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How fucking kvlt are you? My guess is that while you may dabble in a little weekend corpse paint, you have yet to venture into church burning. So you long for something to consummately up the devotion, fully engaging your creative black energies, but perhaps something more legal. Welcome to Black Metal Theory, the mutual blackening of metal and theory, duh, which is all the trooest rage in the chthonic realms of Continental Philosophy. Two symposiums already, Hideous Gnosis and Melancology, and I am assuming more on the way. Hideous Gnosis is available in paperback in case you missed it. But what the fuck is all this? From Melancology:

Black metal irrupts from a place already divested of nature, a site of extinction…

As such black metal could be described as a negative form of environmental writing; the least Apollonian of genres, it is terrestrial – indeed subterranean and infernal – inhabiting a dead forest that is at once both mythic and real unfolding along an atheological horizon that marks the limit of absolute evil where there are no goods or resources to distribute and therefore no means of power and domination, a mastery of nothing.

A new word is required that conjoins ‘black’ and ‘ecology’: melancology, a word in which can be heard the melancholy affect appropriate to the conjunction.

…

This environment of absolute evil is exactly the same as the absolute good of black metal itself: the expenditure of a sonic drive that propels a blackened self-consciousness, a melancological consciousness without object that is the necessary prior condition to any speculation on or intervention in the environment.

The Black Metal Theory Symposium thus invites speculation and interventions on the blackening of the earth, landscapes of extinction, starless aeon, sempiternal nightmares, black horizons, malign essences, Qliphothic forces from beyond … in a general re-conceptualization of black ecology.

Whoa, dude. You had me at ‘melancology’.

If you can’t wait for another symposium, there is also ‘Helvete · A Journal of Black Metal Theory‘ and their forthcoming inaugural Incipit: Open Issue due in 2012, hopefully before the apocalypse.

I had a dream last night that I pulled up to Dunkin Donuts drive-through and David Foster Wallace was working the window. He very routinely handed me my order, two donuts – one glazed, one chocolate cake- and a coffee, and then conspiratorially asked if I had anything else for him. I reached into the glove box and pulled out a large manuscript and handed it through the small window. He looked at it skeptically, leaned forward and whispered, “No, you know, I mean for the bank. ” And so it turns out that in this particular post-apocalyptic dreamscape all the world’s banks had collapsed and now Dunkin Donuts would “hold your money” in mafia-esque black market accounts, because after all we need someone to hold our money. Are we far off from this (not the recently deceased writers working at Dunkin Donuts part)?

Another good BBC documentary. Sartre…philosopher, playa. That picture of him with Robert Plant hair as a child kills me.

Eventually, I knew something with Albert Camus would turn up on The Youtubes, which should be renamed JesusTubes, because it is as awesome as Jesus, and maybe even more influential. I don’t think I’ve ever seen video of Albert Camus before, but here he is being interviewed at a soccer game in Algeria, the country he was born in. I hope this is dubbed because he has a funny Goddard scoundrel type voice that I don’t think fits his writing.