(actually p^nk s has repeatedly asked me to do these and similar things of late but Canada rules my world in all horizons at the moment thus alas still the Annette Peacock bit would have been worth taping)

and his stockhausen essay is pretty good — much better than PhilModMus

we eventually had to move outside and sit on the pavement, which to a dying man was surely a mortification too far — esp.as it began raining and we had to move into the dickensian passage by the binbags

The Jerusalem Tavern: my judgement is that it could do with being a bit less impressed with itself, but it’s overall pretty good if you can get a table. If no table: discomfort and misery.

Also they could do with a session beer, because multiple boozes of their St Peter’s varieties = headache morning bindeath.

(Additionally: I would never choose to go there on a Friday night for reasons of packedness. The chatters’ choice in that neighbourhood on a Friday is The Sekforde Arms, just for future reference like.)

Also JT is a good pub, but this is largely for ale based reasons.

Also2 Mark, next we are in the pub, remind me to tell you about my theory that the Crazy Frog is the nu-godfather of minimal techno.

I open my mail. I find a letter from the International Socialist Organisation. It begins:

You don’t get far by making people feel bad. My father used to quote sadly the old Communis Party recruiter back in the 1930s: “Brothers and sisters, even as I speak our comrades in Latin America are writhing in the torturer’s thumbscrews, our comrades in India starving in the the stinking jails of British imperialism, our comrades in Africa groaning under the book of the oppressor. Brothers and sisters, join the Communist Party.

i think there is a remnant of baudrillardian totalist rhetoric in yr phrasemaking — that’s what i’m reacting to mainly (bcz he is a reactionary cynic, which you aren’t) (it’s HIS nothing-is-possible-anymore that i’ve grown to distrust and hate);

i’m sorry you had a bad night on fri and i’m sorry you were ill and feeling rubbish; nevertheless despite this, i enjoyed it and didn’t think “nothing happened” or that i turned into a vegetable — not least bcz of the random element of meeting that other matt, and being annoyed by him at first and then coming to hear his rhythm and picture… if we’d organised totally to avoid risk elements (haha = if woebot knew a better pub) then that wouldn’t have happened… and if you’d this is really horrible let’s go somewhere else, then we could have done that — that’s the tie-up i suppose, that yr “attack” doesn’t actually happen at the point where it’s needed for YOUR PSYCHIC HEALTH

(and of course part of the story here is that for YEARS i was very hostile to any kind of organised socialising — oh noes it was a TRAP! — and i made myself really really miserable and isolated; and discovering that actually i’m allowed to step out and choose my surroundings and companions to keep me energised and undepressive was a hughe change in my life)

(what i realised was that i was quite bad at setting up the parameters for the social adventure all by myself — i need to use something that already exists as a jumping-off-point, and i had taught myself to distrust all “things that already existed”: so i became a bit more tolerant of them, and frankly the boundaries i’d set MYSELF just seemed to epxlode outwards)

academia = well, you tend to justify pop-cult work by reaching out to theorists; work is good when it accords with zizek’s insights, or whatever (rather than when it clashes with them) — you’ve demonstrated previously that these theorists are “non-standard” as academics, and “outside the academy” and whatever, and that’s fair enough — but they are all WRITERS with a basis in PHILOSOPHY. “Academia” goes back to Socrates and his little drinking gang hanging around under the trees trying to explain the world in terms of first (metaphysical) principles.

their dismal PRODUCTS = you and me and simonR and marcello and… e.p.thompson and christopher hill and… i too always say “well, i’m not an academic”, but no one listens

why am i allergic to negation? well unlike the essay they round off the sentences i quoted aren’t “critical”, they’re just rhetorical — and it’s true that i favour materialist exploration of “how it works”, and what are the useful and the dark sides WITHIN any given institution, that’s just how my mind works, i get bored with discussions that respect the shape and name the world at large gives any phenomenon or institution

but on the other hand when i DO “attack” something — like you a bit here, or anyway this setnence, and the “dissensus hivemind” — or even persons which i am very reliably and openly hostile to (like terry eagleton or baudrillard or nick broomfield) — i can be VERY EASILY made to feel bad about it, as i am doing now here

i’m just not cut out to be an attack monkey, i think — i am generally unconvinced by attack-work (simon is at his worst in this mode; so is benW) — but of course that also means that if there’s something that niggles me abt someone’s work it builds and builds and then explodes in a form they don’t recognise — this happened with simon on FT a couple of years back (i mean, i was right abt what i said, but completely unnecssarily hostile); and now it’s kinda happened here a bit with you :(

Still, I suppose you need a straw man to make obligatory optimism seem that it’s something other than m/class complacency :-) …

And I do wonder who is projecting: this silly thing Kapital forever triumphant has nothing to do with anything I’ve ever said. I don’t think we’re doomed at all, but what WOULD ensure that we are forever doomed is never being allowed to be critical (why are you so scared of negation?) Simple dialectical move - things will remain bad while we think they are not bad.

I don’t want to produce despair, I want to ATTACK the university. (Remember when we were allowed to attack things? Coincided with the time that NME was good)

btw I don’t know in what sense I’m ‘part of academia’. Because I read books? I don’t hold a teaching position in a university. My whole approach is what universities - cooling and blocking systems - are set up to destroy. Compare them with art schools….

My position on universities is not based on my experience - all arguments from experience are bad and reactionary - but on their dismal PRODUCTS.

As for pubs, I think my loathing of them was more than justified by Friday. How much more pleasant would it have been if like we could have heard each other? Of course I’ve long since accepted that if you want to socialize with British people, you have to do it in pubs.

On this bizarrely fantasmatic Dissensus thing, three straightforward misconceptions here:
(1)that there is a Dissensus position
(2) that if there were any such a position wouldn’t be totally in line with pubbish commonsense and
(3)that Dissensus has got anything to do with me (I got hounded off that board months ago)….

of course it doesn’t help the clarity of either of our cases that i consider k-punk to be PART of academia, while he most strenuously does not