Kaelie Giffel

Tag: freedom

  • wanting a different world (or: on dorothy day)

    wanting a different world (or: on dorothy day)

    “There’s not a day when I don’t think/how nice it would be/if I wanted different things/there’s not a day when I don’t think/how good it is/that I don’t.” –Dijana

    I started thinking about this in my essay on Perfect Days, which is about the alternative hedonism presented by the movie, a vision of life in which commodities are not the center. This picture of some graffiti from my time in Italy reminded me of a central, difficult question about wanting things and what happens when you want things that are unavailable or not easily acquired by money.

    We can want things, commodities, as they present us with visions of ourselves as cool or complete or as somehow staving off the reality of finitude. I’m talking here about the things we don’t necessarily need or those objects that fill us with rapturous visions of who we could be rather than satisfying, say, our nutritional needs or our spiritual desires. We can also want things that are not things but are really forms of life: like better relationships; clean air; more kindness; health and happiness for our neighbors. But these things cannot be solved by buying things.

    It’s easier to want the thing rather than to want forms of life.

    This is why, as Todd McGowan argues, we in some ways like and want capitalism, because it arises from and satisfies things we as humans struggle with and desire. But like Dijana is saying in my photo, things start to get a little difficult when you stop wanting things and start wanting life. (I’ll refer you back to my blog title; less labor, more life!)

    I’ve been thinking about this even more now, reading the memoirs and diaries of Dorothy Day, having become interested in her as a result of Zena Hitz’s fabulous Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of Intellectual Life. I have always been drawn to the stories of those who follow the difficult path of living what they believe in. And in our moment, it is more necessary than ever, even though Day may roll her eyes at me saying that. She recognized that all moments in history are crisis; not just ours.

    My battered, Free Little Library copy of Dorothy Day’s Loaves and Fishes.

    The world looks very different if our words and lives come closer into alignment and Dorothy Day’s life demonstrates this powerfully. Her biography is easily accessible, but the two salient details for me are this: that a free, seeking youth lead her to communism and then to Catholicism. Becoming Catholic intensified her commitment to issues of social justice, especially poverty, labor struggles, and anti-war actions. Her life was a practice of living her values fully, in voluntary poverty, caring for the poor, tax refusals, and anti-war protests.

    For instance, Day writes an explanation for refusing to pay income tax in Loaves and Fishes, that clarifies .85 on the dollar pays for the military-industrial complex in the US. That was in 1963 when the book was published; I am afraid to confirm my intuition that this number is much higher. After all, in the US when services are cut, that money is almost always directed toward the death machine. By earning less money and consuming less, as the Catholic Workers set out to do, there can be a reduction in complicity with war.

    The point is not that we all go out and become Dorothy Day; some of us may become like her but Day would encourage us to work with our desires and our skills toward that vision we have and in community with those who sustain us. Catholicism and anti-capitalist, anti-war politics were central to her vision; her skills were writing, speaking, and caring. For example, I loved parts of being a union organizer; mostly I found it wrecked me every day and I did not have the constitution for it. Instead, I write about how wonderful unions can be and will always participate in one should I have the chance.

    This is a principle shared by many of the feminists I read and teach but particularly the Milan Women: following our desire can remake the world. Day emphasized freedom just as much as the Milan Women; it is one of the most compelling aspects of her philosophy. But in a world where our desires are broken and deformed by the market on the one side and the state on the other, what are we supposed to do? How do we find our way forward? I say “we” here because I feel I have been lost in consumer hell myself. I feel like I am becoming aware of how my desires for feminism, love, happiness, community, a better world have been funneled into the only thing available: buying shit!

    Across all her work, Day desired, more than worldly goods, a world in which every person has freedom, dignity, care, food, and housing. I find this single-mindedness, something Zena Hitz wrote about recently, so moving. The Catholic concept of vocation is a powerful one. I am not Catholic, but I still, in my 30s, wonder what my vocation is. What is the thing I am single minded about? Feminism? Labor issues? Writing and teaching as many people as possible to tell their stories? Writing novels and essays? The answer, after all, cannot be answered by a force of will.

    I think many of us wonder how we can use their special gifts in the world–some of us are even still looking for those gifts, doubting them, chasing them away, hiding if they come knocking. We’ve been taught to love other things besides ourselves and each other, something like Dorothy Day’s life (as she tells us) has revealed to me, loud and clear.

