On grit, intoxicating beauty, and Venmoing our way to solidarity
Plus a new publication and a chance to see me read
Hi dears, and welcome new subscribers! This is my third newsletter. Some personal news:
I’ll be reading poems at Writing at the End of a City, an off-site reading for the Association of Writers & Writing Programs conference here in Seattle. I can only promise that this event will be amazing; you should come:
And my conversation on precarity, dignity, labor, and illness with essayist, novelist, and poet Hilary Plum is up now in Essay Daily.
Finally, please consider a gift to support creative writing spaces for women surviving incarceration. My jail teaching program, the Golf Pencil Group, is returning to in-person classes at King County Correctional Facility, and we’re raising money for teacher stipends, student book requests (there’s no library at KCCF), and writing supplies. Your gift goes a long way.
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Below are seven things from the internet I loved this month: an interview with the tireless Dean Spade, a gorgeous song by Ella Fitzgerald, threads on coping and on theories of change, ALOK’s book reports, another lesson on revolution, and a swirl of thunderstorms a billion kilometers away.
Gender Reveal Season 10, ep 137: Tuck’s interview with Dean Spade. I was overjoyed by Tuck Woodstock’s interview with the inexhaustible Dean Spade, an organizer, writer, law professor, community educator, co-founder of the Sylvia Rivera Law Project and supporter of Seattle’s No New Youth Jail, among many many many other causes.
You probably encountered Spade’s urgent small very good book, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity through This Crisis (and the Next) sometime in 2020. Spade is unfailingly generous with his time: if you have a question about organizing, he’ll write you back; when I wrote asking years ago, he sent me a thoughtful and detailed note on how prison-arts orgs can develop co-leadership bodies with system-impacted or currently-incarcerated folks. Spade’s articulation of his political vision is a mix of excited welcome (“nice party, can I bring twenty people?”) and Manichean severity (“if you’re paying staff, you’re being paid by our opposition”). He and Tuck talk about mutual aid orgs, organizational security, burnout, why you shouldn’t get a law degree, and much more. Spade races through (seriously races—avail yourself of the interview transcript if you need) insights I’m still holding onto. For instance, that mutual aid work is mostly a base-building tool: there aren’t enough $15 Venmo gifts in the world to house everyone and empty the prisons, but organizing to care for your community is a good in and of itself. Or that diversity in organizing culture is its own value: when you get a donation, are you save-it-up or give-it-away-now? When establishing a security culture, are you trust-no-one or invite-everyone-in? If you’re one way and your comrades are another, how can your organization incorporate and balance both?
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Ella Fitzgerald singing “A Flower Is a Lovesome Thing.”
Billy Strayhorn—a shy, devoted, serious-minded pianist and arranger, trained in classical music and shut out of any opportunity to compose for orchestra outside of jazz—joined Duke Ellington’s band in 1939; he was just twenty-four and he hit like a rocket. Before his death from cancer at just fifty-two, Strayhorn arranged dozens of tunes; he also wrote “Take the A Train,” “Johnny Come Lately,” the sublime three-minute symphony “Chelsea Bridge,” and the heartachey “Day Dream.”
Strayhorn was a romantic, and gay in a world with almost zero space for overt expression of gay love; his tunes with lyrics, like “Lush Life” and (my all-time favorite, lip-sync-with-a-hairbrush classic) “Something to Live For,” have a yearning, intricacy, and gravity that sound like someone pouring their entire imagination, soul, libido, curiosity, and heartsickness into four minutes. But this month it was his tune “A Flower Is a Lovesome Thing” that I came back to: a narcotic bliss of a tune, death-haunted, beauty-haunted, as if the gaze alone were complete and mutual possession, as if the eye were a living fingertip-sensitive thing and we were slowly aging in a blooming field, fulfilled, fixed in place like Narcissus. Listening, I felt that I at some level long to become the thing I desire; Ella Fitzgerald is one of the warmest vocalists I know, but here she sounds spookily weary: hear how her breath catches before the blossoms and she murmurs “…such a mir-a-cle…” At the sight of beauty, Strayhorn was enchanted, Fitzgerald was enchanted, I’m enchanted.
