From Freedom News (30/08/2024).
When I discovered the Freedom Press collection of Alex Comfort’s anarchist and anti-militarist writings, I’d already known him for 15 years as the author of The Joy of Sex. This pioneering couples’ manual, which featured ‘aesthetic’/’tasteful’ illustrations drawn from photos, spent more than 70 weeks in the New York Times bestseller top five and 11 in the top position. Generally and for its time, the book showed a remarkably liberatory and egalitarian approach to cis/hetero/sexuality based on play and gentleness. “The Joy of Sex was the anarchist manifesto that conquered 1970s suburbia—” wrote cultural historian Matthew Sweet, “a radical text that found a place on the shelves of millions of readers who didn’t know Kropotkin from Kermit the Frog.”
Anarchism was a general background to Comfort’s thinking, like water to a fish, in his own words. He was an early founder of both the anti-nuclear movement and the field of gerontology (old age care) and a writer of poetry, fiction and cultural critique. His life has long deserved the book Eric Laursen has finally given it, and Polymath is a pleasure to read. The title refers to a person “whose knowledge embraces a wide range of complex subjects and, more importantly, often calls on several of them at once to address complex problems.” Laursen is a great storyteller who excels at balancing taking you forward through Comfort’s life while moving between his diverse pursuits and ideas. I also learnt a lot from his discussions of the political and intellectual context.
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Ghassan Salhab: Trompe-l’œil
From Lundi Matin #441, 02/09/2024.
What if old words like ‘genocide’ (and why not ‘colonisation’) were false friends? What if the new technologies that subjugate our emotions when we think we’re expressing them were also betraying us? And what if we ourselves were betraying the witnesses in this way? And how can we articulate more than snatches of truth when events take our breath away? This text is not an answer. No answer to the ongoing tragedy is a text.
O gentlemen, the time of life is short!
To spend that shortness basely were too long
If life did ride upon a dial’s point,
Still ending at the arrival of an hour.
And if we live, we live to tread on kings;
William Shakespeare, King Henry IV, The First Part
Having to prove every day, every night, every moment, that we are being colonised, occupied, exploited, expelled, decimated and eradicated, and all of this well before a supposedly fateful date, having to prove again and again massacre after massacre, having to prove the devastating process of ethnic and cultural cleansing that began more than seven decades ago and continues unabated, that is the absolute tragedy, the tragedy of the Palestinians. Having to prove that you are being exterminated, having to prove it over and over again. Because no, ‘our’ images prove nothing, they are not ‘their’ images. ‘Nor are our words. Our dead even less so.
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