Holiday Reading

I am off tomorrow to Sardinia for a week's break (trusting in the taxi company to turn up at 4.30am...). I dislike the process of travelling, but enjoy being on holiday. Considering we are firmly on a 'sun lounger by pool' drive I am taking what I hope are enough books (I read quickly).

1. Francois Cussett's French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States

Recommended by the Institute this seems suitably gossipy and low-brow for my tastes, already the anecdotes about Lotringer have amused me. I have shown unusually iron will by not reading further.

2. Shirley Jackson, The Lottery and other stories
I actually wanted to get one of the novels, as I liked The Haunting of Hill House (1959) (great cover in this edition, which is the one I have), but will have to make do with the short stories.

3. Roberto Bolano, The Savage Detectives
I've been warned on this one, but it's long (good for holiday) and I've read most of the others translated into English. I particularly like the fake memoirs of right-wing / fascist / Nazi writers. It's interesting how reviewers also identify them as 'failed' or 'bad' writers, implying that fascists / Nazis by definition cannot be good writers; I don't get that from the stories by Bolano, but rather a more disturbing sense of how like other writers they are.

4.Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War.

One history book is essential and as I did once write a book on death this seemed appropriate as I know little about the American Civil War but have also been interested in it as one of the first instances of 'total' technological war.

5. Elfride Jelinek, Greed
To my shame I've never read any Jelinek, but Austrian misery should be great in the sun (try Bernhard's Concrete, but not if you are writing a book / essay / thesis).

6. JG Ballard, Miracles of Life
In tribute

7. Eliza Haywood, Love and Excess
18thC furries fun (so I'm told)

Steve's reading sounds good as well.

Left Reading

A new online resource of left pamphlets etc.

NEW WEBSITE PROVIDES FREE DOWNLOADS OF CURRENT SOCIALIST BOOKS AND PAMPHLETS

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READING FROM THE LEFT is a new website, created to promote and distribute contemporary socialist books and pamphlets.It will feature free PDF downloads of pamphlets, reviews and announcements of socialist books, free PDF downloads of book chapters, and in some cases entire books.This is a non-commercial project: the website links to places where titles can be purchased, but it does not sell pamphlets or books directly.The initial response from publishers has been excellent.

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**Monthly Review Press
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**Resistance Books (UK)
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Mao's Miracles

Found here; I think they are 'Mao sceptics'

“At 15:40 Chou Te-ming was carried into the emergency room of the Hsin-hua Hospital. His heart had stopped beating 18 minutes before he got there. “The doctor on duty felt it his responsibility to save this worker, but he recalled that according to a foreign medical journal, it was impossible for a patient to revive after the heart had stopped beating for six minutes. Could he save this worker after a much longer time?

“Raising his head, he saw members of the workers and P.L.A. Mao Tse-tung’s thought propaganda teams at his side. Their advice when they came to the hospital rang in his ears: ‘You must follow Chairman Mao Tse-tung’s teaching, join the side of the workers, peasants and soldiers, and serve them whole-heartedly!’ He must try to save Chou Te ming!…

“At that critical moment, the propaganda team read out quotations from Chairman Mao, urging them to “Surmount every difficulty to win victory.”

“After a brief consultation, the medical workers decided to give the patient an injection of adrenalin, breaking with the foreign bourgeois conventions and old medical ‘text books’ which rule out adrenalin in cases of electric shock because it causes strong contractions of the heart which may go into uncontrollable fluttering and result in death….

During that time, members of the propaganda team followed Chairman Mao’s teaching: ‘The revolutionary war is a war of the masses; it can be waged only by mobilizing the masses and relying on them.’ They asked other doctors and nurses to take part. With the joint efforts of the masses who were thus fully mobilized, Chou Te-ming began to take a turn for the better.

“Chou Te-ming finally regained consciousness after 63 hours. 75 hours after his accident, he opened his eyes and clearly saw the portrait of our great leader Chairman Mao in his ward. His first words were: ‘Long live Chairman Mao! A long, long life to him!’”

A Magical Injection of 'Practice'

However couched, the facility of generic allegations of theoreticism, academicism, substitutionism, and so on, against Marxist intellectuals is in inverse proportion to its utility. It substitutes moralistic deprecation for materialist explanation of an objective state of affairs, incorrigible by any amount of voluntarism (as if a magical injection of 'practice' could remedy a distemper of 'theory').

Gregory Elliott

Cold Fanatics

A debility and dimness of the imaginative power, and a consequent necessity of reliance on the impressions of the senses, do, we well know, render the mind liable to superstition and fanaticism. Having a deficient portion of internal and proper warmth, minds of this class seek in the crowd circum fana for a warmth in common, which they do not possess singly. Cold and phlegmatic in their own nature, like damp hay, they heat and inflame by co-acervation; or like bees they become restless and irritable through the increased temperature of collected multitudes. Hence the German word for fanaticism (such at least was its original import) is derived from the swarming of bees, namely, Schwärmen, Schwärmerey.

Coleridge

I have no idea what's going on (Tarnac 9 book launch)

An amusing report on the book launch for The Coming Insurrection, courtesy of the Institute. When I read these kind of things I always think if I was involved I'd be the one arrested / lose my job / have my life ruined, while everyone else headed off to a fantastic anarchist party. The irony of the invocation of courage in my forthcoming book does not escape me...

Vehmgericht (by Marx, avant la lettre) on the nihilism of decay

On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces, which no epoch of the former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman Empire. In our days, everything seems pregnant with its contrary: Machinery, gifted with the wonderful power of shortening and fructifying human labour, we behold starving and overworking it; The newfangled sources of wealth, by some strange weird spell, are turned into sources of want; The victories of art seem bought by the loss of character.

At the same pace that mankind masters nature, man seems to become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy. Even the pure light of science seems unable to shine but on the dark background of ignorance. All our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and in stultifying human life into a material force.

This antagonism between modern industry and science on the one hand, modern misery and dissolution on the other hand; this antagonism between the productive powers and the social relations of our epoch is a fact, palpable, overwhelming, and not to be controverted.

Marx, Speech at the Anniversary of the People's Paper (1856)