1896

They're holding umbrellas up
to keep the soft ash away

While they watch
their city burn down

Block by block
by block by block

The thick eyes glaze over and it chews, it chews

Fragment in hostile commodity history:   



"GRIFFITH, Ind., Dec. 27— A battery-operated Cabbage Patch doll that can chew had to be taken apart piece by piece this week when it munched a 7-year-old girl's hair up to her scalp and would not let go."


They had no off-switch, no way to go in reverse.  The pure drive to eat beyond nourishment, gnawing blankly at her owner's head.

Aerial anarchists! (Or the vanished doom of the great city, plus bomb-heaving dogs)

To be remade immediately: Aerial Anarchists, from 1911.

"There is currently no known surviving footage of this film and all information is based upon the original catalog synopsis. The film contains scenes of a bombing and its aftermath throughout London and features prominently the bombing of St. Paul's Cathedral and a railway disaster in which a train is seen to leap into a chasm."

For a sense of how it likely looked, watch Booth's The Airship Destroyer (1909) from the same series:



[Three notes on this.

One: identical to the arc of nearly every contemporary disaster/war film.  i.e. Your dad won't let us be together, even though we have enough lust for each other to put down our tennis rackets while strolling.  Now there is an unnamed threat to the planet/the West/capital/nation.  They have bombed your house in their campaign of aerial terror.  Luckily, I am a misunderstood engineer, even if that fact has led to an absence of social status which has previously prevented us from consummating our love.  I have been working on something that now is our only hope.  It kills the invaders.  Now we can be together, as we should have been all along, the exceptional promise of extinction having served its temporary purpose of laying waste to social convention.

Two: attackers from the sky have a strangely EZLN look to their headgear.  The black stain spreads wider through the films, evidently.

Three: terribly prescient about warfare to come, from indiscriminate carpet bombing of non-military targets to the fact that the "airship destroyer" in question is, for all intents and purposes, a pilot-less missile or self-destructive predator drone.]

Next to follow: The Anarchist and His Dog, 1907.

"An anarchist makes advances to a woman. When these are repelled he throws a bomb at the woman and her gentleman friend, but his dog retrieves it."

Our proposed  re-version:

A bourgeois gentleman non-friend makes advances to an anarchist woman.  Her dog throws a bomb at him and retrieves his bloody wallet.

[thanks to A for the death from above rabbit hole]

Please send me some of your blood

Erik gave me this book, and it broke my head on a plane.  The red mist settles with no magic left.  I am going to make a film of it when I get a camera, a cave in the woods and an army hospital.  Or just a camera.

S'ì fosse foco, arderei 'l mondo

"... Finally the older worker, a quiet, almost timid railroad clerk-statistician, concluded with vehemence: 'If I had the power?' Then he quoted Dante, an old Italian poet: 'Se fossi foco brucerei il mondo.  Were I a fire I'd burn the world.'"




[from the old Seeds in the Snow BR history.  Oddly, the line isn't from Dante, far as I can tell.  It's a version of the line from Cecco Angiolieri ("S'ì fosse foco, arderei 'l mondo"), who had a had a correspondence with Dante, evidently not on the best terms,  i.e.:

Dante Alighier, i' t'averò a stancare 
ch'eo so lo pungiglion, e tu se' 'l bue  


Dante boy, I'll simply wear you out:  
since I'm the cattle-prod that drives your ox.


Whole sonnet worth quoting (not my translation below, bit formal, though still basically a misanthropic rap boast, especially by the end)


S'i fosse foco, arderei 'l mondo,
S’i’ fosse vento, lo tempesteri;
S’i’ fosse acqua, io l’annegherei;
S’i’ fosse Dio, mandareil in profondo.

S’i’ fosse papa, sare’ allor iocondo,
Che tutt'i cristiani imbrigherei;
S’i’ fosse emperator, sa’ che farei?
A tutti mozzarei lo capo a tondo.

S’i’ fosse morte, andarei da mio padre;
S’i’ fosse vita, fuggirei da lui;
Similemente faria da mi’ madre.

S’i’ fosse Cecco com’i’ sono e fui,
Torrei le donne giovani e leggiadre,
E zoppe e laide lascerei altrui.

