Category: alt-publishing

Sumanta Banerjee

Seagull Books congratulates Sumanta Banerjee on being honoured with the Pandit Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar Gold Plaque by the Asiatic Society. A distinguished cultural historian and journalist, Sumanta Banerjee’s research on popular culture, particularly of the colonial period, has been highly influential in contemporary scholarship.  Seagull is proud to have published three of his seminal works:

The Parlour and the Streets analyses the development of the various forms of folk culture of the the urban poor in the new metropolis of nineteenth-century Calcutta.­

Dangerous Outcast traces how, from the peripheries of precolonial Bengali rural society, prostitutes came to dominate the centrestage in Calcutta, the capital of British India.­

Taking its title from Karl Marx’s description of religion, Logic in a Popular Form explores the hidden logic behind popular religions in nineteenth-century Bengal.­­ https://www.seagullbooks.org/logic-in-a-popular-form/
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Book Burning

Are we living in the greatest ever era of incineration?

Add your favourite book burning quotes here. Bradbury’s F◦451, Maugham’s Razors Edge, Umberto Eco’s name of the Rose, here and here and here…

But mainly I am keen to find stats on how many books are burnt after non-delivery by providers like amazon etc.

The history of book burning is inflammatory of course. Still surprises me when I ask who has burned a book (and how each page seems to be read as the book is consumed). The controversial historical memory of celebrity book burnings is storied enough – Libraries, Spanish Inquisition, Opernplatz, Bibles, The Koran, Rushdie, etc – But today, seems to me more books than ever are put to the torch. An anecdote from John J about living in the building where Progress Press had its offices back in the winter of 1990: in a fuel shortage, the building heating was stoked by feeding the Collected Works of V.I.Lenin into the furnace (sacrilege). Yet, this is minor compared to what I suspect is going on today with the flame put to the written word by the brutality of delivery services and their doublespeak – “energy recovery” (see article excerpt below).

This from a Katie Tarasov @KATIETARASOV article in January this year from the pretty mainstream source that is CNBC:

“Amazon told CNBC, “No items are sent to landfill. We are working towards a goal of zero product disposal and our priority is to resell, donate to charitable organizations or recycle any unsold products. As a last resort, we will send items to energy recovery, but we’re working hard to drive the number of times this happens down to zero.””

““Energy recovery” often means it’s burned. In the words of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, it’s “the conversion of nonrecyclable waste materials into usable heat, electricity, or fuel through a variety of processes, including combustion, gasification, pyrolization, anaerobic digestion and landfill gas recovery.””

““The thing that really shocked me honestly, was the items that the computer system tells you to destroy,” said Shay Machen, a seasonal worker at an Amazon returns center in Mississippi. “I had a book come back, it was a children’s book, and the customer said that it was smashed upon arrival and bent, and it was not. And no matter what I put into the system, it said destroy the item. And that was kind of heart wrenching.””

“Disposal of returns is a widespread practice in e-commerce. Luxury retail brands like Burberry have been criticized in the past for burning millions in unsold merchandise to protect their brands, a practice Burberry told CNBC it stopped in 2018. A Danish TV station reported H&M burned 60 tons of new and unsold clothes since 2013, a claim that H&M told CNBC was a misunderstanding. An H&M spokesperson said, “The products media referred to had been affected by mold or did not comply with our chemical restrictions.” Similar claims have hit Coach, Urban Outfitters, Michael Kors, Victoria’s Secret, and J.C. Penney.”

““It’s the easiest thing to do and sometimes certain brands do it because, you know, they want to protect their brand and they don’t want lesser valued items out there on the market,” Moore said.””

CLIMATE

What really happens to Amazon returns

PUBLISHED FRI, JAN 28 20228:00 AM EST

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Katie Tarasov@KATIETARASOV

Footnote

‘The bookbinding trade in the city of London employs very many young girls from 14 to 15 years old, and that under indentures which prescribe certain definite hours of labour. Nevertheless, they work in the last week of each month until 10,11,12, or 1 o’clock at night, along with the older labourers, in a very mixed company. “The masters tempt then by extra pay and supper,” which they eat in neighbouring public houses. The great debauchery thus produced among these ‘young immortals’ (“Children’s Employment Comm. V.Rept P.44. n.191) is compensated by the fact that among the rest many Bibles and religious books are bound by them’ (Marx 1867/1890/1990: 477n)

Black Swan

“Willem de Vlamingh was sent in 1696 to search for two VOC ships, Ridderschap van Holland (Knighthood of Holland), which had gone missing on its way to Batavia in 1694, and Vergulde Draeck (Gilt Dragon), lost in 1656. He was also instructed to chart parts of the western coast of New Holland not previously mapped by the Dutch. Although no trace of the VOC ships was found, de Vlamingh and his crew mapped 1,500 kilometres (932 mi) of coastline, landed on Rottnest Island, and ventured up the Swan River, becoming the first Europeans to sight the Western Australian black swan.”

Kim Martins 2023 – https://www.worldhistory.org/Dutch_East_India_Company/

The black swan has its own mythology – in honour of Humphrey McQueen’s book The Black Swan of Trespass – worth checking out- and below there are more than enough snippets to follow up to gather the story:

For example (rather than the Nolan ‘portrait’) here is Ern Malley pictured in a tribute by Garry Shead (The Apotheosis of Ern Malley, Greenaway Art Gallery, Adelaide, 26 November – 20 December 2003).

From the Adelaide catalogue via the fakers own journal Quadrant: discussion of how ideas were buried in a frisson of controversy – “the idea that a creative person in this material world is almost inevitably a sacrifice” (Sasha Grishin cited in McDonald, J., ‘The Eternal Ern’, Quadrant Magazine, issue six, 2009

The Black Swan of Trespass “scandal” is worth your time – see here for another version of the hoax. I am more interested that the title of one of the notebooks that contained the so-called fakes is Durer: Innsbruck, 1495. The first poem in the Ern Malley sequence is ‘from’ there:

    I had read in books that art is not easy
    But no one warned that the mind repeats
    In its ignorance the vision of others. I am still
    The black swan of trespass on alien waters.

