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Don’t worry. / Don’t hesitate. / You are good. / You are righteous. / And righteous goodness / can never be cruel.
“Who are… Do I know you…?” Jake was puzzled. The voice came from a woman, tall, olive skin with dark, greying curly hair. She was standing just inside the street light, on the corner of the alleyway, leading from the High Street to Dyvenor Road. After a moment of figuring this out Jake realised she was holding him, gently but firmly by the shoulder. “What do you want…?”
One day I woke up / and somebody called me “elder,” / and I almost checked my pulse. / Then I remembered— / queer years run on dog-time.
You’ve been hiding in the closet / of the abandoned K-Mart. / You’ve become a pastor to pigeons
nestled in trusses and rafters. / They coo to your sermons of / plentiful seed and a multiverse of millet.
1. The first thing you smell when you hit Main Street is: A. Burnt oil and fryer smoke. B. The ghost of the factory, coughing in the dust. C. Your own nerves. D. All of the above.
The socialist politics of art is, in part, centering both the rational and ineffable aspects of being on the actuality of a living revolutionary subject; the working-class both as it is, and as it could be. This includes the aspects of life that resist categorization, mapping, utility and rationality. Accepting this is not a concession to superstition. It is placing a working-class claim on all that it is to be human.
I contend that Manos, while complaining about the lack of politics in Turl’s work, has written a very apolitical review, predicated upon an intellectual campism rooted in what China Miéville calls “folk Marxism,” received beliefs, rather than dialectical reason. Manos’s view of the politics of art seems entirely functionalist.