Eric Levitz in NY Magazine:

Last week, a motley mass of shitposters, gambling enthusiasts, and disaffected Zoomers — united by hate for Wall Street and love of chicken tenders — beat a multibillion-dollar hedge fund at its own game. Through their collective intelligence and audacity, users of the Reddit forum WallStreetBets executed a sophisticated “short squeeze” that took money away from some billionaire speculators, gave it to some badly indebted workers, and made a mockery of neoliberal capitalism’s legitimizing myths. Unfortunately, right when these working-class retail investors had Wall Street’s titans on the run, the plutocracy’s visible hand appeared to reach down and thwart them: Robinhood, a trading app popular with young recreational investors, suddenly barred its users from buying GameStop shares, thereby relieving pressure on the hedge-fund shorts.

That is one way of recounting the GameStop rally, anyway.

Here is another: A group of small-time speculators — including some finance-industry professionals — orchestrated a pump-and-dump scheme that involved convincing a lot of financially inexpert (and/or politically disaffected) people that they could stick it to Wall Street’s largest money managers by … bidding up the price of an equity that is owned by Wall Street’s largest money managers. This generated enough momentum to trigger a “short squeeze,” and the price of GameStop shares shot to the moon. Wall-to-wall media coverage ensued. Inexperienced investors bought the hype, and began piling into what now resembled a Ponzi scheme: When the bubble finally burst, those who bought in early would have a chance to cash out before the stock fell beneath their break-even price; those who bought late would have little warning before the “dump” wiped them out. By late last week, so many people were buying GameStop shares over gamified phone apps that regulations aimed at ensuring the stability of financial markets kicked into gear. The stock market’s central clearing hub calculated that it faced a high risk in facilitating more GME buys, and demanded billions in collateral from brokerages ordering such trades. Lacking the funds necessary to meet this demand, Robinhood was compelled to restrict GameStop buying on its platform while it sought an infusion of liquidity. That pause hastened the inevitable end of the GameStop rally, which ultimately achieved little beyond popularizing participation in stock trading (a development that will enrich Wall Street at the expense of working-class people with gambling problems).

More here.

Virginia Jackson and Meredith Martin in Avidly:

On January 20, 2021, American poetry in public came back in style.  We do not mean that poetry came back into fashion.  We mean that its return was stylish, personified as it was by the young poet Amanda Gorman, wearing a bright yellow Prada coat that nobody can stop talking about.  Gorman gave a performance of “The Hill We Climb,” the poem she composed for the occasion, and her performance rivaled those of Lady Gaga and Jennifer Lopez.  More poetry performances by Amanda Gorman were circulated in the days after the Inauguration than were news and images of the former president–or even of the current one.  This is good news for poetry. It is also surprising in a country in which poetry doesn’t get much attention, especially not poetry spoken out loud — in person, in public.  As two scholars of poetics who have thought a lot about how and when and where poetry goes public, we began to wonder why Gorman’s performance struck such a chord.

We love the women’s culture aspect of this poetic event, and it matters for how the poetry happened. Gorman’s performance was a part of how the inauguration of another (much better than the last) White man was supported (as usual) by a network of women with an eye for fabrics and accessories with political significance. Some details: Oprah bought Gorman a ring symbolizing Maya Angelou’s singing caged bird, as she had bought Angelou’s coat and gloves for Clinton’s inaugural; J.Lo wore the suffragist white worn in the past by Shirley Chisholm and Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris; Harris wore purple for Chisholm, and so both Gorman and Harris invoked the suffragist associations of both yellow and  purple; Gorman’s red headband turned her ensemble into a rhyme for Chisolm’s red and yellow campaign buttons, to which Harris’s campaign buttons also alluded. All of this styling served to frame Gorman as she emerged as a new representative of a very old set of genres more often honored in the breach than in the observance: the heretofore minor or obsolete genres of poetry as public speech. It is these genres that Gorman brought back into style —or really, that her performance remixed into a new genre.

More here.

