Recent Reads 8.4.2021

 Red State Revolt

The Jacobin and Verso partnership published a book based on the Chicago teachers strikes a while back. And then after 2018 they published a book about the broader teachers strikes that struck the nation. This is that book.

 

I really liked what Eric Blanc does mainly because even though he gets up close to the people who really worked with the strikes he doesn't over invest in them which for me would be very easy to do as a non-journalist. But you still do get a lot of empathy for the people. What makes this strong is his comparison of the strikes in West Virginia and Arizona versus the ones in Oklahoma. It makes it like points of comparison which could be useful as a handbook for future work.

 

The thing that makes me sad reading this is thinking about all the promise that we had based on Bernie’s run in 2016 and then the teacher strikes in 2018 and then it felt like a letdown as a member of the left that we didn't get more progress especially considering the pandemic. Reading it just felt as if we had something within our grasp that slipped away a moment in time in the ebbs and flows where you hope you could strike wear the iron is hot, but you miss. And it's not missing that's sad.

 

Puppy Dog Ice Cream

 

I don't normally buy a book that would be a biography of a band. But when I was a little bit younger Japanther became my favorite band. The problem was that the time that I was becoming a big fan of them it was at the very end of their cycle. I saw them at Riot Fest and then once later and then I had tickets for a show in the spring of 2014 and then I got an email that said they weren't going to do that tour. It made me very sad, and I didn't know why it happened.

 

So, the thing was getting this book and seeing it offered - I was excited at long last to see an explanation about what happened. My hope was that I would get an entire view of the whole arc of the band. Which is pretty much what this book’s got so that's good. The problem is that as a reader and a story once most interesting is the conflict period and what we have here is Ian's side of the whole thing and we don't really get mad side. So, the subtitle is the story of Japanther, but it's only half the story. I enjoyed reading it was a quick read, but I would like the sequel if it were Matt story of Japanther.

 

I don't mean to disparage what Ian did because the book itself is very well written and I think he is introspective and insightful about his own experience. I think if you were a fan of the band, you would enjoy this book.

 

The Secret to Superhuman Strength

 

I have been reading Allison Bechdel’s work for a while. It started with Fun Home, but I also circled back and read her comics. I think especially in her books Bechdel isn't necessarily just writing about the subject matter at hand. What she's really writing about is herself and her own inner journey. Nominally it could be about her mom or her dad or her lifelong exploration of different kinds of exercise, but really, it's just a journey inward looking at the self. Overall, it's not a bad journey and there's a very good reason that she is an award-winning author and artist -- it's that she really touches the soul, or the nub, she gets to the root of the problem. I don't know. Whatever it is that she does she's very good at it. If you like graphic novels and you like memoirs you are going to like The Secret to Superhuman Strength.

 

The only quibble I have is that I read the whole thing and I don't think I found what the secret was. But I do have to admit to sometimes being an inattentive reader, so perhaps it's in there and I just missed it.

Recent Reads 6.18.2021

 

Fear and Trembling

Okay so here's the thing I really can't tell what Kierkegaard  is going on about here. I read the whole book and thankfully it's a short book because there's all the stuff about Abraham and there's a bit about a merman and the ethics of listening to God to kill your own son.

Reading this made me think less about Abraham and more about both the directions given  by the deity and the son who would have been the sacrifice. I want to learn more about that position and a universe that accepts that as formally true and accepts it as a question of faith and not as fundamental Brokenness to the entire edifice of the mythology. Overall it was an interesting  and worthwhile read but if you really ask me exactly what I'd read and could synthesize a summary I probably couldn't.

Revolutionary Suicide

I really like reading this book because I got to learn more about the Black Panthers from Huey's perspective. I knew they were really interesting and had some good policies. I didn't realize just how awesome they were. But I think what Huey really covers is how much the white power structure goes against anyone who might push back against that power structure. 

So it was interesting to read but also kind of depressing because you saw how it all played out in the 60s. And you're reading it and you go oh wow this is very similar to how the world is today and hasn't changed that much. And that's the not fun feeling to have. 

