Wednesday, October 3, 2018

Walking with Absinthe and Witches

Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women



I got back from DC on Friday night, a high from the civil disobedience action still pulsing through me. Its hard to describe all the emotions, which stream through you during such actions, picking you up, elevating, holding you in the clouds, before crashing, bouncing, telling those in charge what you really think, before the police grasp you, putting the plastic handcuffs on your wrists, making your may through the system.
Back to jail, the train, and home.
Read How to Read a Protest and thought.
I got back to Brooklyn by 745 PM.
 A week into his semester at Vassar, my friend Rob was in town.
We’d spend the weekend exploring the city.
We talked about emergent strategies and seaweed, mixing rum and tequila.
We went to Stanley’s class on Saturday, chatting Adorno.
On the way, the police pulled us for skipping a turn style.
The sun shone.
I told Stanley about going to Gramsci’s house.
We walked from 37th street, looking at the sky, the buildings, taking in delirious New York.
Past the Graduate Center and Madison Square Park, billowy clouds above, a rally at Union Square, we strolled through the gorgeous Saturday.
Down to St Mark’s Place, by the Theater 80, we drank a beer and an absinthe with Jodi.
New York’s her home, but Scotland is her history.
She’s been everywhere.
The Dodgers pulled ahead. 
People were out chatting, sitting on park benches, playing the numbers on the trains.
It really works, noted a woman sitting by me.
The F train nowhere to be found.
J and A back to Holy Brooklyn.
All evening, we read our stories about seaweed, mothers, and femme fatales, reflecting on NOLA a week prior, trying to make sense of it all.

We read for hours.
The kids obsessed on Girlhoods Interrupted.
But we work through them.
Rob said to read 2666.
Its like you.
“Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend,” prophesized BolaƱo.
Sermons at Judson and stories.
Can we ever repent for our migration’s violence?
Thousands of books and ideas to dance with.
The comics grew everywhere from the bookstore by Bryant Park.
Andrew had friends over to the park.
We played frisbie and remembered the Brain Eaters, Claremont’s ultimate team.
Rob threw it with a good West Coast spin.
Riding through Holy Brooklyn on a Sunday.

Rob said goodbye.
Silvia talked about witches as the senate debated how much perjury is too much perjury, how many abuses are enough?
And women told their stories, reminding us, it’s a new time, a new place, a new space for all our stories.
Capitalism demonizes those it expatriates.
The which hunts remind us.
But what are the roots of the violence, the attacks on the commons?
Do we ever find that dream place?

Silvia Federici: Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women
Sunday, September 30, 5-7pm at Interference Archive

Join Common Notions and Silvia Federici in the launch of her latest book
Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women.

In this new work that revisits some of the main themes of Caliban and
the Witch, Silvia Federici examines the root causes of a new surge of
interpersonal and institutional violence against women, including new
witch hunts. This surge of violence has occurred alongside an expansion
of capitalist social relations.

Federici outlines the consequences for the women affected and their
communities. She argues that, no less than the witch hunts in sixteenth-
and seventeenth-century Europe and the “New World,” this new war on
women is a structural element of the new forms of capitalist
accumulation. These processes are founded on the destruction of people’s
most basic means of reproduction. Like at the dawn of capitalism, what
we discover behind today’s violence against women are processes of
enclosure, land dispossession, and the remolding of women’s reproductive
activities and subjectivity.

As well as an investigation into the causes of this new violence, the
book is also a feminist call to arms. Federici’s work provides new ways
of understanding the methods in which women are resisting victimization
and offers a powerful reminder that reconstructing the memory of the
past is crucial for the struggles of the present.


















































































































































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