Regarding http://urbanhonking.com/regarding Gesamtkunstblog Tue, 04 May 2021 14:21:31 +0000 en-US hourly 1 Spring is here / the lilacs bloomed and died already http://urbanhonking.com/regarding/2021/05/04/spring-is-here-the-lilacs-bloomed-and-died-already/ http://urbanhonking.com/regarding/2021/05/04/spring-is-here-the-lilacs-bloomed-and-died-already/#comments Tue, 04 May 2021 14:21:31 +0000 http://urbanhonking.com/regarding/?p=4052 Continue reading ]]> I recently had a fun yogurt breakthrough that I’m excited about. I have been making all our yogurt for a year now, and it’s easy and fine. As with all such projects, you know, there is a lot of googling and YouTubing for things like “yogurt runny why” and “how long can I culture yogurt” and “my yogurt smells weird” and such. And over time I cobbled together a method and it’s all great. But then somehow the other day I was googling more because I had a batch turn out really yeasty, and I fell through a hidden pocket of knowledge into a whole other realm of Yogurt Internet I had never known about before: not Mediterranean yogurt internet but INDIAN yogurt internet. It’s a slightly different method, with different accessories! And I had never known about it before because when Indians talk about yogurt in English they don’t call it “yogurt” they call it “curd.” KEYWORD REVELATIONS. So in conclusion I bought a handsome terra cotta curd pot that supposedly will make my yogurt less runny (because of porous terra cotta/evaporation during culturing). I find this very fun. The other yogurt revelation I had is that when people say you can put your yogurt (or your bread dough) in the oven with the light on to keep it warm, I always thought that meant PILOT light, and since I don’t have a gas stove I’ve been culturing my yogurt in a cooler filled with jars of boiling water, which is unwieldy and mildly annoying. Finally realized it literally does mean “oven light,” as in the light bulb that’s in there. I cultured my last batch in there with the light on and was astonished by how warm it stayed in there. You just have to put a post-it on the oven that says DO NOT OPEN OR USE OVEN OR TURN OFF LIGHT.

The first revelation was born of cultural difference, the second of me being stupid! Both are great.

I finished Capital vol. 1 some time ago. It was such a wonderful journey. I feel very very satisfied by the experience. My brain changed a lot and I learned so much. I took 110 pages of notes, which sounds like a lot until you remember the book itself is 940 pages long plus I simultaneously read David Harvey’s companion book, which is like 300 pages I think. I’m sure I have gone on and on before in here about how much I love my notebooks and my note-taking method, but it really came to the fore for me during this process. I felt this was really more of a spiritual journey, like a monk rewriting the Bible 100 times or something (to sell to a King for gold lol).

Capital is just a great book. After the first three chapters it just gets so good. The end is really rip-roaring, he gets into colonialism in America and it’s just devastating. He’s so angry through the whole book and yet is being so incredibly precise and writing with such intense clarity. There’s a joke on Twitter about how Marx considered everything, because it’s basically true and there’s something so funny about that. Like I saw a joke where someone said “Marx failed to consider a giant boat blocking the Suez Canal” and then someone else came along and found some weird passage where indeed Marx is like “let’s say a giant boat blocks the Suez Canal, what would happen then” and then accurately explains indeed what did happen. What a brain! Scribbling away in his horrid London grotto with his little English son calling him “Charley.”

All this being said, I also can’t imagine someone reading Capital without having read like 500 other books across ten years first. When people say Capital radicalized them I just either don’t believe them or else I’m incredibly chagrined by how dumb I am. I just can’t imagine this being your first intro to a critique of capitalism. How could you possibly make sense of it?? If I had read it ten years ago before having read all this other crazy shit I’ve read by now, it would have been like trying to read an Algebra textbook upside-down. I guess we all are truly so different in God’s benevolent gaze. Also I do think my brain is slower than a lot of other people’s, it takes me a long time to really learn stuff. I’m also forgetting stuff at a faster rate than before, which sucks.

Yesterday was my final TGIF of the semester. What an absurd semester! Teaching online–something I imagine Marx genuinely did fail to consider, although I am open to being corrected on this point–is extremely not fun. The experience of sitting here at my desk for four months straight is totally bizarre. I mean my lifestyle is always very desk-oriented, but at least during normal times I get up and drive to work and walk around campus and stuff. Instead now I’m just….here. Every moment of every day. Sometimes I’m here in my house when I’m sitting here; other times I’m in a classroom when I’m sitting here; other times I’m in an organizing meeting or a mutual aid meeting when I’m sitting here; sometimes I’m talking to a crying grad student in New Hampshire when I’m sitting here. Yesterday I was scrolling through Twitter in the 10 minutes before I had to teach, which is my way of managing last-minute teaching anxiety, and Gary came in and did the passive aggressive thing we do to each other when one of us is annoyed the other one is on their phone (asking “what’s on your phone?” in a bright, interested voice that is just dripping with scorn) and I yelled FUCK OFF, I AM AT WORK, HOW DARE YOU. He said he forgot I had to teach. Which is fair, as I’m just puttering around in my office at home! Sometimes I vacuum or something in between classes. It’s so weird. Also bizarre is the experience of teaching my big nighttime class, because during it I am also hearing the banging of pots and pans that signifies Gary in the kitchen making lasagna. Simultaneous spaces and temporalities! Teaching some crazy lecture about propaganda to 80 students and then just closing the laptop and instantly you are home and dinner is on the table. No thank you. Never thought I would miss a commute but I do; I miss the decompression time, the farm fields rolling by in the gloaming, the moving from here to there.

A few weeks ago I was teaching a seminar about music during the Third Reich, when a gigantic hawk SLAMMED against my office window right in front of my face, feathers flying as it speared a mourning dove in its talons. It flew away low over the yard, carrying the dove. I screamed and ran off camera and watched it fly up onto a tree branch and start tearing into the other bird.

Another time a thunderstorm rolled in while I was teaching, so while I was maintaining normal composure talking about some boring-ass shit and gesturing with one hand, with the other hand I was trying to comfort my gently sobbing dog who was pressed trembling against my legs.

Another time a grad student was attending class while driving and had to screech to the side of the road because he wanted to make a point about Nietzsche.

Anyway it’s over and now we wait to see what the Fall will hold. What fresh horrors await? Like most of us, I assume, I no longer really speculate about the future. One day at a time, baby

I am getting a haircut on Friday. It is my first haircut in FIFTEEN MONTHS. I might get bangs. I am also getting a tattoo. The really cool 21 year old anarchist I co-coordinate a food distro team with does super avant-garde freehand tattoos for a living and I feel like there will never be a better time, reason, or situation than this, for me. They recently asked me how long Gary and I have been together and when I said “eighteen years” they just stared at me wordlessly, so to fill the space I said “we met on the K Records message board” and THEY KNEW WHAT THAT WAS. Cross-generational, cross-country connections, thanks to punk culture. Surreal to picture the fact that when Gary and I were falling in love on the K Board via weird long jokes about our shared orthodontia history, this person was three years old. Alas! “Every old man dies a foreigner in his own land”–Chateaubriand

We are starting to move into public outreach phase of our budget project. It’s exciting and unnerving. One of us received an anonymous letter in the mail the other day detailing all this corruption in our local government. It’s all incredibly small potatoes stuff but still. Deep Throat!

Gary’s anti-profit bookstore is going really well. He’s now hosting the wishlist for Noname’s book club! Selling the books at cost, zero mark-up. “It’s literally so stupid” he said happily. Making zero income and spending 40 hours a week in the basement with 800 browser tabs open is honestly the happiest I have ever seen him. All he does is make spreadsheets, research shipping costs, have long phone conversations with local weirdos he’s doing various projects with, and then on Tuesdays he drives around delivering books for free to locals. This has been such a cool and fun aspect of our network-building this year. If you want a cheap-ass book without using Amazon, check it out! We make no money off this (all profits are rigorously dispersed elsewhere, primarily to mutual aid projects in our area, and always will be) so I don’t feel weird about promoting it. It’s Gary’s contribution to the struggle. He will eventually have to get a job but I think it’ll be okay. I have given him one haircut over the past year and he looks like a beast. He is currently using our food dehydrator to dry a bunch of stinging nettles he made me get from the farm co-op.

We are nearing the end of our biggest movie project yet. Over the past year we have undertaken lots of projects where we, like, watch all of Ruben Östlund’s movies in chronological order; watch both versions of Brewster’s Millions and discuss how they reflect changing historical circumstances; watch all of Miami Vice (we made it through I think 4 episodes and couldn’t deal although we did paint our bathroom Miami Vice colors if you’ll remember); we went through a long period where we picked our nightly movie based on a weird “game” where I would describe a vibe and Gary would research and find movies that fit that vibe. Like “British thriller from the 70s” or “period drama but NOT Jane Austen” or “courtroom drama” or “non-American rom-com.” He finds such good movies! We went through a period of re-watching movies that made huge impressions on us as kids (Hot Shots Part Deux; Double Jeopardy; the Brady Bunch movie; Gremlins (“Billy from Gremlins is the worst character in the history of Western fiction”)).

ANYWAY our biggest project yet: watching all of Star Trek: the Next Generation, from the beginning. 7 seasons of like 20 episodes each; remember what TV used to be like?? It was really soothing at first to get back into that older paradigm of episodic television. Like one episode is just the most devastating meditation on humanity and you are weeping; the next episode is Deanna Troi’s mom is too horny and it’s “hilarious!” People are constantly adopting children and swearing never to leave them, or falling in love, but then you never see the children or the love interest ever again. Worf has at least two kids at this point. A character will have the most shattering experience you could possibly imagine and then at the end of the episode it’s like “Well number one I’m certainly glad everything is back to normal” and you never hear mention of the shattering experience again. It’s also so interesting to watch this exploration of the liberal mentality. It’s the perfect liberal utopia, in all its legitimate joys and wretched sorrows. The unexamined centering of certain values and perspectives as universal; the 90s style multiculturalism where all types of aliens are welcome to participate in the Enterprise so long as they give up all but the most superficial markers of their own cultures in order to be appropriately productive as a member of the crew; the show even explores how wrenching this is, i.e. when Worf is screaming about how he had to give up sex in order to be a Federation officer. The insistence that human society has moved past war and yet Starfleet is clearly a military and they are constantly blowing shit up. The insistence that society is egalitarian and yet somehow they are also rigorously hierarchical. The absolute acceptance of meritocratic top-down hierarchy, but it’s okay because the boss is the best person who has ever lived, so you are in good safe hands, you don’t have to worry about anything. As Claire put it: “the central thesis of TNG is: ‘what if daddy was good?'” It’s such a window into how a certain type of bourgeois liberal humanist sees themselves. Caring deeply about equality–the way they instantly free those giant jellyfish in season 1 even though they know it will cause a diplomatic incident, simply because Troi is like “THEY ARE SUFFERING IN BONDAGE.” How devastated they are when they accidentally commit genocide because they didn’t know the sand on that mining colony was sentient or whatever. “WE ARE SORRY. WE DID NOT UNDERSTAND.” The one where they encounter a totally unknown life form swimming through space and they are all just astounded by the joy and beauty of that encounter but then accidentally immediately kill it!!! And are so ashamed. The weird displacement of self-loathing onto the Ferrengi, who represent the dark side of the bourgeois ethos, and thus are viscerally loathed by every single other species in the universe to a degree that is just straight-up rude and racist. Methinks the Federation doth protest too much! Also, of course, Data, the greatest character in Western fiction. Is he a person or not?????????? They are constantly worrying over this point, even though he is clearly a person. It’s Frankenstein, but again, it’s Frankenstein if Daddy was good instead of a piece of shit like Victor was. How I wish there were a scene in Frankenstein where the Creature tries to learn how to small-talk by observing a boor at a cocktail party. Or where he learns to tap dance! OMG the Creature does tap dance, in “Young Frankenstein!” Whoa

And it’s also just a very fun and silly show with a lot of truly weird moments. So many parts have made us laugh for days. “MY NAME IS, BLEEP BLOP!!!!” “You’ll always be Jean-Luc to me”

I genuinely think Brent Spiner is the greatest actor of our lifetime

But anyway my point is that we are almost done with season 6 and we are getting tired of it. We watch two episodes every night no matter what, and I always fall asleep during the second one and Gary has to recap it to me in bed and it’s confusing. They are all blurring together in a really psychedelic way. I’m tired of the opening credits, which we DO NOT skip. We are also getting so overwhelmed by the repetitive plot paradigm that it’s like we stop paying attention to plot and get really fixated on details, like a really weird piece of blocking where Picard gets up and walks thoughtfully across behind someone to the wall and back, and if you actually think about it it would be the most psychotically weird thing for someone to actually do during a conversation. Or like there’s one moment we saw recently where Geordi is walking toward the camera just PAWING at his little iPad thingy, like the most half-assed fuck-you fake computer acting you could imagine, and we were dying, we were imagining it was like take number 20 and LeVar Burton has HAD IT. Or there’ll always be a scene where somebody is talking intensely in close-up and then behind them is a totally random extra in the most outrageous face prosthetic imaginable, playing some fuckin’ alien, and after awhile it becomes really surreal and hilarious.

It will be so weird to finally finish and then go back to watching movies. It will feel like shooting into the future! Although, the first movie I want to watch after this is “Speed,” so who knows.

Today is the first day of vacation (not counting grading) and I tried to read a book about history but couldn’t concentrate because I kept thinking about all the other books I want to read this summer:
– Robinson, Black Marxism
– Jackson, Blood in my Eye
– Brown/Gordon/Pensky, Authoritarianism
– Adorno, Aspects of the New Right-Wing Extremism
– Robinson, Hungry Listening
– couple books about time
– finish this book about primitive accumulation and Renaissance pedagogy I started 2 years ago
– political theory book I can’t remember title of
– Lewis, a Power Stronger than Itself
– Rosa Luxemburg
– Kropotkin, mutual aid and conquest of bread
– Dialectic of Enlightenment! I’M GOING THERE
– want to finish the Marx bio I started last year, it’s really good
– Nietzsche, not sure what. What should I read? Zarathustra?
– other things I think I am forgetting
– It is also time to re-read Infinite Jest again, I do so every few years
– I also am going to re-read Lonesome Dove in honor of my childhood and Larry McMurtry’s passing

Will I read them all, in truth? I have no idea.

I fell out of fiction reading over the past year somehow. During all the times I’d normally read fiction I instead played video games. I did read all the LeGuin short stories collected in that cool box set.

I have a videogame group chat where we discuss the games we are playing; we like to find out about a new game then all start it at the same time and talk about it. One of us is an incredible gamer genius so she always is like “I finished the game, it was pretty good” while the rest of us are still in learner mode being like “how do I walk forward.” This group is really a support group, born of the intense yearning for the Breath of the Wild sequel that feels like it will never come; we are always looking for games that somehow approach BOTW even though that of course is not possible.

Videogames:
– Windbound (fun at first but very not fully realized)
– Long Dark (amazing, not at all like botw but an incredible hypnotic game made by weird Canadians)
– Stardew Valley (so great)
– just started Yonder!

My joy-con broke and I had to ship it back to Nintendo for repairing and my husband mocked me til his throat was sore

What else has happened? So much, yet so little. Some say maybe/others aren’t so sure. Time has passed in blur and also stretched on forever. I have aged 10 years and yet am a child again. The world explodes over and over and yet each day you still have to do the dishes and feed the dog. The apple tree is blossoming; asparagus are in season at last; a cat has been shitting in my raised bed. An oriole visited us again, same as this time last year, a fun little orange bright spot kicking up a ruckus in the bird bath while Gary takes 700 pictures of it. Snoopy is an old bumpy man who now groans continuously and farts more than usual, just like a real grandfather. At his senior wellness check the vet said he is beautiful and perfect. “Greatest dog in town” she said, “best dog I’ve seen in my career” she said, “this dog should be president of the United States” she said. He will catch a cookie in his mouth if you toss it over your shoulder; it’s the only trick he knows. He disrupted MANY of my classes this semester, as he is actually the worst.

Our friend Luke now lives in a house with a pool, and so it is going to be a decadent summer. We also just learned that you can rent the entire historic movie theater in Brattleboro for $50 and they’ll open the popcorn stand and let you watch a DVD you bring from home. NO BIG DEAL!!!!!!!!!!

One big summer project I might undertake is renting out an industrial kitchen and trying to can like 1,000 jars of tomatoes and salsa, to give out during distro next winter. Winter distro has been super depressing and how amazing would it be to have canned local produce?! This might be too ambitious an undertaking, I don’t know. I did find a cheap kitchen you can rent but I now need like a team of dedicated canners and a bunch of equipment and anyway I might be too scared. I also formed a gleaning team and we got hooked up with a local rabbi who operates a vast gleaning network, so we will be gleaning local farm fields and orchards on Sunday mornings sometimes! All this food work and yet I still haven’t learned to garden. Maybe I just never will.

My other summer goal is to become fluent in Spanish, which I know won’t happen.

Oh we also finally learned how to smoke weed!!!!! Turns out it’s great

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“To Stonk or Not to Stonk”: Stock Market Advice From An Anarchist Who Doesn’t Know Anything http://urbanhonking.com/regarding/2021/02/02/to-stonk-or-not-to-stonk-stock-market-advice-from-an-anarchist-who-doesnt-know-anything/ http://urbanhonking.com/regarding/2021/02/02/to-stonk-or-not-to-stonk-stock-market-advice-from-an-anarchist-who-doesnt-know-anything/#comments Tue, 02 Feb 2021 16:03:05 +0000 http://urbanhonking.com/regarding/?p=4036 Continue reading ]]>

Two dearly beloved longtime readers/actual human friends who are also real-life life partners who live together posted SIMULTANEOUSLY YET UNBEKNOWNST TO ONE ANOTHER on my last entry, asking me for, of all things, stock market advice! Well, one of them wasn’t asking for advice, to be fair, but their comments were about the same issue, and that’s crazy enough for me.

