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Geographer at Allegheny College | Neo-Classical Luddite For the ruthless criticism of all that exists. The South got something to say. colemanallums.net

Teaching in the Age of Artifice All the banks I love are fog and all the work worth doing doesn't pay. I'm here another year. But now the creature in the corner of the classroom—not feathered, not soul-perched-begs me show it to these young ones, let its shining body blind them, its claws mangle and rend, quick before it rusts away (surely it must). I call out for the otherwise. Give me mist to hide us all from the seeking cyc of enterprise. The here and now need not be only hell. -COLEMAN ALLUMS
Photo of a book titled “A Conversation with Luis Barragán”
Excerpt from Marcuse’s “The Struggle Against Liberalism in the Totalitarian View of the State”
Screenshot of headline from CNBC: “Fannie Mae accepts first crypto-backed mortgage product”
Let the Poets Govern By Camonghne Felix
Concluding note This question—how to make great again that which never was?—has haunted me as I finalize my work revising this paper. In recent weeks, two non-violent observers were murdered by the US Department of Homeland Security in Minneapolis as they attempted to provide witness and aid to their community amidst a now weeks-long campaign of state-sponsored white supremacist terror. In many ways, I think, we can read the entirety of the second Trump term to date as precisely the sort of possessive, authoritarian exercise that I have just spent the preceding pages working through. The white supremacist version of the United States put forward by Project 2025 and operationalized by Stephen Miller and other reactionaries in the administration is precisely an image “in which there is no longer anything that is supposed to remind us how it came into being” (Benjamin, 2002: 669). Perhaps no better illustration can be desired than the removal this month from George Washington’s historic home all public acknowledgements of his well-documented slaveholding. What Buckhead City and all other white authoritarian projects desire is no less than the accumulated totality of the ill-gotten wealth and privileges of the white possessive project and the abject subjection of the rest of us to their violent excesses. To make great again is only ever to make and remake, in every desperate moment, the image that simultaneously represses and exalts in such power, else Benjamin’s utopian promise—the vital activity of care and emancipation and redemption embodied by Renee Good and Alex Pretti and Martin Luther King, Jr. and John Brown and so many others across this vast wreckage of history—might just begin, again, to leak out.
Twin Cities My blood is kerosene alight, incandescent eyes like razor blades. Tonight, our soul slouches Bedlam way, crawling over shattered bodies through snow, lies, lies, lies. Surely some revelation is at hand. Surely some revelation is at hand.
Hope without optimism by Eagleton
Struggle A gainst Liberalism in Totalitarianism The turn from the liberalist to the total-authoritarian state occurs within the framework of a single social order. With regard to the unity of this economic base, we can say it is liberalism that 'produces' the total-authoritarian state out of itself, as its own consummation at a more advanced stage of development. The total-authoritarian state brings with it the organization and theory of society that correspond to the monopolistic stage of capitalism.
Remember, these are the years... Remember, these are the years In which it is not a matter of winning victories but Of winning the defeats Who lives in order to be victorious Is ignorant of victory Swimming from the sinking ship You don't seek the best island but The nearest. Changing the world Does not mean: winning victories. Do not go forth To change the world, and Be victorious in your own town which Remains unchanged.
W.E.B. DU BOIS AND THE CRITIQUE OF THE COMPETITIVE SOCIETY ANDREW J. DOUGLAS
The cover of J. Camatte’s _The Wandering of Humanity_
Bee balm
FIRE ALARM by Michael Löwy
NEGATIONS by Herbert Marcuse
FIRE ALARM by Michael Löwy
NEGATIONS by Herbert Marcuse
MACDUFF Stands Scotland where it did? ROSS Alas, poor country! Almost afraid to know itself. It cannot Be call'd our mother, but our grave; where nothing, But who knows nothing, is once seen to smile; Where sighs and groans and shrieks that rend the air Are made, not mark'd; where violent sorrow seems A modern ecstasy; the dead man's knell Is there scarce ask'd for who; and good men's lives Expire before the flowers in their caps, Dying or ere they sicken.
Thesis VI, Walter Benjamin: “To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’ (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger. The danger affects both the content of the tradition and its receivers. The same threat hangs over both: that of becoming a tool of the ruling classes. In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it. The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist. Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.”
Carl Sandburg’s poem “Name us a King”: Name us a king who shall live forever-- a peanut king, a potato king, a gasket king, a brass-tack king, a wall-paper king with a wall-paper crown and a wall-paper queen with wall-paper jewels. Name us a king, so keen, so fast, so hard, he shall last forever-- and all the yes-men square shooters telling the king, "Okay Boss, you shall last forever! and then some!" telling it to an onion king, a pecan king, a zipper king or a chewing gum king, any consolidated amalgamated syndicate king-- listening to the yes-men telling him he shall live forever, he is so keen, so fast, so hard, an okay Boss who shall never bite the dust, never go down and be a sandwich for the worms like us--the customers, like us--the customers.
Selection from linked text: “capitalism has turned us into selfish, contradictory beings. why do we see the internet grouse at fiction readers, pointing to self-help books by men in grey business suits as the only reading that ‘counts’? this war being waged has specific victims in mind. “
Photo of the cover of Bianca Stone’s book of poetry, titled “What is Otherwise Infinite.”