The Personal is Political. The Political is Personal.

 

2022: a year in crappy links

 

TiR clicked on some or all of the following in 2022.

In alphabetical order:

 

 

 

Abdelhalim Hafez’s music, the Nasserist backstory 

 

"Africa suits [Graham] Greene because it is unformed, suggestive of risk and danger and disease; something like a war zone without the shooting. Such is Africa’s power to bewitch the credulous."

Paul Theroux, here

found via here ("Don’t romanticise the global south")

 

 

"After all, seven centuries elapsed between Magna Carta and the bipartisan cooperation of British Conservatives and Laborites." (from the obit of Vera Micheles Dean, here)

 

 

"All those who are curious about this topic should have it on their bookshelves." (on Eric Williams)

 

"an American institution — one that lit up tens of millions of homes each evening around dinnertime" (on “Eyewitness News”)

 

 

an appreciation: Radio Biafra (here and here)

 

"And if the prosperity of European imperialism was built on the massacre of the Paris Communards, America’s rise as a participant and leader in world plunder was built on the unbridled deceit and terror which broke Black Reconstruction in the South." (on Du Bois, 1950)

 

 

"And of course they couldn't imagine the resistant and creative life-forms that might then emerge in this desert." (Bernadette Corporation)

 

"And so we dare envisage our indigent sage surrounded by a kingdom of last year's grandeur: old-model nose straightenders, . . . Alpine sun lamps lacking yodel attachments, . . . radio-phonographico-pianos without Neo-Novo Nevaware buffet-lunch inserts."

from Kenneth Burke's "Waste - the Future of Prosperity," The New Republic 63:815, pg.228 (July 16, 1930)

Appiah on a certain "ubiquitous predigested text" (here)

 

Are you a Eurocentrist?  Take this 4-part test & find out. (spoiler: this fellow passed the test)

 

 

"Artists’ boring sides are sometimes their most characteristic and indispensable." (RH on JLC - + HM)

 

 

"a subtle distillation from that word, stands, in point of relative intensity to it, as attar of roses does to rosewater"

(from Melville’s “The ‘Gees” (1856) mentioned herein)

 

 

birdsong as an orchestra of combined but strategically competitive frequencies -

a discussion and a book - which aren't quite about this

 

Blackness  - in antiquity - considered

 

 

both bohemian and cricket fanatic: one man was able to achieve this

 

Breton on the effect of Apollinaire's interior decorating style on the visitor: "You tack . . . like a sailing ship driven by a strong wind." (here)

 

 

"British officers . . .  walked around with revolvers but presented themselves as being in mortal danger from village women carrying leaves." (here)

 

 

"But the bird? Its most delectable song is merely an arabesque on which we compose our own interior symphony . . . This music is buried in the unsayable. The most surprising accounts of beavers, ants, and bees show us the limit of cultures that have at their agency only paws, antennae, and mandibles."

from Henri Focillon's "In Praise of Hands" (“L’éloge de la main”) (1934)

 

Captain Cook, from hero to zero (here)

 

 

copyright as straight-up colonialist f*ckery (Prof. Larisa Mann)

 

Creolization as our only damned hope (here)

 

culture as nothing more than the synthesis of all its individual members' disagreements

(bouncing off Maydieu, here and here)

 

diving to The Voice of Peace shipwreck (2016) (here)

 

 

do even angels need government? (here)

 

 

"Du Bois does not analyze US history teleologically but rather by scrutinizing the forces on the battlefield." (here)

 

 

falling off the edge of a map called "critique" (Felski, here)

 

 

"Familiarize yourself with every crime. Take them in rotation. . . . Commit two or three crimes every day."

Mark Twain on "the first time I stole a watermelon"

a story mentioned in a footnote to Freud's Civ & Its Discontents

 

 

Foucault as CIA Man, f__ckin' A Man (here)

 

 

Goodbye Westphalia, Hello Raiders

(no not these Raiders)

 

 

"Half ignorant and the other half misinformed, the poor girl sits waiting, or capers freely within decorous limits, to attract possible attention, and silently starves under the impression that it isn't polite to be hungry."

from Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Duty of Surplus Women," Independent and Weekly Review (1905) - almost Martian in weirdness but also all too familiar

 

 

How London changed Walter Rodney

 

how to think like Husserl

 

How Veblen lived "a kind of Bohemianism which is inconsistent with the requirements of life outside Bohemia" (here)

 

 

"I must confess that I started from a tremendous naivety, I had no idea what I was getting into. The bibliography quickly began to pile up." (here)

 

"In a decade and in a city when almost everything had a price and someone almost always paid it" (here)

 

Is Descartes best understood-- by reading poetry? (here)

 

 

is Bruce Nauman's art interesting?  the investigation

 

Italian Opera for the Yiddish-Speaking Masses (Early 20th-C.) (here)

 

"I WAS THE ONE WHO TRANSLATED 'ALL STAR' INTO ARAMAIC AND BACK PLEASE STOP THANKS" (here)

 

 

Jascha Heifetz & Milton Kaye record Arthur Benjamin's "Jamaican Rumba" 

date: October 16, 1944

World Broadcasting Decca Studios, New York City

 

