Interchange – Planetary Factory: Jasper Bernes on Logistics and the Violence of Market Competition

in Capitalism Globalism on Share

AUDIO LINK: Planetary Factory Our conversation with Jasper Bernes, recorded in May of last year, might be called a delayed Part II or even Part III as it features a previous guest extending the parameters of a previous conversation and begins with a consideration of the artist, activist, and social and political critic, photographer and filmmaker, Allan Sekula, who was the subject of another Interchange…

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“The Planter” and Poor Whites – Habituated to Harm

in America Books Society/Culture on Share

The photo that illustrates this post is of a lynching in Excelsior Springs, Missouri in 1925, ten years before Du Bois’ published Black Reconstruction in America. I think it’s important to see these pictures of the crowds of white people who must be, I suppose, enjoying their presence there while feeling justified at their actions. But I have cropped it so as not to show…

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Reading Black Reconstruction: The True System

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Today’s walk lasted approximately 40 minutes so I could listen to all of Chapter 2 of Black Reconstruction in America, “The White Worker.” What follows is just where my mind took me upon contemplation. Property isn’t a material thing that you can possess; it is a name given to force. Which is to say that it works to hide and valorize violent dispossession. Most people…

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Reading Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction – Chapter One, The Black Worker

in America Books on Share

This will be necessarily sketchy – but I hope to share what stands out to me while I listen to Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction which was published in 1935 (a universally acclaimed masterpiece). The two things I’ll mention are disfranchisement and the making of “the deplorables.” Du Bois begins with suffrage, and this seems surprising. Which is just to say, I never thought of this…

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Revealed for Our Sins

in Literature/Arts Poetry Society/Culture on Share

The previous post on a “squib” of Baudelaire’s was actually not what I had intended to write. Rather, it was a redheaded beggar girl I meant to display. That is, I had been reading Keith Waldrop’s translation (2006) of Fleurs du Mal when I remembered I also had Richard Howard’s (1982) on the shelf. So off I went in order to see how these were…

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Squibs…

in Literature/Arts Society/Culture on Share

An oft-quoted line of Baudelaire’s (born in the same year as Melville, 1819) is: Dieu est le seul être qui, pour régner, n’ait même pas besoin d’exister. God is the only being who need not even exist in order to reign. This is from the first of the ““Fusées” or”Squibs” written in 1867 but only published posthumously in 1887. For those of you who wonder,…

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Quibbles?

in America Books Briefs Reading on Share

A friend asked recently, well, what are you reading now that you’ve stopped doing the radio show (for which all my reading energy was spent)? Honestly, I wasn’t really reading anything. Dipping into many things without real interest. But I’ve not begun reading Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century, by Charles…

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Arts Interchange – This Little Mayberry: Will Johnson’s Hatteras Night, A Good Luck Charm

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AUDIO LINK: This Little Mayberry: Will Johnson’s Hatteras Night Our show is “This Little Mayberry” and my guest is singer-songwriter and painter Will Johnson. Johnson might be best known as the lead singer of Centro-Matic which disbanded at the end of 2014. But he’s also the leader of South San Gabriel which persists and contains the same musicians. Today we discuss the ways the bands…

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Natasha Lennard’s “We, Anti-Fascists”

in America Corporatism Politics Resistance on Share

In her new book, Being Numerous, published by Verso, Natasha Lennard offers “Essays on Non-Fascist Life.” It’s currently only $9.98. Here is the publisher description: Being Numerous shatters the mainstream consensus on politics and personhood, offering in its place a bracing analysis of a perilous world and how we should live in it. Beginning with an interrogation of what it means to fight fascism, Natasha…

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Glorifying War Shall Not Grow Old

in America Briefs Humanity on Share

Concerning War Movies (prompted by a conversation about Peter Jackson’s movie They Shall Not Grow Old). In J. D. Salinger’s “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters,” Buddy Glass [the author’s alter ego] comes across these words in Seymour’s diary [the “sage” of the family who committed suicide]; they concern what Seymour believes to be the dishonesty of the Gettysburg Address: He [a psychoanalyst Seymour was…

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