Amia Srinivasan begins her foreword to 'f letter'- an anthology of feminist Russian poetry- by eliding the one thing that could make it poetry- viz. that it is in Russian- a vastly poetic language whose 'dhvani' resonances are as scintillatingly myriad, as symphonically musical, as its own autumn forests dimming the glory of an All God-birthing gloaming.
I was on my knees in front of him/ he was drunk/ I had his dead cock in my mouth/ Koka kept saying suck it suck it don’t stop keep sucking more more come on suck it suck it in a mean voice full of despair and impending doom eight months later he was killed in Afghanistan Lida Yusupova
Presumably, the reference is to the Soviet misadventure in Afghanistan. The Kremlin had to go in because some Marxist nutter- radicalized at Columbia- had run amok. Thus the Soviets were merely replacing the far-Left Khalqis with the less noxious Parchami faction. Still, the damage had been done. Afghanistan has been continually moving to an Islamism which will ensure that nobody will get drunk and neither men nor women will have cocks in their mouth.
Why is Amia highlighting this passage from a poem by a cultured Russian lady? Communism has perished there. Russia isn't fighting pointless wars. Alcoholism has decreased. Young people are more religious than ever and there has been a crackdown on porn.
The answer to my question is- Amia is a cretin. She has just shown that Communism was fucking horrible. The Marxists caused Afghanistan's descent into the inferno. Still, she thinks this quotation is somehow connected to the stupid whining of American academic feminism.
‘The law sees and treats women the way men see and treat women,’ Catharine MacKinnon wrote in her 1983 essay on the relationship between feminism and the state.
But, Amia has just quoted some Soviet era poetess showing that the nature of the state, or its laws, didn't matter in the slightest. Some women- like some men- suck cock. So what? It may be that oral sex is an unconscious attempt to check for the presence of venereal disease.
The law sees, for example, a woman’s short skirt as a come-on,
No it does not. Even assless chaps are not seen, by the law, as an invitation to anal rape.
a woman’s domestic labour as a gift of love,
whereas a bachelor doing the washing up is seething with hate.
a woman’s pregnancy as her biological destiny,
Only if she is carrying a human fetus. If she gives birth to a giraffe that aint biological destiny at all.
a woman’s love for another woman as an aberration.
Yup. Daughters are supposed to hate their Moms- at least if they are Feminists.
It follows, for MacKinnon, that women are in a bind. They can turn to the state, trying to make their case as abstract persons with abstract rights, knowing all the while that the state will have little interest in overturning the structures of sexual subordination that gave rise to their complaints.
Very true. You turn to the State to enforce your right to something or the other and immediately a cock is stuffed into your mouth. This is a major nuisance all over the world. Mrs. Thatcher came to see Ronald Reagan at about the time McKinnon was writing this shit. She could scarcely get in a word edgewise coz of all the dicks that kept getting thrust into her mouth. Mrs. Gandhi faced a similar problem as did the Queen, Gor' bless 'er.
Or they can abandon the state and place their hope in civil society, ‘which for women has more closely resembled a state of nature’.
Though, in a state of nature, dicks don't keep getting thrust into mouths.
But to say that the law sees and treats women the way men see and treat women is not to say that the state is on the side of men. The state is on the side of the ruling class. The worker is sent to die in the factory,
or have his legs chopped off in an office, or get subject to other types of mutilation in a lecture hall or laboratory
but he can be allowed the satisfactions of beating his wife and children when he gets home
But he has already died in the factory. Thus, it his ghost which is beating his wife. She avenges herself by smashing in the heads of her kids who, brains leaking out of their craniums, torture little animals which in turn are mean and sadistic to plants.
The soldier is sent to die in a war, but, first, he can demand that his dick be sucked.
Homeless dudes can demand their dicks be sucked. So what? Women are constantly demanding cunnilingus in between smashing in the heads of their children. Do what I do. Ignore them.
The wages of masculinity are paid out as compensation for the deprivation of political power. Women, who have always worked for free, receive no such wages.
For Srinivasan, the wages of femininity are paid out of writing stupid shite.
. fn. 2 now there’s someone to look up to now there’s plenty to pick from—the new seriousness of buttons and peaked caps the subtle irony of collaboration so die for us, black sun of the pig’s uniform Elena Georgievskaya
Elena is trans-gender. Amia doesn't seem to be aware of this.
Anti-carceral feminists dream of a world without prisons, without police.
Which is cool in concealed carry States- if you are a good shot.
In response they are often asked: what will we do with the the rapists, the murderers? We might begin by responding: which rapists, which murderers? The police and prison guards, or the other ones?
