gonzo Borges

Man, but Sam Kriss really has a thing going on. You think the United States started on the East Coast and gradually spread westward? Not true. Totally fake. It began, if it began, right in the centre, the Mississippi valley, the heart of the continent; it’s a riverine civilisation, like Egypt or China. Over its long long history it expands and contracts, diastolic and systolic, like a heart; when it reaches outwards it brushes against the oceans and sometimes it can even cross to the opposite shores; when it draws in again, the fringes of the empire revert to barbarism. It’s been doing that for thousands of years. Maybe more. America is two hundred and fifty thousand years old. Two and a half million years old, maybe. It’s always existed. It lives outside time. Sam Kriss https://samkriss.substack.com/p/infinite-america And what that thing is, I’ve decided, is a very timely combination of 1) a sort of Borgesian fabulation, heavily reliant on the dead-pan interpolation and…