Farewell, Richard Cory

My brother-in-law, a generous, successful person whom everyone enjoyed, died the Thursday before Thanksgiving in one of the most beautiful cities in the world. He had everything people are told they should want, but it wasn't enough.

Maybe we need to redefine success and re-examine what we're supposed to want.

I have many things I could say, but perhaps it isn't my place to say them. I can say, however, that if something looks too good to be true, it is. 

Have uncomfortable conversations. Be vulnerable, even if it means you're going to be shot down and hurt sometimes. Be messy, and blink a few times when you're told to be perfect. A life filled with angst and doubt is better than a perfect portrait. 

‐--

Richard Cory

'Whenever Richard Cory went down town,

We people on the pavement looked at him:

He was a gentleman from sole to crown,

Clean favored, and imperially slim.

'And he was always quietly arrayed,

And he was always human when he talked;

But still he fluttered pulses when he said,

"Good-morning," and he glittered when he walked.

'And he was rich—yes, richer than a king—

And admirably schooled in every grace:

In fine, we thought that he was everything

To make us wish that we were in his place.

'So on we worked, and waited for the light,

And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;

And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,

Went home and put a bullet through his head.'

- Edward Arlington Robinson

‐--

Goodbye, JB

Deb in the City

Treats aren't all they are cracked up to be

Meeting in the middle of the morning that prevents me from seeing my sons today (but I do get to see them tonight).) So I thought I deserved to treat myself to breakfast.

My dear reader, when will I learn?

It wasn't bad, but it wasn't as good as I can make. This goes without saying, and not because I am unusually talented but rather, well, an adult. More irritating is that I paid a premium for something that wasn't very healthy, in spite of my best efforts.

But there wasn't going to be any treat that was going to make up for not eating in my own kitchen, and that is probably the real problem.

Deb in the City (no, seriously, I insist)

--
Sent from my GO FLIP 3

Happy birthday to me!

I do plan on celebrating a little more than a matcha latte and a piece of
chocolate -- but for the record that wouldn't be so terrible if that were
the extent of what I did today.

I have much to celebrate. A sister who is autistic and nonverbal has been
having a number of scary symptoms for several weeks. My mother, who has
been her primary caretaker, is suffering with her own issues...etc. Suffice
to say that getting my sister in for a procedure yesterday required not
only the help of another sister, my husband, and some kind nurses, but also
the planning I'm known for. And maybe a couple of minor miracles.

I am happy to report that she is fine or will be in a few weeks. Of all the
problems it could have been, this is the one that I would have picked.
Thank you, universe.

I also celebrate that I feel so much better for this birthday than I did
for the last one. I had just left what turned out to be my final chemo
session the day before, which required me to be in the hospital five days,
but I could only endure four. And that day also featured the chest pains my
team was watching for, and which ultimately determined that my sessions
were ending. It was not the worst day ever -- I had my family -- but this
one is already better. Indulging in an early morning walk instead of
sitting in the dark for a few hours is even better than the latte.

Finally, the last few days have been tempered with more bitter news.
Another close relative learned that a health problem they had vanquished
years ago had returned for a repeat performance. It is frightening, since
this person is now that much older. However, and I mean this, in this case
that may turn out to be a good thing, not least because it also means
medical science has had that much longer to improve.

Aging can save our lives.

Let's endure those bad days and scary times so we can enjoy early mornings,
matcha, chocolate, good news, and family.

Deb in the City

PS The latte was very good

--
Sent from my GO FLIP 3

I am done drafting!

No, really, though I don't blame you if you don't believe me.

I have been working on drafting this speculative fiction project since 2017. In my defense, it's a lot of story. Also in my defense: family health, my health, and the pandemic.

Also in my defense: you can only guess how long it took me to draft my second novel, which I actually started writing more than twenty years before the first. This story had also been rattling around for about two decades before I started writing it. Also, the story is actually sixteen different pieces of varying lengths, although that might change.

But did I mention that the draft is finally done?

I am taking the month of September off. I will not touch the story until October 1 when I am ready to start transcribing. In the meantime, I'm going to delve into the myriad projects that have been making the back of my head itchy, including but not limited to:

• my "personal knowledge management project" which includes taking "temporary" notes from just a few more books and going over my other notes to turn them into permanent notes
• differential equations
• chemistry
• learning more of the Korean language (at this point I think I need a conversation partner, or will soon)
• planning a thrifty kitchen renovation
• sending out newsletters again
  

I want to say that's all I'm going to have to do for the month of September, but it isn't. Some are joyful -- going to my sister-in-law's wedding -- and some are excruciating (dealing with a parent's declining health as well as procedures for a sibling's health issues). I suspect this month is going to be busy, so this is a good time to not feel the pressure of the story weighing on me. (Thank goodness for exercise.)

...and to celebrate! I'm really bad about marking milestones, but this one is important. Maybe a banger cake for my birthday at the end of the month? A good restaurant? A movie of my choice...no, never mind. But...something, even if it's just a satisfying math problem. Because this is a big deal, and it was a long time coming.

Deb in the City

I'm not that way

May and June were a little tight around here. Several big bills came in at a time when our income was a little lower than usual, and we had a bill due in a few months that we were putting funds aside for. It was tight but it wasn't desperate by any means; we were in no danger of not being able to pay bills, and when minor emergencies came up, we could attend to them. But anyone who has ever suffered from financial hardship for extended periods of time knows how traumatizing it can be. As with all traumas, they can be triggered with surprising ease, never mind what you intellectually know and even believe. 

