I saw the eclipse this week- not at totality, but at whatever % NYC was at— 95? I saw it with my coworkers. One of my coworkers was so excited, she just kept exclaiming science! Two of our clients were nearby and I offered them a chance with my glasses. One of them took them from me and the other, a generally bashful guy, said it was ok, he’d seen it before. But the first one smiled so big at the sun and moon that the second guy took a look and he smiled too. They passed me back my glasses and I realized I’d remember that for as long as I remember anything, sharing my glasses with them and my coworkers and people gathered in the street by the Manhattan Bridge.
Books
There’s a bookstore not too far from my job that has a nice area to sit and read unbought books undisturbed. I went there four or so times in the last week and a half to read chapters of Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! I’ve been buying so many books lately and Martyr! was in my libby queue, so I didn’t think it would make sense to buy it, but I just couldn’t wait for my library copy to come. After I read a quarter of the book this way and had a particularly hard week I thought, fuck it, and bought the book because I was loving it so much.
It’s about a poet & recovering addict named Cyrus Shams who was born in Tehran and lives in Indiana. His mother died in 1988 when an Iranian plane was shot by a US naval warship— a horror that actually happened— and his father died after years working as a chicken farmer. The book goes forward and backward in time, into Cyrus’s dreams, and into the heads of his mother, father, romantic roommate, PTSD-stricken uncle, and others in his universe. Cyrus is obsessed with martyrs throughout history and makes tentative plans to both write a book of poems about them and to become one.
I plan to do another read of it soon and annotate it a bit, so I’m not going to offer to loan it out now— but that fact that I plan to dive deeper should serve as a recommendation.
Without spoiling, its ending reminded me of the ending of Namwali Serpell’s The Furrows: An Elegy. And Martyr! is full of elegies, poems written by Cyrus about the martyrs he idolizes. It also reminded me to reread The Recovering by Leslie Jamison. Nobody writes about ego and humility the way recovering writers do, and the way they write about it has provided me with deep guidance over time. This week I was going through something and reading about Cyrus’s recovery experience centered me, reminded me I am just like everyone else, that the drama of my own problems is addictive and limiting.
The best fiction makes me feel hollowed out and raw, open to the world, full of grace. I felt that with Martyr!. I wished it had been written just a little later, because it is impossible not to think about the over 33 thousand Palestinians martyred in the last 190 days, or Aaron Bushnell.
When asked about the difficulties of sculpture, Michaelangelo said, “It is easy. You just chip away all the stone that isn’t David.”
It’s simple to cut things out of a life. You break up with a shitty partner, quit eating bread, delete the Twitter app. You cut it out, and the shape of what’s actually killing you clarifies a little. The whole Abrahamic world invests itself in this promise: Don’t lie, don’t cheat, don’t fuck or steal or kill, and you’ll be a good person. Eight of the ten commandments are about what thou shalt not. But you can live a whole life not doing any of that stuff and avoid doing any good. That’s the whole crisis. The rot at the root of everything. The belief that goodness is built on a constructed absence, not-doing. That belief corrupts everything, has everyone with any power sitting on their hands. A rich man goes a whole day without killing a single homeless person and so goes to sleep content in his goodness. In another world, he’s buying crates of socks and Clif bars and tents, distributing them in city centers. But for him, abstinence reigns.
I want to be the chisel, not the David. What can I make of being here? And what can I not?
The book asks: What does it mean to mean something? What does our desire to be good make us see? What does it blind us to? What grace can we afford ourselves and others?
Chapters 1-4 of W.E.B. DuBois’s Black Reconstruction. I’m taking a four week class on the book and had my first one on Thursday. I love the professor and the book and I’m extremely happy I took the course. There is sooooo much information in the first four chapters. DuBois gets to his thesis paragraphs at the end of the second chapter.
Then came this battle called Civil War, beginning in Kansas in 1854, and ending in the presidential election of 1876—twenty awful years. The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery. The whole weight of America was thrown to color caste. The colored world went down before England, France, Germany, Russia, Italy and America. A new slavery arose. The upward moving of white labor was betrayed into wars for profit based on color caste. Democracy died save in the hearts of black folk.