The last four lines of the short poem (you can hear it read, with care, here):

The Hoax was a conservative piece of mischief that got more traction than might have been expected (media sensation, obscenity trial, collapse of the Angry Penguins publishing venture) but the Hoaxers went on to found the despicable aforementioned “Quadrant” magazine, putting the lie to the idea that we now live in an era of false news – it was ever thus.

It is not that surprising to be taken by obscure details and I am still somewhat curious at the motivations as to why “Malley” would name his notebook after Albrecht Durer, maker of images of that rhino in 1515, also not seen in person.

What?? Defend Toko Buku Rakyat bookstore.

Image: Officers from the Malaysian Ministry of Home Affairs raiding Toko Buku Rakyat in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. (Peoples Dispatch)

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VIA Leftword: https://mayday.leftword.com/blog/post/books-are-not-a-crime-solidarity-with-toko-buku-rakyat-in-malaysia:

“The International Union of Left Publishers expresses solidarity with the Toko Buku Rakyat bookstore that suffered a raid by officers looking for The Communist Manifesto.

The International Union of Left Publishers issued a statement of condemnation after a left book store in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia was raided by the Malaysian Ministry of Home Affairs who seized several books related to Marxism, and one written by the owner of the establishment. The International Union of Left Publishers is a network of 40 publishing houses from Indonesia to Chile.

On Friday, August 18th, 2023, a raid happened at Toko Buku Rakyat (People Bookstore) in Wisma Central, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Four enforcement officers from Malaysian Ministry of Home Affairs wearing vests stating “Penguatkuasa KDN”, came unannounced to look for the book “The Communist Manifesto” and then seized a book about Marx and education, and also a book of poetry written by Benz Ali, owner of the bookstore.

The International Union of Left Publishers condemns this raid as authoritarian and anti-democratic, not only because it perpetuates a long-standing campaign against any Marxist discourse/thinking, but also because it violates the basic right of Malaysian people to read and speak freely.

This act betrays the hope of Malaysian people that the new government under Anwar Ibrahim will be more democratic, fair, intellectually and culturally open than all the previous eras. How can a public intellectual like Ibrahim—who is known to like to quote Shakespeare, Raniri, and other names—let a seizure of books happen under his reign?

We demand that the Malaysian government guarantee the basic right of Malaysian people to read freely, and the safety of booksellers and publishers across Malaysia.”

Privatisation of academia…

On the issues of weaponising research, this might be a minor quibble, but its part of the great restriction…

Of course I like what academia-edu can do for finding research papers I want, of course I hate that it seems more concerned with monetisation rather than research or politics. And the algorithm conspires to limit what it does not like – a big fat wet phooey to those who think the web is a way to publish anything by anyone, of course its not. This post, for example, compared to others that get seen, has been low on the roster, which comes as no surprise.

https://www.academia.edu/community/EV0j4l

Hi – where can I find the transparency page that shows the salaries and stock holdings of the board of A-edu? Some transparency on this would go a long way to, well, start the discussion of the commercialisation of journals and privatisation university research that is a huge issue that needs urgent refocus of attention. Not that I think Universities are innocent in this themselves, and the very need for a-edu is facilitated by their websites having been reformatted for pecuniary gain (showing off the facilities in a recruitment drive, hiding, it seems to me, the identities of the staff that teach – especially where that effects recruitment, ie, brand name profs whose teaching is done by underpaid adjuncts). So, start here – what is the make up of the board and what are their benefits from all this effort to commodify research paid for by and large by taxpayers and students?

Edit: resources and more here: https://coastsofbohemia.com/2018/04/04/the-rae-and-ref-resources-and-critiques/

Predator journals target ISSH2021 – be warned.

So, a process warning to those not used to getting chatty friendly emails from parasite journals that will charge you to publish. The ISSH2021 conference gets hit by these predators. Promising to publish, but they won’t peer review or copy edit, are not rated in Scopus or ISI clarivate and will charge you up to US$6000 at the end for being tempted.Someone needs to extend Marx’s discussion of piece rates and expose these 7figure ‘earning’ corporate cowboys preying on adjuncts and new researchers. Even as some profs are starting to be a bit more alert to their predicament, such as Harry Cleaver below:

‘Another white-collar job, which is structured by the dynamics of piecework, is that of university professors. While most formally receive pay in the form of a salary, in truth the size of that salary is largely determined by piecework. Although universities pretend to value the importance of teaching, large research universities–that dominate higher education and set the standards by which other universities are ingly base professors’ pay not on teaching but on research and publishing…. Professors are supposed to understand their fields well enough to choose appropriate projects and skilled enough to craft both research and articles reporting on that research without direct supervision. The more articles reporting on that research without direct supervision. The more articles they publish, the more likely their known as “merit” pay increases. They are, in short, paid according to the number of “pieces” they produce. Moreover, like other pieceworkers they are not entirely on their own. They too are subject to quality control when they submit grant proposals or articles to journals. Quality control takes the form of “peer review,” wherein other professors evaluate their proposals or articles and decide whether they should receive grants in the one case or publication in the other. This situation, again like other piecework situations, is highly conducive to intense competition. With research funds and space in prestigious journals limited, professors compete for both—as well, of course, for tenure and promotion. For almost four decades the last 20 years of the twentieth century and the first 18 of the twenty-first-conservative politicians have used tax reductions on the rich to produce rising by cutting social programs but also on higher education, including reduced funding for research, which intensifies competition and makes universities funding for research, which intensines competition.’ (Cleaver 2019: 383-4)

some of the ISSH2021 recordings wll be coming soon…

Zines

From the very first Tecoma Youth CYSS(tem) one to a few neat things already linked here – The Paper, Invisible Finger – I’ve always enjoyed the Zine scene (not too seriously): Monoscop has a pretty handy, somewhat US-ocentric, list of links:

https://monoskop.org/Zine_culture

Contents

Events

Collections, Resources

Anthologies

  • Chip Rowe (ed.), The Book of Zines: Readings From the Fringe!, 1997. Anthology of pop culture writings from about 80 zines.
  • R. Seth Friedman, The Factsheet Five Zine Reader: The Best Writing from the Underground World of Zines, New York: Three Rivers Press, 1997, 192 pp.
  • Tristan Taormino, Karen Green (eds.), The Girl’s Guide to Taking Over the World: Writings from the Girl Zine Revolution, New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1997. An anthology from zines created by women.
  • Jen Angel (ed.), Zine Yearbook, since 1997. Annual anthology of zine writing.
  • Ethan Clark (ed.), Stories Care Forgot: An Anthology of New Orleans Zines, Last Gasp of San Francisco, 2006, 149 pp. Reproductions of a dozen punk zines. Also includes author memoirs of their experiences during and after Hurricane Katrina.

