#Alain Ginsberg

[honeyleesblog]

Astrological Outlook and Personality Analysis for Individuals with a June 3rd Birthday

Smart, chatty, exuberant and with a unique capacity for movement and change of climate, with a specific propensity to the roaming life. Imperious, anxious, dynamic, fiery individuals - they show conciliatory abilities and can capably track down their lifestyle. They frequently show a specific familial person, despite the fact that they are typically enthusiastically forfeited for other people. They can be impassive, chilly, unconventional. The best calling for individuals brought into the world on this day is connected with scholarly work, the press, news-casting, instructing or travel. They likewise show surprising expertise in manual work and have creative capacities. Their imperfections: they are to some degree malignant, bad tempered, and, surprisingly, handily irritated. They appreciate sterile contentions and immaterial questions. These imperfections are more unmistakable in individuals brought into the world during the day. What undermines them? Collaboration and associations with others will be fairly challenging for them. They will most likely be unable to pivot unreasonable changes, whether inside or brought about by life altering situations. In such a case, your life is spent in interruptions and diversion. Astrological Outlook and Personality Analysis for Individuals with a June 3rd Birthday 

 Assuming your birthday is June 3, your zodiac sign is Gemini June 3 - character and character character: great, autonomous, focused, adversary, mean, awful calling: model, fireman, designer tones: beige, purple, daffodil stone: pearl creature: camel plant: red oak fortunate numbers: 5,14,16,24,26,27 very fortunate number: 32 Occasions and observances - June 3 World bike Day Banner of Argentina.svg Argentina: Italian Settler Day. Regulation 24,561 June 3 VIP birthday events. Who was conceived that very day as you? 1901: Josდ© Lins do Rego, Brazilian essayist and columnist (d. 1957). 1903: Pedro Garcდ­a de la Huerta Matte, Chilean government official (f. 1994). 1906: Josephine Pastry specialist, French artist and artist (d. 1975). 1910: Wilfred Thesiger, English wayfarer and essayist (d. 2003). 1911: Paulette Goddard, American entertainer (f. 1990). 1913: Pedro Mir, Dominican public writer (f. 2000). 1916: Aldo Zeoli, Argentine military and astronautical architect (f. 2003). 1922: Alain Resnais, French producer (d. 2014). 1924: Olga Lamas, tango vocalist, with a diverting collection (f. 1988). 1924: Jimmy Rogers, American blues artist. 1924: Torsten Wiesel, Swedish analyst, 1981 Nobel Prize victor for medication and physiology (d. 1997). 1925: Tony Curtis, American entertainer (d. 2010). 1926: Allen Ginsberg, American writer (d. 1997). 1927: Eliseo Mourino, Argentine soccer player (d. 1961). 1928: Donald Judd, American stone worker (d. 1994). 1929: Werner Arber, Swiss microbiologist, 1978 Nobel Prize victor for physiology or medication. 1930: Marion Zimmer Bradley, American essayist (d. 1999). 1931: Raდºl Castro, Cuban lawmaker and progressive, sibling of Fidel Castro (1926-2016) and leader of Cuba somewhere in the range of 2008 and 2018. 1931: Walter Malosetti, Argentine jazz guitarist and arranger (f. 2013). 1931: John Norman, American sci-fi author. 1931: Lindy Remigino, American competitor. 1933: Roberto Bodegas, Spanish movie producer. 1933: Anthony Harvey, American movie producer. 1935: Carlos Jimდ©nez Villarejo, Spanish law specialist. 1935: Imanol Murua, Spanish legislator (f. 2008). 1936: Larry McMurtry, American writer and screenwriter. 1936: Enric Gensana, Spanish footballer (d. 2005). 1939: Steve Dalkowski, American baseball player. 1939: Marcos Velდ¡squez, Uruguayan performer and artist (d. 2010). 1942: Curtis Mayfield, American performer (d. 1999). 1943: Billy Cunningham, American b-ball player. 1944: Edith McGuire, American competitor. 1944: Tony Vilas, Argentine entertainer (f. 2013). 1945: Isabel de los დ?ngeles Ruano, Guatemalan author and artist. 1946: Michael Clarke American performer, of the band The Byrds. 1946: Penelope Wilton, English entertainer. 1947: Mickey Finn, English percussionist, of the band T. Rex. 1948: Carlos Franzetti, Argentine writer, piano player and arranger, champ of a Latin Grammy grant. 1950: Frდ©dდ©ric Franდ§ois, Italian vocalist and arranger. 1950: Suzi Quatro, American vocalist and entertainer. 1952: Billy Powell, American keyboardist, of the Lynyrd Skynyrd band. 1954: Dulce (f. 2003) and Inma Chacდ³n, Spanish authors. 1954: Jiri Georg Dokoupil, German vanguard painter, brought into the world in Czechoslovakia. 1954: Claudio Hohmann, Chilean specialist and legislator. 1954: Angela Irene, Argentine people vocalist. 1956: Danny Wilde, American performer, of the band The Rembrandts. 1961: Lawrence Lessig, American attorney and author. 1962: Susannah Constantine, English style advisor. 1964: Doro, German vocalist, of the band Warlock. 1964: Kerry Lord, American guitarist, of the band Slayer. 1964: James Purefoy, English entertainer. 1967: Takehiro Ohno, Japanese-Argentine culinary specialist. 1970: Peter Tდ¤gtgren, Swedish performer, of the Deception band. 1973: Sargis Sargsian, Armenian tennis player. 1973: Tonmi Lillman, American performer, of the band Lordi. 1973: Sebastiდ¡n Teysera, Uruguayan vocalist, from the band La Vela Puerca. 1974: Kelly Jones, Welsh vocalist, of the band Stereophonics. 1974: Martდ­n Karpan, Argentine entertainer. 1975: Russel Hobbs, American drummer, of the Gorillaz band. 1977: Cristiano Marques Gomes, Brazilian soccer player. 1979: Redimi2 (Willy Gonzდ¡lez Cruz), Dominican Christian rap vocalist. 1982: Yelena Isinbდ¡yeva, Russian competitor. 1983: Javiera Mena, Chilean vocalist lyricist, maker and performer. 1985: Papiss Cissდ©, Senegalese footballer. 1985: Dan Ewing, Australian entertainer. 1985: Tavion La'Corey Mathis, American vocalist, of the band Pretty Ricky. 1985: ვ?ukasz Piszczek, Clean footballer. 1986: Rafael Nadal, Mallorcan tennis player. 1986: Al Horford, Dominican b-ball player. 1987: Lalaine, American entertainer and vocalist. 1987: Masami Nagasawa, Japanese entertainer. 1988: Tomomi Nakagawa, Japanese vocalist. 1989: Imogen Poots, English entertainer. 1989: Megu, Japanese vocalist, of the band Negicco. 1991: Natasha Dupeyrდ³n, Mexican entertainer. 1992: Mario Gდ¶tze, German footballer. 1998: Logan Fabbro, Canadian entertainer and artist.

[lifeinpoetry]

Yes, I want to die, but all I have been able to do is kill, again and again, so I hope to plant myself, dirt hands into dirt making dirt body a succulent, something manageable, but needing management.

— Alain Ginsberg, from “Poem in Which I Transition into a Succulent,” published in wildness

[buttonpoetry]

Our next chapbook finalist is Aeon (Alain) Ginsberg, for the manuscript FACTS // DISCLAIMERS. Check out this poem from their book!

[nostroviapress]

N!P’s 2017 Pushcart Prize Nominations

Nostrovia! Press is excited to announce our nominations for The Pushcart Prize:

Alain Ginsberg @alainginsbergofficial – “on ‘shim’”

Katie Clark – “february water”

Joseph Parker Okay @josephparkerokay – “how many red caterpillars are in the world hold on let me count”

While we’re sharing these pieces with you, a final reminder that our 2017 Chapbook Series can be found as limited edition, pay-what-you-can printed chapbooks. 

But for now, enjoy these fantastic pieces:

on "shim"

Shim, noun, a thin strip of metal used to align parts, make them fit, reduce wear / I was first aware of the word in middle school, how there was a need for a word and no one to tell us it was not the right word, all interest in aligning the parts to the idea of a body, make fit, reduce, reduce, reduce / Shim, noun, not quite a boy, not a real woman / example / is that human, that he-she, that shim / example / she is not a woman for how she believes herself to be, that's a shim, or, synonym, something flaming or, synonym, combustible or, synonym, to be laid onto a pyre or, synonym, if you burn someone at the stake you will gain five more minutes of warmth.

I research shim the same way I research everything else; how long will it take for me to die after being one? A friend is followed by a military man, which is to say someone who wishes for Chelsea Manning to not pass out as the flames lick her screaming mouth, and the police pull my friend over, let them be doused for how easily the parts align / and making a body fit into a machine to be able to watch it leave you /

Shim, verb, wedge to fill space, and we do so overcrowd this planet, losing water, food, and autonomy, and when the ocean drowns the land, whose bones will we use to build boats of? Whose going to fill the caskets or, synonym, who will eat all of the bullets or, synonym, who will we let ourselves consume when the non-human animals perish or,

antonym,

I drift through crowds like a ghost, I am a ghost, I am spectator or spectre, or no one sees me in what would not be called a campfire or in this world the same pieces used to align machinery will be used to destroy it, to throw ourselves on the cogs of that which kills, when they see my body burning the world, they will only be able to call out my name open-mouthed and without breath.

