I’m curious if Walter White of Breaking Bad or Hank Devereaux of Lucky Hank might qualify here, even though they have some power. Variation on the police officer or the customs agent?
Thank you Carol! I've only read Agamben very cursorily. I'm kind of provoking myself to read more. As far as I can tell, he's really and truly brilliant. Carl Schmitt is a kind of very dark entity in political philosophy, and Agamben is an important corrective to him.
This summarizes a terrible feeling about work I’ve been fighting since Covid. It’s introduced a lot of anxiety around my work life, which seems like some sort of “mock life” if you will. It’s a sought after job. I like the people I work with. But the office environment and expectation make it more like bare existence than not...
Thank you Shaina! I've gone through some different phases of this. Right now, I'm really enjoying my remote work job - it's very humanizing and there are all kinds of quality-of-life benefits with it. But I went through a couple of other post-pandemic jobs that were the exact opposite of that, and which just felt like an endless grind interrupted every so often by other faces on a screen. I've had so many different changes of heart on this over the last three years that I'm not exactly sure where I land, but 'bare existence' has been closer to the forefront of my consciousness, which is a troubling sign!
Dig that customs officer. For your next customs let's find a sad eyed portrait of a mailman and label it Msrs Melville. Third of the way through Glass Bead Hame for t first time thankyou youtube. Dig that the note i posted about Castalia is the highway to something or other sounds like that garden city in Hesse. Didn't know, but you are publishing your intents and purposes.
Cool! It's such a beautiful book. I sort of didn't know that it was possible to write that slowly and thoughtfully and for it still to be so engaging. Let me know what you think when you finish it! There is something very dead and at the same haunt haunting in the expression of that customs officer lol.
Be aware that all of us were gobsmacked by Pool Boy. A happy ending does not have to be a trick. Bit in there you can see that in another Recession it will take your kind of use of tools to pull off what we like to hear. The same is the ending of Friend of the Earth by T C Boyle. Both of you are utterly believable. Your commenters ran into the anxieties of jealousy on that. I could have gotten them started but the praise will appear soon enough.
At the one third mark of Castalia or the Glass Bead Game I stopped to savor a human moment. "Knecht began to feel his freedom evaporate" He was on edge because being touched for spying meant he was tied to duties before his own priors. Savored that, and in 24 pages r at the one third mark Hesse just buries him in the intrigue. As a thought experiment it is like you said. Hesse is imitating other Utopias. All the way back to H More and Bellamy. In other words it would take a deadly clearing of the face of the globe for say a Benedictine world to be established.
When I hear about jobs like these, I get that country song I Never Picked Cotton stuck in my head. And even though, having never worked in a job like that, I've gotten flack for "not understanding what it's like," it didn't change my mind. This idea sheds a lot of light on that gut reaction.
In any case, it's something writers have to watch out for. And an interesting conundrum: if a writer begins to orbit a center of power in a state of bare existence, how long until that writer becomes a propagandist? Despite their reputation for outspokenness, writers are a lot more vulnerable to this than they may want to believe.
Thanks Felix! Yeah, I've totally avoided some very important experiences - never waited tables, never worked a truly menial job. Probably my writing and my thinking are the worse for not having done that. But I always had this feeling that if you go down that path you never really come back from it.
This gets into some very tricky stuff. There are jobs all around us that are so dehumanizing that they must change a person's psyche in truly profound ways - and make genuine exchange with anybody not in that same sort of dehumanizing job almost impossible. There's a lot of good art (Fight Club, White Tiger, etc) that gets at this sort of idea.
I’m curious if Walter White of Breaking Bad or Hank Devereaux of Lucky Hank might qualify here, even though they have some power. Variation on the police officer or the customs agent?
Ach! I haven't seen Lucky Hank or enough of Breaking Bad! What do you think?
Thank you for the introduction to the work of Giorgio Agamben. Very thought-provoking.
Thank you Carol! I've only read Agamben very cursorily. I'm kind of provoking myself to read more. As far as I can tell, he's really and truly brilliant. Carl Schmitt is a kind of very dark entity in political philosophy, and Agamben is an important corrective to him.
This summarizes a terrible feeling about work I’ve been fighting since Covid. It’s introduced a lot of anxiety around my work life, which seems like some sort of “mock life” if you will. It’s a sought after job. I like the people I work with. But the office environment and expectation make it more like bare existence than not...
Thank you Shaina! I've gone through some different phases of this. Right now, I'm really enjoying my remote work job - it's very humanizing and there are all kinds of quality-of-life benefits with it. But I went through a couple of other post-pandemic jobs that were the exact opposite of that, and which just felt like an endless grind interrupted every so often by other faces on a screen. I've had so many different changes of heart on this over the last three years that I'm not exactly sure where I land, but 'bare existence' has been closer to the forefront of my consciousness, which is a troubling sign!
- Sam
Dig that customs officer. For your next customs let's find a sad eyed portrait of a mailman and label it Msrs Melville. Third of the way through Glass Bead Hame for t first time thankyou youtube. Dig that the note i posted about Castalia is the highway to something or other sounds like that garden city in Hesse. Didn't know, but you are publishing your intents and purposes.
Cool! It's such a beautiful book. I sort of didn't know that it was possible to write that slowly and thoughtfully and for it still to be so engaging. Let me know what you think when you finish it! There is something very dead and at the same haunt haunting in the expression of that customs officer lol.
- Sam
Be aware that all of us were gobsmacked by Pool Boy. A happy ending does not have to be a trick. Bit in there you can see that in another Recession it will take your kind of use of tools to pull off what we like to hear. The same is the ending of Friend of the Earth by T C Boyle. Both of you are utterly believable. Your commenters ran into the anxieties of jealousy on that. I could have gotten them started but the praise will appear soon enough.
At the one third mark of Castalia or the Glass Bead Game I stopped to savor a human moment. "Knecht began to feel his freedom evaporate" He was on edge because being touched for spying meant he was tied to duties before his own priors. Savored that, and in 24 pages r at the one third mark Hesse just buries him in the intrigue. As a thought experiment it is like you said. Hesse is imitating other Utopias. All the way back to H More and Bellamy. In other words it would take a deadly clearing of the face of the globe for say a Benedictine world to be established.
When I hear about jobs like these, I get that country song I Never Picked Cotton stuck in my head. And even though, having never worked in a job like that, I've gotten flack for "not understanding what it's like," it didn't change my mind. This idea sheds a lot of light on that gut reaction.
In any case, it's something writers have to watch out for. And an interesting conundrum: if a writer begins to orbit a center of power in a state of bare existence, how long until that writer becomes a propagandist? Despite their reputation for outspokenness, writers are a lot more vulnerable to this than they may want to believe.
A lot to digest in this article, for sure!
Thanks Felix! Yeah, I've totally avoided some very important experiences - never waited tables, never worked a truly menial job. Probably my writing and my thinking are the worse for not having done that. But I always had this feeling that if you go down that path you never really come back from it.
This gets into some very tricky stuff. There are jobs all around us that are so dehumanizing that they must change a person's psyche in truly profound ways - and make genuine exchange with anybody not in that same sort of dehumanizing job almost impossible. There's a lot of good art (Fight Club, White Tiger, etc) that gets at this sort of idea.
Best,
Sam