Documentary films

  • Fanzini Sa, dir. Siniša Dugonjić, 2011, 41 min. A documentary on the underground and DIY fanzine culture in Serbia during the 1980s and 1990s. EN subs.

Literature

  • Nigel Fountin, Underground: The London Alternative Press 1966-74, New York: Routledge/Chapman & Hall, 1988. History of the underground press in the UK.
  • Mike Gunderloy, How to Publish a Fanzine, Port Townsend, WA: Loompanics, 1988, 91 pp.
  • Mike Gunderloy (ed.), Why Publish?, intro. Jacob Rabinowitz, Pretzel Press, 1989, 54 pp.
  • Mike Gunderloy, Cari Goldberg Janice, The World of Zines: A Guide to the Independent Magazine Revolution, Penguin, 1992, 224 pp.
  • Bob Black, Beneath the Underground, Portland, OR: Feral House, 1994, x+190 pp, IA.
  • Counter Intelligence: Zines, Comics, Pamphlets, Flyers: Catalogue of Self-Published and Autonomous Print-Creations: Articles! Reviews! Contacts!, eds. Jason Skeet and Mark Pawson, London: 121 Centre, 1995, 24 pp. Catalogue of an exhibition held throughout Oct 1994 at 121 Centre, Brixton, South London.
  • Pagan Kennedy, Zine: How I Spent Six Years of My Life in the Underground and Finally Found Myself–I Think, New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1995, 184 pp. Review: PW.
  • V. Vale (ed.), Zines! Vol.1, San Francisco: RE/Search Publications, 1996, 169 pp. [2] [3]
  • V. Vale (ed.), Zines! Vol.2, San Francisco: RE/Search Publications, 1997, 137 pp. [4]
  • Francesca Lia Block, Hillary Carlip, Zine Scene: The Do It Yourself Guide to Zines, Los Angeles: Girl Press, 1998.
  • Alex Wrekk, Stolen Sharpie Revolution: a DIY Resource For Zines and Zine Culture, 2002, 96 pp; 2nd ed., 2003; 3rd ed., 2005. [5]
  • Elke Zobl, “Persephone is Pissed!: Grrl Zine Reading, Making and Distributing Across the Globe”, Hecate 30:2, 2004, pp 156-175. [6]
  • Stephen Duncombe, Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture, London: Verso, 1997; repr., Bloomington, IN: Microcosm Publishing, 2008, 256 pp.
  • Elke Zobl, Do-It-Yourself. Feministische künstlerische Praxis am Beispiel von Zines und Magazinen, Vienna: Akademie der Bildenden Künste, 1999, 126 pp. [7] (German)
  • Liz Farrelly, Zines, London: Booth-Clibborn, 2001.
  • Chris Atton, Alternative Media, London: Sage, 2002, 172 pp.
  • Elke Zobl, The Global Grrrl Zine Network: A DIY Feminist Revolution for Social Change, Vienna: Akademie der Bildenden Künste, 2004. PhD dissertation.
  • Julie Bartel, From A to Zine: Building a Winning Zine Collection in Your Library, Chicago: American Library Association, 2004.
  • Alison Piepmeier, Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism, forew. Andi Zeisler, NYU Press, 2009, 264 pp. [8]
  • Janice Radway, “Zines Then and Now: What Are They? What Do You Do with Them? How Do They Work?”, 2009.
  • Signs 35(1): “Comparative Perspectives Symposium: Feminist Zines”, ed. Agatha Beins, Autumn 2009. Texts by Elke Zobl, Feminist MAF(I)A, Val Rauzier, Red Chidgey, Noya Kohavi, Jenna Freedman, Claire Villacorta, and lolagouine (aka Riot Coco). [9]
  • Teal Triggs, Fanzines: The DIY Revolution, Chronicle Books, 2010, 256 pp. Features hundreds of reproductions of zine covers plus a history of fanzines and examination of various genres.
  • Janice Radway, “Zines, Half-Lives, and Afterlives: On the Temporalities of Social and Political Change”, PMLA 126:1, Jan 2011, pp 140-150.
  • Elke Zobl, Ricarda Drüeke (eds.), Feminist Media: Participatory Spaces, Networks and Cultural Citizenship, Bielefeld: transcript, 2012, 292 pp. [10]
  • Kate Eichhorn, The Archival Turn in Feminism: Outrage in Order, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013, xii+188 pp.
  • Kate Eichhorn, Adjusted Margin: Xerography, Art, and Activism in the Late Twentieth Century, MIT Press, 2016, 216 pp. [11]. Reviews: Mosher (Leonardo), Horne (Radical Phil).
  • “Zinedepo Manifesto of Radical Zineculture”, Arnhem, n.d.
  • Jan-Frederik Bandel, Annette Gilbert, Tania Prill (eds.), Under the Radar: Underground Zines and Self-Publications, 1965-1975, Spector Books, 2017, 368 pp. [12]
  • Miloš Hroch (ed.), Křičím: „To jsem já.“, Prague: PageFive, 2017. On Czech fanzines from the 1980s until today. English extract. [13] (Czech)/(English)
  • Momo Nonaka (野中 モモ), Barubora (ばるぼら), 日本のZINEについて知ってることすべて　同人誌、ミニコミ、リトルプレス―自主制作出版史1960～2010年代, Tokyo: Seibundo Shinkosha, 2017, 319 pp. (Japanese)
  • Art Libraries Journal 43(2): “Zines and Libraries in the UK”, ed. Gustavo Grandal Montero, Apr 2018, pp 71-112. [14]
  • Florian Cramer, “#Synchronicityofparasites @Zinedepo/Motel Spatie, 17-5-2019”, Making Public blog, Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 7 Jun 2019.
  • Paula Guerra, Pedro Quintela (eds.), Punk, Fanzines and DIY Cultures in a Global World: Fast, Furious and Xerox, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.
  • more

Links

All great things – check out the original post for more: https://monoskop.org/Zine_culture

Hybridity in music – for Cello.

