Trespassing Assemblies

afieryflyingroule: Wobbly variation on a theme

Fri, 17 May 2013 11:04:38 +0100

Wobbly variation on a theme

Poem: Notebook parentheses

Mon, 13 May 2013 21:15:20 +0100

(dismiss experiences far too easily,

I want to become a commonplace of everything)

(only)
(just)

(what do you smash? When everything is backed-up, what do you smash?)
(I saw something nothing like you/ the symmetries of your face folded when I fucked you)

(& partly my own)
(historically and actually)

(but it was a pseudoscience)

(to remember it)

(this briefly happened in Little London)
(what have I to do with lamentation?)

(democracy)
(ie religion)
(ie unionised)
(ie embodied labour)

(what about the struggle? The Luddites, the Chartists, the imprisoned ones, what about them?)

(what isn’t)
(make me happy)
(mitto – hand)

(present & future)

(ie self-harm, as in prison)

(might be overdone)

(said long)
(said very fast like a shame word)

(against what? Writing, part-time work)

(who once married a stranger called Gloria)

(I was cheerfully stupid)

‘I Don’t Want To Sleep Alone’ Tsai-Ling Miang,...

Mon, 13 May 2013 07:28:42 +0100

‘I Don’t Want To Sleep Alone’ Tsai-Ling Miang, 2006

From 'Wales – Green Mountain, Black Mountain' by Dylan Thomas

Sat, 12 Jan 2013 16:24:00 +0000

From 'Wales – Green Mountain, Black Mountain' by Dylan Thomas:

Remember the procession of the old-young men
From dole queue to corner and back again,
From the pinched, packed streets to the peak of slag
In the bite of the winters with shovel and bag,
With a drooping fag and a turned up collar,
Stamping for the cold at the ill lit corner
Dragging through the squalor with their hearts like lead
Staring at the hunger and the shut pit-head
Nothing in their pockets, nothing home to eat,
Lagging from the slag heap to the pinched, packed street.
Remember the procession of the old-young men.
It shall never happen again.

"And is it not an odd jealousy, that the poet finds himself not ever near enough to his object? The..."

Sun, 30 Dec 2012 22:11:00 +0000

“And is it not an odd jealousy, that the poet finds himself not ever near enough to his object? The pinetree, the river, the bank of flowers before him - there is always this sense of stillness that follows a pageant which has just gone by; always a referred existence, an absence, never a presence and a satifaction… what shall we say of this flattery and baulking, of this use that is made of us?”

- Emerson

I read some great books this year.

Sat, 29 Dec 2012 22:56:00 +0000

2012 was a really brilliant year of reading, especially novels. I haven’t enjoyed reading fiction so much since finishing an English degree 5 years ago, and not coincidentally, I spent most of the year doing an MA which focused my mind on methodology and politics. Much of what I read was not an escape from that and its questions but a complement to my thinking and to the academic work. Many times this year I found myself looking for particular things in novels, and I was surprised to find them. I found the questions that I ask of life and love and politics in them. I write this as a thank you to friends who shared their excitement about some of the books mentioned here, and if you’re looking for something to read, I hope I’m passing some of that enthusiasm on.

There were some repeated themes to my reading. Particular forms of political organisation, especially clandestine politics, first reared its head in Andrew Berger’s Outlaws of America (2006), a history of the Weather Underground and its place in anti-racist, anti-imperialist insurgent politics in the USA in the 1960s and 70s. The subtitle of the book is ‘the Weather Underground and the politics of solidarity’, and this sympathetic and wide-ranging book sets the Underground in the wider context of the SDS (Students for Democratic Society), militant Black and other liberation politics and events beyond the USA, and what ‘solidarity’ means (or doesn’t) in practice – across race, class, gender, cultures and nations. I found the analysis of strategic failures by SDS and the Underground instructive and depressing in equal measure. A real strength of the book is Berger’s extensive interviews with key figures in the movement, two of whom, David Gilbert and Laura Whitehorn, are particularly fascinating. I’m glad to have discovered the depth and breadth of anticapitalist organising in the US during this period and this book led me to many more questions – to what extent did the US differ from radical European politics at the time? What does the development of feminism tell us about these movements? Why there now so little political action attempting to simultaneously address race, class and gender oppressions? Several other books I read linked to some of these questions. The bravery and the foolhardiness of many of these people, and the fact that these two are never evenly mixed in any of us, terrified me. The thought of living in certain times follow me everywhere. Two other books about US grassroots organising Andrew Cornell’s Oppose and Propose (2011), about the influential Movement For New Society of the 1970s and 80, and Team Colours Collective’s Wind(s) from Below: Radical Community Organising to make Revolution Possible [!] (2011) are both slightly unsatisfactory short books which complement each other. The first focuses (haphazardly) on the strategy and practices of the MNS, which can be summarised as a triangle of long-term research and local organising, intentional communities and direct action, whilst the second is a it what my friend Emma calls ‘wafty’ but does at least pithily dissect the history and current barriers to ‘movement-building’ in post-Fordist USA, especially in terms of the co-optation of radical organisations by the state, and the professionalisation of ‘organising’. I found the former realistic and depressing and the latter concise, turning to too vague, but quite inspiring. Both are worth a look if you’re interested in this stuff.