Here is their mutual question as voiced by one of them:

First off, I want to acknowledge that this is an AWESOME problem to have. Please excuse me if this sounds like I am complaining about good fortune!
So my partner and I had long discussion last night about investing in the stock market. She is a university professor, as you know. I am a freelancer with many random jobs, including some adjunct work. Through privilege, pandemic luck, a bushel of scarcity thinking, and seven years of my partner’s stable income, we’ve managed to amass a savings of $15K. We both feel safer than we ever have, feeling like if something happened to our house or medically we are finally in a place where we wouldn’t be in crazy trouble. Once we hit this savings goal, we began to aggressively pay down debts, highest interest rate first.
So that’s where we’re at. The problem is that that savings is just sitting in point zero zero zero whatever apr savings accounts and my partner feels like she is being stupid by not investing it. She doesn’t LIKE capitalism, but feels like “participating in the economy” is how life works if you want to be comfortable when you retire or if you have extra money, like literally, you are being stupid if you’re not using it at least to keep up with inflation.
I know this is SO dramatic sounding, but the thought of willingly investing in the stock market makes me feel ill. Encouraging unethical business practices, the ethos of growth, and “finding new markets,” all of it. Not to mention, I believe investing in the stock market has the power to degrade folks’ moral characters. God, it sounds so crazy to say that, but we live in trump territory and most of the people who are into him are so strictly for their retirement accounts. We’ve talked about alternatives, including peer-to-peer lending, real estate (maybe like a real estate investing co-op), and even weird (to me) shit like gold bars/coins. None of this seems as logical and straightforward as an index fund to my partner.
We have a non-optional stock market-based retirement account through my partner’s job. In the last few months, I have been randomly bequeathed stock in a utility company that my grandfather worked for. So I know that I’m already participating. My partner makes the point that we already participate by just being alive in this country and I see her point. But life is choices, right? Every day, we try to make decent choices, going to the farmer’s market, reusing things, not eating meat, whatever. I don’t know. I have the feeling I’m being a huge baby but I also having a really hard time processing the idea of willingly investing in the market system.
One last thing: we’ve agreed that we have until March 1 to come up with a compromise solution or we’ll just go for it. I’ve promised her that I’ll be fully on board, joking I’ll get myself a green tinted visor and a cute pair of suspenders for the occasion. We’ve also talked about how we’d rather not divide the savings into “hers” and “mine” and instead want to do something as a team.
Any advice for a more productive conversation around this or for just swallowing this pill?

My friends, let me preface my predictably long meandering overwrought response by first very definitively saying: me no know.

This life is so complicated and contradictory and I don’t know if I can tell you concretely what you should do, not least because I haven’t solved this problem for myself either. My partner and I are similarly comfortable thanks to similarly privileged life trajectories/my current employment situation, and we similarly now have a little money in the bank, and don’t really know what to do with it aside from putting it into our home, which we also own and said ownership of which also chains us–albeit in a more abstracted way–to the stock market (in the form of “property values”) etc.

We don’t invest in the stock market ourselves, for all the reasons you mention in your question, so in that sense I guess I am more on your side than your partner’s. BUT!!! I have many caveats to this. For starters, as your partner points out, we too are already “invested” in the stock market, with or without our full consent. I am a state employee, and so I have a pension fund, like your partner. I have nothing to do with it, didn’t choose it, don’t manage it in any way, but it’s there, a fund for my retirement that I pay into and that my university manages on my behalf, and I imagine it’s all part of the university’s own investment package, you know, how they take their money and put it in fossil fuels and resource extraction and real estate speculation then so it’s like the health of my retirement fund is contingent on the health of the university’s other investments, a.k.a. the rape of the planet/other cultures/the poor. This is upsetting. And there are movements to divest the university from fossil fuels and all that, but nothing’s ever gonna change this basic dynamic. I can’t remember if it’s Marx or somebody else I’ve recently read, but basically literally any time you get a profit off an investment it is coming from somebody’s unpaid labor, somewhere. That’s just the deal.

Every qualm and conundrum and back-and-forth you and your partner mention is exactly right. Everyone has to survive in this system and there IS NO WAY of doing that without being complicit in this system in some way, as your partner notes. “There is no ethical consumption under capitalism” and all that. There is no “good” way to retire–it will ALWAYS be done on the backs of other people elsewhere, somehow, so long as our social organization is chained to capitalism. There are no “good” jobs, only jobs manifesting varying degrees of complicity with the overriding system of global evil and destruction that is required for accumulation to continue.

ON THE OTHER HAND, there is complicity and there is complicity, right? Like you say, life is choices. There is “I have to work for somebody so I guess I’ll take this random desk job or wait tables” and there is “hmmm I will deliberately write code for Amazon to sell to the U.S. military.” There is buying a home to live in and there is buying 10 homes to rent out to people who don’t have generational wealth. There is putting your money in the bank because you have to put it somewhere and there is BEING a banker, and taking all that money and sticking it into the global imperialist project.

It’s hard to both recognize that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism (and rent is theft and wages are theft and ACAB etc.) and nonetheless figure out some sort of life plan/set of choices that you are able to live with, morally, while also continuing to, you know, literally live.

And yet, like your partner, I sometimes worry that we are being foolish. If we reject all these investments and opportunities to make money, what does it mean for us? If we are 65 and living in penury because of choices made in our impetuous radical youth (lol “youth” but you know what I mean) what does that really look like, how will that feel, will it be pathetic and will we regret it? Gary says: well, if that is how it plays out, then we will just die in penury, like millions of people currently do every day already. We aren’t special and we don’t have some special preferential spot on the earth where like it’s wrong for us personally to suffer the same fate everybody else does. This is really hard and scary to think about. We are trying to basically embrace the reality of death, which is maybe impossible and anyway super fucking scary and sad.

By this I mean, facing your own death and your own insignificance in the global project. Things start seeming smaller, maybe, maybe in a good way. In fact maybe it helps to put it in different terms than “facing death,” which is admittedly so brutal and perhaps needlessly metal. Maybe it’s more like, “insisting on life.” Real life. Doing things, and doing them in such a way, so as to insist that a better world is possible. And that we can all choose to live in that world, already, whenever we get the opportunity. That’s what “mutual aid” is for example–an act of “prefiguration” where you simply behave as though you already live in the world as you want it to be, a world where people help each other totally outside of any organizational or institutional or legal framework, and with no money changing hands. The more mutual aid we do, the more it spreads, the more practices get folded into it. Will these small-scale experiments bring about the downfall of global capitalism? Obviously not, but they plant seeds. They create ties. They open up ideas of what could be possible, if things were to become different. So e.g. we have this woo-woo feeling that by not putting our money in places where you are supposed to put it, and instead using it for other stuff in the here and now, we are acting as though we believe by the time we are old the world will be different. Like we’re putting our faith in that, as an act of hopeful practice. I do think that in reality this is stupid and won’t work out for us, so, you know, caveat emptor on this whole concept.

Ok so anyway these are my thoughts on your side of the equation, sort of, I guess. AND YET, I also want to turn back toward your partner’s point of view. Because I also think I believe that there are lots of ways to turn away/turn toward, and that it’s our responsibility to find those ways for ourselves, where they make sense for us, in our own situations. Maybe for your emotional health you really should invest your nest egg! Everyone is in a different situation. For example I know that my familial situation engenders in me a deeply-felt sense that “it’ll all probably work out,” because my parents are well off and I’ve always had a support network I’ve taken utterly for granted because it’s always absolutely unconditionally been there. I’ve definitely been broke as hell in my life but deep down there was always the absolute knowledge that if I really needed to I could ask mommy and daddy for help and they would help me instantly. So like being broke was an inconvenience and stressful and sometimes humiliating but it has never yet been SCARY, for me (knock on wood; my life ain’t over yet). I think this stuff looks and feels a lot different to people living closer to the edge, obviously, so there’s another caveat from me.

And anyway we’re always entangled in this system so long as we continue living in society, which I think we have to do. You can’t leave society, that’s nihilistic and probably impossible anyway. So, if we choose not to invest in the stock market, we are still feeding into the system in other ways. Given the fact of all of our complicity, yet also given the fact that it’s also all of our (in this case “our” meaning “people with the luxury to have choices at all”) responsibility to critically engage with this and make good decisions anyhow, somehow, I don’t think there are, or should be, rules for everyone to follow. I think you have to decide your own rules for yourself, you have to answer the thought experiment yourself, and how to put imagined things into practice yourself, in the way that makes sense for your context. Not Investing In The Stock Market is maybe just one rule; there could be many others. If you do invest your little nest egg, maybe you could actively challenge yourself to look for other opportunities to offset that act of complicity. Where are there opportunities to “create the new world in the shell of the old,” for you? They exist everywhere, and will be different for different people. I don’t know if this is an ideologically coherent thing I am suggesting, but I THINK this is basically what Gary and I do, for whatever that is worth to you to hear.

I love thinking about all the different needs the struggle has, all the different ways we can be useful to each other. I’m a middle aged middle class white intellectual, what are my skills, what is authentic to me, who do I have access to to build coalition with, to challenge, to be challenged by? To whom can I be useful and how? I just read an essay by a guy who couldn’t get hired as a history professor in the 50s because he was a communist, so instead he went to law school and became an employment lawyer and spent his career helping poor people sue their bosses. He said he first thought about just saying fuck it and going to work in a factory, but then he was like, that’s stupid, I am who I am, and because of who I am I have the opportunity to use the tools of the system to serve people who don’t have access to those tools, so that’s what I should do. And he’s like 100 years old now and he says he feels great about this life choice. A life spent relentlessly hectoring rich people! #goals

I guess I’m describing something a lot more concrete than just “try to be a good person” or like “give some money to charity.” I’m saying, find an actual project, a thing to really do in real life with your actual human hands, a way to change your own life so that it is turned toward a radically different, better world, in some way, even if in a small way, or a temporary way. I know you already do good work like this; maybe the answer to your painful dilemma is to consciously dedicate yourself to doing more of it, in addition to whatever else you do to survive. Mutual aid work, direct actions of all kinds, maybe you turn your garage into a free place for someone to live, maybe you start a free school in your town, maybe you offer classes to incarcerated people in your area on whatever they want to learn about within your purview, maybe you start a food distribution network or join an existing one, maybe you have a cool skill like gardening or canning or construction and you can offer free instruction in those skills, like literally put up a flyer at the library and just go for it, maybe you start a group to make demands of your city council, maybe you do a community needs survey and use it to demand your town defund the police, literally there are so many things to be done, given where you are, what the needs of your community are, what skills you can collectively muster.

This essay on accomplices not allies is really thought provoking for me, maybe it will be helpful to you. It’s one attempt to outline What Should People With Relatively More Comfort/Access/Etc. ACTUALLY DO. And it suggests a framing that I have been finding really useful lately, in reorienting myself in the struggle. What can you do from INSIDE, where you–regrettably, perhaps, and anyway through no particular fault of your own–happen to have ended up living? I mean to the extent that we even are “inside,” in terms of access to wealth and power. We have a little bit more access than a lot of other people, I guess you could say. And here by “we” I literally just mean myself and the two people I am addressing in this entry, lol, I don’t know anything about the rest of you people!!!

There are certainly radicals out there who would read this entry and think “what a bunch of bullshit.” Bunch of rich people wringing their hands about how to both live comfortably in the imperial core AND somehow serve the struggle. Well, you can’t do both, they would say, and maybe they are right. Maybe I am justifying a lifestyle that is unjustifiable (I don’t mean to be “justifying” it, though, exactly, but like maybe I’m being lazy or turning away from something I should be willing to grapple harder with, I don’t know). But I think there are roles for everyone to play and that we all have different ways we can authentically contribute, and I also think you can’t really change who you are and how you’ve been shaped by the various compounding accidents of birth. You can abdicate and go join the guerrillas in the jungle, and some people do do that, and that totally rules, I just have limitless awe and respect for that act. But I also have to believe there are other ways to be of service than only the most extreme acts of abdication. What can you do, in your position? To whom are you legible? To what do you have access? Where can you reach out, make a connection, build something with those around you? This is where I’m at, at this moment in my political development, so this is what I say to you guys in response to your dilemma. I’m saying something less extreme than “quit your jobs and move to Chiapas and learn to use automatic weapons” and something more extreme than “just do your best and don’t be too hard on yourself.” Something in between those two poles. Something that is real and that manifests real change in our lives, a change that grows and flowers out of really critically grappling with reality, but that also doesn’t cause us undue anguish or pointless suffering. Investing or not investing, ultimately this is passive either way–what is something active that’s also available to you?

I don’t know what else there is to do, honestly. You can’t abdicate privilege, it will always be part of you. I think it’s our job to find ways to put it to use, and that means staying here, and staying here means being complicit also, and constantly struggling with ourselves in deciding what is the right way to be, what little examples of a new world can we create together right here in the shitty shell of the old one. And we will never do this perfectly, ever. And that’s it!

I love you both and I am glad to be with you in this struggle, and I also will say I hope you can find a way to make this struggle joyful and not just grueling/a source of antagonism betwixt you. This is the real stuff, what life is all about! Grappling together. I think whatever you decide to do after all this grappling will be great.

Also I’m sorry that this went off the rails and I talked about a bunch of stuff you weren’t actually asking about. But I took this opportunity to work through some problematics I’ve been chewing over in my own life, so thank you for indulging me (as always).

Solidarity!

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What a Tangled Web we Weave http://urbanhonking.com/regarding/2021/01/18/what-a-tangled-web-we-weave/ http://urbanhonking.com/regarding/2021/01/18/what-a-tangled-web-we-weave/#comments Mon, 18 Jan 2021 13:30:09 +0000 http://urbanhonking.com/regarding/?p=4034 Continue reading ]]> Hi y’all
It’s been like a week of nonstop gross weather and I am starting to feel the burn, of Covid life I guess. The burn of the onrushing online semester I deeply dread; the burn of isolation from humanity; the burn of constant low-grade anxiety and all that. I haven’t been sleeping well. When you become middle aged “not getting a full night’s sleep” is like “drinking poison” or “letting a man hit you with a novelty fairgrounds hammer for ten straight minutes” or something. I saw a tweet where someone said once you’re over 30 pulling an all nighter would mean your certain death and I definitely think that is factually true.

Anyway but, I have been having such a great reading journey these recent months. I actually set myself the task of using this time to read Capital Vol. 1 cover to cover, and I am doing it! I just got to Part 7 (709 pages in) and this is now truly the home stretch (only 240 pages left to go). It’s been really exhilarating. One tries to read Capital periodically but it presents so many barriers. Its fantastical length of course is intimidating–you can’t really imagine casually carrying it around and cracking it open at a bar or something, it’s more like a Torah you study in a dedicated space–but also it’s so complex and layered, by intention, but then also the intervening couple hundred years-ish since he wrote it have added more layers you have to first identify and learn about, like about history and stuff, and about his method.

It’s just an outrageous book. I’m also reading David Harvey’s companion book which is really fun because you read a chapter in Marx, then you go read the companion chapter in Harvey, and sometimes Harvey literally is like “chapters 19-22 are boring and the writing is bad” and you’re like great I’ll skim those, thanks for the tip. He also says you can’t understand Capital without understanding Marx’s critical-theoretical method, but Marx never wrote anything explaining his method, and in fact the best explanation of his method is simply the entirety of Capital, which you can’t read without understanding his method. Then Harvey is like “sorry!” He’s also great because he points out all the ramifications of this or that theory given what we’ve seen happen since the 1860s in the world, like what would Marx have said about this or that facet of today’s world, and see how this or that aspect of his theory is borne out or disproven given what’s actually happened since he wrote this crazy book.

Harvey also notes that “Marx himself would never have gotten tenure at a university in any discipline,” which makes the whole thing so much more compelling and interesting to me. The point being, this is a VERY STRANGE BOOK. I never understood how unusual it is until just now, actually reading it straight through. It incorporates everything into this deeply entangled and nuanced and complex web in an effort to understand not just how capitalism literally works but also its effects on/in life, history, the family, how we think and feel. So he interweaves long critical exegeses of political economists’ work with what we might call “primary source” material–reports from factory inspectors and doctors, reports from people who wrote factual descriptions of the condition of the working class in 1830s London, reports from Engels on how factories function etc.–but then also interspersed with extremely enlightening and apropos quotes from Goethe, Shakespeare, Aristotle, the Bible, Benjamin Franklin etc. You can’t know it completely if you approach it only with your own disciplinary perspective and I LOVE THAT. Harvey: “you have, in short, to struggle mightily to determine what he is saying beyond what you can easily understand by way of your particular disciplinary apparatus, your own intellectual formation and, even more important, your own experiential history.” So reading it isn’t just like “learning what Marx thought about x or y,” it’s also like, “struggling to clearly see what *I* think about x or y and how the shapes of those thoughts create a frame within which I slot everything I learn” and then “trying to break out of that frame a little bit in various ways.” You read Capital to learn about capitalism but also to learn about the dialectical method itself, which you can only learn by experiencing it. And after awhile all the crazy shit people have said to you in explaining dialectical materialism start clicking and you are like oh, so it really is just taking opposites and smushing them together over and over. To see how and why the world has developed in this or that particular way; to see what problems and contradictions new things have arisen to (seemingly) resolve.

