I am still snowed under with October work: Bridging the Invisible this weekend and How Tarot Became Magic next week, but I want to pause to recommend some reading to you that will give you 1) power 2) political resistance and most importantly 3) joy. Okay, some pain, too, just to acknowledge where we are right now (fascism) and how much it is destroying every aspect of our lives and cultures.

But we can fight back.

I don’t know when it finally dawned on me that surrealism permeated my life since I first went through the looking glass with Alice (and quite possibly before–after all why did that resonate so profoundly?). I do know that it has since brought me so much joy and strength that it seems odd I never really pursued it in a structured way until recent years (maybe that is suitably surreal anyway). Hey, it even got me to learn French finally.

Three pieces I recommend reading for the moment we are in:

Anna Kornbluth: How Defunding the Arts Brought Civil Disintegration ( blistering indictment of the 250 ‘celebrations’).

Anna Kornbluth, again (follow her on Bluesky) and Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado: How to Protect Your Right to Culture.

Luce DeLire at E-Flux: Revolutions That as Yet Have No Model: Political Surrealisms and Tyrannical Excesses.

Some may claim that I am generating a pipe dream for the educated upper class, that “ordinary people” can’t understand political surrealism or won’t be interested. I take this to be a condescending stereotype. The huge success, for example, of fan fiction (which is entirely imaginative) and conspiracy theories (which are really a fusion of imagination and reason gone wrong) proves that a great many people are very interested in creative imaginations and that it allows them a degree of joy. Consequently, the surrealist state is not a luxurious fancy. It is a potential at work in everybody who imagines in order to cope with reality—hence everybody.