Joan Nestle’s A Restricted Country (1988) is a collection of memoir, short stories and poems by Nestle, a working class Jewish lesbian femme civil rights activist (these namings are important to some extent, because they frequently outline the position she writes from, without being a constraint). Two pieces stand out particularly. Nestle’s history of the identifications of ‘butch’ and ‘femme’ in lesbian culture contends that ‘butch’ and ‘femme’ are genders carved out in themselves, not merely imitative of ‘a man’ and ‘a woman’, and it made me re-evaluate my own opinions on masculine and feminine posturing, my feelings about my own and others’ gender presentation, and reminded me that gender and sexuality are and have histories – personal and epochal. Her memoir of her time as a civil rights activist registering black voters and marching alongside Martin Luther King describes living alongside and in solidarity with African-Americans, sharing victories over racism but feeling unable to share the history of her own oppression. It’s incredibly moving and shows the possibilities and limitations for solidarity in practice.

I could have picked a better time to read Nanni Balestrini’s pauseless monologue of catastrophic 70s Italian insurgency, The Unseen (1987) and perhaps if I had, I wouldn’t have found it shattering. As it was, I have rarely been so physically affected by a book. It made me want to scream and smash things up and vomit, and it made me feel (unhelpfully) hopeless about radical politics. It is a relentless piece, there is nowhere to hide in it, and it is a novel about comradeship, about political effects rather than political causes; what happens when you commit to the Underground, what carries on happening and what carries you along. It is doubly violent because it describes violence violently. It is also based on real events (whatever that means), and it feels like reportage with no place for reflection. There’s a good contextual review of it here, and I’d recommend it, if you have the stomach. I’ve not read much to match it in vicious urgency. It’s really extraordinary.

To calm me down after Balestrini, I was prescribed José Saramago’s Blindness, and its sequel, Seeing (1995 and 2004). Congruent titles, no?. The first describes an epidemic of inexplicable blindness which spreads rapidly through a population of a whole country – the first are interned in a hospital, from which they later escape. The second book describes the same country, a few years later, where another epidemic – of non-voting – arises, equally inexplicably. As with Balestrini, and especially in Blindness, it’s about effect, not cause. The politics is improvised from the situation, and there’s no turning away from suffering. The effects of both conceits are deeply explored – with more success in the first novel, which I had to keep putting down because it was so painful. Saramago’s allegories are particular and tender, and made me think of Bunyan and Piers Plowman in the distance and the grace of allegory – there’s something clean and maybe even forensic about the bell-jar of a never-known situation. And yet the uncomfortable moments in allegory come when you know this shit is real. The state of emergency occurs more frequently than we care to know – the institutionalisation of the criminal-ill, the paranoia of the state conjuring imagined crimes and real punishment. There’s a wonderful moment near the end of Blindness where a small group who have banded together come across a sort of Speakers’ Corner in a square in the squalid city of blind people. Voices espouse democracy, the free market, business and enterprise, progressive politics, a new dawn, the existence of an all-powerful god, cures for cancer and so on. People stand and listen and cheer, but our characters walk on, indifferent. In Seeing, the government nakedly tries to impress on the people their need for the government by making them suffer. Government, justice, democracy are described just as they are; frail, contingent, uneven and contested – not as fixed as we (or others) want them to be. What makes these novels richer than this exposition, though is their understated explorations of solidarity, love and friendship, and and as one review I read puts it, they reveal much of what we keep hidden from ourselves.

