Our forebears said evil is banal, but still we were unprepared for the crushing weight of the everyday as it unfolds parallel to the shifting tectonic plates of history pursuing the darkest timeline. Politicians gather (like generals… in their masses) and pull levers that threaten to shift ethical poles and move continental thought patterns, leaving collateral damage in all four corners. A future army is set on the march. It might be made up of drones. It will be comprised of killers... Back home your son wants a particular dish, cooked in some specific way. The drains are blocked, in some anomalous way. The algorithms of war pump more data. The real estate magnate botches another sales pitch. It doesn’t matter — he’s not selling anyhow. He’s stealing. Meanwhile, you’ve got a lesson to teach, a bill to pay, a podcast to record, a meme to post, a pizza to cook… all as global techno fascism comes rolling in.
Read MoreWhither the Burgerkrieg auf Normal Island? The UK economy is at near perfect standstill. The state is busy hammering the repression button, the only thing it knows works… and it’s not so sure it works.
Read MoreThe people who became us lived under oaks. / In the canopy two rat snakes were in love, / spending their days in a warm caduceus.
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Read MoreDon’t bury your images in the yard. / You’re supposed to starve the faeries, / mow down grave mushrooms, / take off your Scotch bonnet and / burn your scalp with moonlight.
Read MoreTHE BOREDOM Artist was set to retire. He would give one more performance. London’s Festival Hall was sold out as a result. Last chance to see. One-thousand seven-hundred and ten people, people who liked and appreciated what he did, would go with Dave to a place he had never gone before, though midnight, past the hour-mark. A clock behind them counted down.
Read MoreIf you held to your guns you’d still have guns. / Mean like Lenin without the mean, wrap / yourself in Jacobin bylines like a letter jacket, / forget the golden rules.
Read MoreIt was four years since the attempted self-immolation by my body. Three years since my body was named The Idiot. Two years since The Idiot had any contact with sister, mother or father. A year and a half since The Idiot’s prayers had been answered. In the wrong way.
Read MoreMainstream right wing politicians have been experimenting with summoning their fascist golems. Suella Braverman who, in November 2023, was Home Secretary, after being frustrated at being unable to prohibit a peace march in London on the same weekend as Armistice Day, suggested that ceremonies at the Cenotaph on Whitehall were under threat from “hate marchers” displaying “thuggish intimidation and extremism.” The far right took this, fairly obvious, cue and descended on Whitehall, drunk and high. With no one to fight, they first fought the cops, then each other. Plus la change. Braverman largely blamed the police for this debacle. By December 2023, she was a back bench MP.
Read MoreDon’t worry. / Don’t hesitate. / You are good. / You are righteous. / And righteous goodness / can never be cruel.
Read More“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…?”
Read MoreOne day I woke up / and somebody called me “elder,” / and I almost checked my pulse. / Then I remembered— / queer years run on dog-time.
Read MoreYou’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.
Read More1. 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.
Read MoreDigital technology appears as naturally artificial when it is actually shaped by political economy and intensive ideological encoding. It appears as a phantasmagorical being — a neutral cloud of invention floating above everyday life.1 In actuality it is a product of social life, including its privations, exploitations, and oppressions — and it reinforces or undermines those aspects of life, usually for financial and political reasons.
Read MoreThe 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.
Read MoreFew serious people would consider Greg Abbott, the current governor of Texas, to be excessively subtle or nuanced. But even by the crude standards of right-wing politics in the Lone Star State, Abbott turned some heads when he announced on October 19th, in a post on Elon Musk's "X," that college and university professors can and should be fired for mere "ideological differences" with him and his de facto fascist outlook. Right-wing politicians usually talk about such things in a slightly more guarded way, deploying euphemisms and dog whistles.
Read MoreI 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.
Read MoreThe Housing Act 1980 was the big bang, the origin story for Normal Island. After World War Two Britain was desperately short of housing stock. State action, by both Tory as well as Labour governments, got homes built. Even in the 1970s work was ongoing, bomb sites were still being cleared. The 1980 Act, however, promised council tenants the right to buy their homes. In time a gigantic amount of equity was released. By 1986, financial markets were deregulated and this equity could be traded with greater ease and velocity.
Read MoreThere is one form of the Romantic culture that does not advocate the return to the past, but a detour by the past, towards an emancipated future. This we call revolutionary Romanticism, which begins with Rousseau, followed by Blake, Shelley, William Morris and many others.
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