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february water

moves like milk does: it doesn’t.

this was never something i picked out. i just watched you walk across a lake, and it was mid-winter,       and so it happened.

i think today i loved you, which is another way of saying it doesn’t always happen in the order that it happened.

on monday, i found my last-year body floating in the lake you walked across. there was no reflection. the lake has thawed and frozen over again, and again, and she is less for it. she was angry i cut my hair.

tuesday, we are in the basement and you are holding spines. i watch as they clean crooked curl around your fingers, alive, somehow, and not. to think this was body, but now, here in your hands: bone. a week later, there was my spine and how you held it, but i don’t remember that part.  

wednesday, i am still lying on your desk, your hands and the projector light are dewing over my shoulders like morning. you kiss me even though my jacket

is orange and i like how the cold tastes on you.

thursday, a year after this, my partner reaches for me, but i no longer have any bones. i’m trying to tell you i think i know how the story ends now.

friday, i don’t know what it means or what it doesn’t that i accidentally smiled at you in passing. i heard you have a job that makes you grateful and that makes me grateful. i need you to know you did not ruin me.

what’s left of saturday: gold glitter and whiskey spit. my friend leaves, you stay, we all regret this.

i was wearing my roommate’s basketball jersey. i do not think i brushed my teeth before. i remember it like this: i don’t. i had breakfast.

you tell me i didn’t say yes, but that we could try it again. you said you didn’t have to tell me; i hated you for that.

sunday, i wake up with your body by my body like a needed fact. it happened. it still happens, but less now.   the week starts over. i think maybe this time, i will pull myself out of the lake, walk her home.

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how many red caterpillars are in the world hold on let me count

nuyan is riding a bike through a forest. “i’m the frickin fastest bike rider in this dang ass forest” says nuyan. suddenly they hit a fallen tree and go flying thru the air. they do 13 flips before landing in the unsuspecting arms of a large, beautiful bear. the bear looks down and is shocked and immediately begins to weep. the bear has been alone and scared in this forest for so long and now she finally has a friend.

nuyan starts singing “crazy town” by ozzy osbourne to calm the beautiful bear down. and it works!! the bear actually starts singing along!!!!

and!! she has a beautiful voice!!!!

“wow” nuyan thinks to themself, “i could take this bear back to civilization with me and make a fortune taking her on day-time talk shows” but then instantly feels upset with themself and pushes the thought from their mind. 

nuyan knows their upbringing in a capitalistic society is to blame for intrusive thoughts like these. they have truly no interest in profiting at the expense of others and it makes nuyan sad to know that in the society they live it’s considered “subversive” to look at the beauty in the world and not want to exploit it.

the bear finishes singing the song and does a cartwheel. it makes nuyan feel 100% better. they tell the bear they will come back to see her tomorrow and then rides their bike away without holding onto the handlebars.

the beautiful bear is so extremely happy and sleeps 13 hours that night. while she’s asleep she has a dream that she’s in the dmv. the bear does 7 kick flips in a row and then pushes mongo out of the dmv. in the parking lot she does a 50-50 grind on the back bumper of hulk hogan’s stretch limo.

the bear skates to a nearby park and jumps off the skateboard. she walks over to a palo verde tree and starts licking it. 

“o wow” the bear says between licks. “i can’t believe this tree grows without any bark. it’s as if over millions of years of evolution it’s learned it can trust the world around it not to harm it and can now take the energy it would have used building defenses in ways that are beneficial to itself and its surrounding environment.” all the tree licking makes the bear’s tongue dry so she walks over to the bubbler.

“‘bubbler’ is what people in specific parts of wisconsin call water fountains” the bear explains even tho there isn’t anyone around to hear her.

… weird .. …. it’s almost as if she knows she’s in a story and is aware there are probably some people reading the story who aren’t familiar with this specific regional jargon?

hmmm.

seems suspicious maybe.

the bear goes over to a park bench and continues talking to herself.

“wow” says the bear. “there’s so much we can learn from trees if only we’d start to pay more attention.” the beautiful bear falls asleep on the bench for 3 weeks and when she wakes up in the dream she wakes up in real life. the sun has just started to rise and the bear gets excited all over again when she remembers she’s going to have company today. she does 10 minutes of yoga and then goes out to find a large pinecone to give nuyan as a gift for being her new best friend.

the end

[bostonpoetryslam]

how salty I am lately and how bad that must be / for my health but I am / preserved meat / I am seasoned / well enough or cooked long enough to have the blood dry out

Alain Ginsberg, “Clipping My Nails In Artifact At The Communal Table,” published in Lambda Literary

[queenmobs]

Two Poems from Alain Ginsberg

ON BEING FIRED FOR THE FIRST TIME FOR BEING TRANS, THE AUTHOR BUYS A BOTTLE OF MEAD FOR THE CONTAINER

in the short version of the story I will say I was fired and it is sad, will joke and laugh and say how many arms we were up in. fuck the boss man and his prejudice and how unsurprising for this embrace to find my shoulders, to be let go of and not have to worry if it was me or who I am and not tell the parts of the story where I take the money slid between the folds of my last paycheck, will call this blood money, call this the time where I collect my body back from the grave, broke bread and shared wine as the criminal sent to the gallows but only after the burial, how all of my sins are crimes for their ability of keeping me alive and for this we must find other ways. how mortal I am for thinking I could work the job and not be broken until I am broke.

in the version of the story I want to share I will say that when my hair is pulled back, you say that you got a thing for working girls and I’m comforted because I always work, always try to find the parts of me to hide and what to accentuate, how I don’t feel the need to hide myself anymore, when there is a halo around the moon it’s because of a high altitude cirrus cloud, that glow is also my gender, and you the cloud, for this I will pull my hair back and receive the text from the manager whose mouthfire changes me working-girl to just girl, maybe. in this version I will tell people about all of my free time and no one will laugh, no one will talk about the hours we have sold to eat, drink, survive and sustain each other and how resilient we must be to eat the slaps that feed us most, how full this stomach has been and how red this face is for it. in this version my coworkers don’t quit with me and instead I drink less and learn to knit, how good I am at holding things together, how that does not apply to myself.

in the version of the story I don’t tell I thank the chef who saw this body and found it unfit for him to be lecherous toward, how little I could be consumed all gristle bone body sinew. I thank the chef for being honest, the first in a long line of aggressive men to call the sun too bright to look at and how much I do glow now and how hard it is to see me before the storm, and I leave.

READ MORE

[thelonguepuree]

Infrarealist Manifesto

WHAT DO WE PROPOSE? TO NOT MAKE WRITING A PROFESSION TO SHOW THAT EVERYTHING IS ART AND THAT EVERYBODY CAN DO IT TO DEAL WITH “INSIGNIFICANT THINGS”/ WITHOUT INSTITUTIONAL VALUE/ TO PLAY/ ART SHOULD BE UNLIMITED IN QUANTITY, ACCESSIBLE TO ALL, AND, IF POSSIBLE, MADE BY ALL

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

REFUTE ART/ REFUTE DAILY LIFE (DUCHAMP) AT A TIME THAT SEEMS NEARLY ENTIRELY BLOCKED OFF FOR PROFESSIONAL OPTIMISTS TRANSFORM ART/ TRANSFORM DAILY LIFE (US)

CREATIVITY/ LIFE MISALIGNED AT ALL COSTS (TO SHAKE THE HIPS OF THE PRESENT WITH EYELASHES BATTING FROM THE AIRPORTS OF THE FUTURE) AT A TIME WHEN MURDERS HAVE BEEN DISGUISED AS SUICIDES

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

TO CONVERT LECTURE HALLS INTO SHOOTING RANGES (WOULD DEBRAY SAY/ THE CARNAVAL IN THE CARNAVAL?)

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

BEETHOVEN, RACINE & MICHAELANGELO STOPPED BEING THE MOST USEFUL THE MOST AMPHETAMENIC, THE MOST NOURISHING: SOUND BARRIERS THE LABYRINTHS OF SPEED (OH JAMES DEAN!) ARE BREAKING APART ELSEWHERE

”””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””

TO GET PEOPLE OUT OF THEIR DEPENDENCY AND PASSIVITY TO SEEK UNPRECEDENTED MEANS OF INTERVENTION & OF DECISION IN THE WORLD

TO DEMYSTIFY/ TO BECOME AGITATORS NOTHING HUMAN IS ALIEN TO US (GOOD) NOTHING UTOPIAN IS ALIEN TO US (REALLY GOOD)

======================

AT THIS TIME MORE THAN BEFORE THE ARTISTIC PROBLEM CANNOT BE CONSIDERED AS AN INTERNAL STRUGGLE OF TENDENCIES/ BUT RATHER AS ABOVE ALL A TACIT STRUGGLE (ALMOST DECLARED) BETWEEN THOSE WHO WHETHER THEY KNOW IT OR NOT ARE WITH THE SYSTEM OR AIM TO CONSERVE IT AND PROLONG IT/ AND THOSE WHO IN A CONSCIOUS FASHION OR NOT WISH TO MAKE IT EXPLODE

********************

ART IN THIS COUNTRY HAS NOT ADVANCED PAST A LITTLE TECHNICAL COURSE FOR EXERCISING MEDIOCRITY DECORATIVELY

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

“ONLY THOSE MEN FREE OF ALL BONDS MAY CARRY FLAME SUFFICIENTLY FAR” ANDRÉ BRETON

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

TO RETURN TO ART THE NOTION OF A PASSIONATE & CONVULSIVE LIFE

-------------------

CULTURE IS NOT IN BOOKS NOR IN PAINTINGS OR STATUES IT IS IN THE NERVES/ IN THE FLUIDITY OF THE NERVES/ CLEARER PROPOSITION: A CULTURE MADE FLESH/ A CULTURE IN FLESH, IN SENSITIVITY (THIS OLD DREAM OF ANTONIN ARTAUD)

5555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555

ALL THAT EXISTS: THE FIELD OF OUR ACTIVITY / AND THE FRANTIC SEARCH FOR WHAT DOES NOT YET EXIST

********************************************* OUR FINALITY IS (THE TRUTH) PRACTICAL SUBVERSION &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