Thus in June I found myself developing a very bad case of hives, and on top of that the insomnia that frequently haunts me became unbearable. I remembered something I had read in the book Move the Body, Heal the Mind about the value of more intense exercise in getting some sleep, so I decided to follow the author's plan. 

The first day found me bored out of my mind. I walk all over the place, but for this more intense, half hour walk I decided to go into one of the many green spaces near my home. It really is lovely, but after three laps around the body of water I thought I was going to jump out of my skin. However, it worked: I slept really well that night. More intense exercise does work, but I could not repeat that experiment.

The second day called for a warm up and then circuit strength training. The exercises were very doable, even though my right hip was strained, but it was still a little boring. (But again, it worked.) In desperation, I jumped onto YouTube to find something at least for the warm ups.

I stumbled upon British trainer Lucy Wyndham-Read. Her workouts are very doable and creative, and the fact that she's my age makes me take her a little more seriously. After one session, I was hooked (and, yes, my sleep has been great). I'm spending no more than thirty five minutes on my workouts (unless I'm really inspired), I'm working up a sweat, and I feel good. We're basically doing low-impact circuits of approachable light calisthenics (my downstairs neighbors just don't appreciate my higher-impact movements), and it's..fun.

It's fun, and I feel good. It's been a while since I had that combination from physical activity, and it was noticeable. I'm someone who's been physically active most of my life, so why was this different? And since this was the case, why had I spent so long tormenting myself with yoga and Pilates?

I think it comes down to performance, and once again that makes me cringe.

I just can't anymore

 

I once read something in an old Glamour magazine in the late 90s (don't ask for more specificity than that) in which someone said training for a marathon made them feel like they weren't just working out, they were now being athletic/practicing a sport. At the time I nervously nodded my head and started doing the exhausted kind of math I did in my late twenties. Must be serious about working out to the point of being an athlete...no matter how much time that took out of my already punishing schedule.

I was disturbed to realize how much I had taken not only seriousness but athleticism to heart (and no, not because of this one article). And it's probably obvious that I was very aware of what people thought of my physical activity, whether I wanted to acknowledge it or not. (Who knew being the last one picked for dodge ball stayed with you this long...)

I was a yoga teacher, and I was a Pilates instructor. When I stopped teaching, I was then a Walker, even when I had young children, and even when I was suffering with cancer. And I always felt like I should practice -- and I mean, practice -- qigong more. And even when I did something that was less doctrinaire, it had to be "fusion", or at least conscious of those modalities. And even when it wasn't, much of it was informed by the principles of dance.

Well thank goodness for weight training...except that always had to be done "correctly". I don't just mean form -- please, your form is extremely important if you lift weights! -- but the methodology -- the thinking -- behind all of the moves had to be logical. Squats, deadlifts, and shoulder presses were my holy trinity, because they got your whole body and you wouldn't waste any time and that was what people who were serious about weightlifting did.

There were many times when I would exercise and I would feel better afterward, but it was always tempered with "how can I improve?", "did I do that as well as I could have?", "did I do it correctly?", and, of course, "what would other people think?" The hell of it was always -- always -- that unless I did something unapproachable for many people -- walk for a really long time, do something that required a lot of core strength, or push into my flexibility -- my modalities were silly or girly or not going to give me Results or just not serious enough and why was I bothering? 

Honestly, a lot of times I hated working out, but for the last week I haven't. And did I mention that I feel good? That is worth me no longer having a respectable identity. I am not a yogi. I am not a Pilates practitioner. I am not a qigong student. I am not a dancer. I am not a weight trainer. I am not even a super duper walker. 

I just work out. And I feel good. Oh yeah, I also sleep really well.

Deb in the City

When "They" Come

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

—Martin Niemöller

I've known that quote since I was a child -- in the Eighties, the good old days when we talked about totalitarians without perverse admiration -- and I think of it all the time now. Jews do very often still have targets on our backs, but the socialists, trade unionists, and Lutherans seem to be safe. For now.

The people that "they" are coming for now are the LGBTQIA+ among us, with particular emphasis on trans people, especially children. That should horrify anyone who contemplates it, except people with totalitarian streaks never factor in youth as something that should protect anyone. Just ask the Indigenous children of Canada and the United States who were stolen from their parents and killed in institutions. Just ask the poor Black, Brown, and White children who are imprisoned. 

"They" are coming for the children in the schools, and under the guise of protection (from facts, from history), they are limiting what can be both explicitly taught in an official curriculum and implicitly inferred through fiction. And when they come for those children, they come for teachers, who can lose their livelihoods and have reason to fear for their safety.

"They" come for the children, the teachers, the people browsing in a mall, the people shopping for food, when they continue to be unimpressed by the numbers of people killed with assault weapons never meant to see action by civilians. No laws are changed so that fewer guns will make it onto the streets; instead, the laws are being reworked such that it is now that much easier for people to purchase guns.

"They" come for women who aren't wealthy -- and the people who love them -- by making it increasingly impossible to safely terminate a pregnancy. By trying to make it illegal for such women to leave for states where they could have a safe medical procedure. By removing safe and proven drugs for abortions from the markets. By making it illegal for someone to help a woman who needs an abortion. By making women carry unsafe pregnancies to term. 

"They" have consistently been coming for Jews, and since 2001, for Muslims. And Asian Americans. They are killing Black men for being poor and desperate. They are kidnapping, raping, and murdering Indigenous women and children. They piloted all of this on the Indigenous and on enslaved Black people. 

Eventually, "they" will come for all of us. You don't think so? You are wrong. Your wealth does not protect you. Your religion does not protect you. Your ancestry does not protect you. Sooner or later, they come for us all.

You may think that when "they" come, you will be on the winning side. You're safe -- you're white, you're Christian, you don't ask for "handouts". You're just the kind of person "they" say they are doing all of this in the service of. You are wrong, because they are lying. You are just their excuse until they don't need one. 

Eventually, when "they" win, they rewrite reality. 

"They" are already telling your children what is safe to read. They are already taking books out of bookstores. They are already threatening people for living proudly, as they are. They have long been redrawing voting maps to entrench power. (They are even doing it in Boston, but then again, we started it.) They will eventually tell you what you can say. And then they will tell you what you can think.

And this is only the start. One piece of information I always remember from the book Revolution 1989 was the temperature in Romania. There was a law that stated that when the temperature dropped low enough, the state was required to turn the central heating in buildings on. Toward the end of the Soviet era, the Iron Bloc countries were looking to save money (when they weren't trying to siphon it off). Their solution? The temperature rarely reached the cutoff. The result? Hundreds of elderly Romanians froze to death in their homes. 

The Ceausescu government could control the temperature in the winter because they could control reality. And what was going to stop them? A thermometer? Another scientific instrument? Please.

Living like that is madness, and the price of survival is your sanity. And that is how they get us all.

Don't fool yourself that you can find a safe haven. Somehow, in the midst of all of this, you must have missed anti-Muslim activity (and massacres) in India. You must have missed the anti-LGBTQIA+ statements out of Turkey made by Erdogan before his dreaded victory. You must have missed Viktor Orban in Hungary. You must have missed the Arab League welcoming a butcher back into their fold. You must have missed China committing genocide. You must have missed the president of South Korea getting rid of the Gender Equality Ministry. (But surely you have not missed Russia.) When "they" finally arrive in full force, there is nowhere you can go where they can't eventually find you. There is no escape -- so let's change it now.

Go vote, but let's be real and acknowledge that the corruption of all three branches at the federal and local levels means that our votes are dulled -- which doesn't mean there's no point in voting, but that everyone needs to participate. 

Voting isn't everyday, but opportunities to speak out are. Protect those who are vulnerable (there is no "most" at this point). Protect LGBTQIA+ people. Protect the Indigenous. Protect Black and Brown people. Protect women. Protect the disabled. Protect Jews. Protect Muslims. Protect children. Protect the elderly. Protect the poor. (And understand how many of those identities frequently intersect.) Protect anyone who is endangered by speaking out. Be that annoying person who never "lets it go", because what you're not letting go is the reality that other people are in danger. It might not work even if you try, but it definitely won't if you don't. 

"They" are coming, but they can still be met.

Deb in the City

The War on Pregnant Women

Even my feel good reading doesn't always leave me feeling good.

I try to keep abreast of current events without being in danger of winning a Breaking News-Off, and I continue to dig into historical topics, in part because it affects my fiction, in part because I have a responsibility to know what came before me, and in part because it's genuinely interesting. But I will be the first to admit that it can wear on one's psyche, and my reading list isn't the first thing I'd recommend to anyone feeling Age of COVID, Corruption, and Fascism Angst. I think there is cause for hope in history -- humanity has endured so far -- but it's hard to criticize anyone for focusing on, for example, genocide. It's a lot for anyone.

I am not, however, traumatized by the news (just incredibly annoyed with its simplistic delivery). Who knows why -- everyone's triggers are different -- but part of the credit also goes to the other things I read, including news from other countries (particularly South Korea), business and economics (boy, has that been fun lately), and science news. I don't call those things light, and it would be a mistake to say that none of it is influenced by the larger conditions around us (for some reason, a lot of science news seems concerned with the effects of rising temperatures), but there is less of a sense of doom in all of those, and it's also fair to say that business and economics is actually a place where you can sometimes find better if not good news. I think those topics give me a psychological buffer, and I encourage people who want to be "informed" but not traumatized to, generally, look at those sources.

So you can imagine how genuinely upset I was when I came across this piece a few months ago about maternal deaths in the United States two months ago. 

Did you guess that Black women died at disproportionate rates during their pregnancies and in the six weeks after? And that the problems -- the racism -- in our system make this discrepancy worse? And that the pandemic didn't do anything to alleviate those problems? Good guesses, and what I would have surmised going in.

What stopped me cold was that for all of the inequities in the medical care that so many pregnant women are subject to, what kills them and new mothers more than anything else is homicide. Raise your hand if you did not know that in the majority of those cases the perpetrator is an intimate partner, but you already know that what they are killed with more often than not is a gun. And being pregnant makes you uniquely vulnerable, in case that wasn't obvious -- women in the same age range who aren't pregnant do not die in the same numbers.

(Now just throw in that another leading cause of death for these women is suicide, and you can appreciate why this science news was more disturbing than "current events".)

This doesn't present a question, and this isn't a topic that anyone needs to "have a serious discussion" about. We do not need to ask why it is that some of the most vulnerable people among us live in such great danger and so frequently don't survive it. We need to do something about it, now. And we are doing something...it just happens to be exactly the wrong thing.

