#Suxessfail

3rd Annual Sussex Poetry Festival, Friday 8th & Saturday 9th June.

[Elizabeth Guthrie] & Lee Harwood:

(Camera cuts out on Elizabeth. See also Elizabeth & everyone’s reading at Crossing the Line in London in January).

Niels Frank (w/ Daniel Kane) & Reem Kubba (w/ Keston Sutherland):

Jow Lindsay, [Richard Owens] & Verity Spott:

(“What you are giving me is simply too much and so I have no choice
but to decline your generous offer.”

Richard Owens read from No Class. See also Rich’s reading in Cambridge a week earlier).

Drew Milne & Laura Kilbride:

Sam Solomon & [Peter Middleton]:

Dan Spicer, Julie Carr & Holly Pester:

Ralph Hawkins & Linh Dinh:

(& played out by [West Hill Blast Quartet]. No video, but here’s Tim Hughes:

See also Dan Spicer’s Mystery Lesson).

(Mostly Rich Owens’s videos & photos + Alice Incident’s doodles).

Venn

Letter from Lenin to Inessa Armand (17 January 1915)

Trans. Andrew Rothstein.

Dear Friend,

I very much advise you to write the plan of the pamphlet in as much detail as possible. Otherwise too much is unclear.
One opinion I must express here and now:
I advise you to throw out altogether §3 – the “demand (women’s) for freedom of love”.
That is not really a proletarian but a bourgeois demand.
After all, what do you understand by that phrase? What can be understood by it?
1. Freedom from material (financial) calculations in affairs of love?
2. The same, from material worries?
3. From religious prejudices?
4. From prohibitions by Papa, etc.?
5. From the prejudices of “society”?
6. From the narrow circumstances of one’s environment (peasant or petty-bourgeois or bourgeois intellectual)?
7. From the fetters of the law, the courts and the police?
8. From the serious element in love?
9. From child-birth?
10. Freedom of adultery? etc.
I have enumerated many shades (not all of course). You have in mind, of course, not nos. 8-10, but either nos. 1-7 or something similar to nos. 1-7.
But then for nos. 1-7 you must choose a different wording, because freedom of love does not express this idea exactly.
And the public, the readers of the pamphlet, will inevitably understand by “freedom of love”, in general, something like nos. 8-10, even without your wishing it.
Just because in modern society the most talkative, noisy and “top-prominent” classes understand by “freedom of love” nos. 8-10, just for that very reason this is not a proletarian but a bourgeois demand.
For the proletariat nos. 1-2 are the most important, and then nos. 5-7, and those, in fact, are not “freedom of love”.
The thing is not what you subjectively “mean” by this. The thing is the objective logic of class relations in affairs of love.
Friendly shake hands!

Source: In Lenin’s Collected Works, ed. Robert Daglish, vol. 35 – quoted in Neil Pattison’s essay “To the Professors of Fleeting Etc.: Keston Sutherland’s Antifreeze and the Significance of Love,” in Crisis Inquiry, ed. Rich Owens.
Elsewhere: Damn the Caesars.

From an interview

With Keston Sutherland.

I’m extremely suspicious of the forms of implicit and explicit messianism involved in that kind of fetishism of intensities —not simply because it becomes harder and harder to do, the more I learn about the world, but also because I do think that it’s at least potentially and is often actually and in fact a thoroughly bourgeois posture. I think that people when they hear the word ‘bourgeois’ tend to imagine that this is a concept whose application can conveniently be limited to people whose authority we despise or who are our parents or who are older than us or who own shops or whatever it might be. But in fact, of course, there are all sorts of very exciting, very intense and emotionally bewildering forms of romantic bourgeois posturing which are bourgeois not because they come from the mouths of the people who own the means of production, but rather because they imaginatively spirit into existence solutions to social problems whose origin and engine is the poetical imagination rather than real political activity aimed at resolving social issues.

From “Ode to TL61P 1″

By Keston Sutherland.

The code TL61P belongs to a Hotpoint dryer;
You’ll find out nothing if you look
it up through the sky in the screen, the vault
of exchangable passion, Vertigo at
the horizon prostrate as an outstretched
cheek; but in the mouth that grows
in capacity behind that overflow,
Nobody can take away the word for it:
love, the provisional end until death;
TL61P its unconditional perfected shadow
opposite; Now go back to the start.

Proclamation from HQ

If we are to build a broad-based campaign against the state’s planned attack on social spending, we must accept a similarly broad range of tactics — including tactics that we ourselves wouldn’t necessarily advocate or feel comfortable with.

(*)

Student cunts. Put them up against any decent mob of football fans and they’ll soon fuck off back to Mummy and Daddy’s cottage in Norfolk whinging about poor treatment. F*cking hate students. Mostly worthless. Get a job, you lazy twats.

(*)

The way police deal with protests was overhauled after criticism of the “heavy handed” approach to the G20 demonstrations last year.  Yesterday’s events demonstrate that the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction.  Police had their hands tied and the result was pure anarchy.

(*)

If there will be a revolution in the UK, it will involve the army; war will continue either way, sugared by truth or not; love is not the unswerving bias of police dogs; it has to be made from scratch at the first indication of its possibility. 10.11.10 A4 remix.

(*)

[...] many analysts, from diverse perspectives, believe that we live at a moment of radical change in the system of global organisation.  The exclusive territorial state, which has been the dominant form of political organisation for the past three centuries, is threatened with displacement from new forms of organisation.

If the state is indeed in decline, there are four main possibilities. First, convergence on a new dominant type, much as the state replaced the variety of competing forms of organisation in an earlier transition.  The chief contender for this role is the multinational corporation; such a displacement would imply the secondary displacement of liberal rule of law with Sustainability / CSR. The second is that a range of forces will interact to govern across borders: corporations, international organisations, NGOs, CSOs, illegal syndicates and private armies [...]

(*)

I work hard, I have three kids. Two of them have lupus. I am unimpressed that my taxes will have to pay for the damage, even if it is only a minority of students who are violent. I never went to university, is that why I can’t understand the point of expensive protests like these? I have been abroad.

From "Your Editorial Comes In Three Chapters"

By Keston Sutherland.

“I want to come behind your bottom lip for you, I want my come to heat your teeth like cakes for you, I want my come to glue your cheeks together, but I won‘t do that. Shower, strong coffee, the internet, soup, clothes, drugs, then reality, then start, then read.”

In Quid 20. Most other quids here.