june 13
hello friends! I am on vacation as we speak, writing this to you from in between fun events with family and lakeside enjoyments. I have not yet been fully submerged in a real lake, but that is coming soon.
My life this past week has just been Vacation, Vacation, Vacation even if I have only been on actual “vacation” since Thursday. I have already seen friends and it was so delightfully wonderful and I’m going to see friends again on the way home when I do eventually head back, and that is exciting, and I have had and will have a couple more days in my hometown and that will be fun. It’s just a wild and weird time—vacation is a weird time to be just hanging out and trying to write despite the time of hanging out and that’s been a fun challenge—it’s something I want to keep up despite my vacation, and maybe that will be more the case in the morning, when things are quite and not quite as wild as the evening (adult cousins make for a wild time.)
In short: I am having a good time, even if I’m scattered and it’s hard to keep track of some things at this time. (We did so much shopping yesterday and frankly I am still recovering from that, not from the travel time.) So let’s move on to
Books I Wrote About This Week
More poetry! I’m getting better at reading it, I think maybe. This collection was admittedly rushed—it’s currently overdue at the library (oops… I’ve been busy! I will get it to the library this week! We no longer have fines at my library so I’m still good at doing my returns but also I’m not gonna stress about getting books back) but I did read this out loud at least, or large swaths of it. I was expecting maybe something a little different—Franny Choi has written one of my favorite political poems, “Field Trip to the Museum of Human History,” and this collection isn’t quite that though obviously there are political poems in it. But it’s also about grief and loss in some really beautiful ways, and really I think those were my favorite poems out of this collection.
One kind of bonkers interesting poem is “Pussy Monster,” where Choi takes all the words in the song by Lil Wayne and puts them in order by use, meaning you’re left reading (and this is one I STRONGLY suggest reading out loud,) “I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I” almost ad nauseam and it asks a lot of great questions about the song itself, how we think about what it’s about, and also that it’s just complete nonsense at some point. It’s just a really interesting poem and as someone who worries a lot about just skimming over poems, this was a really interesting experiment for me to sit with and think about. So look, I’m getting better at reading poetry! And I feel pretty accomplished about that, not gonna lie.
Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone, by Sarah Jaffe
So I’ve talked about this book already on twitter, but I think about it a lot, and not just because there’s a chapter about the extremely fucked up labor situation in academia, though I do think about that about twice a week even though I’m not currently enrolled as a student. But it’s SO important, talking about how work that asks us to love it then obviously manipulates that love.
There are so many jobs covered in here that folks do—care labor like nannying or caring for elderly folks in their homes, K-12 teaching, adjunct and grad student teaching, tech work, non-profit work, internships… it goes on. And if you’re in any of those fields you should read this and then uh organize with your coworkers. Or, if you’re like me and in academia, just don’t go on the job market when you get your degree (assuming you, like me, have a great reason to finish your PhD, like if you don’t want people to use “Mx.” as a non-gendered title so instead you’re going to spend a great deal of time and energy so you can force people to call you Dr.) But it reveals so, so much about the ways that people are manipulated to do un- or underpaid labor on the premise that they “care” (or, in the case of teachers, blaming them for not caring enough) and/or should just be so grateful they have a job, or have an internship with the hope for a job.
Jaffe writes about “hope labor,” a concept she didn’t invent but cites from other scholars, but GOD I’ve been thinking about it since reading this book. “Hope labor” is first introduced in the internship chapter, where you do un- or underpaid labor with the hope of getting a real job later along the line. I’ve been doing hope labor for the last three and a half years (well, not counting the last year,) with the idea that doing this work will get me in a position to get a job in a job market where less than half of people graduating get jobs. (Enormous yikes.) And I think what I’ve come to realize, independent of reading this book but also alongside, it, is I don’t want to do hope labor any more. I want to do work I find meaningful but I want to be paid for it, paid a LIVING wage (when I was in grad school, we made 150% under the poverty line for the county I live in,) and I don’t want to do it with my eye towards a job I am unlikely to get.
And this isn’t to say I’m gonna go off and work a corporate job, because we’ve already tried that and um I don’t think it works for me (and let’s talk about temp work as hope labor too, as jobs are dangled in front of you in a similar way to internships,) but I want to do work that doesn’t make me feel dirty and isn’t me hoping to get a job. I don’t want to work in a field where precarity, imagined or not, is built in to create divisions that prevent people from taking a stand with people who have less power than they do—this is a huge problem in academia and I’m done with it. No more hope labor! Now if only I could get a job…
I was somewhat familiar with Assata Shakur and the injustice she faced in the US court system, but I’d never read this, her autobiography where she documents both the horrific treatment in prison and her experiences before she was arrested for multiple crimes she did not commit. It’s SO powerful—I am always thinking when I read nonfiction how it might be useful for teaching, in the back of my mind, not that a book not being great for teaching makes it not a good book, but that’s just how I read. This book I think could be so powerful when used in the classroom, for so many things. Her statement to the court, which she reproduces in whole here, could be a really great piece for younger students—not very young, but middle school or early high school—to read to encounter so much context about how the US criminal legal system attacks people for their politics rather than for any “crimes” they commit (even before we get to the problem of what counts as a crime and how we build those constructs to punish poor people.)
It’s also fascinating to me because this was not that long ago at all, and I think about how little I was taught about this case or COINTELPRO or any aspect of that when I learned about civil rights or other movements in high school. Yes I learned the tiniest amount I think about the Black Panther Party, but almost nothing more. This book was so accessible and I think what’s more frustrating is how ready I would have been to read it in high school, how receptive I would have been. And yes, I have it now, and yes I know that we can’t teach the history of liberation movements to children apparently because then the apparatus of history as keeping the state moving would fall apart, but still! Someone should have given this to me, like they gave me Borderlands/La Frontera! I was ready! I have read it now, but I hope we can introduce it to younger people than me and use it to help mobilize them.
The Reading Situation
100 books: at the time of this writing, I’ve finished 59 out of 100 books, and am fifteen books ahead of schedule! I’m hoping to do a lot of reading this week but also we’ll see because who knows. This week reading has been weird since I have been so weirdly busy shopping etc. but cross your fingers things chill out and I get some stuff read!
Author identity challenge: still 11/18 books finished, or 61% finished! Still doing the same thing, still not like truly working and working at it, but we’ll see how it goes! Just going along as best as I can without really paying attention (until I absolutely have to pay attention towards the end, I guess.)
Currently reading: I’m not very far into For the Wolf, but I’m enjoying it so far very much! I’m also slowly making progress on Mysterious Skin, and I’m hoping to read more of Radical Sacrifice and What Doesn’t Kill You this week but we’ll see how it goes!
HMU
And that’s it for this week! If you want to see very, very very periodic updates from me on our adventures, you can follow me on twitter @fadesintointent, and perhaps—PERHAPS—I will post an image or two on instagram, where I am @sonofahurricane. I hope you are having a good time and keeping yourself safe and happy. Take care of yourself, and others. <3