Hi, I’m Patrick Leftwich, a researcher, writer and translator based in Cracow, Poland, and this is my personal blog and website. Minas Mongrel is a forgotten tower once ruled by a dark sorcerer, but now overrun by mongrels, some are feral, some are gentle. It was once called Minas Morgul, and Minas Ifil before that. Minas means “tower” in Sindarin, the language of Grey Elves of Beleriand, Morgul is “sorcery” or “dark magic”. So Minas Mongrel means “tower of mutt-magic”.
Minas Mongrel is also a cipher for what you can expect to find on this blog as I’m interested mix-breeding different fields, such as post-deleuzoguattarian and accelerationist theories of subjectivity, imagination in contemporary American indie literature and Polish poetry; French cinema of fascination; algorithmic rationality and post-truth semiotics; protocols of escapism; epistemology of solarpunk; synthetic intimacy; and German idealism.
In 2017-2022 I’ve belong to the HOMAR collective which (co-)organised or participated in a number of various events, such as club parties, music/art festivals, gallery exhibitions, workshops etc. [which you can find all info at our shrine-website https://homar.blog/]. We’ve explored different modes of theory production and distribution, and for the most part the idea of synthetic intimacy engendered by contacts between alien agencies (from outer space, time or phylum) and human affectivity. Roughly that time I’ve also co-designed Cybercafé, an art installation for Unsound festival, finished a book of modular poetry (in Polish), 0°DLL, and translated Nick Land’s Fanged Noumena, which regrettably still hasn’t come out. This year (2023) finally after aeons of suffering I’ve submitted my doctoral thesis on the diagrammatics of post-truth in the light of Deleuze & Guattari’s transcendental materialism (written in Polish).
[note: any links to homar.blog (from the projects/writings section) will only take you to the main page, so if you want particular translations or notes, you have to locate them on the website yrslf]
