He did not attempt to charm Congress. He did not attempt to enlist international institutions and partners.

Moreover, a delusion is not a lie.

There are lies, no doubt, just not the one Ossoff suggests.

There have been fifty years or more or lies about Iran, threaded with half truths wielded as weapons. And before that, at least thirty more years of lies, some of which, we have lived with, but only barely.

Bush lied, as did his administration, as did many of the journalists and sycophants with which it was surrounded, and staffed, and maintained in its illusions.

Trump has lied about many things but not this. After hegemony, there is no need for consent. “L’état, c’est moi.”

Where is the lie?

Babalon working, Babalon restrained. But still, we have rockets in the desert. Delusion is our manna. Our destination, still unknown.

Thirty-two, sixty-two

Historiography between history and hallucination; or, the question of doubt and the status of meaning. Conviction is a position, and a relation with respect to contingency; certitude belongs to the sequence of the psychopath, who knows only truth, too often, too much.

A Godardian interlude: The Palestinians who run the Somali market on the way to Bde Maka Ska give you Turkish delight, gratis, because you ask about their furn, which is offsite, but not so offsite as Dearborn, bless them, those Michiganders.

For the Midwest, analyzing the weather is now woke, so the futures market is moving to Kalshi. There is no weather; only the will, and the Will, which is another way of saying MiracleGrow, and Nutrien. Your weather app is a psychic; it traffics in smudged crystal.

Psychotic, together, we hallucinate the media, which is all that is left of the cognitive map.

The epidermal schema as it mediates the relation between instinct and drive.

Daniel Bensaid: “Lenin’s opposition to this reduction of politics to the social was entirely original for the period. Like a psychoanalyst attentive to the “displacements” and “condensations” at work in neuroses, he understood that economic and social contradictions do not express themselves directly, but in the specific, deformed, and transformed shape of politics. This is why one of the party’s tasks is to listen closely, to decipher within the political field the often unexpected ways in which these contradictions manifest themselves --- a student struggle, the Dreyfus Affair, an electoral question, an international incident. Their untimely irruption at an unforeseen point becomes a symptom. It condenses and reveals a latent global crisis of social relations. That is the miracle of what constitutes, as distinct from the ordinary news item, the political event proper.”

Broken time and the gamble, the leap into the future. But also the slow walk, the seamstress. Sewing the new skin of the revolution onto the old form, which is renewed.

“Such a revolution can be successfully carried out only if the majority of the population, and primarily the majority of the working people, engage in independent creative work as makers of history. Only if the proletariat and the poor peasants display sufficient class-consciousness, devotion to principle, self-sacrifice and perseverance, will the victory of the socialist revolution be assured.”

The ice cream cone was invented by Syrian and Lebanese vendors at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair which makes the savory BBQ pork mac and cheese waffle cones at the 2026 Minnesota State Fair seem at least doubly haram.

“For the first time in human history a socialist party has managed to complete in the main the conquest of power and the suppression of the exploiters, and has managed to approach directly the task of administration. We must prove worthy executors of this most difficult (and most gratifying) task of the socialist revolution. We must fully realise that in order to administer successfully, besides being able to convince people, besides being able to win a civil war, we must be able to do practical organisational work. This is the most difficult task, because it is a matter of organising in a new way the most deep-rooted, the economic, foundations of life of scores of millions of people.”

Fatteh as a compromise formation, somewhere between pain perdu and egg foo young. The ice cream cone as cornucopia, the offspring of Pan and his meeting with Ceres.

Just steps from the crossroads where Robert Johnson let the Devil tune his guitar, one finds a Lebanese restaurant.

“The objective situation reviewed above, which has been created by the extremely onerous and unstable peace, the terrible state of ruin, the unemployment and famine we inherited from the war and the rule of the bourgeoisie…all this has inevitably caused extreme weariness and even exhaustion of wide sections of the working people. These people insistently demand—and cannot but demand—a respite. The task of the day is to restore the productive forces destroyed by the war and by bourgeois rule; to heal the wounds inflicted by the war, by the defeat in the war, by profiteering and the attempts of the bourgeoisie to restore the overthrown rule of the exploiters; to achieve economic revival; to provide reliable protection of elementary order…In view of the specific features of the present situation…the practical solution of these extremely elementary problems and the overcoming of the organisational difficulties of the first stages of progress toward socialism are now two aspects of the same picture.”