Jessica Boyall in Sidecar:

Cecilia Mangini, who died on 21 January this year, is widely credited as Italy’s first female documentary filmmaker, though she was also a photographer, critic and activist. Her career, which spanned over six decades, followed a sinuous path. Born in the Southern region of Puglia in 1927, Mangini moved to Florence at the age of six after her father’s leather business collapsed. She studied political science at the University of Florence and upon graduating took up a secretarial role at the Italian Federation of Independent Cinema in Rome, where she began writing film reviews for Cinema Nuovo, Cinema ’60 and L’Eco del Cinema. From there she turned her hand to documentary filmmaking – an arena in which she was critically acclaimed, if never famed.

Living through the fascist era and the Years of Lead, Mangini’s turbulent political context shaped the political impulses – primarily Marxist and feminist – which unite her eclectic body of work, pulsating through her studies of the Vietnam War, the life of Antonio Gramsci, the rise of the European far-right and the traditional shamanic practices in Apulia. Paradoxically, though not unusually, Mangini’s first forays into filmmaking were via the ‘Cineguf’ group: a fascist student film club attended by a number of leftist avant-garde directors – including Pier Paolo Pasolini and Antonio Ghirelli – in the early stages of their career. Like them, Mangini quickly shrugged off her reactionary affiliations, working with Pasolini and Lino Del Fra (the Roman director whom she would later marry) on several militant cinematic treatments of postbellum Italy.

More here.

Phenomenal World has releases its first collection Market Economy, Market Society: Interviews and Essays on the Decline of European Social Democracy edited by Maya Adereth, and featuring contributions from Adam Przeworski, Stephanie Mudge, David Broder, Juan Andrade, and Jonah Birch. Stephanie Mudge’s conrtibution:

The problem of democratic representation has always turned on the question of the “have-nots”—that is, not only those without wealth and property, but also those marginalized on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, origin, religion and education. Even in a world of full-fledged democratic rights, the democratic game tends to break in favor of the “haves.” They enjoy an easy affinity with political elites who are not so different from them, and they experience democratic politics as a hospitable and responsive place. When in doubt, they can back-channel, mobilize proxies and networks, and exchange cultural influence and economic power for political voice, cloaked in the comfort that what’s in their interest is in everyone’s interest. None of this means the powerful always get their way. But it means they operate on the assumption that their way is likely to prevail.

Before democratization, which in both Europe and the United States did not reach its full expression until the turn of the twentieth century, those without power were politically excluded by fiat. Even when some “have-nots” overcame formal exclusion, they had to further overcome efforts, both brazen and subtle, to impede the exercise of their political rights; if they managed to bridge the distance between rights-in-name and rights-in-fact, they still had to muster meaningful representation in a game that was not built for them. The achievement of both rights and representation for the powerless is difficult, rare and fragile—not least because formal rights, once achieved, can be used as a pretense for rendering representation practically meaningless. In this case, democracy becomes form without substance.

Three kinds of institutions were crucial drivers of the fitful, contested, imperfect construction of democratic rights and representation of the powerless between the 1850s and the 1920s: socialist and social democratic culture, mass political parties, and labor movements. Where the three converged, the result was a unique historical organization—the labor-allied mass party of the socialist and social democratic left.

More here.

Ian Balfour reviews The Benjamin Files by Fredric Jameson, in the LA Review of Books:

THE WORK OF Walter Benjamin continues to beguile, teach, provoke, enlighten, madden, even inspire. If some of the debates about his work are tired and people have had their fill of the great, generative “Mechanical Reproduction” essay (better “Technical Reproducibility”), and if he is sometimes too easily deferred to as a kind of “Saint Benjamin,” as Michael Jennings terms it, Benjamin remains one of the best figures with whom to think. And one of the most rereadable. This last has to do with what Jameson calls, after Barthes, the “writerly” texture of his work. If common-garden-variety criticism tends to be fairly inconspicuous in relation to its objects of study, a good deal of Benjamin’s work presents itself as writing to be pondered and puzzled over in its own right, the writerly being, for Jameson, conceived as not so conducive to being understood.

There’s no such thing as an ideal reader, but Jameson is far better primed than most to do justice to just those materials and texts that Benjamin engaged with, and not simply because of his formidable powers of analysis and synthesis. One of Jameson’s prime areas of expertise — French literature (and culture and history) of the 19th century — coincides with Benjamin’s main interest of the 1930s. Add to this deep knowledge of the history of Marxism and the attendant politics. Plus, he’s far better grounded in philosophy than most good literary critics, and he’s well versed or conversant in proximate and not-so-proximate disciplines (film, architecture, sociology, urbanism, et al.). Plus, his long-standing interest in and consumption of popular culture parallels impulses in Benjamin. Plus, he’s written book-length studies of two of Benjamin’s three main men: Brecht and Adorno. He’s even something of a Berlin-o-phile.

