Metabolic Grift

throwing up tridents at my son's trash fit

The title and subtitle have absolutely nothing to do with the rest of this post but me and my friend had a really stupid riff that’s been stuck in my head, screenshotted below, that I felt the need to include. Keep in mind when reading this substack that I don’t know how to format images:

Do you think Macklemore is a PSL Cadre member? I’m starting to think so. He seems too sincere not to be.

I told my therapist I had started writing and was having a lot of fun with it. I told her that I enjoyed exteriorizing in a semi-confessional tone, and would like to write increasingly personal pieces (namely of course, more on sex and sexuality) but needed to make sure I was good enough at it- had a certain amount of style, voice, whatever. “According to you”- “According to me, yes, I would need it to be well done”. This is a public performance after all! Like everything else, my interest in writing is socially mediated. Public speaking about your personal life isn’t intimidating if you know when to pause for effect (I do), how to shift your tone for dramatic effect (I can), and when to not take it seriously (I don’t, not too much at least). I think it should be similar with writing. 

About a year ago I was much more stressed out than I am now. I do miss being stressed out- waking up at 5:30 am with a feeling of tension in my limbs, lying in bed really “feeling” that part of myself, always being a little more on and alert than I am now. Not to say that I should be any less stressed now as surrounding conditions have gotten worse all around even if I am feeling “better”. It’s very nice to be able to feel emotions rather than just know that they’re there. Regardless- I remember sitting at my favorite bar in the twin cities (Palmer’s, of course- the 19 is a close second now that it’s reopened) with a friend who was trying to figure out what my “comfort topic” was. (paraphrased) “What do you like to talk about to calm down and disconnect? Noah will just start going on and on about his bike for instance but, like, I don’t know what calms you down.” A couple days? weeks? later I will be at the same bar with the aforementioned Noah, this time at one of the tables set against the wall ~5 feet from the bar rather than at the bar itself (I tend not to sit at the bar at bars, although at diners, counter service restaurants, daytime locations it’s my preferred seating arrangement). I am recapitulating this conversation with him and we land on my “comfort topic” really being people- their interpersonal relationships, desires, gossip, you name it. This isn’t really that different from just being a gossip I guess, beyond that it’s most of what I think about and does calm me down to talk about. In part this is why I have such an ambivalent relationship to organizing- I get to do this and think about it constantly, but it also gets placed in to the realm of work. 

This isn’t that related to what I want to write about today, beyond the fact that it’s guided me in helping find what I want to read over the past year. I do really love people and how they think and how they think about other people and how they think about other people thinking about other people. It’s been nice, both since beginning HRT and more so since getting pushed out of graduate school, to really be able to read for interest and engagement. I wanted to write a little about a few things I’ve read over the past 3 years that have in one way or another structured how I think and go about moving through the world. This post has no pretense at broader, non-autobiographical points, unlike the last two. There’s a part of me that wants to write salient political critique and is consistently disappointed and surprised that others tend to compliment my more confessional-style writing (and vlog-style fast food reviews). Unfortunately I can’t really do that. So as follows, here’s just some scattered thoughts on 3.5 and another hidden half books I’ve read over the past couple years.

I do not know how to talk about novels. I do not know how to think about fiction. I only comparatively recently started reading them again. I wish I could work through them with the same depth and love that many of my friends can. I want to start by talking about Human Acts. Written by Han Kang and inspired by the violent put-down of the pro-democracy uprisings in Gwangju in 1979/1980, it is one of the few books that has made me consistently cry at each chapter. The beginning serves as a direct analogy to Antigone, with unburied dead above ground and a hopeless fight being waged. The way in which it deals with time, and the partial success of this martyrdom, I found especially painful to read. One chapter details the personal pain and tragedy of a lifelong labor organizer who found her start adjacent to the massacre. Similar to reading about the life and effect of a prominent Mexican American labor organizer in a special exhibit at the excellent Chicago museum of Mexican-American art in Pilsen, I find myself really, really upset.

