2005-03-15 - 3:27 a.m.
things i did today instead of work:
-fried some empandas which i bought thinking they were microwaveable
-read grace lee boggs' autobiorgraphy for many hours (did you know she started out as a trotskyite?)
-watched an hour of a terrible elvis movie (roustabout or something) which was campy as hell [sidenote: what was the appeal of elvis movies (other than stealing black people's music)? some kind of subversion that appealed to the white brougeoisie i think]
-listened to norah jones
-read lots of news articles
-daydreamed about being in far away places, without any responsibility or accountability to anyone or anything
-lay in bed with cigs and the internet trying to not think about everything i have to do
--
things occurring to me while reading grace lee boggs- maybe doing a big action isn't so much about forcing people to choose sides but forcing them to confront a contradiction (example of big action: a hunger strike or sit-in)? stretching one's humanity is maybe a better phrase than restoring one's humanity. franz fanon talked about how the native thought every day about taking the place of the colonizer- is grip of consumerism on the impoverished in the same vein or a new phenomenon? i definitely fantasized about having expensive toys every day growing up- and in junior high, sometimes wished i had trendy clothing. jimmy boggs challenged a lot of black power adherents to look more at class issues- those motivated purely by nationalism can be pretty reactionary, obviously, without any class analysis- for groups like OCA, is there any class analysis? it seems there is some vague liberal commitment against poverty-
speaking of poverty, how does a liberal answer the basic problem that no matter how accessible education becomes, there will still be the same number of janitors and the same number of corporate execs? doesn't the necessity for work to be organized and valued differently have to be confronted at some point?
boggs' book is interesting- but all these types of books are narrative and don't go into much detail- details about organizing work would be useful
why is narrative so powerful, very generally speaking? even that crappy elvis movie created narrative suspense
