Grindstone

Deliver Us From Evil: Legal Opiates in Post-prohibition America

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“Is this just getting older?” The crying jags had become more frequent. Color drained from my life and usual distractions. Color drained from my face and skin. The days were interchangeable, tense, and brief. Hurry hurry til you crawl back home half-dead. But there was no cocoon of safety or “me”-ness to return to anymore. I watched the minutes domino mindlessly with no sensation more concrete than dread.

It wasn’t the getting older. And it wasn’t any of the problems (probably projections) I had with my loved ones. A light inside me had turned off. Motions were gone through but nobody was home. Maybe my struggle was part of something bigger, but mostly in a “class-action” lawsuit kinda way. I don’t think it was just the delusions and deficiencies coming home to roost in middle age. Or, it was probably all of that stuff too. But it was also the kratom.

I picked up a bag after reading it mentioned half-positively online.

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A Fantastic Boxing Novel

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Let it be known that W.C. “Bill” Heinz’s “The Professional” is the best boxing novel ever written. He was the Balzac of boxing, a master of unadorned prose.

Let it also be known that Lucia Rijker, “The Dutch Destroyer,” was the best female boxer I ever saw, a stone cold Buddhist killer. I saw her once on the street in New York and she was a beautiful dark angel.[1] 

And let is also be known, finally, that Rita Bullwinkel is a young writer and I am an old reviewer.

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Battle Cry of Freedom

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Here’s a comprehensive take on Mercedes from Jane McAlevey–someone with way more organizing chops than I’ll ever have.

For my part, I woke up on May 17 thinking, “Brace yourself, they’re probably going to lose.” In my experience, the “Baby, just give me one more chance…” angle is highly effective. Mercedes implemented substantial improvements in the wage structure while still retaining a somewhat reduced version of the “Alabama discount”.  Then they fired the plant manager and the new guy asked for some time to set things right.  They intimated that, if people were still discontented, they could come back in a year and vote the union in.  Of course, Mercedes will spend the next year systematically undermining union support, harassing union leaders, etc. (though they may be somewhat constrained by German and U.S. labor investigations).

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Mayday 2024

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Sure, Trump could get elected or installed, and further shrink the NLRB, and impose a national right-to-work law. The Supreme Court majority could invent an interpretation of the Constitution that eliminates Social Security and Medicare, maybe even labor unions. Congress could find more ways to top load our already finance-heavy economic pyramid and push more people from the bottom out onto the streets.

But this May Day, I’m feeling this is not the time to feel discouraged. The labor movement is on the move.

It’s not just the UAW big win at The Big Three, or the follow-up victory at VW in Chattanooga, or now the contract victory at Daimler Truck. It’s the fact that all this is part of a plan to organize the auto plants across the south, along with the Amazon warehouses, schools, auto parts plants, and whatever other dominos begin to fall.

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Frau Gertrude Kugelmann and the Five Gates of Marxism

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Open one of the gates to Marxism — “The Working Day” chapter in the first volume of Capital — and you’ll find paragraphs with equations (“As the working-day is A—–B + B—–C or A—–C, it varies with the variable quantity B—–C…”) Stones in your pass-way? Yup. Yet once you’re through the gate, you’ll see a path that leads to a life in struggle. You can’t help but wonder if you’ll be worthy. Not that you’ll feel a need to be (what Karl said he wasn’t) a Marxist, but you’ll always wish to come down on the commoners’ side of class conflicts. And the older you get, the more you’ll suspect the only regard that matters comes from militants with the brains to turn tears into controlled rage as Marx does throughout his “Day”…

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Good News from Chattanooga: Paul Baicich & Tom Smucker on Operation Dixie (21. C.)

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The UAW victory at Volkswagen in Chattanooga, Tennessee, is not simply impressive; it is HUGE. With 3,613 ballots counted, some 73% of the workers voted in favor of union representation. (The final total was 2,628 votes in favor of joining the UAW, and 985 votes against.)

Clearly, the union gained the confidence of the VW workers after impressive UAW strikes and contract victories last year at “The Big Three.” This election in Tennessee has been closely watched because the union has struggled for years to organize foreign-owned auto operations in the South.

Will Mercedes-Benz in Alabama be next? Could be: Those workers vote next month.  — Paul Baicich

…

It’s even better than you think.

I just got back from the biennial (except-for-covid) Labor Notes conference in Chicago. Years ago a gathering of labor dissidents and left-wing dreamers, over the last decade it’s become a site to celebrate some actual union victories: West Virginia and Chicago teachers, my own Local’s 2016 NYC Verizon strike. Two years past, as a sign of changing times, along with Bernie Sanders, two newly elected union presidents—Teamster’s Sean O’Brien and UAW’s Shawn Fain—addressed the Labor Notes convention in person.

As this year proved, that change was not a desperate gamble, but a promise. On Friday morning, UAW members were confidently predicting the big win in Chattanooga that materialized that night at 8 pm, and the conference was abuzz with talk of future victories at auto plants across the south.

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Emotionally Yours

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Jordan Poole got his comeuppance all over again this year — as he slumped for months and became the butt of a thousand jokes and memes — but he came through (as his bosses affirmed in their exit interviews)…

 [Poole talk ends at 30:00.[

I’m glad to find out Winger felt JP’s comeback, though I’m ambivalent about nice white managers of black genius. (Hi, Bob Myers.) It was on Poole to find his game once the Wizards’ other less talented point guard, Tyus Jones, went down with an injury, enabling JP to play his natural position. Haters aren’t done with Poole. He brings out the mean in recessives shamed by his fluency — “I’m an expressive person” — and physical gifts that enable him to show out like so…

And so…

JP heated up pretty often in games after the All Star break in late February, but what really counted were moments that led to a (rare) Wizards winning streak — an end of game strip of Giannis and this beautiful assist to Cory Kispert…

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Poetry is Everyday Life

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This is a chapter from Blyth’s first book, Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics.[1] 

…
From Aristotle down to Arnold it was considered that a great subject was necessary to the poet. Arnold says that the plot is everything. It is useless for the poet to

imagine that he has everything in his own power; that he can make an intrinsically inferior action equally delightful with a more excellent one by his treatment of it.

Wordsworth stands outside this tradition by instinct and by choice. He chooses the aged, the poor, the idiot, the vagrant, but does not endeavour to make them “delightful” at all.

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Quarantine Me: I’m Old

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The road to Lisburn serpentines through rolling Pennsylvanian farm land.  At its near start, it anchors a capital bedroom community etched out of GI Bill housing built after the war, what a war.  At its far end, there isn’t much but a firehouse serving charity bbq chicken in the summer and a rope swing stretching out over the Yellow Breeches, also best in summer.  Green grasses bathed in the smell of clipped chlorophyll, young corn just breaking to sunlight, dips that drive you into the earth and then just as quickly rise up to give you the illusion of flight: to travel Lisburn Road is to experience freedom, the soul-freeing kind of freedom, where you scream in your head that it’s great to be alive. And you’re right.

Or, at least it used to be that way.

The famous line is that you can’t go home again.  That’s a lie, of course.  You can always get there if you have Waze or Google Maps.  If you look on one of those aps, Lisburn in all its glorious summer glow still lives.  It’s just that Lisburn Road is gone:  someone killed it with a rotary in the road’s rhythm.

Actually, two rotaries, one right after the other.

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Michael Buffer, Jimmy Lennon, Jr. – and Me!

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Before there was an airport in Philadelphia, planes used to land in Central Airport across the Delaware River in Camden, New Jersey. Weber’s Hof Brau restaurant was at the airport. They had outdoor fights there, too.

My father loved to tell about how he was at the fights at the airport one night and every time this one dude got hit with a good shot, his cup would fly out and the ref would call a halt while his corner men retrieved the reluctant cup and gathered around their warrior to reinstall it.

My one experience as a ring announcer took place at outdoor fights, too, and there was an “incident,” shall we say, at that show, too.

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Preface to the Korean Edition of “The Magna Carta Manifesto”

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This chapter from Peter Linebaugh’s Stop Thief: The Commons, Enclosures and Resistance opens with aristos’ charming spin on the human right to rest. But Linebaugh isn’t one to go on in defense of laziness. Near the end of this short piece, he invokes bookish Reds who once insisted a “Communist is a mere bluffer, if he has not worked over in his conscious­ness the whole inheritance of human knowledge.”[1] Linebaugh has surely put in work on that score. The fact that his essay is a preface to the Korean edition of one of his earlier books stands as a tribute to his worldliness. Linebaugh goes wide in this chapter (as ever) though he begins in bed…

Of the aristocratic and stylish Mitford sisters, Jessica provides us with the Lazy Interpretation of Magna Carta beloved by sluggards everywhere. As a lovely communist (two of her sisters were fascists) she was disowned by her family and fell from the social peaks of English aristocracy to the Dickensian depths of the Rotherhithe docks in London in 1939. Unable to pay the rent she and her husband lived in fear of the process-server who they avoided by going in disguises which the process server soon came to recognize. “Esmond had a theory that it was illegal and in some way a violation of Magna Carta to serve process on people in bed.”[1] So they stayed in bed all day and then all night, and again all the next day, and all the next night under the covers, before deciding to immigrate to America. (Tom Paine, too, thought that independ­ent America was a realization of Magna Carta).