If the other ones are on the prowl then don't begin by asking stupid questions. Buy a gun. Still, Amia has a point. The India her parents left was one where it was a bad idea to report a rape to the police coz they'd figure you were 'habituated to intercourse' and so a few more dicks inside you wouldn't make much difference.
fn. 3 there’s no-one closer than family their thesaurus full of snakes b is for bestiary glossary: mother means a beast who doesn’t exist, a serpent swallowing her own tail, a food chain, daughter—that one, there at the end Daria Serenko
Sucks to be Russian- right? Well, sixty years of Communism can do that to any country.
What is to be done with the family? It is perhaps in regard to the family that the men of the left most converge with the men of the right.
Actually, most men of the left or right or whatever converge with women. A few bum each other but most dicks converge on vaginas and vice versa.
Men have found it difficult, on the whole, to give up the fantasy of the family (by which I mean the bourgeois, straight, nuclear family) as a place free of the alienation of the market, of the domination of the state.
By contrast women don't want to get married. That's how come Brides magazine outsells Ms three to one even though few women have a marriage in their immediate future.
When I was taught Marx as a first year undergraduate,
Why the fuck would anybody need to be taught Marx at College? Mathematical representations of Marxian econ- Kantorovich or more advanced Econo-physics models- okay. But Marxism is easily comprehensible to High School students.
my professor asked: weren’t we already acquainted with a working communism, an institution in which each gave according to his ability, and took according to his need— the family?
Marx said we must have 'to each according to his contribution' till scarcity disappeared. Amia does not know Marxism because she was too stupid and lazy to read him for herself while in High School.
I did not at the time think to ask: in the family, whose needs are served, whose abilities nourished, and who gets to decide?
Did she think to read Engels on the Family? In my family, the kids needs were served. Our abilities were nourished. Since Dad was better at Math, he taught us Math. Mum was better at English, so she took charge of that. Who made the decisions? Mum & Dad.
Amia's family may have worked very differently. Dad was constantly coming home and beating everybody in sight. Mum silently choked on dicks. No wonder Amia had to ask her Professor- in between choking on his dick- about how families work.
Who in the family is free? Too often men on the left talk
Why can't they just silently choke on dicks? Fuck is wrong with them?
about ‘saving’ the family from the logic of market capitalism—
Cool. Mummy and Daddy should grow the family's food and fetch its water. They should not get jobs and hire tutors or send their kids to private schools or tony Colleges.
from the encroachment of ‘neoliberalism’—
Very true. Iyengar girls, like Amia, should be married off at 14. What for all this 'neo-liberal' nonsense like sending them to Yale and other such Godlessness? Let the dim bint milk the cow and draw water from the well the way her ancestors used to.
forgetting that this distinction, between the perversity of market relations and the integrity of familial relations, is a false one.
This is why Amia is going to give up her well paid job and run away from the West so as to settle in some nice Ashram or agraharam in a remote part of India where there are no shops
First, what could be more perverse than the alienation from mind and body that the family demands of women?
I am not a pervert but, after Googling various extreme porn sites, my best answer is 'Jigsaw's demand that women chop pieces off their own body and then use those pieces as dildos upon themselves is more perverted than 'family demands'- at least for Iyengars.
Second, market relations depend on the non-commodified relations of the family.
Nope. Markets work perfectly well when reproduction is commodified. You hire a woman to have your baby. You hire another as wet nurse. You pay tutors and trainers. You sell your daughters and get your sons to earn for you. You may also participate in a territorial gang, or State, which captures slaves and which kills sons or daughters who get out of line.
Silvia Federici wrote: ‘By denying housework a wage and transforming it into an act of love, capital has killed many birds with one stone.
Very true! Why am I not being paid for doing the washing up? I do love myself but why should I be expected to look after my own house without getting paid for it?
First of all, it has gotten a hell of a lot of work almost for free…
YES! My lungs and my heart and other organs have been working 24/7 for 58 years without getting paid even the minimum wage! Fuck you Capitalism! But fuck you Feminism and Communism and every other ism. Why are you not paying me for my hard work in keeping myself alive?
Obviously, the thing is racist and gender discriminatory. If I were a beautiful White blonde, people would pay to watch me doing the washing up while wearing nothing but Chanel no. 5.
At the same time, it has also disciplined the male worker…by giving him a servant after he himself has done so much serving at the factory or the office…
No it hasn't. Male workers are not provided with wives by their employers. If you want to stop working for other people, don't get married. Save up and start your own business. Only if you are offered a big dowry should you get married. That's bourgeois ideology.
