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[...] To old, dirty Europe, America has always seemed aglow with toothpaste, Gleem and deodorizers for every intimate inch. Showers seem to gush constantly. And Hollywood -- every image has been dry-cleaned. We know that America is pathologically, obsessively, fanatically obsessed with hygiene. This fear of contamination seems to be part of the psychic pulse of the nation. [...]
On a more mundane level, consumer capitalism badly needs the artistic imagination: someone has to create Mickey Mouse or Treasure Island, Fagin or Hannibal Lecter and all the other fictions represented in simulation. So it seems that art will continue, whether the artist is subsumed by the spectacle like Norman Mailer, or tries to resist it, as did Thomas Pynchon. All the writers covered in this book have had the immense task of trying to reanimate fiction in the wake of high postmodern experimentation. They have had to deal with a fragmented, absurd society, driven by commodity relations and loosely united at various points by sites of resistance such as feminist or gay politics. Faced with this sort of complexity it is an act of courage to write novels at all. The best writers are usually the most subversive: those most critical of the society in which they find themselves. Those writers who are prepared to learn from and evoke past novelists also seem to have extra strength: books provide refuge and comfort as well as inspiration in a wholly bewildering world.
The interruption of the closure, in this instance, by the frame: "LTV [Steel] was able to use its bankruptcy to reduce payments to productive workers." In the old days when the city bus used to pull up to the factory gate, the driver would call out "butcher shop" or "slaughterhouse". In negotiations with the steelworkers union, LTV extracted more takebacks than other, presumably healthier steel companies were able to." I can remember sitting around the lunch table and everybody at that table, there must have been seven or eight people, had a finger or something missing. "This gave LTV an advantage over its competitors." Believe it or not, people felt it was kind of like a badge of honor that they had a finger or something mising, and that would be a topic of conversations.** "Bankruptcy became, through a cultural process that understood bankruptcy as failure, a condition for success."
from $00 / line / steel / train
Forty years of hard work and what have I got to show for it? Nothing. [...] I can't even speak proper. Working-class kids writing their names on a wall that is bound to erase them. When you're a steelworker (laughs), you don't get to speak the same language that you would do if you meet people in a bank or business office. [...]
History, the arrow
pointing past
[inside this frame]--
interest at 2.9% for What
we can't afford in the first place
lost some of the formatting but the last line really hit me hard
Every day you put your life on the line when you went into that iron house. Every day you sucked up dirt and took a chance on breaking our legs or breaking your back. And anyone who's worked in there knows what I'm talking about.
"He said his father can't survive on an $8- or $9-an-hour job. He takes home about $900 every two weeks and Lisa works part-time at Festival Foods in Virginia ... He ruptured a disk after a huge pipe rolled back on him last year in the mine. He endures surges of back pain that can make normal movements excruciating. Doctors expect them to get worse and more frequent as he gets older."
fuck
Say it loud
I'm black and I'm proud
Say it loud
I'm black and I'm proud!
Except that halfway through the infectious funk, the crew-cuts realize what they're saying: Jesus christ, 'I'm proud to be black' fer chrissakes, like when you're in the porno store, you know, and you get lost or something and you find yourself in the men's part, you know? not the part for men the part about men, Jesus, and you get the hell outta there. And so they hum/mumble the suppressed parts
Say it loud
I'm mmm hum proud
Say it loud
Mum hum hum proud!
on Irish kids in Boston singing "black" songs
[...] In Gary's neighborhood, property values are actually falling.
In another sense, of course, the streets surrounding RJam's soundproof studio are the costliest real estate in Boston. At least two young men died as downpayments within a week of today's recording session. [...]
on RJam's studio in Boston
[...] 'Education,' Chief Justice Warren wrote in Brown
... is the very foundation of good citizenship. Today it is the principal instrument in awakening the child to cultural values, in preparing him for later professional training, and in helping him adjust to his environment. In these days, it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education. . . . To separate Negro children from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.