EXAMPLE OF TOTAL ART TOTAL SCULPTURE (AND WITH MOVEMENT): A RALLY OF 10,000 TO 20,000 PEOPLE SUPPORTING THE STRIKE OF THE DEMOCRATIC TENDENCY OF THE ELECTRICAL WORKERS’ UNION TOTAL MUSIC: A TRIP ON MUSHROOMS THROUGH THE MAZATECA SIERRA TOTAL PAINTING: CLAUDIA KERIK BACKWARDS & FORWARDS TOTAL POETRY: THIS INTERVIEW DISTRIBUTED BY TELEPATHY OR BY JUST THE MOVEMENT OF MY HAIR (OF AN AFRICAN LION) AND ALL ITS ELECTRIC CHARGE

33333333333333333333333333333333333

WORLDS PEOPLE VIBES THAT INTEREST ME NICANOR PARRA CATULLUS QUEVEDO LAUTRÉAMONT MAGRITTE DE CHIRICO ARTAUD VACHÉ JARRY BRETON BORIS VIAN BURROUGHS GINSBERG KEROUAC KAFKA BAKUNIN CHAPLIN GODARD FASSBINDER ALAIN TANNER FRANCIS BACON DUBUFFET GEORGE SEGAL JUAN RAMÍREZ RUIZ VALLEJO CHE GUEVARA ENGELS “THAT MASTER OF SARCASM” THE PARIS COMMUNE THE SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL THE EPIC OF THOSE STRANDED FROM THE GRANMA (I WAS FORGETTING THAT) HIERONYMUS BOSCH (NOT TO BE MISSED) WILHELM REICH THE MYSTICAL PORNOGRAPHY OF CHARLES MAGNUS THE MULTICOLOR EROTICS OF TOM WESSELMAN JOHN CAGE JULIAN BECK JUDITH MALINA & HER LIVING THEATER (AND TO CONCLUDE) MARQUIS DE SADE HÉCTOR APOLINAR ROBERTO BOLAÑO JOSÉ REVUELTAS (AND HIS DISCOVERY THAT THE DIALECTIC CAN SOMETIMES WALK LIKE A CRAB) JUDITH GARCÍA CLAUDIA SOL (AND EVEN ON CLOUDY DAYS) CLAUDIA SOL

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

WE CAN SHOOT TWO REVOLVERS AT THE SAME TIME/ SAID BUFFALO BILL MORE THAN ONCE

STUPIDITY IS NOT OUR STRONG SUIT (ALFRED JARRY DIXIT)

[lefeusacre-editions]

BOOKHOUSE GIRL #53 | ANNA d’ANNUNZIO, actrice et terminatrix

Anna d’Annunzio devrait être l’actrice préférée de tout le monde. Bien entendu, ce serait insupportable. Mais seulement pour elle. Repérée une fois pour toutes, quoique demeurant quatre fois inatrappable, dans le sublimement important L’Etrange couleur des larmes de ton corps de Cattet & Forzani, d’Annunzio tresse un pont nu entre la totale star parfumée d’aurores boréales et la femme de coeur avec laquelle il faut / on peut converser - tu en ressors agrandi pour l’hiver et la saison d’après, minimum. Anna d’Annunzio est aujourd’hui la dialoguiste-poétesse d’AZMANDEH, une bande noire et sang dessinée par Alain Poncelet, entre stryge et berbalang, louve rougie et morsure nyctalope perchée sur toutes les épaules, dont le premier volume a été révélé au BIFFF ( Brussels International Fantastic Film Festival). Une autofiction nécropolitaine entachée de superbe, de fesse et de sucettes à l’hémoglobine, dont la suite est attendue avec fièvre et tics faciaux. Ad’A, dite Daz, est notre Bookhouse Girl de la semaine, enfin.

| Que trouve-t-on comme nouvelles acquisitions dans ta bibliothèque ? Il n’y a aujourd’hui que des vieilleries dans la pile verticale et croulante des en-cours et à-lire. Des acquis de bacs à livres, des reçus et des chourés aux copains. Loup-Garous et Vampires de Villeneuve, Féministe et Libertaire de David-Néel (…peut-on être à la foi loup, garou, vampire, féministe et libertaire ?! Absolument. C’est même fortement recommandé.), Miscellanées de Lorrain, Ni Marx ni Jésus de Revel, Récits de la Kolyma de Chalamov, Un paria des îles de Conrad puis d’autres encore dont je ne vois d’ici pas la tranche, écroulés il y a peu certainement, ramassés et replacés à l’envers.

| Quels livres marquants as-tu découverts à l'adolescence et que tu possèdes toujours ? J’ai perdu beaucoup de livres. La vie. Parmi les survivants, quantité de London. J’ai étoilé mon obscure puberté de ses neiges puis ai été mordue de ses veines rouges et hommes, ouvriers, hobos, marins, ivrognes, boxeurs... C’est aussi une période pendant laquelle je mangeais pas mal de théâtre, lisais et relisais maintes fois les véhémentes, impétueuses et folles tirades des tragédiennes de Racine, de l’Antigone de Sophocle, d’Octave et Perdican chez Musset, Don Juan et Elvire chez Molière, Macbeth et Richard III de Shakespeare. J’aimais ensuite les beautés légères et camarades de L’Usage du monde de Bouvier, l’acidité de Burroughs et Ginsberg, les merveilles fantasques de Gustave Le Rouge, la sensualité, les spleens et ondes lugubres de Baudelaire et Poe. Demeurent et persistent enfin sous la poussière tous les renâclés au lycée que j’ai finalement et aimablement dévoré, Zola, Maupassant, Hugo, Camus, Malraux.

| Sans égard pour sa qualité, lequel de tes livres possède la plus grande valeur sentimentale, et pourquoi ? Ça fait longtemps que je ne place plus de sentiment dans le matériel mais j’aime particulièrement un minuscule livre vert illustré. Le Radis géant. Un vieux monsieur plante un radis et chante pour l’encourager à pousser. Pendant la nuit le truc devient énorme. Fou heureux il tente en vain de le déraciner. Sa vieille dame le rejoint pour l’aider en lui tirant sur le bénard, et la fillette, et le gros chien noir, et le chat… toute une queue leu leu joyeuse, rougeaude et essoufflée, jusqu’à ce que le miaulard sollicite la main-forte de la souris. Tu imagines le dénouement. Enfin tous morfent ensemble et rigolards la gigantesque brassicacée. Cette petite histoire a exceptionnellement résisté à diverses et fréquentes maltraitances enfantines, une quinzaine de déménagements et une vilaine flambée volontaire. Elle traine toujours à vue ; je l’attrape parfois, l’arque et anime comme un petit film, celui où une cerise couronne allègrement toute la fortune d’un gâteau.

| Lequel de tes livres prêterais-tu à quelqu'un qui te plaît ? Le prêt invite à la réitération voire la récidive ou du moins à son prétexte et ce n’est parfois pas nécessaire. Ainsi j’offre. Et adapte le geste à ma visée ou d’éventuelles complicités, mais c’est très souvent un livre de Jack London ou George Eekhoud. Je t’en ai offert un d’ailleurs non !!?

| Oui, en 2016, Une mauvaise rencontre ! Que trouve-t-on comme livres honteux dans tes rayonnages ? Plus rien. Je peux tout assumer. J’ai récemment largué 99 francs de Beigbeder au Secours Populaire et abandonné un livre de quatre-cents recettes de verrines – mais enfin pourquoi ces absurdes présents aux premières de théâtre ?! - et quelques mièvres et fastidieux Bobin envoyés par un amant qui, forcément, n’a pas fait long feu, dans une cabine téléphonique reconvertie en boîte à lire…C’est un peu salopard et venimeux de refiler tout ça non ? J’aurais dû, au risque de l’encrasser, allumer le poêle avec.

| Quels livres as-tu hérité de tes proches ? De mes descendants contemporains, si proche j’en fus, j’ai plutôt chipé qu’hérité. J’ai d’abord enfreint l’interdit de la plus inaccessible étagère au-dessus des toilettes en montant sur - et en cassant - l’abattant du chiottard. Reiser, Choron, Cabu, Wolinski, Cavanna, Brétécher et Serpieri y rayonnaient, et je me souviens très bien du soir (et de l’épaisse moquette bleu marine chez des particuliers lointains à Bruxelles en 1988 exactement) où, condamnée à quitter la table et à aller dormir en haut pour avoir dit « La Belgique ça pue la frite », j’ai découvert Manara et légitimé le principe de la masturbation. J’ai plus tard récupéré les latineries sud-américaines des brûlants et véraces Osvaldo Bayer, Eduardo Galeano et les récits de quelques auteurs et poètes comme Coloane, Garcia Marquez, Cortázar, Neruda, Allende et, c’est certain, j’en suis empreinte.

| Le livre que tu as le plus lu et relu ? Mises à part les bandes dessinées qui se torchent à la selle (et encore, c’est un devoir que j’expédie généralement dans le plus grand dénuement - je me souviens d’ailleurs avoir lu Lire aux cabinets de Miller dans les bureaux de production TF1), je ne relis que très très rarement les livres qui m’ont touchée (ou alors peut-être sans m’en rendre compte ! J’ai une si vague mémoire des noms propres et des histoires !). Ni ceux bien entendu qui m’ont déplu. Mais parcours parfois les pages cornées comme estampillées de mes livres, en cherche le passage ou la phrase qui m’a irradiée, séduite ou interrogée. D’ailleurs la plupart du temps je n’identifie plus ce qui m’a tant intéressée, poursuis plus avant ma lecture et plie de nouveaux coins.

