What in the hell …

You should all go buy Manituana. It’s the latest novel by Wu Ming, at least the latest to be translated into English. I can’t speak to the contents of the novel because I haven’t read it yet. I just found out a moment ago that it was available now in the US, and I ordered my copy immediately on finding out. I’m sure it’s excellent, and I’ll post on it after I get it and read it. Their other work is awesome, though. I like their stuff so much that I used to volunteer a bit with my meager Spanish and Italian helping translate occasionally for their newsletter. I like their stuff so much that I plan to really get my Italian good someday (in like 5-10 years, most likely) and read all their other work that’s untranslated. I like their stuff so much that I’ve gone through some of it in Italian with a dictionary despite the agonizing slowness that makes for me right now.

If you haven’t already done so, you should also go buy their other novels in translation, Q and 54.

Their work is some of the only material in book form that I can think of that I can seriously say about it “this is a cultural product with political uses.”

See here for reviews of the newest novel and news on their book tour (they’re coming to the US but only to New York, sadly).

Now go buy Manituana.

Over time I’ve sort of started fucking around more with the blog, making dumb jokes and so on. That’s cool with me, it can be fun. At the same time, I’ve started to feel like some of the stuff I’ve spent my time on that doesn’t feel like it’s fucking around, like that stuff really is just fucking around. I need to reassess a bit, methinks. Fucking around, great. Not fucking around, great. Trying to do (and initially thinking one is doing) the second while ACTUALLY doing the first, unforgivable. The worst part is when the fucking around and the not-thinking-I’m-fucking-around-when-really-I’m-just-fucking-around eats time for stuff that is genuinely not fucking around and that I genuinely want to engage with. ARGH.

And I still gotta finish that damn post on ch24 of v1 of Capital. ARGH again.

In other news, I’ve started trying to read for enjoyment when taking the bus to work. Weird, eh? I’m rereading If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler again, because once again I find that reading and I are less in love than we used to be (it’s not you, reading, it’s me). This time I’m reading the book out of order - I’m reading the numbered chapters all in a row, then I’m going to go back and re-read the interrupted novel passages all in a row. Then, who knows, maybe read it again cover to cover. Or not.

I had a brief email exchange with a friend about, among other things, cultural politics. I’ve heard that phrase a lot and to be totally honest it’s one of those terms where I don’t have much at all of a clear idea of what it means, but I still use it once in a while because I’ve heard other people use it. If pressed, and trying to press myself here to get clear, I take the term to refer to various things. (more…)

And what in the hell are they anyway? Been a long standing interest of mine, mostly as something I get annoyed about, and it took me way too long to make the distinction between intellectuals and academics. Some recent blog posts on the subject that you good people (both of you) might want to read. First, Duncan’s typology of the role of left intellectuals. Second, these three posts about, in a sense, the degree to which it makes to sense to call some recent academic theoretical and literary writing “left” in a meaningful sense (as opposed, perhaps, to calling it ‘fellow traveler’ writing). Aside from my agreement with the gist of the posts (in all fairness I’ve not read the books in question so I should reserve final judgment, but the spirit of the posts seems to me in line with what Jasper in the discussion here called my vigorous skepticism - perhaps my own version of the despair discussed in the above posts? - on these matters), I think these posts are worth reading for the writing alone.

Part of this afternoon really, really sucked and I was in a very bad mood, one of those moments where the poverty of my language and the wealth of my emotion bring endless murky musings, where in the face of some unexpected frustration my undeveloped intellect becomes filled with impotent and static rage. (more…)

This old post over at Jim’s music blog reminded me that I want to write about singing to my daughter. Jim’s post is about the Dismemberment Plan. Despite the fact that I don’t have their first record - actually, I don’t even know how many records they have, I have two of them - I consider them one of my favorite bands. I love how off-kilter the music is, and yet strangely no off-kilter. I love the dissonance, and I love the melodies, and I love how sometimes the dissonance resolves into melodies and sometimes it doesn’t. I also love the singing. I sometimes sing “Life of Possibilities” to my daughter. (more…)

If I made a laundry list of the influences that shaped my gut level impulses about intellectual and cultural stuff, punk rock and marxism would be really close to the top. (more…)

A new one, clearly.