by
Jerome Stern
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“A story about a beautiful day at Palisades Amusement Park is out of the ordinary,” the writer says. “It was a rare day, a wonderful day, a day when everything went right. Why isn’t that a story?”
The writer’s argument only makes our point stronger. His example can be a story. There is real tension in his re-creating that perfect day. When Wallace Stevens wrote, “Death is the mother of beauty,” I think he meant that we value beauty because we know it is fleeting—the ripe fruit will soon rot, the beautiful person will inevitably die. If with every sentence of the Palisades Park story we feel the fragility of that day’s beauty, the recognition of how exceptional it is, the way the characters transcend their everyday troubles, we feel the tension, and it will be a story.
i do like this
You are interesting. Your experiences, your imagination, your perceptions, your emotions are interesting. What is closest to you is valuable for your art. Believe that. Your honesty and your talent are inseparable. Don’t falsify by conventionalizing. Your uniqueness lies not in fulfilling cultural stereotypes but in expressing what you really uncover, like it or not.
Negri's practising of this method in the 1970s was predicated on accepting and radicalising the crisis of the Fordist social compact to license a thinking of the imminent and immanent apocalypse of capitalist relations. If capitalism started to rupture the structure of the factory and guaranteed employment then one should not regret this and go backwards to some lost world of social democracy, but push the tendency further into exodus, sabotage, and destruction of the 'fetters' of the remnants of Fordism. This is a form of the accelerationism of struggles.
The implication of his work, reflecting on the crisis of Fordism and its 'planner-state', was that communism had already arrived and would need to simply be realized. [...]
in his 1971 Crisis of the Planner-State
The idea of the tracks stretching into the future leaves revolution as a receding moment--the station we never quite arrive in. The result, contra to the revolutionary intervention, it is the constant stoking of the train, i.e. the capitalist productive forces. This is another instance of accelerationism, which either tries to actively increase the speed of capital, or simply because the passenger on the train, allowing the constant destruction of living labor at the hands of dead labor to do the work.
The conclusion is that the emergency brake is not merely calling to a halt for the sake of it, some static stopping at a particular point in capitalist history (say Swedish Social Democracy--which the American Republican Right now takes as the true horror of 'socialism'). Neither is it a return back to some utopian pre-capitalist moment, which would fall foul of Marx and Engels's anathemas against 'feudal socialism'. Rather, Benjamin argues that: 'Classless society is not the final goal of historical progress but its frequently miscarried, ultimately [endlich] achieved interruption.' We interrupt to prevent catastrophe, we destroy the tracks to prevent the greater destruction of acceleration.
A working solution, to be deliberately ironic, is to struggle for decommodification of our lives. Campaigns against privatization and for the return of privatized services to public control try to reduce our dependence on work by attacking the way work is supposed to account for all of our self-reproduction. These struggles are in parallel for struggles to defend public services, protect benefits, and sustain social and collective forms of support. While they may be unglamorous, especially compared to space travel, these struggles can negate the conditions of the impossibility of work by trying to detach 'work' from its ideological and material role as the validation of citizenship and existence. In relation to the Nietzschean rebels of absolute communism or absolute acceleration these struggles can be dismissed as reactive, but they react precisely to the contradiction in which we are currently bound.
“They have the chair,” Eddie said, “and she needs it.”
He hadn’t intended to ask his friend for the money, but now he felt a sudden rise of hope that Dunellen might offer it. He had it, God knew. Might easily have the sum on him now, in his mammoth roll—warmed, like the rosaries, by his fierce body heat.
“Nat could help you with that,” Dunellen said thoughtfully, after a long pause. “I’d have a word, buy you as much time as you need. Take it right off your pay if that would help any.”
It took Eddie a moment, in his half-stupor, to absorb Dunellen’s meaning. He was sending Eddie to the loan shark. And judging by the soft look in his eyes, Dunellen regarded the steer as an act of charity.
Eddie took great care not to react. “I’ll think about it,” he said mildly. If he remained at Sonny’s another minute, Dunellen would read his displeasure and punish him for it. “ ’Night, Dunny,” he said, sliding the Duesenberg’s key across the table. “Thanks.”
ough
When the lunch whistle blew at eleven-thirty, she was itching to get outside. In order to justify leaving the building, she didn’t bring a lunch—a ploy she knew did not fool Mr. Voss. But he couldn’t very well deny a girl food, so he watched grimly as she made for the door while the marrieds unwrapped sandwiches from waxed paper and talked about husbands in boot camp or overseas; who’d had a letter; clues or hunches or dreams as to where their beloveds might be; how desperately frightened they were. More than one girl had wept, describing her terror that a husband or fiancé would not return. Anna couldn’t listen. The talk stirred in her an uncomfortable anger at these girls, who seemed so weak. Thankfully, Mr. Voss had put an end to that topic during working hours, prompting an unlikely trill of gratitude in Anna. Now they sang songs from their colleges while they worked: Hunter, St. Joseph’s, Brooklyn College, whose song Anna finally learned—not having bothered to in the year she was a student there.
lol understandable
Your supervisor doesn’t mind you going out?”
“He likes me,” Nell said, an explanation Anna guessed she must employ—perhaps correctly—to account for much of what happened to her.
“Ours likes us to stay in,” Anna said, aware that she was playacting a little, invoking a version of Mr. Voss that was slightly outdated. Hanger-on seemed to be the part she was auditioning for, perhaps the only one available.
“Try lipstick,” Nell said. “Works wonders.”
“He isn’t that type.”
Nell’s face was all sunny curves; she looked perpetually on the verge of laughter. Yet her blue gaze was rife with calculation. “There’s no other,” she said.
lol
Anna ate her spaghetti and meatballs with her eyes fixed on the water. She was waiting for the diver to surface, but he did not. He was breathing underwater. She tried to picture him at the bottom of the bay—would he walk or swim? What was down there? Jealousy and longing spasmed through her. “Would they ever let us do that?” she murmured.
“Would you want to?”
“Wouldn’t you?”
Nell gave a disbelieving laugh. “They’d never let us. But they might just make us. If the men keep leaving in droves.”
honestly yeah good analysis
Angels are the best liars, that’s what I think,” Nell said morosely. After a moment she asked, “Are you an angel, Anna?”
Anna was aware of the rattle of fall leaves over the pavement, the gardenia smell of Nell’s perfume. No one had ever asked her that question before. Everyone simply presumed that she was.
“No,” she said. “I’m not an angel.” Her eyes met Nell’s, and they understood each other.
cute friendship moment