I feel that I shortchanged someone last week by vetoing their suggestion that we read a few pieces on a touchy issue. So let’s do those this week and start up Perlman in two. The readings will concern children, their sexuality, and the potential limits of free love. We’ll look at a friend’s piece from the ‘80s on the topic and the response some anarchists made to it a few years ago, as well as read a few pieces from an old issue of AJODA (pp. 13-19 and all the pieces therein — “I was fifteen, she was forty-three”, “Girl Love”, “Liberating Sexuality”, “Sexuality and the mystique of innocence”, and “Save the Children”). Obviously we’ll be discussing some uncomfortable topics, perhaps even more so depending on yr experiences, so just be ready for that if you drop by.

We’ll complete our reading of “Against the Gendered Nightmare” from baedan 2 next week; going from “Second Mythos: Lilith and Eve” to the end.

“The perturbations, anxieties, depravations, deaths, exceptions in the physical or moral order, spirit of negation, brutishness, hallucinations fostered by the will, torments, destruction, confusions, tears, instabilities, servitudes, delving imaginations, novels, the unexpected, the forbidden, the chemical singularities of the mysterious vulture which lies in wait for the carrion of some dead illusion, precocious and abortive experiences, the darkness of the mailed bug, the terrible monomania of pride, the inoculation of deep stupor, funeral orations, desires, betrayals, tyrannies, impieties, irritations, acrimonies, aggressive insults, madness, temper, reasoned terrors, strange inquietudes which the reader would prefer not to experience, cants, nervous disorders, bleeding ordeals that drive logic at bay, exaggerations, the absence of sincerity, bores, platitudes, the somber, the lugubrious, childbirths worse than murders, passions, romancers at the Courts of Assize, tragedies, odes, melodramas, extremes forever presented, reason hissed at with impunity, odor of hens steeped in water, nausea, frogs, devil-fish, sharks, simoom of the deserts, that which is somnambulistic, squint-eyed, nocturnal, somniferous, noctambulistic, viscous, equivocal, consumptive, spasmodic, aphrodisiac, anaemic, one-eyed, hermaphroditic, bastard, albino, pederast, phenomena of the aquarium and the bearded woman, hours surfeited with gloomy discouragement, fantasies, acrimonies, monsters, demoralizing syllogisms, ordure, that which does not think like a child, desolation, the intellectual manchineel trees, perfumed cankers, stalks of the camelias, the guilt of a writer rolling down the slope of nothingness and scorning himself with joyous cries, remorse, hypocrisies, vague vistas that grind one in their imperceptible gearing, the serious spittles on inviolate maxims, vermin and their insinuating titillations, stupid prefaces like those of Cromwell, Mademoiselle de Maupin and Dumas fils, decaying, helplessness, blasphemies, suffocation, stifling, mania, —before these unclean charnel houses, which I blush to name, it is at last time to react against whatever disgusts us and bows us down.”

~Lautréamont: Poesies

Next time, the first half of a piece from Baedan 2 on gender as domestication — “Against the Gendered Nightmare”. Let’s go through section XI, stopping at “Second Mythos: Lilith and Eve” (pp. 81).

Coming up, a favorite from Tiqqun #2, republished by a friend in Montreal. “A critical metaphysics could emerge as a science of apparatuses…” will receive our consideration. On Tuesday, then.

Two interrelated readings for Tuesday: Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (pp. 217 in the Illuminations volume) and Scholium’s “The Hollowing of Anarchy: Exhibition Value”. An optional addendum is Jason Rodgers’ zine “Transgression or Affirmation?”. Caveat lector!

On Tuesday we’ll look at Jackie Wang’s “Oceanic Feeling and Communist Affect”. Our friend thinks you might enjoy it.

Next time, we’ll consider a recent essay by Andrew Culp (Dark Deleuze, editor of Hostis) from the art history/political aesthetics journal Selva. “An An-arkhé-ology, or: Preliminary Materials for Any Future Account of the State”.

Hello friends, Dysnomia here. I’m still out of town, but since I heard no reading was settled upon last week, I thought I would recommend a recent favorite for you all in my absence. I received a book of Cioran’s as a gift from Athena at BASTARD a few months back and I’ve found it to be provocative. From History and Utopia, take a look at “Odyssey of Rancor” (pp. 57), a thoughtful meditation on the predicament of reactive forces (in a Nietzschean sense, i.e. resséntiment) qua vengeful resistance. The rest of the book is also splendid, worth a look if you’re so inclined. I hope you enjoy it. See y’all in a week.

“Perhaps, our hair entwined with holly and ivy, we can wassail every day.”

The Chronicle of Higher Jubilation

The Old Calendrists

Anarchy Bang Episode 47 – Holidays

Season of extreme earache torture carries on!

We are looking at Philip K. Dick’s “Piper in the Woods” and “The Erotic Life of Stones” by our friends Søren & Dominique, from Black Seed #5. My ear is all fucked up. That is all.