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Fly Me To You

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…The depressed whore wakes up for her flight before dawn. Nothing ever good comes from waking up this early, she thinks: funerals, surgeries, insomnia, and work. She slept in her makeup because fuck putting it on so early. Still, it’s important to look hot at the airport: a space of surveillance, commerce, vague intrigue. You never know who’s watching you, always traveling under an assumed, or fragmentary, or nightmarish identity. In the Lyft she subtracts the cost of the ride from what she’ll be earning, also the friend looking after her cat, the work she could have gotten staying at home, the unquantifiable toll on her physical and mental health, and yet to remain still is never an option, not anymore, in this world in which stillness equals paralysis, inanition.
…She’s going to a mid-sized, charmless city in the Deep South. She’s looked up things to do in the time she’ll have off, which really isn’t much, just a long afternoon before her return flight, but she knows she won’t step foot outside the hotel for her almost two-day stay, she’ll be swallowed up by that cold, bright glare (the glare that afflicts schizo-amnesiac killers in a David Lynch movie) that never leaves you even when you close your eyes at night. But it doesn’t matter. After a certain point every place, like every client, is the same.

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Some Principles of the Commons

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Linebaugh’s principles made your editor rethink my attachment to “public happiness” — a phrase of Hannah Arendt’s that I’ve leaned on to evoke the excitement of (small d) democratic politics with its imperfectly human meld of egotism and solidarity.  Linebaugh isn’t an Arendt man and he’s never been charmed by her hymns for the American Revolution. Aware our first Founding slipped slavery and the “Social Question” — all the challenges arising from mass poverty and de-skilled labor due to the Industrial Revolution — he’s unenthralled by America’s standard versions of democratic practice. Per Peter, public life/happiness in this country seems a straightened thing…  

We distinguish “the common” from “the public.” We understand the public in contrast to the private, and we understand common solidarity in contrast to individual egotism.

While it’s probably wrongheaded to yearn for demos with no ego, Linebaugh’s distinction is coming through to me this morning. In my inbox today, there’s an announcement of the latest seminar aimed at (what one pale academic muckety-muck terms) “intellectual publics.” Like Linebaugh, I prefer more common things…

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Last Hour of Every Angel

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I

…If you were a goddess, Xylea said, what goddess would you be? She paused to think for a second. If you were a goddess, you’d be the goddess of beauty and illusion…
…That haunted me, for some reason. The reason was that my life had, without my noticing, been drained of reality, or the pretense to reality. I was a celibate, anhedonic whore (let’s say a depressed whore). Sex itself meant nothing to me, having become mere performance, empty enchantment. I fell in love with ghosts, or people who soon became ghosts, whose names I no longer remembered shortly afterwards.

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The City and the Commons: A Story for Our Time

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The essay posted below is the one that brought Peter Linebaugh’s Stop, Thief! home to your editor (who morphed into a “New York City man” many years ago). Linebaugh’s case for “commonizing” the city seemed fresh and audacious, though he almost lost me when he invoked the panopticon. (Bentham? Again?) But Linebaugh wasn’t content to reheat Foucault’s leftovers.

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Liebe Macht Frei

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…I walked by the Sacramento River the day before my thirty-eighth birthday, along the train tracks to an old rusted truss bridge. It was the first time I’d been alone, I mean alone in physical space, in a long time. I’d spent the Christmas holidays with Harvey, who had an excruciating toothache and no health insurance, and with Amber, this trans girl Harvey had just started seeing. Harvey never complained about the toothache, though. They wandered around their bedroom trying on different outfits, showing off their possessions, infinite sentimental relics, displaying their favorite dick pics on their phone (especially the cum vids), making jokes and asking surreal philosophical questions, while Amber fawned over them, which annoyed Harvey, though they kind of liked it, too. Harvey wanted to be seen, to be loved for their capacity to be seen, for their mere appearing in this world, epiphanic ephemera, the brute autistic weirdness of their creature-existence, but they didn’t really like being complimented, compliments made them uneasy, always seemed silly if not outright suspicious, and they liked being romanticized even less, though they knew it was this resistance to romance in themselves that invited it from others.

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High/Low Paris at the Dawn of the 20th C. (“New Acquisitions” at the Met)

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Last season, at the Met, a curator with Dickensian sensitivity to class matters organized a set of eleven Paris prints and watercolors linked to the Manet/Degas show. These pieces—stuck in that odd, tight corridor between the museum’s grand entrance and the European painting wing—were part of New Acquisitions in Context: Selections from the Department of Drawings and Prints. (The title wsn’t the only yawner, who’d stop for New Acq‘s silverware prototypes or “Design for Transeptal Altars”?) The Paris scenes, though, were a trip. So much for peintres celébrès down the hall, Marie-Louise-Pierre Vidal’s watercolors floated viewers into luxe-life while Edgar Chahine’s prints dragged them down and out.

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Three Lessons From Mama

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Over the years, I shared various ways in which my parents intentionally worked to develop me into a constructive person. Often, because my mother was the primary disciplinarian, she has gotten the short end of the stick because most of my stories about her involve being the enforcer of the law. Yet, Claudette was the drill sergeant who was determined to prepare her child for a war in which I was armed to wrestle with the ghostly demons who desired to manifest their supremacy in flesh and blood.

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