Originally I wrote “It feels weird to have engaged in such a comparatively low-stakes (as I’ve stated in my other posts) versions of this- no risk of death, no real tragedy, no real meaty victory either. It’s heartening that I wound up in this tradition, but none of us are in any way real inheritors of it, and I don’t think the contemporary US movement-left (in particular some of the new organizing momentum) engages productively with these differences in risk and scale” Since writing that, multiple graduate workers, particularly those involved in union or Palestine organizing, have been deported and/or expelled. Can’t really say that anymore!

What’s so striking about Human Acts though is that it shows how this seemingly in-vain moment of martyrdom which would wind up personally afflicting and mentally wounding connected survivors was, in fact, not entirely in vain. Slow and imperfect democratization would eventually come. In some ways it would be easier to compartmentalize and handle the grief and death if it immediately and directly had a visible effect, or even if it was a total failure representative of a “what could have been” (such as red Rosa’s body thrown in the river that Leni will fantasize about being resurrected and elected president in Gravity’s Rainbow, however unfortunately AN ARMY OF LOVERS CAN BE BEATEN, but that book is for another post). But this partial, ambivalent afterlife seems particularly bittersweet and sad and hard to handle.

The second novel I want to talk about is Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. I have also, now, read this twice. It is my favorite book bar none. I grabbed a copy on my mom’s shelf when I was back at my parents house for the holidays and read through it. This is a book about thinking about other people and what they’re thinking about. With nothing else besides the internal monologues of 6 interconnected characters thinking about each other (and a silent 7th, our stoic paladin, Percival) throughout life, it’s really all I want out of fiction. I have an idea for a reading group I want to do. It requires 6 people who should all know each other fairly well. We sit down, arbitrarily assign each member a character, and read the first chapter together- with each individual reading the monologue of their assigned character. After finishing the first chapter, we sit and discuss the section like we would in any reading group, and then have an intensive 1 hour conversation about group dynamics in order to decide who ought to take which character for the next chapter. We do this after each chapter, although I would expect after a certain point the character-individual pairs solidify. Ideally, this would be done all in one sitting with 0 breaks to create a heightened sense of delirium. Friends have called this a great idea. Others have called it psychotic or prone to breeding a cult-like atmosphere. I think it could be fun.

What I cannot, however, get out of my head, personally, is Bernard at the end when he finally speaks (rather than thinking to himself, as each other character does) to a random interlocutor. He notes he is effectively ego-less, entirely constituted by his relationships with others and very, very unable to deal with real solitude. He confesses to friends as others might a priest, teacher, or therapist as only by going through another can he really get a sense of self-hood. He is shiny, extremely eloquent, and entirely outward facing. I am not very good at being alone or quiet for prolonged periods of time. I love living in a city. This development surprised my parents as I grew up introverted and very scared of crowds, with few friends in the awkward period between elementary school and the end of high school. I started this blog because I do not want a diary no one else will read.

The third book is Gerald Murnane’s Inland. More than anything, I think reading this book is why I felt comfortable beginning to write. Less this book, maybe, and more the other books and essays by the author I read alongside it, although this was the best one. In graduate school, my advisor noted I was extremely preoccupied with interiorization (specifically how we- or maybe more realistically I- internalize broader social structures and systems of domination into personal pathologies) and exteriorization (how these internalizations then affect how we behave towards others and further these power circuits). She also noted that I had quite a lot of trouble with the latter, and needed to work on my writing and communication. I was a bad writer, and worse, a bad communicator. I do not know if this is true. Others have told me I am quite a good writer. Murnane, however, has an incredibly interesting project. So much of his writing is explicitly about how he can exteriorize his mental images in as exact, precise, and uncompromising a way as possible. There is a part of me that is desperate to be able to do this. I will never have the command over structures of grammar he has, able to form complete and rule-following sentences, and unlike him do believe in some kind of unconscious, but this project of exteriorization and communication with as little mediation as possible is a real desire of mine that motivates this blog.