More here.

Tashi Dorji and Aaron Turner at BOMB:

If I had stepped onstage at a metal concert in the late ’80s and announced to the audience that in the future they would be listening to all-synthesizer metal albums, I’d have had enough beer thrown at me to turn in my outfit for a bottle deposit. The metal and noise genres are reputed to be intrinsically rigid, but that’s what makes them so fun, so compelling and infuriating. Nowhere is this more evident than when surveying the totality of Aaron Turner’s work as an artist, musician, and founder of the heavy, influential, and (mostly) defunct label Hydra Head Records. Turner’s present band SUMAC—since its inception on a nonstop tear of activity, including a recent collaboration with Keiji Haino—just released May You Be Held, the latest planet on their horizon of metal.

more here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1DP0bJCyGA&ab_channel=WEEDIAN

Alex Ross at The New Yorker:

In brief, the circumstances were these: Heine, a master of caustic wit and raw heartbreak, was in his early thirties and had found fame with his “Buch der Lieder” (“Book of Songs”), a collection of outwardly Romantic lyric poems with an ironic undertow that often escaped early readers. Platen bore a noble name—Count Platen-Hallermünde—but had grown up without financial advantages, serving in the military before turning to literature. He had won notice for finespun odes, sonnets, and adaptations of the Persian ghazal. Karl Immermann, a friend of Heine’s, had made cracks about pretentious poets who “vomit Ghaselen”; Heine quoted Immermann’s lines in one of his volumes of “Reisebilder” (“Travel Pictures”) that detoured into politics and literature. Platen, irrationally incensed by this run-of-the-mill literary sniping, struck back in a pseudo-Aristophanic comedy titled “The Romantic Oedipus,” deploying anti-Semitic epithets against Heine. The latter, in his next travelogue, “The Baths of Lucca,” unleashed a homophobic evisceration of Platen—which was widely viewed as overkill and caused considerable damage to Heine’s career. Platen, who already felt alienated from Germany and was based in Italy, said no more. He died of cholera six years later, in Syracuse, Sicily.

more here.

Heaven: A Definition

Heaven cannot be wrung easily into words.
It is like air, open your palm. See? Empty.
Heaven is like this, you can put something in it,
but since heaven itself is weightless,
the thing will fall. Nonetheless . . .

A long green couch n front of a large window. Night.
Lights in the house out, no one but the two of them.
Take two pillows off the back of the couch and have
them lie down. Have him love her in a blind and
elemental way sewn a thousand times together by
need and sex. Have them both confuse these.

Have them love this confusion. Have her love him equally.
Have them both remember “unto death.” Have them
both believe this. Have the stars brilliant, like ice
in a blue/black sky. Have their bodies jigged, beside
and around, into perfect and mutual solipsism.

Have her forehead beside his high Periclean forehead.
Have him stroking gently, gently the hair from
the side of her forehead so that skin absolutely
touches skin. Have their favorite suite playing.
Bach. Perfect volume. Have her feel the stars
can now enter her body because they are him, have her
feel entirely at home on earth because of heaven.

Have him be the shape of the beech tree outside
the window barely visible in the dark. Have her
transmuted into the music entering his ears, able
to move him past his own muscle, tissue, organs
upward without disturbing a thing. Have this evening
framed, let the frame be gold and round, not thick,
not thin. Entitle the evening, “Brave in the Face
of Death Wearing a Grecian Mask.”

by Gene Zeiger
from Leaving Egypt
White Pine Press, 1995

Rafia Zakaria in The Baffler:

JANUARY 6 WAS SUPPOSED to be a good day for Josh Hawley. I can imagine him waking up with a spring in his step, carefully selecting his dark blue suit, his white shirt, and his red tie—an amalgamation of the flag itself. The selection, like so much else the senator from Missouri does, was deliberate; here was the aspirational aesthetic of the MAGA-sexual—sharp, suave, and yet committed to a white nationalist, even theocratic, political overhaul of the United States. An unforgettable image shows him that morning raising his fist to the crowd then gathering around the Capitol. By the end of that riotous day, it was not such a good look.