One, forty-three

Blue green blue and air like bent water broke over and trees as the bowers from which hang cathedrals, transepts akimbo.

Twenty-six years.

Victor Tausk and the influencing machine but the influencing machine is generalized and external. Schreber said waves; we say flock camera and wifi.

Islamophobic hysteria in Dearborn.

Jake Lang is described in the press as an anti-Islam activist, which is an interesting way of characterizing his pathology.

Because Jake Lang’s mother is Jewish, Nick Fuentes will not allow him to be part of the movement; and so, like a good converso, he becomes ever more florid, ever more ingenious in the expression of his sadism.

Do they not know who Caesar is, even now?

And now what? And now what?

There is no point in having a take. Partially informed opinion is our most immediate mode of repression.

Someone asks: “Will US democracy survive Donald Trump?”

An answer: The fact that Donald Trump became president suggests that US democracy was already long dead.

Another answer, a riposte: The more pertinent question is: “After Donald Trump, should the US be allowed to survive?”

In German, there is no etymological relation between “traum” and “trauma” but certainly someone must have wondered just what transpires in the homophonic play between the words for “dream” and for “wound”.

After the Protestant work ethic, the Catholic devotional: labor as ritual whose only purpose is the ritual. Reviving old modes of self-annihilation in service of the new neo-feudalism.

NYT: “With few options, Trump tries applying economic pressure to Iran. Again.”

The compulsion to repeat, of course, and no doubt. Yet, one wonders.

Sitting in Minneapolis, thinking of Beirut, there is an echo.

They are not negligent; this is their purpose. As the counter-revolution proceeds, the pain is intended, and intensified, intensifying. Its field of application is the world, which the counter-revolution receives as an unbearable intrusion, a dereliction.

Listen, they are watching.

Infirmity, infernal, influencing. Tausk and the machine and the puppet, the hunchback.

“I am the arm.”

Twelve, ten

The drowned god in green, dark, leaved with cottage and vine and grape, foreground injunctive. The line and the line.

Precipitate, they wait. And then what?

Being with the language as it unfolds, or–as it were–alone with the weather.

They are camps, not centers.

The “recursive loop of colonial violence” always ends in the same place, which looks like the desert but might be anywhere, as empire–like the drive–is only incidentally concerned with the substance of the body; every field is a killing field when the opportunity arises.

Benjamin said nothing about the antichrist arriving as a necromancer but somehow it makes sense.

When Ma Rainey recorded her records the power of her voice literally bent the resin.

The magnificent clouds and the weather as storage; a story about something only dimly perceived but long in the suffrage.

Two, sixty-four

Chalk blue as light in a tube as water blown through glass into day heat off pavement, invasive as grass and concrete.

The origins of plague have been the same for thousands of years. Not the gods or God but capital, or its aspiration. Aspiration, aspirate, particular stench: disease always arrives with the big ships. Not in production, but circulation.

In the weeks after the port explosion in Beirut, people insisted that there was some conspiracy behind it because no one wanted to believe that horrible things can happen absent persona or malice. That systems that are predicated upon the perpetuation of crisis often beget crises they cannot foresee or control and the mechanisms often break down and errant sparks are then sometimes enough to light the fuse no one knew had been laid.

The most common delusion among psychotics: I am being watched. They have planted listening devices in my house, in my flesh.

As delusions go, this one is totally reasonable, because it is entirely correct. Someone is watching you, right now. Someone is listening. What makes this a delusion is not that it is a lie. What makes it a delusion is that the psychotic believes that just because someone is listening it means that they care.

Siri, you are not a beautiful and unique snowflake.

Epidemiology is not etiology, because cause is chimerical; nevertheless, it lives on as fantasy, which may be the point.

Meanwhile, we know Roundup causes cancer but you can’t sue the manufacturer; not because the evidence is inconclusive but because they operate from a position of neither malice or intent.

