[lbo-talk] Tom Walker's Montage of Time and Doug Ireland's Restoration of Pasolini

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

My dearest LBO-talk contributor and fellow Walter Benjamin enthusiast  
Tom Walker's montage of The Economist's words on "the lump of labor  
fallacy" is up on <http://mrzine.org>.  If you experience his montage  
of fragments of The Economist, you realize how an ideological chimera  
is constantly fed, so it will grow monstrous and become a nightmare  
that haunts workers who dream of shorter work time.  The mrzine  
homepage is adorned with the Sandwichman's favorite image: a 1937  
photograph by Dorothea Lange of a National Association of  
Manufacturers billboard, which proclaims "The World's Shortest  
Working Hours" (the image is linked to Tom's blog entry about it at  
the ever readable MaxSpeak).  Tom serves on the board of Take Back  
Your Time, a major US/Canadian initiative to challenge the epidemic  
of overwork,  Today, Take Back Your Time's North American Conference  
(at Seattle University, Seattle, Washington -- maybe Ian will visit  
it?) will begin at 7 PM.  Tom will report back on the conference later.

Doug Ireland, who gave mrzine.org a great big plug on its launch at  
his blog, wrote a wonderful essay about the reopening of Pier Paolo  
Pasolini's murder case: "Restoring Pasolini."  As the title of his  
essay hints, Doug's ambition is to use the occasion to restore  
Pasolini to his rightful place in cultural history.  He wants you to  
rediscover the literary Pasolini, and so do I.  Shockingly but also  
predictably, "only a handful of Pasolini’s 50-plus published works  
have been translated into English," writes Doug.  (A few have been  
translated, and he gives you a useful bibliography of translated  
works of Pasolini at the end of his essay.)  I hope some of you will  
hit libraries or bookstores and read (or reread) Pasolini, a literary  
and cinematic genius who did not give up on the left even when the  
homophobic leaders of the left exiled him.

Those of you who wish to translate Pasolini essays and poems for  
mrzine.org, please contact me.

Yoshie Furuhashi
<http://montages.blogspot.com>
<http://monthlyreview.org>
<http://mrzine.org>
* Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: <http://montages.blogspot.com/2005/07/mahmoud- 
ahmadinejads-face.html>;  <http://montages.blogspot.com/2005/07/chvez- 
congratulates-ahmadinejad.html>; <http://montages.blogspot.com/ 
2005/06/iranian-working-class-rejects.html>