Domestic Left #31: Back to basics
When I started this newsletter, I envisioned it largely as a report on what I was reading, and notifications about writing I had published elsewhere. Certainly not as a vehicle for rambling 4,000-word essays on art exhibits, close musical readings of pop songs, or transcriptions of dreams.
So ... no original writing in this issue, just reports on some things I have been reading, and links to a couple of places where you can read my writing or listen to me pontificating about labor-related stuff.
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In December and January, when everyone was posting on social media about what they read in 2022, one of my Facebook friends wrote, “I came away from the last year really appreciating how fiction supports the development of emotional intelligence and perspectival thinking.”
It reminded me of maybe four years ago, when I was reading Jennifer Egan’s novel A Visit from the Goon Squad, and I noticed how reading it made me feel anxious. Like, I felt it in my body, my heart rate increased, I would get up from reading and pace around the room to calm down.
I don’t know whether it was something specific to that novel, or the fact that I just hadn’t read very many novels in the previous quarter-century and my mind and body were resisting the book’s attempt to develop my emotional intelligence and perspectival thinking, or something else. But I did not abandon the book, as I have many others (especially novels that were difficult, or just not immediately engaging, or, well, made me feel anxious). I would read a measured amount of the book, notice but try not to give in to my anxiety, and then put it down but commit to picking it up later. And by the time I finished it, I felt good, it felt like an accomplishment, like a successful form of exposure therapy. I felt a little more ready to take on the world.
Anyway, I made a bit of a new year’s resolution to not only read more this year, but specifically to read more novels.
Earlier this week I finished Bachtyar Ali’s The Last Pomegranate Tree, which is hands-down the best book I have read in a good long while. (Not gonna lie, I read it because John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats told me to.) It is heartbreaking and thought-provoking and superbly well-crafted.
Darnielle describes it as “magical realism,” but I don’t think that quite fits, although it certainly reminded me of Gabriel García Márquez’s writing at times. The book begins almost like a fable, but as it progresses, moving back and forth in time, it draws in more and more concrete details and history. And the real history of the Kurdish “revolution” and civil war, which sets the novel’s context, is as heartbreaking as the imagined histories of the novel’s characters.
It is a novel full of suffering I can barely even imagine: being imprisoned for over two decades and trying to find a son you last saw as an infant, just prior to that imprisonment; intense poverty and brutality; children scarred by war in all kinds of ways. Yet it maintains hope and transcendence and joy, earning them honestly, with neither willful blindness nor cheap sentimentality.
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After finishing The Last Pomegranate Tree, I immediately picked up Vigdis Hjorth’s Long Live the Post Horn!, which, to put it mildly, was far more relatable. One might even say it hit a little too close to home. The novel’s protagonist and narrator is an existentially-troubled public-relations consultant who gets drawn into a trade-union campaign; I am a communications director for a trade union who is no stranger to existential troubles.
The novel’s themes of finding meaning through shared struggle, embracing imperfection, and the power of words physically written on paper are handled deftly and, for the most part, with a light and humorous touch. I particularly appreciated the scene where the narrator decides to try “being vulnerable” to see if it produces a stronger or deeper connection with other people, and it completely flops.
As an aside, it also contains one of the best descriptions of insomnia I have read:
I went home to bed and wanted to dream, but never sank into the stage where dreams are shaped, and tomorrow’s to-do list played on a loop behind my eyes. I could already feel the exhaustion I would feel in the morning...
However, the novel slips a little too frequently into explicit philosophizing. Which I suppose is true to its character (what college-educated person in their mid-30s, facing existential crises, doesn’t think in that language?), but I would have appreciated, instead, more development (or at least sketched details) of some of the other characters — the narrator’s two business partners, her sister and mother, her boyfriend. Still, overall, a solid novel, a brisk read, and one that made me tear up — in a good and earned way — at the end.
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I’ve also read a few non-fiction books so far this year, most notably Barbara Ehrenreich’s Natural Causes, for which I wrote a fairly extensive review on Goodreads.
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I had an article published in Labor Notes for Pride last month about a woman who was a leader in the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural and Allied Workers union in Winston-Salem, North Carolina in the 1940s. The article is not really about her union career, or the strike which pulled her into union activism (though the accompanying comic touches on both of these), but on the difficulties of recovering LGBTQ+ labor and working-class history, a topic I kind of stumbled into writing about a couple of years ago.
Also, stretching back a bit further (but I don’t think I’ve mentioned it yet in this newsletter), at the beginning of the year my UE NEWS Feature about the painter Ralph Fasanella landed me an interview on the “Your Rights at Work” radio show and podcast, produced by the Metro DC central labor council. If you’re interested in listening to me pontificate about that subject, the episode is available here.