working at this call center

it's a physically horrible place full of ugly people wearing ugly clothes eating food that smells horrible  sitting in uncomfortable chairs.

the polls on approval ratings and such, by the way, are courtesy of minimum wage "data collection specialists" reading verbatim endlessly redundant and insultingly simplified questionnaires to people over the phone, tirelessly clarifying whether someone really "approves" or "disapproves" of "public schools." one can't talk to the person in any meaningful way outside of the words listed on the screen so as not to risk subtly biasing them. it's a job crying out for automation—if only we could celebrate the coming of the robots and not mourn for the loss of all manner of shitty work for wretched people because we've got a market economy in which people have to punch themselves in the face for a wage.

the surveying is kind of interesting though.  my first night's was about political issues for wisconsinites. their age, religion, means, stance on gun rights/control, immigration, borrowing, tax cuts, public schools, charter schools, etc. people's opinions on this stuff is remarkably piecemeal. i mean, i just talked to 5 people for about 20 minutes each. but the sheer lack of "ideology" in 'em, as in, some kind of coherent world view, was kind of amazing. the people i surveyed to seemed to see the world through the prism of What They Need In Their Little Life. something was either helping or hurting their household budget IN THE MOST IMMEDIATE SENSE, and that was the singular grounds for judging it. it was like government programs were an extension of their shopping list.

this was cheering and also kind of horrifying. cheering because people aren't ossified in some duped conception of the world, dogmatic about what something is. they just judge it on how it affects them. everybody was stoked on tax cuts. people laughed out loud when asked about tax cuts. i mean, fucking of course! that means my taxes are lower and that i personally have more money. i'd be curious to know how that reflexive response has changed, or not, over the years—whether everybody's always been so coarsely self interested. a big part of that, doubtless, is poor people who simply need more money, and the desperate obviousness of a tax cut cannot but appeal to them. can't fault them.

but there's often no ideology, no big picture, no vision. there's the simple insistence that government be the big version of your small life, something to pay for things you need and nothing else. the biggest abstraction i imagine somebody'd stand for, a thing deeply apart from their own life, is a good ol' war, and even that is probably connected up with their kids or their family history, is good jobs in the community and so forth. this leads to a lot of inconsistencies and silliness. there are a lot of minds to be won in this country, and they don't put up much of a fight.

this all reminds me of sarah describing campaigning for obama in iowa. she said people there basically said "make me an offer." they wanted something for themselves, for their state, for their support. this seems reasonable enough, what with pork and winning federal dollars for your state, and so forth. but it's a pretty insane idea in the end, and a very small minded one.

other notes: everybody's gotta swab down the keyboards and phones with rubbing alcohol before the shift. people are often yelling "pass the alcohol" which is funny but i guess it's happened too much now. people are treated like children, told to sit in their seats, told how to sit in their seats, told when they can go on break. you can go to the bathroom whenever you like, but if you take your cell phone it's cause for immediate dismissal. no cell phones in the bathroom. the computer times how long you've been away from your desk. the job pays $7.50 an hour. ALSO—how, statistically, do pollsters account for survey respondents being people who'll spend at least 15 minutes on the phone going through a survey? how does that not hopelessly skew the results toward the politics of people who are losers? is the loser demographic representative of this nation as a whole?

Malcolm X; A Life of Reinvention

So i just finished this fat biography of malcolm x. the acknowledgements at the end explain how this book got made because dozens of people catalogued literally every scrap of paper with x's name on it. for the last 2 years of his life they typically had more than one entry for almost every day. winning a pulitzer for this kind of thing is assembling the most intricate timeline the world has ever seen. marable doesn't make this look easy. the book's not at all elegant. but it is god damn thorough. and when your thesis is Malcolm X Changed A Lot, it gets to feeling awfully definitive.

but malcolm x! what a guy! something that it makes me think about is that if you were an mlk follower, an integrationist, an espouser of colorblindness, that that had to be kind of a downer. you turned the other cheek, and got shat on (apparently racists back then would actually chuck water balloons full of piss at people) all in order to say you were just the same as everybody else. african americans were heinously oppressed and everything was fucking terrible, and all non violence said was LET US BE NORMAL! BE EQUAL! but to what? the innumerable scumbag white people who've kept you down? it takes saintliness, maybe, to stop yourself at equal, at the same level, when you've been drowning for centuries. black nationalism, and some of the ludicrous myths like yacub's history about the evil black scientist who accidentally created all the white devils gave african americans a distinct origin and so a distinct pride, not one they'd have to share with all these fucking oppressive racists. where's the pride in being black with mlk? it's dissolved in universal humanity. maybe that's for the best, that nobody should have any stake, any emotional or intellectual investment in the color of their skin, but when that color's cost you so much, won you so much misery, it'd make sense for it to be worth being proud of. maybe, broadly, imprecisely speaking, preaching black nationalism's legit in the way solanas' SCUM manifesto is. but taken too literally, taken on a practical level, it means you end up negotiating with the klan. it means having the lowest expectations and demanding the worst of people, so that your expectations'll be fulfilled and your violence and separatism legitimated.

