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Organising Time

a day ago
5 min

Organising Time

This is part of a #FridayFlashback series of re-edited and rereleased essays. This essay is a look at time for Marx, Ricœur and Hudis; the vast concerns of an eternal scene. It was first published June 26 2020. Be wise to-day; ’tis madness to defer; Next day the fatal precedent will plead; Thus on, till wisdom is push’d out of life. Procrastination is the thief of time; Year after year it steals, till all are fled, And to the mercies of a moment leaves The vast concerns of an

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Dreams from a Networked Scriptorium

Apr 30
4 min

Dreams from a Networked Scriptorium

This is part of a #FridayFlashback series of re-edited and rereleased essays. This essay is about crises, Covid-19 and what shows through the cracks. It was first published June 19 2020. Over the last few weeks, as well as my usual run of manuscripts (novels, memoirs, etc.) I have worked daily on editing pieces (interviews, essays, reports, statements) for Mutiny, the socialist organisation to which I proudly belong. I have also put together videos; live-tweeted protests comr

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You Have Only Your Silence to Lose

Apr 23
4 min

You Have Only Your Silence to Lose

This is part of a #FridayFlashback series of re-edited and rereleased essays. The essay is about twhy the left must learn to write. It was first published June 5 2020. Thanks to the technologies of modern capitalism, shaped by profit seeking, many forms of self-expression once considered essentially human (dance, song, acting) have been professionalised. Where such activities are still encouraged, it is often uniquely in childhood. And how often do we look to children dancing

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Dick’s Realities

Apr 16
6 min

Dick’s Realities

This is part of a #FridayFlashback series of re-edited and rereleased essays. The essay is a review of Philip K. Dick’s Time Out Of Joint, an exploration of Gnosticism and Postmodernism. It was first published May 22 2020. Because I’m the center of the universe. At least, that’s what I’ve inferred from their actions. They act as if I am. I only have that to go on. They’ve gone to a great deal of trouble to construct a sham world around me to keep me pacified. Buildings, cars,

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It Would be Impious

Apr 9
6 min

It Would be Impious

This is part of a #FridayFlashback series of re-edited and rereleased essays. The essay is about apocolypse, revolution and Robinson Crusoe. It was first published May 15 2020. In the short story ‘The Machine Stops’ by E. M. Forster, when the archetypal resident of the machine is informed of the titular event, namely the end of her world, she responds chiefly in disbelief, ‘It would be impious,’ says Vashti, ‘if it was not mad.’ There are many things to unpack about that stor

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What Language Insists on Hiding

Apr 2
5 min

What Language Insists on Hiding

This is part of a #FridayFlashback series of re-edited and rereleased essays. The one is a review of Christopher Slatsky's book The Immeasurable Corpse of Nature. It was first published May 8 2020. Nature created glorious structures with no intent or foresight, the Giant’s Causeway being one such example. Competence without comprehension. The illusion of purpose by the purposeless. Humans are “promiscuous” teleologists, interpreting natural phenomena as being there for us. Na

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What’s Real After COVID-19?

Mar 26
12 min

What’s Real After COVID-19?

This is part of a #FridayFlashback series of re-edited and rereleased essays. The essay, written in COVID-19's earlier days, explores the calamity and looks back to Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism and Jacques Camatte's Against Domestication. It was first published April 3 2020. OVERCOMING THE SICK SOCIETY In Ursula K. Le Guin’s ‘Ambiguous Utopia’, The Dispossessed, the utopian Shevek visits a world closer to ours — contemporaneously —than the paradise from which he comes. He

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Fiction and the Eternal Now

Mar 19
5 min

Fiction and the Eternal Now

This is part of a #FridayFlashback series of re-edited and rereleased essays. The essay is about the need to imagine beyond our current circumstances, to see beyond. It was first published March 27 2020. I have always lived in London. I have always lived in this flat. I have always enjoyed this view over leafy Chiswick with its church spire and English-town illusion. Just like, when I lived in Tanygrisiau, I had always done so. Had always resided in that slate building. Had a

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Disaster Clichés

Mar 12
4 min

Disaster Clichés

This is part of a #FridayFlashback series of re-edited and rereleased essays. The essay, written in COVID-19's earlier days, is a response to the proliferation of thoughtless clichés at the time. It was first published March 20 2020. There’s always a silver lining; you have to make good of a bad situation; little did I know; you win some, you lose some; easy come, easy go; &c. &c. In these trying times we are spontaneously assaulted by a veritable deluge of readymade clichés

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Bioshock’s Glorious Microcosm

Mar 5
5 min

Bioshock’s Glorious Microcosm

This is part of a #FridayFlashback series of re-edited and rereleased essays. The essay contains spoilers for the plot of the game Bioshock. It was first published Feb 28 2020. To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour. ~ William Blake A literary or narrative conceit I truly love is the use of a microcosm or synecdoche to parallel an overarching plot that contains it, providing a story withi

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Reincarnation, Identity & Love

