Matt Colquhoun's Blog, page 30

Notes on Capitalist Surrealism

Surrealism, refusing any hereafter apart from this world and professing a doctrine of immanence, is nevertheless, inasmuch as it disqualifies the objective World, the messenger of some transcendence. Ferdinand Alquié, in his Philosophy of Surrealism, makes clear a tension I have always struggled to elucidate in the work of Mark Fisher — the tension between […]

Home

I’ve been talking to my therapist a lot about home. Moving to Newcastle and saying goodbye to a relationship has felt like losing a sense of home. That is harder than anything, not least because it unearths so much adoption trauma. Home – both in terms of bricks and mortar, and being in each other’s […]

Our Last Night Together

Lately I’ve realised how many songs have been written on the theme of a last night before a goodbye, but none feel as harrowing as the closer to Arthur Russell’s World of Echo. The simplicity of the song speaks not only of love let go but encapsulates the album’s very reverberations. It’s not certain who […]

The K-Files: Episode #04 — “Have You Been Enjoying Yourself?”

ICYMI, this week we hopped from the CCRU to the Hyperstition blog, reading a post Mark wrote about Stanley Kubrick’s last film, Eyes Wide Shut. For more info, check out the Buddies website.

Notes Against Reading Widely (For a Pluralist Militancy)

Based on two Twitter threads from earlier, gathered together for posterity. I made it three whole months without prodding any of the old Spiked Online / Zer0 2.0 network — as was my New Years resolution — but their creeping influence in the UK, as more people try and copy the US model of edgelord […]

Peterson versus Foucault

Twitter is doing as Twitter does this evening. It’s a deeply ugly and uncomfortable place to be. But no, it’s not increasingly unhinged chatter about Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine. Philosophy Twitter is engaging in “Was Foucault a nonce?” discourse again. Jordan Peterson is the reason why, somewhat unsurprisingly. He’s been on Wikipedia again and […]

Wound Stories: The Orphan-Unconscious in Harry Potter and Anti-Oedipus

I bought the book recommended to me by my analyst the other day: Jeanette Winterson’s Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? I was expecting the sort of book I’ve read a dozen times before: the Hallmark adoption story of a child who seeks and finds wholeness. Instead, I got the most perfect and […]

Move (Part One)

I’m in the midst of moving up to Newcastle at the moment. Lots of shifting feelings and shifting lots of boxes. Here are some photos from a few moments of respite between the stress and the tears and the heavy lifting: collecting Seaham sea glass, a night at the Brinkburn St Brewery and a nostalgic […]

The Spectre of Indie Sleaze

In mid-2021, a TikTok landed on my for-you-page that sent shivers cascading down my spine. A popular trend forecaster I’d been following for some time, Mandy Lee, announced there was an “obscene amount of evidence that the indie sleaze/Tumblr aesthetic” was coming back. I’ve seen a few mentions of “indie sleaze” of late. It seems that it […]

Egress Review: “Un lenguaje común” by Óscar Brox

Here’s a lovely review of the Spanish translation of Egress by Óscar Brox, published on Détour. I’m fascinated by the threads that Spanish reviewers are pulling out, compared to those written on home soil. I did get a general sense that the response to my book in the UK was as some sort of perversion […]