Serious question: which one is more important to you?

Our Supreme Court, which last year overturned the right to abortions and upended the lives of millions, is poised to rule on a case about -- you guessed it -- whether or not someone who has a restraining order for domestic violence against them can keep their guns. This nightmare comes from the Fifth U.S. Circuit Appeals Court, who held that the federal law violated the Second Amendment. (Fun fact: the Fifth Circuit ruling cited a dissent written by Judge Amy Coney Barrett when she was on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals.) 

No, who am I kidding, this comes from the Supreme Court of the United States and their originalist ruling in Bruen last year, which set the standard the lower courts are using now. Since everyone is doing so well with my quizzes, do you remember who is responsible for the current composition of that court? I'll wait.

I was born in the Seventies, and I know what sexism looks like. I appreciate that women have made some genuine gains since then, but it is impossible to look at recent legal decisions and not see much of them being reversed. Not only is it more difficult for women to exercise agency over their bodies and protect their health -- really, what is the medical justification for forcing a woman to remain pregnant with an unviable fetus? -- these same people will not protect pregnant women. I don't need to explain it along a fascist metric; it is callous and cruel to the point of being monstrous, and we have to stop it. In other words: go vote.

Excuse me, I'm going to read more about the bizarre culture of collecting and collectors. We get our feel-goods where we can these days.

Deb in the City

K-Pop ... I know, right? (The #Clueless Blog Hop)

I am so happy to be "touring" with my posse again. Of course, because we all have such a good such sense of humor, we decided we could poke a little fun at ourselves and explore that which we do NOT know. (Thanks to Jami for being the brave blogger who kicked this tour off.) I can't speak for the rest of the crew, but for me it was hard picking something -- there's just so many things to choose from...

There are of course many things I don't get. I like to fob it off on my superior perspective -- I take the long view, I'm more worried about the well-being of everyone, I'm just a better person than everyone else -- but sometimes I simply don't have any familiarity with something and I'm too intimidated to know where to start. Like guns and other weapons, not to mention when they should be used (though I do know where and when they shouldn't be...), and why they're a good choice in that context. I can, oddly, follow military history (in more weirdness, I still think Max Boot's books on military history are great), but if you made me tell you which weapons were being used at which historical pivot points, I'd probably shout something like "tanks in World War I!" and then run away. As someone whom people actually think knows something about history, this gaping hole is a little bit of an embarrassment.

Speaking of embarrassing...If you've read this blog more than once, you may have noticed that I watch more than my share of Korean entertainment. I watch more than my Korean relatives; my thirty-something cousin (once removed) had watched The Squid Game because he didn't live under a rock, but he hadn't seen Mouse, which I thought was an infinitely better told story. I didn't even bother asking about all of the other titles, which now include The Devil Judge. I know -- what even is that title? -- but it's really good. As I've said before, South Korean entertainment is obsessed with South Korean corruption, but this brings the critique to a new level. I'm only half-joking when I say that I can trade Gaslit Nation for K-dramas and get the same content.

So, I *know* about South Korean entertainment. Hell, I know enough gossip about it that I can get the in jokes on shows like Behind Every Star (the South Korean version of Call My Agent!). And I've developed enough of an eye that I can tell when an actor is a model or a K-pop star (among other things, the K-pop stars are thinner and tend to be more "non-threatening"). But you know what? I cannot tell you ANYTHING about K-pop itself. I'm very proud of how well K-pop is doing and the effect it has on South Korea's soft power, but I wouldn't recognize a K-pop song if I fell over it, and I wouldn't recognize the members of BTS if I bumped into them. (Am I the one living under a rock?) 

Who are these people?!

It's weird that it's this way, in part because lately K-dramas have really cool soundtracks, and some of the songs are iconic. Cue Hush from Guardian: The Lonely and Great God (I know, again, these titles)...except the recording artist is Swedish. Okay, fine, but even among the Korean artists, the songs aren't what's considered K-pop (e.g., the theme song from Inspector Koo).

I think I tried listening to BTS -- it had to have been Butter -- but it just didn't grab me and I didn't make it all the way through. And then while stumbling through Spotify's suggestions, I came upon brb., this really cool boy band from Singapore. Like, damn, where have they been all my life? (I mean, nonexistent for most of it, but you know what I mean.) Their music hits that dancy, edgy, jazzy, loungey spot that I'm always looking for. (Listen to Move if that description doesn't work for you.) Okay, I digress...

The closest I've come to K-Pop is stumbling upon DPR IAN, which led me to DPR LIVE, who sometimes performs with GRAY and CL (I have no idea what these names mean either). These DPRs (okay, this I can tell you stands for Dream Perfect Regime, which is the name of their music label) technically include some rap, but what stands out for me is more the storytelling style, and the music is pretty good too. (And of course, my sample is based on the eight songs that have made it to my playlist, so I'm obviously an expert.) However, I don't feel this brings me any closer to an understanding of K-pop as a grouping of musical styles. But I can still recognize a K-pop singer on sight so...maybe I have at least one clue?

What are you clueless or even clue-free about? Please let me or the rest of the crew know. Tomorrow we are over to Kerrie, and then Caroline finishes it off on Friday.

Thanks for reading!

Deb in the City

PS Thank you in advance for the K-pop suggestions some kind soul will inevitably give me. Unfortunately, since my primary computer has gone into an unconscious state for no apparent reason, might be a little while before I can get to them.

