Notebook of Influences #2
Thank you so much to the hundreds of people who have subscribed to my newly revived substack, and especially to the 113 paid subscribers who induce me to actually post to this (not that my love can be bought for $5 a month, but you know).
Some housekeeping
I have a new article out on the Jewish Labor Bund and Gaza in the latest issue of The Funambulist. Go subscribe to this stellar magazine.
As an extra, here’s a banger quote by Henryk Erlich, the Bund’s leader, martyred by Stalin
“If a Jewish state should arise in Palestine; it’s spiritual climate will be eternal fear of the external enemy (Arabs); eternal struggle for every bit of ground with the internal enemy (Arabs)… Is this a climate in which freedom, democracy and progress can grow? Indeed, is it not the climate in which reaction and chauvinism ordinarily flourish?” - Henryk Erlich. 1938
Me and my fellow former Suicide Girl turned public leftist Jamie Peck talked about leftism, AI, art, and being professional naked girls.
I illustrated a rediscovered conversation between CLR James and Stuart Hall for the New York Review of Books
With the shilldibeastery out of the way, here’s what I’m loving this week.
Essays
“Whose Weil” for The Drift, on how the gee-golly American self help ethos sands the edges off even the most jagged of thinkers
“Not using a phone taught me what a phone is really for. It’s not for communicating with other people, getting directions, reading articles, looking at pictures, shopping for products, or playing games. A phone is a device for muting the anxieties proper to being alive” - Sam Kriss. “How to Live Without Your Phone”
Every action has unintended consequences. Violent actions in particular are prone to causing unintended consequences. This does not make them unethical.
It was not unethical for people to overthrow the oppressive regime of Bashar Al Assad, come what may. And, frankly, very few people believe that it was unethical for someone to shoot a healthcare CEO who profits from the systemic murder of the sick. - Margaret Killjoy. “The Future is a Contested Space”
Semprún described his passage through the Communist movement in explicitly religious terms. His childhood was steeped in the traditions of Spanish Catholicism, and he writes that his “subsequent adhesion to Communism cannot be fully explained without taking into account the diffuse religiosity that played an intimate role in it.” The capital-P Party was the “eucharistic representative” of the working class, so expulsion from it was akin to excommunication—an experience he describes in his memoir as being cast “into the obscure oblivion of outer darkness.” PCE leaders in exile spoke to the Spanish workers not in their own language, but in the “singsong voice of the missi dominici of Moscow,” to whom they were so many pieces on a grand chessboard.
- The Living Fraternity of Militants. Dissent Magazine
Airpower was first discovered by colonial powers, who were delighted to find a terrorize their overseas subjects without any threat of retaliation. But they soon found themselves fighting an enemy who could retaliate: each other.
Cursed Cancellations, the greatest account on Instagram
Books
“I Heard Her Call My Name” by Lucy Sante
Lucy Sante is one of those writers who shaped me in ways too diffuse to list. When I was nineteen and breaking up with my high school boyfriend, I found a copy of her Low Life: The Lures and Snares of Old New York in Spoonbill Bookstore on the as-yet-unsterilized Bedford Avenue. It enchanted me. She taught me about the whores, bruisers, rat stompers, conmen, opium dens, bobbies and other unconscious echoes of the old, criminal city that existed even in the Giuliani present. As much as anything else, it inspired me to draw the gilded age tarts that defined my early work. Me and my best friend Leavitt did an illustrated zine about characters named after the streets of my new neighborhood - hookers, villains and anarchsits who swapped gender, race, origin stories, only to end up in Upper East Side mansions with new names. I don't think we ever printed it.
Lucy came out as Lucy in 2021, and this is her story. The lifetime of knowing she was a woman, denying and not thinking she deserved it, until after an encounter with a FaceApp that showed her as a girl throughout her life, her “egg cracked,” as she said. It is raw in a way that she never was with herself, in my memory of her work, and exquisite, and is a gift.
The Secret Life of Saeed: the Pessoptimist by Emile Habiby
Watch
Music
I hope to make a year end wrap up before the year wraps up, but if I don’t, all I can wish is champagne for your real friends, real pain for your sham friends, and a New Years Eve of such glitter and magic as could wake the dead.
What are your resolutions?
I did find the Henryk Ehrlich quote interesting. He and Jabotinsky seem to have agreed on the risks posed by the local Arab population but have taken opposing views of the best solution (for Jews). In a sense, both tested their views: Jabotinsky founding the Irgun in Israel, Ehrlich joining the Jewish Anti-Fascist Council in the Soviet Union. I would argue that, while the jury is still out on Jabotinsky being right (though October 7 makes it more likely he will be) events definitely proved Ehrlich was wrong. Israel has managed a flawed but prosperous democracy that provides us a place of refuge and is committed to Jewish welfare worldwide. All the JAFC were purged as Stalin feared their international connections (classic “Jews as cosmopolitans” anti-Semitism) while the Jews living in Russia’s JAO fled to Israel. I don't think the usual defence—that Stalin perverted Marxist-Leninism—was true. I don't know if you've heard Bertrand Russell describing his meeting with Lenin but the latter sounded very much like Stalin in his opportunism and inhumanity. https://youtu.be/6TK9c-caEcw?si=VZtIe7Uw7vj2m5kc