The good capitalist may take a share in the local gin-palace/ gambling den and cat-house so as to capture a larger portion of his own wage bill. Sadly, Churches and Women's Groups object to this
In the same way as god created Eve to give pleasure to Adam, so did capital create the housewife’.iii
Though marriage exists in non-monetized, pre-capitalist or Communist societies. On the other hand, in the time of Abraham, you could buy and sell wives and daughters and sisters (Sarah was Abraham's sister as well as his wife)
At the level of logic, the market and the family stand in tension;
not any more so than the Coasian firm which too internalizes externalities and minimizes transaction costs.
at the level of politics, they form an organic whole.
No. There is great tension between the political objectives of families and the political objectives of entrepreneurs and shareholders. It is very difficult to strike a balance more particularly if most shareholders reside overseas. One way of squaring the circle is populism with a spot of Gay bashing and xenophobia thrown in.
Pussy Riot was God's gift to Putin.
7 fn. 4 mama says: grandma needs a good hand cream, no, she needs a different world where grandfather doesn’t chase her with a dog’s chain across the garden, where food and things create themselves, a world of different labor. Galina Rymbu
Communism was fucking horrible. Gandpa was constantly chasing grandma with a dog's chain. Was he also sodomizing mummy? Sure. Why not? Sadly GOSPLAN did not overfulfil the production of wire coat hangers and thus Soviet women couldn't all get abortions. Sad.
Still, under Putin, things are looking up. There are only about 15 per cent atheists today. Birth rates have picked up over the last ten years. Things are looking up. As Family Values revived, Alcoholism has declined greatly. Alcohol related deaths, in particular, have fallen from about 30,000 to perhaps 6,000.
One day men will hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening and criticise after dinner.
Marx wrote this in 1848 but did not publish it. He studied Econ after settling in London. He clarified that Communism would only be attained after scarcity had disappeared- i.e. technology had become very advanced.
Who, meanwhile, will hang out the laundry, wash the dishes and wipe the baby’s bottom?
Mr. Roboto. Also, babies will be grown in vats.
Or are those, too, forms of labour to which we can, suitably freed from the strictures of distributed production, have unalienated relationships?
If you don't get paid for it, it aint labor. Thus, if you get paid for doing the washing up, or eating out a pussy, then you have performed labor. If you haven't been paid, you may well have been swindled by neo-liberalism. T
Is human flourishing realised in the reflection of a shined sink?
More so, then a sink which has been shat in.
fn. 5 I’M SENDING YOU SOMETHING ON CHAT, IF THEY FIND IT THEY’LL SHOOT Elena Kostyleva
In Xi's China- maybe. That country is going places.
How much hope to place in technology: in the power of automation to free us from the doldrums of labour, in the power of the internet to radically democratise politics, in the power of new technologies to take us beyond the tragic confinements of biology – from birth, from death?
There probably already is an app to produce dreck like this. But nothing can rescue stupid liars from their imaginary persecutors.
I am instinctively inclined to pessimism.
The word is cretinism- not pessimism- Amia, darling.
I want ‘a world where food and things create themselves’.
Why not a world where porn stars step out off the monitor screen so as to pleasure you? Why stop there? Why not the ability to create multiverses which you and only you will find super-cool?
But all the technologies that were promised to bring about this world have not materialised.
Amia thinks promises were made. Them pointy headed Sciencey types promised me that I'd get a Brad Pitt clone to pleasure myself. True, they didn't actually say it in so many words. Still the thing was implied. Also, Biden promised to eat my pussy on Inauguration day. Nobody else heard him say this, but I remember it distinctly.
Instead, we have technologies that have brought ecological disaster, repressed wages, strengthened the surveillance state, collapsed our free time and stolen our attentions.
which is how come I am not as stupid as fuck. Technology did it to me! The instruction manual clearly said I must shove my new smartphone, as well as my laptop and Roomba up my butt. Well, maybe not in so many words but what I mean is that technology promised to end world hunger if only I shoved every appliance I own up my butt. Now I've got a really sore butt and trillions of peeps are dying of starvation every single day!
And still the kitchen sink must be scrubbed.
Why not pay for a cleaner? Oh. You shat in it. That's nasty.
I am not a luddite.
But are a cretin.
I like it when Paul Preciado
a transgender philosopher
talks about hacking the body with hormones,
i.e. utilizing the research of smart people- not philosophers.
when the activists of the Arab Spring describe their subversive use of Facebook and Twitter,
which worked out swell for them- right?
when the Xenofeminists revive Shulamith
batshit crazy
Firestone’s observation that the natural is not the necessary,
which is the sort of thing a person suffering acute paranoid schizophrenia might say
when Aaron Bastani
who has left the Labor Party thus increasing its electability.
imagines a fully-automated luxury communism.