non violence is always kind of for the benefit of the violent, oppressive ones. not literally that the oppressors will benefit, but that you're taking the high ground, being so obviously better and more good and reasonable than them that they'll be forced to stop doing that. they're your target audience, the one's you're doing your non violence for. when you espouse self defense you're tangibly, obviously doing it for the people doing the self defense. the purpose is to nullify whatever's forcing you to defend yourself, not engaging with it. god, violence and self defense, etc, is SO MUCH EASIER than non violence. what an easy thing to buy a gun. non violence is like fucking public relations, it's convincing people how preposterously reasonable you are so that things will be different in a different realm of argument, of civics, politics. it's christ-like as hell. PR note: be a martyr, die for the oppressor's sins. look how popular christ is!

it's harder for mlk to appeal to "ghetto" african americans" because abjecting yourself by letting yourself be beaten or killed is a lot harder when your life, psychologically and physically, is already that without any of the ideological glory and purpose of a non violent movement for civil rights. it's a lot more complicated, a lot more to think about, than picking up a gun. non violence is a thing done for other people, not for oneself.

anyway. malcolm x had a tremendous idea trying to haul the US in front of a UN committee for human rights violations. wonderful. his life is a crazy good argument for travel: so long's he was in the US he could actually empirically believe that all white people were the devil. the book describes his prison inculcation by the NOI and how he was initially skeptical, but then thought of all the white people he knew and was like, yup, all white people are devils. then he went to africa and the middle east and that pretty much went out the window. stereotypes can be grounded in so much reality. but they're just diagnosing the symptoms of evil, not truth. stereotypes make stereotypes true.

barton fink

jesus christ i hate shit like this. i just read through the fucking wikipedia and got so incredibly bored. i hate how this stuff circles back in on itself, how self referential and small. it's a weird-ass movie about a playwright who goes to hollywood and lives at a creepy hotel with a fellow who turns out to be a homicidal maniac. it's about the creative process and world war ii and postmodernism and flannery o'connor and sex too and nothing at all, especially when people talk about how it's about all these things. it's a sprawling, surreal story littered with oddities that demand exhaustively petty and breathtakingly esoteric analysis.  OH GOD! it REFERENCES something! FUCK THAT!

retributive justice

i was talking to sarah about the bomb at the boston marathon and she came right out with this how's-the-weather declaration about how whoever did it has just got to die. they killed these people, made the world a worse place, and so forfeited their right to be alive. she allowed, alternatively, that they could be banished, if that was still a thing that happened. this was kind of staggering to me because i've always taken it for granted that the idea of justice as punishment was medieval, savage, bonkers. capital punishment, without even the pretense of rehabilitation and reform, was beyond fucking crazy. i don't know how to argue against something as radically primitive as An Eye For An Eye. I thought we were past this shit.

Maybe the best way of approaching it is in complicating the idea of a person's guilt. someone like sarah comes out swinging saying THEY DID IT! THEY HAD A CHOICE TO DO IT OR NOT DO IT AND THEY DID IT! THEY GOTTA PAY! Punishment as Justice rationales often seem to rest on the final, ultimate act, the bad, bad thing, and forget the typically complicating lead up. They make it just a person and their crime

punishment as a deterrent: savage and wrong and straightforwardly ineffective. sometimes it ends up looking effective because all the people who might've ended up committing crimes are jailed so eagerly that you end up depopulating whole neighborhoods. and who is this "example"? who is this individual to whom justice is by definition denied?

punishment as a response to the complex circumstances that lead someone to that hideous criminal moment: simplifying; it's forgetful that the people who commit crimes are (generally, i think) in a low-ass spot. crime is the fruit of a conspiracy of shitty circumstances in a life, a flailing, usually thoughtless and sometimes flat out insane response. punishment means plucking that low hanging fruit and forgetting the barren earth and toxic rain and blighted orchard from whence it came.

punishment as reparation, as revenge for the victim: shades of blood feuding. also, just dubiously personal and subjective. maim a famous person and it's a universal tragedy; maim a homeless person (MURDER a homeless person!) and who cares—can that not but unjustly, evilly color a judicial proceeding?

crime is either a rational (however crude) reaction to one's circumstances, or insanity. that insanity can either be a fleeting passion or desperation, or a long term stupor because of an insular life, an ignorant mind.