Hawley’s version of the MAGA aesthetic landed him in the pages of Vogue this January, but his was not the most memorable outfit of the day. That honor went to a man sporting horns and pelts. If Hawley had decided that a sharp suit and gelled hair made for the best “let’s overturn the election” look, Jacob Chansley, a.k.a., Jake Angeli, the self-proclaimed QAnon shaman, had gone for the opposite, choosing to be horned and bare-chested. Two visions of MAGA manhood collided, each representing some aesthetic truth of the way MAGA men see themselves.

If Josh Hawley had really dressed his truth that day, he would not have worn a suit, a la his banished leader Donald Trump. Like Chansley, who sought to evoke some primitive pre-modern virility, Hawley would have chosen to represent some greater, inward truth turned outwards. For him, this would likely have been a disciple-like long tunic and a sash. To truly capture the fashion sense of the times of Jesus, he may have added a staff and sandals, one more useful than the other while commandeering a mob.

More here.

Chris Lebron in The New York Times:

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: A Black man walks into a federal government office and says, “Give me a lot of money and I’ll build you a Black city.” And the government, to everyone’s surprise, says, “OK, here’s $14 million!” No? Most people haven’t. The story of Floyd McKissick’s dream, struggle and, ultimately, failure to build an American city on behalf of Black citizens is one of the greatest least-told stories in American history. In “Soul City,” Thomas Healy chronicles this tragically quixotic enterprise by McKissick, a civil rights activist turned capitalist, who attempted, beginning in 1969, to build “Soul City,” a Black-run city on a former slave plantation in rural North Carolina, close to Southern Klan country.

McKissick was almost certain to fail the moment he purchased that 5,000-acre plantation in Warren County. So, with the ending obvious from the outset, the challenge for Healy is to recount the tale in such a way that our comprehension not only of McKissick’s attempt but of his inevitable defeat is deepened — to make the story of a Black American who dared to dream the biggest American dream while failing to realize it of value for our continued struggle with racial injustice today.

Floyd McKissick was a civil-rights-era legend. Raised in the South, he was intimately familiar with white supremacy. Healy reports that when McKissick was just 4 years old, he innocently resisted moving to the back of a trolley car, prompting the conductor to snarl at his aunt to come forward to get her “Black son of a bitch and take him back there with you.” From then on, Healy writes, McKissick was continually reminded that he was “a Black boy in a white land.” This incident, along with later racist encounters, including in 1951, when he integrated the University of North Carolina Law School, fueled his career as an activist. McKissick helped organize sit-ins in the wake of the 1960 Greensboro sit-in at Woolworth’s, an early example of nonviolent direct action, and went on to become a leader in the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), which played a key role in the Freedom Rides through the South.

More here. (Throughout February, at least one post will be dedicated to honoring Black History Month. The theme this year is: The Family)

Brian Eno in The Guardian:

I am just one of many artists who have been affected by a new McCarthyism that has taken hold amid a rising climate of intolerance in Germany. Novelist Kamila Shamsie, poet Kae Tempest, musicians Young Fathers and rapper Talib Kwelli, visual artist Walid Raad and the philosopher Achille Mbembe are among the artists, academics, curators and others who have been caught up in a system of political interrogation, blacklisting and exclusion that is now widespread in Germany thanks to the passing of a 2019 parliamentary resolution. Ultimately this is about targeting critics of Israeli policy towards Palestinians.

Recently, an exhibition of my artwork was cancelled in its early stages because I support the nonviolent, Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. The cancellation was never publicly declared, but I understand it to have been the consequence of cultural workers in Germany fearing that they and their institution would be punished for promoting someone labelled as “antisemitic”. This is the work of tyranny: create a situation where people are frightened enough to keep their mouths shut, and self-censorship will do the rest.

More here.

Thomas Bird at the BBC:

The creature stretched, then clung upright against the tree with its sharp claws and began to groom. Its skin required some attention as it had, frankly, a lot of it. A membrane stretched from its neck via its hands and feet to its tail, a kite-like feature that distinguishes the colugo, once popularly known as the flying lemur, from other night gliders like the flying squirrel, which has a long tail that it uses to fan itself through the air. Because they don’t fly, nor use a tail to fan, colugos, with the logic of a hand glider launching from a hillside, typically climb high into a tree before attempting to glide. Still, their range is impressive. According to Miard they’ve been recorded gliding a full 150m, although hops of 30m or less are far more common.