While helping Labor imagine its future as a fringe, anti-semitic, party.
I suppose I am a ‘techno-realist’,
No. The word you are looking for is 'cretin'.
if that means believing that an emancipatory technology presupposes emancipation; that it cannot be straightforwardly produced by it. What I oppose is the idea that the emancipatory power of technology can itself can be automated.
Talk of 'emancipatory' x or 'emancipatory' y is cretinism simply.
fn. 6 I have this dream: there’s no more us. Flying out into the light Come the puffin, the curlew, the pale harrier, Wings beating. The black and rufous elephant shrew, The hairy-nosed wombat, the angelshark. Ekaterina Simonova
On one of the last flights I took before the pandemic, from Munich to London, I was suddenly gripped (not without a sense of irony) by the conviction that climate change would be the ruin of us. Not just a problem on a list of problems—the rise of right-wing strong men; the oppression of women and refugees and queers; spiraling inequality; technology undisciplined by democracy— but the problem. How many of us mock climate change sceptics while tacitly presupposing, in our daily lives, that somehow, in some way, disaster will be averted? How are all my friends having children? As a child myself I loved nature but detested humanity, which seemed to me clearly nature’s enemy. I was instinctively a deep ecologist and an anti-natalist. My parents expressed some concern about this—I remember their line was ‘how can you care so much about plants and animals when there is so much human suffering?’ Later I learned from ecofeminists that the target of such anti-natalist thoughts is inevitably (if only sometimes intentionally) poor women and women of colour.
Amia is purple with orange polka dots. Her parents should have told her that lots of Iyengars followed Mahatma Gandhi who was 'anti-natalist'. He called upon 'all thinking Indians' to abstain from marriage, of if that was not possible, sex within marriage. Sadly his kids and grandkids and so forth ignored him completely. On the other hand, Narendra Modi and Yogi Adityanath are celibate.
Deep ecology anti-natalism presupposes that the needs of humanity and the needs of nature must be antithetical.
But humanity has no need for those gobshites. Let them compost themselves.
Ecofeminists counter that women have long known how to live in equilibrium with nature:
But men, who are part of nature, keep sticking their dicks in them. Sad.
Malthusian crises betray masculinist assumptions.
Yes. They assume women won't stick things up themselves to abort babies or simply smash their heads in if they are having a bad day.
Vandana Shiva writes of the rural Himalayan women who knew how to sustainably lop oak trees to produce fodder for livestock, in turn increasing the productivity of their communally tended forests.
Vandana Shiva's people were being displaced from Garhwal etc by the warlike Gurkhas. The Brits came to their rescue. The fact is, land is scarce. You can be as deep-ecological as you like but you can be driven off your land by more martial people. Anti-natalism can't reduce populations the way ethnic cleansing can.
But the ecofeminist vision has no place for me or others like me: urban, deracinated, wandering.
& protected by well-armed police forces and high tech armies.
There is nothing I know about the earth except what capitalism has taught me.
No. You know nothing about the earth because you are as stupid as shit. Capitalism can't teach cretins. Even if it takes your money, it can only give you a Credential in a shite subject if you are stupid and lazy and self-important.
This is perhaps the sole premise shared between ecofeminism and right-wing nationalism: that life, in its proper state, is a wholly local phenomenon.
This is nonsense. Right wing nationalists understand that you can go colonize a place on the other side of the globe or, indeed, the far side of the Galaxy.
Perhaps that is right. From a certain view, the impulse to theorise— that is, the impulse of the intellectual— is itself a sign of alienation, of homelessness.
No. It's just what cretins do, if that's what cretins are paid to do.
fn. 7 I looked online in all the name dictionaries couldn’t find it Nastya Denisova
What is it about feminism and poetry?
Both turned to shit at around the same time.
Audre Lorde writes that it is ‘through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are—until the poem—nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt’
Rap poetry- sure. The trouble is, most ideas are shit.
n her poem ‘Planetarium’, Adrienne Rich writes: I am an instrument in the shape of a woman trying to translate pulsations into images for the relief of the body and the reconstruction of the mind.
Rich came of age during 'Second Wave Feminism'. Thus she wasn't utterly shite.
fn. 8 a poem is a place you lick raw that’s what a poem is Oksana Vasyakina
Audre Lorde also writes, in a different essay, that ‘Of all the art forms, poetry is the most economical. It is the one which is the most secret, which requires the least physical labor, the least material, and the one which can be done between shifts, in the hospital pantry, on the subway, and on scraps of surplus paper…A room of one’s own may be a necessity for writing prose, but so are reams of paper, a typewriter, and plenty of time.’