It feels more like a spiritual process or a journey than like reading a book. Not because you feel reverent or whatever but just because it’s like this process of grappling and that’s what the book is–the process of grappling itself. It’s a book about grappling and also the book IS a grappling. It’s so awesome. Once you get past the harrowing first three chapters where he just relentlessly goes through the various mathematics of how a commodity becomes a commodity and all that, it gets so good. He’s so angry and his anger is so cleansing. The other thing that makes Marx hard I think for contemporary readers is I think a lot of people don’t give historical authors the benefit of the doubt when it comes to humor and irony. We take them at face value, like they were all just stuffy-ass humorless caricatures of old-time prissy assholes. I have actually published an academic article about this, I just realized, haha. But anyway Marx is constantly sarcastic and hilarious. If you take him at face value he seems to be saying many offensive things–so don’t do that! Give people some fucking credit! There’s long sections where he’s basically like “yes, the amazing factory! What a gift to the world, what astounding feats of mankind” etc. etc. but actually he’s just BLISTERINGLY trolling the classical liberals who “proved” that the free market guarantees political freedom or whatever. He’s being funny! I don’t think anyone ever told me how funny this book is, and I think that is very wrong. It should be a selling point. So it’s been delightful to experience that aspect as well. My margins are filled with “LOL”s. There is this super long footnote where he quotes some political economist he hates, and he keeps interspersing “(!)” and “(?!)” in the text and the insertions get more and more intense and constant (like after every word) as the quotation goes on. Hahaha he put that in a book!

It’s incredible to see how little has changed since he wrote it, in a certain way. All the fatuous insipid shit that liberals say to justify market capitalism–which he dismantles with the most scathing scorn you could imagine–are, like, almost word for word the same shit people say today. 160 years of constantly being assured that capitalism isn’t bad, just our current version of it needs some tweaking. You start to see that this will go on forever. 1,000 years from now when all of earth is a wasteland and one man owns literally every inch of the planet and we all live in dormitories eating regulation sludge out of a tube these people will still be like, yes, there have been some abuses of the system, but progressive tax reform will fix it all this time! Also the way liberals use rationality to address moral issues and how soul-killing it is. There’s this long chapter about child labor and it’s so infuriating. He quotes from all these reports and articles and parliamentary proceedings to demonstrate that questions like “is it wrong to work a child to death” become formulated as like quibbling over “what is the legal definition of ‘child'” or of “day” or “hour” or “work” or whatever. It’s ok to work a 13 year old to death but not a 12 year old, it says so on this piece of legislation! All set. And the way the poor are blamed for their own sufferings–he documents this in excruciating detail. Article after article decrying the selfishness of working mothers, drugging their babies with opiates so they can leave them home alone while they go to the factory. They value their own selfish gain over the lives of their children! Marx describes capitalists as vampires and werewolves but also as automatons, almost, he describes them as “capital personified” and given motivations and ideas. So the book moves around back and forth, from long mathematical equations to werewolves baying at the moon to imagined dialogues between Worker and Capitalist to long sarcastic screeds about the classical liberals’ “Crusoe fantasies” to long excerpts from Aristotle demonstrating that he couldn’t quite get to the answer of what creates profit because he lived in a slave society. And then, like, the perfect quote from Faust demonstrating all of this in one sentence, somehow.

It’s very demoralizing to see how nothing has changed, ideologically, over all these years. But one must press on!

I am also halfway through a biography of Marx that is very fun/upsetting. His marriage sounds so wild and incredible, suffering together so epically and staying in love the whole time (their daughter in her memoir wrote in irritation about how her mom and dad had so many inside jokes that they would roar with laughter together until tears ran down their cheeks and it was SO EMBARRASSING MOM GOD). Jenny never blamed her husband for their life of travail and poverty, “rather she blamed the Prussian government, and capitalism.” I love hearing about these people’s teen years in particular, the worry they cause their long-suffering parents. His dad just wanted him to be a lawyer! But now his son isn’t going to class and is instead reading philosophy and sending home long rambling letters about his sexual longings for his girlfriend Jenny and how he wants to be a poet? And enclosing his poems, which are VERY bad? And then suddenly the Prussian secret police are knocking on the door??? Son, please, your mother is worried

Worried Parents Of History

THE OTHER THING I AM READING is this astonishing history of textiles and/as “women’s work.” It is called “WOMEN’S WORK: THE FIRST 20,000 YEARS,” which is a hilarious title but she is dead serious. It’s about cavemen and shit. It’s interesting thinking of this book in the context of all that stuff I just said about Marx, because it also entails a certain degree of interdisciplinary revelation. It opens with this great origin story–this author grew up weaving, like on looms and such, because her mother was a weaving nerd, a full-on weaving expert who studied the ancient ways in Denmark and stuff. So this girl grew up weaving and knowing all about cloth. But then she became an archeologist. And one day in archeology school they were looking at a bunch of old-ass pots and she was like “look, there’s an impression of a textile on one of these,” and the professor told her that wasn’t possible because they didn’t have looms at that point in history. But the girl was like, I KNOW that is a textile impression!!! What does it mean? And she started doing all this weird research, and found all this amazing information that just hadn’t been put together yet, and it ended up becoming her dissertation and then also a book. I love that so much!!! The way knowledge accumulates in different ways / can be put together in different ways. Those pots existed and were studied for ages, but it took someone with such a specific background and life journey to have that realization: a woman who grew up weaving, which is very ancient and describes millions of women who have lived on this earth; but also a woman who grew up weaving but who also lived at a time when women who grew up weaving could also go to archeology school; and then also a woman who grew up weaving who had access to archeology school and who WANTED to go to archeology school. All these things had to be in place for this particular revelation to happen. Think about all the other revelations out there waiting to happen! Wonderful.

I am learning so much amazing wild stuff from this book. Here is a small selection:

– hieroglyphics in tombs were painted without perspective because the idea was that the objects they depicted would somehow mystically accompany the dead person into the afterlife, and so they had to be depicted in their entirety in order for that transubstantiation to occur. So you get stuff depicted both sideways and in birds-eye view, really weird perspectival stuff that now makes sense when you know this is why

– the dramatic ancient Egyptian eye makeup was actually a fashion that was based on a necessity–the makeup was made out of a mineral that was an insecticide for a specific insect that gave them eye diseases

– the Venus de Milo, what was she doing with her missing arms? SPINNING WOOL (long tradition of associating spinning/weaving with women/fertility (making something out of nothing))

– most flags until the late 19th century used only red, white, and blue because until the invention of synthetic dyes, red and blue were the only organic dye colors that were colorfast when they got wet. LITERALLY THESE COLORS DON’T RUN

– King Tut was actually a boring short-lived king nobody cared about, and his tomb was embarrassingly small and shoddily furnished, compared with other pharaohs, and the reason he’s a big deal to us is simply that unlike all the other tombs we’ve studied in modern times his tomb made it through thousands of years of history INTACT, and the only reason it made it through history intact is that a later, cooler, fancier, richer king built his own tomb in the hillside above King Tut’s, and the debris from that huge construction project covered up Tut’s tomb so completely that nobody found it again for 6,000 years

– There’s this site in Eastern Europe where they’ve found tons of artifacts from 10,000 years ago, specifically ORGANIC MATERIAL like wood and cloth (which normally cannot last that long, it rots/degrades/goes away), because these ancient people decided to build a little town right on top of a horrible-sounding mud bog, even though it makes no sense, apparently they had to constantly pound wooden pylons down into the mud to keep their houses from sinking, etc., and anyway the mud is this really specific thick-ass deep mud with specific chemical properties that mean anything dropped into it is swallowed up immediately and totally preserved essentially indefinitely. And so it’s now this trove of amazing info about ancient cultures, because so much shit got dropped into it from this weird town. So I love thinking about that so much. For example she talks about a hank of spun dyed yarn that is one of the artifacts. She talks about how much work went into spinning and dyeing that hank of yarn–shearing a sheep, carding the wool, spinning and spinning for hours until you had a useable hank, then dyeing it (pounding berries, creating the dye, etc. etc.), and then the person fucking DROPPED it in this STUPID FUCKING MUD and I picture them being like OH GODDAMNIT, like what a total disaster…..and then somehow there’s a connection between that person and the archeologist 10,000 years later who found the yarn and was like HOLY SHIT GUYS LOOK AT THIS!!!!!!!!!!! Like both people at either end of that connection are so invested in the yarn but for different reasons

– she has an entire chapter about the invention of string. She’s like, everybody talks about the wheel, the internal combustion engine–but fuck all that. Humanity literally could not have progressed if we hadn’t invented string. And then you read the whole chapter and you’re like, damn she’s right, string RULES

This book is also so interesting to read alongside Marx, and it’s incredible I just happened to read them both at the same time, because of course Marx’s main example of “labor” he returns to throughout the book is WEAVING. And his insights would have been even stronger had he considered weaving specifically in light of the ancient and longstanding gendered quality of that labor! But he didn’t, and so that’s a great example of how even the most fantastically brilliant among us are still only able to think and see what our historical context allows us to think and see. The great thing about Marx is that he’s aware of this and indeed it’s sort of the whole point: trying to analyze your own brain (probably this is not a good description of the dialectical method but whatever)–his big criticism of Darwin and the classical liberals is that they didn’t take THEIR OWN BRAINS into consideration in formulating their analyses. He’s like, huh it’s pretty crazy that Darwin identified modern English society in the workings of “nature” (meaning: survival of the fittest and competition and progress–all the stuff in the 19th century theory of evolution is just capitalism, and evolutionary scientists in other non-capitalist countries didn’t come to the same conclusions as the English ones. AND then isn’t it interesting that the English version of the theory was the one that won, and that we all learn in school as the only theory of evolution that exists? And not, say, the Russian version, which emphasized cooperation and collaboration as the engine driving evolution? Huh neat). Like if you can’t at least acknowledge that there COULD BE angles you aren’t seeing because your own brain is inevitably conditioned by who/where/what/when you are using it to think things, you are a dangerous person to be weighing in on things like “human nature” or “how great capitalism is for everyone on earth.”

David Harvey tells a charming anecdote about how he was involved one time in the planning of a new city, and so it was a group of architects and engineers and stuff, and then him, as a geographer, and he started talking about what cities are for and how to think about what goes on in them and how constructions of cities tell us a lot about the values and ideas of the people who built them, and everyone is sort of flummoxed and astonished, and somebody says “where can we read more about all that stuff you just said” and he goes “oh, footnote 4 of chapter 15 of volume 1 of Marx’s Capital!” and then he says he was an “idiot” to say this, because immediately everyone was like……[fart sound] and it made him sad

“Capital, which has such ‘good reasons’ for denying the sufferings of the legions of workers surrounding it, allows its actual movement to be determined as much and as little by the sight of the coming degradation and final depopulation of the human race, as by the probable fall of the earth into the sun…Après mois les déluge! is the watchword of every capitalist and of every capitalist nation.”

Damn, dude, tell us what you really think

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“I’m Still Alive”–Pearl Jam http://urbanhonking.com/regarding/2020/09/06/im-still-alive-pearl-jam/ http://urbanhonking.com/regarding/2020/09/06/im-still-alive-pearl-jam/#comments Sun, 06 Sep 2020 15:31:28 +0000 http://urbanhonking.com/regarding/?p=4029 Continue reading ]]> Y’all!!! Thanks to the couple of people who have checked in on me recently. I know it is weird when you have been reading some random person’s blog forever and then they disappear. You are like, did they die? How would I ever even find out? It’s very strange, this internet life. Rest assured, as of yet I am not dead, and I will try to remain in this state for some time, as we continue surfing our way into apocalypse.

I have been becoming a different person, or trying to, insofar as we can ever change who we are/what we were born into. I really have stopped thinking about my “work,” my research etc., which I was completely obsessed with for so many years. I think back on how unhealthy my relationship with my job was, how cowed and fearful I was about getting tenure, how stupidly I lived my life while trying to get that book out. Not sleeping not eating, allowing myself to go through mental health spirals, neglecting everything, directing everything inward, thinking only of myself, etc. I totally participated in my own mental exploitation and it was dumb of me. I’ve started reading Fred Moten and I sat in on this amazing talk he and Stefano Harney gave about how we should all (meaning academics) stop doing our jobs and it made a huge impression on me. “Find the work, in your job, and just do that,” meaning basically don’t read the emails from the Dean, don’t spend time on the self-reporting paperwork, don’t submit to the “diversity and inclusion” committee survey, don’t participate in the bullshit. Find the work, which is probably for most of us teaching, but even within teaching, find the real work, which is not grading and assessment but something else, the thing that drew you here to this imperfect, deeply complicit and corrupt institutional pathway in the first place. I’m trying to do that.

But I am spending most of my time doing work unrelated to my job at all, except in the sense that I’d been reading all this anarchist theory and now I am trying to live those things in practice to the extent I am able. I joined an affinity group and we are working on abolition projects in our town. Currently I am in charge of researching participatory budgeting and creating a budget survey for our community. It’s fascinating. We are requesting public records and police logs and different group members with different skill sets are doing different things with it all. Sitting in on excruciating city council meetings, delivering furious speeches to the city council. We are learning so much shocking info about how our town works. For example we learned that our public schools rely on unpaid jail labor for a lot of their grounds maintenance. Neat! If you have the time and inclination to get involved in this kind of work in your community I highly recommend it.

We also joined a mutual aid group that does food distribution in a nearby town. Every week we pick up leftover produce from all the little local farms, bring it to a central spot, throw it all into bags, and give it out to whoever wants it. It’s so much fun and feels so good. Mutual aid is amazing and easy and everyone loves it. I’ve been reading and thinking about mutual aid for so long and only the current uprising made me realize, wait, oh, this is something you DO, not just something you theorize about. I don’t understand what was in my mind all these years, why I just read and thought and didn’t do. Anyway I am trying to change this orientation in my life. This food distro stuff is also eye-opening work, just seeing the massive, massive amount of food that is actually available and that, if we didn’t drive around and pick it up, would simply go into the compost. And if this is the amount of waste at this tiny local level, imagine larger farming operations, how much wasted food there is.

I think a lot of people think of the revolution in terms of scarcity, in terms of all of us who have scraped together some wealth and some luxury having to give it all up in order to scrabble in the dirt with everyone else. But I think of it in terms of unlocking all the abundance that is already here and readily available, and simply sharing it with everyone instead of letting like 6 guys hoard it all. There is so much food out there. There is so much space, so much housing. There are so many people who want to be teachers, doctors, counselors, farmers, artists, shepherds, potters, tech dudes, to do all the things we need to make our lives fun and worthwhile. We have everything we need and (thank you Karl Marx) we also have the tools we need to continue making more and more abundance. It’s not about giving up our hard-earned shit, it’s about breaking everything wide open and sharing what’s already a wildly profuse amount of wealth and good things. This food we give out each week, nobody bought it, nobody had to raise money for it, it wasn’t hard to get, and it isn’t hard to give it away. Nobody has to present a pay stub proving how poor they are. Nobody has to do x number of volunteer hours in order to become eligible for x number of free bags of food. It’s not charity, because charity is paternalistic and fucking sucks. It’s mutual aid. It’s us taking care of ourselves. If you want a bag of food, come and get it; if you have something to offer your community, do it, and if not, that’s fine too, because you just existing as a person is contribution enough. We had some extra time, so we went and collected this food and had fun doing it; here you go. A few weeks ago someone who got food from us saw that we needed another big table, and so she went home and got one she wasn’t using, and gave it to us. That’s mutual aid! I’m meeting so many people I would never have met if I hadn’t started doing this. And I’m learning about food networks and forging solidarities and also getting the opportunity to do a lot of internal work I wouldn’t get to do if I stayed in my normal demographic lane. Intersectionality is a key value of anarchism. Working together with common cause but without the expectation that differences will be resolved; solidarity without the need to anxiously avoid antagonisms. At the last distro event, for example: I had a moment of being clumsy with pronouns; then later some younger comrades were unintentionally ageist to me and it hurt my feelings; then later due to white privilege I didn’t notice until too late an awkward racist question a community member asked one of my comrades. There was also a moment when I tried to talk about something that was actually too arcane and boring for who I was talking to, which is part of being older but also obviously has to do with being in academia, and I think this is a type of difference also; we have different interests and that’s fine, we don’t have to force our interests on anyone else; my younger comrades sometimes talk about stuff I find deeply boring and that is not just fine but as it should be; I don’t need to be involved in every convo and vice versa. There were all these points of conflict and stress and acknowledgment of our different lives, identities, experiences, and places in the network; and yet the entire day we laughed and slung watermelons around together and supported each other in those moments of conflict and (I believe, I hope) ended up feeling invigorated and powerful and happy to be together. Periodically throughout the day different people suddenly go “isn’t this amazing?” and everyone says YES. That is the world I want to live in, and this work lets us create that world for a minute together. It could all be like this, all the time, if we made it so.

It’s interesting to hear the questions people ask when they come to our distro area. Who paid for all this? No one. How did you get this job? This isn’t a job. Do you need to see my license? No. Can I have extra corn instead of beets, is that okay? You can simply take whatever you want, and as much as you want. Are these peppers spicy? I actually don’t know.

What else? Ummmm since covid started I haven’t really been able to read or write. I struggle even to read a novel. I read the Twitter accounts of journalists on the ground in Portland, and I read, like, Jezebel. Early in covid I did somehow manage to read a bunch of books about anchorites that were totally riveting. Anchorites! Nuns that chose to be walled up in a tomb and live in there, doing nothing but praying, until they died and got buried in the floor of the tomb and a new nun would move in on top of them. There were a lot of people who did this! And they occupied a weird position, not quite part of the church hierarchy/not quite part of society. They were declared legally dead and a requiem mass was said over them while they lay in their own grave, inside the tomb. In some of the tombs, the little slit window into the church is positioned so that in order to hear mass you’d have to kneel in your own grave. It’s fucking GOTH. And what I learned is that Hildegard of Bingen was an anchorite for TWENTY YEARS! I somehow never knew this about her?! She was dead and lived in a tomb. And then in her 40s she got a vision from God telling her to found a new nunnery, and she petitioned the bishop to let her out, and after some reluctance he agreed, so they took down the wall of her tomb and said she could be alive again, and she crossed the river and started the new nunnery and became a famous scientist among other things (the list of species of fish in the Rhine River that she compiled remained the authoritative list until 1926), and scandalized the local gentry by putting on biblical plays in which her nuns wore jewelry and let their hair down (there is a letter she wrote replying to the criticism of this practice, in which she says that the Bible says that only married women should hide their beauty, not virgins). Did I tell you all this already? I can’t remember when last I wrote here. Anyway it’s fucking crazy and amazing and I love it, the death nuns of medieval Europe, who cultivated “the holy idleness” necessary for true communion with God. I’ve been thinking a lot about idle time and how it is anathema to capitalism, not only because it is time during which we could be generating surplus value for our employers, but also because–as we see is the case during covid!–it’s time during which we get the headspace to look around and be like, wait a second, this is all bullshit!!!! FUCK THIS I’m not going back to fucking work! So I love this idea of “holy idleness.” Specifically an idleness that seems mostly to have appealed to women. Not having to get married and raise children! Instead you want to sit and read and think about Jesus. Go for it, dude.

