twenty-two: each person, each situation, and each subject in its own way

The title this month comes from Buber's I and Thou--or, as translator Walter Kaufmann rather persuasively argues, I and You, because Du is the informal-intimate you in German, how you speak to friends and lovers, and translating it otherwise is missing the point.

In the face of wildfire, flood, regime collapse, rising fourth wave case counts, and deadlines, I took to my bed with a hundred-year-old work of relational philosophy last Monday, bundled up, and dug in. This was a good life choice. Weimar-era philosophers have seen some shit and they have got your back.

But the title. This is a comment Kaufman--who is absolutely hilariously cynical about people who bicker and posture but don't do in that dry way that I can laugh at in the privacy of my own home, but probably bespeaks a real wound--made about how Buber himself moved through life: He was not a man of formulas but a man who tried to meet each person, each situation, and each subject in its own way. This feels like something to aspire to.

Kaufman speaks for about 40 pages on Buber, writing from Jewish ethics, historiography, translation, and how modern people (being, the readers of 1970) don't really know how to read--all in the spirit of a d'var Torah--and ends up here:

So there's this past week and a half's set of existential questions answered: How do you face the untranslatable, unknown, and inexplicable? Context and elbow grease. Thanks, exiled intellectuals of the Weimar Republic.


virtuality

This month I caught up to the 2020 moment and did my first comprehensive virtual convention, Readercon 31; yes, there was ICFA this spring, but watching isn't doing, and doing was a whole interesting new thing.

The highlights: Faces! Many of which I haven't seen in an age! And a brilliant panel on the sense of place in Jeffrey Ford and Ursula Vernon's work, and the linguistics panel I shared with John Chu, Francesca Forrest, Greer Gilman, and Sarah Smith. We were fraught with technical issues, enthusiasm, anecdotes, ideas, and five people generally crawling all over the topic like a thousand-legged creature that likes shiny things, but that creature knows how to have a good time, and the conversation afterward was a really restful way to end the weekend.

I find myself having a visible struggle to take virtual cons on their own terms. Much of what I actually enjoy about conventions is by necessity cut out: random encounters in hallways, organically meeting new people, spontaneous schedule flow, being wholly and entirely in one physical space with one job to do in that present moment, instead of torn between panels and the trappings of the rest of my life. The sheer amount of chores I did while "in panels" that weekend was impressive, but half the pleasure for me, it seems, is stepping out of the universe of multitasking and productivity and lists of everything to be done. I wanted to be just there.


literal and slightly less literal but not entirely figurative imprisonments

Novel research reading has taken me through the Auburn and Pennsylvania systems of penitentiaries (ie, some things that did not work in the early 1800s and people went hey, it don't work but then there was money to be made, so they conveniently forgot about that in a manner reminiscent of Andrea Pitzer's history of concentration camps).

Shane Bauer's American Prison has, as well as an expansion of his expose article in Mother Jones, a decent starter history of the convict leasing and prison chain-gang systems -- short version, once the United States stopped building wealth through slavery on cotton and sugar plantations, it turned around and built most of the transport infrastructure in the South with leased convicts, aka slavery. Railroads, coal mining, and swamp-draining: all inmate labour. And it goes back farther: there are definite structural echoes in this of convict transportation from Britain to the colonies, of Jean Valjean in the Bagne of Toulon.

This continues today: the Pinkerton Detective Agency was bought up by security companies and flipped into the correctional officer business, and good chunks of federal government supplies and services currently come from prison labour. Literally nothing in the American economy, from Day One, has ever seemed to function without some form of slavery or coerced labour, and sometimes history is a straight direct line. I am feeling this inform my opinions about capitalism as we speak: the stories we tell about it, the byproducts, the gap between its aspirations and the actual guts of the machinery.

(Author's note: Good thing I have a whole other book about the structural nature of slave societies to fold some of this stuff into, because it sure won't fit in the YA novel, and it deserves a proper treatment.)

I also finally dug into Jennifer M. Silva's Coming Up Short: Working-Class Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty, which someone recommended to me two-plus years ago (Chet, was that you?) and it's turned into a book that's simultaneously blowing my head open about dynamics we have seen in the world--in our own families, in what it is the YA novels I review are reflecting through distorted glass, in what it is people are doing precisely when they go to war on Twitter--and making me want to argue with it intensely in the good way, and then making me think about cultural amnesia.

