K Punk: classic or dud?

http://bat-bean-beam.blogspot.com/2017/01/vale-mark-fisher.html

I am grateful to Mark for being one of the very first people to take an interest in my writing. By this time I had already started blogging, but it made me feel like it was something worth doing, that it could be made to matter. I am far from the only person who felt this way. Douglas Murphy: ‘Without him and the other theory bloggers, it wouldn’t have occurred to me to even begin writing’. Evan Calder Williams: ‘Reading k-punk was formative to me, to why I wanted to write online, in hopes that other people who I didn't know would stumble onto something I wrote and feel like there was a shared world that could be understood and fought.’ Owen again: ‘Speaking to Mark made me a writer who took seriously what I did, as he did.’ Comments like these are the constant of the tributes, in long-form or social media, that have followed the news of Mark’s death, and speak not only of his influence but also of an incredibly generous mind. As Juliet Jacques noted in another lovely tribute: ‘He introduced many of us to each other, and gave us the confidence to combine the cultural, personal, and political in ways that felt thrilling and liberating.’ I can certainly say that, while I never met Mark in person, it was through Mark that I met a number of people whose friendship and comradeship I treasure.

http://www.thewire.co.uk/news/45139/mark-fisher-1968-2017

owen hatherley's tribute is very moving.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jul/16/mental-health-political-issue here's an example of that mental health writing i mentioned, difficult tho it is to read right now

Repeater Books have tweeted this link to a page where people can donate to a memorial fund to support Fisher's wife and son

https://twitter.com/RepeaterBooks/status/821697398833553408

I missed this thread bump until this morning. This news has broken my heart. Ghosts of my Life was great and his blog pieces on the Fall were unparalleled.

I wish he had been able to continue.

reynolds

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jan/18/mark-fisher-k-punk-blogs-did-48-politics?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Waiting for what Fisher had to say is a sensation I recall only too vividly. I remember the electric anticipation of those early-to-mid 2000s mornings when the first thing I would do after making some tea was check whether K-punk had posted. K-punk, Fisher’s online alter-ego, was the hub of a blog circuit in which I took part, and which for a glorious moment brought back the intellectual fervour of the postpunk music press.

“It wasn’t only about music and music wasn’t only about music,” Fisher once said of weekly papers such as the NME. “It was a medium that made demands on you.” More than any other blog of that time, K-punk reanimated the polymath, autodidact spirit of the golden-age rock press, where music held a privileged status – but film, TV, fiction and politics were in the mix too.

Reading through these donations has got me tearful for someone I never met but wish I had. Some people have given hundreds others two or three pounds. Amazingly, it's at £18,000 as I write this. That's just incredible.

over £24,000 now, fantastic. considering how it had only been in the last couple of years that he'd managed to get full-time work teaching there's no doubt this was necessary and will be invaluable

I'm going to buy the new book ASAP

looks like the US release is Jan 31

amazon just sent me a message saying it's eligible for day-of-release delivery

alex niven:

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/01/mark-fisher-capitalist-realism-vampire-castle/

xpost it's already in the kindle store so i'm getting that

Man, I would love to have seen where he was going with the whole 'Acid Communism' concept...

Man, I would love to have seen where he was going with the whole 'Acid Communism' concept...

Some hints here perhaps:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deZgzw0YHQI

Albeit operating at a pretty generalised level.

I feel like the 'negativity not pessimism' phrase from Adam Harper's blog post is really key to understanding Fisher's whole enterprise - it's certainly the aspect that took the longest time to 'click' for me personally.

I don't remember starting this thread but I do remember reading a lot of K Punk about a decade ago and I exchanged a few emails with Mark. A lot of his cultural obsessions were mine too and I was intrigued by the hauntology concept.

Capitalist Realism was really good although perhaps a bit overtaken by events now. We longed for the end of ne-capitalism but little did we know that it would be replaced with something even worse.

Very sad to hear of his death, and with his insistence that personalising depression is capitalism's way of absolving itself of the blame, it's hard not to see a kind of world despair in his suicide, regardless of his personal circumstances.