| Le livre qui suscite en toi des envies symboliques d'autodafé ? Je voudrais littéralement en terroriser et incinérer plus d’un, préjugé. Mais je ne lis pas les autobiographies. Ni les manuels religieux. Ainsi par tracas d’impartialité, je m’abstiens. C’est dommage car, tu t’en doutes, j’aime beaucoup les incendies.

| On te propose de vivre éternellement dans un roman de ton choix, oui, mais lequel ? Non. Éternellement de mon choix résonne en oxymore. C’est un coup à rester coincée dans un roman d’Anne Rice ; mais tiens, puisqu’il trainait alentour ces derniers jours et que je veux bien jouer, pourquoi ne pas finir déifiée dans Albina et les hommes-chiens de Jodorowsky ou en souris dans le Radis géant.

| Quel est l'incunable que tu rêves de posséder, ton Saint Graal bibliophilique ? Bon alors déjà il m’a fallu chercher la définition d’incunable…Tu vois l’genre. Ensuite je ne quête pas vraiment les saints ni ne rêve particulièrement de posséder ; mais il me plairait de tomber hasardeusement sur certains secrets et genèses, d’exhumer quelques grimoires parcheminés, lettres, notes et mémoires intimes de solitaires, nomades, pionniers, femmes ou sorcières. Je les remettrais en terre ensuite parce que c’est assurément le seul organisme à pouvoir les honorer et préserver.

| Au bout d'une vie de lecture, et s'il n'en restait qu'un ? Plus d’un au bout allons ! J’aimerais que s’attardent et s’éternisent des pléiades de livres frères, achevés, détériorés, pliés, décousus et tachés, ou de longs manuscrits de mains aimées zonant aux bouts des miennes, jamais relus ou très vaguement parcourus. Non pour clore une vie, mais pour la poursuivre.

Noir Puma publiera AZMANDEH en septembre 2019. Une “soixantaine de pages griffées rouges, noires, blanches, recelées dans une couverture rigide résistante aux morsures. Ce dernier point est important.”

Pour mieux connaître et encourager ce projet en cours, rendez-vous sans gant ni jarretière ici :

https://www.helloasso.com/associations/noir%20puma/collectes/fff

[notamountain]

favorite things that i read in 2018 (in approximate chronological order)

poetry

“why won’t you celebrate with me” Lucille Clifton (++)

“The Neighborhood Dog” Russell Edson (+++!)

“Body Snatcher” Daniel Myers (+++ (this is my fave))

Two Poems Eloisa Amezcua (+++)

“AMERICAN SONNET FOR MY PAST AND FUTURE ASSASSIN” TERRANCE HAYES (+++!!)

“SONS OF ACHILLES” Nabila Lovelace (+++!!!)

“Elegy for Mr. Spock“ W. Todd Kaneko (+++!)

“a breakdown of types and costs of American Girl Dolls” ASHLEY MIRANDA (+++!!)

“Chap” REILLY D. COX & BRENNAN EMMETT COX (+++!!! (this is incredible))

“Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah” Patricia Smith (+++)

“At My First Punk Show Ever, 1998” Hanif Abdurraqib (+++ (re-read, a fave))

Three Reilly Cox (++++!!!)

Two Poems Reilly Cox (+++!!)

fiction

“Premonitions of a Valley Girl” CAT INGRID LEECHES (++++!!)

“The Entryway” Kira Frank (+++ (tws))

“Sister Godzilla” LOUISE ERDRICH (+++!!!!!!!)

“The Fifth Story” Clarice Lispector (+++!)

“Dimension” Alice Munro (+++!!! (tws))

“Apollo” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (+++ x100)

“All at One Point” Calvino

Five Stories Lydia Davis (+++!)

“WHY I CAN NO LONGER LOOK AT A PICNIC BLANKET WITHOUT LAUGHING”  Yukiko Motoya (+++)

“CODE OF OPERATION: SNAKE FARM” Amelia Gray (+++!)

“Man Not Superman” Jonathan Goldstein (+++ (a fave))

“A Diagram of Reproductive Anatomy” CAT INGRID LEECHES (!!!!)

“Live Mermaids” ELIZABETH THERIOT (+++ (i love it))

“Who Binds and Looses the World with Her Hands” RACHAEL K. JONES (+)

“Seasons of Glass and Iron” AMAL EL–MOHTAR (+++)

“Monster Girls Don't Cry” A. MERC RUSTAD (+++)

“Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™” Rebecca Roanhorse (+++!!)

“Regarding Your Future With The Futures Planning Consortium” Raq Winchester & Fran Wilde (++)

“The Red Thread” SOFIA SAMATAR (+++)

“TILDA SWINTON’S CHRISTMAS COUPONS” RACHEL SIEMENS (+++!)

“Ten Years a Statue” Sam Martone (+++!)

“Space” Sam Martone (+++!!)

nonfiction

“BLACK GIRLS FROM THE HOOD ARE THE REAL TRENDSETTERS” WANNA THOMPSON (+++!!!)

“Lay Off the High Ones” ISABELLE DAVIS (+++!!!)

“Sword Guys Are a Thing and I’ve Had Sex With All of Them” Hana Michels (++) 

“A Wonderfully Weird Wedding” MICHEAL FOULK (++ <3)

“Meet the Glasscos: Lesbian foster parents in the Bible Belt” KATHERINE WEBB-HEHN (this is beautiful and made me cry a lot idk)

“Wherever West Is” Jeanna Kadlec (+++! (love this))

“Caramel” Krys Malcolm Belc (+++)

“IT’S ME, THE LIGHT-SKINNED BLACK GIRL IN YOUR SCHOOL’S DIVERSITY PAMPHLET” JENNA LYLES (DAMN THIS IS GOOD)

Small Talk Krys Malcolm Belc (+++!!!)

“Welcome to Dog World!” Blair Braverman (+++!)

excerpt from Lying Lauren Slater (+++!!)

“The Killer in the Pool” Tim Zimmermann (this is awful and really sad)

“The Octopus at the Camden Aquarium” Robin Gow (+++!!!)

“Litter” Reilly Cox (+++!!!)

“Die in Summer or Not at All: A Resurrection in Three Acts” Sarah Panlibuton Barnes (+++!!!! (this is an incredible essay! (tws sex tho)))

chapbooks

loathe/love/lathe alain ginsberg (+++!!)

our own soft katie clark (++)

flowers are for pussies (and other white lies) sung yim (+++! (tws))

the weather came & so did we zooey ghostly (+++!!)

can we talk here belladonna*132 carmen gimenez smith (+++! (fave))

fiction novel

the grotesque child kim parko (++++! (second read; i love it))

pop fiction

the 100 (+ (series))

the scorch trials (++ (series))

aristotle and dante discover the secrets of the universe (+)

truth-witch (+++! (slow start, but i really liked this))

crazy rich asians (+++!)

comics

runaways (2003) vaughn/alphona/newbold (++)

heavy vinyl Usdin / Vakueva (++)

Fence (+++!!! (i love this so much))

runaways (2005)  vaughn/alphona/yeung (+++)

black lightning (1977) isabella/von eeden/springer (++)

Black Lightning: Year One (+++++++, i cried a lot)

black lightning (1995) (+++! (i cried more sos))

moonstruck vol 1 (+++)

the prince and the dressmaker (+++)

nimona (+++!)

how to be a werewolf (++++ <3)

clueless benson/kuhn/keenan (+++ (a fun read))

man-eater is 1-2 (++)

runaways (2008) moore/ramos (+++)

dream daddy lee c.a./jack gross (+++!)

avengers academy is 1 gage/mckone/cox (+++)

runaways (2018) rowell/anka/wilson (+++!!! <3 <3 <3(gd i love this))

goddess mode quinn/rodriguez (+++)

poetry

simulacra airea d. matthews (+++!)

cannibal safiya sinclair (this book is really fucking incredible)

calling a wolf a wolf (++)

sons of achilles nabila lovelace (++++!)

rocket fantastic (+)

in full velvet (+++)

what runs over kayleb rae candrilli (+++!!!)

don’t call us dead (goddamn this is good)

literary journals

bwr 44.2 (++) 

[lifeinpoetry]

If my life is framed by whomever looks at it // what would I build if not a place where I can hide.

Alain Ginsberg, from “Self Portrait as Waluigi” published in Peach

[periodensystem-der-musik]

Bei den Gasen ist sicher „Oxygene“ von Jean Michel Jarre zu erwähnen, ein Klassiker des elektronischen Instrumental-Pops. Zwei Jazz-Alben tragen den Namen Helium, man beachte die ähnliche Farbwahl (ätherisch-gasig?). Eine Oper nach Versen von Alain Ginsberg heisst „Hydrogen Jukebox“. Der Ausdruck stammt aus dem Gedicht „Howl“ und bezieht sich auf die Wasserstoff-Bombe.

[greedyreverence]

Until the Cows Come Home by Alain Ginsberg Elation Press — Pay What You Can ($3+) (PDF) Poetry

A small collection of poems centering around the transformative nature of self discovery and survival as a trans person in the world. The writing is autobiographical, and the narratives are skewed by trauma or envelop trauma as a means to go on.

[nostroviapress]

2017 Chapbook Contest: Week 6 Review (WINNERS)

It’s one of the biggest days of the year for N!P  as we announce the three winners of our chapbook contest!

Featured Finalists

Jeremiah and I discussed representative pieces to share for each of the 10 finalists, then messaged to get confirmation. With that we shared the page Saturday morning, boosting it for the weekend--when you have a moment, do check our 2017 Featured Finalist page, which shares some really fantastic work. 

As I’ve said, everyone from our finalists impressed us, and we're still very excited to have them join the N!P Family. Near the end of the year, each of them will be invited as features for our online reading. And we thank them, again, for trusting us with their work. 

Deciding Winners + Handling Responses

Friday, Saturday, Sunday... Jeremiah and I were still trying to decide upon our three winners, and kept rereading. We talked Monday, getting it down to ~5 MSS. And though I know I might sound silly, for a moment I actually did reconsider whether three picks was still best. It’s just really hard: there's so much strong work here and I want to make people happy. I see the people online and in the emails and they're so excited and their work is really on point and vulnerable and moving and it's like, could I just take on a little extra work? To get them that big accomplishment? But I set some firm guidelines for the contest and felt it was most respectful to everyone if I stuck to them. That said: I doubt next year’s contest will go about unchanged. 

After all that back and forth, Jeremiah had it down to four by the end of Monday night. After another round of rereading on Tuesday, around noon we finally had our three! I drafted emails for all ten writers, and sent them in the evening.

Announcing Winners

*drumroll* But enough backstory: we at N!P  are so damn excited to announce our three winners of our 2017 Chapbook Contest:

Can’t wait to bring their fantastic work to you all this summer <3

Jeremiah and I spent a good chunk of the morning editing the N! website, updating our catalog + 2017 chapbook page. I’ve also already reached out to CA Mullins and Chuck Young, passing along the rough drafts of the current 2017 series--like last year, both will be lending their expertise to make sure these chapbooks have titles and printing dimensions that match their distinct styles. 

From here, things slow down a little as we enter the editing phases of the contest, but I’ll be sure to share all the best details in my upcoming reviews!

Much love, and see you next week! <3 -Christopher

*

We’ll have a new Tavern post each Wednesday, giving an inside look at the N! process, so stay tuned for more updates!

Week 1 Review    (Opening the Floodgates) Week 2 Review    (Reading + Ordering Supplies) Week 3 Review    (Reading + MSS Observations) Week 4 Review    (Reading + Starting Search for Finalists) Week 5 Review    (Picking Winners)

[yesiamdrowning]

so and so (o sul fascino di trovare Pasolini dove non te lo aspetti).

Sentirsi un po’ così non è esattamente come essere depressi, le cose non vanno poi troppo male, sarà che fuori piove debolmente, nemmeno un bel acquazzone come si deve che pulisca l’aria, sarà che il giovedì non è sabato, che questa mattina volevamo dormire e invece ci siamo svegliati lo stesso alle sei e un quarto. Sarà che l’appuntamento di stasera sembra meno attraente di come ci appariva l’altro ieri, sarà che avremmo potuto mettere un altro maglione che così sembriamo solo una brutta copia di un bimbominchia. Sarà che la torta è buona ma le candeline sono sempre una rottura di palle. Sarà che avremmo un po’ tutti voluto suonare rock e invece non è andata così. Sarà che, stringi stringi, abbiamo un po’ tutti quel “ovo sodo dentro che non va né su né giù e ormai ci fa compagnia come un vecchio amico”. Giorni fa riflettevo su come parlare del quarantennale dell’uscita di Easter di Patti Smith, uscito nel marzo del 1978, all’interno della stessa stagione creativa che aveva portato alla luce i componimenti di Babel, senza ribadire i soliti concetti vomitati in ogni dove per uno degli album più apprezzati e fortunati della carriera di Patricia, contenente quella che è la più celebre “catastrofe” del suo repertorio musicale, Because the Night che, come tutte i successi di fama interplanetaria, poi finisce per svilire tutto il resto del lavoro svolto.

Il disco, un tripudio di chitarre elettriche e tecniche di cantato recitato sopraffino, è stato definito “trascendente e pienamente riuscito, è un album che racchiude ossessioni Cristiane, in particolare quella della morte e della resurrezione, sia reale che simbolica” e si configura come uno dei tentativi più organici di fusione tra musica, liriche poetiche, spiritualità di matrice evangelica (a partire dal titolo stesso, Pasqua), impegno sociale e irriverenza punk.

Nelle liner notes dell’Lp, vale a dire le note interne al libretto, la cantante statunitense decide di fare riprodurre - addirittura a penna nell’edizione originale - tutti gli appunti privati e le fascinazioni artistiche che avevano condotto alla creazione di ogni singola traccia, sotto forma di citazioni, immagini, richiami, riproduzione di versi al fine di comporre un vero e proprio collage dal sapore postmoderno. Per anni non ci avevo mai prestato tanta attenzione, preso dalla musica e timoroso di imbattermi in uno di quei pipponi che hanno caratterizzato molti degli artisti di quella generazione. Intendiamoci, nel 1978 già Allen Ginsberg spesso sembrava un sacchetto di plastica in testa, figuriamoci emuli come Patti Smith. Signore, pietà. Ho scoperto quasi per caso che nel commento testuale relativo al brano di apertura, Till Victory, appare incredibilmente la figura di Pier Paolo Pasolini, uno che per certo di giornate così e in attesa di un certo non so che migliore (terreno e/o ultraterreno) era un grande conoscitore. Invocato e apertamente nominato all’inizio dell’opera come se ci si trovasse di fronte a un Inno alle Muse di memoria classica.

a vienna c’è un’area che circonda e passa attraverso l’hotel de france. i motociclisti italiani. il negozio dei preti. giubotti di pelle fatti in paradiso modellati sulla pelle di alain delon. qui c’è la strada dei camion. qui il vicolo della lanterna dove tizi tosti si appoggiano, si pavoneggiano e si mettono in posa per il passaggio di pasolini.

L’architettura testuale è, come accennato e come sovente accade in Patti Smith, di matrice beat: assenza di maiuscole, uso particolare dell’interpunzione, giustapposizione di gergale (thru) e arcaico (shoppe), assonanze e allitterazioni, ripetizioni e rime al mezzo (trucks… bucks). La posizione del soggetto reale del brano (il passaggio di Pasolini) non sembra affatto casuale e suggerisce un rovesciamento sintattico dell’ordine della frase al fine di creare un effetto suspense, di attesa, che riesca a condurre attraverso le strade viennesi in un’atmosfera notturna, immaginiamo underground, fino alla comparsa del protagonista di questo vagare, Pier Paolo Pasolini. Che può essere prosaicamente visto come “la svolta" della serata o magari dell'intera esistenza. Pensate a quanti, nelle notti romane, hanno mutato diametralmente il loro pensiero sulla vita dopo l'incontro con l'intellettuale bolognese, dai futuri attori di fama Franco Citti a Ninetto Davoli passando per Ettore Garofolo e “Accattone”, al secolo Antonio Mancini, affiliato della Banda della Magliana che fu l'unico dichiaratamente di sinistra, amante sentito di cinema e lettura.

La suggestione letteraria, ritrovata poi in altri frammenti d'intro-spiegazione, così come nei versi di High On Rebellion, appare affine ad alcune tra le più realistiche descrizioni dei giovani incompiuti che popolavano le borgate nelle pagine di Ragazzi di Vita e Una Vita Violenta, il primo e il secondo romanzo scritti da Pasolini, ipotesi linguisticamente e cronologicamente avvalorata dalle traduzioni dei romanzi stessi; dal momento che la casa editrice che pubblicò profeticamente in lingua inglese The Ragazzi e A Violent Life fu la Grove Press che, si badi bene, aveva sede proprio nella New York della poetessa rock. In entrambe le edizioni sono contenuti ritratti e descrizioni affini a quelli evocati da Patti Smith: dread-afraid feeling, leather jacket, unhingen lantern, eternity rides the wave, older boys with mototbikes, eccetera. In aggiunta al raffronto, una ulteriore fonte potrebbe essere stata costituita da alcune suggestive scene di Accattone, primo lungometraggio di Pasolini, guarda caso usato per il lancio internazionale con una proiezione-evento a New York nel 1966, con lo stesso regista presente. In particolare il vissuto di Vittorio/Citti in perenne ricerca di un'eventualità migliore rispetto a un presente amaro e inconcludente. Può apparire un'analisi emo-romanzata, con un utilizzo persino semplicistico di Pasolini, rispetto alla complessità della sua opera e alla levatura del suo pensiero, ma del resto quella di Patti Smith non vuole essere certo una analisi socioculturale e - soprattutto - lo vuole ricollocare in quel contesto punk-rock che a lei è più congeniale. E il punk è per antonomasia semplice e diretto, dove non c'è nulla da decifrare e le allegorie, se ce ne sono, sono estremamente basiche. Eppure, non cadono mai nella banale messinscena. Till Victory quindi, ovvero finché le cose non andranno un po’ meglio di “così”.

[underblong]

Issue 2 :: Contents

COVER ART

Mia Salamone - !!!

EDITORS’ NOTE

Sam Herschel Wein & Chen Chen - “Hello!”

POETRY

Hannah Rego - “In the future, my gender” and “I Remember the Precise Moment of Learning Certain Words, like Jostled, like Corrugated ” and “(One More Time) for the people in the back”

Logan February - “The Honest Lie”

Mag Gabbert - “Fever” and “Donut” 

Alain Ginsberg - “Springtime as Judith” and “Angel Olsen Says Every Artist Should Title A Piece unfucktheworld”

Stevie Edwards - “Harm’s Way” 

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach - “Sure as Superstition” 

Omar Sakr - “Sky Orchards (or, The Hazards of Being A Fruit)”

Alex Hall - “for roses”

Kimberly Quiogue Andrews - “Other Deluges” and “Some Mirages of the Heat-Addled”

Brett Hanley - “I Should Have Loved Bigfoot Instead”

Rajiv Mohabir - “Hybrid Unidentified Whale”

Katherine Gibbel - “Send Nudes (My tree was the selfie stick...)” and “Send Nudes (I want to talk about the nakedness...)”