Indeed, the plight of the white working class throughout the world today is directly traceable to Negro slavery in America, on which modern commerce and industry was founded, and which persisted to threaten free labor until it was partially overthrown in 1863. The resulting color caste founded and retained by capitalism was adopted, forwarded and approved by white labor, and resulted in subordination of colored labor to white profits the world over. Thus the majority of the world's laborers, by the insistence of white labor, became the basis of a system of industry which ruined democracy and showed its perfect fruit in World War and Depression. And this book seeks to tell that story.
My teacher made a big deal out of the fact that he takes two whole chapters to get there, and those chapters are called “The Black Worker” and “The White Worker.” DuBois introduces these two characters first because he’s introducing a labor-oriented history of the Civil War and Reconstruction, where race and class are inextricably intertwined and propel history forward. DuBois outlines how the Civil War was not a war for abolition, but a war about containing vs expanding slavery, and how elites and white laborers on both sides could not conceive of Black labor as being of value, even though it created all the surplus value the country was fighting to control. Then, he says, enslaved Black workers carried out a general strike. They withheld their labor en masse by escaping, joining the Union army, and only working waged labor. This strike is what won the war for the North and forced Lincoln’s hand in emancipation.
It was not the Abolitionist alone who freed the slaves. The Abolitionists never had a real majority of the people of the United States back of them. Freedom for the slave was the logical result of a crazy attempt to wage war in the midst of four million black slaves, and trying the while sublimely to ignore the interests of those slaves in the outcome of the fighting. Yet, these slaves had enormous power in their hands. Simply by stopping work, they could threaten the Confederacy with starvation. By walking into the Federal camps, they showed to doubting Northerners the easy possibility of using them as workers and as servants, as farmers, and as spies, and finally, as fighting soldiers. And not only using them thus, but by the same gesture, depriving their enemies of their use in just these fields. It was the fugitive slave who made the slaveholders face the alternative of surrendering to the North, or to the Negroes.
It’s fascinating and DuBois writes well. He quotes from primary sources and a lot of it is pretty evil. All the power and privilege the United States has, the empire, is built on this evil. My professor is from Brazil and she said she is so ridiculously grateful and glad she wasn’t educated in the United States, because we get so much propaganda to the contrary. And it’s true. I went to “good” schools, award-winning schools, and most of the history I was ever taught was dogshit. It’s amazing, how differently the world looks when understood from seen through a labor lens. I’m in chapters 5 and 6 now, the beginning of Reconstruction.
Essays/substacks
“The Rejection Plot” by Tony Tulathimutte on rejection in literature and life. Beautifully written. There is a segment on stalking that turned my stomach just a bit. I have been, and continue to be, the rejector to someone who has not accepted the rejection(s) for over four years now. It’s hard to explain or admit, the deep nausea, helplessness, and anger I feel about it all. But this piece is excellent.
To whatever extent the mind is a part of nature, it too abhors a vacuum. Just as infatuation drives you to project intimate fantasies onto strangers, the blank slate of rejection, the lack of a script, invites you to devise an elaborate narrative about why you were rejected, and what that says about you. But even stronger than the temptation to dwell in the past (what might have happened) or dread the future (what won’t be) is the urge to wallow in an eternal present. Your life can’t move forward, so it moves sideways, to a parallel reality. At parties you imagine the date you didn’t bring, then go home to share your bed with a ghost. Absence becomes the realest thing in your world. So the true rejection plot is the one the reject devises in the absence of a plot.
