by
Joshua Cohen
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November the policy changed. The new deal was no meetings. Kor had sent the email, which Cullqui fwd:d approvingly, and Quicull fwd:d disapprovingly, but we had also received the missive directly from Kor. We responded to such redundancies with an email reminding them of their founder status, which, if it had no other perk, at least signed a blank check re: scheduling. Cullqui replied all complaining about our tone, cc:ing Kor, bcc:ing Moe. Quicull replied all complaining back, cc:ing Moe, bcc:ing the Soviets.
We neglected to mention that we had taken to regarding them not as like friends anymore but a conformant unit, which we called Cullqui if they sided with Kor, and Quicull if they sided with us. We called them that mentally, then increasingly aloud.
The meeting would be a Culloquium, a Quiocullum, calendared for Founders Only, and for everyone else not a founder to worry about [...]
the last line kills me
[...] I tried to contact the New York Times, CNN, Time. But my calls were not returned to the only payphone left in Alameda County. [...]
[...] In America, even the smallest portions were too big for him, except with “frozey yozey.” His favorite places were always selfserve and charged flatrates for small and large cupsizes, regardless of the amount of yogurt and toppings. Moe would stagger in vast crockery to fill, and the staff was unequipped to charge in excess of the maximum. It was not as like anything was returnable, melting probiotics crammed back into dispenser, the carob chunks replaced. It was because of this that all the places switched to retailing by weight. [...]
vast crockery is fantastic
Some tech obsolesces, some has been engineered to obsolesce, all is basically nonrecyclable. Moe was manic about that recursion, the tech afterlife, the device eschatology. When products die, they are exported back to where they were made, to the nativity of the East, to India. This being the true cosmic cycle, the pdas and comps and printers illegal to dump in the West instead leaching their mercury, lead, cadmium, beryllium, barium, into the foreign groundwaters, and rewarding the same populations that manufactured them with silicosis and neurotoxicity, just enough to numb against irony. Meantime corporate atrocities are offset by quarterly donations. 10% of gross to related causes.
Knock knock? Who’s there? Aaron. Aaron who? Why Aaron you replying to email? Though the other punchline is Aaron the side of caution. Dear, dear—this is your personal assistant again. Your Lisabeth. Telling you that your mother’s been ringing nonstop. She’s worried. You haven’t been answering her emails, and she’s been telling Lisabeth that the only reason she got involved with paying Verizon $54/month, and she can’t understand why her first month’s bill should be $88, incidentally, was to be in touch with her son! and then Lisabeth went through explaining her plan, the Quantum, 15/5 Mbps, 10 MB of hosting! I told her you were off on an investigative project, something about unfair wage labor practices in telecom manufacturing because that’s what was in the NY Review under my latte (rhetorical latte), which was how I found out you’d told her you were doing something about scandals between donors and museums relating to deaccession policies and I apologized and agreed, you were overcommitted and overdue on both without an alibi, and she wondered how I held my soap, which was faintly erotic, and already today the answer’s on my desk (your mother made me a soapdish).
i really like the aaron emails
The politics of Wages for Housework was shaped by women who had an understanding of capitalism, imperialism, and the anti-colonial struggle. Thus we could not accept that women’s liberation could be a struggle for “equality with men” or that it could be limited to equal pay for equal work. We saw that in the same way as the racialization of black men and women had served to justify slavery, so had gender-based discrimination served to exploit women as unpaid workers in the home. This is why we supported the struggle of welfare mothers, which was led by black women—not because black women were the majority of women on welfare, which was not the case, but because black women were the most ready to struggle for their rights. They were the ones who were out in the streets saying: Welfare is not charity. Every woman is a working woman. They were saying, like us, that raising a child is socially necessary work. They were saying, Don’t tell us that we are parasites. Don’t tell us that we are dependent on the state. When the state needs soldiers, it turns to our children. When it needs people for its factories, it turns to our children.
so good!!
Our analysis of violence against women hinged on seeing housework as a form of capitalist production, and analyzing the role of the wage in constructing the whole family’s organization. We argued that violence is always latent in the family because, through the wage, the state delegates to the husband the power to supervise and control the work of the wife, and the power to penalize her in case she does not perform. I would describe it as a sort of indirect rule: the state mediates the control over women through the man and his wage. [...]
cool way of thinking about it
Wages for Housework was misunderstood as saying, Give us money so we can stay home, doing the same domestic work. We actually saw wages for housework as a strategy of refusal, as a strategy giving us more options, more power to decide how to organize our lives. We were accused of “institutionalizing women in the home.” But many women we met would tell us that they were already institutionalized in the home because, without any money of their own, they could not go anywhere or they could not leave their husbands even if they wanted to.
Wages for Housework was not the end goal for us, as some critics supposed—which is not to say that it was not a powerful goal in itself. We believed that the struggle for Wages for Housework would be the quickest way to force the state to give us free daycare and other key support services. [...]
clearing up common misconceptions about the project
Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. The relation is roughly that of courage to war.
The human beauty we're talking about here is beauty of a particular type; it might be called kinetic beauty. Its power and appeal are universal. It has nothing to do with sex or cultural norms. What it seems to have to do with, really, is human beings' reconciliation with the fact of having a body.
in a footnote, on why we need to reconcile this: "It's your body that dies, after all."
See also note 29
[...] There's a peculiar mix of stodgy self-satisfaction and relentless self-promotion and -branding. It's a bit like the sort of authority figure whose office wall has ever last plaque, diploma, and award he's ever gotten, and every time you come into the office you're forced to look at the wall and say something to indicate that you're impressed. [...]