RIP Mark Fisher, we need more thinkers like him

neoliberalism I meant

This was beautiful

http://siobhanmckeown.com/goodbye-dear-friend/

Didn't see this posted yet, but here's Fisher speaking about designer communism at Digital Bauhaus last year: https://vimeo.com/171577013

http://lareviewofbooks.org/article/in-memoriam-mark-fisher/

In fact, I think it’s that effort to establish a new radical public that will be remembered as Mark’s animating objective, and his successes in doing so which will be remembered as his greatest and most important achievement. It’s a common thread in his endeavors from the days of the CCRU, through his curatorship of the “Dissensus” internet forum (an early incubator of the blog scene, which I think was launched in the early 2000s), up to his last activities of recent years. His books were as much as anything adverts for the very idea of critical thought, aimed mainly at an audience that had no prior access to cultural studies or radical philosophy — invitations to a mass of often isolated and oppressed individuals to come and join a great community of liberated thought.

longer version of LARB's jeremy gilbert entry here: https://jeremygilbertwriting.files.wordpress.com/2017/03/my-friend-mark33.pdf

at least i think it's longer, i only checked very quickly: i don't agree with all of it but as well as being very personal and affectionate it's good on some of the flaws in MF's thinking and approach as it evolved

(tho much too uncritical, as everything i've read has been, on his music-writing and thinking, which is absolutely his weakest work -- tho of course also the area i am going to be most territorial about) (one day i might write this up, but not without a lot of thought and self-examination)

we'd kind of fallen out, not bitterly but it felt a bit irreparably, for reasons it seems otiose to rehearse here and now… i've thought about him every day since he died

i should read (and reread part) of that when home from work

on a related note, i was especially queasy at the idea of a need for "left accelerationism" someone was arguing for on twitter the other day. just, no

http://blissout.blogspot.com/2017/10/leaving-some-signs-now-legend.html

In a way, it's a shame Burial stopped doing the interviews - he was almost born to do them, even more than make music! He's better at describing his own music and motives than any of his critics, except K-punk himself. I remember Mark telling me after he'd done the interview that he couldn't believe his own ears - the stuff that Burial was coming out with was so poetic and evocative, too good to be true almost. A dream of an interview. Anwen Crawford told me of a similar experience: as I recall it, it was like she was hypnotized, sent into a trance by his voice over the phone. But at same time he was completely real and genuine - somehow down to earth and an ethereal being floating out there at the same time....

pete wolfendale

https://deontologistics.wordpress.com/2017/12/22/transcendental-blues/

When I found out Mark Fisher had finally been cornered by the black dog, I was standing at a bus stop on a chill morning in Ryhope. I could see the sea from where I was, and I could hear the pain in my friend’s voice, but I couldn’t connect with either of them. I couldn’t connect with anything. My life had unravelled around me. I’d recently admitted to myself and others that I couldn’t return to my postdoctoral position in South Africa. I couldn’t write or read. I couldn’t even understand my own work. I couldn’t enjoy anything. Not music. Not food. Not the morning sea. I could barely stand to be in the same room as people who cared about me. All because I was being chased by the same black fucking beast.

I was dragging myself out of bed every morning and walking a tooth grinding forty-five minutes to the nearest swimming pool in order to get the thirty minutes of exercise that was supposed to keep the beast at bay. The path follows the route of an old colliery railway line, over a bridge my great-grandfather helped build more than a century ago. Every day, once on the way there, and once on the way back, I’d think about throwing myself off of that bridge. It would never quite rise to the level of volition. I could consider the burdens I’d lift from others, the anxieties I’d finally be free of, even the bleak poetry of it. What I couldn’t do was ignore it. This was the first time this had ever happened to me.

I couldn’t process the significance of Mark’s death. I was too numb. Deep depression washes all the colour out of the world, turning the contrast down until you can’t tell the difference between real loss and mundane misery. It’s leaked in slowly, bit by bit over the last year, as I regained enough sensitivity to properly feel it, and enough understanding to properly mourn it. It’s the sort of thing you get periodically reminded of, discovering new layers of response each time, be it wistful sadness or blistering anger. I don’t think this process is finished, it won’t be for a while, but I hope that writing this post will help it along. Back then, there was one meaningful signal that cut through the depressive noise: this fucking thing shouldn’t have been allowed to take him from us, and I shouldn’t let it take me too.