“In the Cornish mines about 19,000 men, and 11,000 women and children are employed, in part above and in part below ground. Within the mines below ground, men and boys above twelve years old are employed almost exclusively. The condition of these workers seems, according to the Children’s Employment Commission’s Report, to be comparatively endurable, materially, and the English often enough boast of their strong bold miners….[I]n the matter of the health of these workers, the same Children’s Employment Commission’s Report judges differently. It shows…how the inhalation of an atmosphere containing little oxygen, and mixed with dust among the smoke of blasting powder, seriously affects the lungs and disturbs the action of the heart, and diminishes the activity of the digestive organs….[M]any due young of galloping consumption…[having become] unfit for work between the thirty-fifth and forty-fifth year….”

That was Engels, writing in 1845.

Capital is particulate, viral. It pulses through rock and into your lungs; it seeps through the soil and lives on in your skin, through cuts and abrasions.

What is needed is a digest.

Forty-eight, twenty-nine

Flat light, sharp, a plate breathing blister and silhouette with numbing, the asphalt, the day.

Show trials by way of Bravo: The Real Housewives of the Senate. The new Cold War. The new Red Scare. Congress plays both Stalin and McCarthy. And somehow, improbably, Roy Cohn is still with us.

Somehow, Palpatine returned.

At least twenty Iraqi fighters killed in US-Saudi strikes, reports the Guardian. Like Sykes and Picot, Lord Balfour, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, and Ariel Sharon, Lindsey Graham is still with us.

And the war came, said Lincoln, who was Tony Kushner’s third best fictional creation after Roy Cohn and Ethel Rosenberg.




Everything we told you was going to happen in Palestine is happening in Palestine. They didn’t listen to Einstein or Arendt, which is why we knew they wouldn’t listen to us.

In the Atlantic, David Brooks looks hard at AI and discovers that salvation from automation can be found through rigorous adherence to the Protestant work ethic. Only through hard work can you hope to be spared the fate of the downsized.

A renewed theology of election by grace. A new theodicy of the post-Christian God. Let many angels dance on this pin.

Meanwhile: ‘North America is pre-eminently the country of religiosity, as Beaumont, Tocqueville, and the Englishman Hamilton unanimously assure us. The North American states, however, serve us only as an example. The question is: What is the relation of complete political emancipation to religion? If we find that even in the country of complete political emancipation, religion not only exists, but displays a fresh and vigorous vitality, that is proof that the existence of religion is not in contradiction to the perfection of the state. Since, however, the existence of religion is the existence of defect, the source of this defect can only be sought in the nature of the state itself. We no longer regard religion as the cause, but only as the manifestation of secular narrowness. Therefore, we explain the religious limitations of the free citizen by their secular limitations. We do not assert that they must overcome their religious narrowness in order to get rid of their secular restrictions, we assert that they will overcome their religious narrowness once they get rid of their secular restrictions. We do not turn secular questions into theological ones. History has long enough been merged in superstition, we now merge superstition in history. The question of the relation of political emancipation to religion becomes for us the question of the relation of political emancipation to human emancipation.’

Erudite, but not scholarly, no one eludes the Angel’s talons.

The difference between settling and staying: The difference between being someone who abides with the compromises and violences which subtend belonging as a function of property and the fiction of the nation; and someone who is with no better option than to go on biding their time, pausing for a moment, taking a break before moving on.

Contiguous but not congruous, and this is the metric by which we judge value.

According to certain therapists, all Indians are magic; and if you’d like to be certified in a practice that springs from said conviction, you must pay said therapist many thousands of dollars.

Said therapist is always, without fail, an old white man who most certainly failed at being a hippie.

There are no literary models for this experience which are not already corrupted by orientalist stain.

Twenty-two, thirty-seven

The precipitate of worms. A diet, convened.

Marat is in the bath but no one is coming. The boulevards are not yet built and no one has noticed.

Thawra, abeyant. Still, at this late hour. We wait.

The streets find trees for their shadows, which is the premonition of fire.

Adjustment bureau, attunement. The daily record.