    Day’s life, and her life-writing, were so unique, so powerful, I can feel her coming through the pages of her books. To be that alive, to seek life out in the presence of suffering others, amazes me and reflects my life back to me in unsettling ways. The daily courage her life required, well, encourages me. Dorothy Day did not claim the mantle of feminism for herself, but her picture now belongs in my pantheon of spiritual advisers.

    Day at her typewriter. Credit: Bob Fitch. Source: U.S. Catholic.
  • blossoms and beauty in tokyo

    blossoms and beauty in tokyo

    I spent last week in Tokyo, soaking in the cherry and plum blossoms, as well as the public baths. I rested in gardens and hurried to catch the packed subway trains. I wandered along rivers and sat in cafes watching people go by.

    It was my last stretch of time without having to report to a job, though the job loomed at the end, quite like it might when you take a “normal” vacation. There’s always a sense of finite time. My experience of Tokyo this time was less full of possibility and more bittersweet than it was a year ago, precisely for that reason.

    But I loved my time there, just as I did the first time. I loved the unfamiliar sounds, both the songs and language. I now live in a small town (it calls itself a city, but I beg to differ) and so I do not hear the clatter of train cars or the announcers’ voices or the mix of many languages at any given time. So many different people come to Tokyo from all over the world, even from within Japan itself, so there’s also a real diversity of people moving through the city.

    I visited my third crown jewel garden, Kairakuen in Mito, about a two hour train ride from Tokyo. The garden’s name references a particular kind of pleasure and ease. This philosophical aspect of the garden felt like a natural conclusion to my time off, as both were something I thought in sustainable and nourishing forms. Much of the pleasure we have access to on a daily basis is not…healthy? It’s at least not sustainable, as we try to consume our way out of loneliness and mortality and lovelessness and anger. Instead, Kairakuen was a place for everyone to retreat to rest in the beauty of the plum trees and the exceptionally beautiful Koubountei, a three floor residence with rooms painted in different designs. Kairakuen, of the three crown jewels, was always treated as a public space rather than the domain of the wealthy.

    momiji (maple) room in Kobountei

    The plum trees were still in bloom, so I wandered the plum grove multiple times, breathing in the scent of the trees. Photos can never capture smell and they fade from memory, only to be evoked in surprising ways later. (Proust taught us this, I suppose.) I was acutely aware of the impermanent nature of smell as I sat beneath the blossoms, enjoying my onigiri for the day. I enjoyed watching people show each other the blossoms, snatches of Japanese conversation floating toward me and away.

    white and fire-pink blossoms in Kairakuen

    I think the Japanese acknowledgement of the shaping relationship between people and nature is sound, much more sound than the culture I come from which views nature as valuable only for resource extraction or feelings of sublimity (these two things may be related). The Japanese garden is sometimes derided as being artificial to which the Japanese respond, rather sensibly, with “well…yeah.” Men cannot make mountains, though, in my country, they work very hard to destroy them. But in a Japanese garden, men can create mountains. Mountains can be made with carefully placed stones that evoke legend and symbolism. Ponds can stand for lakes, and the barest of fields suddenly becomes the plains. The Japanese gardens are worlds created to satisfy a need for beauty and one that engages all of our senses and faculties.

    Imagination is where beauty begins.

    I haven’t been working on any writing in the last two weeks, even this blog was a casualty of my travels and my job starting. But this problem of imagination and beauty, of how we restore our souls, especially when we don’t have money or means, interests me very much. That problem of restoration and beauty is the center of a story I’ve been working on for a couple of years about tiredness, inspired by Byung-Chul Han’s The Burnout Society. (That book actually saved my life.) Maybe I’ll get back to it since I’ve returned from trip, full of sustaining images and memories to get me through the workday.

  • love & work

    love & work

    Graffiti in Florence. “Videocourse for how to construct healthy relationships. 150 dollars.”

    Today my essay on Feminism in Revolt, an edited collection of Carla Lonzi’s work, will come out on Full Stop. I have long been fascinated by Italian feminism, in particular because of the way its writing is often experimental and outside the academic realm. Italian feminism, too, has an entire different universe of concepts unrelated to American feminism which has a hard time thinking past “gender” as a concept, even if it collects a lot of modifiers along the way. It ends up being very monotone and not at all interested in what it means to live and how one might want to do so.

