heaven knows we sure had some fun, boy

It is morning in Barcelona and I have put on Jonathan Richman’s “Roadrunner” because I rolled over in bed and opened my phone and the first thing I saw was the news that Joshua Clover is gone and I am absolutely heartbroken.

How and where to start? I have two copies of his book on that song because he sent enough gifts my way that he forgot he’d already done so and sent it twice. I was reading a book of his poems in October while not so quietly falling apart. My latest piece dropping in print yet again hangs something on his argument from Riot.Strike.Riot. He sent flowers just because. He gave me the best edit I’ve ever gotten (“I know you have a better adjective than that in you, Jaffe!”) and he was 100 percent right. Even when I thought he was wrong, arguing with him made me sharper, smarter, better, and most of all, braver.

I am here on a writers’ residency and I was just talking with one of the other residents last night about the kind of friend who always encourages you and believes in your work, the kind of person who by treating you as an equal helps you to believe it yourself. Those people are rare when you are a (no longer) young woman in the world of Politics and Thoughts and Writing, so many want to extract things from you and/or subtly put you down. The people who give you confidence even when challenging your premises, the people who argue not to shut you up but to make you louder and more confident, having passed through the crucible of their brains and care. I have few enough of those people in my life that I can ill afford the loss.

We (and by we I mean the nebulous thing that we sometimes call “the left” and other times “the movement” and mostly anyone who cares about actually transforming this fucked-up world) can ill afford the loss. Joshua Clover was more committed to “ruthless criticism of all that exists” than anyone else I know, and that was even true when he wrote about music (this piece, from the dearly departed Commune magazine, is brilliant, about genre and race and class and Lil Nas X doing country years before Beyonce did). He was committed to telling no lies and claiming no easy victories, to pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will (and to reminding me and everyone else that Gramsci stole that formulation and didn’t invent it).

Joshua Clover was a poet and a revolutionary. He was, despite the image that possibly springs from those two words, always relentlessly practical, committed always to understanding the mess of the conjunctures we inhabit. I don’t remember how we became friends, only that it probably involved Twitter and our mutual disdain for a type of condescending social democracy that masquerades as radical politics in some corners of the left. I read his book and I hung two books and a third proposal in some way on his argument around the “affirmation trap” because he was fucking right, even if I retain more faith in the strike than he did (and even if he lost faith in the strike’s ultimate power he was always on the picket line and helping strikers find larger audiences for their demands, unlike so many people who tweet about a ‘general strike’ but can’t be arsed to show up to, let alone plan, a local one). We had our version of a group chat for a while in 2018 and 2019 with another comrade (names withheld to protect the might-not-want-to-be-implicated) in which we unleashed all the rants and rage that were best kept off of Twitter. We wrote emails and traded jokes and he was one of the few people who knew the place I came from and used it as a shorthand joke to remind me that he cared. To make me feel known. To find a way to connect.

I picked up my habit of ironically saying “thanks dad” from him.

We only met in person a couple of times, and I don’t have any pictures, and I am heartbroken about that too.

(somewhere in here a day has passed and all the power went out across Spain and it was one of those days where outside events mirror the inside ones too perfectly. did my grief make the power go out? did Clover manage this, somehow, some magical posthumous act of climate sabotage? I have switched to George Michael because somewhere in the book on “Roadrunner” he mentioned wanting to also write about “Freedom ‘90”. As “Father Figure” plays I realize that he would have been the perfect person to message in rage that Spotify has added “featured in Babygirl” to the title of “Father Figure” because are you fucking kidding me, comrade George deserved better. I think I am overdue for going to Highgate and this time I will go and leave a stone for JC too. The power is back on, and I am pleased because I walked halfway down a mountain yesterday to get enough phone service to download a couple of podcast episodes so I could hear his voice again.)

One of those few times we got to hang out in person was in 2019 when, filled with irritation and inspiration and high on each other’s getting it, we planned a public event with Nikhil Singh at NYU and I don’t have photos from it (but maybe you do, if you were there?) and I have the audio somewhere and we’ll post it somewhere soon and a transcript too, can’t believe we didn’t back then but maybe we always thought we had time.

I can’t remember now how we met, nor can I remember if I read his book before I knew him, I think I had somehow expected it to be similar to my first book and it was the furthest thing from that and it changed how I thought. My most-used part of Riot. Strike. Riot. was obviously the affirmation trap, about which I have written over and over and over again and am still, in the time of the Trump/Musk attempt to purge the federal workforce, writing about. But my favorite part is actually this one, below, because god he could fucking write:

That is to say, the strike emerges into the new world of capitalist production, as it must, from the space of circulation. It strides from the sea trailing foam, if not yet quite fully formed. British, American, and French sailors were consistently among the most militant workers in the eighteenth century, rivaling shoemakers (the tradesmen found most consistently among leaders of political disturbances from the seventeenth century through the Paris Commune). The English word strike itself seems to date from 1768, when sailors joined “city artisans and tradesmen—weavers, hatters, sawyers, glass-grinders, and coal heavers—in the fight for better wages, [and] struck their sails and paralyzed the city’s commerce. They ‘unmanned or otherwise prevented from sailing every ship in the Thames.’”

The derivation of the French term for strike, grève, is even more suggestive—an etymology with the reach of an epic, beginning on a riverbank and ending at the Hôtel de Ville a few centuries later and eighty paces away. It is an old word. Originally it meant a flat area of sand and gravel next to the water, a strand, and so a place where boats unloaded cargo. . . .

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. We are down at the port once more, the place that provides the main coordinate for this first section, for the golden age of riot. It is inevitable, because it is practically and logically necessary, that port and market midwife the strike. It is equally inevitable, then, that we will return to the port later in this book, as things swing back from strike to riot. It is a catchment of unused labor amid the great machine of the market. A place of misery and possibility. It is fitting, perhaps, that the Place de Grève will also host a guillotine; the 1835 dictionary associates the word grève with executions. It does not yet mention labor actions.

(I cannot help noting that we lost him just a few months after we lost Jane McAlevey, the best advocate for the power of the strike that we had, another ruthless critic and loyal friend and sender of cards and flowers and lover of the wilds of northern California. That I think I met Joshua in person on the same trip that I went horseback riding with Jane, and yes that’s a humblebrag but it is also me thinking through what it means to have had my life and work transformed by these two people. Two people who disagreed on a lot but who were committed body and soul to doing the fucking work.)

I am far from most of my books now, on another continent from them, and I wish I was carrying that book of his poems with me as I was in October, reading it in between interviews about grief. Tonight I have to talk about work (it feels awful to even vaguely self promote in here but if you are in Barcelona for some reason and you knew him or his work come join me and we’ll talk about him, I can’t imagine talking about anything else) and how am I going to begin without breaking down and conceding defeat on our long-running arguments even though he wouldn’t want me to, he would want me to keep scrapping even when he thought I was wrong.

I have said in a variety of ways here: I am a better person for having known him. And so. Think of him when you are reading a poem or listening to a perfect pop song. Most of all, think of him in the streets, when you are putting your body in the way of the death machine.

Goodbye, J.Clo. I’ll try to be even braver now.