A dispensation of tree smoke, pope smoke, smog.

Spain is still burning but perhaps no one will notice.

Didion at the gas station and McMurtry at the Dairy Queen and somehow both are observing from points east. Fort Snelling and the Apartheid Wall live near, but not so near as the others they are meant to contain, to destroy.

Preservation against resilience, which is, in the end, a colonizing trick.

A proposition, following Freud and the logic of negation: When Republicans say that white children should not have to be ashamed of being white what they are really saying is that shame should indeed be enforced, because in the end, it is the only way they can get off. And this is the story of Lindsay Graham.

Psychiatry is enclosure, extraction. Diagnosis figures character as a function of plot. A Jungian repetition, mirthless and cold. The joy of abstinence.

The hysteric who thinks he is master: a bafflement, a midden.

Alone with the Cyclopes, in the land of the blind.

Sharp stick and staff and stitch.

Sixty-two, forty-five

Hot rain sulfur and the cost, broken and cancerful, pestilent fields, necrotic river

Zohran Mamdani was invented in the vicinity of the back booth of the Village Lantern on Bleecker Street circa 2003. You can tell because of his command of the dialectic.

Aufhebung, Amreeka.

‘...the American rebellion was a sideshow to a far greater imperial drama. Britain, arguably, decided to cut its losses with the unruly thirteen colonies to better safeguard its more lucrative possessions in the Caribbean and South Asia. Meanwhile, every Indian schoolkid knows of Tipu Sultan’s last stand, and generations of Britons were raised on tales of colonial derring-do and the menace of the “tiger of Mysore,” Tipu’s sobriquet. (An ornate automatonthat Tipu once possessed, of a tiger eating a British soldier, is probably the most well-known object in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum.) In more recent years, the culture wars waged by India’s ruling Hindu nationalists have complicated the image of Tipu and his father, who some now have recast as bloodthirsty Muslim warlords rather than icons of national resistance. But that was not the case when, as a teen-ager, multiple decades ago, I went with my family on a tour of the ruins of Tipu’s fortress. Guides spoke of the monthlong siege that ended only because of the treachery of a local noble who turned on the sultan and allowed British troops to scale the walls. Tipu himself was found slain near a passageway once used to bring water into the fort; it’s dubbed the Water Gate. “First Watergate, Seringapatam,” the guide told us, elongating the consonants in melodious, if broken, English. “Second Watergate, Washington.”’

‘Israeli settlers attacked Palestinians and foreign solidarity activists northeast of Ramallah as residents tried to reach land threatened with confiscation.

‘Residents of Turmus Aya and Abu Falah launched a march towards the al-Badoud area where Palestinian landowners have been struggling to access their property during escalating settler violence, the official Wafa news agency reported.

‘An elderly Palestinian man was wounded in the attack while several solidarity activists were sprayed with pepper spray.

‘In a separate incident, settlers stormed an area near Palestinian homes on the outskirts of al-Mughayyir, northeast of Ramallah, under the protection of Israeli forces. Settlers threw stones at a house and tried to pour a toxic substance into the family’s water tank.

‘The Kaabneh family has faced near-daily attacks since settlers established an illegal outpost near their home about two years ago, Wafa reported.’

General Washington, Town Destroyer, to Major General John Sullivan, 1779: ‘The immediate objects are the total destruction and devastation of their settlements and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible. It will be essential to ruin the crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more…’

The Haudenosaunee do not forget.

Eight, seven

Strawberry moon wine and milk limpid and starred.

Sun-starved and bouffant grey light.

The rain comes in over the river.

The Goldwater Rule should be extended to cover armchair diagnoses of performers on MTV reality shows.

Ezra Klein and J.D. Vance are sharing a beard, and also a make-up artist.

That anti-Trump is a career maker is a sign of its emptiness, its strategic irrelevance.

That the villain of American history is King George and not the Earl of Guilford tells you pretty much everything you need to know about American politics.

Part of the apocrypha surrounding the death of Thomas Jefferson, two hundred years ago this Saturday, is that, according to the three white men who were with him in the thirty-six hours before his death, his last words were either, “This is the Fourth,” or “This is the Fourth?” or “It is the Fourth?”