Some of these themes arise in Victor Serge’s The Case of Comrade Tulayev(1942) and Nawal El Sadawi’s Woman at Point Zero (1973). In the former, the unpremeditated murder of a Politburo official by a neurotic clerk provokes the Stalinist apparatus to identify a conspiracy and conspirators at any cost. In the latter, a woman condemned to death for murdering her pimp makes her only testimony. Again, both novels are drawn from the experiences of two political and literary figures of truth and exile. I have wanted to read Serge for a long time, and I was lucky enough to be ill and thus read Tulayev all in one big go. What I loved about it was the pace and eddying of the narrative, as characters are drawn in and out and finally down by the chance shooting. It moves through Russia, Spain and France, weaving the characters together not through the theme of Russia as a place, but rather the growing power of the USSR. It combines lots of good things I like in other Russian writers – the absurdity and wit of Bulgakov, the metaphysical discursions of Dostoyevsky, and it reminded me of Nabakov too, at points – moments of beauty entirely outside the machine of the state, moments which elude the bureaucratic imagination so soon after a flourishing of revolutionary art and politics. It reminded me I wanted to read Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading again – another ‘Kafkaesque’ (a word that does too much work) narrative of a man condemned to death without knowing the reason. What I really like about Serge is how the characters are complex, unpredictable people, and his study of how they each deal with the paranoid absurdity of the Stalinist regime. In this piece, people are not victims of history – people are victims of people. The state is not the state – it is the people in the state, acting under the idea of the state and the imperative to preserve and sustain Communism. It’s such a rich book, I want to read it again. But I’m going to read Conquered Cities next.

In Woman at Point Zero, it is also impossible for those judged guilty to prove their innocence. The woman of the title, Firdaus, rejects the sentence of guilt upon her for murdering her pimp – a man she never asked or consented to be controlled by – by tracing the narrative of her enforced prostitution and the greater crime of the impossibility of power and honour for women except under the terms of the patriarchy’s systematic subjugation of women. This subjugation – and the impossibility of ‘honour’ under any other terms, along with how to escape from being such a subject, is the main theme of the book. The virtue by which women like her are defined is a paradoxical one. ‘I had learnt that honour required large sums of money to protect it, but that large sums of money could not be obtained without losing one’s honour.’ The freedom of the estrangement Firdaus experiences when she rejects the terms of her guilt is spellbinding; her whole story, told in a single sweep from childhood to prison, makes one cheer when she stabs the man to death. It’s an intensely materialist novel – flesh, clothes, coins and notes pass through it, as Firdaus’ ‘value’ is constantly weighed and contested. It’s ace, and not long - I read it in one go.

I also read several books centred on writers writing, and my favourites were Archie Hind’s The Dear Green Place (1966) and Carol Shields’ Unless (2002). Hind’s Mat (who bears a strong resemblance to the author) is a working-class man in 1960s Glasgow struggling to earn money, keep a family and write. The book combines descriptions of life and that city, which I love, with the doings of writing itself – sitting down with pieces of paper in the small hours, shuffling and getting nowhere – then bunking off ‘everyday’ life when an idea strikes, knowing you’ll have to face the consequences of your absconding. I love the way Hind explains Mat’s (and his own) translation of the world of work, of popular (and unpopular) socialism, of family and of self-analysis into writing, into another world of words. It’s not a happy ending but this story gave me some fire for my own work, and also reminded me of Gray’s Lanark, one of my favourite books.Shields’ Unless I read for the third time – I needed it. I have this with only a few books – Doris Lessing’s Memoirs of a Survivor is one, and if you haven’t read it, go and do so, and Lanark is another. In the book, a writer loses her daughter to a mysterious place of selflessness – she quits university and sits on a street corner wearing a sign saying ‘Goodness’. This is a book about so many things; the friendship between women (and its absence from literature), translation, selflessness, sex and getting older, bourgeois life, righteousness and self-righteousness. It is about the difficulty and selfishness and longing of political commitment, which the narrator understands in glimpses. ‘What Norah wants is to belong to the whole world or at least to have, just for a moment, the taste of the whole world in her mouth. But she can’t. So she won’t.’ The Stone Diaries(1993) is worth a read too – a woman’s life across the Canadian century.

Another story of a middle-aged woman in crisis is Anne Enright’s The Gathering(2007), which I knew nothing about and read in two sittings, its momentum pulling me along at the uncomfortable speed at which life often seems to go. It’s about a large Irish family with many siblings coming together for the funeral of one. When I say it reminded me of McGahern and Joyce it is the best of both that come through. Enright describes sex, particularly, and sexual desire, and the body and death, with painful truth: ‘So it is all – the I hate you, I love you, I hate – a dream of killing and dying, I understand that much; that when you roll away from each other to go to sleep, then the dream is over for another day.’