    In my essay on Full Stop, I explore the significance and experimental nature of Lonzi’s writing. She is rarely treated as a writer–only as a critic and feminist. But I think she is an artist, using her life to create new and surprising works. In this post, I’m going to follow a thread that got cut from the essay because it is far more relevant to my blog’s usual themes of living and (not) working. Lonzi’s enactment of feminism, to me, has close ties to an anti-work ethic that many miss if they take her self-narration at face value. Lonzi, at least in the excerpts that we have in English, doesn’t necessary use the language of the anti-work left, which has a strong presence in Italian leftist thought.

    In teaching Lonzi for the first time, I was reminded of how distant Italian feminism is and how useful it is to give some context. Lonzi lived from 1931-1982 and was the cofounder of a group of Italian feminists called Rivolta Feminile. The group experimented with different kinds of consciousness-raising as a way to extract themselves from what they saw as a male-dominated culture. This culture had little respect for different ways of being or living, and its subjectivity was often geared toward profit and the harm of others. One of the key aspects of Rivolta Feminile, like that of the Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective’s philosophy, was that developing autonomous relationships between women was a valid political practice that could create different kinds of freedom. Freedom is often what we see Lonzi searching for in her writing, though she called it “authenticity.”

    Her first book, Autoritratto, or Autoportrait, is a collage of interviews she did with mostly male artists and one woman artist who was also involved with Rivolta Feminile, Carla Accardi. The book is not very enjoyable, in my opinion, but it does mark the end of her career as an art critic. What concerned Lonzi about art-making was the way it destroyed relationships. The language of her critique came from a feminist perspective, of course, critiquing the figure of a male artist’s autonomous subjectivity forsaking the real background that enables and produces him. This would include any women that reproduce his labor. Lonzi also tires of being the critic in that it puts her in service of the art and art world rather than her own subjectivity. In other words, she had to submit her subjectivity to a commodity, even if a special kind of commodity, and that she found intolerable. Refusing the exploitation, she left art criticism altogether.

    She affected a similar kind of leaving with the publication of Vai Pure, a dialogue with her long-term partner, the artist Pietro Consagro. The book is transcription of video recordings that Lonzi took of their final argument. It is, quite frankly, an amazing document. Using her personal experience, Lonzi shines a light on conflicts in relationships that seem universal: the lack of understanding, a lack of gratitude, and a lack of care. But in the context of feminism, this argument takes on a heightened significance as Lonzi is struggling to live out feminism in her day-to-day life with a man she feels does not appropriately appreciate her. Vai Pure is often very funny as Pietro demands examples from Carla as she lists her grievances and as Carla struggles to explain to him the stress of trying to be a feminist while also being partner to a man who doesn’t seem to care a whole lot about feminism.

    Within the written work Pietro publishes he does not (to her mind) acknowledge her role in his art sufficiently. Instead, his work operates on a liberal assumption: “Everyone creates an image of himself, a resumé, grants himself himself his preferred identity” while everyone in his liberal circle, clinging to the “abstract originality of the individual,” consents to the idea that ‘I don’t talk about you, you don’t talk about me” (246). This is an insane basis for art, let alone society. In reproducing the abstract individual who sells his labor willingly and freely (note the language of resume here), Lonzi accuses Pietro of colluding in capitalist subjectivity.

    If that point seems a little, well, abstract, there’s another critique that Lonzi makes which seems even more heartbreaking in its universality and simplicity. Keep in mind that Consagra is an artist, an original freelancer who has some control over his labor. In a translated excerpt of Vai Pure not included in Feminism in Revolt, Lonzi delivers a huge blow:

    I don’t know how to name it. We eat lunch with the feeling that you have to go to the studio, you come back in the evening with the feeling that you must recharge your batteries and in the morning you are off to the studio again … Even when we are at Elba Island [on holiday], you don’t want to go climbing on the rocks, because you want to work on a drawing, on a project, on something, and you accuse me of stealing time from your work. You give me the remainder of your time in the afternoon. We don’t walk around the island, we don’t take walks, we meet people only and exclusively for work, we have restricted the world for ourselves to the people that are interested in your work, whoever they are, clever people or idiots, but it is the work that counts. You must understand that our whole life is structured by work, all of it, that we are never together for ourselves. It’s just a pause, a rest from work. The vital, conscious, and active moment, the promised land is work … You don’t have a schedule, you don’t have a job, you don’t have obligations, but you create a more constraining situation than if you had a job and a boss. (Excerpt translated by Claire Fontaine, in e-flux.)

    Even the artist lives his whole life around work, making time for his partner rather than living his life and making his art an accessory to it. Lonzi has no patience for this; it hurts her deeply to come second to Consagra’s art process.

