Excerpt

Apr

2020

Shannon Chamberlain “Fan Fiction Was Just as Sexual in the 1700s as It Is Today” The Atlantic

“Modern fan fiction’s version of this exploration comes at a time when liberalization around sexual preferences, practices, and identities likewise makes it useful for auditioning socially costly decisions and roles in less risky environments than real life. Slash, the form of fan fiction in which writers take characters who weren’t sexually involved in the original work—often but not always of the same sex—is one of the most popular manifestations of the form. Writers can be Draco or Harry for an afternoon, or a player in a Fifty Shades–style sadomasochistic sex game, but retain the right to say, “Oh, it was only fiction.” Fan fiction’s reputation as an “unserious” form has in this very way made possible the deep dives and often moving explorations of human sexuality and romantic love that permeate the genre, even as fan fiction itself becomes less artistically stigmatized.”

link

Mar

2020

Chris Kraus on collectivity

From ‘The Failed Collective’ in ‘Where Art Belongs’ p 169

“There is no such thing as a failed utopian community; or, if the collective is an experiment in shared time, how can time fail? A great sense of failure couches every success. YES and SO WHAT? Is That All There Is To It? What goal do you imply with the phrase, “failed collective?” Utopia- static and therefore unreal- is never the point. Collectivity arranges itself around a desire for something, to produce something, to become something else (and who cares what else?) beyond its individual members.”

Mar

2020

David Graeber on revolutionary action

From: Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, p 45

“A revolution on a world scale will take a very long time. But it is also possible to recognize that it is already starting to happen. The easiest way to get our minds around it is to stop thinking about revolution as a thing – “the” revolution, the great cataclysmic break- and instead ask “what is revolutionary action?” We could then suggest: revolutionary action is any collective action which rejects, and therefore confronts, some form of power or domination and in doing so, reconstitutes social relations- even within the collectivity- in that light… And history shows us that the continual accumulation of such acts can change (almost) everything.”

p 76

“The moment we stop insisting on viewing forms of action only by their function in reproducing larger, total, forms of inequality of power, we will also be able to see that anarchist social relations and non-alienated forms of action are all around us. And this is critical because it shows that anarchism is, already, and has always been, one of the main bases for human interaction. We self-organize and engage in mutual aid all the time. We always have… [R]evolutionary constituencies always involve a tacit alliance between the least alienated and the most oppressed.”

Mar

2020

M Train, Patti Smith

P 87

Fred finally achieved his pilot’s license but couldn’t afford to fly a plane. I wrote incessantly but published nothing. Through it all we held fast to the concept of the clock with no hands. Tasks were completed, sump pumps manned, sandbags piled, shirts ironed, hems stitched, and yet we reserved the right to ignore the hands that kept on turning. Looking back long after his death, our way of living seems a miracle, one that could only be achieved by the silent synchronization of the jewels and gears of a common mind.

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