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Monday, October 23, 2017
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Thursday, November 17, 2016
Full Employment
(This is part of a series of draft responses to False Choices: The Faux Feminism of Hillary Rodham Clinton, ed Liza Featherstone, Verso Books 2016)
You get 60 months of TANF in a lifetime.
After 24 months of TANF you must be employed.
The expanded EITC, intended to replace AFDC as a work-pegged income supplement, hasn't been updated since 1993.
The federal minimum wage was only modestly increased in 2009. It's something like 20% below the 1980 wage in real dollars.
Because since 96 TANF is administered in block grants to states and can't be court-challenged, most families living in poverty today don't receive cash assistance.
36 percent of families in poverty receive cash assistance in 2013, down from 68 percent before reform.
Welfare rolls are down from 14 to 4 million.
Meanwhile, number of families living in poverty, and in extreme poverty, is still rising.
3 million children live in extreme poverty (less than $2/day).
45.3 million Americans are poor, as defined by income, per the 2014 Census; 14.5 percent of the population.
(Measurements. You can measure the poverty rate another way, putting it closer to 18, and in that measurement it's the rich world's highest.)
The hard left nominally carries the responsibility of looking out for everybody, not just the most visibly downtrodden. It will always reserve a special soft spot for the most invisibly downtrodden.
The classic example of this group is the people living in extreme poverty, and children, in particular, among those. Why children? Children are blameless, I guess. They don't vote and don't know what country they live in. And everyone likes them. Just like Loving America is a condition of entry to the debate on Congressional policies, caring about children (or 'child welfare' to put it in like policy prescriptivist terms) is a condition of entry to the debate on capitalism and the future of human civilization.
[[ During the Clinton administration the hard left carried academic and philosophical debate to greater and greater heights of abstruseness.
One product was a yuppie class who got bored of these questions and thrived under technocracy. Obama worked ok for them and they saw a path to becoming rich and respectable.
Another, later product was a socially engaged identitarian class who found public consequences to 'doing theory'.
Obama was a hollow compromise for them and they could never become respectable, and probably not rich. ]]
The hard left was always against the Clintons.
It seems like the difference before and after this election is that now there's kind of a visible common coalition of the hard left, personified in Bernie Sanders and visible at his fun and uplifting rallies.
It's generally accepted by the contributors that the Clintons made their jump to the main current of political sentiment in America by saluting the Reagan vision of entrepreneur-driven prosperity, and maybe more cynically, the idea that folks don't want to feel shamed for getting or being rich. (I guess
---It's worth noting that the Bernie movement is also a creative triangulation, and a historically significant one....
Did it come together? Did it unite the old Young Socialist-IWW Verso Port Huron New Left Review left with the new Oberlin BLM gender-non-conforming meme left? The book spends a lot of time pleading for less emphasis of Sanders' old white male identity
Could you measure the success of the Bernie movement in terms of his mobilization for Clinton in the final determination?
The first essay, on Clinton's belated populism, nicely lays out the objection to same.
"Ending Poverty as We Know It"
HRC talks a good game on poverty and families (geez even the word "families" is like a piece of policy verbiage) but owns a ragged record on welfare protection: so goes the hard left construal, at least, which relies on eg insider reportage to reconstruct her own views on her husband's legislation in the 90s.
Meanwhile. The Sanders platform calls for full employment as the solution to poverty.
The authors have objections ranging from functional to economic/systemic to moral to philosophical.
Functional objections to a policy of full employment:
Employers hate it. Even in the 1940s, at the political zenith of organized labor, it was defeated.
Very tight labor markets improve standards of living for those at the bottom. The skilled industrial workers of the 40s were able to live in houses. In the 90s, everybody got a car, a tv, a computer. (Even today -- people might not have cars but everybody has a little web terminal in their fucking pocket.)
Economic objections:
-Wages are low today, even while "labor force participation rate for adults is at its lowest level since the 1970s." Existing jobs will keep disappearing and new ones will not be created as fast.
(I guess I buy this. There is much more creativity and reward going to those who create shareholder value, compared to those who create jobs. Anyway, 'creating jobs' always sorta sounds like bullshit. Creating them out of what? For whom?)
Systemic objections:
-The 'Global South' will send more migrants this way, and they will want jobs too.
(The hard left has to remember to invoke the 'global south' in economic and climate forecasting, as well as in surveys of poverty and suffering, not to mention reckonings with imperialism in its many historical guises.)