This was a surprise, at the least:

Solo Cello String Ensemble (4-4-4-3-2) c. 25 minutes

https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5c04v6g3

 

Screen Shot 2020-06-21 at 13.02.08

 

“Clifford uses the word to describe ‘a discourse that is travelling or hybridising in new global conditions’ and he stresses ‘travel trajectories’ and ‘flow’ (Clifford 1994, pp. 304 /6). Worrying that assertions of identity and difference are celebrated too quickly as resistance, in either the nostalgic form of ‘traditional survivals’ or mixed in a ‘new world of hybrid forms’ (Clifford 2000, p. 103), he sets up an opposition (tradition/hybrid) that will become central to our critique of the terms” (Hutnyk, 2005: 80).

 

Tradition – Hybrid – Survival is a work for solo cello and string ensemble. The requirements for the ensemble are 4-4-4-3-2 divided into the following groups:

Local: 1st Vln I 2nd Vln I 1st Vln II 2nd Vln II 1st Vla 2nd Vla Vc DB Diaspora: Vln I Vln II Vla Vc DB

Outsider: Vln I Vln II Vc

See fig.1 for a representation of how the groups should be arranged on stage.

Note that there should be a physical gap between the local and diaspora groups, and diaspora players should be either seated on a raised platform or standing. Outsider players should be offstage and unseen by the audience and musicians. The solo cello is intentionally partially concealed by the conductor. Groups and Their Meanings Each of the groups represents a certain kind of identity group and therefore uses musical material in a particular way. The local group represents identities that share a locality: persons of shared cultural heritage who are co-present, and whose actions are directed into greater alignment through the sharing of laws, practices, codes and customs. The diaspora group represents people of shared cultural heritage who are separated in space and time. They exchange material both amongst themselves and with the local group, but are variously distanced from these interactions, leading to a sense of fracturing and alienation.

The diaspora and local groups relate to each other in important ways. At many points during the piece (for e.g. letters R, S, V, W & Y) the local and diaspora groups play a similar or identical boxed phrase with distinct starting points. That is, all members choose their own tempo but the local group begin together at the conductor’s downbeat while the diaspora group start the phrase when they choose. This results in a blurred aural landscape in which all members explore the same basic idea but with some members more united in this process than others. Moreover, at other moments such as letter T, both groups come together and play in a united, frantic manner.

The outsider group stands apart from both the local and diaspora, and operates completely independently. They are unseen, unconducted and virtually unknown to the wider group since they do not join the ensemble prior to the final rehearsal. This is so that the music played by the outsider group comes as a surprise to the rest of the ensemble, who should not otherwise be informed of the nature of what this group will play. The outsider group represent vague and distant ‘others’; individuals who drop in from nowhere and then disappear again just as quickly. They do not interact with the complexities of diaspora/local relations since their music never relates to anyone else. Moreover, the outsider group parts are partially redacted so that they receive only a small amount of information on the activities of other members of the ensemble.

From AA, the outsider group begin playing a repeated figure at their own slow tempo. Their material is relatively simple – cycling through a series of chords – but since the rhythmic content is uneven and the tempo unknown, it should be practically difficult for the local and diaspora groups to work out when each chord will change. This is intentional and important, since at letter FF the local and diaspora groups are charged with attempting to align their material with these chords. This should be a difficult process that forces the ensemble to listen carefully to this group, momentarily providing the outsider group with the entire focus of the ensemble and a great deal of power as result. For these reasons, it is imperative that the local and diaspora groups do not see the notated outsider parts at any point. Due to the complexity of achieving such an alignment, it is recommended that the only rehearsal at which the outsider group are present should be focused on this section of the piece.

The solo cello charts a course between these three ensemble groups, weaving in and out of the different material they present; subverting, challenging, echoing or extending it. The solo cello remains most distinct from the outsider material, which they do not draw on explicitly until the final bars of the piece. At letter II the soloist detunes their C string to a B while playing, aligning with the tonal centre of the outsider group’s material and thus forming a sense of communion with this group for the first time. The solo cello therefore represents an individual who charts a course between each of these identities, never remaining entirely fixed in any grouping and with the ability to draw on each of these forms of being at particular moments.

For the rest of this confection see: https://escholarship.org/content/qt5c04v6g3/qt5c04v6g3.pdf

Centrifugal Citation Conformity Machine

I was recently in an information briefing (which was very useful) about Web of Science and citations/searches. Here are some thoughts on how the system at present breeds conformity. Or at least, this is what I said, pretty much. very slightly odified to remove some names:

On Metrics as Tools

My concern – something I have discussed with a few others – is how there are some serious gaps in the Web of Science coverage for some areas of the social sciences and humanities.  I wonder if you are interested in this discussion as well. I think there are a few important things to consider, or if they have been considered, make the thinking clear as to how they have been handled.

I work (and think) in a variety of different ways that sometimes seem to me to be specifically designed to fall between the cracks of the indexes. This started with noting that the journals I really admire, were not making it from ESCI to SSCI, or rather, some were even choosing not to. I don’t think I should say which ones, but a few I have had some reviewing or editorial exchange with have said they are pulling out of the indexing ‘game’ as metrics was both too blunt and too normative. There are also a few things, discussed especially, that were not being indexed. Smaller magazines for example, museum catalogues and artist books, visual research (I had taught ethnographic film for many years) and political pamphlets are falling by the way in the face of a normative centrifugal force.

