aragorn – Page 7 – Aragorn! blog

Never apologize

There will probably be a time in the future where apologizing makes sense again. Where you can honestly say you were sorry for some transgression or when one will be able to articulate an honest position that looks like an apology, but that is not today.

Today is the time of frowny clown emo bullshit that just covers lies, or hides the possibility of a lie in tears, or maudlin tales. Every apology is a weak kneed limp avoidance of the real. Of real consequences, real choices, and the very real possibility that forgiveness is worst that the status quo. Words cover the fact that the small parts of truth that are somewhere in there are corpses. Suffocated by what is actually the dominant form of expression… static.

From now on I will not apologize and that may make me an asshole but not someone who is trying to split the difference between mediocrity and deceit.

On the seventh day of anarchy…

The bulk of the socializing, selling, talking, and this-and-that is over. All that is left is a dinner and the last Anarchist Study Group. Before we finish up I’ll share with you some of my impressions of the past 7+ days and give some shout outs to people & projects I am happy about.

Obviously for me the two big projects for this week were the brand new issue of The Anvil (here is the editorial) and our brand new book Enemies of Society. We gave out over 500 copies of The Anvil over the course of Saturday alone (!!!) + sold enough copies of Enemies that I am not freaking out today. Whew…

Here are other notes from the 8 days of anarchy

Mental illness is serious business. We see shattered people all around us and I think it is evident that each and every one of them could be part of an amazing, vibrant, quilt-like world. Instead we live in a ticking terrifying landscape where we anticipate explosion and pain.
Attempting to have a conversation with 30+ people is ridiculous… and I love trying.
Bob is better when he drinks less
This movie wasn’t incredible but good for an introduction to the SI
This movie is now officially among my three most favorite SF movies ever (including Robocop and Starship Troopers)
Voyer didn’t stop writing… and his shit is very powerful
Techs deal with cognitive dissonance by filtering out any input they refuse to process
Station 40 is a monster
Logistics are a pain in the ass
Americans know how to shop
I really really really look forward to carrying manyCharles H Kerr and Black Swan
Occupied London are really nice and, while less showy than our other Greek friends, give good presentation
Drunk entitled POC’s are just about the worst people to have in a workshop
PNW participants in the anti-police activity are the best trolls EVAR!
My house is way to small for 50 plus people… which means there should have been 80!
Lorraine is a good one. Shocking but true!

If you live in the Southwest I will be near you soon.

Tucson AZ: April 14th & 15th
Phoenix AZ: April 16th – 18th
Austin TX: April 19th – 22nd
Houston TX: April 22nd – 24th
St Louis MO: April 25th – 26th
Milwaukee WI: April 27th

I hope to see you there!

Now that I’m gone here is where I am

I am typing this slowly. Perhaps that says most of what needs to be said. I am ok. My right hand is working but just takes a little more attention. A little more time. My head is clear and hesitant.

This week I suffered my second cerebral aneurysm. It happened while I was sleeping (I think) just like the first time. The main symptoms include a very weak right hand with a significant loss in motor function and a slurring of speech. Both are hard to live with but the terror is surprisingly under control. The first time was horror. The idea of a loss of everything I am, of the ways I am in the world, was too much to bear.

But if I have learned anything in this life it is that I will bear.

Free(r)

Ending are anti-climactic. You know that, I do too. After working for three years in the cubes I am now free and barely know what to do with myself. I feel like someone recovering from Stockholm Syndrome.

I have at least 12 months to do… something else. I have a fairly good idea about what those things are going to be of course. After a couple week break I am hitting the road… Scratch that. Little Black Cart is hitting the road and I am its chaperone. If you are going to nearby these locations/dates please stop by and say hello!

Tucson AZ – April 15th
Phoenix AZ – April 17th
Austin TX – April 19thish
Houston TX – April 23rd, 24th
St. Louis – 25th, 26th
Milwaukee WI – April 27th

After that I’ll be back in the Bay for some yet-to-be-announced events and then in NYC for some more. Finally I’m headed to Europe for three months of travel. If all goes well I will come back and have my head totally cleared of the spooks of cloud computing and career drama. I will remember what exactly it is that is motivating me…

Oh wait, that isn’t really my problem at all. I know exactly why I continue to plod forward… stubbornness. And now I am free(r) to be stubborn on my own terms.

Yay me!