-People don't necessarily want more hours. They want more predictable schedules, more leave to care for children, parents, and sick family, and flexibility to go to school. They want better part-time work, in many cases. (They don't want to lose their job if they get sick, and they also want freedom to get trained for a better job.)
Moral objections:
-Full employment relies on Growth Growth Growth and that keeps us dependent on oil and stuff.
(I guess you could frame this as a systemic objection if you could demonstrate once and for all that growth leads inexorably to climate change leads inexorably to worse economic futures.)
Philosophical objections:
-Full employment sucks. Work sucks. The hard left has taken its eye off the ball.
For me, this nails it.
And this was after all the original critique of Third Way liberalism, articulated in The Baffler by Ivy Leaguers and in grunge music by good old American nihilist burn-outs: work sucks.
The argument in Sherrod Brown's recent Times ed, that paid labor can 'lose its dignity' when elites don't pay it the proper respect, is a dumb conservative nostrum masquerading as a populist call to action. "Over the past 40 years, as people have worked harder for less pay and fewer benefits, the value of their work has eroded. When we devalue work, we threaten the pride and dignity that come from it."
(When you write about politics you have to use words like 'nostrum' to show you're clued-in.)
Are Sen Brown's constituents aware that no one can make you feel inferior without your consent. Maybe they're just getting hip to the hard math of the Democratic Leadership Council: we can't fight the globalized neoliberal future, so we might as well court it. Surely Trump knew he was lying about bringing back manufacturing jobs. And Clinton wasn't going to take the rhetorical position of that Weekly Standard guy, or whoever it was, who said Rust Belters should just finish committing suicide and overdosing on opiates and neither party should defer to them. But how long can you muddy the issue, and what to do you actually legislate? Higher wages at Taco Bell? If you've seen Roger and Me you know there's no dignity at Taco Bell.
Is there any dignity in life?
Is there any dignity in living in a country where people gotta work at Taco Bell?
Sometimes you just want to get a taco at Taco Bell, and the hell with it. Or you want to get something nice but you're tired and you're broke or whatever so you might as well just get a taco at Taco Bell. It's not a dignified choice. Still, you don't have to be rude to the counter guy! You smile at him and talk about how cold or warm it is outside.
The authors make the case for 'wealth transfer' payments: essentially, direct cash payments to the poor. They point to the example of free housing for homeless veterans, one example of throwing cash at poverty which seems to work pretty well. Though -- veterans are a specially protected category of what we might as well call 'undeserving' poor, and most Americans feel obliged to help them out. Not so with our old friend the Welfare Queen. Authors acknowledge the problem is one of "political will." Under the old Aid to Families with Dependent Children, direct cash payments along with higher wages seemed to keep most families from dire poverty, but the Clinton welfare reforms restructured cash payments and tied them to work incentives to avoid fostering a culture of 'dependency.'
Wealth transfer programs in the developing world have worked pretty well, the authors argue, and are tied to easy incentives like making sure recipient families send their children to school and to health check-ups. (The authors ignore the subtext here -- the African, Asian and Latin American governments funding these anti-poverty measures have been enriched by global free trade agreements, and their eventual goal is to create a globally competitive workforce, which is why the Clintons and the Robert Rubins of the world's developed economies have encouraged them.)
The broader philosophical issue is still relevant.
Why should a basic income depend on the labor market?
If there are only bad jobs on the market, ought citizens to suffer for their recalcitrance until they knuckle under?
Bill Clinton thrived on stories of former welfare recipients 'empowered' by work. He enjoyed trotting out these folks at rallies, where they could preach about their newfound dignity. To whom were they preaching?
You get 60 months of TANF in a lifetime.
After 24 months of TANF you must be employed.
The expanded EITC, intended to replace AFDC as a work-pegged income supplement, hasn't been updated since 1993.
The federal minimum wage was only modestly increased in 2009. It's something like 20% below the 1980 wage in real dollars.
Because since 96 TANF is administered in block grants to states and can't be court-challenged, most families living in poverty today don't receive cash assistance.
36 percent of families in poverty receive cash assistance in 2013, down from 68 percent before reform.
Welfare rolls are down from 14 to 4 million.
Meanwhile, number of families living in poverty, and in extreme poverty, is still rising.
3 million children live in extreme poverty (less than $2/day).