    Lonzi estranges us from the typical vision of art as an expression of human greatness or creativity. From the perspective of relationships, art is an inhuman process, merely an extension of capitalist production, if a highly specialized one. It is no different than other forms of labor for pay, it just arrogates prestige to itself.

    Lonzi’s entire oeuvre is dedicated to the question: what kind of art can we make if we are unwilling to destroy our lives and relationships? While it’s true that art might outlast us, do we really want to live our lives as if we are already dead?

  • My Career Break

    My Career Break

    Graffiti I saw in Rome on my way to the airport.

    We’re all fed up with work.

    It’s a mood, a structure of feeling, that all of us look at waged work and think, “yuck.” But it’s difficult to act on that mood. Who can really leave work behind? I think of Rental Person Who Does Nothing and the anonymous author of “Tang Ping,” Luo Huazhong, who works two months a year and has monthly costs of 200 yuan. Both of them left work behind, but in different ways.

    I, too, was fed up with work. It was somehow both soul-crushingly boring and kept me just busy enough that I stressed constantly. I needed an off-ramp, quickly. My partner had just taken a year to get a degree and leave customer service work entirely. He finished his degree and got a job in Montana, one that would cover rent entirely. Our roles swapped: I would quit my own job. I turned in my notice, moved out of the North Carolina apartment, and flew to Montana after a couple of months.

    There was very little information about taking a career break when I started, with the exception of Julie de Vivre’s archive (which I highly recommend). I read about travel writers who were digital nomads but had financed themselves through sold houses and in demand careers. This, obviously, was not an option for me. I read about people who lived in communities that helped them reduce their spending considerably and so their career breaks were “permanent.” These people invariably had gardens that required a lot of work. I read about someone who cashed out $190,000 in savings. I read about Luo Huazhong and his 200 yuan a day and knew I could never do that, either.

    But I did think I could manage a year on what I had saved without being wealthy, gardening or eating tofu and rice for every meal. It turns out I was right, thanks to my partner covering rent when I was in Montana. (I could have contributed toward rent, but he refused.) I covered all my other expenses which included travel to Japan and Italy, as well as travels to see my family. (Recapped here.)

    As of right now, I have about $10,000 of the $24,000 that I started with. My one-year mark will be on March 31, 2025. I’m being transparent about this because, before I started, I felt doomed to work forever, parceling out my time in 1-2 week stints of vacation time that feels so oppressive. I used to think you had to be wealthy to take this much time off of work. But it’s more about assessing how much you need to live on and how much you’re willing to give up for the freedom.

    I haven’t been entirely work free. I finished writing my book (though I haven’t received any money from it) and taught a couple of classes at Hugo House for Writers in the past year. I have done free book reviewing for a few sites I admire. I published a couple of paid essays. I have also been working on multiple book projects that I enjoy and hope to publish in the next year or so. These are all things I have enjoyed doing and took on willingly. Taking a break from work let me focus on things I really enjoy instead of having to cram those things into the tired hours around a commute and office stay. I used to have a 1.5 hour commute (1 hour if the traffic wasn’t bad) each way to work, meaning I went to the gym at 5 AM to ensure I fit it in, and then had to work 8 to 5. I would get home after 6 and have no energy for loving on my mammals, my partner and our two dogs, or for doing things I wanted to. I was completely drained.

    Consider my day now. I start each day with coffee and work on one or more of my writing projects. My partner gets up and one of us makes a second cup of coffee for all. (Even the dog. Kidding!) Then I go to the gym, come home, take care of the dog, and make my lunch. After lunch, I do some household stuff, then I take a nap, especially if my gym session is particularly heavy. Then I’ll study one of my two languages, Italian or Japanese. I make dinner some nights, my partner makes dinner the other nights. TV before bed. And then I start all over again. On a week to week basis, my partner and I go to the hot springs in nearby Boulder. That’s our big adventure. If this sounds at all boring to you, rest assured, this is the perfect life for me. It is a nourishing routine, doing things I love, and not having to suffer 8 hours a day for someone else’s profit.

    My initial concern about taking a career break was money. How would I survive!? But now my concern is: how can I go back to work after this unparalleled stint of freedom? How will I survive having to crush myself down small again to fit into a work environment?

    In reading about career breaks and their endings, the key is to learn how to “sell” your time off to employers as a bonus. This means thinking of your career break as a time in which you gained skills that you can sell in the marketplace. Apparently, my Japan trip wasn’t an enjoyable encounter with a culture that has long fascinated me but an upskilling in intercultural exchange and soft peoples kills. This annoys me. Not everything we do, as humans, needs to be folded into work or seen as job training.

