panel on a book Monday May 20, plus lots of other random stuff
hey all,
I mentioned that my friend Rob Hunter and I cowrote a review of a Marxist theory book we like a lot (that’s here https://spectrejournal.com/on-economic-compulsion/). Red May is hosting an online panel on the book on Monday May 20th at 11am Seattle time (that’s 1pm Central, or as I call it “the correct time”), with me moderating. It’ll be here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxYlA3MwHIM Come along if you like!
That aside, I hope you’re all maintaining alright despite the hellishness of the hellscape. I have the itch to write something here yet felt like I had nothing to say at the moment so I’ll just meander an update. I’ve been feeling kinda grumpy lately, work stress mostly, and a bit of stress about rising costs of living and a stagnant paycheck. I’m slowly grinding out the article draft I was complaining about a while back, about doctors and preventing management from perceiving the moral consequences of their actions. I hope to have that done in a week or so, fingers crossed. If any of the formal writing I’ve done this year sees the light of day I’ll be sure to announce it here, on the theory that if you’ll tolerate my little blog you’ll also tolerate my little articles and shit.
I hope to get clear of my semester in a week - I better! that’s when the grades are due! There’s lots of meetings right now. Two of my colleagues are leaving for better jobs, which is sad, though I am genuinely happy for them, and is also prompting all these meetings. I’ll be glad to see the back of all that. Soon, soon, I hope. I think I’m more worn out than I’m fully conscious of, I get little glimpses of the full extent of the tiredness sometimes and it feels vast. I’m trying to plan to decompress before jumping into something more ambitious, but those ambitions are all tied to things I care a lot about, so I don’t know. It’s hard to be both tired and restless - those are two debts that can’t be repaid simultaneously, to pay off one deepens the other. I’m unsure if there’s any other alternative. Pick your poison, I suppose.
This has been a hard academic year. I taught three new courses last semester, which had some upsides but was a ton of work and I never felt like I found my footing. This term was easier, but I started it in a deficit and I agreed to write too many things so I felt behind the whole time (because I was, and still am, behind!). There’s also the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Not that I’m remotely a main character, but it just is true that it’s disregulating to live with even remote attention to the world in a world where that’s happening. Amid all of the above I lost some of the thread of my reading about covid and thinking through social murder. I’ve kept up to some extent as demonstrated by this blog but it’s been more a catch as catch can affair - a matter of finding those themes in stuff I happened to read or watch or think about, rather than any kind of organized research project. I hope to change that over the summer and into the next academic year.
I will also say, I think - well, I’m changing my mind mid-sentence. I was going to say ‘I’ve been happier’ but that’s not true really: what’s actually the case is that I’ve been less immediately distressed yet with a weird sort of nagging dislocation offsetting that reduction in distress as I’ve spent less time staring directly into the pandemic. That’s not something I chose, I just had to do all this other stuff for my job, and as I said I plan to get back to being more attentive on an active basis. I’m just saying I notice the difference, and this makes me get a little more why some people have chosen to tune out on the pandemic. Part of me wants to say that I prefer the more distress less dislocation experience but I’m not sure that’s really true. They both suck. All of this takes a toll - big psychic costs all around, no one’s not paying, but I suspect conscious awareness of those costs is wildly unevenly distributed and also varies with what the specific costs are.
That’s probably too static in how I put it too. These aren’t constant aches, well, not only constant aches, but things that come and go. Lately, or maybe off and on for a little while now, I’ve had a few times when it’s really hard to read. (I wrote a bit about this the other day in my post on a group blog I’m recently part of, that’s here in case it’s any interest: https://notesfromasummer.blogspot.com/2024/05/ffffffuuuuuuuuuuuuu.html) It’s sort of like writer’s block but for reading. (By the way, I’m a third of the way through this at the moment - https://www.thegauntlet.news/p/liberals-joined-conservatives-to - and it’s great, about some of the ideological situation we’re in around the covid vaccine.) This isn’t a block for any reading whatsoever but rather for reading with any emotional heft, and the more heft the harder to push through the reading. I think this is partly just being very tired, partly fatigue at the unending distress and, to maybe contradict myself, partly hesitation to return to front and center attention to a distress I’d not been focusing on recently. (By the way I wrote an essay ages ago now about the weight of writing my book on workplace injuries, if that’s any interest it’s here: http://legalhistoryblog.blogspot.com/2020/07/heavy-books-compulsory-positivity-and.html) Like I said it comes and goes, and if I slow down and read patiently I seem to be able to get it to settle, but whatever it is, it sucks. I figure it’ll pass eventually and it’s only an occasional thing, but I figure it’s another indicator of psychic costs, and I figure everyone’s paying them massively in a wide range of ways, with some people’s coping mechanisms being mutually incompatible, unfortunately.
