Articles / Book reports

Robinson Crusoe Instructs and Civilizes His Man Friday and Endeavors to Give Him an Idea of Christianity

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The title of this article is almost verbatim the title of chapter 23 of Robinson Crusoe. No doubt untold numbers of scholars and writers have detailed the racism in this classic novel; have explained Crusoe’s white-European understanding of his “servant” Friday as “the noble savage” who accepts European culture without […]

American History / Articles / Election 2024 / Prison

The damage is immeasurable: election saboteur has ass handed to them by Judge

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This judge’s sentencing of election-denier election-saboteur Tina Peters is brilliant and shockingly humane – the way he compares this privileged defendant to the usual people who sit in the defendant’s chair – that the judge sees that there’s a difference – feels tremendously empowering and sadly surprising. If you know […]

Articles / Movies / Zines

Riot Girls: Itty Bitty Titty Comittee

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Released in 2007, Jaime Babbitt’s Itty Bitty Titty Committee is a riot-grrl movie that represents the hopeful feminist causes of the 1990s keeping the flame alive in the era of George Bush’s 2nd term full of torture and terror and war and resistance. In the 1990s, our culture’s hatred of […]

Uncategorized

Ulysses cut-up

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Across the world for a motion and her presence: the Admiring step backward a sinkapace on footpaths. Runs, she runs to wife. admonition of her craters, the solemn floor. If others have their will She laughed on the wind. Blind friendship, woman, the void of incertitude, familiar to him. They […]

American History / Exploding Brooklyn

Barren Island, New York City

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In 1691, Governor Ingoldesby’s “Humble Address” to the King described New York as “situate upon a barren island.” And that, “The middle of the Island [is] altogether barren… All the rest of the Province, West Chester, Staten Island and Martin’s Vineyard excepted, consist of barren mountain hills not improveable by […]

Articles / Movies

The Drag and The Padlock: Queer Representation and Fascist Repression in 1927

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1927 was a banner year for queer representation in cinema and theater – and also the year that the progressive momentum was met with increased institutional repression, arguably commensurate with the success of LGBTQ+ rights in the era. In particular, 1927 saw the production and theatrical debut – and repression – of a play called The Drag, written by playwright and film star Mae West, a proponent of gay rights and women’s liberation.

sports

The Detroit Lions, the beginning of the NFL, American Fascists, and the New York Public Library

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Recently, at the New York Public Library, looking for obscure literary needles in huge periodical haystacks – their immense Crowell-Collier collection, innumerable boxes stacked with rejection letters and internal reference docs and cc’s – I came across this 1934 letter from Lions Vice-President and General-Manager Cy Huston, to writer Kyle Crichton, featuring the brilliant early Lions logo.

Movies

1900

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1900
about the rise and fall
of Fascism in Italy –
the opportunistic bullies –
the women and children abused –
everyone on the bottom rung
but collaborators.

Cut Ups / Fiction

100 Years of Ulysses

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Blind friendship, woman, the void of incertitude, familiar to him. They talked seriously of invading. corporation emergency production of semen by extinction of that beam of I you he they. pouring gushes. Flood, gush, touch you dead. dustbuckets, Roman distillation: the futility of heaven. ecclesiastical triumph or protest or Language […]