According to the enslaved people who attended to his domestic affairs, including many of his children and other close family relations, his last words concerned the arrangement of his bedclothes. “Fix my pillow.” Make sure I am well arranged upon my demise.

“Is it the Fourth?” is apt every year, but this year in particular. What is the Fourth, after all, but a state of misrecognition?

The bit about the bedclothes is equally pertinent: Take care with the counterpane so no one notices the old man is a corpse.

A specter is haunting and it is ‘woke’. If history is any guide, certain steps must be taken.

Ocean surface temperatures reached record highs in June. Algae rejoice. The heat dome descends.

Justice Jackson, quoting Frederick Douglass, would have you remember that–despite great insistence otherwise–the sin for which Sodom and Gomorrah was punished was inhospitality.

Meanwhile, somewhere, Stephen Miller continues to do his best Walder Frey.

A category mistake: it is not cynical to point out cynical opportunism.

Cynicism: The insistence that any politics which does not comport with or flow from the party apparatus and the nomenklatura is inherently pathological.

Also: An ‘ally’ is not a comrade.

“As the nephew of the son of a Holocaust survivor, he has an aversion to being in prison…”

There is another apocryphal tradition associated with Jefferson’s death that involves students from the University of Virginia trucking up the mountain from Charlottesville to view his dead body in its alcove bed. If true, it is more than likely that Edgar Allan Poe would have been among the assembly, which is why we celebrate July 4, 1826 as the day the literary gothic was unborn in America; and with it, jouissance.

Just reading the story about climbing the Empire State Building is giving me vertigo.

American grain is bread for the circus. This is why the soil is depleted and cancer rates are skyrocketing.

Wilhelm Reich would have made a killing had he lived to haunt Silicon Valley.

I miss Joan Didion, and the Jane Hotel.

Just taste.

Twenty-six, twenty-seven

Fifty-five, thirty-two

Cotton hot and damp with corn, its breath, occlusion.

The coup in Moscow that precipitated the end of the Soviet Union took place from August 19-21, 1991. Zohran Mamdani was born two months later, on October 18.

A specter, etc.

What becomes of ‘Communism’ after the End of History(™)?

The state of hyperarousal of children abused and neglected.

Schismatics in Switzerland because we do not miss Rome so much as the empire.

“Our State Fair is a Great State Fair”

Donald Trump and Megan Mullally, “Green Acres”

“...it was a tone reflecting the idolatry of the rich that so often accompanies the democratization of things, the flattening out.”

The US Army thinks I just graduated from medical school which is an upgrade of sorts from the recruiter that keeps trying to get me to join Border Control.

How far the center has shifted when the mere proposition that being alive should not be an opportunity for extortion is considered ‘far Left’.

On the continuing misuse of Hannah Arendt.

We have lost a generation of journalists to the tyranny of Rachel Maddow but Ms. Now! is a good bit.

To clarify, this is not about Rachel Maddow, but about “Rachel Maddow” which is to say, the tyranny of the image.

The primary qualification of a journalist is to be camera-ready.



”Going to work for Vogue was, in the late 1950s, not unlike training with the Rockettes.”

Sixty-four, six

The hole of the night gray earth and still not yet.

Scansion and the irritable aspects of time on the scalar, the scapular.

Aphorism not influence and better still the hot take and the take away like rest stop convenience store fast food but no fruit.

Abundance is a plan but the sea is wide and deep and some spaces we dig will never be filled.

Cynicism is the brand but we have lost all of the cattle.

The irony that everyone knew the unbranded cattle belonged to Maverick now that “Maverick” ia a brand of everything from cigarettes to bolo ties to suitcases to fighter pilots.

They have destroyed the Reflecting Pool to profane the Lincoln Memorial.

Constitutional originalism is the juridical equivalent of fandom-oriented IP. Every Supreme Court decision is presently an extended commentary on the proposition that Han shot first.

Insight is no objective. Nor is insight an object. Or an object the end. Dilly dally with surplus, which is neither definite nor discrete.