45.3 million Americans are poor, as defined by income, per the 2014 Census; 14.5 percent of the population.
(Measurements. You can measure the poverty rate another way, putting it closer to 18, and in that measurement it's the rich world's highest.)
The hard left nominally carries the responsibility of looking out for everybody, not just the most visibly downtrodden. It will always reserve a special soft spot for the most invisibly downtrodden.
The classic example of this group is the people living in extreme poverty, and children, in particular, among those. Why children? Children are blameless, I guess. They don't vote and don't know what country they live in. And everyone likes them. Just like Loving America is a condition of entry to the debate on Congressional policies, caring about children (or 'child welfare' to put it in like policy prescriptivist terms) is a condition of entry to the debate on capitalism and the future of human civilization.
[[ During the Clinton administration the hard left carried academic and philosophical debate to greater and greater heights of abstruseness.
One product was a yuppie class who got bored of these questions and thrived under technocracy. Obama worked ok for them and they saw a path to becoming rich and respectable.
Another, later product was a socially engaged identitarian class who found public consequences to 'doing theory'.
Obama was a hollow compromise for them and they could never become respectable, and probably not rich. ]]
The hard left was always against the Clintons.
It seems like the difference before and after this election is that now there's kind of a visible common coalition of the hard left, personified in Bernie Sanders and visible at his fun and uplifting rallies.
It's generally accepted by the contributors that the Clintons made their jump to the main current of political sentiment in America by saluting the Reagan vision of entrepreneur-driven prosperity, and maybe more cynically, the idea that folks don't want to feel shamed for getting or being rich. (I guess
---It's worth noting that the Bernie movement is also a creative triangulation, and a historically significant one....
Did it come together? Did it unite the old Young Socialist-IWW Verso Port Huron New Left Review left with the new Oberlin BLM gender-non-conforming meme left? The book spends a lot of time pleading for less emphasis of Sanders' old white male identity
Could you measure the success of the Bernie movement in terms of his mobilization for Clinton in the final determination?
The first essay, on Clinton's belated populism, nicely lays out the objection to same.
The Clintons' many apologists would likely shrug their shoulders at Bill and Hillary's deep ties to the global financial elite. They'd insist there is no alternative to Clinton-style neoliberalism and that resistance is both childish and futile. The only changes we can make, they'd argue, are incremental ones -- nudges and tweaks. And even enacting those requires the endless stroking and appeasement of the 1 percent, who after all have the power and the money not only to buy elections, but also to destroy, or at least seriously enfeeble, and proposed reforms (the crippling of the Dodd-Frank financial regulations being a recent case in point). The best hope for human progress, then, lies in sitting back and letting political elites slavishly cultivate moneyed interests, who then might deign to let us enact a few micro-initiatives. Midnight basketball for everyone!
"Ending Poverty as We Know It"
HRC talks a good game on poverty and families (geez even the word "families" is like a piece of policy verbiage) but owns a ragged record on welfare protection: so goes the hard left construal, at least, which relies on eg insider reportage to reconstruct her own views on her husband's legislation in the 90s.
Meanwhile. The Sanders platform calls for full employment as the solution to poverty.
The authors have objections ranging from functional to economic/systemic to moral to philosophical.
Functional objections to a policy of full employment:
Employers hate it. Even in the 1940s, at the political zenith of organized labor, it was defeated.
Very tight labor markets improve standards of living for those at the bottom. The skilled industrial workers of the 40s were able to live in houses. In the 90s, everybody got a car, a tv, a computer. (Even today -- people might not have cars but everybody has a little web terminal in their fucking pocket.)
Economic objections:
-Wages are low today, even while "labor force participation rate for adults is at its lowest level since the 1970s." Existing jobs will keep disappearing and new ones will not be created as fast.
(I guess I buy this. There is much more creativity and reward going to those who create shareholder value, compared to those who create jobs. Anyway, 'creating jobs' always sorta sounds like bullshit. Creating them out of what? For whom?)
Systemic objections:
-The 'Global South' will send more migrants this way, and they will want jobs too.
(The hard left has to remember to invoke the 'global south' in economic and climate forecasting, as well as in surveys of poverty and suffering, not to mention reckonings with imperialism in its many historical guises.)
-People don't necessarily want more hours. They want more predictable schedules, more leave to care for children, parents, and sick family, and flexibility to go to school. They want better part-time work, in many cases. (They don't want to lose their job if they get sick, and they also want freedom to get trained for a better job.)