Akosua T. Adasi’s consumption report
My wound existed before me, I was born to embody it.3 The truth is in the future.4 Ethics = affecting and being affected.5 If you hit a wall, surrender. We don’t know what we are capable of.6 I must hold in balance the sense of the futility of effort and the sense of the necessity to struggle; the conviction of the inevitability of failure and the still the determination to ‘succeed’—.7 Acknowledge the bruising.8 a shaped wound.9 What kind of animal do you become when you’re researching/writing/thinking?10
PYM on solidarity, from last October in the New Inquiry:
But also and more broadly, what we are asking those who wish to be in solidarity within the West is threefold. First, struggle through organizations and your workplaces and your communities and in the streets to demand an end to both the current genocidal campaign and for an end to the entire system of settler colonialism that has strangled Palestine for the last century. Second, go on the offensive: demand sanctions against Zionism; no more weapons, no more money, no more cultural or institutional cover. We want the total anti-normalization of a Zionism that has once again shown its face to the world. Finally, understand Palestinian resistance as fundamentally just and as a means of survival for our people; it will not stop in the weeks and months to come, and you must be prepared not to waver again.
“Driving is Worse Because Society is Worse” in Mental Hellth. A short story: Normally I try my hardest not to provoke road- (or sidewalk-) rage, but I hate speeding in pedestrian zones so much that it fills me with my own rage. I often joke to coworkers that I will die stubbornly asserting the pedestrian’s right of way. I only tell this joke to coworkers because my friends do not find it funny. Last night, two cars were at a stop sign & crosswalk. The second car was fancy and I could tell by the way it was inching closer to the first that it planned to blow through the stop sign and speed up the road. The first car turned and I stepped into the crosswalk, walked slowly across it, forcing the fancy car to follow the law and feeling the perverse pleasure of needling a reckless driver. As I walked away, the driver rolled down the tinted window and yelled to me, “you must not value your own life, man!” Interesting points made here. Do I value my own life? Sure, absolutely- but I could probably have refrained from egging them on. But they could also value their own life, or at least their nervous system, by chilling the fuck out instead of threatening vehicular manslaughter. It was sort of a kind warning— a lesser person would have murdered me. It is always good for my ego to be reminded I can be murdered at any moment. And they called me man.
Anyway, as always, Mental Hellth mirrors, explains, and politicizes my life.
New thot pudding! We don’t talk about Ted Chiang enough.
“on living happily during the war” by Pranay Somayajula
“You look around you at all these beautiful, terrible things, and you want to scream, for you know the price that others have paid—still pay—for you to have them.”
“In Spite of All the Damage: On hunger, boyfriends, and that New York Times article” by Dronme
“how to change your life, part 2: agnes callard's aspiration: every writer begins as a poseur ✦ on Kafka, Proust, philosophy, and trying very hard” by Celine Nguyen. I love this series so far where Nguyen reads philosophy and explains it to us in a self-helpy way. This one is about how becoming something you want to be involves wanting to be that and trying to be that. I love faking it until I make it. I love deciding I’m going to be different and then doing it. Jake from Adventure Time says “Sucking at something if the first step to being sorta good at something.” Nguyen also talks about Kierkegaard, Vigdis Hjorth (who I have it on good authority that she’s a nice person as well as a genius writer), and Descartes. It’s warm and encouraging.
Poetry- Last night I went to my friend Sreshtha’s poetry reading, where they were reading alongside Emily Lee Luan and Jeddie Sophronius, who was celebrating publishing his book. I bought both Emily’s book Return and Jeddie’s book Interrogation Records. Jeddie wrote poetry about the massacre of Communists in Indonesia and brought scans of the archives he used in his research and read poems about that research. I can’t find the poems Sreshtha and Emily read online, just one line of Sreshtha’s I quickly typed into my notesapp: “I am too afraid of naming things so I call it unhappiness.”
Music- I’m still v much in my Cowboy Carter era but I have listened to a fewww things besides it.
Shireen, you showed me Princess by Ayesha Erotica ft. Petey Plastic. “I'm the kind of bitch to hold a blunt up in my pussy lips” yes
Btw do you ever feel like a middle-of-the-set nesting doll separated from the rest of your doll family? Hollow inside and exposed outside? I guess I’m saying I’m lonely tonight. Nothing a weighted blanket can’t help.
<3 ALF