“I am not trying to seduce you...Would you like me to seduce you? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”

“It’s only a flesh wound, Lambchop.”

Grace, then censorship.

Fifteen

Twenty-five, twenty-one

Seven

Electric night and drums on the morning silver with taut skin no beat

The Gaza Health Ministry says at least 73,043 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since Israel’s genocidal war began in October 2023.

The 1976 bicentennial as a theory of neoliberalism and America as subject of financialization.

The Board of Peace plans to grant itself immunity and from what or who or where remains unclear but everyone who stands to profit from rebuilding Gaza in the image of Atlantic City seems to be telling themselves that they are both legally covered and morally correct and might as well proceed with building a Trump island off the coast at Deir al-Balah.

Rami Khouri: “The ‘framework’ is vague because they cannot possibly reach a solid agreement while Israel insists that it must have superior rights to act militarily in Lebanon, before Lebanese get their sovereignty back. This is another neo-colonial slap in the face to Arab rights, just like Trump’s ‘Board of Peace’ nonsense and other efforts more greared to political entertainment, fantasy, and magic acts than to reality. Once Israel accepts to end its colonial, genocidal, and apartheid-loving policies and live in peace with equal rights with its Arab neighbors and a Palestinian state, full peace can happen, as Israel achieved with Jordan and Egypt decades ago, and as the Arab Peace Plan that remains active offers.

“When Israel has to rely on American official promotion of racist zionist superiority over Arab rights, as this voodoo document offers, the chances of a lasting meaningful agreement are zero. Make-believe cartoon-land frameworks, however, can be announced every week, as we witnessed last night. The ultimate aim of a negotiated full peace between Israel and Lebanon is one we should all support, but it will only happen if all sides behave honestly, decently, and equitably — which Israel and the US have shown they are unable or unwilling to do in Palestine and Lebanon, at least.”

Y Tu Mama Tambien is twenty-five.

‘As a work interpreting “great” works of fiction for a popular audience, these enduring political commitments, like Mathiessen’s far from clandestine homosexuality, were encoded within the literary critical tradition inaugurated by American Renaissance, just as Mathiessen’s insistence on the historicity of American literary valuation stood as a riposte to a tradition of formalist criticism aligned, broadly, with the Wilsonian vision of post-Reconstruction national reconciliation predicated upon whiteness as a vehicle of cross-class alliance. Predicated upon the indication of non-conflictual wholeness, formalist approaches to American literary criticism drew upon a transhistorical metric of literary valuation that reflected a neo-Confederate neutralization of class struggle and racial difference through the nominalism of the belle lettristic.’

Israel violated the latest cease fire in Lebanon within an hour of its being signed.

The Strait of Hormuz is closed in observation of the anniversary of Stonewall.

Eleven, twenty-three

Broke gray light and cold smoke crawling

It is Ashoura. May we always remember the sacrifices made for justice.

Eddie Glaude talked about the Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention on a podcast yesterday which is the latest in a long strange of uncanny reminders about that long ago research project.

At least a thousand people are dead in Venezuela and as of yet the Viceroy has not spoken.

CENTCOM reports the US is bombing Iran again and certainly no one could have seen that coming what with J.D. Vance’s spectacular beard in Switzerland.

Heather Cox Richardson is most definitely AI generated.

Stephen Miller is the love child of Roy Cohn and Peter Fraser.

Certain parts of contemporary trauma theory are low-key a branch of eugenics.

Old fashioned Xerox machines were entered into evidence as proof of some sort of leftist conspiracy in Texas because activists were printing zines the old fashioned way, which is to say samizdat.

Hysterics suffer from an abundance.

The Lebanese government has consented to hand over portions of the south to Israel because certainly that is bound to make Israelis feel safe finally and forever.

Meanwhile: An Israeli attack has killed three people in Maghazi camp in central Gaza.

And then: Zohran goes on TV and declares that the only majority party in the United States is the party of the working-class and the Democratic Party leadership says no thank you indeed we want no part of your winning strategy of guaranteeing people fair wages, affordable housing, childcare, education, and health care. Bring on the Trillionaires!

