My favorite art of the year

Honors papers need mixtape style covers.

Drink a Sake on Suzuki

This:

Victor Serge’s personality and life were typical in an extreme way, almost improbably so. From the middle of the last century onwards the Russian revolutionary movement produced a great many men who spent a considerable part of their lives as exiles abroad, as deportees in Siberia, as prison-inmates. Their ideas and personalities differed in many ways, but one thing they had in common: to be true to themselves was for most of them an obligation. They despised those personal advantages which are gained by accommodation to the existing order.

[...]

Of course, profound historical understanding and real revolutionary activity are impossible within the terms of bureaucratism or romanticism. One of the main hypocrisies of Stalinism was the creation of a system in which bureaucrats posed as revolutionary romantics, and employed romantics, who for their part posed as theorists. (The ideological amalgam of Stalinism combined the vulgarized Marxism of the German Social Democrats with the romanticism of the Russian narodniki.) Serge’s diametrical antiposition to this hypocrisy makes him—in a certain social and anthropological sense—the “anti-stalinist” par excellence. The monstrosity of Stalinism—and at the same time its positive historical significance in a certain period—lay in its formally conservative nature: Stalinist “centrism”—as opposed to Trotskyist “leftism” and Bukharinist “rightism”—was concerned with the conservation of Party and Power; principles and human beings were regarded as of secondary importance. Serge’s outlook was just the opposite. His absolute, emotional opposition to Stalinism produced an understanding which was most remarkable as a corrective (it was certainly not in itself sufficient to provide a historical interpretation).

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How I'm writing my Chechnya essay.

new Zizek, old Lenin

For some reason Zizek's essay in NLR feels dated.

The footnotes,

[1] V. I. Lenin, ‘Notes of a Publicist’, published posthumously in Pravda, 16 April 1924; Collected Works, vol. 33, Moscow 1966, pp. 204–7.

[2] Samuel Beckett, ‘Worstward Ho’, Nohow On, London 1992, p. 101.

[3] Lenin, ‘Eleventh Congress of the RCP(B)’, Collected Works, vol. 33, pp. 281–3.

[4] Sándor Márai, Memoir of Hungary: 1944–1948, Budapest 1996.

[5] Moshe Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle [1968], Ann Arbor, MI 2005. pp. 131–2.

[6] Quoted in Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle, Appendix 1, pp. 146–7.

[7] Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle, p. 84.

[8] Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle, p. 133.

[9] Lenin, ‘Better Fewer, But Better’, Collected Works, vol. 33, p. 495.

[10] Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle, p. 125.

[11] Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle, p. 124.

[12] Alain Badiou, The Meaning of Sarkozy, London and New York 2008, p. 115.

David Simon Murders Everything

The Wire's creator recently got the chance to eviscerate his enemies in front of the United States Congress. Not surprisingly, the casualties from Simon's testimony include just about everyone and everything.

The internet:

it leeches that reporting from mainstream news publications, whereupon aggregating websites and bloggers contribute little more than repetition, commentary and froth. Meanwhile, readers acquire news from aggregators and abandon its point of origin, namely the newspapers themselves. In short, the parasite is slowly killing the host.

Capitalism:

Second, Wall Street and free market logic, having been a destructive force in journalism over the last few decades, is now not suddenly the answer.

Citizens:

Indeed, the very phrase “citizen journalist” strikes my ear as Orwellian. A neighbor who is a good listener and cares about people is a good neighbor; he is not in any sense a citizen social worker, just as a neighbor with a garden hose and good intentions is not a citizen firefighter. To say so is a heedless insult to trained social workers and firefighters.

Himself:

Well, so much for new media. But what about old media? Well, anyone listening carefully may have noted that—I’m sorry. Cut that part. Anyone listening carefully may have noted that I was brought out of my reporting position in 1995.

Winning:

They had arrived from somewhere else, and they—if they won a prize or two, they would be moving on to bigger and better opportunities within the chain[...]The self-gratification in my profession does not come, you see, from covering a city and covering it well, from explaining an increasingly complex and interconnected world to citizens, from holding basic institutions accountable. It comes from someone handing you a plaque and taking your picture.

I'm sure that after hearing all of this all present members of Congress packed their bags and killed themselves in despair.