My heart totally pounds when I imagine Hildegard leaving her tomb after 20 years. Walking through the streets of the town, smelling the smells, seeing the sights. Seeing crowds! Seeing horses. Hearing a profusion of voices, hearing somebody sing a song, seeing a juggler, seeing a blacksmith, seeing children running, hearing a lute, seeing the river. Being amongst the bodies of men, instead of only women. Seeing the sky! The last time she experienced these things she was twelve years old. What was it like?????

Other than that brief amateur research immersion I have barely read a single thing. I read a book about rape, feminism, and the carceral state that was great (The Feminist and the Sex Offender). I read the introduction to The Ecology of Freedom. I read some essays. I read an essay about classical music and white supremacy a friend of mine wrote. I read some anarchist collections and an amazing essay by John Zerzan about how tonality is the sound of hierarchy. I read some collections of Black radical thought and the introduction of a book about the word “comrade.” I read some Adorno. But mostly I am not reading. It makes me feel sad and confused but I don’t know how to force my mind back into that space of quiet concentration. I don’t know if it is laziness or something else, or multiple things including laziness.

Oh yesterday I did successfully read this really mesmerizing thing Wallace Shawn wrote in the 90s that recreates the internal monologue of a rich liberal slowly having a shattering revelation about class and capitalism and his own indefensible yet also irreconcilable position within it, and it’s all metaphorized as him being violently sick on the floor of a luxury hotel in “a poor country” where he’s a tourist. You’re supposed to read it out loud as a performance piece to small groups of people in your home. Ha! Here it is, it’s pretty great: http://www.wischik.com/lu/senses/fever.html

I will say that a few years ago a friend of ours was in the cheap seats at the Met and at intermission Wallace Shawn came all the way up all the stairs past all the tiered levels to the very top (worst) one, zeroed in on our friend, and said he had to leave early and did our friend want his fancy tickets. So our friend and his girlfriend got to watch the second half of the opera in the best seats in the house and they said it was incredible. I don’t know what this story symbolizes or signifies except that Wallace Shawn, insofar as the restrictions of his class position allowed, seems like he was a pretty nice guy. I love thinking of him climbing all those stairs and looking for the shittiest looking person he could find, and it was our friend.

His description of the revelation he has about commodity fetishism while reading Capital naked in bed is pretty great. You can tell he really has read Capital because he mentions how the first three chapters are impossible to read but then it gets so good because Marx unleashes his rage. That is everyone’s experience of Capital, very authentic.

I read the three Wolf Hall books several times in a row, that was part of my covid self-care and it was pretty effective. Those books are simply divine. I have also been playing a new video game that I hate. And re-reading Le Guin short stories. It sounds like I am reading a lot I guess but compared with my “normal” reading amount it is hardly anything and it stresses me out. But maybe that is ok.

I also had my best year yet in terms of food preservation, I will say. I feel so proud and smug when I look upon my works. It starts in June and I finished by mid August. Here is what I have done:
– picked 6 quarts of strawberries and made like 14 jars of jam
– 5 pints rhubarb sauce
– 6 quarts peaches
– 14 pints cucumber pickles (I did have an epic failure here because I actually GREW all the cucumbers I needed to make this many pickles, and I did it, and I made the pickles, and then I realized I’d grown the wrong kind of cucumber, and so the pickles were so mushy nobody could eat them, so I had to start over with purchased cukes, and I am just sick about the waste of time and materials and just generally what a dipshit I am)
– 19 pints of salsa
– an assortment of weirdo pickles, like “cucomelons,” I have no idea
– 3 little jars of very fancy blackberry preserves (you can make whiskey smashes with the syrup once you open a jar)
– and of course the king of preservation season: 55 quarts of heirloom tomatoes. Last year I did 44 quarts and it didn’t quite get us through the whole year, so this time I did 55 and we’ll see how far it gets us. Y’all I get 20 pounds of heirloom tomatoes for 20 bucks. A buck a pound?! What a steal. And I think I ended up canning 150 pounds or something? Anyway, a lot.

Then in the freezer:
– 5 batches of dried tomatoes
– 10 “pizza portions” of corn
– enough zucchini, poblanos, and corn to make one batch of calabacitas, which I will save for a day in the deadest of winter when we are feeling our worst
– 20 cubes of pesto; 20 cubes of basil
– 3 quarts of blueberries
– 5 portions of cherry tomatoes for use in “pizza casserole”
– 20 jalapeños
– I think some other stuff I’m forgetting

Feeling pretty good about it. We’ll see how it goes. Our apple tree still did not produce apples even after an expensive professional pruning; we think now maybe it is the drought. So no apple report. We will do cider again this year but we’ll have to buy it from the orchard.

We also joined a community gardening/food security network that will get ramped up in the spring. I hope to learn how to garden finally.

Oh I also started making all our yogurt. It’s absurdly easy. I’m actually so appalled at how many years I spent buying plastic containers of yogurt over and over again. It’s so easy to make it yourself! And it’s so good. And the other day I seized victory from the jaws of defeat: I made yogurt, put it in its little warming cooler to sit for 24 hours, then FORGOT ABOUT IT, and only remembered the NEXT day, and was like oh fuck, but guess what, it was the best I’ve made so far. I’ve learned a valuable lesson! I feel like the monk who accidentally invented champagne. “Brothers, I am tasting stars!”

We got our porch rebuilt because it was rotting and a huge hole had opened up that had become a liability for the mailman. It was such a pain and porches are so stupid even though they are great. But they just really rot all to hell. Why aren’t they all made of concrete, as in Texas?? It’s like the only thing Texas gets right, aside from Mexican food, which isn’t even from Texas except in the sense that Texas rightfully belongs to Mexico in the first place. Those big sprawling concrete patios of childhood, out there in a thunderstorm playing parcheesi. The salad days.

Early in the revolution Gary was diverting a lot of his anxiety and feelings of uselessness into obsessing over the totally baseless idea that our house was infested with termites. He did stuff like get up in the middle of the night and start prowling around the basement with a flashlight. He was really going into a weird Howard Hughes place in his mind or something. During this fugue state he bought an extremely expensive new side door off Home Depot’s website, and it got delivered on a big wooden pallet and sat in our driveway for awhile while he fretted and agonized over it. Then one night we had a tornado warning, and I went and looked outside and it actually did feel like tornado weather (again my Texas childhood coming in handy, as when I envision the ideal porch) so we decided we should probably move this heavy loose door into the shed just in case. We went out there and got set up to move it. Gary was so careful and nice and patient about it, as he has lived with me a long time and knows my ways. “It is very very heavy, okay? Make sure your feet are stable. You pick up that end and we’ll move it towards me okay? Are you sure you’re ready? It’s VERY HEAVY, are you sure you’ve got it?” I kept being like “yes, yes I’m fine, I’ve got it.” So he said one two three and we lifted it up and I IMMEDIATELY fell all the way down, dropped the door, fell full length on top of it and face-planted into the glass, and crushed my whole arm and hand in between my body and it. It hurt SO bad. And also me falling shoved Andrew hard into our neighbor’s car. And we dropped the door. It all happened in less than 2 seconds, him saying one two three and me falling was like, almost simultaneous. And I was lying there in the driveway under the creepy green tornado sky and I was like, I literally think I broke my wrist. The door was fine! I was so lucky the glass didn’t break when my face hit it, can you imagine. Anyway we moved it into the shed and then there wasn’t a tornado anyway. And TO THIS DAY (this was weeks ago) my hand hurts and the spot between my fourth and fifth knuckles is totally numb and throbs, and I can’t put that hand on my hip because that angle hurts it. who knows what happened in there? It’s all part of this wonderful life process of learning. Anyway the punchline is it was the wrong sized door to begin with so we had to rent a truck in order to return it to Home Depot because they wouldn’t pick it up. It was a true fiasco start to finish. And then we got involved in all this mutual aid stuff and Gary’s obsession with termites fizzled. We never had termites at all.

I got tenure and am now on sabbatical, which is the reason I have all this time to spend not thinking about my job, which is giving me the space to try to become a different person. Which I realize is a great unresolvable irony, my very job giving me the incredible luxury of time off from my job to think about ways to subversively not-do my job. I get it, believe me. Anyway it’s really incredible, reflecting on my life and what a different person I am now than I was 10 or even 5 years ago. By the time I got my tenure decision I literally wasn’t even thinking about it anymore. I got the email and was like oh cool. Yes, by that point I was confident I would get it (although with covid, who knows) and I don’t intend at all to diminish the anguish of those waiting for tenure because it truly sucks and is grueling. But still, my feelings upon actually getting it are not even vaguely comparable to how I thought I’d feel. I used to fantasize about it and yearn for it, and feel like my life would totally change once I got it. And now, because of covid and also the revolution, I feel like…I don’t even know if there will be a university a year or two years from now. And actually, maybe that would be fine. I don’t mean that in a flippant way at all. I love my job and a world in which the university ceased to exist would almost undoubtedly be a very stressful world for me and probably everyone else to navigate. But… I used to think I would be nothing without this job, that it defined who I was in a very deep and real way, and now I don’t feel that way anymore. I like my job and I like the lifestyle it enables me to have and I care about certain aspects of it very much. But also I am a whole multi-faceted person with all kinds of things I am interested in and probably would be good or okay at doing, and there is all kinds of work to be done out there and anyway lately I’ve been feeling like I’m kind of trying to annihilate myself, in a positive way. Trying to become no one. Trying to simply exist as a creature in the world, without so much ego wrapped up in everything. Trying to harness the socially useful powers of the Leo and violently repress the self-serving ones. I might shave my head and get a tattoo to mark this moment of transformation.

Basically I feel like I am having a very positive midlife crisis, one that’s being shaped by the synchronicity of the political theory I’ve been reading for the past several years and the actual revolution that was sparked this summer. We’ll see what happens. But also I don’t matter at all so it doesn’t matter.

I do wake up in the night sometimes, sleepless with terror and dread about the coming Times. Or clenched up with anxiety about weird specific things, like How Will We Kill Our Dog If The Apocalypse Comes or What If My Parents Get Covid or I Will Never See My Brother Again And I Don’t Know How To Live With That If It’s True or or or any number of other things, just like most of you I am sure, these sleepless nights, these apocalyptic scenarios, all of California is on fire, everyone in Florida is dead, it is now totally legal to mass murder people as long as you are a white supremacist…….

One thing I have been thinking A LOT about is the idea of detaching Hope from Optimism. I read a book about this and it has made a huge and lasting impression (Hope and Grief in the Anthropocene, it’s on Routledge and very expensive, unfortunately, I got it for free because I contributed to an edited volume for them, weird perk). She argues that hope is a practice, and optimism is a feeling, and we need to work to separate the two inside ourselves, and that to do so would mean we would have to confront grief. Before we can talk about cleaning up a river, we have to look the fact of “ecocide” full in its face, and say, this is what we have done, and the grief of it is depthless and will never end so long as we live, and we will have to find ways to live within that grief and address the river in a different way through that acknowledgment. Meaning, if in order to do things based on hope for the future we must also feel optimism–the happy belief that our actions will be successful–it keeps us from seeing the full extent of the problem and thus what really would have to happen for a solution to be found. Because if we can only do work if we can be certain it will have a positive outcome, it means we will only do the easy work. The problem of climate change is such that it could only be addressed by the world as we know it coming to an end. Society would have to change in the most drastic ways imaginable. Every single one of our lives would have to be utterly, shatteringly transformed; our outlooks and worldviews and ways of living would have to utterly change. But that is too hard to imagine and too scary and hard to draw up an Excel spreadsheet demonstrating so instead we are like “oh boy, if we simply vote in a carbon tax we will have addressed climate change!” Because that is manageable and seems doable, whereas within our current discursive framework anything that is NOT manageable or doable is just not on the table. And if that is the case, then the full extent of the problem can never be named. And this is why this author argues that liberals, as well as conservatives, are climate change deniers. Because they refuse to face the grief of our murdered world, the world they too have murdered. Because they deny the full scope of the situation, instead fixating on small tweaks to the existing system, and calling anyone who tries to pull back the curtain a fanatic, a dreamer. Our job is to stop living in denial, acknowledge that the murderous devastation is irreversible and morally evil, and yet work tirelessly to change things regardless. Optimism is a trap, in other words, a trap the system uses to keep things from changing. Anyway it’s a great book. It’s about Australia.

Hope is a practice! This is the thing I reflect on a lot lately. Hope is actions and works and things you do, not a blobby feeling you try to cling to because you’re scared of a world without it. You make it, you don’t feel it, and you make it simply by doing the actions that insist that it is real. That’s it.

So this stuff wakes me up at night, but also things like, uhhhh, should I get my teeth cleaned

Oh, I also joined the Wobblies! How fun, why did it take me so long. Everyone should join!

We have been watching a huge array of diverse movies. We watch a movie every single night. Everything from The Act of Killing to Encino Man; a documentary about Tibetan women to all of Lucretia Martel’s movies; Parasite and Single White Female; all of Ruben Ostlund’s movies in a row followed by Batman Forever; Mrs. Doubtfire followed by Mati Diop’s Atlantics; etc. We went on a kick of watching movies from childhood we haven’t seen since, and it’s fascinating to see which ones hold up and which ones don’t. Wayne’s World DOES NOT hold up; Bill and Ted DOES. Shockingly, Weekend at Bernie’s holds up to the max. Just laughing very authentically at Weekend at Bernie’s! Who knew?! We watched both the 1945 and the 1985 adaptations of Brewster’s Millions (both very weird movies–Max Weber stuff about money and work, very confusing). We watched Passenger 57, extremely good. After painting our bathroom in the Miami Vice palette we watched a bunch of episodes of Miami Vice and it is just a shockingly insane show, I somehow missed it due to growing up without a television so it was all new to me and I was actually truly shocked by it. Every single person involved in that show just absolutely had to be on cocaine the entire time. It is COMPLETELY incoherent, its narratives make absolutely no sense, there is no connection between scenes, nothing that happens makes any kind of sense. I mean at a very concrete, literal level. I have honestly never seen anything like it and it is unimaginable to me that it was such a popular mainstream show. It is weirder than the weirdest experimental film I have ever seen, in certain respects. We watched Ivan the Terrible, which I uncontrollably slept through. We watched Major League and enjoyed it so much that the next night we watched Major League 2, one of the worst movies I have ever seen in my life (“it was worse than Miami Vice, which at least was crazy”). Lately we are watching episodes of On Cinema followed by episodes of this German drama called “DARK” that is Twin Peaks plus Stranger Things plus Lost, in Germany. The music is REALLY good and one of the main guys looks like Mads Mikkelsen but I’m pretty sure he isn’t.

My hair is very long and I look like a witch. I try to do yoga every day but I never do. I am cooking a lot. We get all our food from these two local farm pickups and it’s very fun. I make: bread, pizza, “pizza cake” (stale bread recipe); calabacitas; enchiladas; cool summer pastas; pesto; boring stir fries to use up all the leftovers. I made some pies. I made Gary a yellow sheet cake for his birthday. I made cherry muffins and took them to our neighbor and she said they cured her gout.

Our snoopy dog is good. He is old and lumpy and sleep all day as usual. He’s a great pal.

All is well; nothing is well; everything is beautiful; the world is ending; watch Weekend at Bernie’s and you won’t regret it

solidarity and love to you all!!!!