The Party is declaring war on the Left because they really do get off on the satisfaction of failure. They are also just incredibly stupid. And superstitious. But not superstitious enough. Or correctly.

“Ultimately they all want English morality to be proved right–because this serves humanity best, or ‘the general utility,’ or ‘the happiness of the greatest number’–no, the happiness of England. With all their powers they want to prove to themselves that the striving for English happiness–I mean for comfort and fashion…is at the same time also the right way to virtue; indeed that whatever virtue has existed in the world so far must have consisted in such striving.”

Dessalines was not the world spirit but he will be coming, and soon.

It is Ashoura.

Eleven, twenty-four

Stop pretending things are metaphors when they are not metaphors.

“Exchange turns from the metaphor of social relation into a means of jouissance.” Says Samo Tomšič.

“It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.”

The first headline in the Guardian online today: Americans who rent their homes are overburdened by the proliferation of fees for services that once would have been included in the rent (my favorite is always the “convenience fee” for making rent payments online).

Second headline in the Guardian today: Everyone is shocked (shocked!) that Mamdani’s slate of candidates won (and won big) in New York primaries.

Third headline, everywhere: Mamdani is a kingmaker.

The upside here is that as long as the political media continues to mistake personal charisma for political strategy, they and the major political parties will continue to ignore the fact that the DSA is winning these elections not because of any one individual but because it is out organizing the legacy parties–that is, it is actually organizing people, and communities, not “interests” or narrowly defined “constituencies” of corporate “partners”.

Speaking of retro chic: Odelay is thirty years old. It came out forty-three years to the day after Julius and Ethel were electrocuted.

The paper sleeve for a coffee cup is called a zarf which is a Turkish modification of an Arabic word.

I imagine the Iranian negotiating team in Switzerland spends most of their down time making fun of J.D. Vance’s beard. (And then they crack jokes about his facial hair, too.)

Twenty-one, twelve

To say that the sun rises and know that it is only just a way of speaking because things happen like white and yellow and again the street crumbles down.

We need a plot twist.

Repetition compulsion.

‘As a function of power in the state of exception, the crisis of empire, in this sense, exists—always—elsewhere: It is never here, never where we are, inasmuch as the “we” of what and where we are is constituted as a function of the otherness of the space in which empire is manifest as the state in which exception is heralded, but not codified, as a—but not the—rule. Wherever we are, it is not here; wherever it is, we cannot be. Localizing the state of exception as one of libidinal excess, the periphery is here designated as the site of an elsewhere which is as alluring as it is destructive, a site less of carnivalesque inversion than quasi-psychotic imposture. The elsewhere, in this sense, designates a terrain of inquiry in which the capacity of negation has been rendered eccentric, though not inoperative; and that becomes all the more conventional for the eccentricity of its florid deviations from the eerie, the weird, and the norm. To endure, within this schema, is to constitute the space of the elsewhere as the realm of the otherwise: to evoke the otherwise as not merely the situated other of capital, but its omnipresent, irrepressible negation.’

If Dirty Dancing, a movie about 1962, had not been released in 1987, what music would we listen to in the year 2026?

Has anyone yet written a musical history of Rosanna Arquette and why or why not?

Do we know for sure that David Lynch did not name the band Toto?

One wonders what Carlos Leon and Tony Ward are doing and why there has not yet been a reality show in which Madonna’s C- and D-list exes all live together in a house in Brentwood.

A federal judge in Texas has sentenced anti-ICE protesters to more than fifty years, seventy, and one hundred years in prison on Trumped-up terrorism charges.

Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan write that Trump is “a story we intend to cover to the end.” They seem to mean this optimistically, although no one knows why.

On optimism, a grandmother, expressing dismay at the state of the Reflecting Pool, is reported to have said, of the United States, “We’re young but we’re bright.” Presumably, she means the nation is young. Except that it is not. It is, in fact, quite old, and much the worse for wear.

“From the ancient Persia of thousands of years ago to the civilized Iran of today, the spirit of Iran remains alive and steadfast…We came to Los Angeles with pride, competed with honor, and leave with dignity.”



Sumud.

Six, fifty

Obamalisk basilisk a chamber of secrets.




