JL, 2012-2014

Bossk rifle

Lars Lerin
(acuarela 150 x 450)


I like when people do something from the heart, not from skill.

At the heart of my despair about the novel had been a conflict between my feeling that I should Address the Culture and Bring News to the Mainstream, and my desire to write about the things closest to me, to lose myself in the characters and locales I loved. Writing, and reading too, had become a grim duty, and considering the poor pay, there is seriously no point in doing either if you’re not having fun. As soon as I jettisoned my perceived obligation to the chimerical mainstream, my third book began to move again. I’m amazed, now, that I’d trusted myself so little for so long, that I’d felt such a crushing imperative to engage explicitly with all the forces impinging on the pleasure of reading and writing: as if, in peopling and arranging my own little alternate world, I could ignore the bigger social picture even if I wanted to.

Jonathan Franzen, “Perchance to Dream,” Harper’s  Magazine (April 1996)

“What is it they want from a man that they didn’t get from his work? What do they expect? What is there left of him when he’s done his work? What’s any artist, but the dregs of his work? the human shambles that follows it around.” 

William Gaddis, The Recognitions (1955)

IKEDA Manabu

70s NY police.

The moral power of Marx’s work doesn’t just derive from its systematic demystification of capitalism; it also flows from his insistence that capitalism cannot generate the conditions for human flourishing. He never equated material well-being with happiness, but he knew that there can be no happiness without material well-being.

The crime of capitalism is that it forces the vast majority of the population to remain preoccupied with basic concerns of nutrition, housing, health, and skill acquisition. It leaves little time for fostering community and creativity that humans crave.

And the injustice of capitalism is that it does so in an era of plenty. There are enough resources to ensure basic material satisfaction for all, but capital mandates that those resources do not benefit the great majority. Further, those same resources have been generated by the hard work of the population that is denied its benefits.

Nivedita Majumdar

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In the banking concept of education, truth and knowledge are wholly represented by the teacher; whom themselves submit to “a philosophy of knowing derived from logical and mathematical treatments of people, which holds the exclusive source of all legitimate knowledge as that which can be measured empirically.” In this instance, unbeknownst to most educators, they facilitate oppressive ways of knowing by objectifying their students, “dehumanizing them into “things” to be analyzed and (based off that analysis) dictated to the when, what, why and how of living.” They presuppose themselves as the authoritative avenue by which their students could ever legitimately know the world.

This is the educational paradigm of capitalism. In it any ideas that strengthen the institutionalization of it are good and valued, ingraining it in people’s minds as the entire possible spectrum of education that there is, while any ideas that are introspective, intuitive, or humanizing are shunned as ineffective/inefficient because they or their results cannot be quantified.

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Black Doily
Don Van Vliet