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Midsommar ok!!!! http://urbanhonking.com/regarding/2019/10/31/midsommar-ok/ http://urbanhonking.com/regarding/2019/10/31/midsommar-ok/#comments Thu, 31 Oct 2019 12:10:24 +0000 http://urbanhonking.com/regarding/?p=4021 Continue reading ]]> MIDSOMMARRRRRRRRRRRR

I thought it was brilliant!! It was about several interesting things, I thought (LOL). I don’t have a good outline for putting my thoughts together so I guess they will just be all over the place. For starters don’t you think it was basically the ultimate “culture clash” movie? It explored cultural encounter in such a brutal way. I guess it wasn’t just culture clash, it was specifically a critique of American globalization–the way rich Westerners get to travel around the world scooping up bits and pieces of other cultures they find interesting, and how despite the fact that these encounters are always described as amazing and beautiful and “the people are so friendly over there” and such it’s actually a really dehumanizing act. Seeing other human beings as sites to visit and take home something from. The Americans in the film were excited to encounter this strange other culture and they did it in such an acquisitive way, a way that wasn’t about people at all, wasn’t about being together in different ways on the earth. I was really into the moment when they first arrive at the village when the Anthropology student (not the boyfriend, the other one, I can’t remember a single character name) meets the village leader who tells them something about some custom they’re about to do, and the guy is like “oh yeah, don’t the such-and-such people of Sweden have that same custom?” Like as though he’s just chatting abstractly about “culture” to someone else “interested in culture,” rather than to a dude who is living his damn life not thinking of it as “interesting culture to compare academically with other cultures.” And so the village elder just looks at him in confusion. I loved that. And of course the bickering of the two students over who “gets” this culture–it’s mine, I called it I have dibs! The more overt signaling of how disgusting these people’s attitudes toward other human beings are (mirrored in the boyfriend’s lack of feelings for his own girlfriend)

So there was that. But then also the movie raised questions I don’t know how to answer, about cultural relativity. When they all witness the old people’s deaths, the different reactions of the outsiders are so interesting and it all raises questions that to me are disturbing and pretty urgent. Our main girl is horrified by it, it triggers her dead-family-trauma, but then her instinctive impulse to flee is tempered by the Anthro dudes who somehow have taken it in stride, they somehow aren’t disturbed by what just happened. They’re amazed but they immediately fold it into their academic understanding of culture; they perform their anthropology methodologies on it, immediately working to understand the ritual in its historical and cultural context. But this act totally evacuates not only moral judgment (which is the point–anthropologists aren’t supposed to “judge” the cultures they observe really) but also PERSONAL response (which is maybe less forgivable/more disturbing). It seems like what’s really disturbing about the Anthro dudes is that they don’t CARE. Their bodies don’t shudder; they aren’t concerned about the old people’s inner experiences; they won’t have nightmares about this moment. So it’s complicated–on the one hand, the terrible Anthro bros are RIGHT, right? You don’t go traipsing over into somebody else’s culture and then start screaming about how it’s evil. And yet our hero is also right to FEEL FEELINGS about what she sees, and to be overwhelmed and upset by these things that are so outside her enculturated understanding of right and wrong. Also, the two British characters are right to immediately start screaming and crying and saying you people are monsters, and to trying to leave. All those reactions are correct, in their own ways, and yet you see in the film how inadequate each one of them is, how none of them take the full consideration of human life/experience/culture into account. And you’re left wondering: what would be the BEST reaction? What possible reaction could you have, other than the three we were shown? So in that way I also thought the movie was about the irreconcilability of difference, which is something Ive been interested in lately because I’ve been reading all this anarchist theory and anarchism is all about a kind of radical inclusion that doesn’t try to prevent or ignore “antagonisms,” in the words of one cool book I read. And it’s hard to think this way. It’s hard to develop a politics that truly, genuinely, includes EVERYONE. Because some shit just IS irreconcilable: I put it to you that none of us could encounter that village in a way that didn’t somehow invoke an irreconcilable difference in feelings or judgment. And yet, the village exists, and we exist. What to do? Midsommar to me was at least partially about this. There maybe IS no way to appropriately contextualize or experience this crazy village; it’s just itself, doing its own thing, and what you think of it doesn’t matter, and yet here you are, too.

Along these lines I was especially interested in how the village/villagers were depicted. I think the main source of why this movie felt so “disturbing” to people was that the villagers were not evil, but that insistently-reiterated fact doesn’t gibe with the things we see them doing (ritual human sacrifice). The villagers were fun and nice, full of love and joy, full of enjoyment for one another and of pleasure in getting to live in a beautiful place together. The “horrible” stuff they do as part of their religion ISN’T HORRIBLE TO THEM, it’s beautiful and thrilling and deep. I loved all the moments that showed us this. The crazy sex ritual where they drug the boyfriend and make him impregnate that girl in front of all the naked women—for him, he’s having a truly horrifying, traumatic nightmare experience; but for HER she’s having one of the most special, exciting moments in her life! She’s so happy, and all the women are so happy for her–the mom kneeling down and taking her hand and singing to her, it’s such a beautiful, beautiful moment. Getting to be a part of this special ritual, that will only happen to a girl one time in her life! Meanwhile the dude is basically having the worst acid trip anyone has ever had on this earth and his brain breaks apart. How to reconcile both those experiences of that moment, both of which were very authentic and “correct” given who the individuals involved are?

(yes there are issues of consent of course, the Americans did not “consent” to becoming the ritual sacrifices of this weird Norwegian cult. I’m leaving that aside I guess)

It’s interesting that both Hereditary and Midsommar are about roughly similar kinds of culture clash. In Hereditary it’s a group of pagan devil worshipers doing human sacrifice; in Midsommar it’s a group of pagans (not sure if they worship the devil explicitly) doing human sacrifice. And they have SUCH SIMILAR ENDINGS, where the harried and confused son/main girl finally SUBMIT to the madness of the pagan cult, and just kind of accept it and go along with it and get subsumed into it, and there’s this huge sense of RELIEF in that final moment, ahhhh it’s OVER. But the feel of the two films is powerfully different. It feels like Hereditary is about evil, but Midsommar is not, and the quality of why/how they are each disturbing films is very different to me. We talked about it after and we decided part of this difference is that the Satanists in Hereditary want evil things–money and power–and they are murdering and torturing people in order to attain those worldly goals; and also that THEY have come into OUR place, our culture, where they aren’t wanted. The Midsommar people don’t want money and power, and they haven’t gone out into the world infiltrating other cultures; it seems important that the Americans/Brits came to THEM, as part of their fun tourist attitude. The villagers are just there, doing what they do. They’re just what Gary called later “a garden-variety pagan fertility cult,” the kind of culture that was a dime-a-dozen a few thousand years ago, all over the world. And reading about this kind of culture in ancient history doesn’t seem to bother us so much. That’s what they believed, and everyone involved in the society was on the same page with it, so it wasn’t horrible. The idea that what is “horrible” is relative, whatever the majority agrees upon–I think that is a hard thing to grapple with and yet it is true. The Midsommar situation only becomes “a problem” or “disturbing” when put into juxtaposition with modern Western values or whatever. The old people who die in the beginning are fine with it and their death–after your initial shock of course–actually maybe doesn’t seem that horrible. It’s the outsiders who are not part of this cultural situation who make it into a nightmare. They don’t want to live this way.

And yet, the way the Americans DO live is portrayed as so empty and shallow. The boyfriend character was so great for this and I thought that actor portrayed him so well. The guy who seems like a nice normal guy but actually inside his heart he is a howling void of emptiness, there’s nothing inside of him. I was laughing with my cousin because we were going so deep interpreting this movie but then we had a moment where we were both just like GOD he was SUCH A SHITTY BOYFRIEND, and like I love that that’s also what this movie was somehow about: the ways dudes can be the worst fucking boyfriend on the earth. Hahahaha and her ultimate reconciliation of that coming in the form of having him murdered! Jesus. But yeah, so, the film also forces us to be like, huh, is the way you people live really all that moral and wonderful compared to these weird villagers? Is your inner life so deep, your spiritual experience so rich, that you can really stand in judgment of what these people do?

So basically I felt like overall the movie was really about feelings, specifically crying. It was about feeling feelings together, fully living together in the full awareness of life in all its beauty AND terror, and how modern life in the sense that we all live it totally precludes that possibility, and how that is actually what is horrifying. I think maybe what we experience as “disturbing” with this film is the fact that deep down we’re kind of on the side of the villagers; their life seems better, realer (and the American characters are such pieces of shit), and we can’t really see them as evil even though they are doing these horrifying things. But yeah, feeling feelings and honestly facing life TOGETHER, not alone. The main girl didn’t have anyone who would do the work of being with her in the face of her intense emotions. She had no one who would cry with her, no one she could really cry with. The mirroring of the first horrible crying scene, in the sterile apartment in the snow with the bad boyfriend / vs. the amazing cathartic scene of screaming and crying and grieving with all the women on the floor of the dormitory (and also how insistent the film was about showing us the whole village ritualistically crying/screaming together), I found that juxtaposition incredibly meaningful and powerful. This is a village of people who can withstand feelings and don’t turn away from them; even the most brutal thing of all, DEATH, is something they face honestly together, turning it into a site of joyfulness and honor. The thing the town witch or whoever she is says after the old people die is TRUE–isn’t it better to live 76 years and then die on your own terms, brilliantly, in the bosom of your respectful family who honors you? Than to crumble into nothing slowly, in a hospital bed, looked at by nurses who don’t care about you, cycled into somebody’s spreadsheet somewhere, shitting your pants etc.? There IS something so powerful about that first death scene, the old woman is clearly feeling such intense, profound feelings, making those powerful runes with her arms, communing with the fucking spirits that made the earth and control the tides, then facing death actively, bravely, in front of everyone. It was fucking awesome.

[later addition: I was pondering the brutal death of the old man, getting his head smashed by his neighbors with a mallet, which is so upsetting to watch. I think maybe there’s something here about social responsibility–his kinsmen don’t turn away from his death, his suffering, they take responsibility for it. If he fails to die, it is their job to help him succeed, even though to the outsiders watching it looks so brutal. But is it really more brutal than, for example, dumping your parents in a nursing home and visiting them once a month, and feeling guilty and alienated and awful about it all? Again there’s something powerful about this community’s ability to face things together and to not just try to ignore or shove aside or make invisible the aspects of life that are uncomfortable or hard. Maybe?]

So those are my thoughts. What did I miss?? I thought that main actor was so brilliant. Florence Pugh?? I’m not going to google it even though it would take less time than it took to type this sentence. I really loved her. Everyone in the movie was good but that main couple really killed it. I also loved the friend who was from the village–I loved the moment at the end when he was congratulated for following his instincts and bringing them such good outsiders to offer as sacrifices, and he was genuinely so happy and proud. Hahahaha. And god the maypole scene. What a tremendous scene. And did you notice HOW FUCKING GOOD THE MUSIC WAS IN THAT GODDAMN MOVIE?????????????? The whole time I was also assuming the same person who did Hereditary did this one, because they are both so good and in similar ways, but they are two different people. The dude who did Midsommar has worked with Bjork and, like, sludge metal bands, so that makes sense, but also specifically what I loved about the score was how much amateur singing was on it. The singing of people who are not professional singers. If you watch that movie and pay attention to the music you will find it does major major work in the world-building. God it was so good. I really think that director is a genius. Every single shot in both these films is so precise and perfect (although Gary takes major issue with the opening establishing shot in Midsommar, which he says “ruined” the entire film for him, although he also says the film was otherwise “perfect,” so take that as you will). Isn’t it fun to get to discover a brand new filmmaker who you are like “I will see anything that dude makes”???–did you know that Hereditary was LITERALLY HIS FIRST FILM? He hit the ground running!!!!!!!

other answers to your questions:
– I got the new Dyson cordless vacuum and it is still a game-changer and I love it
– We are able to watch mummy movies because we got internet in the house after 3 years!! The town finally delivered on its promise to create a town-wide broadband internet network that would be regulated as a public utility. So it costs like 1/3 what Comcast costs and is great. It’s been totally fine having internet in the house again–I think those 3 years re-set my internet habits and now it’s not a source of distraction for me. My computer is 90% a workplace and 10% emails/reading the Onion and that seems fine.
– We have seen several more mummy movies since I last spoke to you, all of them are terrible except THE GHOUL, a Boris Karloff film made the year after the original mummy, which is not technically even about mummies at all but has lots of signifiers of the genre. It’s very very good. The rest of them are trash. We plowed through two of the Brendan Fraser mummies and then couldn’t continue because they were sapping our will to live.
– We cleansed our palate with maybe the two best zombie films I have ever seen: one is Korean and is called TRAIN TO BUSAN and it literally made us both physically cry; the other is, surprisingly, the sequel to 28 Days Later, which mark my words is much much much better than the original. Who knew??? It also made us cry. Both these movies are utterly bleak and misanthropic and basically about the sorrow of trying to continue struggling to be together and help each other in the face of the growing awareness that it’s all over and the world has ended. There is some father/daughter melodrama in Train to Busan that will make your heart explode. Like really that movie is actually a cliche plot about a father who works too much and only thinks of himself and doesn’t really care about his child, and through hardship he comes to learn the value of other people and of social responsibility and his intense incredible profound love for his child is reawakened–but because late capitalism is so powerfully dehumanizing it literally takes a zombie apocalypse for him to have these revelations, and of course the revelations come too late, because it’s too late for us all. God I cried

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TOM CRUISE MUMMY http://urbanhonking.com/regarding/2019/09/15/tom-cruise-mummy/ http://urbanhonking.com/regarding/2019/09/15/tom-cruise-mummy/#comments Sun, 15 Sep 2019 12:54:08 +0000 http://urbanhonking.com/regarding/?p=4019 Continue reading ]]> It is so funny to come back here after so long solely because I wanted to write about the Tom Cruise mummy movie but that’s what I’m doing!!!!

A couple of years ago we decided to get really into Halloween. It feels like a pretty pure holiday: it’s Of My Cultural Heritage (motley anglo-euro peasantry) but, somewhat uniquely amongst that heritage, it doesn’t seem to be rooted in anything particularly evil or settler-colonial (although I’m ready to stand corrected on this, as I have done no research). I like that it’s ancient and pagan but also fun-loving. I like the tiny glimmer of anarchy that’s still present in the concept of trick-or-treating. I like the funny children dressed up as Ninja Turtles. I like scary movies, I like making a jack-o-lantern. And it is the holiday that is the great doorway into autumn, the best season.

So when we moved to Olde New England, the land of Halloween, we decided to really embrace it and go to haunted hay rides and shit. That aspect hasn’t paid off yet and actually I don’t want to do a haunted house because that isn’t a version of Being Scared that I enjoy (I don’t enjoy the jump-scare). But, we have gotten into fall festivals and making cider and trying to make things jolly for the trick-or-treaters, even though starting last year our stupid town has instituted this thing where instead of trick-or-treating everyone just walks down main street and receives promotional candy handed out by businesses. God every time I think “maybe we’re gonna be okay,” my fellow humans do something that makes me feel like the biggest fucking alien. Parents say it’s “safer” than trick-or-treating. LORD ON EARTH

We also have gotten into setting ourselves movie projects for the Halloween season. Last year we watched every John Carpenter movie in chronological order. This year our intention is to watch all the mummy movies. I was just saying, you never see a mummy in a movie anymore, but it seemed like in the 40s it was a big deal. The Universal Horror Cycle and all that (“Universal” meaning the film studio; I am not saying these monsters are “universal” in the sense that all cultures have them!! Hahaha). Then we started wondering what precisely is the nature of the terror the mummy invokes? And what makes some monsters stick around in culture and some fade away? As you no doubt are aware I’m so interested in monster movies because I think they show us our truest grossest fears, just like superhero movies show us our truest grossest fantasy (which is that we actually love fascism and yearn for it).

We started talking about werewolf for example. WHERE DID THE WEREWOLF GO? It was such a standard of 1950s movie culture. And it’s a great monster! Very compelling, scary, full of pathos. Werewolf is obviously about Freudian stuff, the beast within, the fear that actually deep inside you are a ravening wolf/the fear that your neighbors are actually ravening wolves. Sex and murder being poorly tamped down by the flimsy shreds of civilization. Suddenly I had a revelation about what happened to the werewolf in contemporary culture: it turned into the SERIAL KILLER. I think serial killer movies replaced werewolf movies. The beast within! The horror in contemplating the idea that the local baker, the school teacher, your boyfriend, could actually be a psychotic monster and nobody knows it. He goes about his normal life, goes to his job, and then at the full moon he becomes a raving beast of violence and pointless horror. So now we have the serial killer, which is much scarier than the werewolf, so we don’t need the werewolf anymore.

Anyway I don’t need to go into all my thoughts about the various standard monsters of film history and what happened to all of them. Because the point is: MUMMY

Mummy madness has swept the Euro world several times. In the nineteenth century it was an expression of colonialism and Romantic exoticism and there are all these creepy 1840s novels about British archeologists unwrapping hot female mummies and having sex with them (okay I say “all these” but actually I can only think of one. Oh, two. But still). In the 20s everybody got mummy madness because of the discovery of King Tut’s tomb. Those are actually the only two examples of historical mummy madness I know about; I wonder if there was one in the 80s that accompanied that traveling Ramses exhibit? Did you go to that? I sure as hell did; my entire town drove to Denver just to see it. I remember looking at the mummy and feeling both disappointed and totally awestruck, an odd and unusual affective combination I have not felt many times in my life, now that I think about it. I wonder if that was where I first started thinking about becoming the half-assed semi-historian I am today?

Maybe Ramses-fever generated those Brendan Frasier 90s mummy movies? Which I have never seen. Actually I’m realizing there are tons of mummy movies and it didn’t really disappear as a monster. But I’m not so sure it has to do with exoticism anymore, exactly, or colonialism, although those are still sort of obvious themes of the mummy trope. I will need to watch a lot more before I have any interesting thoughts (if ever).

Anyway we’ve now watched the original Boris Karloff mummy and then the third mummy movie (we accidentally skipped the second)–apparently after the Karloff mummy in 1932 they made roughly seventeen thousand mummy movies across the 40s, all starring Lon Chaney’s SON, which seems depressing (for him). All of them have between a 10%-15% on rotten tomatoes and they have increasingly unintentionally hilarious titles, the reading aloud of which suddenly showed me what that one Mr. Show joke is about. They are all called like “THE MUMMY’S HAND” “THE RETURN OF THE MUMMY’S HAND” “THE RETURN OF THE CURSE OF THE MUMMY’S HAND” “THE RETURN OF THE MUMMY’S TOMB, WHERE HIS HAND WAS EARLIER,” every single one has a poster on which a mummy carries a swooning babe in his arms while men point and shout, and all of them are, judging by the one we have watched so far, totally hilarious. The one we just watched opens on an old archeologist sitting in his comfortable New England home regaling his family with stories of his exploits in Egypt. He’s smoking a pipe and everyone is wearing fancy clothes and drinking tea, just sitting down of an evening for one of father’s great stories. He starts telling his tale and the movie keeps awkwardly cutting back and forth in flashback, and the story is the most insane thing you can imagine, it’s like “well, that’s when the mummy opened his eyes! Well you can imagine how startled we were when he strangled Henry, by jove,” and then his sister laughs rudely and LITERALLY SAYS “oh Charles stop boring everyone with your long stories” and just affectively and narratively it makes NO sense, the story he is telling is the furthest possible thing from “boring,” it’s about a fucking 5,000 year old mummy coming to life and murdering his partner, like, no ma’am, this isn’t just some musty-old anecdote I’m zoning out during. But everyone is acting like it’s sort of a normal after-dinner thing to have happen. “Wow wasn’t dad’s story wild?” “yes it’s wonderful to think of all the adventures he’s had, I almost can’t believe it! See you tomorrow.” The way he tells the story is so conversational and so bizarre. “Well we lost the mummy that day, it’s certainly odd to think that he’s still out there somewhere, walking around murdering people. Well, goodnight dear”

Anyway lets cut to the chase, last night we watched the 2017 Tom Cruise mummy movie that was an enormous, enormous flop but that had a truly great trailer that we accidentally saw two years ago and have talked about ever since.