Moral objections:
-Full employment relies on Growth Growth Growth and that keeps us dependent on oil and stuff.
(I guess you could frame this as a systemic objection if you could demonstrate once and for all that growth leads inexorably to climate change leads inexorably to worse economic futures.)
Philosophical objections:
-Full employment sucks. Work sucks. The hard left has taken its eye off the ball.
For me, this nails it.
And this was after all the original critique of Third Way liberalism, articulated in The Baffler by Ivy Leaguers and in grunge music by good old American nihilist burn-outs: work sucks.
The argument in Sherrod Brown's recent Times ed, that paid labor can 'lose its dignity' when elites don't pay it the proper respect, is a dumb conservative nostrum masquerading as a populist call to action. "Over the past 40 years, as people have worked harder for less pay and fewer benefits, the value of their work has eroded. When we devalue work, we threaten the pride and dignity that come from it."
(When you write about politics you have to use words like 'nostrum' to show you're clued-in.)
Are Sen Brown's constituents aware that no one can make you feel inferior without your consent. Maybe they're just getting hip to the hard math of the Democratic Leadership Council: we can't fight the globalized neoliberal future, so we might as well court it. Surely Trump knew he was lying about bringing back manufacturing jobs. And Clinton wasn't going to take the rhetorical position of that Weekly Standard guy, or whoever it was, who said Rust Belters should just finish committing suicide and overdosing on opiates and neither party should defer to them. But how long can you muddy the issue, and what to do you actually legislate? Higher wages at Taco Bell? If you've seen Roger and Me you know there's no dignity at Taco Bell.
Is there any dignity in life?
Is there any dignity in living in a country where people gotta work at Taco Bell?
Sometimes you just want to get a taco at Taco Bell, and the hell with it. Or you want to get something nice but you're tired and you're broke or whatever so you might as well just get a taco at Taco Bell. It's not a dignified choice. Still, you don't have to be rude to the counter guy! You smile at him and talk about how cold or warm it is outside.
The authors make the case for 'wealth transfer' payments: essentially, direct cash payments to the poor. They point to the example of free housing for homeless veterans, one example of throwing cash at poverty which seems to work pretty well. Though -- veterans are a specially protected category of what we might as well call 'undeserving' poor, and most Americans feel obliged to help them out. Not so with our old friend the Welfare Queen. Authors acknowledge the problem is one of "political will." Under the old Aid to Families with Dependent Children, direct cash payments along with higher wages seemed to keep most families from dire poverty, but the Clinton welfare reforms restructured cash payments and tied them to work incentives to avoid fostering a culture of 'dependency.'
Wealth transfer programs in the developing world have worked pretty well, the authors argue, and are tied to easy incentives like making sure recipient families send their children to school and to health check-ups. (The authors ignore the subtext here -- the African, Asian and Latin American governments funding these anti-poverty measures have been enriched by global free trade agreements, and their eventual goal is to create a globally competitive workforce, which is why the Clintons and the Robert Rubins of the world's developed economies have encouraged them.)
The broader philosophical issue is still relevant.
Why should a basic income depend on the labor market?
If there are only bad jobs on the market, ought citizens to suffer for their recalcitrance until they knuckle under?
Bill Clinton thrived on stories of former welfare recipients 'empowered' by work. He enjoyed trotting out these folks at rallies, where they could preach about their newfound dignity. To whom were they preaching?
Thursday, October 13, 2016
(June 2 2016)
Here's some stuff I can spam you about if you need some boring opinions in the next 48 hours
Moth evolution
Jen Kirkman
The New Yorker
NPR
The New York Times
Email exchange with Caitlin
Date plans with this girl that are giving me anxiety
Anxiety
Lil Yachty
Twitter
Birds
Drake
Future
The weather
The future
Bullshit
Anxiety
Boredom
Fear of boredom
Anxiety resulting from fear of boredom
Wanting people to like me
McSweeney's
N plus 1
Zadie Smith
Charlotte Brontë
Branwell Brontë (Charlotte's older brother, the family fuck-up and the original 'fuccboi')
Anohni
Trump voters
Fresh, cool breeze, so delightful after this humidity we've been having
Spotify
Vice
Podcasts
Amazon (site)
Amazon (destination)
Lemon ants
Limerence
Ashbery
Obama
Lakutis
Virginia Woolf
Capitalism
Friday, April 17, 2015
Tuesday, April 14, 2015
Jian Bing in New York
Jian Bing in New York City 煎饼
Here's where to find delicious jian bing in Flushing, Queens:
Golden Mall, on 41st Road, west of Flushing Main Street.
The entrance on the south side of 41st Road takes you down a ramp to a basement-level food court. Take a left and you'll see the stand on your left! This is real jian bing.
Caveat emptor: While I found the stand's jian bing a satisfying substitute for the authentic Beijing street snack (the subtle difference probably owing to absence of some prohibited additive), it will set you back $3.50. Tai guai le ba!
I had a craving for this street food after coming back from Beijing and couldn't find an easy answer online about where to get it in New York. As a service to jian bing enthusiasts, I am attempting to 'SEO' this post. So, enjoy some delicious jian bing next time you're in Flushing, Queens! This is where to find jian bing in New York City. 煎饼
For more on jian bing, here's a blog post by Evan Osnos on jian bing in its natural habitat:
.http://www.newyorker.com/news/evan-osnos/hutong-economics-meets-r-w-apple
This guy runs a jian bing cart in Berkeley:
http://jianbingjohnnys.com
If you're in New York, take the trip to Flushing and enjoy Beijing-style jian bing, a delicious Chinese street food with a devoted following!
Here's where to find delicious jian bing in Flushing, Queens:
Golden Mall, on 41st Road, west of Flushing Main Street.
The entrance on the south side of 41st Road takes you down a ramp to a basement-level food court. Take a left and you'll see the stand on your left! This is real jian bing.
Caveat emptor: While I found the stand's jian bing a satisfying substitute for the authentic Beijing street snack (the subtle difference probably owing to absence of some prohibited additive), it will set you back $3.50. Tai guai le ba!
I had a craving for this street food after coming back from Beijing and couldn't find an easy answer online about where to get it in New York. As a service to jian bing enthusiasts, I am attempting to 'SEO' this post. So, enjoy some delicious jian bing next time you're in Flushing, Queens! This is where to find jian bing in New York City. 煎饼
For more on jian bing, here's a blog post by Evan Osnos on jian bing in its natural habitat:
.http://www.newyorker.com/news/evan-osnos/hutong-economics-meets-r-w-apple
This guy runs a jian bing cart in Berkeley:
http://jianbingjohnnys.com
If you're in New York, take the trip to Flushing and enjoy Beijing-style jian bing, a delicious Chinese street food with a devoted following!
 |
| See? Here's the jian bing I told you about in Flushing, New York City. |
 |
| Here's the jian bing being made. Chi le ma? |
Monday, February 2, 2015
Snow
Sky a close and humid pink, like a closed eye, as the snowfall curls and billows under the streetlight.
The street is snowed smooth, scalloped at the curb. Black arterial treetops.
Inside, in bed, my childhood room on the second floor. Where I can lay on my side and watch the snow with one open eye and listen to the heartbeat in my ear. I suppose I have been a real person, my dreams and memories. Cocoon of a teenager, staring out a bedroom window in the hour of mellow blood and curling flakes of suggestion. Like I'd never left. All alone and night brings expectation to a rolling boil. Earth a polychrome leviathan waiting in the black deep, angels and aurochs, faint beings singing to you like the chorus in Euripides, sweet suggestion, the kindly ones, honeyed humors shunting in the too-full flesh. Whatever I was waiting for, I was well into my 20s before I made myself notice that this wasn't that. You open your hands and let go of the unravelling threads and you go to the doctor with your bloody chafed palms. And winter lets you appreciate slow accumulations of fleeting moments: the snowfall rises, an objective correlative.
After Inle Lake we went to the coast of the Indian Ocean. We stayed in a ramshackle motel across a dirt highway from the beach. A fisherman walked along the sand with an extravagant lobster. It was polychrome and polymorphously spined and crenelated. It was tropical gothic. Under the tail, a foamy orange mass of eggs. Female.
The modest Burmese swam in shirts.
We ordered grilled snapper on rice and squeezed lime over the cubed flesh. big sweating bottles of Myanmar Beer. The pink quality of the sea, the sand, and the air: there was an exciting soupiness to all of it, a completely new texture of ocean. Prickling stars. The Indian Ocean - far out, the Andamans, mysterious and fragrant, coated so heavily under the gold dust of longing. Black rocks and tiny crabs, schools of silvery little fish running the tide pools up the beach, at the foot of the cliffs where the sure-footed nearly-naked boys pried urchins and bivalves with a savage heavy knife. Out upon the deep, the heavy-muscled silver carnivores that chase through the schools with idiot mouths. A fish is always desperate on the high seas - a sizzling axon unblinking. The trawlers sloshing with blood.