I'd say that the only thing that really dragged about this book is the last 80% where he really covers his trials to the minute detail. It seems as if it was probably recent to the writing so it was well within his mind but I think it kind of goes against the broader structure and it's not as effective as some of the earlier chapters. Overall it made me want to learn more about the Black Panther Party and the history of Huey and his companions and how Eldridge Cleaver did him wrong.

Planet on Fire

This was a hard book to read Because I probably agree with all the descriptions of the problems they look at in the book. I agree that there is a emergency that we need to deal with on the climate front and that's embedded in an entire social and political structure that is fundamentally broken and will not fix the emergency on its own accord. 

The problem is that this book is written like a very well-written undergraduate paper. It talks about the problems and I kept wanting to say “well okay what is the mechanism that we use to fix these problems?”. Because to really address them as you mentioned earlier we have to fundamentally reshape the political and economic structures. So I'm reading it and I see at the very end of the kind of hand-wave towards it but even then I already made my decision about this book and so it didn't really strike me as a good strong mechanism for change.

Which is unfortunate because so many of these books are able to diagnose the problem and we can fall back on that world. That's like the quote we attributed to Jameson where it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. If we don't end capitalism as we know it there's going to be a major dislocation in the political and economic social structures anyway in the later part of the century. It's very scary and depressing and it's something we need to do something about and I think I'm of the same boat as the authors here and not knowing exactly what we can do about it

Existentialism is a Humanism

This book serves as a pretty good introduction to the philosophy of existentialism. The core of it is a speech that Jean-Paul Sartre gave with the same title.  It's interesting because it's a short book anyway but the speech itself was so short that they had to wrap it up in an introduction, the Q&A of speech, and a separate commentary on The Stranger. It even includes something like a 10-page question from some other dude. It strikes me as the most exemplary example of the “This is more of a comment than a question" style question that you will ever see. In spite of all that it's still like 100 page book. So if you're interested in existentialism like I am it's not a bad thing to look up. I wouldn't be surprised if there is a PDF of the speech itself somewhere that you can just read. It might really do exactly what you need instead of this presentation format that I have from Yale. 

The Antifa Supersoldier Cookbook

Matt Lubchansky Is a National Treasure. They're probably the third or fourth best left-wing political cartoonist working today, at least in my opinion. I usually see their work through the neighborhood so it's nice that I was able to get this long-form version where we get to see help water a narrative Arc. It's really a smart look at the ongoing conflict between the citizens of America and the police we pay. That makes you laugh but also makes you a bit sad because it also shows the ongoing escalation that's not really necessary and it shouldn't be necessary but we kind of live in a police state which isn’t fun.

Diaspora Boy

I'm a fan of Eli Valley.  What his art is able to do is really make you uncomfortable. And it makes you uncomfortable because he's telling you the truth and he's showing you things as they are. 

I think it's a skill a lot of cartoonists don't really have. I think the other thing that I really like about him is his drawing style -  that real heavy dark line work I'm sure has the name but it reminds me of old school woodblock prints. So they're also very visually interesting. 

The book itself is actually kind of hard to read. And it's not because of subject matter but because of the very physicality of the book. It's printed as if they were printing a broadsheet page but it's much heavier than a broadsheet page so I had to lay it out on the table to thoroughly read it. The other piece about this specific text is that it is really focused on Jewishness and the Jewish experience as a left-wing American Jew and how to deal with the state of Israel and how it goes against so many of your ideals. Something I really like that Valley does here is that he includes short essays to give context to what was going on both in his career  and World politics of the time because there's a lot of deep cuts that if you're not hyper conscious and aware of what's going on within that specific context you'll only miss it.

Unfortunately the conflicts that Valley writes about are daily ongoing and they don't seem to have any resolution so that even though this book was published 4 years ago it still feels very timely I would recommend that you read it.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

There's a line from the preface to this book we're James Agee says but he's going to take his subject matter seriously.

It Is hard to find the cogent words to talk about this book.

It's not a novel, but it is novel.