But Inland is not about that. Inland is about jumping between 3 places, 3 times, with confusing switches between tenses, and between different yearnings and fantasies or “scenes”. Murnane (or his character, written in the first person, distinct but not entirely so from the author) writes to the editor of a journal of great plains literature at first, imagining her life, her relationships with others, constructing a mental image of a workplace and set of conflicts and antagonisms almost certainly completely ungrounded from reality, before returning to the childhood of Murnane (his character, still distinct but not entirely so from the author) in Australia. He is, simultaneously (in the book, if not chronologically) a resident of these great plains as well- analogies are made between being between two sets of rivers on flat land in both Hungary and the american midwest. The second half of the book centers around this character yearning for the “girl from Bendigo Street”, again placing numerous fantasies upon her (as adolescents often do to random classmates). There is a quite touching passage where the protagonist with a tenuous relationship to the author passes notes back and forth with the Girl from Bendigo Street, mediated through another Girl who is from Bendigo, not Bendigo Street. This passage back and forth will culminate in him whispering to the Girl from Bendigo that “I like her”, directed to (and hopefully overheard by) the Girl from Bendigo Street. According to Murnane (or another character, probably distinct but not entirely so from the author) in another of his books, he still does not believe in any unconscious. However, he writes quite a lot about this habit- constructing fantasies of random strangers, or acquaintances, or people closer to him. We obviously all do this to some extent, myself included, but I guess what’s interesting to me is what is placed upon us (or in this case me). It’s very funny to be mis-apprehended, to be told you are something you are not. I like to think I present in a way that gives an accurate image of my life, but then I will be assumed by others to be any number of things that are not close to the truth- in some eyes I am an only child, I am a night-owl, I am promiscuous, I have an extensive skin care routine, I am a hard worker. I have a younger sister, tend to be in bed by 11 and up by 6, am consistently thwarted by a thicket of aversions and repressions around personal sexuality, use cerave once a day with little else, and spend more time fretting and complaining about work than actually working. When I am directly made aware of such a misrecognition, I wonder what has generated this picture of me. Normally I find it pretty funny regardless. 

ADDENDUM: I just finished reading Malcolm’s Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession. The other people in our book club- sorry, reading group- find it alarming I read partially off my phone. My favorite part of reading the book is relating not to the analysts in question, but to the patients seen through the eyes of the analyst. Who am I, to either my therapist or others around me? Am I the refined woman who communicated with her analyst in literary allusions to block real emotional connection (no- I’m not beautiful enough and stubbornly avoid making too many literary references in therapy and general conversation)? Am I the first patient, abrasive and simple and prone to outburst, and in reality the model analysand (I can only wish)? Am I the woman who puts her analyst to sleep due to her sexlessness and avoidance of eroticism (now we’re getting somewhere, though still off the mark)? What about the patient who has “no redeeming qualities”- raised well but developed into a cruel, exploitative person (no, unfortunately I value the opinions of those who seem to care about me too much to actually believe this about myself)?

My second favorite part is the following quote:

Like God or Lenin. However many years later, this quote has a new valence, for me at least. That’s right- we need PMC Lenin. America needs a charismatic figure from the woke consolidated professional class to take on the technocratic bosses of the newly aligned far right, university administrations, healthcare conglomerates, and big tech. Just joking. He’s not coming. He never will- Lenin was a PMC, and this class has been mobilized almost as far as it can be, at a stubborn 30-40% engagement of any kind in union activity from any model bargaining unit.

Were he to, though- Woke Lenin will come and make giant strides across the land, sewing the seeds of fully automated luxury communism and endless possibilities, imaginaries, and futurities- maybe, if we’re lucky, even some alternate post-modernities as well- like Johnny Appleseed, marching from Boston, through the dykey western Mass, across upstate NY stopping in at the most terrifying Arby’s I’ve ever been to when I drove from Montreal to Oberlin junior year of college after 2 hours of sleep and large amounts of grain alcohol the night before- I ordered my food, all was silent until a man appeared out of nowhere, this time behind me away from the counter, to give it to me- onwards Woke Lenin keeps moving though, passing by Oberlin (the crucible of woke, with it’s imitation Banh Mi starting some of the stupidest fake controversy of all time which presaged Trump by a year- the real controversy should’ve been a year before when Viet Cong was forced to change their name to preoccupations). Woke Lenin will keep going, along I-80, getting frustrated at the absolutely ridiculous tolls and consider going an hour out of his way on backroads through Indiana in order to save 20 dollars. Slowly moving west, through Chicago, Wokesota, and onwards (I cannot detail this part of the journey- I have never been west of Lincoln Nebraska, a state that Woke Lenin likely will not detour for). 

