Monday, July 12, 2004
Tomorrow afternoon a GI doctor will dope me up and then shove a tube down my esophagus and into my stomach to attempt to discover the cause of my involuntary regurgitation of undigested food (not as vomit - still tastes the same coming up as it did going down. Thank goodness for small favors.) I am not particularly looking forward to this.
Sunday, July 11, 2004
I just watched "When Harry Met Sally" on the television. Amidst the heartbreak of my melodramatic post-girlfriend melancholia in high school, and all those New Yearsses without the kiss-commodity, i remember finding that movie touching. Now it strikes me as profoundly cynical, which, i suppose, is basically Nora Ephron's modus operandi. I don't know what Ephron looks like. For some reason i always imagine her as the twin of former SNL comedienne Nora Dunn. Oh wait, it's cause they're both named Nora. I have never faked an orgasm. Nor do i necessarily think i woudl have ordered what she did. Soemone found my old blog bu searching for Erin Scharff, which is a little weird. Hope it wasn't a stalker. The search for "Hazel Carby and Michael Denning" strikes me as even weirder though, unless it was their son or something. I mean, who would search for them together unless you were trying to discover the minutiae of their personal life online?
Is love a patriarchical construction of desire and power and need written on womens' bodies and psyches or is there something more to it beyond even the horrible silences which Ephron and Reiner's sappy sentimentalism masks. And why the fuck do i like romantic comedies so much? Particularly ones with John Cusack in them? Two Cusacks? Even better!
Good night.
Is love a patriarchical construction of desire and power and need written on womens' bodies and psyches or is there something more to it beyond even the horrible silences which Ephron and Reiner's sappy sentimentalism masks. And why the fuck do i like romantic comedies so much? Particularly ones with John Cusack in them? Two Cusacks? Even better!
Good night.
The huge post i lost yesterday was, among other things, an extended meditation on the construction of the family and the historical and ideological formation of the categorization "American Jews," prompted both by me turning 23 and feeling like i should be more of an adult than i presently feel like i am, living here as a non-paying tenant in my old room in my parents' apartment, and by comments by an israewli minister which i overheard on national public radio regarding the Hague's ruling on the wall, which greatly disturbed me. I won't try to rehash the entry here, because it was very long and went in to an in-depth exploration of the tensions between socialist/anarchist internationalism and white privilege in my family's history as a way of describing some tof the tensions underlying the formation of this category and my tenuous relationship to it, but i'm a little excited to have found the words to talk about feelings of exclusion and contingency that have been haunting me since 7th grade and possibly before in ways which aren't vitiative or accusatory.
I don't think this statement:
On a more personal note, i miss my friends. With the exception of Alyssa, Vic, and Austin, i haven't seen any of them in months and i'm feeling very isolated and frustrated and lonely.
EDIT: Thanks to Erin for recommending this fantastic piece in the nation by Esther Kaplan, which asks and answers a lot of the questions i was trying to grapple with.
I don't think this statement:
"Time will tell how effective this is. However, it does reinforce the reality that the traditional benefits of the union movement are no longer appealing to workers."by Randel Johnson, VP for labor, immigration, and employee benefits at the US Chamber of Commerce, is at all uselful. If some of the traditional methods and languages of union organizing have been rendered obsolete by the influx of new workers from the global south, and i'm not entirely sure this is the case - it seems more that many unions have forgotten how to organize immigrant workers, tactics which built the labor movement between the 8 hour movement of the 1880s and the first world war, and then again during the 1930s. Moreover, Johnson strategically elides the systematic destruction of workers' right to organize by corporations and their political allies, which has been responsible for sweeping changes to the workplace, and, specifically to workers' ability to excercise a voice in the means and conditions of the work that they do.
On a more personal note, i miss my friends. With the exception of Alyssa, Vic, and Austin, i haven't seen any of them in months and i'm feeling very isolated and frustrated and lonely.
EDIT: Thanks to Erin for recommending this fantastic piece in the nation by Esther Kaplan, which asks and answers a lot of the questions i was trying to grapple with.
