springSNOW:

Should we apologise for so much of the country being inundated with springSNOW, fallen, we assume, to signal the sending to the printer of the first issue tomorrow Monday [yesterday!].

There are slight amendments to our earlier announcement in that the issue is extended to 80 pages with an additional contribution, Michael Haslam, and a change to Keith Sand’s Mandelstam contribution.

The roster is now prose and poetry by Michael Haslam, Rosa van Hensbergen, Peter Hughes (Petrarch), D S Marriott, Alistair Noon, Joseph Persad, Denise Riley, Peter Riley, Keith Sands (Mandelstam), Nick Totton, Juha Virtanen, Nigel Wheale, James Wilson.

Other contributions are an etching dated 1975 by Gisèle Celan-Lestrange and a 1983 letter by J H Prynne substantially about Paul Celan and translation; music scores by India Cooke, the late Leroy Jenkins, Dave Soldier; film, photography and other work by Sung Hee Jin, Alexis Nishihata, restaurateur Alex von Riebech, Aya Toraiwa; and a drawing of Hélène Cixous reading at the 1979 Cambridge Poetry Festival. We also have a Snowgo by Fiona Allardyce.

SNOW is available only direct from the UK publisher. Issue 1 is priced at £10 incl. mailing or euro12 or US$19 incl. airmailing. Payment can be made to PayPal ID ab@abar.net or by sterling cheque payable to Anthony Barnett and purchase is recommended before all the copies melt away.

From “Kazoo Dreamboats”

Or, On What There Is.
By J. H. Prynne.

[...] The play of unity
as a mental device sides with denial of its self-image, contracted
to open a hazard sentence with subject deletion at null point of
its entry. To speak of forgiveness, a cloud may be forgiven yet
not forgive, participate to shed excuse by transfer to ransom, and
yet still the moral apex is contested, generic virtue just a name
for the apex above its snowy brow shedding its tribute with a sound
but half its own, things by dielectric bonding, its outside voltage
source proportional to and opposite in sign to the charge delivered
by the intervening material to its outer boundaries: and what wert
thou, like this brooding vapour, if no more than vacant, than no
more is more because than is the limit to love, of its favourite
name, the check for chicken in a basket. Don’t end there for
Brent-crude declension ever uppermost by famous agent out of reach
captured to line enhancement, word lackage at horizon long for
longing and dredged with ethic partaken: zero point flooded with
lunar shadow across the eyelid. [...]

Previously: get the fuck out of joy and beauty

From “In Defence of Free Speech”

By Dr N. et al.

[...] Reasonable arguments cannot succeed here. Willetts is not interested in winning an argument of that kind; indeed he is not interested in argument in the way that you are interested in it at all: he simply does not esteem argument as you esteem it. He is interested in only one thing — in managing his policy through Whitehall. You can’t talk him out of it. Politicians are immune to having “flaws” in argument exposed: that just isn’t how argument appears to them to work, isn’t what they believe argument is for. They do not behave like academics in debate; they do not behave reasonably, and cannot be reasoned with. Willetts’ views, right down to his responses to sharp questions on policy, are well-known. The man hardly lacks a platform. Only the most cloth-eared participant in our higher-education culture could be unaware of Willetts’ arguments, and only the most staringly loyal tory squire would be unable to mount his own description of its egregious opportunism, myopia, and chauvinism. His policy will not change: it’s not like a research paper which we can subject to an especially swingeing peer-review. There is no super-sophisticated, high-level, “interdisciplinary” argument which we can deploy to change his heart. To entertain such fantasies is vain and self-deceiving [...] I can only suppose that such fantasies vibrated in the minds of those behind the invitation which CRASSH extended to this person.

PDF pamphlet.
Original context: statement from Jeremy Prynne & discussion thread.
Sections of the goatscape: Ian Patterson in the LRB | Alice Jones in the Independent | Matt Russell (Varsity) on rustication protest | Rees Arnott-Davies in The Guardian

&&

From “Kazoo Dreamboats”

By JH Prynne.

Living trees burn, the smells are intense, how like you this fresh surprise and for nothing why ever not,

From “Kazoo Dreamboats”

Or, On What There Is.
By J H Prynne.

[...] No dream
all hunger in the mouth get the fuck out of joy and beauty come on
be direct for a change truth to tell not even war but abject misery
the nothing to not have not eat, feel your mouth lost for words
and minimum fluid intake. Dry is not a sound dwindling beyond
utterance because in the very internal being of the nothing that
is not there, empty. What language is this unable to be spoken
tongue cracked I saw no need nor use for the dialect beyond all
that so is self-being implicit as a luxury good, fancy handbag
for what you’ll never put in it or snap its glitzy closure void
at heart and brain where mouth unoccupied not even known, even
or not, masticate on words of the species unquoted on the ex-
change so far below par. Keep very calm since excess along the
indigent/indignant border is the radiant bonus paid out against
Rule One. The calmness is a special kind of final joy even at
deep unkindness, because it is the truth of things and this
truth shall not make you free, to sit still or not it is for
sure necessitous but man-made and not by necessity this limpet
contradiction faces the void and is the truth of captivity, to
know this is the joy of ruin and needfulness feel these words
in the feral mouth of separation this too no lick no spittle,
freedom too costly even at the top end or especially there (Rule
Four) our bonds are our sure bondage already in manifest plain
view I saw this too. [...]

&&

From Veer, Critical Documents, Anything Anymore Anywhere. Starry Snood Model’s Own

From “Kazoo Dreamboats”

Or, On What There Is.

By J.H. Prynne.

[...] Rule One: people with top pay are rubbish,
everyone knows this, it’s a law of nature. Rule Two: Diogenes
offered himself as a master, in the market, to any slave who needed
one. Rule Three: you do not see into the life of things, dimension-
less or not, except by harvest of data plotted against uncertainty.
Rule Four: justice is scarce ever the obverse of injustice, since
the one is the top end and the other the bottom. None of this it
must be said is the power of harmony even in charge fluctuation
or lifetimes except the desire integrate the variation of sep-
arate notice, that’s what spirit mostly does who where she went
bare in her forehead morning, only men write their socks off like
this: better to be clear than dizzy or cynic, not to refuse joy
in favour of rapture or contentment, the gradients are lateralised
in additive counterflow. But rapture is also pretty nice [...]