We have a possibility that makes us freer than the gods: we can quit. This is an idea to be savoured to the end. Nothing and no one is obliging us to live. Not even death. For that reason our life is a tabula rasa, a slate on which nothing has been written, so contains all the words possible. With such freedom, we cannot live as slaves. Slavery is for those who are condemned to live, those constrained to eternity, not for us.

-At Daggers Drawn

The fog may lift

I am looking forward to Spring. Many projects are coming to fruition and I am finally reclaiming some of my time. My burnout is officially over and what cured it was the humans.

Here is what is coming up

We are finally working on a new book “Enemies of Society” and the second edition of “Till the Clocks Stop”. Little Black Cart is taking a couple week tour through the southwest in late April. We will go through Phoenix, Austin, Houston, St. Louis, and Milwaukee for sure. If you would like LBC to stop in your town (on the way from one of these towns to another) drop us a line. I will be spending the next three months in Europe. If you have any contacts there that you think I should meet… please let me know.

Also by April we should have another issue of The Anvil out. Issue #2 will include an insert of some of the material from the Insurgent Summer reading group. Hopefully this will engage more readers in one of my favorite books, Letters of Insurgents. Allegedly we will also have a series of new pamphlets that attempt a new approach to “introductions to” anarchism. Not sure that is going to happen though.

Oh! and starting this month some friends of mine from the Anarchist Study Group are starting a monthly audio event. You can find more information about it at TCN Radio (as soon as we finish it).

Burnout

The truth is that I am still not working effectively. This albatross around my neck is filling my head with static and heat. Everyday I stumble around, through the mediocrity of the grind, and if I’m lucky, if nothing particularly stressful comes up, I get an hour or two of good project time at night. At least I’m getting that much and for that I thank the holiday season.

Tons of people came around, we talked about things I like to talk about, we laughed about things I like to laugh about and for a little while I felt normal. I was excited about writing and thinking and what I am doing with my time. Working through burnout by the social.

Writing

In addition to a review I am working on of “Sarah Palin’s Alaska” I am working on an article on hosting software on corporate servers, the 101 series, and I updated The Anarchist Library with some of my older reviews and editorials from AJODA. I look foward to writing longer stuff later in the year but feel fairly good about what happened last year. I’ll probably put up a draft of the SAAS article here in the next week or so.

Do what you will

I wish I had something more inspiring to say than I did 6 weeks ago. I don’t. I am still burned out. I have succeeded at a couple small projects but they were maintenance (upgraded an out of data Drupal to Drupal 6) and not on the big list of major things that Need To Be Done ™.

It is alarming the extent to which I am motivated by crisis and change. There was a recent bit of drama that could have inspired some (more) public name calling and conflict but I just don’t think dealing with these situations in that way is the best strategy (for a non left position)… Because there are two things going on, one is exceedingly boring and irrelevant (a conflict between small-to-medium sized businesses) the other is deeply fascinating to me and worth talking about outside of the pinprick of this particular indignity.

Since the publication of SALA (Social Anarchism vs. Lifestyle Anarchism) there has been a tension (although one of several) in North American Anarchism. What is interesting about this tension is that the one side (the accused) have spent (hundreds of) thousands of words grappling with the implications, motivations, and philosophy of this book. Those who align themselves with its intent never defend it (per se) but instead evoke it like a glowing sword. Like a pistol at a fist fight. Believing that the mere utterance of the word “lifestylist” is enough to start, resolve and end any argument. North American’s are already impoverished: by an education woefully lacking in history or geographical context, by a near cellular level of acceptance of exchange relationships, and by our own geographical contradictions (being in a country that is comprised of at least 3 different cultural bodies).

I mention SALA not because I believe the text to be particularly important but the fact that there is a real conflict between those who share a lot of the same terminology in describing our desired world can’t be understated. For some this conflict boils down to serious disagreements about the strategy we should undertake, for others it is about a (set of) moral compulsion(s), and others about what form anarchist practice should take today. I take a softer (and harder) position. I care less about the particular articulation one chooses to make around their practice, desire, or strategy but much more about the religiousity (or ideological) one has around their choices. Consider this a bookmark to a larger discussion about this topic and enjoy this song (related).

Say what you must, do all you can,
Break all the fucking rules and
Go to Hell with Superman and
Die like a champion, yeah hey!

Life while burned out

I still have 1000 ideas running through my mind but absolutely no energy to act on any of them. I have enough energy to exercise, get through my work day… and that’s about it. I am burned out. I am sick of this routine but have still not completed my tasks (even though they are arbitrary) here. Life while burned out, dancing in the husk of potential, the bitter liquid that kickstarts another day and the set of problems I have to attend to…

But I am still on the data flow. Here are a couple nice snapshots from today alone.

