Late Linkdump
Always late for something and early for something else, pulled and loose, aïaïa.
What’s really good tho ? It’s been a hot minute.
It’s been more than that If I’m honest but I’ve been in this peculiar position where you feel like things might get a bit more breazy so you get to work(art) and do what you want for a while and then the world notices you doing effortlessly and decides to remind you of all of your pending engagements, and then responsibilities come crashing down in waves on anything and everything you were trying to work on in the moment, your art plans get digested by work plans. Does that make sense ?
It’s been strange seeing people go on vacation as I went back to work though I don’t really had anything like a synchronised(?) schedule for how I go about in terms of professional life. I’ve been seeing old friends again and tried to pick up exercising again (hello pain, my dear friend). And I’ve been reading and marinating in dark ideas, dark in a way that feels both tied to the present and very distanced from it. Let’s say that the point of politics is “what is to be done?”, then the point of philosophy is “what is to be thought?”, this is a set of books that says “Nothing, nothings, no things” and on and on, and all the differences between voids and nihils and nothingnesses and absences. Fun stuff.
I don’t think it’s the reason I haven’t sent a newsletter in a while. Summers have always been a hard time for me even when I was unemployed. There’s something about heat that gets me tired and thoughtless. If I had some brains left I could articulate the strange not-solastalgia of seeing the West-african weather of my youth wash up the French City I live in. Really quick rain(flood)-season chasing after a dry season. Heat like a weight on everybody, worsened by the fact that public libraries are closed, the only social spaces you can get refreshed at (and use the bathroom) without having to pay for it.
Friday feeling :
THE DOORS ARE MANY, THE EYES CAN ONLY STARE :
A language that’s a tool for coercion, that’s a bridge and boundary between laborers, that’s a ground for hybridity. South African Workers History.
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I have no way of explaining this better than the people who’ve been and are still directly affected by it. (trigger warning for discussion of emotional abuse)
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“Everyone involved, in their own way, might have been trying to fix the problems of the past by creating the idea of a new history that seemed to be unburdened by it.” a recap of someon’s 2010s
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“Texts of Nothing” : Kathy Acker, nothingess, the author as a gap
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Tarsem Singh’s The Cell discussed on a great Horror movie podcast, a movie that must have influenced the NBC Hannibal show, at least the spliced horse thing.
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Ales Kot has a new project out !
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Don’t fucking organize on twitter.
I’m feeling a bit of regret from that last Utopian distraction piece, not because of the subject matter but because i dared to think I could link afropessimism to utopia so early in my approach to it. I feel like its (AP’s) framework is still being grappled with, not that it’s a new idea or an easy one but rather that it has such a totalising outlook people will always have trouble entering and inhabiting it as a thought-context, i don’t know if that makes sense. Basically I feel like I talked about afropessimism rather than wrote through and for it and I still have a lot to learn. Oh well, I’ll do better.
(Meta-Nomad’s blog sometimes covers obscure reactionary parts of the internet so you might wanna be careful if that’s not your bag: ) “Schooling overstepped its bounds and now it’s arguably not until after all traditional forms of education are finished that you begin to learn something of practical use”. Schools are not prisons, they have their own fucked-up-ness to themselves.
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Mormon transhumanists, all american theological immortalists.
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It’s a mixed bag, it’s a mess, it’s the end of the shortest week of my life. Everything happens so fast I’ve stopped trying to watch it all. I can only trust what’s at hand now. I should get a clique, a band of people I can throw things at and get back from, people whose reach you’ve gotta trust is gonna be enough for them to handle the things too far away for you, people who act as extensions of something you belong to too. Is that just friends ?
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