See if you go look up the reviews you'll find confusion about what it is that Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was supposed to be about. And I have the same confusion. Ultimately I think this book is often lumped in with Grapes of Wrath not because they're stylistically the same or did they really kind of hit on the same subject matter or even though that's more parallel. But what I think Steinbeck has in common with James Agee is that they both took that subject matter seriously. If I could compare this book to anything in literature I think it is those interstitial chapters to Grapes of Wrath that aren’t specifically about the Joad family but that are trying to set the scene.

Because ultimately what this book is more than anything “about”  it's not about the sharecroppers it's nominally covering but I would say it's more a close reading of the land of the objects and the clothes and the things that they touch. More than anything it reminds me of that mid century literary criticism before the French broke everything but it's a literary criticism that applies to the physicality of the world. So it's kind of like a precursor to Barthes looking at the semiotics, the laundry detergent or whatever.

So It's a really interesting book but it's impossible to read cover-to-cover because it is like a kind of pastiche of bringing together notes and clipping. You don't get any kind of narrative arc but it's as if you're looking at a world from one inch away. I tried to understand it like that. I think it's a rightfully celebrated text but you have to understand it on its own terms and not try to see it as something else that you wanted to be. 

Cancel Student Loans

 I'm a bit of an untraditional case when it comes to student loans.

My wife and I met in graduate school where we were both working towards MAs in English. In 2007 she graduated, and I left the program without a degree. We moved to Chicago where we both got jobs. I was teaching and she was working with a website. In 2008 I lost my job and was unemployed until 2011. Thankfully, we didn't have much debt from the first round of school and managed to pay it off (about 15K total). There's a weird generational thing where when we first went to school it was like you can major in anything and get a job, but then we left graduate school right as the worst recession in our lifetimes to that point was starting. What the crash and the recession afterward really cemented was that in this modern economy you need to keep refreshing your skills (though I worry at some point I'll end up overqualified). So, once I got a job after being unemployed, I realized I needed to learn more stuff within the framework of that job and that agency. The problem is education is expensive. I started taking classes at a community college and in 2014 I started an MBA which I graduated from and then did an MA in Economics where I graduated last year.  My wife did a post-graduate certificate program for her work and is looking to extend that for her second Masters. We've been employed and taking out loans  and then paying them as we go but still owe close to 30K. 

Here's the weird thing that doesn't make me a sympathetic character - over the last year when they announced the moratorium I just opened a savings account and plowed money into that, We both kept our jobs and I got a raise and there was no commuting or leisure costs so we were able to put enough money away last year to be able to pay off our entire balance. It would be cool if they cancelled the debt because it means we can replace our windows or go on a real vacation.

Because what debt does is constrain. We have been married since 2008 and have never gone on a real vacation. When we have time off, we visit family and that's about it. When you have the monthly payments, it hangs over you and limits what you can do. Part of why we've never really entertained having children is the cost of childcare when you have other costs already. There's this paradox that you need to keep learning things to survive but that costs money, so you need to keep upping those skills. 

I support a cancellation of student debt but should just be a part of a much broader structural change because a lot of people have stories worse than mine and greater constraints, but we have generations behind us who will have the same needs. A cheap master's degree with face-to-face learning is between 30-40 K. There are programs with online delivery with lower price points, but there aren't many. And the other costs like housing and childcare and health care are only going up with our real wages mostly stagnate. Just a huge broken system. 

But - if cancellation is something that Biden can do unilaterally (and I think it is) then it is something he should do. Not only will it help so many people who have been trying to survive in this economy and economic system, but I would imagine it has electoral benefits.

The other final  thing to add is current policy creates uncertainty. They ran on forgiveness of some of the debt while others were pushing higher amounts. They rolled in and pushed back the start of repayment to the fall, but I was really hoping movement before then. But it's coming soon, and they want to spend their political capital on getting a bipartisan consensus on infrastructure which from where I am standing doesn't seem likely. Freeing up cash flow for borrowers, even if it spikes inflation some, should be a net good.