At the beachside restaurant tables, fat men in shades with scintillant pirate-plunder wristwatches smoked American cigarettes, while their bored mates in shades fussed at status phones and tried to stay out of the sun. The jewel-like fingernails. All over the developing world there is a code of toilette that says 'I belong to a vulgar and powerful man.' I watch these women - careful not to look too long - and wonder it's like. The routine, phone and jewelry and preening and pouting, appears to me sometimes like heartbreaking naïveté, other times like a naked expression of our species' fundamental callousness. And still, each woman, each man, girds themselves in western luxury in order to tell the story of his or her unique personal worth. What are they showing me? They sit in the shade, smile and translate for me when I ask to see the Fisherman's spiny lobster, and we look out together on the brown bodies hauling boats in the surf, wait for our next beers. The sea is full of food. The air is full of mosquito-smoke and grill smoke. The clean white column of the snappers spine when you've picked the meat off - it reminds me of cracking certain old perfect-bound paperbacks and finding that ribbed strand of hard gray glue. The charred tailfin like an insect's wing.
We stayed a few days, the scene repeats. Moved to a slightly nicer motel on the other side of the dirt highway. A sign in the rooms warned visitors not to eat the kebabs carried up and down the beach by timid women in headscarves, in baskets on their heads, day after day, which makes sense. At night geckos lashed their tails and cackled. I searched around the room for them. They hide in shadowed corners and in seemingly impossible crevices: behind bookcases, along the tops of picture frames, watching. I like to grab them and feel their paws pushing, the vise of their little jaws around my finger. I watch them heaving their micro ribs and I peer into their night hunter's eyes, swollen scheming black orbs full of gold chips, then I let them go free again. A big moth goes down in three gulps. A glutton's blinking ecstasy.
What really delights me is when a hotel will leave you a perfectly-formed miniature version of a normal tube of toothpaste.
The beach is in a wide cove. You can see hills, cliffs at either end. After a few beers and the sweat in your eyes you forget it's not Puerto Vallarta. We pick up decaying paperbacks in one town and swap them in another, proceeding this way around the continent, in and out of serendipitous tales. The one hardcover book I bought new - Bring Up the Bodies, I read it in Deqin under a sacred Tibetan mountain that never quite emerged from the fog in our time there. I studied photographs in tourist flyers, took a picture of one, trying to make it look like a picture of the thing itself but with a supercharged aura, like a Richard Prince.
The snow has nearly smoothed the division of street and curb now.
We returned to Yangon and stayed with a wealthy Malaysian businessman who'd come to Burma long ago to manage a factory, and in the way of long-term expats become proficient in the mechanisms that sustain comfort for the rich alien, and over time entrap him by accustoming him to a life he can't afford back home. A satrap, he retains a fawning household staff, curries favor with his easy charity, and affects to cultivate some eccentric passion. For the Malaysian it turned out to be collecting jade. I always wondered, Am I one of them? Put me down here for a few years, on a fixed income: will I then be writing a history of the church tower and employing a stable of widows to turn out sustainable handicrafts?
The snowplow grinds past. The muffled scrape stirs up something young and desperate. Suspended in the yellow taillights, crazy spangles caught from nowhere.
The street is snowed smooth, scalloped at the curb. Black arterial treetops.
Inside, in bed, my childhood room on the second floor. Where I can lay on my side and watch the snow with one open eye and listen to the heartbeat in my ear. I suppose I have been a real person, my dreams and memories. Cocoon of a teenager, staring out a bedroom window in the hour of mellow blood and curling flakes of suggestion. Like I'd never left. All alone and night brings expectation to a rolling boil. Earth a polychrome leviathan waiting in the black deep, angels and aurochs, faint beings singing to you like the chorus in Euripides, sweet suggestion, the kindly ones, honeyed humors shunting in the too-full flesh. Whatever I was waiting for, I was well into my 20s before I made myself notice that this wasn't that. You open your hands and let go of the unravelling threads and you go to the doctor with your bloody chafed palms. And winter lets you appreciate slow accumulations of fleeting moments: the snowfall rises, an objective correlative.