...

For the moment, I want to pay my respects to Mark through pale imitation. I want to talk about my mental health and what it means. Mark eloquently explained the difficulty of being public about depression, and how secrecy can eat away at you when you’re in its grasp. As I’ve slowly come back into the light, I’ve tried to be open about it, but I haven’t been as open about it as possible. This is an attempt to do that in such a way that it can’t eat away at me the next time I’m lost in the dark. In case the introduction wasn’t sufficient warning, this is going to get personal. It’s also going to be long, and in some parts technical and wildly speculative. If you don’t want any neuroscience, skip §2.1, if you don’t want any logic skip §3.2, and if you don’t want any computer science, skip §4. I’ll reference some of this in the conclusion, but you should be relatively safe.

http://thequietus.com/articles/23832-take-care-it-s-a-desert-out-there-in-memory-of-and-for-mark-fisher-the-caretaker

https://ninapower.net/2018/01/13/in-memoriam-mark-fisher-january-13th/

i think one of the people in that picture round the tree might be me!

I've just finished the Red Riding quartet and have been re-reading Mark's writing on Peace (on the blog and in Ghosts of My Life), which is patchy ad brilliant in all the usual ways. It led me to a bunch of places (Owen Hatherley's blog, Padraig Henry's blog, various excellent Peace interviews) and christ do I mourn the passing of that little milieu and its world of possibilities. Has it simply ceased to be, become more diffuse, or is it happening somewhere, and I'm missing it?

it still just-about exists but yes, it's quite diffuse now -- i guess repeater books is its central nexus if anywhere, but no, it has no real conversation space now*. ppl now have jobs and families, and various sharp political splits have taken their toll (i'm on-line acquaintances with a number of people who have become mutual foes -- of one another not me -- and will i imagine never speak to one another again).

*actually someone recently told me that dissensus also still rumbles on but i haven't checked

this has been interesting reading
I always assumed this was a thread about Korean punk rock

It isn’t?

I always assumed this was a thread about K records K Punk imprint

^That’s what I assumed when I clicked just now

so glad NRQ and Dom are gone

For real

Wow, hadnt known he passed away. Ive been a big admirer of his article on the "pulp modernism of The Fall", for years now. Reread it a few times. Great stuff indeed! Think i will imagine him badgering old man MES with his theories, in the great hereafter. RIP.I will miss them both.

yeah.

with regard to what mark s said about beefs you'd have hoped that one good thing that could have happened after mark f's death is that people would put those behind them and moved on.

xpost

I was with a friend on Saturday who teaches at Goldsmiths and he intimated that part of the issue with Mark was that Gs were wary of legitimising his research and kept him on a part-time contract, accordingly. Which is kind of staggering, but makes sense all the same.

Which specific aspects?

I'm not sure of the specifics. The intimation was more a general response to his writing, ideas and research. It does sort of make sense from an academic institution, I suppose, but it looks more short-sighted by the year. And what it must have done for a general sense of precarity is immeasurable.

An article by? about? with? How To Dress Well, in which they mainly talk about Mark Fisher

https://www.talkhouse.com/how-to-dress-well-on-mark-fishers-theory-of-capitalist-realism/

jeremy gilbert and pals have released a mark fisher-inspired podcast abt radical/leftist culture

https://soundcloud.com/novaramedia/acfm-trip-1-out-of-the-box

Interesting - will have a look.

I'd like to read a few reviews of the book.

there's one in the wire by some fool

lol I need to get myself to an actual shop that stocks it.

I was just chatting the other day about how (as someone who was addicted to checking the blog bitd) his recent semi-lionisation seemed to come out of nowhere - this is a case of me not being switched on probably. Anyway there is never enough talk about how classic it was when he would call ppl “smugonauts”

I fell asleep while reading the new anthology and had unsettled, f-ed up dreams. Serves me right.

Kinda always wanted him to do more dialectical-ish historical accounts on popular music culture (modern, post-modern, post-post-modern type of deal) instead of so much personal critique, much of which I found a bit contrived. The hauntology stuff is underrated, though.

Also, what does the opening statement of this thread mean?

start of this thread is relatively scathing