Taste is not stable and peaceful, but a means of strategy and competition. Those superior in wealth use it to pretend they are superior in spirit. Groups closer in social class who yet draw their status from different sources use taste and its attainments to disdain one another and get a leg up. These conflicts for social dominance through culture are exactly what drive the dynamics within communities whose members are regarded as hipsters.

From NY Times: Sociology of a hipster

I’m not setting myself above the fray. I’m right here in the middle, reading comments as if listening in on a national party line (I experience a slight dislocation when I realize how few of you have ever listened in on a party line, or even know what one is). There are comments here are on all sorts of things: Politics, literature, movies, art, health, God, the universe.

From Roger Ebert’s Journal

I am also starting to think more seriously about a request that was made by a friend about an essay I should write. The topic is the decision making model used for LBC but more generally is the unanswered question about what are the different models that anarchist have at their disposal for decision making. I have direct experience with several of the models but want to sketch out the positions fairly and not just through the lens of my disillusionment. This will include consensus, spokes council, union of egos, charisma driven, etc…

This is all I have for now.

Anvil + foot == Ouch!

I haven’t updated in a while as I’ve been busy being unmotivated… and getting out the first issue of The Anvil! This link get’s you a free (but for the postage) copy of the paper. This link is to the editorial of the first issue. Here is a quote from the editorial that I’d like to expand on.

In our unreal world, it is hard not to be overwhelmed by the invisible things that are easily confused with reality: fake controversies, confused priorities, hyperbolic rhetoric about inconsequential things. We become disengaged with the torrents that pass us by. Paper slows us down enough to engage in the ideas that we are talking about.

Many readers are likely to know that as much as I valorize print, in my daily life I also spend 12+ hours a day in front of a screen. My criticisms of the Internet generation are criticisms that I know all too well. They are criticisms of me and the person that I have become since I started spending all of my time in front of a screen. I spend my waking hours switching from fake controversy to stupid priorities pausing long enough to dissect something useful, if possible, out of the rhetoric on the screen.

I don’t sit in the sun for hours. I rarely spend more than 15 minutes a day reading a book that I can touch with my hands. I recently bought a kindle and am rereading old, readily available SF on it. I am a brain in a bottle, stacked in a row. Can you tell I’ve been working in the cubicle farm for too long?

Outside of the torrent of screen life is the pace of publishing. I love it. We tend to line our titles up for a once a year (hopefully twice next year) launch around the San Francisco Anarchist Book Fair in March. This means that we are discussing manuscripts with authors now to finish in the next two months, to finalize in December, layout in January, and print in February to have on hand in March. Compared to blog-o-reality where the couple dozen people who check this regularly get a chunk of my thoughts a couple of hours after I start to have this this cycle is excruciatingly slow. Many of the people in my daily data flow sincerely believe that this aspect of life (print) is worthless. They extract no value out of the slow moving, muddy stream. They live in the rush (and the push and the land that we stand on is ours), the data rush, the drama rush, and the rush of the gaze.

I’ll wrap up my thinking about The Anvil other than to ask interested writers of review essays to get in touch with us. We would like to publish you. Interested readers we would like you to consider subscribing to the paper. If you do you will be helping support the project and make it easier to go to print more often.

I have been experimenting a bit with barefoot walking (with minimalist shoes). While I can’t imagine walking around the city in them, when I am at home, or hiking I am entirely in love with them. I think that the arguments about shoes being casts for our feet and weakening/atrophying our foot and lower leg muscles is entirely on point.

I started dialing into this because I tore some ligament in my knee (probably the ACL) a couple of years ago and haven’t been able to run with traditional running shoes ever since. I can still do cardio in the gym (which is basically an exercise cast for your whole body), I can still do everyday activities (including walking) but as soon as I add the extra motion of running in a couple blocks I am done.

Running as been the one kind of exercising that I have ever loved and I mean love L-U-V. As a teenager I was part of the cross country team and got into the whole package. Long runs, country runs, the competition, the solitude, endorphins, the whole package appealed to me. That was 25 years ago. Now I sit in front of a screen, motionless but for my fingers. I debate whether to watch one more hour of a program rather than be in my body. I need to run.

