notes from a rootless cosmpolitan

notes from a rootless cosmopolitan

I'm heading back to the US next week and I'm sad but also happy, I think, to take the weird disconnection of pandemic life back Stateside for a while. This level of disconnect makes every human interaction feel so laden, so fraught, so overdetermined, so full of possibilities that when it's just a normal interaction it feels like a failure instead of the thing I so dearly wish was still possible, "normalcy," what does that even mean? 

It's spooky season and I've been binge-listening to Bauhaus and Depeche Mode and dancing in Joana's living room where I've been staying the last two weeks of my England stay, working on the second round of proofreading for the UK edition and saying goodbye to people with a heavy heart and tabulating significance in my head as though that's a thing that's possible. I love autumn and spring the most, these transitional seasons, took a walk in the cemetery the other day to visit Marx and the workers of the world surrounding him and to just enjoy a day full of falling leaves and temperatures and the reminders that time will pass and things will change and different heartbreaks will come, sure, but also other things. Other possibilities. 

I wrote to you last time about repair and about building something new in the ashes and today I'm thinking about nostalgia and ghosts. Ghosts of my past and of other possible pasts, other ways this moment could have been. Haunted by the mistakes I've made and choices that weren't mistakes but nevertheless foreclosed other possibilities. The times I kissed the right person and the times I didn't. A left turn, a missed meeting, an opportunity accepted, one let go. A plane I almost didn't get on. We are all made up of such little serendipitous choices, and lately I am remembering that I do not regret the things I did, the attempts I made to connect. I can follow them like breadcrumbs back and forward through my life. Connect. 

I talked to an old favorite source, Chuck Jones, this week for a story that'll be up next week just before the election, and have been thinking since about the rootedness of industrial jobs and then their uprooting, the way maybe even the grief of jobs lost, factories closed, is also a grieving for home. It's a loss of home underneath you, whether you leave as another person I interviewed for this story did, pack up and go away from the place you grew up in order to find another job that won't love you back, or you stay and watch things crumble around you. 

And me, when people ask where I live these days I start laughing because how do I even begin to answer that question? Back to Philly, briefly, then New York again for a short fling, then...who knows? "Home" is a word that drops easily from my lips but when I pause to think about it what do I mean? I was uprooted as a child several times away from what I knew and thought of as home and then uprooted myself, bouncing from state to state attempting to find soil conducive to my particular type of plant. "Home" is not where my mother lives nor where my mail goes nor where I am currently sleeping. 

Home instead for me is wherever I feel solidarity bigger than myself. It is where I am greeted with fierce lift-you-off-the-ground hugs and bade farewell with tears and whispers. It is where I can lie down at night with a glass of wine and my dog. It is every place where I walk around a corner and am greeted with emotional memories that I feel in my chest. It is places I've never been but where someone I love resides. It is that feeling when I hear from someone I talked to for a story, a book years ago that reminds me why I do what I do.

Thank you all for being part of it. Somewhere along the line I turned this newsletter into a personal-political intermittent journal of sorts and it's helped me not only work through things that have been happening while I wrote this current book but also think about the way I want to write the next one. A thing I struggled with on Work Won't Love You Back was how to talk about affect, feeling, emotion--I like the title we settled on because it doesn't say that loving isn't worth doing, and I danced around how to talk about the genuine positive feelings people, including me, have for their jobs before settling where I did, letting the people I interviewed speak for themselves and bring all the nuance--and the solutions--that I didn't want to prescriptively offer. I wanted to bring two things, really: a mainstream critique of wage labor, and a theory of the composition of today's working class. But in doing that I did aim, as writers always do, to make you feel something.

I made myself feel something--I cannot read my conclusion without crying, even still when I have read it all so many times, but I guess we'll see if that lands with other people or if people really want what Joshua Clover called "ten chapters of Marx one chapter of Keynes" or what Malcolm Harris called a "bop it" solution. I had drinks two nights in a row with friends who occupy what one of them called "think tank land" and they've got policy papers galore that I think are great and I love what they do, but at the end of the day I think that writing moves people by getting to their feelings--usually by getting to a feeling that they've had before but been a little embarrassed by, a little scared of, maybe, unwilling to acknowledge because of the fear that feeling is wrong. If we're lucky, journalists, novelists, essayists can tap into that feeling and encourage it to grow. 

It's almost time for this book to be out in the world. Readers, if you can't tell, I'm terrified. 

Writing

The American Prospect has a whole issue on the issue of family care out now, and I have a piece in it talking about the ongoing lack of paid sick time for workers, and what that's meant during a pandemic. Including workers who walked off the job for time to get tested and self-isolate, and workers who helped win a statute for paid sick time for gig workers, and Ellen Bravo talking about the history of the fight for paid sick time. 

Podcasting

We're how many months into a global pandemic and still debating who and what are essential workers? Yep. Belabored 208, with Nadia Marin-Molin of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON) plus striking healthcare workers, and a workers' day of mourning for Covid. 

Troublemaking

Are you an organization, a union, a worker center, a reading group, a bookstore owner or worker who would like to host me for my (alas, mostly virtual) book tour? We're planning it! 


And my dog:

Just after a bath: