November 20, 2014

Paysage1904Robert Demachy 1859 - 1936

Skull of a CurlewTheo Dorgan Skull of a curlew full of stars, my mouth on fire with black, unspeakable bees. Light on the lime boles, bleached and bare, my gorge rising, crammed with blackfurred bees. Clay of the orchard on my cheek, cheeks puffed like wind on a map’s margin. Dust in each lungful of cold air, lips burned on the inside by black bees. I wait for the moon to rise me I pray to the midnight ant I clutch at fistfuls of wet grass I hammer the earth with bare heels. Skull of a curlew full of stars, night sky dredged with the eyes of bees. Black fire around each star, I swallow fear in mouthfuls of fur and wing. Skull of a curlew full of stars, the great hive of heaven heavy around me. I spit out bees and black anger, mouth of a curlew, fountain of quiet stars. Theo Dorgan, from: What This Earth Cost Us

On the voyage of life, all that finally matters is ‘fellow-ship’Nine Bright Shiners, Theo Dorganreviewed by Thomas McCarthy

There is a strong political sense in these poems that the poor shall inherit the Earth and that poets, somehow, will one day own all the means of production. Dorgan’s is a generation of intellectuals radicalised by Herbert Marcuse and Jean Paul Sartre, illuminated by Costa Gavras and bewitched by Pablo Neruda and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Newer generations of Irish writers, those reared in a private, ironic world (so private that they are outraged by the free gift of a U2 album) could never understand the massive optimism contained within Dorgan’s unbroken sense of community. Such a belief in political community is, in a very real sense, an affront to the modern. Frankly, my modern dears, Dorgan does not give a damn:

‘I saw his last matches for the Glen, the young bucks already impatient to sweep him to the heavens where blood and raw knuckles, mud and defeat or victory would fade into remembered youth A child myself, I sensed their insensate cruelty, the watchful precise impatience of the young.’

The poem here is ‘Learning My Father’s Memories’ and the remembrance is of Christy Ring, the greatest hurler of them all, it could be said, who when he rose to catch a sliotar was pushed sky high by several adoring townlands, from Cloyne to Blackpool. It is that sense of community that Dorgan captures to describe and praise life.

A Fisherman’s Bedroom1853Christen Dalsgaard1824 - 1907

Speculative Anarchism arranjamesAttempts At Living

Many anarchists have engaged with continental philosophy only begrudgingly or not at all. The epithets of idealism, self-importance, separation from everyday concerns, and theoretical self-indulgence, as well as a certain stale boredom, haven’t gone unanswered by certain circles of philosophers, anthropologists and sociologists. The speculative turn towards materialism and realism offer an opportunity for anarchism to re-engage with a different kind of philosophy.

The term ‘speculative turn’ may be getting old fashioned already by this point, just as the names that preceded it (“speculative realism”, “object-oriented philosophy”, “the new materialisms”) have also begun to undergo mutations, modifications, disappearances. Some of these authors are now speaking of ‘machines’ instead of objects, of posthuman life, or may be more readily understood as weird nihilists or accelerationists. I don’t pretend that I have a comprehensive understanding of the various strands of the new materialist and realist orientations, and I don’t want to act as guide or (even less) teacher. That said I have decided to assemble a list of books that a speculative anarchism reading group could consider looking at.

Robert Genter and Splitting Modernism Andrew Hartman reviewing Late Modernism: Art, Culture, and Politics in Cold War America

So what does it mean that we are all neo-pragmatists? How can we understand the strengths and weaknesses of our work when we’re all more or less working from the same epistemological vantage point? Alasdair MacIntyre insists that we must learn from pre-modern traditions that enable “us to overcome the constraints on self-knowledge that modernity… imposes.” Is this even possible? What other possibilities for self-knowledge are open to us? Or is it pragmatism all the way down?

Slavoj Zizek: Spirit as the Wound of Nature S.C. Hickman quotes from Absolute Recoil: Towards A New Foundation Of Dialectical MaterialismDark Ecologies

Spirit is itself the wound it tries to heal, that is, the wound is self-inflicted. “Spirit” at its most elementary is the “wound” of nature. The subject is the immense— absolute— power of negativity, the power of introducing a gap or cut into the given – immediate substantial unity, the power of differentiating , of “abstracting,” of tearing apart and treating as self-standing what in reality is part of an organic unity. This is why the notion of the “self-alienation” of Spirit is more paradoxical than it may appear: it should be read together with Hegel’s assertion of the thoroughly non-substantial character of Spirit: there is no res cogitans, no thing which also thinks, Spirit is nothing but the process of overcoming natural immediacy, of the cultivation of this immediacy, of withdrawing -into-itself or “taking off” from it, of— why not?— alienating itself from it. The paradox is thus that there is no Self that precedes the Spirit’s “self-alienation”: the very process of alienation generates the “Self” from which Spirit is alienated and to which it then returns.

Robert Demachy 1896

Special Feature on Kenneth Irby(b. November 18, 1936)Jacket2

This feature devoted to the work of Kenneth Irby collects a number of papers delivered at the 2011 colloquium devoted to Irby in Lawrence, Kansas, along with new essays by Robert Bertholf, Dale Smith, Matthew Hofer, and others; a chronology, a poem by Nathaniel Tarn, some uncollected Irby poems, a selection of letters between Irby and Ed Dorn, and a cluster of former student musings; and sound recordings from the Lawrence symposium, including readings by Irby.