For a couple weeks I tried to run barefoot. It was fucking fantastic. For a couple of the runs I was reminded of the endorphin rush I used to get back in the day. I was reminded that I actually have more going on that just being a brain-in-a-bottle… so of course I injured myself. It has been two weeks since then waiting for my foot to heal (no break, just something that feels like a bruise). I realize that my hope to jump up to 10 miles a week isn’t going to happen quickly. I am fragile and fat. This thing that I know is going to nourish me in exactly the way that I want to be nourished right now is just out of reach.

Couple that with the misery of a routine I am tired of and I am not in a great place right now. I am just watching the days go by… waiting.

Pieces of a Roast – Part III

Finally a third one from a friend in OR

ARAGORN! – Avatar of Clarity

As the crisis of industrial civilization intensifies and the Biosphere becomes ever more fragmented, it’s clearer and clearer that those resisting the death march of Empire could use some truly radical analysis. Personally, we feel the world could use more explicitly anarchist analysis of our collective plight, strategic anarchist analysis that seeks the broadest and deepest change possible, involving the largest numbers of individuals possible. Yet most contemporary anarchist “theorists” insist on being endlessly discursive, absurdly prolix, in love with tiddling academic ornamentation for the sake of it, arcane on the surface but mundane on the inside, and above all hyper-dull. One is often left with a strong puzzlement over who and what this smug literary tiddling is actually meant for!

Intellectuals have (or ought to have) an obligation to communicate clearly, or else they automatically become a closed system, creating ideas solelyfor each other; the sheer complexity of their thought results in deeply unattractive formulations of byzantine dimensions that resist simplification. Without “simplification” (an admittedly lazy word choice) anarchist and other subversive memes are only ever carried by a high-brow cultural elite. This is a matter of comprehensibility, and our use of the word “simplification” refers to a process more akin to distillation: for ideas to spread they must be framed in an accessible fashion!

If we’re dealing with empowerment, then ideas need to be stated clearly. It’s authoritarian at the very least to expect everybody who encounters anarchist propaganda to do their own self-financed course in obfuscatory French philosophers before being admitted to the fold. To remove subversive ideas from the control of the intelligentsia they must be made more comprehensible to a wider range of people, especially overworked wage-slaves who may well not be interested in grinding their way through sadistically dull, neurotically overwrought post-modern windbaggery. A great many contemporary anarchist writers actually disempower their readers due to the sheer obscurity of their thought!

Fortunately for us, this is where Aragorn! steps in. Waging a one-man war on vagueness and ambiguity, Aragorn! recognizes that whatever language constructs are most efficient at getting themselves copied will also be the most effective replicators of the anarchist meme. To this end, Aragorn! smites down the shadowy phantoms of ineffectual intellectual dialectical detritus with his fiery sword of clarity: employing a dazzling, but down-to-earth, writing style and a straightforward precision not seen in anarchist thought since Louis Ling, Aragorn! uses the visceral power of everyday speech to bypass the analytical defenses of the overeducated mind and send atavistic emotions surging through his readers.

In a stunningly illuminating prose that is neither circuitous nor self-indulgent-a prose that can best be described as elemental– Aragorn! reveals himself to be a sworn enemy of obfuscation and tedious, doctrinaire talk, unleashing word-combinations that strike not at the conceptual excesses of the post-modern intellect but at the very core of the human soul! This is not to say that Aragorn! attempts to speak in a “pseudo-populist” vocabulary or tones down the subtlety of his ideas for mass-market consumption, it’s just that he never leaves any room for misinterpretation and die-hard fans and casual readers alike always know exactly where he stands!

Well Aragorn!, by now , after the battering you’ve received this evening, I’m sure you could use a supportive, healing hug from someone. But unfortunately for you, Sunfrog doesn’t seem to be in attendance!

pieces of a roast – Part II

Here is a second roast contributed by John Zerzan from Eugene Oregon

Aragorn! Subversive Trickster or Postmodern Confusionist?

Who is this larger (much larger) than life figure? How should we appreciate and applaud his bizarre term of confounding us? He who laughs at such pedestrian notions as commonly accepted definitions, historical fact, and consistent vision––what manner of beast is this?

Did he receive his wound to the chest from actual skinheads in Sacramento—or was this a decentered bit of text about a virtual “Sacramento?” His manifest energy—perhaps the output of theory graduate students in league with his merry deconstruction of reality?

And what manner of man, after all, is he who attracts two women who together, arrange his birthday roast?

His nihilism may be elusive, if not elliptical, but AK Press, NEFAC, and other assorted lefty losers are paying the price.

All hail to our smiling conundrum, and welcome all interpreters, floating signifiers, and guides to the perplexed!