The blunt version of the argument here is that the new Incites tools do not ‘incite’ enough – but rather encourage heading in the same direction that everyone else is heading in – collaborate with those who are most likely to collaborate with you, cite those who cite you, read those who read you etc. Sure, that perhaps has its merits in terms of group cohesion, but academic work should surely be, at one level at least, not about that at all. It is disagreement and difference we should seek, not everyone heading towards the same spiral of universal chanting “ISI ISI” as if a group of characters from a Thomas Pynchon novel had spring off the page in full riot gear. Doesn’t the tendency to seek out the most popular make it harder for new and novel ideas to get a hearing? At what point do the top citations, top metrics, top index procedures need to be disrupted by ideas might not even be recognised by ‘metrics’? Ideas that disrupt the play of uniformity, conformity, safety and repetition? Obviously, I am setting this out starkly to make the point clear, but I think there is a fundamental problem when we have 50 million papers that are there because, as you said, ‘we want to make the world a better place’ but some could argue that the world is demonstrably becoming less better, or at least a significant set of indicators would suggest that. maybe the 50 million need to not refer more and more to the centre, but seek more and more the alternative, angular, oblique and even opposite/oppositional ideas. Ahh, we are communist after all (though in communism there is also a tendency to centralisation, of course – as I said, overstating to make the point).

What mechanisms can be demonstrated within your presentation, or within the tools, that cater for the need to engage in a ‘ruthless criticism of everything’ as old beardo would have us do. The old man with a beard also saw himself as on the road to science, but that it was no easy path, there was work to be done. What could be entered into the search algorithms to ensure the critiques of normative and even hegemonic ideas in each area are challenged? What mechanisms in the search can be dysfunctional for the ongoing business model that is, frankly, no longer really fit for purpose in a degraded and entropic world…

I would love (ironic and hysterical laughter – cackle cackle hee hee hee) to see some explicit attention to how critical disruptive thinking could be built in as potions for the indexing process. I know indexing cannot be neutral, but can the biases run the other way sometimes? can you say how these questions might be addressed? And what great possibilities would be there if 100 flowers contended with 100 schools of thought in bloom…

cheers

Just to confirm that referentiality takes all kinds, my most often cited ISI works (ISI articles cited by ISI journals) show interesting trends. (All available on the download texts link in the sidebar).

Hybridity

Authors:  John Hutnyk 

Published:Jan 2005 in ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES DOI: 10.1080/0141987042000280021

Music & Politics

Authors:  John Hutnyk; Sanjay Sharma Published:Jun 2016 in THEORY, CULTURE AND SOCIETY DOI: 10.1177/02632760022051211

Culture

Authors:  John Hutnyk  Published:Jun 2016 in THEORY, CULTURE AND SOCIETY DOI: 10.1177/0263276406062700

Clifford’s Ethnographica

Authors:  John Hutnyk  Published:Jul 2016 in CRITIQUE OF ANTHROPOLOGY DOI: 10.1177/0308275X9801800401

Jungle studies: the state of anthropology

Authors:  John Hutnyk Published:Feb 2002 in FUTURES DOI: 10.1016/S0016-3287(01)00032-5

downloads

WordPress started counting text downloads of articles in July this year. Interesting stat.

So the books get quite a few

56 for Rumour of Calcutta 1996  (buy here)

26 for Pantomime Terror 2014

But just the occasional hit for individual papers  like:

10 for British Asian Communism (2005)

6 for Semi-Feudal Cyber Colonalism (on the multimedia super corridor 1999)

and just the 1 for poor old The Authority of Style (first serious essay published 1987)

Unfortunately, Icannot easily cut and paste all the totals, but some are in the hundreds (thanks) and most of the papers are here.

Reblogged: useful list of Left History stuff

This is from Hatful of History. There was a time when links to these sorts of sites etc were a common thing on blogs, but even the ones I did, which were much more Asia focussed, have fallen into disuse (I will seek out the link [see the bottom left hand column here, many no longer live]). nevertheless, its really good to see Tandana on this list, and indeed I’ve been in a few of the other groups, given it is a bit Australia and UK focussed, but yeah, more of this sort of thing, as they say:

Radical history online – a list of collections

by hatfulofhistory

I am very interested in the growing amount of radical literature from around the world that is being scanned and digitised. As there are so many and from many different places, I thought it would be useful to make a list. All of those that are included are free to access (there are others that require some form of subscription). If there are any that I have missed, do let me know, either by commenting below or sending me an email.

African Communist

Amiel and Melburn Trust Internet Archive

Anglo-Soviet Journal

Anti-Apartheid Movement

Anti-Fascist Action

Assorted Soviet stuff

Assorted communist stuff (via Socialist Truth – Cyprus)

Australian Left Review

Australian Marxist Review

Banned Thought (collection of global Maoist literature)

Big Flame

Comintern Online Archive

Communist Review (Australia)

Communist Party of Australia pamphlets (from State Library of Victoria)

Daily Worker (USA)

De Waarheid (paper of the Dutch Communist Party)

Die Rote Fahne (paper of the German Communist Party)

Digital Innovation South Africa (including Communist Party and ANC material)

Direct Action (IWW Australia)

Documents in Revolutionary Socialism in Canada

Entdinglichung (German left history)

Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism!

Freedom archive (US and international material from 1960s-80s)

Freedom newspaper (London)

Gay Left

High Times (Australia)

Independent Voices (US Alternative Press archive)

International Labour and Radical History Pamphlet Collection (Canada focused)

International Times

Irish Democrat

Irish Left Archive

Koori History

La Bataille Socialiste (French)

Labour Monthly

Labor Star (British Columbia)

Libcom

Living Marxism (RCP)

Mao Projekt (German far left)

Marxism Today

Marxists InternetArchive

Oz (Sydney)

Oz (London)

Political and Rights Issues and Social Movements collection

Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine historical documents

Reason in Revolt

Red Action

Red Army Faction

Red Mole Rising

Revolution (Australia)

Revolutionary Communist Group publications

RudéPrávo (paper of the Czech Communist Party)

Socialisme ou Barbarie

Solidarity! Revolutionary Center and Radical Library (US)

Splits and Fusions (British Trotskyist history)

Tandana (Asian Youth Movement)

The Communist (Australia)

The Communist (USA)

The Digger (Australia)

The Leninist

The Living Daylights (Australia)

Wits Historical Papers (includes material on Communist Party of South Africa and ANC)

Workers’ Star (Communist Party of Australia – Perth newspaper)

Workers’ Weekly (Australia)

Articles to download

Screen Violence and Partition

Inter Asia Cultural Studies

Screen Shot 2019-09-24 at 09.58.40ScreenviolenceandpartitionIACS2018

 

Other downloads:

(Not sure if you need to make an account to get these, but it works for me):

Contexts for Distraction

Henri, Tom, Hutnyk, John

144 KB

Clifford’s Ethnographica

Hutnyk, J.

