I didn’t do a very good job of making time for myself this week, and as a consequence I ended up spending a lot of Saturday morning (when I usually do the bulk of the writing for these newsletters) lying in bed listening to twee British pop music. So, no original writing this week, just links to stuff I’ve been reading, writing, listening to, and watching.
About a week and a half ago, Bernie introduced legislation to shorten the workweek to 32 hours, with no loss in pay. The first speaker to testify at the Senate hearing he held on the bill was UAW President Shawn Fain. Jacobin magazine reprinted Fain’s comments in full, which I think are a quite moving commentary on the importance of free time for human flourishing, the injustice of how so many working people have to spend far too much time at work making far too little money, and the way overwork is fueling the mental health crisis and the rise in deaths of despair.
This article in The Guardian, about the difference between solitude and loneliness (and how misunderstood the former is), really spoke to my experience:
“We tend to conflate the word ‘solitude’ with loneliness,” says [Thuy-vy T] Nguyen, an associate professor of psychology at Durham University and principal investigator of its Solitude Lab.
Loneliness pertains to the distress felt at one’s social needs not being met and solitude is a state of simply being by oneself.
“You can be with other people and feel lonely,” says Nguyen.
This poem from
’s Substack pierced my heart, in a good way.Last Friday marked the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Coalition of Labor Union Women. I wrote a piece about it for the UE NEWS.
That twee British pop music I was listening to yesterday? Flyte.
When we visited Rome thirty-odd years ago, my father and I discovered that the Vatican owns a small but fascinating collection of modern and contemporary Italian art. Italy is, well, not known for its post-Renaissance art. Quite possibly, if I was Italian, or more knowledgable about art, I would have found the artworks to be interesting local variations of the French and American styles that dominated the art world in the 19th and 20th century (Impressionism, Cubism, Abstract Expressionism, etc.). But instead they just struck me as a set of charming but not-quite-successful efforts to imitate, well, the really good stuff.
Flyte’s music is a little like that, though I know more about music than art, so I can tell more easily where this melody or lyric, that chord change or arrangement, doesn’t quite live up to its promise. The song “Even on Bad Days,” for example: you might expect a song with that title to use the (obvious) lyric formula, “even on bad days, [something good happens].” But many of the lines in this song tell us that even on bad days, unpleasant or even bad things are going to happen (“the phones are going to ring,” “I’ll kick you in the shins”). Okay! Interesting way to subvert the obvious!
But ... they just don’t really do anything with it. It’s just a mish-mash of good and bad and indifferent. Which is fine, I mean, that’s how life is, but the song doesn’t really give us any insight into that condition, let alone convey any kind of coherent emotion or tell any kind of compelling story.
Still, I enjoyed taking an hour and a half to just listen to music, as opposed to having it on in the background while I do something else. They have a lovely Beatlesesque (if not quite Beatles-quality) way with melody and do turn a nice phrase. They’re playing in Pittsburgh in June — if anyone local is interested in going, hit me up.
Karl Wallinger, the singer, songwriter, and principal instrumentalist of the band World Party, died two weeks ago, but I only learned about his death this week as I was catching up on my Guardian “Sleevenotes” email newsletters. I pulled up the video for “Put the Message in the Box,” which came out when I had just turned 17 and was about to graduate from high school, on YouTube Friday night, and it reminded me of all the sunshine and hope of that spring.