Little Red's Recovery Room

Read an excerpt from the soon-to-be published Hashish writings of Benjamin. If only I'd read that stuff at 17 instead of Terence McKenna's space-aliens-in-the-magical-mushrooms gibberish, who knows where I'd be now.

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Probably here anyway, probably a day almost exactly like this one-- reading Hardt and Negri's Multitude, writing an essay on Jeff Wall and Benjamin, and surfeited by news sources (all bad, all meanings of this) such that the melting of the polar ice caps and an economy based increasingly on churning liquidity and speculation on speculation, combine, by both displacement and condensation, in the entirely banal phrase: trying to keep afloat.


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Here's one for the poetry wars: "All the elements of corruption and exploitation are imposed on us by the linguistic and communicative regimes of production: destroying them in words is as urgent as doing so in deeds. . . Knowledge has to become linguistic action and philosophy has to become a real reappropriation of knowledge." (Multitude, 404)

Write your poems; you too can experience "the irrepressible lightness and joy of being communist." (Empire, 413)

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I'm going to pretend I believe that words are as urgent as deeds and keep at the essays and research. Meanwhile, if anybody wants to do something. . . Please, please, be my guest.

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I like Jane's remarks about (the) soul as surplus value. I used to think the unconscious was the shoebox full of unopened mail I kept in the closet.

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Somebody please post a YouTube video of Anne Boyer kicking Jim Behrle's ass at the Flarf Festival.

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I might be scarce until I finish up classes mid-May. But I'll be listening.