More here.

[Thanks to Farrukh Azfar.]

Joanne Randa Nucho in Public Books:

The Treaty of Versailles—a contract that changed the course of the century and beyond—has been all but forgotten in the public sphere and in popular discourse. As a result, few people think about the world we live in as being made by the Treaty. In fact, most don’t think about it at all.

Now, at the 101st anniversary of the Treaty coming into effect, on January 10, 1920, the authors in this series look back. They do so to think about how Versailles helped build our present, and to consider what was lost in the aftermath of this often-overlooked moment in the history of the 20th century. The fate of the Middle East; the treatment of former Ottoman subjects; the triumph of finance over democracy; the weakness of the statesmen rebuilding after the war; the entrenchment of antisemitism across Europe; even the extraordinary renditions of the 21st-century US War on Terror: all this and more flows from the Treaty of Versailles, now just over a century old.

More here.

Liz Day in The New York Times:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_R9hziWmPU&ab_channel=vozni

Lyndall Gordon at The Hudson Review:

What she was up against were, in short, warnings. These were most explicit each Lent and Easter. In April 1932, Eliot said he had gained so much that he could not give up his journey towards what he termed “reality”: as he put it in the Quartets, “human kind / Cannot bear very much reality.” The real thing lay beyond life, and he could no longer accept the kind of love that would mean giving that up. If he were to rank his two narratives, the supernatural did come first. Desire was evil, he believed, and talking to Hale more frankly than to anyone, he explained how difficult it was to fight this evil when he woke in the morning. When she notes his diminished expressiveness in the spring and summer of 1932, he explains this as a strategy, inseparable from unsatisfied desire. His typewriter stumbles, he crosses out and picks up the thought again with more deliberation, putting companionship before passion, then dependence, reverence and a protective instinct. He decides to label his feeling for her “respect.” True enough, though only one strand. He was not so earnest that he did not sometimes fix on her bathing costume and wavy hair.

more here.

Jana Larson at The Paris Review:

Bismarck, North Dakota, is a six-hour drive from Minneapolis, but it takes about ten hours by bus. You sit toward the back, next to an old man who sleeps with his mouth hanging open and an older woman with a red checkered shirt and dyed black hair in curlers. She reads a coupon circular like it’s a novel. Just in front of you, three Amish brothers talk among themselves in a thick Germanic language. You eavesdrop and try to figure out what they’re saying. It sounds biblical at first, but occasionally they say things in English, like “solid oak door,” and you second-guess that theory.

You settle in, take out your video camera, and start to film the landscape going by outside the window. You try to imagine you are Takako Konishi—that you’ve watched the movie Fargo, believe it’s a true story, believe there’s a suitcase full of money buried somewhere on this road, and believe you can find it.

more here.

Luvell Anderson in Boston Review:

What is racial fraud and how is it possible? The answer would be clear enough, perhaps, if race were a biological reality. But the consensus seems to be that race is a social construction, a product of human ingenuity. So why can’t you choose to be any race you want?

Rachel Dolezal, the former president of the Spokane NAACP who identifies as Black despite being born to white parents, clearly believes we are free to choose our racial identity. Her case would seem to expose the limits of thinking of race as a social construction. If races are social rather than biological, some commentators on Dolezal suggest, we are free to make of them what we will; there are no rules. Yet responses to Dolezal tell a different tale. A 2015 Rasmussen survey of 1,000 likely U.S. voters found that 63 percent believed Dolezal was being deceitful in claiming to be Black: she was engaged in a kind of racial fraud.

Is it incoherent to believe both that race is a social construct and that racial fraud is possible? In other words, does endorsing the notion of racial fraud require believing races are biological, after all? Literary scholar Walter Benn Michaels makes this sort of argument in his 1994 essay “The No-Drop Rule,” and versions of that idea endure. Michaels’s claim basically amounts to this: in order for a charge of racial fraud to have any normative power—that is, the kind of authority we generally grant to statements about what we should and should not do—it must rely on the claim that race is an essential, biological part of who we are.

More here. (Throughout February, at least one post will be dedicated to honoring Black History Month. The theme this year is: The Family)