Wednesday 4 November 2009

Please Mr Postman

Actually, thanks, Mr Postman. Today I received an advance proof copy of Paul Auster's latest, Invisible thanks to Librarything's Early Reviewer's group, The Coming Insurrection (download it free in English or French through that link) by The Invisible Committee (the manifesto of the Tarnac 9 group of French communists) and Kats Karavan, a 4 CD compilation of Peel favourites. Yummy. Though I'm surprised that the Nightingales aren't on it.

The Coming Insurrection is a bracing piece of revolutionary rhetoric - but I can't help feeling that any movement whose manifestos are elegantly published by Semiotext(e) and MIT Press is one that's become a bourgeois fetish object already. I downloaded a copy a long time ago, when Tarnac was in the news, but the book is a beautiful piece of design, revelling in its anonymity - available via Amazon. How this differs from 70s students waving Mao's Little Red Book, I don't know. I do know that, however much sense is in the publication, it's already dead.

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