    My time off, frankly, isn’t an employer’s business. It is deeply disturbing to me that, as a culture, we give so much power to prospective employers who can demand information at will and whose power deforms us into performing creatures who will do anything for money. This is an unfreedom: it means people live their entire lives around an imaginary figure’s expectations rather than their own desires. For example, career guides recommend, in the strongest terms, that you make sure your blog is employer friendly. Don’t write anything to upset them or make them think you won’t be a good worker. You don’t, then, even have free speech in your own time; not really. Elizabeth Anderson argues in Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives that employers govern our lives in way that are far more insidious and damaging than some forms of state control.

    So that finds me here, on a snowy February morning, thinking about what my career break has meant to me. And I think it has, ultimately, meant reclaiming a kind of freedom. It has given me time to recover myself beyond the status of “worker.” It has also helped me recover pleasure in activities that began to feel like obligations. Writing, for example. Whether this career break becomes permanent, when I leave the career ladder for a different relationship to work, or is just a pause, I don’t know. But I’m sure I’ll see you back in the life of waged labor soon enough.

  • 2024 in Review

    2024 in Review

    Navigli District, Milan

    In March of 2024, I left my job in the university.

    I had major burnout. I had been cycling from burn out to burn out, (read: emotional implosion to emotional implosion) for five years by the time I finally left. I did not have a job lined up but I had roughly $24,000 in savings from jobs, my personal retirement, and a random cash account that I kept to catch travel money. The discourse in the US is to build your entire life around funding retirement and keeping health insurance. But I couldn’t do it.

    I needed a break.

    I’m not quite at the one-year mark of my sabbatical yet, but I wanted to reflect on that period, from March 31st until now, a period of my life not defined by work or my earning potential. I have been working since I was fifteen or sixteen and basically worried about money since then. This is terrible! I won’t say I haven’t been worried about money as I worked. It is hilarious how many times my partner told me to put away the resume because I would be just fine. Anyway, here’s to the year in review.

    japan: april-may 2024

    In October of the previous year, I booked a 40 day trip to Japan, fully intent on taking my vacation time and then some in order to go on this trip. I had not been planning to leave my job at that point. But in November of 2023, I decided to leave my job so I could take this trip without limits.

    I made my way from Tokyo to Nagoya to Kanazawa to Osaka to Kyoto to Hiroshima to Beppu to Imabari to Takamatsu to Okayama back to Tokyo to fly home. Phew! I ran out of breath just typing all of that. I want to do a more extensive write-up of my trip later. (I do have an essay about my experience coming out in the first issue of SOLO Travel Mag, so check it out!) But I will mention 2 things that were life-changing for me.

    First, sento. I had been determined to find tattoo-friendly onsen during my time in Japan only to find out about their more welcoming, far more plentiful cousin, the sento. It’s a public bath house with a variety of features: hot baths, cold baths, medicinal baths, saunas, etc. It was the place where I got to interact with Japanese people on a daily basis and they were, without fail, friendly to me. We even managed some hilarious conversations with what little of the other’s language we had. One woman in Osaka was thrilled that I had discovered sento. I went to a sento multiple times a week because they were so affordable (anywhere from 400-500 yen) and they restored my body after walking 10+ miles most days.

    me looking like a happy nerd after my sento time in Hiroshima.

    The second thing: gardens. Japanese gardens were my initial reason for traveling to Japan, as there were a couple when I lived in Seattle and then one when I lived in Durham. I travelled to the crown jewel gardens of Kanazawa (Kenrokuen) and Okayama (Korakuen, which has 3 Michelin stars, incidentally). They deserved every ounce of praise they received. Korakuen was my favorite of the two as its history and use was interesting.

    This is Korakuen in Okayama. It’s my favorite picture of my entire trip.

    The most significant garden I went to, though, was in Hiroshima. It was called Shukkein garden and it bore the history of the atomic bomb. A beautiful garden had regrown. The signs told of a mass grave, as residents headed to the garden after the bomb because they didn’t know where else to go. Images showed devastation and the haunting outline of a bridge that survived.

    My trip is on my mind every day and I can’t wait to go back to Japan.

    family visits: june 2024

    Coming back to the US was a bit of a shock, I had book revisions to manage and family to visit. I went from speaking only a few phrases each day (if any at all) to suddenly communicating at full blast all the time. It was a little overwhelming! I visited all my grandparents in the great state of Michigan before heading home to visit with my in-laws. They had come to visit us in the lovely season in Montana, before the summer heat.