Photo

Sun, 25 Nov 2012 21:46:15 +0000

Housing (policy, theory, activism)

Thu, 15 Nov 2012 14:46:53 +0000

I’m looking for good housing blogs - Tumblrs and others - radical approaches, all tenures, critiques and evaluations of housing policy (eg comparative European stuff) - send ‘em up!

from Victor Serge's 'Memoirs of a Revolutionary'

Wed, 14 Nov 2012 19:35:00 +0000

“I give myself credit for having seen clearly in a number of important situations. In itself, this is not so difficult to achieve, and yet it is rather unusual. To my mind, it is less a question of an exalted or shrewd intelligence, than of good sense, goodwill, and a certain sort of courage to enable one to rise above both the pressures of one’s environment and the natural inclination to close one’s eyes to facts, a temptation that arises from our immediate interests and from the fear which problems inspire in us. A French essayist has said: ‘What is terrible when you seek the truth, is that you find it.’ You find it, and then you are no longer free to follow the biases of your personal circle, or to accept fashionable clichés.”

(from Susan Sontag’s introduction to ‘The Case of Comrade Tulayev’ by Victor Serge (1950), NYRB 2004)

images

Sun, 11 Nov 2012 20:30:37 +0000

My friend Bill told me yesterday that the Spanish surrealists who are part of the occupations and mobilisations in Madrid refuse to produce any images. People get very angry about them for this but still, they refuse it.

other-wordly: pronunciation | ka-RO-shE

Wed, 07 Nov 2012 21:31:23 +0000

other-wordly:

pronunciation | ka-RO-shE

"On that happy day when the rain was lashing and you played so unexpectedly well came the resolution..."

Sun, 04 Nov 2012 14:03:56 +0000

“On that happy day when the rain was lashing and you played so unexpectedly well came the resolution of the nebulous something that had imperceptibly arisen between us after our first weeks of love. I realized that you had no power over me, that it was not you alone who were my lover but the entire earth. It was as if my soul had extended countless sensitive feelers, and I lived within everything, perceiving simultaneously Niagara Falls thundering far beyond the ocean and the long golden drops rustling and pattering in the lane. I glanced at a birch tree’s shiny bark and suddenly felt that, in place of arms, I possessed inclined branches covered with little wet leaves and, instead of legs, a thousand slender roots, twining into the earth, imbibing it. I wanted to transfuse myself thus into all of nature, to experience what it was like to be an old boletus mushroom with its spongy yellow underside, or a dragonfly, or the solar sphere. I felt so happy that I suddenly burst out laughing, and kissed you on theclavicle and nape. I would even have recited a poem to you, but you detested poetry.”

- Vladimir Nabokov, Sounds (via howtotalktogirlsdialectically)

Leaf and nut in the ha-ha, nr Wakefield, Oct 2012

Mon, 29 Oct 2012 21:10:30 +0000

Leaf and nut in the ha-ha, nr Wakefield, Oct 2012

Is this your life? Inserts which come free with French filing...

Thu, 25 Oct 2012 19:22:58 +0100

Is this your life? Inserts which come free with French filing cabinet, Oct 2012

‘The Italian Republic’ died 2nd June 2012, according...

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 22:19:00 +0100

‘The Italian Republic’ died 2nd June 2012, according to this DIY private eye cover. Paint and collage, Florence, Sept 2012

"During the 1607 uprising in Rockingham Forest more than fifty people defending common right were..."

Sun, 07 Oct 2012 09:20:20 +0100

“During the 1607 uprising in Rockingham Forest more than fifty people defending common right were massacred. The commotion of forest commoners was a major step in the history of class struggle in England. New kinds of writing arose describing the class struggle, such as the seditious writing wrapped around a ball of wax (“living the poor doth want and living they shall have”) and thrown into a church choir, or such as Shakespeare’s treatment of the hard-hearted ruler faced with a starving populace in his Roman play Coriolanus (1608).”

- Peter Linebaugh, The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberty and Commons for All (via howtotalktogirlsdialectically)

I have come to you, not through everything that mattersI have not come to you through everything...

Sat, 06 Oct 2012 21:27:39 +0100

I have come to you, not through everything that matters
I have not come to you through everything that matters
I have not come to you through everything that matter is
I have come, not to you, through everything that matter is
I have come, not to you, through everything that matters

‘The state watches us - smash its eyes!’ Poster...

Sat, 06 Oct 2012 17:45:00 +0100

‘The state watches us - smash its eyes!’

Poster everywhere, Paris 19e and 20e arrondissements, Sept 2012

luxurycommunism: social housing amen. Actually, amen. I was...

Thu, 04 Oct 2012 09:57:10 +0100

luxurycommunism:

social housing

amen. Actually, amen. I was sitting in a Brunelleschi cloister the other day thinking we could definitely do with more of these. But I’m down with fan vaulting too.

thusly: immolator: here’s my latest research: TOWARDS...

Thu, 04 Oct 2012 09:53:30 +0100

thusly:

immolator:

here’s my latest research: TOWARDS RESPONSIBLE CAPITALISM

(can i work for the labour party now?)

synergy