Lorde would have been a better poet- or song writer- if she hadn't got sucked into academia. Still, she spoke of genuine issues- not hysterical grievances.
fn. 9 thin trees of reason bear not the burden and bend. Yulia Podlubnova
That should be 'branches', not 'trees'. Trees may bend to the wind, but not under a burden of fruit. The problem is that thing branches of reason, like thick ones, have no fruits or flowers or big fat owls roosting on them.
Of course, a poetess has plenty of time in prison
Sadly, this was not the case for Soviet prisons. Still, some remarkable work emerged from there.
fn. 10 Oh! and is my writing sufficiently feminist Oh! and is it sufficiently activist Oh! and is my writing sufficiently political is it relevant to the here and now or am I hurtling into eternity or am I hurling into a damned distant despairing infinity and does my writing mirror history’s specificity … Oh, will it be understood will it be loved Stanislava Mogileva
This lady is a curator and publisher. Ratushinskaya was a prisoner and a poet. Their concerns could not be more different. Thank you Putin!
Sometimes, we are trying to preserve those things that make human life, should it survive in something like its current form, worth living. We go on not in the hope of saving anything, but so that there might be something worth saving. Is this enough?
More than enough- if you are a cretin. What else could you do?
fn. 11 you are the mirror of your ancestors, the greatest shame of your people, the dying tongue of those at the feast Egana Djabbarova
Amia may well be 'the mirror of her ancestors'. But her parents considered it no great shame to get the fuck out of a shithole. True, if you were really good at Tamil or Telugu you could make much more money staying in South India than emigrating, but you'd have to have some basic intelligence.
No Dravidian is mourning the loss to her language when Amia chose to remain ignorant of it.
Participation in a tradition is a condition of intelligibility.
Quite false. Amia had ancestors who were wholly ignorant of Christian or British or American traditions. Yet the great works of those traditions were more, not less, intelligible to them than Amia type shite in their own language.
If I am to be understood, I will have to use words—make signs, sing songs—as my ancestors used them,
Very true! Your students at Oxford won't understand you unless you sing to them in Tamil. Also, like mummy, you should be doing bharatnatyam, innit?
as ‘my people’ use them. They will not understand that I am rejecting them unless
you beat them and push them away. Talking to them in Klingon won't do the trick.
I do so in their terms. They will not understand that I am trying to change their ways of speaking unless I speak mostly like them.
Rubbish! Tambrams of my vintage were inured to the spectacle of little kids turning up from Amrika and demanding 'Coco-pops' or whatever in Amrikan lingo. Their elderly grannies soon accommodated themselves to these precious jewels. In T-Nagar, specialist shops catering to the Amrika returned grandkid soon sprang up. T-Nagar is now considered the biggest shopping district, by revenue, in India.
Earlier there had been some resistance to 'England returned' scions imposing their values. But America was much richer and- well it was America. Suddenly, the mark of the true Tambram patriarch was a penchant for American Middle School slang. Dr. Balamurali Krishnan himself could play video games and discourse learnedly on Spiderman and Archie & Veronica by the mid-Eighties.
But can I not have my own private language, one that makes sense only to me?
Sure.
To this Wittgenstein famously replied: what purpose could such a thing possibly serve?
Witlesstein didn't get that it could be a private language with algorithmic proof checking etc.
How about this: because it is only when I speak nonsense, when my ancestors disown me, my people deny me, that I am free.
No. You can speak nonsense all you like. Family will still be family. They may, discreetly, arrange psychiatric help. On the other hand, if you decapitate the dog and sodomize the cat and go after granny with a butcher's knife, they will disown you fast enough- if, that is, you aren't crazy but have merely misunderstood the requirements for your thesis in Moral Philosophy.
fn. 12 slitting open the night, slitting open the night of discursivity … Dilige et quod vis fac, my love, my dear Lolita Agamalova
The Russian higher education system- for some incomprehensible reason- insists on actually educating students. Lolita may be as queer as she likes, but quoting St. Augustine (love, and do as you like) is so not cool. It suggests that you weren't incessantly fisting yourself during lectures. You actually did your homework assignments. Not cool Lolita. Not cool at all.
What is that unruly thing that cannot be named, that cannot be brought to heel by words?
If aint the dog, then the answer must be pussy.
It would be foolish to try to say.
Like that's ever stopped you!
But sometimes the poets slit open the night, and give us a glimpse.
Of what? Intestines filled with shit? But why would poet's go in for such 'slitting'? Constipation? I suppose so. Without Neo-Liberalism it might be difficult to get your hands on ex-lax.
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