    I enjoyed visiting with everyone and then had to figure out what to do with myself now that I wasn’t planning a trip…

    book revisions: june-july 2024

    My time was carved out in a major overhaul of my book draft for my publisher. The feedback I got on the first draft from my editors was kind but I knew the book was no good. So I stripped it for parts and worked through it at a prose level. I broke down my sentences and explained things as simply as I could. This probably sounds like a no-brainer: it was not how I was taught to write! I had one meeting with an advisor during my dissertation where she helped me break sentences down simply but I forgot that lesson for almost two years until it came time for me to write a book for undergraduates.

    I actually enjoy editing more than writing. It works my puzzle-loving brain a bit more than the generating phase. I also can tell when I’ve edited well. I sent the book back and received an enthusiastic YES from my editor.

    turning 31: august 2024

    Turning 30 was a bit of a crisis for me. I had struggled with intense awareness of mortality as a result of the pandemic and so I worried that turning 31 would be marked by the same feeling that time was running out.

    I had no such feelings and, in fact, I felt lighter. I was able to stretch into my days because, as time passed, I was less and less beholden to the sensation of working constantly. I had a book coming out from a publisher–my life-long dream–and I had all the time in the world to write and lift weights. I had literally nothing to complain about!

    book published: october 14, 2024

    The book came out! A little earlier than expected and I wasn’t quite sure what to do with it. It didn’t help that I would be in Italy by the time my author copies arrived…

    italy: october-november 2024

    I planned a second trip, based on my budget, to Italy. I wanted to meet the Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective, a feminist group based in Milan. They, to this day, run a feminist bookshop run by volunteers. Their book, Sexual Difference: A Theory of Social Symbolic Practice, changed my life and thinking when I read it. I don’t talk about it much in the book, University for a Good Woman, but I did write an essay about them for Oh Reader, issue 17 that also came out in October. I packed my bag and headed to Milan.

    The inside of the Libreria delle donne di Milano. I left with an extra copy of Sexual Difference, their journal, and Carla Lonzi’s Taci, Anzi Parla. I should have gotten more!

    In their book, the Milan Women underscore the practice of gratitude between women, acknowledging what you’ve received from others. In my acknowledgements page, I tried to mention everyone I had to be grateful for (inevitably leaving off names, much to my horror). But the Milan Women, for some reason, didn’t make it. So I decided to meet them, give them a copy of my essay and book. My Italian is minimal, but what I found interesting was how passionately they argued and how they managed disagreement. I had never seen such lively political discussion in my life. This sticks with me.

    After my time in Milan, I went to Venice, then Florence, then Rome. It was overwhelming to see so many ruins and so much art. I was amazed by how small Venice and Florence were, the way they evoked older ways of organizing cities. I ate fabulously, though was sick for a lot of my trip. I also felt a lot of pressure to see things: because Italy has such a long history of tourism, there are big feelings about what must seen and how, and I did not enjoy that aspect. I was supposed to spend over a week in Palermo, but cut my trip short because of my illness.

    family visit: november 2024

    I returned to visit my parents and sisters in South Carolina for about a week. It was refreshing to see them, as I had last seen them in January when they hosted me before I moved to Montana. We had a lot of fun and good food while I was there. I miss them all immensely. I unfortunately headed home before Thanksgiving because I was homesick, but I celebrated Thanksgiving with Mountain Man (my partner).

    hot springs: december 2024

    Going to Japan made me appreciate living in Montana a little bit more. I complain about it a lot as a joke, my partner fretting about my unhappiness. But Montana has tons of hot springs! It is basically the closest to the aspect of Japan I will get in all of the US. We are a 30 minute drive from my favorite hot spring, Boulder Hot Springs, which has a clothing-optional women’s only side with both a hot bath and a cold bath. (It is divine.)

    Mountain Man, the dog, and I all trekked up to Hot Springs, MT, a 3-ish hour drive that takes us near Flathead. Hot Springs has a hotel with hot springs pools as well as several smaller “plunges” (the local term) that operate on the honor system. You drop 5 dollars in a box and soak. So cheap! We stayed at Alameda’s Hot Springs Retreat which had its own private soaking tub. It was my first time in a claw-foot bath. The water was sulfurous which was also new for me.

    Me in Rose’s Plunge in Hot Springs, MT. Those are the Camas Bath House Ruins on the left.