2.71 MB

Pantomime Terror: Diasporic Music in a Time of War

Hutnyk, J.

142 KB

Music for Euro-Maoists: On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among Pop Stars

Hutnyk, J.

2.69 MB

CLIFFORD GEERTZ AS A CULTURAL SYSTEM: A Review Article

John Hutnyk

2.27 MB

THE AUTHORITY OF STYLE

John Hutnyk

2.23 MB
931 KB

Critique of Exotica: Music, Politics and the Culture Industryby J. Hutnyk

Review by: E. Dominique Midolo

299 KB

Jungle studies: the state of anthropology

John Hutnyk

91 KB

Comparative Anthropology and Evans-Pritchard’s Nuer Photograph y

Hutnyk, J.

3.67 MB

CALCUTTA CIPHER: Travellers and the City

John Hutnyk

1.12 MB

Introduction

Kalra, Virinder, Hutnyk, John

79 KB

Culture

Hutnyk, J.

100 KB

Poetry after Guantanamo: M.I.A.

Hutnyk, John

175 KB

The Dialectic of Here and There: Anthropology ‘at Home’ and British Asian Communism1

Hutnyk, John

150 KB

Sexy Sammy and Red Rosie? From Burning Books to the War on Terror

Hutnyk, J.

278 KB

Bataille’s Wars: Surrealism, Marxism, Fascism

Hutnyk, John

99 KB

Music & Politics: An Introduction

Hutnyk, J., Sharma, S.

1.07 MB

Tales from the Raj

Hutnyk, John

183 KB

The Rumour of Calcutta: Tourism, Charity, and the Poverty of Representationby John Hutnyk

Review by: Bodhisattva Kar

291 KB

Hybridity

Hutnyk, John

186 KB

Adorno at Womad: South Asian crossovers and the limits of hybridity-talk

Hutnyk, John

656 KB

The chapatti story: how hybridity as theory displaced Maoism as politics in Subaltern Studies

Hutnyk, John

116 KB

THE DIALECTICS OF EUROPEAN HIP‐HOP

Hutnyk, John

194 KB

Brimful of agitation, authenticity and appropriation: Madonna’s ‘Asian Kool’

Kalra, Virinder, Hutnyk, John

249 KB

Book reviews : The Cambridge Survey of World Migration Edited by ROBIN COHEN (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995) 570pp.  75.00

Hutnyk, J.

495 KB

Photogenic Poverty: Souvenirs and Infantilism

Hutnyk, John

1.84 MB

Proletarianisation

Hutnyk, John

101 KB

Media, Research, Politics, Culture: Review article

Hutnyk, J.

737 KB

Indexing

The requirement imposed upon untenured ‘early career’ scholars to target only alleged “quality” publications is academic narrowcasting. Zines fall between the cracks of experiment and necessity. Over time necessity produces conformity. A conformity encouraged by pressures of dubious provenance, a consequence of the new privatisation championed by parasite aggregator companies like Elsevier, academia.edu and Taylor and Francis that prefer not to employ many people (as is the way of platform capitalism) and so engineer elite sector data compliance through simplification and regularity of product – electronic proletarianisation, insofar as this enables algorithmic automation (full luxury uniformity, replicant writing and dalek alliegences)….

scamming journalographica (trinketization at large)

Was helping a colleague find a place for a journal article. I thought a one day turnaround was rapid – its unlikely the article was read, only the abstract (and even then misapprehended). What seems to be going on is a funnelling system designed to entrap younger researchers into open access pay to publish (even after not being paid to write):

For future reference (the tricks and traps in publishing a getting more and more dubious).

Article is sent to journal. A day later the article is praised by the editor but regrettably not suitable for the journal, but perhaps could be placed in x series. Two days later, a personal message from some assistant editor of an previously unheard of series:

Dear L xxxx, I think your paper could be of particular relevance to Cogent Social Sciences (indexed in Web of Science Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI), Scopus, International Bibliography of the Social Sciences (IBSS), Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), amongst others), and I would be very pleased should you decide to take us up on this offer. Please email transfer@cogentoa.com with your existing manuscript ID number (this can be found in the subject line of this email) to automatically transfer your manuscript, or if you have any further queries. Please also let us know which Cogent journal you would like to transfer to in this email. I look forward to hearing from you.

The message is signed, the links check out, Taylor and Francis are not exactly pretending to be completely altruistic – but I find it very dubious that younger researchers are offered this. I’ve never had such a letter, and frankly, if I’d got one I would kick off much more than you can see in this little squib about my colleague (who rightly already had questioned this ‘model’.

A few seconds’ search about Cogenta yields some other squibs, well expressed:

But in looking at the original journal, I noticed this crazy business model they have. The journal, Cogent Social Sciences, is an open-access outlet published by Cogent OA. It charges $1350 to publish an article, unless you don’t have $1350, in which case they’ll take some unspecified minimum.
Okay, so far it sounds like every other scammy “peer-reviewed” open access journal. But wait. Cogent OA, it turns out, is owned by Taylor & Francis, one of the largest academic publishers. Taylor & Francis owns Routledge, for instance, and publishes Economy and Society, Environmental Sociology, and Justice Quarterly, to pick a few I’ve heard of.
Cogent OA has a FAQ that conveniently asks, “What is the relationship between Cogent OA and Taylor & Francis?” Here’s the answer (bold is mine):
Cogent OA is part of the Taylor & Francis Group, benefitting from the resources and experiences of a major publisher, but operates independently from the Taylor & Francis and Routledge imprints.
Taylor & Francis and Routledge publish a number of fully open access journals, under the Taylor & Francis Open and Routledge Open imprints. Cogent OA publishes the Cogent Series of multidisciplinary, digital open access journals.
Together, we also provide authors with the option of transferring any sound manuscript to a journal in the Cogent Series if it is unsuitable for the original Taylor & Francis/Routledge journals, providing benefits to authors, reviewers, editors and readers.
So get this: If your article gets rejected from one of our regular journals, we’ll automatically forward it to one of our crappy interdisciplinary pay-to-play journals, where we’ll gladly take your (or your funder’s or institution’s) money to publish it after a cursory “peer review”. That is a new one to me.
https://orgtheory.wordpress.com/2017/05/20/that-gender-studies-hoax-is-dumb-but-look-at-this-business-model/

 

Keep in mind this happens just a month after Sweden made the impressive move to cancel contracts with Elsevier (not renew them, not quite the same) and that follows France, and indeed various controversial aspects of so-called open access (as opposed to property ownership v squatting or v access to all by all for all etc). See The Scientist here and THE here (the latter is paywalled – the original article from THE, how apposite).