Silva's using traditional as a bit of a shorthand in this study; traditional marriage, traditional gender roles. Yeah, I know what she means and can get directly to her points, which are frequently interesting and good ones, and she's generally not advocating for a particular style, more observing the change. But I simultaneously can't help but think it's a loaded word, and this isn't a surfacy, tongue-stuck-out, no-you kind of nit to pick.

One of the weird benefits of being intermittently obsessed with an era of modern history that was a little more fast and loose in its cultural narratives (teaser for next issue, where we're going to go on a bit about Robert Capa and Gerda Taro and the Spanish Civil War, silent film, the Hays Code in general, I think I've mentioned before that every book we read about Weimar Germany starts with so like this era was a shitshow, amirite? Enjoy the historical discontinuity).

--anyways. One of the good things: I have a maybe more fluid assumption about what tradition means. I'm deeply--not suspicious, but critical in my approach to someone claiming anything was always: for whom, where, why, who wants me to think of that as an unbroken line, who wants me to think an unbroken line connotes rightness and authority, why is this speech act being undertaken when it's clear that absolutely not one thing in human history has ever been an always, except breathing, eating, and poop? Very little about marriage, about Western gender roles, about how work works has ever been a stability. It's been pushed back against from multiple sides, it's been a site of contest for as long as it's existed. Can you really call something a tradition if it's had so little cultural buy-in that entire social classes routinely slipped the system, and there were organized protest movements against it that have lasted centuries? That's not tradition, that's struggle. It's struggle that's been around for a long time, is all.

It reinforces for me that most of what we know about history is hindsight and propaganda, and--I mean, I think we just have to live with that? People do nothing better than squirm through the cracks of the systems we're in, like water. Nothing has ever been as concrete as all that.

So, I know what she means, but. I think it's important to think about how we portray changes as meaningful without placing a false stability behind them to compare to. I've been fact-checking for years now. It was never that.


treating as You

This month the project did, after a year or more of intensive research, turn the corner from when I read things into when I call people and ask them stuff. I've got my hands around my material; now for the gaps.

It never stops amazing me how willing people are to talk about their lives, experiences, hopes, and fears to some rando with a word processor, and cheerfully offer more in case something else comes up, and ask me when the book will be done and they can read it. This is an absolute act of grace.
 

things read (yeah, I know it's been nothing but this month, the library wants their stuff back)

As of this writing, I've finally worked my way through Ursula K. Le Guin's The Wave in the Mind, which took a long time to read because I can't do it in the bathtub. She's too smart about everything, so I have to get up to make notes every five pages and drip all over the floor, or just make other arrangements. So it's come to me piecemeal and in chunks I can digest; thoughts I can be done thinking before I tackle the next essay.

I'm ruing a bit the ways I reflexively avoided anything that smelled like a how-to book as a young writer, having been a bit skittish of other people's rules bumping me about before I figured out my own. Lord knows if I'd have understood the nuances of emotional intelligence and prosody that she discusses here back then, so maybe everything just comes in its time and when your hands are right for the toolset, but hoo boy, I was missing out for no particular good reason.

I also flew through A.E. Osworth's We Are Watching Eliza Bright, a novel about Gamergate-like activities which made itself possible to read for me, a person who watched all that go down one degree of separation away, without damping down the impacts and implications. It does some very clever work with voice: a set of collective narrators, the looping and unified voices of the random and anonymous persecutors--and some community-oriented protectors who are also suitably ironized, which keeps it out of black-hat/white-hat territory. It's doesn't end in a way that quite works for me--and which gave me some thoughts about what makes for a satisfying ending--but as a technical feat, it's (stereotypical books review word, but true) thoroughly compelling.

Finally, partly for research and partly for myself, I went through Ejeris Dixon and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement. This is like forest-bathing, but for stable sanity. The strategies is the emphatic word here; it's actually long on what has worked, what didn't, what could, everything the variety of contributors know about why. It was a little bit of the art of the possible.


things to read

A quiet moon-and-a-fortnight on this front, but for the Canadian side of the readership: Prix Aurora Award voting is open until September 4th, with "The Death of the Gods" nominated this year in the Best Poem/Song category. This has been my occasional, uncomfortable wrestle with "do I mention it or not?" and then figuring no, it's my obligation to the work.

*

A little more variety in the diet next month, I promise, and stay safe.