    I’m not normally a fan of outdoor baths, but Rose’s Plunge was perfect for two of my soaks while we were in Hot Springs. I hope to go back soon.

    now, 2025

    Admittedly, I had my crises throughout the year where I doubted the wisdom of taking time off; I got rejected for a job I sort of wanted; I also felt like I should leave writing behind entirely. But somehow, I kept going. I’m working on a novel that I’m really excited about: it’s about restaurant workers and inspired by the humor of Terry Pratchett. (Humor is difficult! But I crack myself up sometimes.) I have published a few things this past year which is a 1000% improvement over past years. But I still feel reticent about trying to make a writer of myself. As if I’m blocked somehow.

    But still, I show up to the page every day and meet my goals. I have an essay/review about Carla Lonzi (remember her?) coming out in March and am working on an essay/review about Nanae Aoyama’s A Perfect Day to Be Alone. These are both part of my second nonfiction book project, tentatively titled Women with Issues that collects and refines my criticism about contemporary feminist authors and why their work matters.

    Finally: thing I did not mention was weightlifting. It has been absolutely central to my mental health. I’m in a block (period of programming, about 10 weeks) where I am hitting previously unheard of numbers for my squat, bench, and deadlift. I am so proud of myself and I feel so good when I leave the gym.

    Tired, need a haircut, but I always love squat day!

    Here’s to heavier weights and weightier dreams in 2025. xo

  • After Burnout

    After Burnout

    “People can die because of the stress of adapting to society. Or they can lose every ounce of their energy. I’ve seen it happen.”
    –Shoji Morimoto, Rental Person Who Does Nothing

    I’ve been writing a book about the stress of graduate school. During that time, I suffered severe burnout. It’s been a couple of years now, though I feel as if I am constantly on the edge of burnout. How do you recover from burnout? I quit my job and moved to Montana where my partner took a new job. I’ve been floating in unemployment while I work on my book, travelling a little. Is idleness the solution to burnout?

    I think and read a lot about idleness as a concept which seems radically other to our moment. We must be doing or consuming at every moment. I find it hard to do nothing, to take a day where nothing must be planned or done. Days filled with TV, online scrolling, work, reproductive labor, it all feels very overwhelming. I’ve always wanted to write a book but that’s still work! And I have a graduate school hangover: every moment could be for writing, so why isn’t it? This is really unhealthy and unhelpful. But difficult to shake.

    I just finished reading Shoji Morimoto’s Rental Person Who Does Nothing, a surprisingly moving account of resisting work and labor. It has made me reflect on my ingrained worked tendencies. It also makes me think about what makes work, well, work and how we might recover from burnout. There is no prescription here: no bubble baths or long walks. (Though you should definitely do those things.) But rather, Morimoto helps us see a way out of burnout through being with others.

    Morimoto became famous a few years ago for receiving requests on twitter, mostly for companionship, and he obliges. He does not get paid, though he often gets his travel reimbursed and gifts from those he fulfills requests for. He lives on savings to support his partner and their kid, spending his day fulfilling requests to do nothing. Often, he watches someone while they work on an essay, goes with them to an event, or eats at a restaurant with him. He does not do labor for others. It is almost a performance art piece, this doing of nothing. And it really is “nothing,” in Morimoto’s words, as he tries to think nothing and say as little as possible in these encounters.

    As I said, reading about idleness a lot, I have come across work with similar ideas to Morimoto’s. I can see parallels between Morimoto and the work of Emi Yagi (Diary of A Void), Jenny O’Dell (How to Do Nothing) and even Luo Huazhong’s “Lie Flat is Justice.” I think Morimoto gets to the heart of what is so radical about doing nothing in his work, much better than I have ever read.

    The origin story of Morimoto’s Rental Person persona is complex and has at least three causes. First, his own alienation at work and through job hunting (of having to be defined by your abilities and skills). Second, tragedy in his own family: his brother’s breakdown and his sister’s suicide. Both were work related. Third, the birth of his child which showed to him that there are points in a human life where we live according to our desires with no repression from within and we receive the unconditional care and resources we need without any expectations for payment. (Later, your parents may blackmail you, but for a while, you’re safe.)

    A central fear that connects all three of these causes is a fear of calcifying into a character, of being made to inhabit a role. Morimoto’s work, as in the book and in his “do nothing” rentals (which aren’t even rentals!), refuses roles entirely. In fact, part of what alienated him about seeking work and then being a worker was that he had to describe himself as if he were a character. Morimoto has an almost superstitious relation to language in that he felt he had to constantly renarrate himself on Twitter to avoid becoming a kind of “character” defined by his consumption, strengths, abilities, and so on.

