Communism

Speaking of Armed Cell, I've been reading Brian Ang's new Berkeley Neo-Baroque chapbook and it's straight up audacious, no doubt about it!

It's called Communism and it begins with a poem entitled "Third Part of "A"-9" (BOLD!) which runs "Donna mi prega" through the ringer yet again (w/ all the appropriate pyrotechnics, etc.) using Badiou as his interlocutor (rather than, say, Marx or Spinoza). Brazen!

THEN Ang has this suite of poems that's meant to "resonate dimensionally" as you read across four poems at once (a simultaneity Zukofsky was fond of, for sure, and which, according to ME, was inspired by reading James Clerk Maxwell's science textbooks!). Ang calls this form "Late Dialectics." I call it going big or going home!

Here's "Inaesthetics" (Badiou!):

of truth-value before silence-speech
which subtracts from their alternation

a crushing victory for democracy
unthinkable by terror-virtue

nothing but takes and editing
mathematical correspondence

imperial democratic phraseology
atoms by degrees of existence

the virtual spies with hats
a tsunami of avant-garde rats

what are numbers
the relation is total

entirely nothing than one riven
after a delay of varying length

below the encyclopedia of the situation
a moving division forever tangled

sexuated topology
hard-working between differences

kinds of inscriptions
pieces of the game

a symptom too little too much
intuitive universality variable

politics thought traversed
requirements of the epoch

masterplan as drawn
as implemented existence

to think change in being
intellectual racist blustering

no concessions to democratic debate
production by the finite of an infinite

the international moribund creeds
the exceptional stable paradox

the slow repressive inversion
not good-bad but is or is not

a transcendental algebra for the evaluation
necessarily

imperative and immobility called masculine
wandering and story called feminine

the affirmation of chance
the possible objects at once pure and solid

[END ANG]

A tsunami of avant-garde rats, indeed! You'll have to get the chapbook yourself to read this baby in the context of its suite. Head over to Berkeley Neo-Baroque here for the hook-up.