Keegan Lester - “The Abridged Version of the Newscast for Breece d’j Pancake”

Matty Layne Glasgow - “All Afternoon”

Jane Wong - “Dinner and A” and “When You Died”

Emilia Phillips - “If You Wanna Make Sense Whatcha Lookin at Me For?” and “Moonpie”

CONTRIBUTOR NOTES

<3 <3 <3

&

Special thanks to Jeff Gilbert for his help with getting the audio recordings set up for this issue. 

[voxrepulsori]

The French Origins of « You Will Not Replace Us »

THE NEW YORKER | 04.12.2017 | Thomas Chatterton Williams

The European thinkers behind the white-nationalist rallying cry. The Château de Plieux, a fortified castle on a hilltop in the Gascony region of southwestern France, overlooks rolling fields speckled with copses and farmhouses. A tricolor flag snaps above the worn beige stone. The northwest tower, which was built in the fourteenth century, offers an ideal position from which to survey invading hordes. Inside the château’s cavernous second-story study, at a desk heavy with books, the seventy-one-year-old owner of the property, Renaud Camus, sits at an iMac and tweets dire warnings about Europe’s demographic doom. On the sweltering June afternoon that I visited the castle, Camus—no relation to Albert—wore a tan summer suit and a tie. Several painted self-portraits hung in the study, multiplying his blue-eyed gaze. Camus has spent most of his career as a critic, novelist, diarist, and travel essayist. The only one of his hundred or so books to be translated into English, “Tricks” (1979), announces itself as “a sexual odyssey— man-to-man,” and includes a foreword by Roland Barthes. The book describes polyglot assignations from Milan to the Bronx. Allen Ginsberg said of it, “Camus’s world is completely that of a new urban homosexual; at ease in half a dozen countries.” In recent years, though, Camus’s name has been associated less with erotica than with a single poignant phrase, le grand remplacement. In 2012, he made this the title of an alarmist book. Native “white” Europeans, he argues, are being reverse-colonized by black and brown immigrants, who are flooding the Continent in what amounts to an extinction-level event. “The great replacement is very simple,” he has said. “You have one people, and in the space of a generation you have a different people.” The specific identity of the replacement population, he suggests, is of less importance than the act of replacement itself. “Individuals, yes, can join a people, integrate with it, assimilate to it,” he writes in the book. “But peoples, civilizations, religions—and especially when these religions are themselves civilizations, types of society, almost States—cannot and cannot even want to . . . blend into other peoples, other civilizations.” Camus believes that all Western countries are faced with varying degrees of “ethnic and civilizational substitution.” He points to the increasing prevalence of Spanish, and other foreign languages, in the United States as evidence of the same phenomenon. Although his arguments are scarcely available in translation, they have been picked up by right-wing and white-nationalist circles throughout the English-speaking world. In July, Lauren Southern, the Canadian alt-right Internet personality, posted, on YouTube, a video titled “The Great Replacement”; it has received more than a quarter of a million views. On greatreplacement.com, a Web site maintained anonymously, the introductory text declares, “The same term can be applied to many other European peoples both in Europe and abroad . . . where the same policy of mass immigration of non-European people poses a demographic threat. Of all the different races of people on this planet, only the European races are facing the possibility of extinction in a relatively near future.” The site announces its mission as “spreading awareness” of Camus’s term, which, the site’s author concludes, is more palatable than a similar concept, “white genocide.” (A search for that phrase on YouTube yields more than fifty thousand videos.) “I don’t have any genetic conception of races,” Camus told me. “I don’t use the word ‘superior.’ ” He insisted that he would feel equally sad if Japanese culture or “African culture” were to disappear because of immigration. On Twitter, he has quipped, “The only race I hate is the one knocking on the door.” Camus’s partner arrived in the study with a silver platter, and offered fruitcake and coffee. Camus, meanwhile, told me about his “red-pill moment”—an alt-right term, derived from a scene in the film “The Matrix,” for the decision to become politically enlightened. As a child, he said, he was a “xenophile,” who was delighted to see foreign tourists flocking to the thermal baths near his home, in the Auvergne. In the late nineties, he began writing domestic travel books, commissioned by the French government. The work took him to the department of Hérault, whose capital is Montpellier. Although Camus was familiar with France’s heavily black and Arab inner suburbs, or banlieues, and their subsidized urban housing projects, known as cités, his experience in Hérault floored him. Travelling through medieval villages, he said, “you would go to a fountain, six or seven centuries old, and there were all these North African women with veils!” A demographic influx was clearly no longer confined to France’s inner suburbs and industrial regions; it was ubiquitous, and it was transforming the entire country. Camus’s problem was not, as it might be for many French citizens, that the religious symbolism of the veil clashed with some of the country’s most cherished secularist principles; it was that the veil wearers were permanent interlopers in Camus’s homeland. He became obsessed with the diminishing ethnic purity of Western Europe. Camus supports the staunchly anti-immigrant politician Marine Le Pen. He denied, however, that he was a member of the “extreme right,” saying that he was simply one of many voters who “wanted France to stay French.” In Camus’s view, Emmanuel Macron, the centrist liberal who handily defeated Le Pen in a runoff, is synonymous with the “forces of remplacement.” Macron, he noted acidly, “went to Germany to compliment Mme. Merkel on the marvellous work she did by taking in one million migrants.” Camus derides Macron, a former banker, as a representative of “direct Davos-cracy”—someone who thinks of people as “interchangeable” units within a larger social whole. “This is a very low conception of what being human is,” he said. “People are not just things. They come with their history, their culture, their language, with their looks, with their preferences.” He sees immigration as one aspect of a nefarious global process that renders obsolete everything from cuisine to landscapes. “The very essence of modernity is the fact that everything—and really everything—can be replaced by something else, which is absolutely monstrous,” he said. Camus takes William F. Buckley, Jr.,’s injunction to stand “athwart history, yelling Stop” to the furthest extent possible, and he can be recklessly unconcerned about backing up his claims. On a recent radio appearance, he took a beating from Hervé le Bras, a director emeritus at the Institut National d’Études Démographiques, who said that Camus’s proclamations about ethnic substitution were based on wildly inflated statistics about the number of foreigners entering France. Afterward, Camus breezily responded on Twitter: “Since when, in history, did a people need ‘science’ to decide whether or not it was invaded and occupied?” Camus has become one of the most cited figures on the right in France. He is a regular interlocutor of such mainstream intellectuals as Alain Finkielkraut, the conservative Jewish philosopher, who has called Camus “a great writer,” and someone who has “forged an expression that is heard all the time and everywhere.” Camus also has prominent critics: the essayist and novelist Emmanuel Carrère, a longtime friend, has publicly reproached him, writing that “the argument ‘I’m at home here, not you’ ” is incompatible with “globalized justice.” Mark Lilla, the Columbia historian and scholar of the mentality of European reactionaries, described Camus as “a kind of connective tissue between the far right and the respectable right.” Camus can play the role of “respectable” reactionary because his opposition to multicultural globalism is plausibly high-minded, principally aesthetic, even well-mannered—a far cry from the manifest brutality of the skinheads and the tattooed white nationalists who could put into action the xenophobic ideas expressed in “Le Grand Remplacement.” (At a rally in Warsaw on November 11th, white-nationalist demonstrators brandished signs saying “Pray for an Islamic Holocaust” and “Pure Poland, White Poland.”) When I asked Camus whether he considered me—a black American living in Paris with a French wife and a mixed-race daughter—part of the problem, he genially replied, “There is nothing more French than an American in Paris!” He then offered me the use of his castle when he and his partner next went on a vacation. Although Camus presents his definition of “Frenchness” as reasonable and urbane, it is of a piece with a less benign perspective on ethnicity, Islam, and territory which has circulated in his country for decades. Never the sole preserve of the far right, this view was conveyed most bluntly in a 1959 letter, from Charles de Gaulle to his confidant Alain Peyrefitte, which advocates withdrawal from French Algeria: It is very good that there are yellow Frenchmen, black Frenchmen, brown Frenchmen. They prove that France is open to all races and that she has a universal mission. But [it is good] on condition that they remain a small minority. Otherwise, France would no longer be France. We are, after all, primarily a European people of the white race, Greek and Latin culture, and the Christian religion. De Gaulle then declares that Muslims, “with their turbans and djellabahs,” are “not French.” He asks, “Do you believe that the French nation can absorb 10 million Muslims, who tomorrow will be 20 million and the day after 40 million?” If this were to happen, he concludes, “my village would no longer be called Colombey-les-Deux-Églises, but Colombey-les-Deux-Mosquées!” Such worry about Muslims has been present across Europe at least since the turn of the twentieth century, when the first “guest workers” began arriving from former French colonies and from Turkey. In 1898 in Britain, Winston Churchill warned of “militant Mahommedanism,” and Enoch Powell’s 1968 Rivers of Blood speech alleged that immigration had caused a “total transformation to which there is no parallel in a thousand years of English history.” Anxiety about immigrants of color has long been present in the United States, especially in states along the Mexican border. This feeling became widespread after 9/11, and has only intensified with subsequent terrorist acts by Islamists, the Great Recession, and the election of the first black President. Meanwhile, white populations across the world are stagnant or dwindling. In recent years, white-nationalist discourse has emerged from the recesses of the Internet into plain sight, permeating the highest reaches of the Trump Administration. Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the White House senior adviser Stephen Miller endorse dramatic reductions in both legal and illegal immigration. The President’s former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, has returned to his post as the executive chairman of the far-right Web site Breitbart. In a 2014 speech at the Vatican, Bannon praised European “forefathers” who kept Islam “out of the world.” President Trump, meanwhile, has made the metaphor of immigrant invasion literal by vowing to build a wall. In Europe, which in recent years has absorbed millions of migrants fleeing wars in the Middle East or crossing the Mediterranean from Africa, opposition to immigration is less a cohesive ideology than a welter of reactionary ideas and feelings. Xenophobic nationalism can be found on both the left and the right. There is not even unanimity on the superiority of Judeo-Christian culture: some European nationalists express a longing for ancient pagan practices. Anti-immigrant thinkers also cannot agree on a name for their movement. Distrust of multiculturalism and a professed interest in preserving European “purity” is often called “identitarianism,” but many prominent anti-immigrant writers avoid that construction. Camus told me that he refused to play “the game” of identity politics, and added, “Do you think that Louis XIV or La Fontaine or Racine or Châteaubriand would say, ‘I’m identitarian?’ No, they were just French. And I’m just French.” Shortly after Trump’s Inauguration, Richard Spencer, the thirty-nine-year-old white nationalist who has become the public face of the American alt-right, was sucker-punched by a protester while being interviewed on a street corner in Washington, D.C. A video of the incident went viral, but little attention was paid to what Spencer said on the clip. “I’m not a neo-Nazi,” he declared. “They kind of hate me, actually.” In order to deflect the frequent charge that he is a racist, he defines himself with the very term that Camus rejects: identitarian. The word sidesteps the question of racial superiority and co-opts the left’s inclusive language of diversity and its critique of forced assimilation in order to reclaim the right to difference—for whites. Identitarianism is a distinctly French innovation. In 1968, in Nice, several dozen far-right activists created the Research and Study Group for European Civilization, better known by its French acronym, GRECE. The think tank eventually began promoting its ideas under the rubric the Nouvelle Droite, or the New Right. One of its founders, and its most influential member, was Alain de Benoist, a hermetic aristocrat and scholar who has written more than a hundred books. In “View from the Right” (1977), Benoist declared that he and other members of GRECE considered “the gradual homogenization of the world, advocated and realized by the two-thousand-year-old discourse of egalitarian ideology, to be an evil.” The group expressed allegiance to “diversity” and “ethnopluralism”—terms that sound politically correct to American ears but had a different meaning in Benoist’s hands. In “Manifesto for a European Renaissance” (1999), he argued: The true wealth of the world is first and foremost the diversity of its cultures and peoples. The West’s conversion to universalism has been the main cause of its subsequent attempt to convert the rest of the world: in the past, to its religion (the Crusades); yesterday, to its political principles (colonialism); and today, to its economic and social model (development) or its moral principles (human rights). Undertaken under the aegis of missionaries, armies, and merchants, the Westernization of the planet has represented an imperialist movement fed by the desire to erase all otherness. From this vantage point, both globalized Communism and globalized capitalism are equally suspect, and a “citizen of the world” is an agent of imperialism. When Benoist writes that “humanity is irreducibly plural” and that “diversity is part of its very essence,” he is not supporting the idea of a melting pot but of diversity in isolation: all Frenchmen in one territory and all Moroccans in another. It is a nostalgic and aestheticized view of the world that shows little interest in the complex economic and political forces that provoke migration. Identitarianism is a lament against change made by people fortunate enough to have been granted, through the arbitrary circumstance of birth, citizenship in a wealthy liberal democracy. Benoist’s peculiar definition of “diversity” has allowed him to take some unexpected positions. He simultaneously defends a Muslim immigrant’s right to wear the veil and opposes the immigration policies that allowed her to settle in France in the first place. In an e-mail, he told me that immigration constitutes an undeniably negative phenomenon, in part because it turns immigrants into victims, by erasing their roots. He continued, “The destiny of all the peoples of the Third World cannot be to establish themselves in the West.” In an interview in the early nineties with Le Monde, he declared that the best way to show solidarity with immigrants is by increasing trade with the Third World, so that developing countries can become “self-sufficient” enough to dissuade their citizens from seeking better lives elsewhere. These countries, he added, needed to find their own paths forward, and not follow the tyrannizing templates of the World Bank and the I.M.F. Benoist told me that, in France’s Presidential election, in May, he voted not for Marine Le Pen but for the far-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who shares his contempt for global capitalism. Benoist’s writing often echoes left-wing thinkers, especially the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who wrote of “hegemony”—or the command that a regime can wield over a population by controlling its culture. In “Manifesto for a European Renaissance,” Benoist argues that white Europeans should not just support restrictive immigration policies; they should oppose such diluting ideologies as multiculturalism and globalism, taking seriously “the premise that ideas play a fundamental role in the collective consciousness.” In a similar spirit, Benoist has promoted a gramscisme de droite—cultural opposition to the rampaging forces of Hollywood and multinational corporations. The French, he has said, should retain their unique traditions and not switch to “a diet of hamburgers.” Despite Benoist’s affinity for some far-left candidates, “Manifesto for a European Renaissance” has become a revered text for the extreme right across Western Europe, in the U.S., and even in Russia. The crackpot Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, who promotes the ethnopluralist doctrine “Eurasianism,” has flown to Paris to meet Benoist. “I consider him to be the foremost intellectual in Europe today,” Dugin told interviewers in 2012. Earlier this year, John Morgan, an editor of Counter-Currents, a white-nationalist publishing house based in San Francisco, posted an online essay about the indebtedness of the American alt-right to European thought. He described Benoist and GRECE’s achievement as “a towering edifice of thought unparalleled anywhere else on the Right since the Conservative Revolution in Germany of the Weimar era.” Although Benoist claims not to be affiliated with the alt-right—or even to understand “what Richard Spencer can know or have learned from my thoughts”—he has travelled to Washington, D.C., to speak at the National Policy Institute, a white-nationalist group run by Spencer, and he has sat for long interviews with Jared Taylor, the founder of the virulently white-supremacist magazine American Renaissance. In one exchange, Taylor, who was educated in France, asked Benoist how he saw himself “as different from identitarians.” Benoist responded, “I am aware of race and of the importance of race, but I do not give to it the excessive importance that you do.” He went on, “I am not fighting for the white race. I am not fighting for France. I am fighting for a world view. . . . Immigration is clearly a problem. It gives rise to much social pathologies. But our identity, the identity of the immigrants, all the identities in the world have a common enemy, and this common enemy is the system that destroys identities and differences everywhere. This system is the enemy, not the Other.” Benoist may not be a dogmatic thinker, but, for white people who want to think explicitly in terms of culture and race, his work provides a lofty intellectual framework. These disciples, instead of calling for an “Islamic holocaust,” can argue that rootedness in one’s homeland matters, and that immigration, miscegenation, and the homogenizing forces of neoliberal market economies collude to obliterate identities that have taken shape over hundreds of years—just as relentless development has decimated the environment. Benoist’s romantic-sounding ideas can be cherry-picked and applied to local political resentments. The writer Raphaël Glucksmann, a prominent critic of the French far right, told me that such selective appropriations have given Benoist “a huge authority among white nationalists and Fascists everywhere in the world.” Glucksmann recently met me for coffee near his home, which is off the Rue du Faubourg SaintDenis, one of the most ethnically diverse thoroughfares in Paris. The Nouvelle Droite, Glucksmann argued, adopted a traditionally German, tribal way of conceiving identity, which the Germans themselves abandoned after the Second World War. The Nazi theorist Carl Schmitt argued that “all right is the right of a particular Volk.” In a 1932 essay, “The Concept of the Political,” he posed the question that still defines the right-wing mind-set: Who is a people’s friend, and who is an enemy? For Schmitt, to identify one’s enemies was to identify one’s inner self. In another essay, he wrote, “Tell me who your enemy is, and I’ll tell you who you are.” The Nouvelle Droite was fractured, in the nineteen-nineties, by disagreements over what constituted the principal enemy of European identity. If the perceived danger was initially what Benoist described as “the ideology of sameness”—what many in France called the “Coca-Colonization” of the world—the growing presence of African and Arab immigrants caused some members of GRECE to rethink the essence of the conflict. One of the group’s founders, Guillaume Faye, a journalist with a Ph.D. from Sciences-Po, split off and began releasing explicitly racist books. In a 1998 tract, “Archeofuturism,” he argued, “To be a nationalist today is to assign this concept its original etymological meaning, ‘to defend the native members of a people.’ ” The book, which appeared in English in 2010, argues that “European people” are “under threat” and must become “politically organized for their self-defense.” Faye assures native Frenchmen that their “sub-continental motherland” is “an organic and vital part of the common folk, whose natural and historical territory—whose fortress, I would say—extends from Brest to the Bering Strait.” Faye, like Renaud Camus, is appalled by the dictates of modern statecraft, which define nationality in legal rather than ethnic terms. The liberal American writer Sasha Polakow-Suransky, in his recent book, “Go Back to Where You Came From: The Backlash Against Immigration and the Fate of Western Democracy,” quotes Camus lamenting that “a veiled woman speaking our language badly, completely ignorant of our culture” could declare that she is just as French as an “indigenous” man who is “passionate for Roman churches, and for the verbal and syntactic delicacies of Montaigne and Rousseau, for Burgundy wines, for Proust, and whose family has lived for generations in the same valley.” What appalls Camus, PolakowSuransky notes, is that “legally, if she has French nationality, she is completely correct.” Faye’s work helps to explain the rupture that has emerged in many Western democracies between the mainstream right, which may support strict enforcement of immigration limits but does not inherently object to the presence of Muslims, and the alt-right, which portrays Muslim immigration as an existential threat. In this light, the growing admiration by Western conservatives for the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, is easier to comprehend. Not only do thinkers like Faye admire Putin as an emblem of proudly heterosexual white masculinity; they fantasize that Russian military might will help create a “Eurosiberian” federation of white ethno-states. “The only hope for salvation in this dark age of ours,” Faye has declared, is “a protected and self-centered continental economic space” that is capable of “curbing the rise of Islam and demographic colonization from Africa and Asia.” In Faye’s 2016 book, “The Colonisation of Europe,” he writes, of Muslims in Europe, “No solution can be found unless a civil war breaks out.” Such revolutionary right-wing talk has now migrated to America. In 2013, Steve Bannon, while he was