TOM CRUISE MUMMY was supposed to inaugurate Universal’s version of the Marvel movie franchise—it was the first entry in what was to become a reboot of the Universal horror sequence from the 30s-40s, and they had already slated out the upcoming movies and who would play which monster: Frankenstein (Javier Bardem–apparently they actually MADE this movie (Bride of Frankenstein), then shelved it when Tom Cruise Mummy was such a flop!!! Don’t you think Bardem would be SUCH a good Creature, omg Universal RELEASE THE BARDEM FRANKENSTEIN), Invisible Man (Johnny Depp, probably only because he looks just like Claude Rains, which is annoying (Gary: “Depp does NOT have the voice for that role”)), Dracula (I forget who was going to play him), Wolf Man (I also forget), Jekyll and Hyde (Russell Crowe), and mummy (sort of Tom Cruise). Oh and that fish guy I guess. Swamp Man? I don’t know those movies. The guy who looks like the dinosaur who kills Newman in Jurassic Park. Anyway can you imagine this rebooted Universal Universe? Where like Frankenstein’s Creature and Fish Man team up with Dracula to fight ISIS or something??? This is literally what they were trying to do. God I am SOBBING about this never happening. And it’s ALL TOM CRUISE’S FAULT!!!!!

So anyway it was a big deal and Universal was all smug about it—they even created an alternate Universal logo that shows before the movie: DARK UNIVERSE, like it’s going to be this whole “universal universe” akin to the Marvel universe (keep in mind, while I am very interested in the original Universal horror cycle, I am not interested in these contempo Marvel movies so this is just what I have gathered from living in culture and maybe seeing Iron Man once a thousand years ago). Anyway it’s so awkward to watch because it does all this Marvel-style ham-fisted signaling, like “wink wink, this is the cool headquarters of the secret international monster-hunting club that is going to be at the heart of this upcoming franchise of films! Here’s the conference table where the Mummy and Invisible Man will have their humorous planning sessions”

So basically the movie opens with some comical hijinks in war-torn Iraq where Tom Cruise and Jake Johnson are soldiers who loot treasure from the towns they help destroy. This is played solely for laughs. Then they uncover an Egyptian tomb (“an Egyptian tomb! We’re in the ‘Persian’ Gulf, Tom Cruise, didn’t you notice? Do you understand the significance of this discovery” and he’s like “BORING”). Down in the tomb the real archeologist who is also the love interest is narrating everything she sees, and it’s so bonkers, it’s a pool of mercury with all these pulleys and chains holding something down in it (“this isn’t a tomb……………………………….ITS A PRISON”) and then Tom Cruise is just like “huh” and shoots his gun at this 5,000 year old pulley and makes the whole works explode and anyway it pulls up a mummy in a sarcophagus. Tom Cruise looks at the golden eyes of the sarcophagus and is suddenly hit with a vision of ancient Egypt and the sexy mummy lady (whose origin story we saw at the beginning of the film) kisses him and calls him her chosen one and says thank you for rescuing me. And he’s like “whoa”

then they take the sarcophagus on an airplane and then a flock of crows destroys the airplane and there is a genuinely SPECTACULAR plane crash scene (this was the trailer we saw that so inspired us 2 years ago) where Tom Cruise and Love Interest are falling up and sideways as the plane rolls and it’s so amazing, we kept yelling AWESOME during it, I wish the whole movie had just been that. Later there is almost as good a scene involving Tom Cruise falling out of a rolling ambulance that then flies over his head. “WHAT A STUNT”–Gary

Anyway Tom Cruise DIES.

He dies at the end of Act I! Like, immediately! He dies in the plane crash! After heroically giving the only parachute to Love Interest and shoving her out. He wakes up inside a body bag in the morgue, with a tag on his toe. And he’s like “weird.” And Love Interest comes in to identify the body and is like “weird!!!!” And then they go to a bar and do shots and she’s like “I just don’t understand how you survived that crazy plane crash” and he comically shrugs in that Tom Cruise way where it’s like “whaddya expect.” Oh Jake Johnson is a comical zombie at this point who only Tom Cruise can see, he got bit by a scarab beetle. He’s kind of like Clarence, in It’s A Wonderful Life, but a hideous zombie. Kind of a great role for Johnson, really.

But the point is that within the first 30 minutes of the movie, Tom Cruise FUCKING DIES, and when he wakes up, it turns out that he is the REINCARNATION OF SETH, THE EGYPTIAN GOD OF DEATH. This is true, a real film a human person wrote.

So this movie is about Tom Cruise becoming an ancient Egyptian god. That is the “superhero” concept Universal was pitching with this film. It’s way, way too intense for what’s supposed to be kind of an adventure romp a la Iron Man. I do not find “The Egyptian God of the Underworld” to be a compelling “superhero” character, frankly. Just gimme a normal mummy, or Batman or something! Jesus.

So then he’s just struggling against his evil Seth-side for the rest of the film. He gets taken to the cool headquarters of the international monster-hunting club, which is run by Russell Crowe, who is Jekyll and Hyde. Crowe delivers some incoherent monologues about evil and saving humanity and fighting against evil and stuff (sidenote: it’s honestly so offensive to me that “Mr. Hyde” is always played working class, while Dr. Jekyll is posh. Crowe here does like a cockney accent when he turns into Hyde, the evil guy. “Poor people can’t control their animal urges lol”). He mentions sacrificing Tom Cruise but it’s unclear what this would accomplish. They have the sexy lady mummy (who (before getting her life force back by sucking it out of various people) briefly was a very cool CGI zombie type thing lurking around in the ancient cathedrals of Great Britain sucking the faces off of various bobbies who come upon her like “oy! who goes th—AAHHHHHH”) chained up and are pumping mercury into her veins because it’s the only way to keep her power contained. She talks to Tom Cruise telepathically and to Love Interest in normal English (“your language is simple”), basically saying that she is going to kill every person on the earth. Love Interest is like “oh no” but maybe is also jealous because mummy lady is clearly putting out some pretty intense mystical sex vibes at Tom Cruise, who after all is her 5,000 year old ordained life partner. Then they run away and all the windows in London turn into sand and it looks pretty cool honestly. They go down into the tunnel and have to fight hundreds of zombie skeletons of Crusade Knights (don’t ask) and anyway Love Interest dies, and because he is the God of Death Tom Cruise brings her back to life and then is like “I must find a cure, I know not what I am” and goes and rides horses out into Egypt and the signaling for a sequel is SO over-the-top.

Oh I forgot to mention that the flashbacks to ancient Egypt are SO bad, they look like low-budget perfume ads from the 90s. They look like a Depeche Mode video. It is like somebody had a $100 gift card to the prom dress store at the mall and that’s where they got the costumes.

In conclusion it was really great and I loved it. I think next we are going to watch all the Brendan Frasier mummies, which I did not see when they came out. But I mean, so far one thing we have learned is that mummy is actually not a very compelling monster, and you kind of have to go through weird narrative contortions to make it interesting–for example, in the Boris Karloff original, he’s only a mummy for like 5 minutes! Then he becomes just a regular guy, walking around going to the British Museum and attending dinner parties. Because what can you really do with a regular mummy? Proper mummy is really just a zombie in bandages and there’s only one of them, and there’s only so much tension you can generate with it, as evidenced by the Lon Chaney Jr. one we watched, where it becomes harder and harder for the film to explain why the townspeople can’t catch the mummy, who basically just shambles extremely slowly down Main Street over and over and manages to murder people who just stand there staring at him and going “it’s the mummy!” So I guess all the sexy lady mummy stuff and Tom Cruise being an Egyptian god maybe come out of this basic narrative problem? I’m not sure. I’m really not sure what could lead somebody to write the plot of the film we just watched.

We were talking about the Marvel franchise and how disgusting it is and Gary at one point very sincerely burst out with “I can’t believe that Robert Downey Jr. took all that amazing charisma that God gave him, and just loaned it out to the stupidest shit on earth, and now we’re stuck with it forever” and I thought it was sweet how genuinely aggrieved he was by RDJ wasting the beautiful gift the Lord gave him freely at birth

Other stuff:
I canned 42 quarts of tomatoes and learned how to make pasta
my book came out
the mailman thinks Franklin’s name is “Kevin”
I got my first mammogram
finally got some Adirondack chairs
Midsommar was so good, who knew it would be among other things a critique of academic anthropology?? I loved it so much
we painted our kitchen purple
Gary works at a bookstore
I finally bought an extremely fancy cordless vacuum after thinking about it for two years and it is one of the best decisions I have ever made and now I truly am #livinforty

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NIETZSCHE’S EYEBALLS http://urbanhonking.com/regarding/2018/12/16/nietzsches-eyeballs/ http://urbanhonking.com/regarding/2018/12/16/nietzsches-eyeballs/#comments Sun, 16 Dec 2018 14:37:44 +0000 http://urbanhonking.com/regarding/?p=4017 Continue reading ]]> Well it has certainly been awhile. HELLO. Are any of you even still out there? I don’t know why I’ve fallen off updating this thing so steeply. I got busy with an actual career I guess, and now I’m old as dirt and spend my free time sleeping (not true), but then also there’s something about working on learning to write intensely/deeply/critically (like I do for my job) that makes it harder to put breezy blog entries down on paper, as it were. I keep wanting to go back and edit them all. “Writing” occupies a different part of my brain now than it used to. In many ways I’m glad, as learning to read and write at the scholarly level has been incredibly transformative for my brain and life. But I miss informal writing. Oh laddie the times they are, ah, becoming quite different

I did feel honor-bound to update the internet about how I have CURED MY NIGHT SWEATS, on the off chance a fellow afflicted will find this and learn of this miracle. As you know I’d had years of unhelpful doctors and unfruitful self-cure attempts. Somebody put me on PROZAC for awhile because sometimes it has a side effect of regulating night sweats. And I took it! That’s how bad it was. Finally I went in for a routine pelvic exam to my new gyno. At this point, I put “night sweats” on all medical intake forms on the off chance someone has a brilliant idea, but I had given up hope of actually being helped. Then this lady was like “huh, have you tried magnesium?” and I was like whaaaaat? and she was like, sometimes your body can’t absorb vitamin D and magnesium helps you do that. And I was like OKAY and started taking magnesium and IT WORKED, it like mostly worked. I was down to three sweats a month instead of fifteen or twenty. The magnesium was intense and gave me truly transcendent morning shits but I was still happy. THEN Jessica posted about this magnesium product on instagram and the product is all about maximum absorption and I just had a feeling about it and I went and got it and it was like aaahhhhhhhhh, PEACE AT LAST. The product is Natural Calm and it’s a powder you put in water and drink. I am free. I can sleep at night. The shits are no longer transcendent. My boobs don’t hurt all winter long anymore. I no longer dread going to bed; I no longer sleep between two beach towels. I am so happy, thank you to our Lord and Savior for this blessed release from pain. Thank you to Jesus for MAGNESIUM SUPPLEMENT. Anyway, if anyone out there is struggling with wintertime night sweats, give MAGNESIUM a try!

I keep thinking what people with this affliction did in the nineteenth century. Just suffered I guess. My parents are having all these medical issues suddenly, they’ve both had surgery this year and they’ve both survived cancer this year (my dad by being patient #1 in an experimental immunotherapy drug trial??? “I’ve always been lucky”–my dad’s life motto). My dad had this weird pinched nerve due to his lifetime of hunching over a typewriter or computer finally catching up to him (word to the wise, also to myself) that DEADENED his left arm, like not only was it incredibly painful but it turned his whole left arm numb and weak and useless. And he got surgery to correct it and it worked. And the other day he was like, what did people do in the old days, when they didn’t have painkillers and corrective surgery? And I was like, well, they SUFFERED. Much like today, if you don’t have health insurance. You suffer. Then I told him about how medieval doctors performed eye surgeries on patients with no anesthetic whatsoever, and the patient would just kneel gently on a cushion at the doctor’s feet while the doctor probed around in their eyeball. So it seems like pain and suffering also are cultural, like maybe an old dead arm that’s super upsetting and painful in middle class America today wouldn’t have felt like that big a deal back then. I don’t know.

J.S. Bach got eyeball surgery! Also Louis XVI got penis surgery.

When it comes to pre-modern surgery I say: no thank you

I am also reading this totally bonkers new Nietzsche biography I AM DYNAMITE! It is so, so good. It’s mostly all about Wagner, actually, so it’s right up my alley. Talk about nineteenth-century medical issues!!!!! Good lord!!! You want to see someone who suffered medically look no further, plus the treatments he endured were worse than the disease. For starters, from childhood he was plagued by this weird sickness that would come over him all sudden-like, where he’d get super sick, be unable to tolerate light, have splitting headaches etc., maybe like migraines?? But the biographer doesn’t suggest this diagnosis; it sounds like nobody to this day knows what was wrong with Nietzsche, although his father died of “brain softening” at age 35 and the family had a history of mental illness and weird neurological problems. But this is just the start of poor Friedrich’s woes.

As he grew up he became very brilliant and also kept getting sick a lot. His friends would read to him during these times because reading hurt his eyes and brain too much. He was sick A LOT. And every time one of these bouts came over him, he’d be sick for a full week. So it really took a lot out of him. But it’s so interesting–he developed his aphoristic writing style explicitly because of this pattern of epic sickness followed by unpredictable amounts of time of feeling ok. So he developed this writing style where he basically just wrote incredibly brief pithy things, as developing long arguments was impossible for him. He started wearing glasses that were tinted deep green, along with a green visor, to shield his weird eyes from the sun. As he descended into madness in his early thirties he started thinking electricity from the sky was what gave him brain problems.

On a doctor’s recommendation he started putting deadly nightshade in his eyes to paralyze the eye muscles (this was a cool nineteenth-century version of pain relief), which apparently relaxed his eyes so much that he couldn’t see at all and his pupils grew enormous and everyone said he looked “frightening.”

MEANWHILE he suddenly goes to serve as a medic in the dang Franco-Prussian war! He is not medically trained, nor is he particularly physically fit (see above re: gigantic pupils) but he wants to be part of this great historical moment and serve his country in some way. He gets 2 weeks of medical training then is sent out into the field, where he’s literally sawing off legs and treating people whose guts have been blown out of their body. He has this utterly harrowing experience where he’s the only medic on board a hideous cattle car full of dying soldiers, for three days. During that time he contracts dysentery and diphtheria, on top of all his other problems. He also witnesses the utter horror of war and becomes a “Europeanist,” eschewing nationalism for its tendency to generate violent cultural clashes. His cosmopolitan beliefs will strengthen over the course of his life and ultimately cause the breakup of several friendships with German nationalists, whom he will come to see as vulgar and disgusting.

Anyway the treatment for his wartime medical problems was enemas of tannic acid, which destroyed his digestive system irreparably. So now he’s got that to contend with on top of everything else. For the rest of his life he takes intense, too-large doses of things like opium in an effort to find relief from his unbearable chronic pain, but everything he takes for the pain also worsens his physical condition. By his early thirties he’s a shambling wreck. It’s honestly hard to read about.

As basically a child, he becomes a famous professor in Switzerland. One thing I will say the nineteenth century, specifically in Germany, has going for it is the enormous esteem professors were held in. The descriptions of his fame are so funny in the context of how professors are seen today, at least in this country! He’s considered a national treasure–every time he even SEEMS like he might be considering taking a job somewhere else, his university ups his salary and stuff. The actual country of Switzerland considers him an asset and plies him with praise and money to try to make him stay. I think at one point he receives a medal from the city?? Crazy shit like that. And he’s famous with students, students come from all over to study with him, etc. He’s only like 24 years old–he was named the CHAIR of Philology before he’d even finished his degree, and he didn’t have any teaching certification. But they were like PLEASE COME RUN OUR DEPARTMENT, so his current school just GAVE him a doctorate and sent him off. In short, he was very smart.

Around this time he befriends Richard Wagner, an internationally famous/infamous superstar composer currently being supported by the teenaged King of Bavaria (Ludwig, aka “the Mad King Ludwig”) and kicking up a ruckus wherever he goes. Nietzsche was obsessed with Wagner for various complicated reasons having to do with philosophy and Germany and capitalism and cultural renewal and Schopenhauer. Wagner is like 30 years older than him and they develop this strange father/son thing where for many years Nietzsche is sort of in thrall to him and worships him and wants him to like all his writing and approve of him. This kind of thing goes hard on a person when disappointment or disenchantment creeps in, as it did For Nietzsche for several well-known reasons and one (to me) totally previously unknown reason that made me scream!