Open access or not – both are now worse.

sweden cancells Elsevier

(screen grab from Por la ilusión de un Ministerio de Ciencia)

PS. Contrary to some views I’ve heard out and about, Sci-hub is still operating. Search around and you can find a live link/proxy – though this is never an official recommendation. Pay the labourer.

img_2546

PPS. in the interests of Fairness (!) here is the Cogenta position on payments. Of course no self-respecting institution is going to fork out a subsidy for you. Discounts for world bank designated low-income apply – but since when did designation mean extorted? – ahh, oops, there goes the rhetoric of fairness. Ah well, I suppose the rhetoric of freedom had been bashed enough in the following:

Freedom Article Publishing Charges
Freedom Article Publishing Charges, pioneered by Cogent OA, allow authors to choose how much to contribute towards the publication of their research in an open access journal.

Authors with funding, institutional support, or from commercial organizations should select the recommended Article Publishing Charge (APC) of $1350.

Authors without direct funding/support should talk to their librarian and faculty about options that may be available:

Your institution may be part of the Taylor & Francis pre-payment membership scheme, which also covers Cogent OA publications. So, your APC may already be covered.
Alternatively, most funding bodies will allow authors to use part of their research grant to cover the cost of article publishing charges.
Cogent OA operates a Freedom APC model; whereby, if you don’t have funds available to you, you can choose to pay what you can. In order to support sustainable open access publishing, a minimum APC applies to ensure we cover the costs of the peer-review process, copyediting, typesetting, publication on our website, marketing, and indexing in major databases. To ensure the integrity of peer review, our team of editors and reviewers receive no information about payments at any stage.

Notebooks (Artaud’s for example)

Screen Shot 2017-05-24 at 22.09.17Rereading Jay Murphy’s book Artaud’s Metamorphosis and thinking about the 30,000 pages of notes Marx is said to have written in the last ten years of his life – and which are only slowly being released through the MEGA. Then find Jay has the following on page 207:

Artaud’s last works are above all, an action, a setting of forces into motion. In examining how he accomplishes this, largely from the springboard of the copious 406 lined school notebooks of which there are some more than 30,000 pages, at times there is the temptation to mimic his method by fracturing the field, separating out the elements that come into conflict, such as sound image text, or even their constituent bodily sources, and it is by such recourse that I isolate the treatment of the face and the voice at the end of this chapter; to see better how they interact, meld, hover, disintegrate or invade other elements…

I won’t reproduce his analysis because the whole book needs to be bought, and the notes still need to be written, but along with Walter Benjamin’s obsession with certain notebooks, whatever was in that case, add also anthropology’s note-writing fix exemplified in Mick Taussig’s drawings for I swear I saw This, and the entire complex of more or less uncanny parallels that revolve around the lined page, schoolbook or not, I’m hankering to generate some sort of method for handling the detritus of the (allegedly) declining years. Plus starting a new journal for my eldest now.

Artaud’s Metamorphosis is available in Berlin at Buchhafen. Or by post from Pavement.

 

Semifeudal Cybercolonialism: Technocratic Dreamtime in Malaysia

Thanks Kaloy Cunanan for recovering this from ascii-land.

An article on the multi-function polis in Malaysia, from 1999

Hutnyk 1999 Semifeudal Cybercolonialism Technocratic Dreamtime in Malaysia

appeared in Bosma, Josephine et al (eds) 1999 Readme! ASCII Culture And The Revenge Of Knowledge, New York: Autonomedia.

A longer unpublished version is Semi-Feudal Cyber-Colonial.

 

News sites at first blush

Listing is not necessarily endorsement. Please add to this. 

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http://www.wsws.org/

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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_Standard

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http://llco.org/study/

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http://strangetimes.lastsuperpower.net/

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http://sonsofmalcolm.blogspot.co.uk/?m=1

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https://www.thecommunists.net/

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RCP USA http://www.revcom.us/

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http://m.fightbacknews.org/

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CPGB http://weeklyworker.co.uk/

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http://democracyandclasstruggle.blogspot.com/

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Liberationnews.org

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http://www.workers.org/

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Philippines CP  https://www.cpp.ph/

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http://www.rcpbml.org.uk/

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http://ruralpeople.atspace.org/

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http://www.revolutionarycommunist.org/

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http://www.workerspower.co.uk/

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www.blackagendareport.com

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http://www.communistvoice.org/.
EPW http://www.epw.in/

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Rally http://rallycomrades.lrna.org/
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Viewpoint Mag https://viewpointmag.com/

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Online Uni of the left http://ouleft.org/

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Others Democracy Now, Dissent, Jacobin, and so on are easy enough to find, but please add urls. This is barely a start…

New Book by Jay Murphy on Antonin Artaud

artaudThis is it – Jay Murphy’s book is out.

Use the pavement site because postage is included…

Artaud’s Metamorphosis: From Hieroglyphs to Bodies without Organs
by Jay Murphy

The first book on the transformation from Artaud’s ‘early’ to ‘late’ work, showing how the ‘final’ Artaud leads straight into our digital present.
£18.99 (inc. free postage)

Lockjaw from Telephone Publishing. Book launch.

image

National Gallery of Victoria

Book Launch: Lockjaw
Surpllus/Telephone Publishing co-production
Sat 30 Apr, 1.30pm
NGV International
Part of Melbourne Art Book Fair 2016
Free entry

Zerox Dreamflesh (1979–1984) worked in the underground and around the edges – but mostly against the grain of – Sydney’s early-1980s postmodern philosophy and art scenes.

