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cut plan
This time i want a little distance from the top of my head though I’m still prepared to claim it by giving it away.
in a long set of unmade circles, the conditions and effects of miscommunication are brutal and glorious. They keep going till you stop. to revel in something that breaks you up. to rebel in dread of reverse and whatever brings it because if there were nothing it would be impossible and easier. sposed to be talking about two zones of miscommunication + their affective ground and atmosphere and terrible beauty. They’re the same but really close to one another but unbridgeably far from one another, connected by some inside stories we keep running from, the way people flee a broken park when the island is a shipwreck. the crumbled refuge is a hold and a language lab. Half the school falls away from the other half that escapes. help in the form of a persistent gunship and madman, the exceptional nation of the abstract individual. aggressive, hovering neglect of the instructor. he says the constant variety of distraction makes collaborating impossible and the other story’s been buried again, concrete taken for water. The serially disrupted plan should have been disrupted but the disruption is serial—the same, enlarged catastrophe whose counterstrophic anticipation will peek through every once in a while, as suppressed stories of suppression, and somebody has to imagine that, and how we keep dying for the shit we live for. the slave trade’s death toll took a shock the day before yesterday and today we couldn’t quite engage, always a little turned away and elsewhere, a little alone. at 1:15 we have to see if we want to figure out a way to work through this, which is to say in this. to move in, which is to say through, the obscenity of poetry, of what it is to think about one little boy but removed, upstairs in the luxurious monastery. the question of how we can read this poem is redoubled now. now, how can we read this poem? This, too, is what Zong! is about, having claimed the catastrophe. And also: how can we turn the whole world into rubble for what was already held in the disaster.
Posted in Uncategorized on Thursday, January 14th, 2010 by Fred Moten.
Comments (5)
Rubble, stubble, soil and stumble,
Rubles revel, rebels mumble,
Unmade circles blur the Hubbel,
Zong and Zog are seeing double.
Burma Shave.
or, how to write about haiti: an essay in the limits of language and the [illegible] of (the) africa(n diaspora), vol. 673,699,235.
I think about one little boy removed in the luxurious monastery occasionally myself, but I’m well aware that those feelings are wrong, as they happened to me and mine before. Otherwise, I’m 100% with John Oliver. Where’s Walt Kelly when you miss him so?
Very exciting to see you on here, Fred! Great opening blog posts, and I look forward to whatever you come up with next. Oh, and if you do the opportunity, it would be fascinating to hear your thoughts about Pascale Casanova’s *The World Republic of Letters* and other texts, like those by Moretti, et. al., that (attempt to) (re)think questions of global literature and the relationships between metropoles and peripheries. Gayatri Spivak sort of dismantled Casanova’s argument in a talk she gave at Northwestern about a yaer (or was it two?) ago, but I can’t say that I completely followed her. Your thoughts would be, as they always are, illuminating on the subject.
John Keene