Minor Notes

1. Blog-roll updated to include the correct address of Ads Without Products, instead of its old ghost address which is filled now with both ads and products. A w/out P noted the same NYT article I'd meant to write about: anthropologists as war consultants (Hearts and Minds).

2. Desertion is much on Carceraglio's mind of late. Carceraglio and friends may once have exaggerated desertion's virtues in certain derivative political pamphlets we wrote or claimed to have written. But we did not exaggerate by much:

Nothing is less passive than the act of fleeing, of exiting. Defection modifies the conditions within which struggle takes place, rather than presupposing those conditions to be an unalterable horizon; it modifies the context within which a problem has arisen, rather than facing this problem by opting for one or the other of the provided alternatives. In short, exit consists of unrestrained invention which alters the rules of the game and throws the adversary off balance. --Paolo Virno, Grammar of the Multitude

Return of the Weird

K-Punk announces the reprise and continuation of the Weird Realists' conference, December 1 in London, with speakers China Miéville, Ray Brassier, Benjamin Noys, and Graham Harman.

The conference announcement asks, "What examples of the Weird can be found in fiction, film and science?"

Carceraglio proposes Melville's "The Encantadas":

Man and wolf alike disown them. Little but reptile life is here found: tortoises, lizards, immense spiders, snakes, and that strangest anomaly of outlandish nature, the aguano. No voice, no low, no howl is heard; the chief sound of life here is a hiss.

And:

On oppressive, clouded days, such as are peculiar to this part of the watery Equator, the dark, vitrified masses, many of which raise themselves among white whirlpools and breakers in detached and perilous places off the shore, present a most Plutonian sight.

Gone to St Charles Island, The Encantadas

Doubtless for a long time the exiled monarch, pensively ruralizing in Peru, which afforded him safe asylum in his calamity, watched every arrival from the Encantadas, to hear news of the failure of the Republic, the consequent penitence of the rebels, and his own recall to royalty. Doubtless, he deemed the Republic but a miserable experiment which would soon explode. But no, the insurgents had confederated themselves into a democracy neither Grecian, Roman, nor American, but a permanent Riotocracy...

--Melville, "The Encantadas"