The idea that we’re doomed, however accurate, isn’t a particularly interesting proposition. We should come up with something better.

Renee Nicole Good, murdered by ICE, was a prize-winning poet. Here’s that poem: lithub.com/renee-nicole...

"Some truth has no nourishment in it." - Alice Childress

"I want the freedom you take for granted. All the freedoms. The freedom to walk up this mountain and know it’s my home, to know it will survive, and also the freedom to tomorrow be on a tropical beach and forget this war for as long as I choose..." radicalcut.blogspot.com/2025/12/exce...

"Destroy the Universe / With a solution." - Mina Loy

"I believe in luck: how else can you explain the success of those you dislike?" - Jean Cocteau

"...a dying empire is a dangerous beast and will extract a big price in blood for its decline. The more desperate it becomes, the more reckless it grows, even without such a notoriously dozy, incompetent and self-aggrandising leadership." - Richard Seymour

"The difficulty of translation from a language that doesn’t yet exist is considerable, but there is no need to exaggerate it. The past, after all, can be quite as obscure as the future." – Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home

everyday is a good day to hear Pat Parker <3 www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuoZ...

"There is no better place for hiding a secret than an unfinished novel." - Italo Calvino

I made a list of some of my favourite political novels: radicalcut.blogspot.com/2026/01/favo...

“The likelihood that your acts of resistance cannot stop the injustice does not exempt you from acting in what you sincerely and reflectively hold to be the best interests of your community.” – Susan Sontag

“I had mistaken many people for friends, for kindred spirits, not understanding they had chosen to leave conventional life, and I’d been thrown out.” – Nate Lippens, Ripcord

You ever think about how the Roman Senate kept meeting centuries into the reigns of emperors. Hanging out, shooting the shit, giving speeches, and play-acting that their positions of privilege remained positions of power.

"These may be the last days, but not even Armageddon is going to save us from growing up, and our learning curve remains steep." - Greg Tate, Intelligence Data

"War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country." – Don DeLillo, White Noise

"To bring certain natural resources and labour into the jurisdiction of the global marketplace. To ensure these resources most benefit the capitalists doing the bombing and least benefit the people being bombed." radicalcut.blogspot.com/2025/06/beca...

"You’re going to write about us, but you’re never going to get it right. [...] Whatever you write might not do us much good, but from what I can tell, you’re sincere enough, so it probably also won’t do much harm." radicalcut.blogspot.com/2025/12/exce...

"From the beginning he held the tragic position that the only revolution was the eternal revolution – an inexhaustible struggle for something already lost." – Fanny Howe, Indivisible

"Happy the way he was when he read something that was sad but written euphorically." - Rodrigo Fresán, The Invented Part

"Live with your century, but do not be its creature." - Friedrich Schiller

There is a specific passage from my book Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim that a few different people have posted online. From this I gather it might be something of a reader favourite. So, to end the year, I thought I’d post it as well: radicalcut.blogspot.com/2025/12/exce...

"The right of opacity becomes the right not the be understood, not to be reduced to epistemic violence of comprehension and judgement. Or, colloquially, 'You don’t know me; don’t pretend that you know me.'" - James K. Stanescu (writing about Édouard Glissant)

Since the year is almost over I thought I would post this one last time - Some favourite things from my 2025: radicalcut.blogspot.com/2025/12/some...

“Go ahead and live your life. You might be surprised. The world might continue.” - Gwendolyn Brooks, from the poem Jane Addams

"And then there was you, the protagonist of your own singular dream. There is almost always you." I’m currently serializing my novel-in-progress Faithful Unbeliever. The above lines are from the fourth instalment.

I just discovered the music of Meet The Bug and now want everyone else to discover it too: meetthebug.bandcamp.com

"There is no such thing as contradiction, only the fire that burns amidst the networks made up of them." - Pope.L

Instead of trying to be more successful, which has never really worked for me, I have decided to actively attempt to become less successful with the hope that this will also backfire.

“I was jealous, since, in my writing, the slippery subject often got away from me, became swamped with concerns of the contemporary, and slipped out of sight, into my own spiralling digressions. My own work was about the circles I ran around whatever it was I wanted to write about.” – Andrew Durbin

"Instant gratification takes too long." - Carrie Fisher

"Belief initiates and guides action – Or it does nothing." – Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

We don’t get to choose the world we live in, we only get to choose the world we fight for.

"A funny thing about novels though: Often, the more convinced they are, the more they fail to convince." - Chelsea Leu

"Perhaps, but it is hard to know; people living together can have greater secrets between each other than those who live far apart, indeed the proximity can lead to a virtuoso performance in concealment." – John Holten, The Readymades

"What it means to care, to oppose, and still be structurally entangled in the systems you’re resisting." radicalcut.blogspot.com/2025/12/stil...

"More voices, more collective, louder, riskier. [...] Not everyone has to make the same choices. Certainly not everyone has to agree. But we all have to act." radicalcut.blogspot.com/2025/12/two-...

“My favorite genre of literature is gossip. My second favorite is prayer. But sometimes those are one and the same.” – Aurora Mattia, The Fifth Wound

Trying out yet another possible title on Xmas Eve: radicalcut.blogspot.com/2025/11/inve...

"it’s too late for pessimism and despair, they’re too popular" - Chris Cutler (in 1975)

"Speculation has been hollowing art out for decades, and we might simply have passed a threshold where price is the only measure of worth. But I’m alert enough to know that the era of unbridled conspicuous consumption might be ending." radicalcut.blogspot.com/2025/12/two-...

"It would be nice / to interfere with the accuracy of the world." - Lisa Robertson, Palinode

“The letter wasn’t even a success,” he says. “Look, it’s divided the art world.” “I think we have different ideas of success.” radicalcut.blogspot.com/2025/12/two-...

“Sometimes our dreams shared characters, the same characters would leave one dream and enter another. We would talk about these dream people, try to describe them to each other, try to ensure they were actually the same figures. That our dreams were falling into sync.”

“I’ve never been very happy about the world. So what makes me tick is this obsessive need to figure out what isn’t here that I want to be here. I make plays — or whatever you want to call them — to try to fill that great big void.” — Richard Foreman

Christmas is proof that the dominant culture is in fact dominant.

Your semi-regular reminder that I have a new book out. The title is Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim. It got some really nice reviews and makes a perfect Xmas gift: radicalcut.blogspot.com/2024/11/some...

"Neo-colonialism is… the worst form of imperialism. For those who practise it, it means power without responsibility and for those who suffer from it, it means exploitation without redress." - Kwame Nkrumah

"I hate endings… The temptation towards resolution, towards wrapping up the package, seems to me a terrible trap. Why not be more honest with the moment? The most authentic endings are the ones which are already revolving towards another beginning. That’s genius." - Sam Shepard

So nice to see my book on these end of year lists. (Made even nicer by the fact that Worthy of the Event by Vivian Blaxell was also at the top of my favourite books list from this past year.) radicalcut.blogspot.com/2025/12/end-...