Notebook of Influences

Some Art and Writing I Loved While in Misery Island

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I stopped by London for a few days to see friends and draw the massive Edward Said tribute that that my friends at Palfest threw at Southbank (thousands showed up, in quite the display of cultural power). The weather was beastly, of course. The sort of bone-trembling cold that gets into your organs, making your throat scratch and your bronchial filaments clog with phlegm. No wonder these jokers colonized the world, my friend told me. They just wanted to get off misery island.

Every day, I took the tube from Anna’s place in South Woodford. It slid cleanly, silently, like I imagine electric pulses might slide through the inside of an iPhone, and the glass gates opened at the exact moment the train pulled up, so no one could jump on the tracks. Everything about the London tube underscored the dysfunction of my New York City subway. Where were the pools of viscous liquid? Where was the furious man punching the air around him and screaming about lizards? Where were the energetic leaks and the peeling tiles? Where was the shit? The many varieties of shit? Yet even as I noted these differences, I couldn’t help but feel a nostalgia for my fucked-up home. The Ecuadorian lady selling churros with a baby strapped to her back, her angel-eyed five-year-old reading a book at her feet, or the rasta guy who lit up torches of incense on the long underground passage between the 6th avenue L stop and the 14th Street 2/3. You might die on the subway, but the tube had no serendipity. It doesn’t even run all night.

Here are some books, articles, songs and podcasts I loved last week, especially during my trip to Merry Old England. They’re not all new, because fuck the endless push towards newness. They are however, all good.

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WATCH:

READ:

At the recommendation of Sarah Jaffe, I subscribed to The Financial Times. Her argument is that FT is no bullshit, since our overlords need the straight dope about how shit is going down in order to properly allocate their investments. She’s right.

Pankaj Mishra’s Run and Hide. Mishra’s fiction has all the hilarious meanness that he never lets himself deploy in his big theoretical works, and I was dying I loved this novel so much. Also listen to his lecture “Shoah after Gaza” down below.

The main feature tying together the shows that young right-leaning men watch and listen to now is curiosity: They include discussions and debates; their hosts might not be particularly knowledgeable and they are open about it, so they ask what might seem like dumb questions without shame. Even when the discussion veers into pure propaganda, it comes wrapped in the appearance of open inquiry. If liberals want more organic intellectuals like the GOP seems to have, they need to be willing to be more organic—to actually hang and talk, not just hector from above

- John Ganz. “Party Under Country - Dissecting the Democratic Malaise”

(As many people have noted, the left does not need to make a Joe Rogan. It had a Joe Rogan, who endorsed Bernie in 2020, only to have a ton of liberals and leftists go insane over it. Idiocy. I’ve been on Joe’s show twice, and loved being on it)

The living and the dead call to each other across a ghost world where nothing can be relied on to stand firm, not even words. “In the house, the house is missing.” “What are you thinking? / What thinking? / What you?” As I type out that quote, jagged blue waves appear under the last two lines, demanding I flesh them out into complete sentences. Syntax is warped and wrecked by the pace of destruction.

Yasmine Seale reviews Mosab Abu Toha

LISTEN:

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• The Fire These Times #172: The Holocaust, the Nakba and Restorative Memory with Elia Ayoub and Voskoboynik

• Popular Front: BONUS 165: Media Lies of the Maccabi "Pogrom" (you need to subscribe to Jake’s Patreon to listen, but you should subscribe anyway because Jake is a legend).