After Inle Lake we went to the coast of the Indian Ocean. We stayed in a ramshackle motel across a dirt highway from the beach. A fisherman walked along the sand with an extravagant lobster. It was polychrome and polymorphously spined and crenelated. It was tropical gothic. Under the tail, a foamy orange mass of eggs. Female.
The modest Burmese swam in shirts.
We ordered grilled snapper on rice and squeezed lime over the cubed flesh. big sweating bottles of Myanmar Beer. The pink quality of the sea, the sand, and the air: there was an exciting soupiness to all of it, a completely new texture of ocean. Prickling stars. The Indian Ocean - far out, the Andamans, mysterious and fragrant, coated so heavily under the gold dust of longing. Black rocks and tiny crabs, schools of silvery little fish running the tide pools up the beach, at the foot of the cliffs where the sure-footed nearly-naked boys pried urchins and bivalves with a savage heavy knife. Out upon the deep, the heavy-muscled silver carnivores that chase through the schools with idiot mouths. A fish is always desperate on the high seas - a sizzling axon unblinking. The trawlers sloshing with blood.
At the beachside restaurant tables, fat men in shades with scintillant pirate-plunder wristwatches smoked American cigarettes, while their bored mates in shades fussed at status phones and tried to stay out of the sun. The jewel-like fingernails. All over the developing world there is a code of toilette that says 'I belong to a vulgar and powerful man.' I watch these women - careful not to look too long - and wonder it's like. The routine, phone and jewelry and preening and pouting, appears to me sometimes like heartbreaking naïveté, other times like a naked expression of our species' fundamental callousness. And still, each woman, each man, girds themselves in western luxury in order to tell the story of his or her unique personal worth. What are they showing me? They sit in the shade, smile and translate for me when I ask to see the Fisherman's spiny lobster, and we look out together on the brown bodies hauling boats in the surf, wait for our next beers. The sea is full of food. The air is full of mosquito-smoke and grill smoke. The clean white column of the snappers spine when you've picked the meat off - it reminds me of cracking certain old perfect-bound paperbacks and finding that ribbed strand of hard gray glue. The charred tailfin like an insect's wing.
We stayed a few days, the scene repeats. Moved to a slightly nicer motel on the other side of the dirt highway. A sign in the rooms warned visitors not to eat the kebabs carried up and down the beach by timid women in headscarves, in baskets on their heads, day after day, which makes sense. At night geckos lashed their tails and cackled. I searched around the room for them. They hide in shadowed corners and in seemingly impossible crevices: behind bookcases, along the tops of picture frames, watching. I like to grab them and feel their paws pushing, the vise of their little jaws around my finger. I watch them heaving their micro ribs and I peer into their night hunter's eyes, swollen scheming black orbs full of gold chips, then I let them go free again. A big moth goes down in three gulps. A glutton's blinking ecstasy.
What really delights me is when a hotel will leave you a perfectly-formed miniature version of a normal tube of toothpaste.
The beach is in a wide cove. You can see hills, cliffs at either end. After a few beers and the sweat in your eyes you forget it's not Puerto Vallarta. We pick up decaying paperbacks in one town and swap them in another, proceeding this way around the continent, in and out of serendipitous tales. The one hardcover book I bought new - Bring Up the Bodies, I read it in Deqin under a sacred Tibetan mountain that never quite emerged from the fog in our time there. I studied photographs in tourist flyers, took a picture of one, trying to make it look like a picture of the thing itself but with a supercharged aura, like a Richard Prince.
The snow has nearly smoothed the division of street and curb now.
We returned to Yangon and stayed with a wealthy Malaysian businessman who'd come to Burma long ago to manage a factory, and in the way of long-term expats become proficient in the mechanisms that sustain comfort for the rich alien, and over time entrap him by accustoming him to a life he can't afford back home. A satrap, he retains a fawning household staff, curries favor with his easy charity, and affects to cultivate some eccentric passion. For the Malaysian it turned out to be collecting jade. I always wondered, Am I one of them? Put me down here for a few years, on a fixed income: will I then be writing a history of the church tower and employing a stable of widows to turn out sustainable handicrafts?
The snowplow grinds past. The muffled scrape stirs up something young and desperate. Suspended in the yellow taillights, crazy spangles caught from nowhere.
Sunday, January 11, 2015
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