Feb 26
6 min

Reincarnation, Identity & Love

This is part of a #FridayFlashback series of re-edited and rereleased essays. The review of Jan Fortune’s Casilda Trilogy, which was first published January 24 2020. Memory, always made of objects; of good and bad smells, of faded photos in a shabby scrapbook. Trilogies are tricky. It is easy for the rival logics of stories to become unwieldy, to resist proximity. My mother Jan Fortune’s trilogy overcomes this by encoding repetitions and echoes into the heart of the overlapp

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Learning Loss

Feb 19
4 min

Learning Loss

This is part of a #FridayFlashback series of re-edited and rereleased essays. The review of the children's Lovecraft book, The Old One and the Sea, was first published January 3 2020. In his introduction to Lex H Jones’s Lovecraftian children’s book (subtitled ‘For The Grown-Ups’), Jim Mcleod asks: ‘When do we introduce Horror to children?’ This question soon steps sideways into a related one, ‘How far do you dilute the horror and fluffy up a demon?’ Jones comes to the view

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A Postmodern Cave

Feb 12
9 min

A Postmodern Cave

This is part of a #FridayFlashback series of re-edited and rereleased essays. It was first published December 20 2019. All the astroid mining, Green New Deals and social democrats in the universe cannot stop the jack boots marching. ~Prolekult This is a review of Prolekult’s YouTube Marxist documentary (see below for embedded video). In the past I have critiqued BreadTube (the dominant community of leftist YouTube creators) for its subsumption into a media ecology that pollut

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A Fascist Internet?

Feb 5
12 min

A Fascist Internet?

This is part of a #FridayFlashback series of re-edited and rereleased essays. Here I return to part two of a review of The Twittering Machine, looking at the mediocrity of online microcelebrity. It was first published December 6 2019. chapter 1. our parasocial malaise The telos of the clickbait economy is not postmodernism, but fascist kitsch. Last week I published a favourable review of Richard Seymour’s The Twittering Machine, a book about the harms and potentials of socia

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Utopia & Dystopia: Online Capitalism

Jan 29
12 min

Utopia & Dystopia: Online Capitalism

This is part of a #FridayFlashback series of rereleased essays. Here I return to part one of a review of The Twittering Machine, first published November 29 2019. We need something to long for, the better to devise grander escapologies. We need the ‘intercalary gush’ of Catholic poet Charles Péguy, a moment of rupture in our daily habits through which to escape not only the Twittering Machine but the unnecessary burden of misery that it successfully monetizes. When I was fir

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The Hidden Uncanny

Jan 22
8 min

The Hidden Uncanny

This is part of a #FridayFlashback series of rereleased essays.This one revisits my reviews of two works of contemporary horror, ‘The Unheimlich Manoeuvre’ and ‘Everything That’s Underneath’, first published October 11 2019. As the title suggests, Tracy Fahey’s The Unheimlich Manoeuvre is rooted in the uncanny. As Cate Gardner puts it in her fabulous introduction, the tales occupy ‘a world you and I would recognise. They are stories of folk who take the wrong road, knock on t

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Bridging Interiority

Jan 15
5 min

Bridging Interiority

This is part of a #FridayFlashback series of rereleased essays. A Review of Portals: Gates, Stiles, Windows, Bridges & Other Crossings first published October 4 2020. Since gods of nearly all cultures were believed to inhabit the skies, the route there was usually stepped. It is an acceptable theory that the monumental stone Step Pyramid of Djoser, designed by Imhotep in the 27th century BC, was not only a tomb but intended to facilitate an afterlife in heaven. The high zigg

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Preface: Born in Blood

Jan 8
7 min

Preface: Born in Blood

This is part of a #FridayFlashback series of rereleased essays. This is my preface for Born in Blood: Volume II by George Daniel Lea, first released online on April 2020. You can also read my review of volume I here. Love your music, for silence descends. You shouldn’t have seen this, but now that you have, you may as well enjoy the show. Volume Two in the Born in Blood series is a magisterial addition to what is as much a mythos as a frame for diverse fictions. Unique in its

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Utopia in a Burning World

Jan 1
4 min

Utopia in a Burning World

This is part of a #FridayFlashback series of rereleased essays.This one revisits my impressions of the stakes after attending an environmental demo, and was published on September 20, 2019.* Nothing much has changed, except for the worse. Today* I joined thousands in London’s centre on a strike against climate change, a protest in solidarity with many more across the world. It was a glorious expression of working class outrage against capitalism’s death cult, a scream of ange

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Blurring Distinctions

Dec 18, 2020
8 min

Blurring Distinctions

This is part of a #FridayFlashback series of rereleased essays. A Review of Born in Blood: Volume One, first published September 13, 2019. They watch, the Flesh-Singers, the Old Fathers; watch and whisper their lullabies into dreaming and fevered minds, inspiration stoked by despair; an escalating need for solutions to apocalyptic ills: drought, rising sea levels, pandemics, economic collapses, mass starvation, over-population, corruption and war and genocide . . . Not their

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