this country loves stories of incredibly stupid criminals, but lost in that is that crime IS an incredibly stupid thing. virtually fucking everybody gets caught and dumped in a horrifically poorly run prison system in which tens of thousands of rapes happen yearly. people who commit crimes are generally enterprising morons. think of this when thinking of punishing these people. do you punish the mentally disabled? ignorance, drug-addled desperation, the banal, unending misery of being a poor, oppressed person in this country, all inhibit people's ability to think clearly enough about how incredibly stupid it is to commit crimes. these are the people you want to punish?

then, inevitably, there are The Evil Ones, the psychopaths or whatever. those whose evil is intrinsic and essential. punishing such people has got nothing to do with them. it can only be for the victims, can only be vengeful reparations. punishing the incurables is mean, small, sentimental, pointless.

book

i sat down just now to write about stuff i've read of recent. i don't want to just forget this stuff, because while i like reading just to do it, i despair to think how little i retain afterwards. k just had to remind me that i spent like a month trudging through the fountainhead. it's incredibly didactic and repetitive. it's like words as corporal punishment for bad students, with all the finesse of bart simpson writing his sins on a blackboard. 

i wanted to read the damn thing to see what right wingers dream of. howard roark's the dreamboat. he's an architect. he is completely unaffected by literally everything. he's going to be an architect so he does it, and that is all. he grew up dirt poor, like all the noble doers in this story, unsullied by inheritance. i mean, rand's pretty down with getting rich and rich people, but she's keen on saying that people who're worth it will triumph NO MATTER WHAT. nothing external matters, so just get out of the way. people rise and fall or fall perpetually in wretched gutters because of the completely transcendent fact of what they are. 

the fountainhead's super atheistic and condemning of anything that isn't of a single person. everything from communism to corporations is damned because it lacks the infinite glory of the individual, responsible for their actions and pure of vision. kind of dubious about democracy, implicitly, but it doesn't go there. virtually everyone is just "the mob" and that is all, led arbitrarily by trashy newspapers. 

she writes beautifully about architecture and excellently about the self abasement, shame, and guilt religion demands. her notions about individualism are staggeringly simple and stupid. she thinks The Market is the best way to suss out what's worthy; it'll serve up a sufficient number of very rich people who can stand alone to select the next worthy crop that'll make life worth living. turgid sermons on the evils of altruism, glory of egotism. 

atame!

watching a lot of almodovar's stuff i feel like i'm seeing a soap opera, a fabulous universe, that don't have a shred of anything real. the sets and the wardrobes and the feelings all have the same outrageous hue. atame! is a strange one to resonate, but it does. it's about a guy who kidnaps a woman to make her get to know him. it's confusing emotionally because he's played by antonio banderas who looks great in those jeans and is very nice, but also threatens to slit her throat if she tries to escape. it's the inverse of nick ray's In A Lonely Place, i think. In that movie, bogart plays this entrancing person suspected of murder, who one gradually realizes is such a terrible and abusive person that it doesn't matter whether he actually killed someone. such exquisite discordance here! and then it's got the sublime bitchiness and signature lechery. wonderful, wonderful, wonderful movie.

love,
frank

the grapes of wrath

It's a bible for a world built by people—people in pursuit of profit—and the perverse evil they wreak. It's a book about people's alienation from land and food, about the enraging paradoxes of the market, about rotting cornucopias, about hunger. 

The book gets you on an especially basic, brutal level because the Joads are farmers. To survive, they really just want a piece of land out of which things can grow, and they can pretty much take it from there. They won't starve to death, at any rate. But after they get kicked off their patch, stuff gets heartbreakingly absurd.

There are descriptions of farmers secretly cultivating little patches of land hidden amidst the weeds of someone's fallow property. These people want to sink their teeth into the planet in the most basic, productive way. To "pray and curse" over a little patch of land, to have a livelihood as a literal livelihood! And they can't. 

In Of Mice and Men it's Lenny and George's little fantasy: self sufficiency, living off "the fatta the lan'." There's never a prayer of working up a "stake" in Grapes; fantasies of private ownership give way to collectivist longings, and tragic personal idiosyncrasies (looking at you, Lenny) to a vision of structural injustice. In the government camp there's aborted talk of a glorious field they could all share in. 

What does it say about a book if it makes you cry? Steinbeck was trying to, the intro quotes him as wanting to "tear the reader's nerves to rags" or something. but is that reasonable? does that betray some sloppy, melodramatic falsity about it? probably a bit, but then you'd be taking the little picture. no, i wouldn't have wept hanging out with the joads. but does their situation, the real plight of all these migrants, not make you sad as shit? it ought to. 

tom jr and ma are unreasonably perfect people. but that's only fair; it's a way of disappearing them so that one can better examine the forces acting on them. people that immaculate are less complicated, have less of an interior life to obfuscate that which is done to them. and this book is about that which is done to them.