You could’ve gone to two camps in Manhattan this weekend. The uptown one, the Gaza Solidarity Encampment at Columbia University, the site of the class struggle and the revolutionary illusions, with the student demonstrators and other pro-Palestine activists decolonizing themselves in the “liberated zone” against the genocidaire university administrators and the NYPD and a bunch of ghoulish Zionist counterprotestor crybullies, sleeping in the tents on the lawn in the locked-down campus, chanting utopian slogans, dancing dabke, beating drums, and so on. And then the downtown one, the 52-hour livestreamed marathon reading of Gertrude Stein’s abortive novel The Making of Americans at Earth, Dean Kissick’s new “open format culture space” on Orchard Street, the site of the avant-garde illusions, a different sort of trancelike chanting, with a lineup of dimesquareños out of Walt John Pearce’s rolodex taking turns every 20 minutes to sit in front of the stars and stripes and wrestle with the notoriously impenetrable modernist dronecore epic about “family living.”
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