Lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous living

Mao more than ever

Damn it, sometimes I fear I’m on the wrong side of the Atlantic. I’ve just noticed I missed an awesome-sounding conference about Mao, and two talks by eponymous Walter Benjamin scholar, Andrew Benjamin. Not to mention living on this continent means I can all too easily end up in a city where the temperature drops below 0° Fahrenheit (something I had, in my metric-system innocence, assumed was impossible).

That being said, there are advantages. I was in Chicago for a conference which was about as good as a non-Maoist conference could be expected to be; great papers on the 1844 Manuscripts and Machiavelli, among others. I ended up getting in a drunken argument when someone else mentioned Katie Price, leading me to launch into an explanation of how my paper proved Jordan’s revolutionary credentials; that’s what you want from a conference. I met up with Moll, who showed me her hipster neighborhood and pointed me in the direction of a great alternative zine/comics (or, as I suspect they would spell it, comix) shop. They had a copy of Prairie Fire for sale! The revolution is surely just round the corner. I didn’t buy it though, as I already have a copy; I did pick up a pamphlet called “Trashing the Neoliberal City,”  about anti-gentrification and pro-public-space actions in Chicago.

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Adapting a Woody Allen joke

So, Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault are in some kind of critical theory afterlife. They get talking, and at some point Foucault asks Benjamin, “Do you think sex is boring?” Benjamin grins and nods, and says, “Yes, if you do it right.”