Hellmouth

  Thelonious Monk, Desiring-Machines, and Cultural Production “Alas, I am a mere textual-production machine.”--Quote attributed to Gilles Deleuze--apparently the last words he uttered before throwing his body (and, presumably, his body without organs) out of the window of his flat in Paris. Thelonious Monk has long been considered an enigma--an outsider in the history of modern jazz--to the point of his supposed mental illness being considered as an explanation for his unique musical style and vocabulary.  More attention has been paid to his eccentricities than to the logic and cohesion that pervades his composition and improvisation. If we use the theories of the French post-structuralist Gilles Deleuze and his colleague Felix Guattari, we have a lens through which to view Monk’s cultural production and its relation to “mental illness,” capitalist production, desire, and flows.  Thelonious Monk is a great disjunction or rupture in the flow of modern jazz and the “mainstr...

    Why We Should End the War on Fire This is a favorite pet issue for me, my primary political concerns are ecological, but as mike davis pointed out in [The Case for Letting  Malibu Burn]( https://longreads.com/2018/12/04/the-case-for-letting-malibu-burn/ ), the class aspects are not totally separable from the ecology.  I'm mostly not going to focus on the Mike Davis essay and the class analysis, bc trueanon already did that, and I think that some of the details about the science and wonk stuff from a different piece are worth shining a light on.  But mike Davis' essay is great for tracing some of the bizarre history, geography, and ecology of fire suppression.  It addresses how extremely wealthy homeowners in Malibu have basically gotten protected by the government and in some cases private fire fighting contractors.  the most bizarre part to me was how many homeowners in Malibu actually preemptively spray their shrubs with the commercially used fir...

Hellmouth This is a true story but it’s not a story.  It doesn’t have narrative form because to have narrative form there must be a beginning and an end--in other words there must be change.  And nothing ever changes here.  I am in hell.  I am in hell forever.  I am being tortured and I have no idea why.  If I had any idea why it wouldn’t be hell.  You see, people think of punishment as having reason:  “the punishment fits the crime” and so on… but in reality, punishment IS the reason.  And if I knew why I was being punished, there would be some consolation to it--consolation that is forbidden to me.  So I am punished, without reason.  The pain is the reason, and the denial of reason IS the punishment. I am here and my punishers are demons.  They are not red or horned, there are no flames.  This is more like a dimly lit warehouse, the demons grey-fleshed middle-managers with onyx eyes.  But since part of the punishmen...