How much stupid *is* in the economy?

I have a confession: much as I consider myself a numbers person and follow business, economic, and finance news, there is a lot that I still don't "get". I realized this week that most of it comes down to my extremely conservative nature when it comes to money. If I were going to invest in stocks, I would do it because I had researched the intrinsic value of the company and had good reason to believe that it would do well in the future. If I were going to invest in bonds -- which I had always been told before this month were so safe that they were boring and should be avoided for that reason alone -- I would do so because I believed in the strength of the entity selling it and hold it until it matured; hell, I would probably reinvest the funds after. It took me a while to remember that most people do not see their investments that way; they do not look at the long-term, and many don't even look at the medium-term. They are super-sensitive to every hiccup and will bail if they see enough people doing so, just as they will invest in something if they see enough people doing so. I have always been distrustful of the crowd, which is why I remain hesitant to trust this very emotional bunch with my financial security.

This obsession with short-term thinking, apparently, blinds people to the consequences of obvious phenomenon right in front of them...say, a decade or so of extremely low interest rates. 

I suffered through the last recession. I have complained at length about it, so I don't want to go on more about it here. I was also a conscious human being in 1987, 1990, and 2001, so I knew that another recession would come, no matter what the Treasury or Fed did to soften the impact. That is why I worked very hard to stabilize my financial circumstances. (I am not wagging my finger at anyone who wasn't able to do so; I appreciate that my family enjoyed some privileges that many others don't, and while my choices may have created some opportunities, it mostly amplified what advantages I already had.) That is also why I had a savings account and noticed that, while my accounts were modestly growing, they weren't growing as much as they might if, say, interest rates weren't consistently low.

What could possibly go wrong?

Let's agree that the world economy shouldn't pivot on my needs alone...but I somehow doubt that I was the only person in my position who had a little bit of money that I was trying to grow but didn't want to "risk". But that isn't what made the low rates so galling. They were, as far as I could see, the most durable measure that was taken after the 2008 financial crisis and ensuing recession, and they outlived their usefulness.

What was the point of low-interest rates? To make money more available to spend...but how? By encouraging people to borrow money. That money financed (or refinanced) mortgages, cars, educations, and businesses. Some of that might have been great -- but what about opportunities to build wealth that you didn't first have to borrow for? What about raising the minimum wage so it could be a livable wage, so that if a family had two wage- or salary-earners, they could save money? What about lowering the cost of education so that families didn't have to bet everyone's futures so one person could get a Bachelors degree? What about making it easier for people with high school diplomas or Associates degrees to get good paying jobs? What about subsidizing the cost of childcare so more parents who wanted to work could be a part of the workforce and generate more income? What about not making high end residential developments so easy to build -- with that cheap and easy money -- and driving up the cost of housing for everyone in the process?

Yeah, I guess keeping interest rates low was much easier than attacking those problems. A shame no one reminded people who worked with money for a living as well as the vast majority of our elected representatives about long-term consequences.

Here we are, and there's nothing we can do to change it except move forward. Here's hoping everyone remembers that nothing lasts forever and plans accordingly, especially those we trust to plan for us. (One last thing I'll say: cryptocurrency really shouldn't be your backup plan.)

Deb in the City

The road to hell

If I'm writing a lot about Slavery and the Culture of Taste, it's because the book covers numerous topics that get at the heart of the intensifying anxiety so many of us experience as we contemplate the current state of our culture.

One of the things I can't stop thinking about is how the internal contradictions were always so obvious to the "founders" of modernity. Instead of addressing those contradictions, they played verbal and mental gymnastics with themselves, then threw on layers of pretension to hide what they couldn't fix.

Did it really never occur to anyone that their circles couldn't be squared? That they needed to strip down to brass tacks and start again? Because it certainly has occurred to a number of people now. Or did they think that there was a moment, some time in a vague future, in which those contradictions could be resolved? Was that moment supposed to be now?

If you value liberty as a fundamental right and believe that your civilization is better when those in it are free, you don't get around that by redefining certain people as inferior or subhuman because it is an economic necessity that those people work under conditions you wouldn't be willing to take on for yourself. You have to redesign your economic system, which will almost inevitably mean redefining the concept of success. 

I feel pretty strongly that the answer isn't to use machines to provide silent servitude; the fact that so many -- in business and fiction -- fantasize about robots that might as well be sentient speaks, to me, of a recognition that a spark of humanity is necessary for, well, the company of other human beings, and we endeavor to escape that at our own peril.

Philip Ball's excellent Modern Myths theorized that one of the fears Frankenstein stokes is that we will become the robots, not so much that they will take us over. After reading Slavery and the Culture of Taste, I have to wonder to what extent Frankenstein was inspired by slavery. I can't help but think that Mary Shelley, like so many around her, had a deep seated recognition that modernity was creating monsters -- more out of those who used other human beings than the misused human beings.

Sunny Auyang's book The Dragon and The Eagle covered these topics as well. Auyang distinguishes between those who use slaves (Han China) from those who depend on them (Imperial Rome). Empires end: ultimately what drives them is conquest, and sooner or later the costs of conquest outweigh the benefits. But while all empires suffer from hypocrisy of one flavor or another -- the prestige of the metropolitan center versus the practical importance of the "creole" borders; philosophies that center on the importance of law and advancement versus those that lean on custom to justify corruption -- those that depend on slavery come to almost neurotically venerate the concepts of freedom and liberty. 

