For the many thousands gone and Cheryl Wall in particular When the editors concocted the thematic for this issue, we’d hoped that “Apocalypse Now and Then” would do more than corner an unmistakable allusion to the title of the 1979 film addressed to the ravages of the Vietnam War and […]
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The American experiment is imperiled again. The danger that has haunted the republic since its founding has been left unattended for too long and is newly, predictably spilling over. The question remains whether or not the co-citizens of this nation are prepared to respond honestly to what they already know […]
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Something that hasn’t been adequately discussed about Marx’s Capital is the extent to which Marx is fascinated by capitalism’s mechanisms, precisely because the system is demented, yet works very well at the same time. —Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “A Very Special Delirium”1 The current pandemic arrogates to itself the […]
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I know, I know, It threatens the common gestures of human bonding The handshake, The hug The shoulders we give each other to cry on The Neighborliness we take for granted So much that we often beat our breasts Crowing about rugged individualism, Disdaining nature, pissing poison on it even, […]
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The announcement of this issue was circulated some months ago, but these past weeks have reassured the editors of the necessity of an enterprise seeking to draw together the best of contemporary progressive thought in order to provide the intellectual and emotional sustenance we need to survive this enormous contraction, […]
Until last week’s uprising, the quarantine had felt like living in an interlude, a present haunted by the potentiality of what seemed to be surely to come. Such interludes comprise the texture of living haunted by the imminent possibility of violence manifesting as confrontation or preventable death. Paraphrasing Zora Neale […]
There has always been enough blood money, mis-education and mass distraction in these dis-United States to erase any memory of catastrophe or atrocity that brought trauma or ethical contemplation to the surface of the national conversation. Problematic, because acknowledging such scar tissue might direct fealty away from the national religion—materialist […]
For Kamau Brathwaite, in memoriam The word “apocalypse” is commonly equated with a cataclysmic world-ending, heralded by all manner of natural disasters from plagues to earthquakes and tempests, and marked by the violent deaths of multitudes. Yet its original meaning has to do with revelation, a laying bare of those […]
This essay is Part 1 of 2 installments by the author “Some few mistakes in printing are here remarked; please forgive us for these errors.” This is a common opening sentence for errata notes. Such a loose sheet of paper inserted into a publication is a common way of saying, […]
In its annual public ritual of announcing how close humanity is to self-destruction, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists convened the press in January 2020 to set the large hand of their iconic Doomsday Clock relative to the small hand which rests at midnight, waiting for the big hand to join […]
Sometimes as I wander loose among pangs and pongs of unsolicited remorse, I cast aside the bromides that shield my thoughts from a disease I fear I cannot shake casting stones across the waters of my losses as one drowning imagines shore.
[….] A Shelter Is Not Necessarily An Island as title for something cogent right now comes to mind & brings to mind Eric Mottram’s 1971 book Shelter Island & The Remaining World […]
unbearable witness i do not want to write these words_ escorted by flashing red and blue lights the long white truck an enormous hearse passes slowly down the street through the neighborhood no where to run or hide from its path the stare of its headlights a mark on each […]
Which modes of speaking, writing, and knowing resound more intimately and powerfully in times of catastrophe? From millenarian prophecy to elegy, one might imagine constructing something of a general typology of modes of speech that resonate around sites of the end. In what follows, I want to briefly dwell with […]