Saturday, July 10, 2004
Today being my 23rd birthday, for which i am doing very little in celebration due to mild depression and general lack of contact with the world outside my parents' apartment, i thought it might be appropriate to initiate my first substantiative post here in quite some time. I'm feeling, as i noted above pretty depressed and lonely, and reading "Retort's" (post)situationist look at the politics of spectacle and what David White so arrogantly termed the world of September 11th people in the most recent New Left Review has perhaps introduced a meditation on the politics of boredom, work and joblessness, privilege, and, yes, spectacle, to my frustrations.
I have what may or may not be an interview for what may or may not be a paying job on wednesday. the organization in question is a workers' center for taxi drivers in new york city. I am hoping it works out.
Wandering broadway today (after lunch with my dad i walked four miles by myself) i saw the person from my high school class whom i used to (somewhat) jokingly describe as my "nemesis." I recognized his face, which still elicits this shock of revulsion and anger from me from all the terrible things i associated him with in high school and all of my fears that i was or would become just like him. He didn't see me, and i was on a line buying an italian ice from the window of the beauty product outlet which replaced the torn-down Shalespeare and Co. Bookstore on 81st Street and Broadway like nine or ten years ago. I don't knwo what we would have said to eachother had he seen me, but i'm sure it would in some way involve my being defensive and ashamed of being unemployed, 23, and living with my parents. It occurs to me that i haven't hung out with any friends in weeks. And it occurs to me that it is both obnoxious and innappropriate to try to elicit sympathy from an imagined public via a blog entry, so i'll cease discussining my Marcusian estrangement from an imagined humanity here and turn elsewhere. By the way, NPR sucks shit. Particularly when the Jefferson experts offer apologia for slavery and Charles Hill and David Brooks constitute authoritative speech while Brian Lehrer responds to GESO veteran Corey Robin's (and yes, i do think it's pretty cool that he was on the radio in the first place) observations about rethinking the Cold War and the Reagan Era with a few brief and dismissive observations. (I also wish Robin had used the more damning anecdote regarding Reagan's meeting with the murderous Guatemalan dictator Erain Rios Montt in 1982, in which the U.S. President referred to the protestant dictator with strong connections to the Norteamericano religious right whose government had initiating sweeping death squad assassination tactics against students, workers, organizers, and indigenous peasants, killing some 15,000 people in the span of a few brief months, as "totally dedicated to democracy" and as haven been "given a bum rap by the press." The same press, of course, whose ranks the death squads were purging.
I have what may or may not be an interview for what may or may not be a paying job on wednesday. the organization in question is a workers' center for taxi drivers in new york city. I am hoping it works out.
Wandering broadway today (after lunch with my dad i walked four miles by myself) i saw the person from my high school class whom i used to (somewhat) jokingly describe as my "nemesis." I recognized his face, which still elicits this shock of revulsion and anger from me from all the terrible things i associated him with in high school and all of my fears that i was or would become just like him. He didn't see me, and i was on a line buying an italian ice from the window of the beauty product outlet which replaced the torn-down Shalespeare and Co. Bookstore on 81st Street and Broadway like nine or ten years ago. I don't knwo what we would have said to eachother had he seen me, but i'm sure it would in some way involve my being defensive and ashamed of being unemployed, 23, and living with my parents. It occurs to me that i haven't hung out with any friends in weeks. And it occurs to me that it is both obnoxious and innappropriate to try to elicit sympathy from an imagined public via a blog entry, so i'll cease discussining my Marcusian estrangement from an imagined humanity here and turn elsewhere. By the way, NPR sucks shit. Particularly when the Jefferson experts offer apologia for slavery and Charles Hill and David Brooks constitute authoritative speech while Brian Lehrer responds to GESO veteran Corey Robin's (and yes, i do think it's pretty cool that he was on the radio in the first place) observations about rethinking the Cold War and the Reagan Era with a few brief and dismissive observations. (I also wish Robin had used the more damning anecdote regarding Reagan's meeting with the murderous Guatemalan dictator Erain Rios Montt in 1982, in which the U.S. President referred to the protestant dictator with strong connections to the Norteamericano religious right whose government had initiating sweeping death squad assassination tactics against students, workers, organizers, and indigenous peasants, killing some 15,000 people in the span of a few brief months, as "totally dedicated to democracy" and as haven been "given a bum rap by the press." The same press, of course, whose ranks the death squads were purging.
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