There’s this hilarious period where he’s hanging out with the Wagners at their beloved home in Tribschen ‘pon the lovely lake and talking about universal harmony and shit. Supposedly the first time Nietzsche approached the house he heard Wagner playing something from Siegfried over and over again on a piano and he was struck with raptures of the soul (in the nineteenth century everyone wrote like this about their emotional life, it’s so amazing. Seeing or hearing cool art sends people into “paroxysms” and makes them faint and makes them beg for death because they can not tolerate knowing that such beauty exists in the world, it obliterates them, etc. Cosima Wagner is constantly begging her husband for death after hearing a piece of music he’s been working on and he’s like my love, if thou diest so die I and then they weep together. It sounds like, from reading her diaries and this Nietzsche book, these explosions of group weeping and begging for death happened regularly, every couple of days, including one famous time on Christmas morning when Wagner got Hans Richter and a fifteen piece orchestra to play music from Siegfried on the staircase to wake Cosima up. “NOW LET ME DIE” she begs). Anyway there’s also a lot of weird descriptions of the rainbows caused by the mist over the lake, and Wagner standing before it and projecting his shadow massively over the mountain and being like I AM A GOD and then shinnying up the drainpipe and standing on a balcony and yelling because he did something he was ashamed of. And making his servant row him back and forth over the surface of the lake while he recites poetry and makes ribald jokes. Wagner sounds like a real character; he actually sounds a lot like Trump, like Trump if Trump were somehow really smart and did actually have deep thoughts. It’s a really weird personality combo–all the thuggish self-aggrandizement and demanding of attention and reverence of a Trump but then also sitting around thinking incredibly deeply about, like, the nature of existence and writing this unbelievably complex music that takes 20 years to fully realize. Also he was intensely, intensely empathetic toward animals and would scream and weep if he saw a carriage driver beating a horse, etc., which it’s admittedly hard to imagine Trump doing. Anyway!

So things are going well For Nietzsche, aside from the aforementioned genuinely hideous physical ailments. He’s actually befriended his hero, and he (the hero) thinks his writing is profound! What bliss! There’s this weird part where somehow Nietzsche doesn’t realize that Cosima is 9 months pregnant and he’s there in the house when she gives birth and somehow doesn’t realize it’s happening even though Cosima is screaming all night and the midwife is running up and down the stairs and everything; Nietzsche just goes to sleep and when he wakes up somehow Wagner magically has a son. Must have been pretty surprising.

So things are going well BUT THEN, disaster strikes! He publishes The Birth of Tragedy and it’s a total flop; no one knows what to make of it, and those that do actually read it hate it SO MUCH, including his former mentors, fans, people who love him. The kindest thing these people do is just NOT review it; so there’s this weird period of total silence when he’s waiting for people to comment on his brilliant book and nothing happens and no one will respond to his letters about it. Finally somebody writes the most epic screed, the most classically nineteenth-century take-down, a blistering review that includes a demand that Nietzsche be removed from his teaching position. Disaster! Poor Nietzsche doesn’t get it, he’s like, but my book is awesome! (Also there’s a quieter tragedy during this period because he sends one of his musical compositions to Wagner and expects that Wagner will respond with praise but instead Wagner just never responds at all; in Cosima’s diary she records that they had Hans Richter play it to them and then they all sat around so bummed and annoyed by how bad it was and then they decided the kindest thing to do is just not write back to him about it. Desperately seeking approval Nietzsche makes the mistake of sending it to Hans von Bulow, who, long story, but anyway he hates it and writes back another blistering screed, literally at one point asking N if this is supposed to be a joke, etc. Anyway N is devastated and embarrassed, as anyone would be. I will say as a sidenote that after I read this part we found a recording of this piece and listened to it and it indeed is really not very good, it’s like a mashup of Beethoven and Wagner emotional drama but without anything interesting going on musically; when it was over we looked at each other with kind of wry “that’s a shame” looks on our faces and I started laughing imagining those very same expressions being on the faces of Richard, Cosima, and Hans Richter once they turned and looked at each other when Richter finished playing. POOR FRIEDRICH)

Anyway because of this horrible disaster of a book publication NO STUDENTS WILL SIGN UP FOR HIS CLASSES ANYMORE and the school has to put him on leave. CAN YOU IMAGINE

So he’s wandering around town in his green eyeglasses and green eye shade, the disgraced professor, if you can even call him that now, and the Wagners have moved to Bayreuth and he’s bereft and lonely and sick.

Then a lot of other stuff happens. INCLUDING the amazing thing that made me scream, which is the actual reason for the famous breach between Nietzsche and Wagner. In my field the canonical story is that Wagner sold out to the aristocracy–he began as a kind of revolutionary but by throwing in his lot with Ludwig and certainly after the building of Bayreuth he became more of an icon of the State and his works were seen as upholding the glory of the monarchy and stuff–and also that he got too Christian (with Parsifal). Nietzsche’s horrible sister Elisabeth, who controlled much of the discourse about him following his death (and I say “horrible” not in the run-of-the-mill misogynist way where every famous man’s female relatives are kind of belittled in the discourse surrounding that man but because she was a LITERAL NAZI and indeed her virulent racism is what drove Nietzsche to finally cut off all ties with her and tell her she was a disgusting pig despite their years of closeness in childhood), anyway, Elisabeth spread around this story about N and W climbing a mountain together and then at the top of the mountain W told N the plot of Parsifal and he talked for hours as N grew slowly more and more disillusioned and upset, and at the end of the conversation N was like “fuck Wagner.” That’s the canonical story of the end of their friendship. And these aspects were indeed a part of it–N goes to the first Bayreuth festival and is totally disgusted and appalled. Wagner’s installed himself as a sort of emperor, living in a newly-built mansion with a special second-floor balcony built expressly for the purpose of him standing and waving at parades in his honor; he’s hob-nobbing with kings and dukes and all the kinds of trash aristocrats that he and N spent years talking about overthrowing and destroying; whereas before, during the idyllic days in Tribschen, his piano was set up so that he looked out onto the glory of God’s sublime creation as he played (the lake, the mountain), in Bayreuth his piano is set up so that he looks out AT HIS OWN GRAVE, which he’s had specially built for him and Cosima and their two dogs (apparently at night he and Cosima stand out on the balcony and look down at their graves with their arms around each other, yearning for death as usual). FUCKING EPIC. So anyway Nietzsche is, to say the least, bummed about all this, but he still reveres Wagner and feels deep loyalty to both of them.

BUT LITTLE DID HE KNOW!!!!!!

Some years previously, Wagner had gotten him an appointment with a famous ophthalmologist to try to get him some relief for his eye problems. And, because this was a time before anything resembling doctor-patient confidentiality, Wagner and this doctor wrote letters to each other about Nietzsche’s condition. And in one of these letters, Wagner–clearly out of genuine worry, but still–tells the doctor that after years of observing Nietzsche he’s positive the man must be a chronic masturbator, because he doesn’t have normal relations with women (meaning he’s not only unmarried but also doesn’t seem to visit prostitutes; highly abnormal and suspect behavior). Wagner goes on and on about how N must be masturbating constantly, and how this must be the source of his eye problems. This theory being a scientifically-accepted one in this period–eye problems being caused by masturbation–the doctor writes back and is literally like “well I examined him, and he assured me that he does visit prostitutes, but still I defer to your greater observation of his lifestyle and so I’m sure you’re right, he must be an awful chronic masturbator and I do think that’s why his eyes are so fucked up.” Furthermore the doctor says that in men of his “advanced condition” (meaning: the masturbation is SO chronic and long-term) there is very little hope that the eyes will ever improve.

Nietzsche did not know that Wagner and the doctor were writing these letters. He found out five years later, when out of spite this newspaperman who served as Wagner’s secretary spread this information around at the second Bayreuth festival. And it was THE TALK OF THE TOWN. Kings and queens were literally gossiping about it, about how that disgraced philologist Friedrich Nietzsche is a chronic masturbator!! My dear it’s simply TERRIBLE, did you hear?? At this time Nietzsche was living in a completely asexual experimental menage-a-trois with his friend Paul Ree and this wild philosopher woman Lou Salomé whom he considered his intellectual soulmate. They took an unfortunate and immediately notorious photograph in which Nietzsche and Ree are hitched to a carriage like oxen and Salomé is in the carriage pretending to whip them. This did not help N’s reputation as some sort of sex pervert.

Then a lot of social drama happens, but at any rate the point is that N was really genuinely so hurt by these revelations about Wagner calling him a masturbator. And that’s what really ended the friendship. And Elisabeth knew this, and specifically spread the Parsifal/mountain story around to try to cover up the real story for posterity. And it worked! The truth was not discovered until 1981 when someone dug it up. What a fun scholarly discovery that must have been!!!! I’d love to discover something like that.

Then Nietzsche goes crazy and dies.

THE END

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Congratulations, and you did it http://urbanhonking.com/regarding/2018/09/19/congratulations-and-you-did-it/ http://urbanhonking.com/regarding/2018/09/19/congratulations-and-you-did-it/#respond Wed, 19 Sep 2018 13:16:50 +0000 http://urbanhonking.com/regarding/?p=4015 Continue reading ]]> Hello!
Well the semester has begun and it is truly a wild ride this time around, let me tell you! Here is why:
– due to how various sabbaticals and parental leaves have played out, this semester I am the ONLY member of my area in residence. This means everyone comes to me with questions about my area I can’t answer because I barely know anything because I’m also the most junior member of my area AND I don’t teach our majors. It also means I’m on the hook for advising our weirdly huge incoming cohort. Lord if you could see me hunched over at my computer every time someone asks me a question I don’t understand! “Alexa, what is a ‘curriculum management system’ and how do I log into it”
– the biennial conference my friend and I put on has fallen ‘pon this semester as well, with all the madness that that entails
– somehow everything I have written in the past 2 years is finally being published now at this exact moment and so there are tons of revisions and fact-checking reports. The fact-checking on one of these articles was terrifying. It was amazing, I was in awe of this person’s attention to detail. They caught things like “in the block quote on p. 22 there is a comma after the word ‘there.’ In the original 1976 source that comma is there but in the revised 2008 edition there is no comma, but the footnote cites the original source.” There are like 10 pages of these notes. Cut to me sobbing in combined terror and glorious awe in the face of this Dark Lord, someone with a brain and skill set so different from mine as to comprise almost a different kind of human altogether, a herald of our future perfection. A job I could never do and would never be allowed to do! It’s interesting because I truly DON’T CARE about those kinds of details, and yet it’s true that this is scholarship and we are supposed to be accurate. So my knowledge of reality bucks against what I actually give a shit about. As is so often the case. Anyway, now I remember two years ago my colleague telling me that the editing at this journal is “intense” and now I get it. And you know what, it’s awesome. Someone is keeping me from embarrassing myself (hopefully)!
– teaching two grad seminars at once, which again is an evil born of the necessity of the aforementioned sabbaticals and leaves, and which is mentally difficult. I love teaching them but it is very hard to remember what we have talked about in one seminar vs. in the other, and also seminars (for me anyway) take roughly 100 times the amount of prep time as my undergrad classes. PLUS our grad students are really smart this year! I can’t bullshit them!!
– half of my tenure file is due THIS SPRING (can you believe how time flies) and so there are workshops and meetings and moments of sheer horror for example when the union gave me a flash drive with sample personal statements from past tenure cases and they are so much longer than I was picturing. The longest one is THIRTY THREE PAGES SINGLE SPACED. The shortest is seven. I was thinking more like two. So now I gotta figure out how to write a thousand pages about my own genius. Luckily I am a Leo–how do Virgos get this shit done?? They’re not narcissistic enough! Jesus Lord
– I guess that’s all the stuff that’s unusual this year, the rest is just the normal mayhem. I kind of love it even as it takes a toll on my body and mind. It’s so funny how we are not even 3 weeks in and already in the halls when you meet a colleague you both just look at each other with wide eyes and shake your heads like “no, no, I cannot explain the sheer horror I am going through.” Also I’m really noticing how bananas our students’ lives are. For example I teach a class until 8 at night at which point I go home and literally collapse on the couch and my husband sort of coaxes tacos into my mouth as I sleep. Not my students! NONE OF THEM go home after class. They either have rehearsal or they’re going to the practice room or they’re copying scores for their TAship. And they’re all in HIGH SPIRITS, whistling down the hall, yelling goodnight to me, joshing one another about various intricacies of the conservatory lifestyle I don’t understand. After I’ve just made them talk about Hegel for three hours (not literally Hegel). Lord alive! They’re amazing.

I am also in my version of high spirits. I love to work punishingly and live unhealthily, because of all that stuff Max Weber says! Yesterday I planned two classes, revised my article in accordance with the 10 page discrepancy report, sent it in, then canned six jars of peaches and seven jars of tomatoes, then made fancy ramen. FEELING GREAT, knock on wood.

We went to the county fair because Gary has decided that our favorite holiday is Halloween and the county fair helps us start the process of getting in the Halloween spirit (because of fall). For weeks he’d been looking forward to it, specifically to riding the “Haunted Mansion” ride that’s like a little train you sit in and it takes you through a haunted house where stuff jumps out and scares you. “It will mark the beginning of the Halloween season for us,” he decided. I’ve never wanted to ride on this ride as I famously hate being scared in this manner. He kept saying “come on, you know it won’t be as scary as Hereditary,” which is true but the quality of terror between those two experiences is different, and one is compelling to me and one isn’t. Still, because marriage is about compromise, I said okay.

The great day arrived. We drove to the fairgrounds, parked, paid our TWENTY DOLLARS EACH to enter the fair, and went immediately to the fried dough stand where throwing caution to the wind I got my own whole one instead of stealing bites from my husband which he hates but accepts (see above re compromise). I felt very sick but regretted nothing. Then we made our way immediately to the haunted ride. It was closed. We stood regarding it for awhile. The outside was spray-painted with a very confusing mural, depicting what appeared to be zombies sitting in a classroom staring lustfully at the teacher, who–due to not having green skin–did not seem to be a zombie, but was dressed like a dominatrix or something, with a book propped on her knees. On the chalkboard behind them was a drawing of a hand holding a plate of brains and it said TODAY’S LESSON. We talked about this for awhile, trying to parse this image while waiting for the ride to open. It didn’t open. We could see the guy in charge of this ride eating something out of a styrofoam container but he was making no move to begin his shift. Around us the fair was slowly grinding into life. Two carnies were polishing the fun slide. Another was ordering curly fries at a booth and joking with the person inside. Our guy finished his food and got up to throw it away and started yelling obscenities at the old lady in the ticket booth, who was apparently hassling him about something. “GO FUCK YOURSELF” he yelled, with a snarl of genuine hate on his face. “Lets go to the monkey business ride” said Gary.

We went to the monkey business ride, which was not a ride but rather a fun house, with the weird mirrors and the mirror maze and such. Like everything at this fair, it was extraordinarily janky, the mirrors mended with black duct tape and such. We handed over our tickets and went inside. The mirror maze was interesting. Then you go upstairs and look in the mirrors that make you look fat or skinny or like your head is floating upside down above your body. Then that’s the end of it and you get out by sliding down a slide. I haven’t been on a slide in probably a decade and my body had forgotten how to do it. The slide itself was only about 8 feet long but I immediately got all twisted around and burned my elbow. Remember slide burns? They hurt LIKE HELL. I was so sad. Damn old monkey business ride!

At this point the haunted house ride was open and the mad carnie was grudgingly taking people’s tickets and letting them on. Sidenote: the carny life seems a hard one. It’s amazing that that is still a life people can lead. It seems so brutal and I bet they are paid so little. Living in trailers out behind the Ferris wheel, trailers I’m sure they have to provide themselves. It just doesn’t seem fun and I would like to know if they have a union or how their labor is accounted for. I particularly wondered this after our experience on the haunted ride.

As we stood in line waiting, we were a bit confused, because he was only letting one car go at a time, rather than the whole train of them. He’d put two people in a car, press the button, the car would disappear, and then he’d run off somewhere. Then there’d be screaming and recorded scary noises and stuff, and the car would come out the other side and he’d reappear and load up the next car. Huh, we thought. We also noticed the ride was literally 10 seconds long. “You can do it honey,” Gary said, reassuringly patting my hand.

We got loaded into our car. I noticed that on the back of the sign indicating how many tickets the ride cost, someone had written in sharpie the simple phrase DARK RIDE. What did my future hold? Perhaps this WOULD be as scary as Hereditary! Gary gripped my hand and began giggling in anticipatory delight. The carny pressed the button and our car began its journey into the hellish darkness beyond which no mortal may peer without being forever changed. Immediately as our car rounded the corner to begin the journey proper, it stalled and began making a horrible grinding noise. Gary was shrieking with laughter, yelling IT’S STUCK, WE’RE STUCK. We rocked back and forth trying to get our car back on the track. Then we began moving again! Suddenly Gary shrieked in ACTUAL TERROR, which made me shriek, but I didn’t know what we were shrieking about because honestly the “ride” was just a plywood tunnel spray-painted black, with sunlight filtering through from the outside, and all I saw was a grimy monster mask that was nailed to one of the walls. Gary was laughing harder now. The car continued around another corner and came out the other side and we got out and staggered away.

“Did you see what happened?” Gary asked
“No, why did you scream??” I asked

It turned out that the ride was actually broken–the track was broken or something–so every single car that went through it had to be MANUALLY PUSHED. So our guy was pressing the button to start the ride, then rushing around the back into the tunnel, where he put on a scary mask and then just pushed the car through the ride himself. What made Gary scream was looking over his shoulder and seeing the guy there two inches away. Something that was not meant to be part of the ride, but that was legitimately fucking terrifying.

We laughed so hard but also I just kept thinking, Jesus that guy is going to do that all night long? Why is his ride broken–is it his responsibility to pay to get it fixed or something? What kind of arcane exploitative labor agreements does this place enforce? I felt bad for how hard we were laughing but also what was funny was the weeks of build up about how scary this ride was gonna be vs. what the reality was. I said it was like a haunted house ride that Homer Simpson would cook up in the yard to try to bilk neighborhood kids.