Behind Woke Lenin will lie a set of professional class unions in industries that are rapidly proletarianizing. With the broken guild contract in academia and decline of shared governance- no longer are you guaranteed a tenured job if you make it through the trials and tribulations of a PhD program and universities are increasingly ran by hedge-fund-ceo types- graduate students and increasing numbers of non-tenure faculty force contracts from the university on their terms. Realizing they’re now employees with-gasp- more in common with less-trained healthcare staff, doctors, residents, and advanced practitioners have begun to realize that behaving like these other staff might be in their interest as well, placing further demands upon an increasingly strained hospital and clinic system without adequate support. Finally, upon waltzing into Silicon Valley, much like the sun settling in its final location, according to the red hot chili peppers, Woke Lenin asks that tech workers form their own associations, levy their own petitions and demands against employers- legacies of both labor and the increasingly rear-view-mirrored #metoo moment. This, especially, cannot stand- the half-baked accelerationism of Thiel, Musk, and Andreesen, inherited from the garbled (and just stupid) teachings of Moldbug and Land- feels itself threatened and constrained by its workers. How can we ever accept anything that might weigh down the upward trajectory of AI and modern IG Farbens?

The point of this is- Woke Lenin has made strides and changed the terrain of a few high-profile industries. We should expect the enemies in these industries to react in the same way. The disappearing of Mahmoud Khalil and Columbia’s extreme complicity in it and the aftermath should not take any of us by surprise. Columbia’s administration, as well as that of other universities, should be expected to behave similarly to Musk- shifting far, far to the right (perhaps less in-your-face-every-day-on-X-the-everything-app, though)- in order to weaken associations which constrain their freedom. Tech, healthcare and higher education are embedded with each other, and the same reactions should be expected from them. 

I don’t exist in this world anymore. I now spend 40 hours a week wrapping sausage, cutting up chickens, and talking to wealthy suburbanites at a co op. It’s a job that starts at 18 an hour (more like 20 when our profit-share bonuses are factored in, with 2 dollar raises or so when trained on grinding, fish, and/or cutting- unfortunately it isn’t union, so these aren’t pre-set), health insurance, and somehow an employer matched 401k. I’m a real working class hero. I’ve been told by coworkers that telling blue-collar chuds that I’m a butcher (an exaggeration) is a good way to force their respect. In all seriousness it has been nice to have a job with regular hours, low stress, and a moderate amount of physical activity. I’ve found it substantially easier to read and write compared to being in grad school or working as a pink collar union rep. My daily routine after 3 weeks has begun to resemble something like this:

8:00 AM- wake up (I naturally tend to wake up around 6:30 so had to force myself to sleep in a bit)

8:15- 9:30 AM- shower and make breakfast, coffee, etc

.9:30-10:30 AM- either accomplish some kind of task or errand (pay overdue tolls, get groceries, whatever) or write.

10:30 AM-11:30 AM- read

11:30 AM: drive to work

12-8 PM: work

8:30 PM- 11 PM or so- some kind of social activity (I normally keep an extra pair of clothes to change into after work, but my shoes still reek of dishwater and meat. Fortunately my naturally glowing skin keeps me looking somewhat fresh even after a day at work).

11:30 PM- sleep.

The most stressful part of this job is that on my drive in to work I need to take a left turn at a light. Now, you might be thinking- Maggie is probably stressed because she has to take a left on a busy road that doesn’t give the dedicated time for left turns, signified by that beautiful green arrow. You’d be wrong! The problem is that the pointing green beacon comes on after the full green, rather than before. Every other intersection I come to, the arrow comes before the full green. I don’t expect it. It’s very convenient- it always seems to turn green right when I pull up to it, but it frustrates me. I guess it’s reminiscent of chicago, where there’s the unspoken rule “3 after green”. Oh well.