In many cases, concepts do not take shape until their hateful opposite is articulated. This may be normal. What is unhealthy is not only that those contradictions are allowed to co-exist, but that a society allows itself to become or remain dependent on that which they have told themselves is intolerable. This is what twists us and causes us to make compromises that we, ultimately, can't live with; this is what causes us to be people who don't really believe anything except that which is most likely to help us survive. This is what makes us hypocrites who spout ideals that in the final analysis we won't do anything to support them. 

I started writing this post before I came across this article about Israel from The New Republic. My rabbi is quoted there, and his quotes are one of the few bright spots in the piece. The Jewish way is to do the work. (I might add so is the Korean way, so I am doubly obligated; I suspect there are few cultures in the world that valued complacency.) The work needs to be done, but I am under no delusions that doing so will guarantee that Israel will be any kind of safe haven for me or anyone else in my family. Not everyone in my family is straight; no one has been Orthodox since my grandfather; I am a woman of mixed heritage. This Israeli government isn't welcoming to people like me, period.

And even if it were...no, I'm sorry, I can't stomach the trampling of human rights anymore. (Yes, I refer to the Palestinians. No, I don't care that some of them wouldn't like me because I'm Jewish; the vast majority are not that way, which is amazing given their increasing desperation, which by definition leaves people with few good and ethical options.) I've fought with many people on both sides of the issue of Israel since the age of fifteen, and for some reason it's only gotten worse as I've gotten older. It is bad enough that I live now in a settler-colonial country that has made mistreatment of BIPOC and immigrant people a policy; I do not want to flee to another place that does the same thing. I do not want my safety to come at the cost of someone else's. I am not going to be soothed that I am doing the right thing because of a chauvinist notion about my heritage.

Good intentions by themselves aren't the only things that guide us to hell. I submit that the dirt surrounding that path are the compromises, contradictions, and hypocrisies that we try to blind ourselves to, and the end of the road is the point at which those good intentions run out. Of course it's hell. 

I want to survive -- I want my family to survive -- but I don't want any of us to do it in hell, especially while there's still time to avert it. Let's all do the work while we still can.

Deb in the City

A Re-evaluation of Tidying

When I first read Marie Kondo in 2015, I felt something click. This was what I had been looking for. Here was the thing that spoke to the desire for a clean aesthetic with my increasing dread of consumerism. And what the effort was pinned on was Joy, or if you prefer, Happiness. I had been given permission to be Happy, and instead of needing to buy something, I needed to look at what I already had and decide what I needed to keep, not disavow. I also loved that she *wasn't* talking about minimalism, and in fact made room for people who genuinely enjoyed certain things to keep them. I harbored a fantasy about a relative of mine being able to have a home that spotlighted their love of tea, peacocks, and red. 

But maybe the better question is why I was looking for it.

I've felt bullied in my life for and by a lot of things, and the state of my home was a big one. My homes were too messy when I was younger; I was messy, I was dirty. It was a failure of my parents, but of course it was my mother's responsibility because that's how people look at everything. And when I got married and had a family of my own, no one gave me an excuse if I had to work as well as take care of a family, or if I didn't have money for the things that made a home more inviting. I was expected to keep a certain kind of home. Because I failed, I decided it was easier not to have certain people over -- certain family members as well as, er, friends -- than to have to defend myself. I did not want those people back in my home once I made it "presentable" or "acceptable"; in fact, maybe it's even fair that I didn't want to be accepted. But I did want to proclaim to people that it was exactly as I wanted it, and that while I had decided I could not use my home or other possessions to achieve approval, I could at least use it to exercise control.

Healthy? Hell no. But, I daresay, completely normal, with a legacy stretching back centuries.

The first thing that forced me to admit that maybe tidying really was more aspirational than I had wanted to be true was Catherine McCormack's fantastic Women in the Picture. McCormack addresses four dominant female archetypes and what they mean for the civilizations that produce and consume them: Venus, the Mother, Damsels and Dead Maidens, and the Monstrous Woman. If you guessed that the home falls into the Mother's sphere of influence, you are correct. 

Aren't we so productive?

I've patted myself on the back for years for how much tidying leans into anti-consumerism, even if it isn't minimalism. But as Slavery and the Culture of Taste drove home to me recently, objects aren't the only things we consume in our modern civilization. We perform -- produce -- sell -- emotions and ideals just as much as we consume them. And let's not pretend that can't be equally damaging as the overproduction of..."goods".

McCormack pointed her readers to Dutch paintings of scenes of domestic bliss: the wives and mothers who were the focus of the paintings were in control of their tidy environment and obedient children. As befitted a proud Protestant household, the subject's prosperity wasn't advertised with an abundance of objects but with the openness and cleanliness of space. For the vast majority of homes, these paintings aren't a reflection of reality; no matter how prosperous, it is difficult to imagine that one woman, caring for multiple children, is able to maintain a home as tidy and organized as the one idealized here.