 

American bombing of Salzburg destroys the dome of the city's cathedral and most of a Mozart family home

date: October 16, 1944 (Monday)

 

Jean-Pierre Léaud: "permanently confined in his inner delirium" (here)

 

 

Joseph de Maistre: on the way to wider Anglo name recognition?  tho perhaps with an iffy set (here)

 

 

Josephine Baker vs. the "Mississippi of the West" (here)

 

 

Joseph Tonda and a decolonial step beyond Debord (here)

 

 

“Lacan the Charlatan” 

author Mathews’ method

like that of the film "Citizen Kane"

but pushed even further

- to conjure up a portrait by talking to all of a person's worst enemies

-  to look at how all their opinions average or cancel each other out -  

- then to depict the results

(here)

 

Lacan: the Judaism connection (here)

 

 

Leeds as having been “slapped in the face with grey poison” (Punk Scholars Network, here)

 

lit crit between the wars, demystified (here)

 

 

"Marc Chagall left so quickly that he was unable to lock his studio, leaving a stack of paintings inside which he never saw again." (here)

 

 

Mohamed Mbougar Sarr's book recommendations (here)

 

 

"‘Most of the civil war was fought over the territories of the minorities" - no, not the U.S. civil war (here)

 

"My brain it seems I get my thinkers, twisted double" (from “The Shoo-Fly Regiment,” here)

 

 

"now venerable selfie icons" (on the built Berlin, here)

 

on a “deep-seated and progressive malady in the vitals of the system” (Joan Robinson, here)

 

on a recurring mirage? (here)

 

on Diego Rivera in Detroit, 1932: "How could the viewer accept this as one totality rather than as an arbitrary patchwork of separate narratives?" (here)

 

"Only through the precedent of elders, battle-hardened by many scholarly and public debates, can intellectual genealogies extend in new and different directions." (on Ladurie)

 

 

on "or it won't be at all"

 

 

on reading words, as "an over-learned skill" which humans can no longer "will the process 'off'" (Pinker)

 

On Redu, book capital of Belgium

 

On “Sweet Daddy” Grace: "Grace has given God a vacation, and since He is on vacation, don’t worry about Him." (here)

 

 

on the “new” new Hegel craze

 

 

on the romanticization of "non-Western" legal processes

 

organized religion as working class upward mobility network (here)

 

“pain, rage, sacrifice, and violence” (here)

 

 

"People used to think I was crazy . . .  Now they say I’m not crazy, but there’s nothing can be done about it." (on the post-’68, here)

"Puccini's sense of humor was often of the schoolboy variety." (here)

 

Q: could you come up with a fresh, new reason every day for a year, for why the USA is messed up?

A: Y

Q: what's today's reason?

A: railroad monopoly

(here)

 

"“Sunday morning only became the most segregated time of the week after the Civil War." (here)

 

 

"That vulgar Maxim, worn smooth in fools’ mouths . . .  is a switch cut from that great tree of Arrogance" (the maxim is here)

 

"The conditions . . .  are not just present, they are 'rotten ripe'." (here)

the Crusades as the birth of imperialism (here)

 

The death of the [non-“ranking”] full stop (here)

 

"Their place was in the pockets of spiked leather jackets as much as on the shelves. . . . Unlike France, where people are constantly fighting obstacles, America has a way of destroying everything positively, by giving you an overdose of what you want."

Lotringer on the "Foreign Agents" book series & what it wrought (here)

 

The Merleau-Ponty rediscovery continues (here)

 

“the most successful demonstration of State Socialism to be found up to the time in modern civilization”

what was it?

The answer is unexpected

(here)

 

the pendulum swings on a left politics of mental care (here)

 

"The problem is pre­cisely to explain the impressive degree of class collaboration and social unity in the face of so many internal strains." (here)

 

"these musics were re-imagined as ‘national musics’ by the post-colonial states" (here)

 

 

"The train that was to become McCarthyism had left the station."  From which station did it depart and when?  Maybe from this one, at this time (here)

this is what Tocqueville foresaw to be US democracy's fundamental dilemma: own property or GTFO (here)

 

“This progress is happening because of the noise you folks are making” (while carrying a casket) (here)

 

 

Werbley Finster - "Here Comes Werbley" (1969) (here)

 

What Toni Morrison foresaw about the USA's strain of racial fascism (here)

why boredom?  could it be - always because a mere monologue of some type is happening? (here)

 

why paint a new painting?  as the "exorcism" of your previous painting (here)

 

why Senghor remains enigmatic (here)

 

 

woah is all of what we call "value" really nothing more than "a meme" bruh? (here)

 

"Would 1984 keep its appointment?" (among the questions posed, here)

Zouglou ivoirien: the history in a nutshell (here)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ah, 2022!

 

At the beginning of the year, we knew . . .                                               

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                . . . so little!

 

In contrast, at the end of the year, we knew . . . .                                               

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                . . . so much less!

 

 

As always, the crappiness ultimately was revealed not to be in the links (many of them were excellent), but in TiRselves.

 

 

 

 

 

posted by TiR at 7:01 AM