Uploading a couple graphs here to get a URL

 

The Search for Autonomy: Gavin Mueller's "Breaking Things at Work"

 
Okay today we're looking at Breaking Things at Work, the new book from Verso by Gavin Muller. It’s an interesting text because it's short and I was reading it and I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. The first part is just the history of Luddism and industrial push-back from the early eighteen-hundreds to current but also includes the office environment.
 
The thing is it has one of the absolute best last chapters of any social science book that I've read. Usually, these last chapters are some sort of call to action that really you can't do much about, the problem they were looking at in the text is stuck as it is unless you go about really changing the entire system. 
 
I think where Mueller really excels is where he hits on his sense of autonomy. The whole point of the book is that it is not having autonomy where you have the freedom to work on your own terms is where the push-back begins. 
 

Quick story: I worked at a pizza shop. I tried to make my work like art. By creating each pizza as a little piece of art it felt as if I had control over what I was doing. I didn’t get paid anywhere comparable to the amount of my productivity over most of my co-workers because I was good, and I was fast. But  I was able to do the work on my own terms. Then my boss decided to put a scale in and really regiment just the amount of cheese we were adding. Which makes sense from a business perspective because you want to make sure all your products are consistent and to cut down on your food cost, so the people don’t add too much cheese. But that constraint really made everybody mad, especially the fact that at the same time they installed a bunch of cameras in the store and the far as I remember there were installed it like three cameras in the kitchen for everyone camera in the dining room and we were open late night that we have a lot of problems with. Our boss was less concerned about that then being able to exert control internally and I think what Mueller is thinking is something like this. The autonomy is what controls being able to do things on your own terms as you like them and not fully controlled. 
 
What we have is a lack of Freedom where the employee is the tool instead of using technology as the tool itself. And that's where we get this larger unrest and a lack of satisfaction, needing meaning at work. The other thing that Mueller does well is that he doesn't claim to have a big answer. What we really need  to create that autonomy is to have some sort of organization at the firm level or even at a higher level of the social political organization. I really liked the book in the end even though the first part I was a little unsure about what he was trying to do. It all came together well.
 

On "The Care Crisis" by Emma Dowling

Today I'm going to talk about the Care Crisis by Emma Dowling. It is a new release from Verso and the subtitle “is what caused it and how can we end it”. Overall it's a pretty good book. It does identify a lot of the problems with our caring organizations from the elderly all the way on down to the youth. I think the big problem for me with this book was that it was more focused on the British context. And they fund their care a little bit differently than we do here in America. But what we do have in common is that there is a lack of funding and support for the organization of the people who do care in both countries.

This of course is a little bit is a bit disappointing because I think there's an idea that the European system and model is a little bit better in terms of healthcare. But especially in the English context we've seen how neoliberalism has brought its Market upon everything.

The English have less distributed governments in terms of taxing. They have their local Council but they're reliant on getting grants from the central government and these grants have been cut over time so the organizations that are reliant on funding for them are just in trouble. Here in America I know personally I work for a caring organization and though we have multiple funding streams that complicate our financials if there is a cut from our funders we have other fullbacks. That's less so here in the context that Dowling describes. So what happens is there's less time and people are more stretched and people that need care either don't get it or it's at a substandard level.

When this book is at its strongest it is in describing the various problems we have with the caring organizations. It does fall off a little at the end, the last two chapters. The penultimate chapter is one that talks about self-care and it kind of feels like it's from left field and doesn't fit in with the rest of the book really. And then the final chapter is the inevitable what is to be done chapter and it just doesn't feel as if there is a way to push back against neoliberalism because it is working within that context and really the entire social system and economic system needs to be reformed and unfortunately I don’t think it's going to happen tomorrow. But overall it's a worthwhile read.

Lawrence Summers Can Eat My Ass

 I have a lot of feelings about the man, mostly negative. He's out of touch and in spite of everyone who says he's brilliant, he's done a net harm to the country and the Economics profession by devaluing it as a policy making tool. To be fair that last part just wasn't him. For all that he's done over his career, he can eat my entire ass.