I squirmed as McCormack pointed out the similarities between these paintings and their visual descendants on Pinterest and Instagram. There, again, is the Mother in scenes of domestic bliss that we can only aspire to: she is forever young, surrounded by obedient children who are the picture of health -- themselves an advertisement for how productive she is -- efficiently going about the business of making the home (usually the kitchen) work. You only think what the picture is selling is the high-tech eco-chic appliance that is tastefully displayed, or the premium food that is being consumed and sure to provide magical healing properties; that picture is really selling an idealized aspect of femininity, and we keep buying. Most of us can't have the gadgets, but we can have a tidier space, and with that, we can enter the marketplace of ideals as producers of our own and start selling. (Why get upset with the economy of attention that runs so many internet sites? It's only making obvious what has always been true.) And isn't being purchased from even better than being in control?

The above insight was uncomfortable, but welcome to adulthood in the 21st century. It wasn't until Slavery and the Culture of Taste that I started stepping back in horror. No, don't worry -- you haven't imagined that the aesthetic ideal of modernity has generally been cluttered with objects, and in many ways is the opposite of the perfectly tidied space. But one special category of the person of culture, the person of taste, always understood that everything has its place and everything must be put in it in order to achieve maximum productivity. Yes, that person was the slave master, and yes, it does imply all of the ugliness of human beings as objects in a greater machine that you think it does.

So why is it that Marie Kondo sounds so similar? Because she -- and many like her -- have as a principle that everything should have a place and the key to order is to put everything in it. Should you fail to do this, she promises that the first out of place item will invite disorder. Why does it make us feel better when she says it but make us cringe when someone who controlled other human beings says it?

Our personal spaces do say something about us, whether we want them to or not. So what is it that we are hoping they will tell everyone about us? What is it we are hoping we can transform about ourselves by transforming our space? Do we want our spaces to embody some kind of domestic ideal that is a safe haven for those who don't spend that much time in their homes, as it was most probably for the real patrons of those Dutch paintings? Or do we want them to be as efficient as a plantation worked by people who needed to be orderly under threat of constant violence? Maybe the bullying I mentioned at the beginning isn't unique to me, and maybe that has something to do with the answer to these questions.

I'm growing more ashamed of the way I've kept my home, and not because it was a mess. I'm not proud that I've made other family members feel as bad about how they kept their space as I was made to feel. I thought I'd kept out the people who made me feel inadequate in my own home, but really I'm not sure they ever left. Maybe I can't do much about them, but at least I've kept some of their friends out by not being on Pinterest or Instagram for the last few years. If I can stop consuming some of those ideals, maybe -- hopefully -- that eventually will be something.

Deb in the City

Staring at the Abyss

I'm in the midst of drafting my series -- almost done with installment fifteen, and then we're onto the finale (wait, what?). I will still, of course, be editing for a while (no, trust me...), so still being in "research mode" isn't inappropriate.

I've read a lot of history, politics, science writing, as well as sci-fi and fantasy, but lately my reading has delved into what we might term the dystopian side of things -- and I refer to the non-fiction. Is there anything more dystopian than chattel slavery? I mean, other than settler-colonialism?

Perhaps modernity itself.

I picked up Simon Gikandi's Slavery and the Culture of Taste in January, and it was only a coincidence that I finished it in February aka Black History Month. It was without a doubt the most difficult book I have ever read. I've whined at length about how hard it was to get through Edward Said's Orientalism, and no small part of that was the sometimes obtuse academic language, and the liberal use of French passages...which I don't speak. That book was easier to read than Slavery and the Culture of Taste. (Stamped from the Beginning was easier to read.) 

 

Not for the faint of heart, but everyone should read it

As I've gotten older, reading about slavery and what it really was has gotten more difficult. It's an increase in empathy in general, but it's also -- and this is a good thing -- other Brown and Black people getting more concerted media attention when they talk about historical experiences and the continuing ramifications. A couple of authors have made oblique references here and there that have stopped me cold, but I could go on trying to understand the shape of history. (And they have shown up in the most unexpected places; take a look at Michael Twitty's The Cooking Gene.) Not with this book.

I have never read anything that so completely described the psychological and psychic displacement that wasn't just attendant to slavery but that made slavery possible. African bodies needed to be transformed from people into objects for the benefit of the slave holders, who, like everyone everywhere, told themselves stories about how good they were, but even though slaves miraculously held onto their sense of themselves as selves and not things, the processes of being displaced, stripped, packed into small spaces as if they were animals, being deprived of privacy, being branded, being regularly, sadistically abused, losing their names, losing their sense of time, and being subject to losing their communities and families at any point traumatized them. As they would anybody. I cried several times while reading the descriptions of these processes, and the only thing that kept me reading was the feeling that I could not do anything to right those wrongs unless I understood it. That is perhaps the most earnest thing I've ever written in this space, and I mean it.

What terrified me was Gikandi's explanation of how the affected psychological and sociological processes work, and how easy it would be to break anyone from anywhere if you did those things to them. I wasn't under any delusions that there was something particularly vulnerable about African captives, but looking out at the world and seeing a planet filled with people that could be as easily broken if as sadistically treated -- and knowing that I was one of them...isn't that part of the horror of dystopian fiction?

(It strikes me how much the dominant community has suffered for ignoring the plight of the people they oppressed. The psychic displacement that African slaves suffered from is not substantially unrelated to what we have seen in other totalitarian civilizations, whether it's the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, or Communist China. We can't, probably, expect most people to assert their previous identities in the same ways when Big Brother is watching with increasingly sophisticated surveillance, but those of us who aren't being tormented should be a little less surprised that simply changing governments and material conditions doesn't magically undo years of psychological and sociological damage.)

Spoiler alert, in case you needed one: miraculously, slaves did not by and large break. They not only established relationships and communities, they kept their senses of self, even if they had to redefine that in a hostile setting. They were hyper-aware that they were the negative by which their "owners" and those communities defined themselves -- much as, per Said, Europe couldn't exist without The Oriental Other -- but their psyches stayed intact by asserting their own history (or remembered fragments of it) in whatever spaces were available, whether it was as dance, art, and ritual or in the provision grounds they used to feed themselves. As time went on, many communities also explicitly thumbed their noses not at the stereotypes they were subjected to but the "manners" their owners pretended to. They used performance to mock performance and thereby establish their own identities.

If I'm honest, I picked up this book because I was interested in the concept of "taste", which is coming up more in other books I've read (Culture and Imperialism, Fearing the Black Body, Women in the Picture). I was not disappointed by Gikandi's insights. Intertwined with Taste is Performance, and modern civilization would not exist without it. Before modernity, what many European cultures needed to perform was Goodness, for God and for our communities, but modernity required the performance of Happiness. Keeping in mind the maxim that the medium is the message and eventually comes to alter it, I would say happiness is more suited to performance than goodness, and for that reason has stuck with us for so long. 

And why shouldn't we be happy when we have everything...underwritten by the exploitation of others? It's really not a new insight -- people understood even when they didn't want to that their wealth was coming off of slavery -- and it has been haunting modern civilization since the beginning. As much as people tried to get around it by strictly defining "We" and by desperately trying to convince themselves that other people weren't just that, we never entirely lost sight that our system is based on varying degrees of haves and have nots. Just as we needed to perform Goodness to convince everyone that we were destined for heaven, we need to perform Happiness to convince everyone that we are destined for success and therefore trustworthy with opportunity. 

Fear of damnation is still the real driver.

We read history to understand our present moment, and this was no exception. I continue to seek to understand the emptiness and hypocrisy that can characterize our culture. I know I'm not the only one, and I presume other people will understand when I say that sometimes it feels as if the abyss is looking back at me. Perhaps that is why I really wanted to finish this book -- millions of people have climbed out of the abyss after they were shoved into it. If they can survive, so can we. But only if we acknowledge them as Us first.

Deb in the City

No maps in the uncharted territory.

I read up on the economy as much as I can without being obsessive about it. I've been reading about inflation mostly via The Economist, but also through political and social commentators and activists like Gaslit Nation. 

The Economist does good coverage on a lot of issues, but mostly they make me chuckle when I read these pieces. I picture a lot of people scratching their heads, thinking, "All things being equal, raising interest rates really should work, so why are we still stuck?" Sarah Kendzior and Andrea Chalupa are not economists, but when it comes up, they are focused on one aspect -- labor -- and frankly I think they've called it: unemployment is so low because the population of people who would have been working before have been disproportionately affected by COVID. In other words, a number of the COVID dead or disabled were those removed from the workforce.

They don't say this, but I do: economists are willfully blind if they're ignoring that fact, and they are bordering on monstrous if they want to suggest that the stimulus money so many governments spent is what's keeping people out of work. For some bizarre reason, my family got those benefits too, even though my husband was able to work the whole time. I have a sense of how much those benefits were worth, and it's laughable to suggest that as rents are going up and the cost of food is going up that somehow people are able to justify staying out of work because of, at most, a couple of thousand dollars they received a year and a half ago. There were some people who were able to pay down debts with that money, and that probably gave them a little breathing room, but we're past that. 

If people aren't applying for jobs, it's because the people aren't there to do so. The fact that we are doubling down on reducing immigration in the midst of that is only going to make the problem worse.

It should also be said that the benefits wage earners are getting now are, frankly, long overdue. The average wage has not kept up with the cost of living for decades, and if people are feeling the pinch of having to make up (some of) the difference now, this is part of what labor activists were warning about.

But let's not pretend that economics is a science. It is at best a description of "the market", and the market is filled with human beings. On average they're making rational decisions, but please define "rationality" when we live through a deadly pandemic, massive political instability on a global scale (January 2021 insurrection in the US, Russia's vicious war of aggression against Ukraine, growing aggression by North Korea, an increasingly unpredictable and genocidal China, an absolutely erratic wannabe dictator in Turkey, a chauvinistic, bigoted populist leader in India, the environmental and humanitarian depredations of former Brazilian strongman Bolsanaro...someone needs to explain to me why Africa gets all of the ink for problems with dictators and corruption), and the continuing state aggression against BIPOC people all over the world. 

It's a lot to expect that people are going to be logical actors making rational decisions if their time scale is surviving the present, unknown moment and tomorrow seems like a luxury. And it shouldn't be a surprise at all that people are going to treat money and goods like the bricks of a protective fortress, either hoarding it so they'll never have to worry about deprivation, or spending it to prove that everything is the Normal they idealized before disaster struck.

Which is all to say: of course economists don't know what the hell is going on and how to end inflation, because we are in uncharted territory. 

I'll echo Kendzior and Chalupa and advise people to be decent to each other -- sharing what we have could mean the difference for someone else's prospects for survival -- and read up on historical analogues. What were they doing during the 1918 Spanish Flu oubreak? How did people survive the initial onslaughts of smallpox? What mistakes were made when the bubonic plague first spread? Discover your history, and learn from it. History isn't a map, but at least it can be a guide.

Deb in the City