I’ve seen a lot of “general strike now” tweets and just want to say, in the spirit of comradely criticism: calling for a major revolutionary action at a time when it’s organizationally impossible is also a form of liberalism
ive never felt more deranged in my life than when i worked for Penguin and had to spend an entire day cold-calling random bookstores to ask if they wanted a lifesize cutout of jonathan franzen
to be clear, i would sob with joy for weeks on end if there was an actual general strike in this godforsaken country. i believe in demanding the impossible & “fighting absolutely,” as mike davis put it. but let’s not mistake righteous desire for concrete—and mundane!—organizing
echoes of Vietnam in Palestine:
just learned that after massacring Viet villagers, US soldiers explained to the military inspector that they had found a child’s drawing of a rifle, which proved that the civilians were “combatants” with “hostile intent” in a “free-fire zone”
years ago, during contract bargaining, admin told us that grad students doing sex work to survive were “turning tricks for a dime” & morally unworthy of a living wage; now that their counterparts across the country are begging cops to maim students & faculty, i want to be clear:
in less than a year, our major humanities institutions went from furnishing a constant stream of elegies for the college essay to groveling at the feet of the most regressive, anti-intellectual tech bullshit we’ve seen this century (so far)
today I learned that the Big Three (APA, Chicago, MLA) have all established a citation standard for ChatGPT generated text. They say putting the company behind the generator (e.g. OpenAI) and the date you generated it counts, even though the text is not replicable or searchable
it must be pretty cool to have an actual poetic method beyond just writing a couple stanzas and then asking myself “would an annoying person say this?”
struggling to make sense of the fact that our social relations are governed by those who “just want to feel safe”—an abstract desire that’s not only detached from genuine safety but in fact requires an ungodly amount of ‘disposable’ people to live in a state of ceaseless terror
so, it's official: the second chapter of my dissertation, "Economies of Dissent: Ferlinghetti, Baraka, & Beat Poetry after the Cuban Revolution" has won the Marxist Literary Group's Michael Sprinker Prize! extremely honored, grateful, and stoked 🙏
i think we’d all be in a much better position to build solidarity if we admitted to ourselves and our comrades that most of us do not have anything close to a “community”
i refuse to buy into the nostalgia for a pre-neoliberal university that never really existed, but it’s hard to celebrate a figure like Berlant without also mourning the incalculable number of similarly brilliant thinkers who’ve been gutted, crushed, and disposed of by academia
“There is a difference between wanting to repair the world such that one’s current desires can flourish, and remaining open to the possibility that making a different world might mean that one’s current desires might have no place.” Patricia Stuelke
i love boycotting. i'll boycott basically anything. i love walking into a store and seeing some particularly evil commodity and denying its power over me. makes me feel like a medieval mystic performing a preventative exorcism
here’s a crazy idea: abolish harvard and turn it into free public housing for all the homeless people that its faculty and admin step over every day on their way to campus :)
“Not a nut or bolt will be allowed to reach Chile under Allende…We shall do all in our power to condemn Chile and Chileans to utmost deprivation and poverty.” — Edward Korry, US Ambassador to Chile, from a message to president Eduardo Frei dated September 1970
one of the most stifling ideas in poetryland is that poems must aspire to heal a broken world by imaginatively resolving social contradictions. what if we refused this capture & embraced those contradictions, not as an obstacle to poetry, but its very conditions of possibility?
so many poets & academics failing the most basic, comparatively risk-free principles of solidarity with Palestine. i learned years ago not to put much political stock in US literary solidarity, but i didn’t think i’d watch ‘us’ passively accept—or actively incite—a second Nakba
just read the phrase “american socialist patriotism” so i’m logging off forever—some concepts cannot be reclaimed & anyone with a decent understanding of US history should know that “patriotism” in a settler-colony is always, always reactionary
just wanna say that while i am certainly a marxist, i will never ever regurgitate some dumb bullshit about the anarchists who risk their fuckin lives against the US police state and its squadristi lackeys. love you all forev; you show us the way ❤️🙏🖤
possibly the most dreadful aspect of adjuncting is having to explain to students who ask you for mentorship that you may never get a chance to work with them again 🤧
every time i see literature people arguing about movies i think of my high school english teacher who called Lord of the Rings ‘the most homosexual film ever made’: a dozen men destroy a giant flaming vagina by casting a cursed wedding band into a volcano, bringing it to orgasm
truly grateful to publish
@IbrahimNasrllah
’s poem “Palestinian” in Arabic & English, translated by the incredible
@FakhreddineHuda
. Nasrallah’s poem is brutal, beautiful, and endless. read it — and renew your commitment to a liberated Palestine 🇵🇸
We’re honored to publish poet and novelist Ibrahim Nasrallah’s “Palestinian,” translated from Arabic by Huda Fakhreddine (
@FakhreddineHuda
).
“I died and lived. I lit myself on fire. I put myself out with my own ashes, / and nothing came of it.”
almost nothing has helped me understand communism more than jazz. studying jazz harmony, groove, & improvisation has clarified problems inherent to the production of collective/individual subjects; the ensemble-form expresses the same political & aesthetic desires as the commune
when u get asked to give a talk about your “cool alt-ac job” to a bunch of grad students at ur phd alma mater but ur “cool alt-ac job” pays $15k a year with no benefits to speak of
just saw a livestream of a pro-Palestine demonstration in Boston and someone was holding a huge sign that read “ABOLISH RELIGION.” not gonna name the org, but there should be no place for that kind of secularist chauvinism in our politics—especially during Eid
using woodscraps, recycled plastic, and clay, my insanely talented partner built me a tiny version of the room in Chetham’s library where Marx and Engels studied together 🤯🥰
one of my least favorite activities is listening to liberal poets explain what poetry is supposed to be, or how to read it, or how it means. they always sound like missionaries for the spanish empire
wore a silly outfit and got my phd legitimized by the proper authorities 🫡 wildly grateful to everyone who put up with my dorky ass over the past 7 years 🥰
i think if you posted pretty much any stranger’s sex poem online and said “this is the worst thing ever,” many people would probably agree! because we are conditioned from birth to mock expressions of vulnerability and pleasure
honestly, i’ve never been closer to fully abandoning academia than i am right now. we’ve watched so many universities—including my phd alma mater—gleefully endorse genocide, unleash police violence on students, & retaliate against (the meager handful of) dissenting professors
watched a documentary on fungi last night and now i’m totally convinced that they’re the most powerful organisms on earth. they’re everywhere forever and will never die; we’re all just living in mushroom world, on mushroom time
beyond psyched to announce that
@proteanmag
Issue V: CONTRA TEMPS is now available for pre-order! i'm not pulling yr leg when i brag that this issue gathers some of the most brilliant thinkers, poets, & visual artists alive. secure yr copy (& merch!) here:
all online leftist poets fall into 1 or more of these categories:
-politically horny
-wordprocessor avantgarde
-terrorist sympathizer
-craves fame, ashamed of it
-adds linebreaks to prose polemics
-all poems about same demo from 2017
-really wants you to think they aren’t white
🚨MUTUAL AID REQUEST🚨
my partner & I are fundraising for an unhoused Roma family in our area. after weeks of searching, they finally found an apartment, but need help paying for it. they're incredibly sweet & it would mean the world if you helped them
found another treasure from my time as a high school english teacher: “comrade pickle,” drawn by a student after our class on mccarthyism & gifted to me clandestinely to avoid the admin’s un-american activities committee 🫡
@KirkMattWhite
@SFCityFan
oh i certainly agree with you there, and have no faith in the democrats to do anything of value. the fight that ensues will have to be led by the rank & file!
nearly wept for joy when i walked into my new classrooms and realized how many students from last semester decided to take my spring courses—a joy that’s so often robbed from adjuncts who are forced to teach at different universities every semester; a joy we all deserve 💕