Category Archives: letters of insurgents

The fog may lift

By aragorn | Published: January 28, 2011

I am looking forward to Spring. Many projects are coming to fruition and I am finally reclaiming some of my time. My burnout is officially over and what cured it was the humans. Here is what is coming up We are finally working on a new book “Enemies of Society” and the second edition of […]

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Drawing a line between love and (anti)politics

By rocinante | Published: September 15, 2010

What’s a book? Is it a self-realization of an individual’s life in the context of living others? Or is it self-realization as a closed compartment, for example an “insurgent,” a category that remains separate from all the other separate categories? – Sophie Back from the Mountains In typical fashion, almost a month late – over […]

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The Great Lesson X – Humility and endings

By aragorn | Published: August 28, 2010

Most of my associates have not been following this project over the summer. I have been excited about taking on the intensity of writing (and reading) every week but have done it largely alone. The web site hasn’t been that active. Comments on my blog have been nearly non-existent. Even the weekly study group at […]

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Reality is starting to incorporate our dreams

By rocinante | Published: August 21, 2010

Maybe what’s happening is that we’re all becoming children again. Our rigid roles and characters are dropping off like dried skin. We’re fascinating to each other because each one of our acts might be a total surprise, at any instant our personalities might change completely. Like children, we’re not exhausted by what we’ve been and […]

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The Great Lesson IX – I know Daman, Ted & Alec

By aragorn | Published: August 17, 2010

This chapter featured a few strong minor characters. Three archetypal characters dominate letter 9 and as archetypes I have known, or been, each of them. Here are a few of our stories. Daman – The perfect student-teacher turned ideological director. He apparently decided that the only meaningful human activity was the total destruction of the […]

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The Great Lesson VIII – I’m going crazy

By aragorn | Published: August 10, 2010

This time around I am not going to start with the first part of my notes (which I do chronologically) and end with the final notes but reverse my order. As a result of going A->Z I’ve probably given a lot more attention to Yarostan’s letters rather than Sophia’s. Around the time I was learning […]

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The Great Lesson VII – Criticism of letter 7

By aragorn | Published: August 3, 2010

I find the back and forth about who really loved who or who loved an apparition instead of the person tiresome. The flatness of Perlman’s character development is apparent here and I don’t love Letters of Insurgents because the characters are plausible. I love Letters of Insurgents because of the way that the ideas are […]

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The Great Lesson – VI

By aragorn | Published: July 27, 2010

A review is in order. I read Letters of Insurgents as a great work on how to do criticism: a humane story about two sharp people cutting each other to size in appropriate, if harsh and perhaps mean-at-times, ways. This criticism ranges far beyond the tome of Letters of Insurgents or the dynamics between two […]

Also posted in criticism, criticism of criticism, labels, love | Comments closed

Letters of Insurgents: Just Dance

By rocinante | Published: July 24, 2010

Dancing in the Dark (you can’t start a fire, without a spark) I’m still in the midst of finishing Letters #6 and so far I’ve read about half-way through. It has been a busy week with old friends visiting from far away, the usual suspect (work), and a little thing called a leaf storm (which, […]

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Letters of Insurgents: Part 3 (y más)

By rocinante | Published: July 19, 2010

You can do anything you want “impossibility is a term of logic and reality doesn’t observe the limits of logic” – Sophie (page #382) Wow. It has been a while, and for a moment there I fell behind a bit in the reading and writing about that reading. The conversation is always there, it is […]

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Letter of Insurgents: The Great Lesson V

By aragorn | Published: July 18, 2010

This is the first chapter of the book that I have re-read in the book itself. Times have changed for me and now I spend 80% of my waking hours in front of a screen and so it is just more convenient for me to read the wonderful version of the text that we put […]

Also posted in criticism, criticism of criticism, personal | Comments closed

What is new with Little Black Cart – Summer 2010

By lbc | Published: July 13, 2010

Spring was a great time for LBC. The Bay Area bookfair was great and the NYC bookfair was a great deal of fun. We even had a quick trip up to Olympia! We watched 10,000 copies ofAfter the Fall pass into the hands of people who found spectacular use for it. We also watched the […]

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The Great Lesson – Part IV

By aragorn | Published: July 11, 2010

Loss and authenticity We are past the intensely critical part of the novel and are now moving onto the great descriptive portion. Letter four is about a carton factory, a university occupation and all of the characters in Yarostan & Sophia’s life. It is about the specific nature of peoples behavior and how the consequences […]

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Letter of Insurgents: The Great Lesson III

By aragorn | Published: July 1, 2010

I am writing about this book again after years of absence, because of how formative the book was in my thinking about criticism (and specifically criticism as a form of communication and engagement with written material). The relationships in this story are still the model I use when considering what I mean and what I […]

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Letters of Insurgents: Part 2

By rocinante | Published: June 22, 2010

losing your illusion in the land of gigantic objects and monstrous toys Hello there world. It has been a busy week, with the official start of summer, and one more set of letters. One idea that really sticks out for me in this set of letters that of illusion. The title of this blog is […]

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Letters of Insurgents: The Great Lesson II

By aragorn | Published: June 21, 2010

This week’s submission is going to be a little short. I think I need to pace myself (I still have eight weeks after this one) but there are so many themes from this week’s reading that I’must dig into, including a rich quote from Sophia about memory exercises, the concept that political people have “the […]

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Letters of Insurgents 1: The Great Lesson

By aragorn | Published: June 12, 2010

I want to preface this by stating that I am going to speak to Letters of Insurgents with a combination of personal journal and exposition as this is both a book that is very personal to me and deserves some analysis beyond the personal. Anyone who knows me knows that I am a very angry […]

Also posted in ajoda, Anarchists, anger, criticism of criticism, punk | Comments closed

Letters of Insurgents: Part 1

By rocinante | Published: June 10, 2010

So, things are heating up over at Insurgent Summer, a participatory reading of Letters of Insurgents. Tomorrow is the deadline for the first letters to be completed, and I’ve just finished them, so I’ll try and write down some thoughts to get the ball slowly rolling. I’m going to try and do this for every […]

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History’s instrument was a firing squad!

By rocinante | Published: May 18, 2010

[photo from the insurrection in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico on May 19th, 1911] Summer has almost arrived and with that, everyone’s favorite hope of free time is being watered and with patience, (perhaps even) growing. What will your summer look like? The grasshopper or ant? Of the many things happening this summer, here is one that […]

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