Anyway then two other guys let us ride the Ferris wheel by ourselves and then we went home. “I don’t feel like that was the fair experience I was looking for” said Gary. But that’s life isn’t it!

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Gyms and Jams http://urbanhonking.com/regarding/2018/07/31/gyms-and-jams/ http://urbanhonking.com/regarding/2018/07/31/gyms-and-jams/#comments Tue, 31 Jul 2018 15:59:27 +0000 http://urbanhonking.com/regarding/?p=4012 Continue reading ]]> I’ve been going to my new 80s gym every day and it’s great. I just really get into the scene there; the other day I watched an entire episode of Judge Judy whilst on the elliptical. I haven’t seen Judge Judy since college. She’s so mean!! Her celebrity is based solely on how much we, as a people, love authoritarianism. It’s so crazy how the whole point of that show is watching someone dominate and abuse people who have no recourse against her. The way she wears people down until they just stand there nervously saying “yes ma’am” as politely as they can. How does that become your life, as a judge, I wonder? She must be an awful human being–I read on Wikipedia that she made her name as the “toughest” family court judge on the circuit. Imagine what that means. She’s taken so many poor people’s kids away from them and called them idiots to their faces. Imagine having your kids taken away by this mean woman and then seeing her on her celebrated TV show each day. Lord. TALKIN’ JUDGE JUDY. My friend told me Judge Judy’s daughter lives in my town. I also recently learned that Matthew Fox lives here. Also Lou Barlow and Jay Mascis. Really interesting celebo mix we’ve got going!

Anyway I still love my gym. I have been going every single day, taking aerobics classes but also just doin’ the old elliptical. I haven’t exercised every day since high school and it feels great. Can this be my new life??? Will I ever learn the Zumba moves? Some say maybe, others aren’t so sure. The other day at Zumba it was just me and one other old lady. The instructor just goes THIS IS WEIRD! Then put on the music and taught class totally as normal. I respected her for it. I realized that day that where her moves are sexy and kind of hip hop themed, my attempts to imitate them end up being basically ska. I am not proud of this.

I took a really hard aerobics class yesterday, from a maniac who is kind of my old age icon, all ropy muscles and wild yelling. She knows everyone by name–the class was packed–and she incorporates humorous ribbing into her shouted instructions. “Okay eight more to go, you can do it! Ha ha look at Carol! Carol hates it, oh my god!” At one point she asked rhetorically “did you guys like that pec series we just did? IT CAME TO ME IN A DREAM!!!” As we were doing our ab work one lady asked “are we allowed to swear” and the instructor said “yes, you can swear” and the lady yelled “son of BISCUIT!”

Working on my syllabi, reading grad theses, messing around with this thing I’m supposed to be writing. Planning these syllabi is always such a slog. It’s so hard to envision the arc of the semester. What should come first? I get bogged down in side issues, finding readings about them, etc., then realizing wait this isn’t what this class is supposed to be about. But to learn anything about this issue, you have to learn this history and that history and this idea and that idea…and before you know it you’ve planned an entire class on “The Symphony” and forgotten to put any readings about the symphony in it.

If you are wondering whether I am still haunted by “Hereditary” the answer is yes. I am still unable to get up in the night and go to the bathroom without risking a heart attack. Last night my friend Sarah and I went to a movie because our respective life partners were watching THE PURGE at our house and we hate those movies. The movie we went to see instead was UNFRIENDED: THE DARK WEB, which was very stupid but I did enjoy how the whole thing takes place on a single computer screen. Our modern world! Anyway my point is on the drive home instead of talking about the movie I just told her the entire plot of Hereditary in great detail while she said NO over and over again. I can’t stop thinking about it.

In other movie news, recently on Mubi they put up a bunch of Ealing comedies, which are these charming British comedies from the 40s. They are all incredibly zany. The first one we watched was called WHISKEY GALORE and it is pretty racist against Scottish people, which sucks coming from the English, but we still enjoyed it. It’s about a tiny Scotch island where the supply of whiskey is cut off by various grand events related to WWII. Nobody on the island gives a shit about the war, it’s all very distant and abstract to them, but the whiskey supply abruptly ceasing sends the town into a spiralling panic. One old man dies of shock in the early scenes establishing the situation. Anyway the whole movie is a bunch of hijinks—a ship carrying a whiskey cargo runs aground on the island but since it’s the Sabbath they aren’t allowed to do any work so they just all sit on the beach staring at the boat for the entire day (joke about catholicism). They finally get the whiskey and spend a lot of time and ingenuity hiding it from the British army guy who’s in charge of the island and who is slowly worn down by their puckishness and refusal to give him straight answers. And once the stolen secret cargo of whiskey is dispersed across the island there is indeed Whiskey Galore! Whiskey in the bread tin, whiskey in the hot water bottle, whiskey hidden behind father’s picture. And everyone is happy and that’s the end of the movie. BUT it was in this movie that we discovered the genius of Joan Greenwood, who I can’t believe I’ve never seen before. WHAT A NATIONAL TREASURE FOR THE WORLD. She’s like a weirder, sleepier Audrey Hepburn. Very funny actor.

Then we watched four more Ealing comedies, three of them starring a young Alec Guinness. Have you ever seen a young Alec Guinness? Do yourself a favor. He is very cute, but also he is a comic actor which I don’t think I realized. There’s one movie where a disinherited nobleman decides to kill the 8 family members who stand between him and his Dukedom, and all 8 family members are played by Alec Guinness. The mean old patriarch, the cute earnest young heir who loves photography, the stern lady suffragette (that one dies when the guy shoots an arrow into the hot air balloon she is using to distribute leaflets triumphantly over London), etc. One of the family members is a doddering old priest who is a fool, and it is 100% proto Obi Wan and so funny to think of Guinness first working out some of those gestures and that diction in the form of this dumb old priest who gives the world’s boringest sermons and only cares about port wine. Anyway that one is called “Kind Hearts and Coronets,” it’s a brutal satire of the class system and social striving, and it’s also got Joan Greenwood. WORD TO THE WISE

I also recommend “The Lavender Hill Mob” very strongly, in re: Ealing comedies starring a young Alec Guinness. It is EXTREMELY zany; there’s a delightful sequence where Guinness and his friend/co-conspirator run all the way down the Eiffel Tower stairs holding suitcases and laughing wildly (they’re chasing a busload of English school girls who have accidentally bought model Eiffel Towers that Guinness and his friend have smuggled gold out of England in. It’s a long story)

That’s all I’ve got, in terms of Young Alec Guinness news and suggestions

I guess that’s all I’ve got in general. I’m making ravioli tonight. My friend gave me a seedling and told me he didn’t know what it was but that he thought it was some sort of berry; when it ripened I posted a picture of it on instagram and everyone told me it’s a DEADLY BLACK NIGHTSHADE. Why/where did my friend get hold of a deadly nightshade seedling?? What kind of nursery is selling them? Anyway now I have a five foot tall nightshade plant in my yard, which I think makes me a goth.

PEACE ON EARTH

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Snapshots From An Offline Life http://urbanhonking.com/regarding/2018/07/16/snapshots-from-an-offline-life/ http://urbanhonking.com/regarding/2018/07/16/snapshots-from-an-offline-life/#comments Mon, 16 Jul 2018 15:28:37 +0000 http://urbanhonking.com/regarding/?p=4008 Continue reading ]]> What’s up bros????????

A lot has been going on, but as usual most of it is too boring to bother telling anybody about. I don’t find it boring but I recognize that it mostly is boring to others. For example: I got a book contract FINALLY!! But when I tell people and then they ask me “oh what’s your book about?” in my brain I’m just like “say as few sentences as possible” but no matter how few sentences I use I can still see the person’s eyes glaze over. It’s crazy that capitalism is destroying our world but when somebody writes a book about it it’s impossible to make it sound interesting. I need to work on this.

But anyway, I got a book contract. My experience with peer review was unusually agonized and protracted, delayed by stuff totally outside of my control, which was very challenging for me. Whenever the ball is in my court I am FINE. I loved writing the book, I loved revising the book, I do these things quickly and with pleasure. But waiting as month after month after month after month dragged by and nobody knew what was going on or why the one reviewer was so late…as the date my tenure file is due draws nearer and nearer. I feel you can see in my face that I have aged unnaturally quickly because of it all. Five months of interrupted sleep, nightmares, and constant all-day obsession are not good for one’s skin. Literally my husband told me “what’s wrong with you, you look crazy” and when I said “what do you mean??” he said “you’ve got intense bags under your eyes and your eyes look weird.” My human husband said that to me, to my face.

It is obviously not important in the grand scheme of things, but we are all just dealing with what’s in front of us. When the final report finally came in and the editor told me to “celebrate!” I burst into tears and cried in my husband’s arms and wailed some embarrassing things. We immediately went to the Game Stop and bought a Nintendo Switch so I could play the new Zelda and that’s what I’ve been doing ever since (joke (sort of))

I really believe in peer review. When people take it seriously it’s amazing and powerful. It is also excruciating and nerve-wracking. Them’s the breaks!

Other things going on:

I joined an 80s style gym, by which I mean it is pretty basic and run-down and full of old ladies, like the gyms I grew up waiting around for my mother in. I’ve definitely fallen into that middle aged rut where you are perpetually joining gyms and getting excited about finally starting to regularly exercise again and then four months later you realize you failed and have to start over. BUT THIS TIME IT’S GONNA BE DIFFERENT ha ha ha. Specifically I want to go to aerobics classes constantly, every day of the week if I can. It is so much fun. Taking a Zumba class with a bunch of old New England ladies dancing to out-of-date hip hop. Sign me up! So far I’ve gone every day for one week. We’ll see what happens. I’m also obviously doing that middle aged thing where you’re like “look at all these old ladies, ha ha” and then you realize they’re probably like six years older than you. Look upon my works ye mighty and despair

I pickled garlic scapes

I grew a ton of stuff in my garden

I hate the cherry tomatoes I chose to plant this year. Fuck this variety; never again I say. And I mentioned this to my friend who is a farmer and her face grew thunderous when she heard what variety I’d planted and she yelled oh FUCK that shit. Whoever invented this variety is truly a monster; I think his name is “Matt” because the variety is called “Matt’s Wild.” Word to the wise. They may be blight resistant but it’s not worth it.

I believe I have solved the fruit fly issue: keep the compost in the freezer and put little jars of apple cider vinegar with a drop of dish soap around the kitchen. I will report back on this in September as we actually haven’t reached peak fruit fly season yet.

I forgot that I have to start getting mammograms now that I am forty and then my doctor reminded me and this depressed me

I started trying to wear sunscreen every day. Success has been middling on this goal so far

We had an epic 7 day heat wave that entailed spending a lot of time sitting in the basement so the dog wouldn’t die

I’m playing so much Breath of the Wild that my real life has become psychedelic, like I’ll walk past a decorative ceramic ball sitting on someone’s porch step and think “I wonder what I’m supposed to do with that” or I’ll see a tree branch laying artfully on the ground and think “I can’t pick that up because my weapons cache is full”

Through a complicated set of circumstances we were given a really fancy juicer for free and I have been making “sour juice” that’s mostly kale and lemons

I read every Tana French book essentially in one sitting and now am devastated that there aren’t any more–anybody got any French-esque recommendations? If you’ve read her you know what I mean by this

I’m playing the piano a lot, and exclusively am trying to learn Bach inventions and Joplin rags. Somehow these seem similar to me. Something about contrapuntal writing and syncopation.

I have decided I don’t care that much about going to Tanglewood. I think New Englanders do “outside hanging out” in a weird way I don’t like.

At the same time, I have recently realized that sitting outside at night in New England is not necessarily impossible; I sat outside til midnight the other night and only got two mosquito bites. So maybe these things are not hard and fast rules, which I am glad to learn.

This whole summer I have been doing almost nothing but working on my book and some articles I have going on. I spend the whole day in my office typing. I don’t know if I will regret this when I am old or not, but it’s just the way it is. Meanwhile, my husband is doing things like taking apart our windows to figure out how they work so that he can replace the sashes himself. He did this because the other day I broke a window through carelessness. He just sighed when it happened. Leo is Virgo’s cross to bear in this way; Leo is constantly like OOPS and looking guiltily at Virgo and then Virgo has to figure out how to fix whatever happened. I’m sorry honey. I also apologize for blaming my character flaws on astrology, which is a cop-out and not cute. Anyway he’s learning a lot about windows, for example our windows are “double hung,” which means you can lower the top half as well as raise the bottom half. We never knew that! And he’s doing wild amounts of yard work, and identifying every plant in our yard and how to care for it and what its uses are. And trimming the hedge and building things and fixing the hole in the roof and paying all the bills and making informational calls to contractors and roofers, and vacuuming and managing the vet appointments and bathing the dog and figuring out direct deposit and ordering me new credit cards and researching dentists and taking the car in for oil changes and dealing with the trash and recycling. I don’t do ANYTHING for this family aside from making the bulk of our income and doing a lot of pickling. I guess I’m also in charge of cleaning the bathroom, so that’s something. I also wash the windows once a year, which I find deeply, profoundly satisfying. I have a squeegee and everything.

And speaking of jobs, Gary got one! As you may know, he retired from teaching after ten years of being ABD and teaching college as an adjunct. He was tired of contingent precarious labor and also tired of this kind of intellectual and affective labor that is impossible to shut off. He wanted to go back to straightforward work where you clock in and out and don’t have to think about it when you’re not there. He’s been applying to all kinds of cool weird jobs in our town, and just got one, working weekends at a bookstore. He came home exhilarated after his first day. “I worked all day doing concrete tasks and now I’m home and am not thinking about it at all and don’t have to think about it again until next weekend!” I am happy for him even though I would rather chew off my own foot than have a 9-5 job ever again.

Oh god, we saw “Hereditary” and I am still deeply haunted. It was over a week ago and I still can’t get up to go to the bathroom without my heart pounding out of my chest–the other night I woke up and even though I was in bed with my old man I still got so scared I couldn’t go back to sleep, I kept imagining a shadowy form emerging next to the bed and I felt like I would pee my pants, and it was so hot that Gary wouldn’t let me cling to him and so I had no comfort. It was the scariest movie I’ve ever seen, which is saying something because I have seen all the scary movies, and been very scared by many of them. But nothing holds a candle to this shit. It was so wild. It was during the heat wave and we just wanted to go see a movie to get into the air conditioning. We have lately been even more out of touch with pop culture than usual and had heard NOTHING about the movie, and literally chose it only because the time worked and it was showing in the one good theater our local shitty cinema has. I vaguely perceived from the poster that it was a horror movie, but that was fine because I love horror movies. I was like “oh boy I love Toni Colette” and that was kind of the end of my understanding of what the movie was. LITTLE DID I KNOW. Jesus Lord alive. I have never, NEVER been so disturbed by a film, and I’ve seen some crazy shit in my time (married to an experimental film scholar). The theater was almost empty–it was just us and then two or three people sitting alone, which became more and more creepy as the movie went on, these mild rustlings from lone watchers in the dark behind us. The movie starts and you think it’s just an artful but straightforward haunted house movie–like, it’s great, the atmosphere is great, the music, the setup, really unusually inventive sound design so I knew Gary was loving it, etc. We were like “ooh this is gonna be a good movie!” and settled in for a fun time…but then there’s this hideous turn and the movie becomes about really different stuff than you thought it was going to be about. It’s very very affecting and scary in a conventional sense but it’s also disturbing on a psychic and spiritual level. There are images from that movie that I swear will haunt me for the rest of my days. I watched the entire second half with my hand covering my mouth, in an “OH MY GOD” gesture. I couldn’t even look at or lean on my husband; it was so horrifying I couldn’t bear to have contact with another human being during it. I haven’t been that scared in a movie since Blair Witch Project and this was 1000 times scarier and more upsetting than that. It was like Rosemary’s Baby, The Babadook, and the Witch put together and made exponentially more disturbing in every conceivable way. Honestly it was shattering. I kept thinking WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING or like OH GOD WHO WILL I BE WHEN THIS MOVIE FINALLY ENDS, HOW WILL I RECONSTRUCT MY LIFE

It seems like I’m over-selling it and I’m sorry but this is authentically how it felt to watch. It was truly a full body experience. I wouldn’t have ever thought a movie could be so affecting. When it ended we sort of staggered out and looked at each other’s drawn, pallid faces and Gary goes “Jesus…..CHRIST”

We both said “I can NOT go back to our house right now” so we went to a bar to try to drink away what we had just born witness to. We sat down at the bar and the bartender was like “you guys look fucked up” and we said “we just saw Hereditary” and he goes “ohhhhhh god I just saw it too” and gave us free drinks. So the story ultimately had a happy ending and it all worked out

Now that I’ve said all this you might be thinking wow, that movie sounds awful, but you’d be wrong, it was probably the best movie I’ve ever seen. Not one second was wasted; every single element was so carefully, consciously constructed. They simply nailed it. It was tremendous, a tremendous cinematic accomplishment. I assume the person who wrote it is a serial killer but I must tip my hat to them nonetheless, as well as to the director and the cinematographer and all the actors and the sound designers and the composer. Well done to all!

I really feel like anyone who says this movie didn’t affect them is either lying or is an actual graphable psychopath. It’s like people who claimed to have seen the twist in the Sixth Sense coming–no you fucking didn’t, and why do you think it makes you seem cool to pretend you did?? Don’t @ me

Remember how I went to see Sixth Sense in the theater by myself at a matinee, and the theater was absolutely empty and I sat right in the middle, and then right as previews were starting another solitary woman came in and sat DIRECTLY NEXT TO ME?? In the actual next seat? This is still by far the weirdest thing I have ever witnessed a person do in public. We never spoke or acknowledged one another. Just me and a total stranger watching the entirety of Sixth Sense alone in a huge dark theater next to each other in silence. OMG I just remembered Sixth Sense also stars Toni Colette

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