Ads With­out Prod­ucts, taking on the advo­cates of mil­i­tant dysphoria—by some def­i­n­i­tions, “the pol­i­tics of disaffection,” by Ads’, “adolescent insanity”—draws a useful line in the sand and fol­lows up with a com­ment that self-​consciously polit­i­cal poet­mon­gers in this coun­try would do well to study:

Far too often, the form that “polit­i­cal” work in the human­i­ties took was as fol­lows: reassem­ble the­o­ret­i­cal machine in your apart­ment. Force lit­er­ary (or other) texts through machine. Scrape up what comes out the other end—generally a fairly bleak pic­ture of our world and our prospects. Strain and mould into mono­graph. Just before baking, add a few vague, hand­wav­ing ges­tures about prac­tice – ges­tures gen­er­ally way out of sync in either their mod­est­ness or their hubris­tic mag­i­cal think­ing with the bleak­ness of the por­trait you’ve just painted. Finally, bake in the glow of your self-​admiration – for now you are a ser­vant of rev­o­lu­tion, you have changed the world with your book on, say, racial pol­i­tics in the 19th cen­tury novel.

…Read More…

From The Daily Mail (via Yves Smith):

Here, on a sleepy stretch of shore­line at the far end of Asia, is surely the biggest and most secre­tive gath­er­ing of ships in mar­itime his­tory. Their num­bers are equiv­a­lent to the entire British and Amer­i­can navies com­bined; their ton­nage is far greater. Con­tainer ships, bulk car­ri­ers, oil tankers - all should be steam­ing fully laden between China, Britain, Europe and the US, stock­ing camera shops, PC Worlds and Argos depots ahead of the retail pan­de­mo­nium of 2009. But their water has been stolen.

They are a pow­er­ful and tan­gi­ble rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the hur­ri­canes that have been wrought by the global eco­nomic crisis; an iron cur­tain drawn along the coast­line of the south­ern edge of Malaysia’s rural Johor state, 50 miles east of Sin­ga­pore harbour.

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A recent exchange in the com­ments over at Ads With­out Prod­ucts offers an inter­est­ing sug­ges­tion for clos­ing the Roberto Bolaño-Roberto Bazlen-​Robert Musil loop that John Latta started and I con­tin­ued. (Advance apolo­gies if crib­bing com­ments like this is poor form):

Scott Eric Kauf­man:

I’ve got to say, I’m think­ing the way a person reacts to Bolaño’s directly tied to their feel­ings about Musil…

CR:

Yes! I’ve never been able to get past, you know, the first sev­eral thou­sand pages of Musil - you must be right!…

SEK:

Less cryp­ti­cally, Bolaño’s novels seem to have that (admit­tedly con­tra­dic­tory) qual­ity of being both a page-​turner and occa­sional. I’m not com­pelled to read them, but when I do, I can’t put them down. Musil was the same way—his pale shadow, Kun­dera, not so much—but this seems to exclude Musil and Bolaño both from the mod­ernist cat­e­gory into which they’re so often shoved….

And yet as soon as I offer the sug­ges­tion, I feel myself want­ing to draw it back.