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In the Bastard books, we have contemporary Naples in all its noisy complexity, and a group of cops whose insights into crime arise as much from their own imperfections as from their training and experience.
Rohan Maitzen on Maurizio de Giovanni‘s Bastards of Pizzofalcone series.
Social scientists tell us that some white people (especially liberal ones) do indeed feel collective guilt for past racial injustice. I have nothing to say about whether they should feel this way or are right to feel this way. Some social psychologists including one that I have co-authored two papers with (Nyla R. Branscombe) find that tapping into white guilt can have social justice-promoting positive benefits. But playing the guilt and blame game when it comes to race matters is, and has always been, tricky business in America. Martin Luther King Jr. certainly appreciated this, which explains why he worried (after the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, were passed) that eradicating racial inequality in America was going to be even more challenging than putting an end to formal racial discrimination.
Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Derrick Darby.
For Catholics it is a moral allegory by one its most famous patron saints; for Communists, the first major proposal for the abolition of private property; for Neo-Liberals, a farce on the absurdity of this proposal. Like the greatest works of political fiction, it has bucked the rhetoric of ideology and managed to resist being coopted.
Jared Marcel Pollen on the 500th anniversary of Thomas More‘s Utopia.
“Not an attic full of lesbians, Lesbian Attic.”
New fiction and art by Roman Muradov.
A welfare state can be used as a form of social investment that boosts employment and the economy, whilst funding good education, family and labour market policies. Providing accessible childcare enables more women to enter employment. Employment creates more employment, a virtuous circle increasing the tax base. All these achievements are real. They are not wishful thinking. Yet the neoliberal orthodoxy hides their accomplishments, and the entrenched interests of corporate elites have such influence on politicians that instead of moving towards such models, governments have been moving towards neoliberalism – even in the more socially democratic countries themselves.
Andrew Brower Latz reads Colin Crouch vs Neoliberalism.
“I got my first venereal disease from my first girlfriend. She got it from her third boyfriend, whom she was dating concurrently with her second boyfriend (me). Later she confessed that she’d been dating him before she started dating me, which chronologically downgraded me to her third boyfriend…”
New fiction and art by Roman Muradov.
At the fag-end of the 1980’s … writing’s anti-authorial, anti-purist, anti-linear, anti-referential and deeply linguistic character was something in the air then. It was an update of Joyce’s ‘polyglottal’ ‘Wake’ project, a sexier, more chic version … that works with and through language, a clash of two codes, textual and bibliographic, but with a further density to the polysemy and plurivocity added, that of a fragmented elucidation. Acker and others – Bill Burroughs was another clear example – were writing monsters of subversion where theme, narrative, character and plot were their targets. Words were no longer subject to the equation that they meant just one thing, or even one cluster of things. Meaning was now just an effect of language not of anything lying within or behind it. Authorial intention and determination was eroded and instead labyrinths of possibility and acrostic sampling were being produced in a kind of hip, punk slippage to indeterminancy. The improvisory, intermedial experience of reading became a biological-emotional state of hyper-real decision making and play.
Richard Marshall reviews the 25th Anniversary Edition of Stewart Home‘s Defiant Pose.
Drawing from the work of Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud, schizoanalysis is a revolutionary political process that seeks to expand upon Reich’s materialist-psychiatric critique of psychoanalysis so as to include the full scope of multiplicitious social and historical factors in its explanations of cognition and behaviour in order to map and thus undermine the causal groundings of fascism.
A.T. Kingsmith on Schizoanalysis.
I just got gripped by the central question of ethics, which Socrates poses so insistently: How should we live? While this is the central question of ethics, in my view answering this question also involves epistemology – since to know how we should live, we need to understand what we should believe, and how we should form and revise our beliefs in response to experience and reflection; and the question as I see it also involves the theory of rational choice or decision—since to know how we should live, we need to understand how we should make choices or decisions, and how we should revise our plans or intentions as we acquire new information over time.
Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Ralph Wedgwood.
Taken as a whole, the book reads as an alternative literary history, moving from slave rebellions in the early Americas to the development of Black Atlantic modernism before ending in a nightmarish vision of contemporary globalised suffering.
Tim Groenland reviews Counternarratives by John Keene.