I’m going to stop in a sec but I wanted to mention, I watched the Ken Loach movie The Old Oak recently. It’s good. Sad. Once again a social murder film - people discarded in various ways, scrambling to live at the bottom of the pyramid. It’s moving and though it’s set in Northern England and features a lot of Syrian refugees, I felt like I could see a lot of my life in the midwestern US in it. I think that’s part of Loach’s artistry, to present people’s lives in their robust multifacetedness yet also draw out social commonalities. My friend Edwad and I talk about this occasionally on the twitter in terms of art, especially some of the music we like, being a concrete universal, a Marx term that I periodically forget the meaning of and have to look up again. Anyway, I recommend it, check it out.
Slightly related, if you’re an Open Mode completionist (and if you’re not then get the fuck out! shame on you! close the tab right now!) you may remember I was on a kick for kitchen sink drama in the UK earlier this year or maybe late last fall. Loach comes out of that milieu. I’m way, way out of my depth here - my opinions on any kind of art being basically the same as my opinions on food, either yum gimme more or ick what the fuck - but I wonder if part of what good social realist art does is to show the basic untenability of the social order, in the sense that unacceptable outcomes are inexorably generated by the death machine, and just has us sit with those realities without resolution, just as they remain unresolved in reality - and permanently so really; as Max Horkheimer once wrote, “even after the new society shall have come into existence, the happiness of its members will not make up for the wretchedness of those who are being destroyed in our contemporary society.” The future doesn’t redeem the past. Part of what we’ll finally get to do in the future good society is to really start to grieve fully under conditions of freedom and work through all the built up un- and under-acknowledge harm and suffering.
Anyway, kitchen sink drama. I went down a wikipedia rabbit hole and found out that there were three different drama programs - Armchair Theatre, the Wednesday Play, and Play for Today - which all ran this kind of social realist drama. There’s bits and bobs on youtube and whatnot, I plan to keep watching more of it now and again, as so far I still like it, find it resonant with my ongoing and growing interests in British history tied to the history of the left and find it speaks to social tensions that have changed in their specific organization but have not ended. And I continue to wonder where we are with the pandemic in terms of art, and particularly social realist art. As I said a while back, I continue to experience abstract electronic music and noise rock and whatnot as pandemic art in that it speaks to my own unsettledness and lack of words to fit the situation, and I value that tremendously, but that’s really me finding a sensibility appropriate to my context in that art, which is significantly different from being about the pandemic, let alone being social realist narrative art explicitly about the pandemic. My twitter pal Caridad sent me a list of recommended pandemic art so I know it exists, I’m sure there’s tons more I’m not aware of too, just saying I continue to notice a relative lack of art on this in my own life and in our readily available shared public life.
I’m going to break off in a second but I wanted to mention, I can’t remember if I have before, that I went on a bit of a kick for early ska and rocksteady and it’s made me intensely curious to know more about the history of Jamaica. This track by Joe White for instance, is so compelling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=su5-cm4Enxs It’s gorgeous pop, so pretty, and has lines like “cop shot rudies, rudies shot cop too, rudies don’t care” and “cop bomb rudies, rudies bomb cop too, rudies don’t care.” That’s such bleak, harsh content, basically social realist depictions of intense upheaval conveyed with the concision of a telegram, and mostly single syllable words to boot, and with a sound that turns on the dopamine faucet in my brain. Amazing.
And, not really related at all except that it’s good music, lately the phrase “keep on trucking” has started to put Eastbound and Down in my head, which is just one of the best songs ever written and brings back lots of good memories of going on the road a little with my grandpa when he was driving trucks when I was a tiny kid. Do yourself a favor and give it a listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOgUaFkpS3Y
Alright friends I’m out. Keep on trucking.