If I were fire, I'd burn up the world,
If I were wind, I'd storm it,
If I were water, I'd drown it,
If I were God, I'd hurl it to the depths,

If I were the Pope, I'd be please d
To harass all the Christians,
If I were Emperor, know what I'd do?
I'd cut everyone's head right off.

If I were death, I'd go to my father,
If I were life I'd flee from him,
And I'd do the same for my mother,

If I were Cecco as I am and have been,
I'd take all the young, graceful women,
And leave the ugly and lame to others.

London we are the black wall
we are the spilled and hemmed

we are the undevelopable
London we are not a torch yet

but we are still rats and our snapping jaws
never rehinged after that day

London, July 7

Oakland, we do mind dying

35 years later.  The location changes, but all can be said, beyond words, is Oakland, we do mind dying.  Got baited breath from a continent and an ocean away.  Rage, Oakland, deliberately against any deliberations, furiously against what will apologize only when it's scared of what it deserves.

Day in London (all objects: roughly half Islamic ornament, half things in newspapers, one unfortunately named Caribbean take away, and none of the people who made it good)

Phantom stillness

Yang Yongliang, from the Phantom Landscape series.  Mountains composed of overgrown skyscrapers, traffic fields, the lyrical stacked up from the crystal remnants of new primitive accumulation.  Mist blur, over the built up and too big to slow and think and not fail.  Looked at this in the British Museum today, at the end of a long line of Chinese prints.  We were quieter than before.

Die Uni brennt!

Eurozine reposts my ghost-rider piece on California and communisation, along with a host of compelling articles on university struggles, Bologna accords, zones that rarely get much attention from us on these issues (i.e. Romania and Russia), Nina on Rancière's "utopian rationalism," and philistines. Check the batch here.

Hookless teem

Fish take break from pucker and gumming at thighs to swarm up on bread-particle filled spit in the water.  I tried to fish with my hands, failed to no surprise.  It just felt like slapping at stone-cool, slick, ungrabbable bundles of fleshily indifferent matter.  Went back to dreaming of hook-hands.

Minnesota

Communism and/or nomadism

I'm going rogue for a while. Left California yesterday for a long drift, now in Minnesota. Listing loose plans below with the hopes that if you're in any of these places at any of these times, or know people that I should meet or things I have to see or anything... (except for the Minnesota portion: that's just me and family searching for the Wendigo in the twilight of the inhuman forest/going canoeing on a pretty lake)

Minnesota from now til end of the month

London from start of July to mid-month (seeing close friends I don’t get to see nearly enough, writing in the British Library, feeling like I’m stuck in a missing Ballard story, mapping dead zones and covering them in propaganda, dancing on bars, maybe giving a talk or two)

Rome from mid July to mid August, maybe longer (meeting autonomia crew past and present, working on my Italian, taking over ruins, eating food so good it makes my heart hurt, determining long walks to be taken via locations in Argento films and Pasolini novels)

Uncertain return back toward Britain, open to suggestions, to friends on the continent now, or to those who want to show me around zones new to me. Convince me. Athens may be calling. Or Napoli or Marseilles or … (this is a blank I leave to be filled)

London end of August/start of September (finishing what we started, or rather continuing to build from there, collaborations, new faces, cheap curry, fighting BNP bastards)

Maine early September (back to the homestead, woods and water, reading Caillois in the bedroom where I grew up)

Back toward California later that month (late summer blue sky, return to missed friends, readying for The Ultra-Left Meets the Academy Part Two: The Empire Strikes Itself Back via Untenable Austerity Measures)

I’m going to be writing a lot this summer, and I’ll throw it up here. [Also, working on a speculative horror novel that draws on some thinking that’s appeared on the blog, especially reverse thermodynamics and ice worlds, humid extinction and counter-rot, factory hostility. But with more dried blood cities and things that go bump (i.e. spread their unholy non-unified ferret tentacles horizontally beneath the soil) in the night.] That said, I will be disappearing for stretches at a time and may be slow to respond.

California, I’ll see you in a couple months. Decaying remnants of once-mighty empires , see you very soon. 

- E