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Revolutions Season 10. This season is historian Mike Duncan’s history—overlong, beautifully characterized, weedy, a little underfocused, intellectually omnivorous—of the Russian Revolution, covering Russian history since Peter the Great, the First International, Marx, Bakunin, Lenin and Trotsky and Kruspskaya and Stalin, the revolution of 1905, the rise of the Bolsheviks, the glorious women-led revolutionary explosion of February 1917, the wobbly liberal-led provisional government, the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917, and the Bolsheviks’ slow tightening into Stalinist awfulness. Duncan’s story speeds up and trails off after Lenin’s death in 1924, while making clear that everything that made Stalin’s rule possible—show trials, secret police, imperialist ambition, centralized control of the ostensibly worker- and peasant-led soviets, the totalitarian arrogance of Bolshevik social engineering, the freezeout of popular involvement in the Party, and its stifling of “factionalism” (dissent)—was in place by the time of the first of Lenin’s crippling strokes. Here, though, is the thing I (provisionally) learned about revolutionary struggle from this latest (and, sadly, last—Duncan’s now a full-time history writer) season of Revolutions:
Revolutionary vanguards don’t win by transforming a society. They win instead by seizing on, and energizing, a society’s existing social and economic relations, turning them into revolutionary weapons. So in Russia: after the Czar was overthrown in February 1917, Russia’s tiny class of urban liberal constitutional republicans was eager to plan for a “constituent assembly” to draft a European-style republican constitution. But the country’s proletarian workers, and especially its peasants (who were the vast majority of Russians), had zero sense of themselves as “citizens” of a Russian “nation,” bound by law to, and protected by, a state. There was no Russian tradition of representation through, and protection by, an elected legislative body; a constituent assembly was a baffling, alien concept. Factory workers’ sole experience of democracy had been the their soviets (direct-democratic cooperatives), initially organized in secret and at great cost, and the peasants’ only experience of political power above the level of their own (rigidly patriarchal) village communes was of corrupt abusive police and thieving land agents with an absolute monopoly on force.
Russia’s urban liberals believed that they could basically conjure a republican polity. They couldn’t. But, once the Bolsheviks seized power in October 1917, the absolutism and simplicity of the their three initial decrees (immediate armistice with Germany and Austro-Hungary, abolition of private land ownership, and worker control of factories) could revolutionize an existing peasant and proletarian polity. (And by the the time the Bolsheviks revealed that those latter two decrees didn’t mean what peasants and workers thought, they’d already rooted themselves into power.) The Bolsheviks brought workers to the streets with “all power to the soviets”; they broke their enemies in the countryside with a slogan that the peasants could instantly grasp: “loot the looters.” That is, seize back—from prosperous kulaks, from arrogant citified absentee landlords—what has been, for generations, seized from you. When in January 1918 the new Bolshevik government suspended the socialists’ and liberals’ planned “Constituent Assembly” after only one day, the vast majority of Russians shrugged. This conclusion isn’t to disagree with Mike Davis that “the moral self-recognition” that revolutionizes a proletarian people is imaginative, heroic, and spiritual; it’s just also important to remember that the demands that bring people to the streets are demands that speak to the pressures, injustices, tensions, and aspirations of their daily lives.
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ALOK’s book reports on Instagram. Curious about the awful and interrelated history of the formation of the West’s ideas on race, gender, and sexuality? Have it in you to swipe nine times? Once a month or so between runway snaps, selfies, poetry, and interview grabs, artist and activist Alok Vaid-Menon digests books like Prof. Thomas Laqueur’s Making Sex (bought this one on the strength of the book report alone), Dr. Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí’s The Invention of Women, or Dr. Londa Schiebinger’s Nature’s Body. Start here and read!
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Nikhil Pal Singh mourning the lack of a theory of change on the left.
I think about this thread every day. Singh—a history professor and the director of NYU’s Prison Education Program—is asking, “How, though? What is the praxis that leads to the future we imagine? How would we imagine and then draw the line from, say, mutual aid work to universal social housing or Medicaid covering trans health nationwide? From pipeline protests to a national decarbonized urban farm system? From carbon sequestration to the cancellation of all international debt?” And this question, in turn, made think about argument; I had my differences with (bonus eighth best thing!) Jon Baskin and Anastasia Berg’s “On Left Straussianism,” but the question of how, and how much, leftists should publicly debate each other feels urgent. In left organizing spaces, publications, and social media, intellectual life is staticky: you’ll see opportunistic posturing, opportunistic pile-ons, and a not-in-front-of-the-kids squeamishness all at once. Baskin and Berg are focused on argument itself—“Can we maintain public intellectual spaces where we trust audiences to be as capable of judging and evaluating arguments as we are?”—but I’m much more interested in praxes of organizing: How do we measure the success of a movement? How do we stay nimble? How do causes successfully resist elite capture? What is the right balance between undermining, and engaging, state power? How do we recognize and develop leadership? What do we learn from failures? Can we please argue with each other about these questions on Democracy Now, on The Dig, on How to Survive the End of the World, in a series of pamphlets from AK or Verso or Haymarket, anywhere but on Twitter?
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Speaking of Twitter, philosopher Liam Kofi Bright on grit and solidarity.
File this under let’s all be a little tougher and more ready to answer back please!
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Finally, let’s wrap up with a knot of polar storms on the south pole of Jupiter. Those cloud formations we see are frozen ammonia crystals coated with soot: this ammonia serves as anti-freeze, keeping atmospheric water liquid far below freezing temperatures, and enabling thunderstorms to build from these water droplets’ collision with flecks and billows of ice crystals rising from below.
Thanks for reading, friends! Tell me what you think, and tell me more things I should read, in the comments.
Those storrrrms! (And all the other great writing :p)
“let’s all be a little tougher and ready to answer back” yesssss tender and prepared. we can be both.