Dreamflesh was a loose group of writers, graphic artists and musicians who would have rejected the term “collective” in favour of something more like, say, “gang”. They produced a series of ’zine-ish print objects, music cassettes, colour Xerox postcards and a Super 8 film (The Black Cat, a riff on an Edgar Allen Poe story), working loosely – sometimes all together, sometimes not.

Their work was oppositional, not very accessible (though when you got it, you really got it), and always inspired and inspiring. Lockjaw (1983) – their fourth print object – was probably the most fully realised Dreamflesh project: A5, perfect-bound, part book, part magazine, part cultural terror manual.

Lockjaw was produced in a small run of a few hundred copies using a mix of two-colour xerography, offset and screen printing, and was collated and bound by hand. It was sold in independent bookshops, galleries, music stores and through the mail-art network.

Lockjaw is a multi-layered mix of photocopy, cut-and-paste graphics and text – a mashup of the intellectual and cultural world of 1982. The dense layering of words and images reflects an equally dense intellectual and emotional layering. It’s difficult to read, but rewarding, the writing a mix of metafiction, reflection, edgy philosophy, cultural journalism and existential comedy splashed across the page.

Dreamflesh’s work was produced in the spirit of Situationism and punk rock – it was ephemeral, not meant to last. Their physical traces today are scant: leftover copies of Lockjaw and their other publications (Zerox #1, Zerox #2, La La Sequence Bruit and Cargo, some colour Xerox postcards, and several music cassettes, including Wampum, a companion to Cargo) stashed on bookshelves and in boxes under people’s beds.

This reissue of Lockjaw is a co-publication of Telephone Publishing and Surpllus. The book has been scanned from an original copy and been reproduced by risograph – a 21st century analog to early-1980s photocopy art.

This new edition includes a separate section with essays by George Alexander and Professor Ross Gibson, an introduction by Sonya Jeffery, and a reflection on Lockjaw’s impact on one reader by Matt Holden.

Special events NGV International
Add to calendar
  
1.30–2pm
National Gallery of Victoria.
Melbourne.
International

Booking is not required.

La ligne d’écume: Encountering the French beach

new book from pavement with chapters by Ffrench, Collier, Launchbury, Gledhill, Fuggle etc.,…

Laligne\

Edited by Sophie Fuggle and Nicholas Gledhill

As a trope, theme, myth and very real space, what is at stake in the frequent artistic, cultural and philosophical articulations of the beach in French thought? Adopting a variety of approaches, this is the question that the essays in this collection seek to address. The beach in twentieth and twenty-first century French philosophy, literature and visual culture represents both limit and liminal space. It is a site of multiple encounters with both the other and the self, of arrivals and departures, of both hedonistic freedom and colonial subordination. At the same time, it is the no-man’s land where, as Michel Foucault suggests at the end of The Order of Things, man’s image is literally washed away.

The essays compiled in this collection, explore the French and Francophone beach via the various encounters this complex and multiple space engenders alongside the role it has come to play in both a French and global cultural imaginary. Bringing together a range of critical perspectives from scholars working in fields such as literature, film, philosophy, gender and cultural studies, the collection analyses the violent erasures and appropriations associated with the French beach whilst also calling for a reimagining of the beach as creative, ethical space.

Strands book series

ISBN: 978-0-9571470-7-2

£18.99 (inc. postage)

Table of Contents

Introduction
SOPHIE FUGGLE & NICHOLAS GLEDHILL

I. Beach Archaeologies

Beneath the Cobblestones, the Beach: An Idea in Everyone’s Mind?
CHRISTOPHER COLLIER

Devant la mer: Thresholds of Fiction and Theory
PATRICK FFRENCH

Death on the Sand: From Tragic Humanism to Depressive Realism
NICHOLAS GLEDHILL

II. Framing the Beach

Proust and the Beach as Écran
ÁINE LARKIN

Vacance: Vacancy and Vacation in the Films of Jacques Rozier
GILLES CHAMEROIS

III. War Zones

Bodies on the Sand: Corporeality and the Beach in the Films of Catherine Breillat and François Ozon
FIONA HANDYSIDE

Colonies de Vacances
SOPHIE FUGGLE

‘Elle ne sera bientôt qu’une épave soudée à ses rochers’: Women Writing the Wreck of Beirut
CLAIRE LAUNCHBURY

IV. Eroded Identities

Between Real and Ideal Space: Embodiment and the Beach in Michel Houellebecq
ZOË ROTH

The Beach as Liminal Site in Abderrahmane Sissako’s Heremakono
THÉRÈSE DE RAEDT

 

Buy it here: http://www.pavementbooks.com/lalignedecume

narco-analysis

Sad to hear that the Shopping Hour journal (ex zine) has ceased publication. Here’s my little piece on Freud’s cocaine murder guilt complex in the pic – click to enlarge. It also serves as hat-tip to Prof Dave Boothroyd’s excellent book on drugs, and is result of a reading group on Interpretation of Dreams 100th anniversary way back in 2001. All the SH issues are here.

Screen Shot 2015-11-02 at 10.42.13

City Requiem, outwitting paralysis to find ways to write anyway

Am pretty sure this page below is a kind of compliment, though it is an uneasy one. As I have said directly, never meant for there not to be many more inscriptions – how could I be the one to hold back the delude (apres moi?). Of course there should never be no reason to stop writing, just sometimes we could stop anthropologising (a moratorium on fieldwork!) and I always hope to write better, a forlorn task. Stereotypes-stereohypes, they keep getting back up again:

Screen Shot 2015-10-20 at 15.04.18

From the book by Ananya Roy 2003 “City Requiem, Calcutta: Gender and the Politics of Poverty” Uni of Minnesota Press, which, despite my being cast as the paralyser, also ends with some beautiful lines that capture what I to was trying to do: ‘ my narrative of the city … can only be one of multiple and irreconcilable iterations’ Ananya Roy. As I think was expressed already in Ashis Nandy’s comment on the back cover of ‘The Rumour’.

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