Geopolitical kabuki:

For most Americans, Iran is not Iran but “Iran,” which is to say, not a place or a people or a history, but a morbid symptom of their necrotic American fantasy of a long displaced geopolitical order that was–and remains–orientalist and genocidal and that continues insists loudly upon its relevance as well as its reference well after its moment is passed. US strategy does not, has not, will not deal in realities. It deals in correspondences which would force fantasies upon realities, whatever the consequences. It is about bending reality in such a way that it is indistinguishable from fantasy such that the only real reality is in the perception of reality as inherently bent. To encounter the bend in reality is to flirt with the trauma of the real.

The east is a career. And remains one, and it is quite lucrative, as it turns out.
But substitute any country you like and the point is the same, with certain provisos.

Speaking of orientalism: Tulsi Gabbard has a guru. Who is also maybe a PAC.

The New York Times continues to have metaphysical questions about podcasting.

The Praeger U sponsored Freedom Truck is a close cousin of the Mitzvah Tank which is a step brother of the Dunk Tank which will also be at the Great American State Fair.

The uncanny non-eventfulness of the semiquincentennial seems to have made a certain type of well adjusted Gen Xer nostalgic for the Bicentennial and the tall ships and so forth because “that was a time of unity”: a position belied by the fact that the 1976 celebration was effectively an orgy of national forgetting designed to sideline Watergate and the Nixon pardon and the twenty-year war in Vietnam that had just ended in defeat barely a year before. It was the occasion of the birth of neoliberal cynicism, which gains credence in the world by pretending naivete.

The reason Lesley Ann Warren is in the “Janie’s Got a Gun” video is because Miss Scarlett has the revolver at the end of Clue.

Everything’s unbecoming.

The return of the repressed but nobody was there to accept delivery.

In classical Marxism, knee deep in the hoopla is what follows farce.

It’s already too late.

Fifty-one

Robert Thurman, former monk and eminent scholar of Tibetan Buddhism, has passed from this world. We do not know where he has gone, but if this were Beirut, it would be somewhere off the Rue de Mexique.

Which begs the question: Where do the wandering ghosts of Ras Beirut go now that Bardo is closed?

To the gossipy, Godardian coincidental: Robert Thurman’s second wife, Nena, was Timothy Leary’s first wife. They met because the Dalai Lama sent Bob to meet with Leary to try to get Tim to cool it with all the acid. Bob ended up marrying Nena and having Uma. Tim, meanwhile, married Rosemary, which is when things started to really go off the rails for him, LSD-wise.

Which brings us back to Zayd Dohrn’s book, in that he provides fairly extensive details of the operation via which the Weather broke Leary out of the Men’s Colony prison near San Luis Obispo back in September 1970. (Because of Leary’s tenuous connection to Tibetan Buddhism, the Weather crew that sprung him used a statue of the Buddha to signal where he was supposed to meet them—the Buddha being, as it were, “on the path to enlightenment.”) After getting him out of California, they smuggled him across country and got him to Cuba, and from there to Algeria, where he ended up hanging out with Eldridge Cleaver, until both Eldridge and the FLN had had enough of his antics that he got kicked out of the country, which is how he ends up in Afghanistan, where is arrested in 1973.

The back half of that story comes from Elaine Mokhtefi who–as the American serving as FLN liaison with the Panthers in Algiers–has some choice things to say about both Leary and the Weather Underground.

The back back half that I can add is that the novelist Katherine Neville once told me that she remembered seeing Eldridge Cleaver and Leary quite regularly when she was living in Algiers; and that on at least one occasion, she saw them walking down the opposite side of the street, in the opposite direction, as Henry Kissinger.

What does it mean to live inside the remnants of a failed revolution? This is, I suppose, part of what Marx was worrying over in the Brumaire. And Freud, later, for different reasons.


But, up close, the new journalism is very old. And very annoying.

To that point, it is worth noting that Robert Thurman had the same literary agent as Gay Talese, Joan Didion, and Tom Wolfe.

If Lindsay Graham were finally outed, could we stop his reign of terror?

Thirty-nine