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This has been the spring for the Gothic strain of specters that Derrida stirred up in Marx in the bloggysphere; yet, so far, nobody has mentioned the name, Jack Zipes. Zipes is famous in the folklore field, or rather, literary folklore field, for applying a Marxist analysis to his study of the Grimm Brother’s Märchen. Zipes, who has also translated and written about Ernst Bloch, seems to have taken Bloch’s sympathy for grassroots peasant radicalism and applied it in a field where, usually, research tends towards a Freudian or Jungian end. Well, archetypes r us has a large American market – and perhaps I shouldn’t laugh. The softening of the American imago – stoic, a loner, a killer – owes a lot to an earnest search for a spirituality that isn’t so persistently shadowed by the cross – and don’t we all want a less wifebeater friendly, a less “God is a bullet” national culture? Sometimes, crawling in this mire of shit and sperm through the valley of the shadow of death that I laughingl

By the way – re the price of oil – as I wrote a week ago, the main driver of the oil price spike recently has been insecurity. The threats against Iran by Israel, and the futile campaign, led by the U.S., to stop the Iranians from engaging in the uranium enrichment program that they are entitled to at least as much as India (where the U.S. has loaned technically illegal support) and Pakistan, have a cost. The cost can be computed at about 50 cents to a dollar a gallon. Here, for further proof of a series of events that the press, in its neocon wisdom, has simply taken off the table for consideration, is a Financial Times article about the effect of the sanctions in slowing down the development of one of the prime oil fields in the world – in Iran. Of course, if this was Venezuala taking a field out of commission, there’d be the usual dyspeptic drumbeat. But stories like this about Iran aren’t meant for the morons or the children – they might start doubting the wisdom of our establishme

Well, Mr. Praxis, at least, liked yesterday’s post ( sniff, sniff ). (I've even lost North, who usually comes in to stronghand me when I emanate self-pity - and by the way, I hope you see that I am emanating self-pity about my self-pity! Trust LI to go Meta!) To take up yesterday’s thread – we last watched the wolf, or werewolf, merrily hop down the path of pins, and end up, via a Loony Tunes loop traversing space, time and genre, at the pin factory at the beginning of the Wealth of Nations. Of course, the question is – what kind of pin factory is this? It seems to be one that physically exists, one that Smith, our genial author, has seen, according to his own written word. Yet no such factory visit seems to have been recorded elsewhere. Plus, textual cues seem to point to the factory being, in actuality, in France – in the pages of the entry on pin, épingle, in the Encyclopedie. And that pin factory seems to have been in L'aigle, in Normandy. About which we have information t

Half a pound of heroin half a pound of treacle that's the way the story goes out comes the evil... LI has been contemplating one of the great lines of English verse over the course of the last couple of days, to wit, Rochester’s “And with my prick I'll govern all the land....” from the play, Sodom. But I’ve contemplated myself temporarily blind, vis a vis my Dom Juan thesis, so I’ll do Rochester at another time. Instead, today’s lesson from the book of LI (written by the archangels in seraphic blood) is about pins. As in how many economists dance upon the head of a pin? You know the answer – all of them. Ho ho. In the 1760s, there was a controversy in Britain about a supposed Scots epic, Ossian, which had been “found” by a poet and published. Ossian was a forgery. Meanwhile, the real Scots epic was a-forging – that is, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. Smith provided the Homeric theology to this thing we be callin’ capitalism. So, unsurprisingly, small academic industries hav

Sundays are the days when we in the LI office lounge around, order out for margaritas, and have long, intense conversations with Brit on our cellphone. For a Britneyphile, this has been a crammed week – but aren’t they all? The baby. The disturbing advice from Mel (if we’ve told her once, we’ve told her a million times – check anything he tells you in the Kabbalah first!). And of course her Mom’s book. This Sunday, though, we mainly chatted about the whether Tracy Feith’s rather busy print dresses were for her, although of course, such conversation is tres confidential. Instead of our Britney Sunday, we will address another subject. Most people come to LI for one reason and one reason only: nude pics of Lady Bitch Ray! That there are no nude pics of Lady Bitch Ray on this site hasn’t seemed to discouraged the hordes of horny lemmings, who apparently can’t live another day without seeing LBR’s pussy. Oh don’t ask why! Oh, don’t ask why! Now the singer we’d really like to promote in the

LI has been immensely irritated with the thumbsucking pieces in the papers about the runup in the cost of oil. The conventional wisdom, in a gesture of blind self-protection, has so molded the issue so that its setpoints are: either the price reflects speculation, or it reflects demand. This is a very convenient way to ignore the drivers of the recent spike in oil prices. What are they? There are two of them. One was the infusion of credit into the financial institutions managed by the Fed for six months now – which, not coincidentally, is the period of the biggest spike in oil prices. Fed policy, as well, trashed the value of the dollar. So, as consumer credit tightened and the largest sector of the credit boom dried up - securitized mortgage instruments - money, understandably, sought a new outlet. Thus, the futures boom in the commodities. However, the underlying structural reason for the price rises has been security. It was due to the tight tie between oil production and security