turning Breitbart into the far right’s dominant media outlet, described himself as “a Leninist.” The reference didn’t seem like something a Republican voter would say, but it made sense to his intended audience: Bannon was signalling that the alt-right movement was prepared to hijack, or even raze, the state in pursuit of nationalist ends. (Bannon declined my request for an interview.) Richard Spencer told me, “I would say that the alt-right in the United States is radically un-conservative.” Whereas the American conservative movement celebrates “the eternal value of freedom and capitalism and the Constitution,” Spencer said, he and his followers were “willing to use socialism in order to protect our identity.” He added, “Many of the countries that lived under Soviet hegemony are actually far better off, in terms of having a protected identity, than Western Europe or the United States.” Spencer said that “clearly racialist” writers such as Benoist and Faye were “central influences” on his own thinking as an identitarian. He first discovered the work of Nouvelle Droite figures in the pages of Telos, an American journal of political theory. Most identitarians have a less scholarly bent. In 2002, a right-wing French insurrectionary, Maxime Brunerie, shot at President Jacques Chirac as he rode down the Champs- Élysées; the political group that Brunerie was affiliated with, Unité Radicale, became known as part of the identitairemovement. In 2004, a group known as the Bloc Identitaire became notorious for distributing soup containing pork to the homeless, in order to exclude Muslims and Jews. It was the sort of puerile joke now associated with alt-right pranksters in America such as Milo Yiannopoulos. Copycat groups began emerging across Europe. In 2009, a Swedish former mining executive, Daniel Friberg, founded, in Denmark, the publishing house Arktos, which is now the world’s largest distributor of far- and alt-right literature. The son of highly educated, left-leaning parents, Friberg grew up in a wealthy suburb of Gothenburg. He embraced right-wing thought after attending a diverse high school, which he described as overrun with crime. In 2016, he told the Daily Beast, “I had been taught to think multiculturalism was great, until I experienced it.” Few European nations have changed as drastically or as quickly as Sweden. Since 1960, it has added one and a half million immigrants to its population, which is currently just under ten million; a nationalist party, the Sweden Democrats, has become the country’s main opposition group. During this period, Friberg began to devour books on European identity—specifically, those of Benoist and Faye, whose key works impressed him as much as they impressed Richard Spencer. When Friberg launched Arktos, he acquired the rights to books by Benoist and Faye and had them translated into Swedish and English. Spencer told me that Arktos “was a very important development” in the international popularization of far-right identitarian thought. Whether or not history really is dialectical, it can be tempting to think that decades of liberal supremacy in Europe have helped give rise to the antithesis of liberalism. In Paris, left-wing intellectuals often seem reluctant to acknowledge that the recent arrival of millions of refugees in Europe, many of them impoverished, poses any complications at all. Such blithe cosmopolitanism, especially when it is expressed by people who can easily shelter themselves from the disruptions caused by globalization, can fuel resentment toward both intellectuals and immigrants. The philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, who has long embodied élite opinion on the French left, sometimes falls prey to such rhetoric. A 2015 essay, which attempted to allay fears of a refugee crisis in Europe, portrayed Syrian refugees as uniformly virtuous and adaptable: “They are applicants for freedom, lovers of our promised land, our social model, and our values. They are people who cry out ‘Europe! Europe!’ the way millions of Europeans, arriving a century ago on Ellis Island, learned to sing ‘America the Beautiful.’ ” Instead of making the reasonable argument that relatively few Muslim refugees harbor extremist beliefs, Lévy took an absolutist stance, writing that it was pure “nonsense” to be concerned about an increased risk of terrorism. Too often, Lévy fights racism with sentimentalism. Lévy recently met with me at his impeccable apartment, in a sanitized neighborhood near the Champs- Élysées. In our conversation, he offered a more modulated view. “I’m not saying that France should have received all two or three million Syrian refugees,” he said. “Of course, there’s a limited space.” But France had involved itself in Syria’s civil war, by giving support to opponents of the regime, and had a responsibility to help people uprooted by it, he said. Recent debates about European identity, he noted, had left out an important concept: hospitality. “Hospitality means that there is a place—real space, scarce, limited—and that in this place you host some people and you extend a hand.” This did not mean that he wanted an end to borders: “France has some borders, a republican tradition, it is a place. But in this place we have the duty to host. You have to hold the two. A place without hosting would be a shrinking republic. Universal welcoming would be another mistake.” A necessary tension is created between “the infinite moral duty of hospitality and the limited political possibility of welcoming.” When I asked Lévy why the notion of the great replacement had resonated so widely, he dismissed it as a “junk idea.” “The Roman conquest of Gaul was a real modification of the population in France,” he went on. “There was neversomething like an ethnic French people.” Raphaël Glucksmann made a similar critique of the idea of “pure” Frenchness. He observed, “In 1315, you had an edict from the king who said anybody who walks on the soil of France becomes a franc.” This is true, but there is always a threshold at which a quantitative change becomes qualitative; migration was far less extensive in the Middle Ages than it is today. French liberals can surely make a case for immigration without pretending that nothing has changed: a country that in 1900 was almost uniformly Catholic now has more than six million Muslims. The liberal historian Patrick Boucheron, the editor of a recent surprise best-seller that highlights foreign influences on French life throughout the ages, told me that he had little patience for people who bemoan the country’s changing demographics. French people who are struggling today, he said, are victims of unfair economic policies, not Muslims, who still make up only ten per cent of the population. Indeed, only a quarter of France’s population is of immigrant origin—a percentage that, according to Boucheron, has remained stable for four decades. Boucheron sees identitarians as manipulators who have succeeded “in convincing the dominated that their problem is French identity.” For Boucheron, it’s not simply that the great replacement is a cruel idea; it’s also false. “When you oppose their figures—when you say that there were Poles and Italians coming to France in the nineteen-thirties—they say, ‘O.K., but they were Christians,’ ” he said. “So you see that behind identity there’s immigration, and behind immigration there’s hatred of Islam. Eventually, it always comes down to that.” But to deny that recent migration has brought disruptions only helps the identitarians gain traction. A humanitarian crisis has been unfolding in Paris, and it is clearly a novel phenomenon. This summer, more than two thousand African and Middle Eastern migrants were living in street encampments near the Porte de la Chapelle; eventually, the police rounded them up and dispersed them in temporary shelters. “We don’t have enough housing,” the center-right philosopher Pascal Bruckner told me. “The welfare state is at the maximum of its capabilities. We’re broke. And so what we offer to those people is what happens at Porte de la Chapelle.” Many liberals have downplayed the homeless crisis, rather than discuss potential solutions. “We turn a blind eye to this issue, just to look generous,” Bruckner said. At one point in my conversation with Lévy, he flatly declared that France “has no refugees.” Far-right figures, for their part, have relentlessly exploited Paris’s problems on social media, posting inflammatory videos that make it seem like marauding migrants have taken over every street corner. Jean-Yves Camus, a scholar of the far right in France (and no relation to Renaud Camus), told me that there is a problematic lack of candor in the way that liberals describe today’s unidirectional mass movement of peoples. “It depends what you call Frenchness,” he said. “If you think that traditional France, like we used to see in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, should survive and remain, then certainly it will not survive. This is the truth. So I think we have to admit that, contrary to what Lévy says, there has been a change.” But what, exactly, does the notion of “traditional France” imply? The France of de Gaulle—or of Racine— differs in many ways from the France of today, not just in ethnic composition. Renaud Camus recently told Vox that white people in France are living “under menace”—victims of an unchecked foreign assault “as much by black Africa as it is by Northern Islamic Africans.” Yet feminism, Starbucks, the smartphone, the L.G.B.T.Q. movement, the global domination of English, EasyJet, Paris’s loss of centrality in Western cultural life—all of these developments have disrupted what it means “to be French.” The problem with identitarianism isn’t simply that it is nostalgic; it’s that it fixates on ethnicity to the exclusion of all else. The United States is not Western Europe. Not only is America full of immigrants; they are seen as part of what makes America American. Unlike France, the United States has only ever been a nation in the legal sense, even if immigration was long restricted to Europeans, and even if the Founding Fathers organized their country along the bloody basis of what we now tend to understand as white supremacy. The fact remains that, unless you are Native American, it is ludicrous for a resident of the United States to talk about “blood and soil.” And yet the country has nonetheless arrived at a moment when once unmentionable ideas have gone mainstream, and the most important political division is no longer between left and right but between globalist and nationalist. “The so-called New Right never claimed to change the world,” Alain de Benoist wrote to me. Its goal, he said, “was, rather, to contribute to the intellectual debate, to make known certain themes of reflection and thought.” On that count, it has proved a smashing success. Glucksmann summed up the Nouvelle Droite’s thinking as follows: “Let’s just win the cultural war, and then a leader will come out of it.” The belief that a multicultural society is tantamount to an anti-white society has crept out of French salons and all the way into the Oval Office. The apotheosis of right-wing Gramscism is Donald Trump. On August 11th, the Unite the Right procession marched through the campus of the University of Virginia. White-supremacist protesters mashed together Nazi and Confederate iconography while chanting variations of Renaud Camus’s grand remplacement credo: “You will not replace us”; “Jews will not replace us.” Few, if any, of these khaki-clad young men had likely heard of Guillaume Faye, Renaud Camus, or Alain de Benoist. They didn’t know that their rhetoric had been imported from France, like some dusty wine. But they didn’t need to. All they had to do was pick up the tiki torches and light them.

Thomas Chatterton Williams

This article appears in the print edition of the December 4, 2017, issue, with the headline ““You Will Not Replace Us”.” 

Thomas Chatterton Williams, a contributing writer for the Times Magazine, is a Holtzbrinck Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. He is at work on a book about racial identity.