The first time it was a little sad and poignant – reading through the 50 volumes of the Collected Works (I got them cheaply via a dodgy deal in California). When Marx died from pure exhaustion and, some years later, the ever-exuberant and priapic Engels finally succumbed to throat cancer at 75 from a lifetime of fine tobacco and good beer and wine, I was in a melancholy mood. The second time was when I finished the long manuscript of Criticism of Earth, the third when I completed a thorough revision of this 450 page tome. By this time I had a distinct feeling of deja vu.
But now, running through 58 years of writings by Engels and 50 years by Marx, in both English and German (and all the other fucking languages in which they wrote – Engels seemed to spout them off with no trouble), I wish they would fucking hurry up and fucking die.
14 April, 2010 at 11:54 am
Surely now is a good time to hire a lumpenproletariat research assistant (ie poor grad student) to do all this dirty, reactionary work of writing references.
14 April, 2010 at 12:25 pm
I would do so if the lump had set this system up in the first place and knew what to do (instead of the mess with Criticism of Heaven) and was paid the same as every one else.
15 April, 2010 at 4:37 am
This is horrifying. Makes me feel marginally better about the dreadful task of indexing my dissertation for publication.
15 April, 2010 at 1:02 pm
Don’t ask me about indexing. Have done too much of that.