    Morimoto totally rejects the definition of life as achieving some kind of identity, of stepping into roles that we use to define us, even if they do not encapsulate us–even if they hurt us. Part of what is alienating about roles, as I finally saw reading Morimoto, despite years of thinking about alienation, is that they are always relations of exchange. The worker role sells labor for life. The spouse/child/friend/relation role is about exchanging labor for affection, social status, belonging.

    Morimoto discovers that his own role as Rental Person allows other people to leave the alienating reciprocity of their relationships. He frequently wonders why he is the one receiving requests rather than family or friends. He soon thinks about it this way:

    In Japan people are very conscious of reciprocity. Someone receiving a gift will try to reciprocate with a gift of greater value. This mentality promotes a gift-giving cycle, which helps to sustain relationships. I think people look for similar reciprocity in terms of behaviour between friends. If A does something for B, then B will try to do something more for A. The writer Tomoaki Kageyama describes the sense of obligation that a recipient feels as ‘a healthy feeling of debt’. For me, though, there’s nothing healthy about it at all.

    I think this emphasis on the gift has particular social manifestations in Japan but I feel this acutely in my own life. I feel I must monitor constantly to avoid being a state of social debt. I don’t know why this is the case, except I feel it as an infringement on my freedom, as if every action I take has to be somehow repaid and vice versa. In simpler terms, we are working even in our personal relationships.

    Morimoto argues that the somewhat impersonal nature of social media actually provides a new set of social relations that are less stressful, more human and more humane. He writes that the social media relationship “which falls short of ‘friendship’, can be quite convenient. You don’t feel you have to worry too much about the other person – there’s no sense of expecting anything from each other.” This is why many people do not contact their friends and family, but contact Morimoto instead. There is no social contract. (Except that he needs his travel reimbursement.) Like character, relationships can calcify, become “fixed” and “carry restrictions and responsibilities. Every named relationship entails particular things you have to do, certain expectations that you have to meet.” Thus the unnamed relationships of social media provide us a different model of relating without expectation or obligation.

    This reminds me of Byung-Chul Han’s amazing essay The Burnout Society (video linked, but you should find the book too!). The Burnout Society concludes with a description of a utopian society of the tired. Han hopes for a new kind of social relationship which he calls “friendliness-as-indifference, where “no one and nothing dominates or commands,” a relation that requires “the I [ego] grows smaller” (33). But for the I to get smaller requires a certain giving up of the narcissism and “I”- centeredness of our society of work and competition. Think of Morimoto’s refusal of crafting an identity. That giving up of the “I,” for Han, appears, or originates, as tiredness.

    I find this passage so beautiful:

    This tiredness founds a deep friendship and makes it possible to conceive of a community that requires neither belonging nor relation [Verwandtschaft]. Human beings and things show themselves to be connected through a friendly and.

    This “deep friendship” rests on a “friendly and” something that Morimoto’s work demonstrates clearly, as he feels free to say yes or no to encounters he chooses and never feels constrained by them. Equally, this idea of community predicated on “neither belonging nor relation” is radical and strikes to the heart of almost every political conception of community, left or right. What could friendly tiredness give us, as a society, if we just decided to stop working so hard?

    For Morimoto, like for Luo Huazhong, existing deserves its own recognition and is its own reward. Morimoto’s refusal of exchange in its most oppressive manifestations as well as his refusal to be someone, to try to be a character defined by work and consumption, is about showing to us the ugliness of our social reality. But it also shows us that maybe through each other we can be different.

  • On Solitude

    On Solitude

    In Claire Dederer’s New Yorker essay about art monsters, she writes:

    For me the particular monstrousness of completing my work has always closely resembled loneliness: Leaving behind the family, posting up in a borrowed cabin or a cheaply bought motel room. If I can’t detach myself entirely, then I’m hiding in my chilly office, wrapped in scarves and fingerless gloves, a fur hat plopped upon my head, going hell-for-leather, just trying to finish. Because the finishing is the part that makes the artist. The artist must be monster enough not just to start the work, but to complete it. And to commit all the little savageries that lie in between.

    Solitude is defined here as a kind of “savagery,” in which the artist, particularly a woman artist, has to commit some kind of violence to extricate herself from the life around her, literally paying for the time to be alone, to be a separate self. I find this fascinating: there’s something difficult about having a self in day-to-day life for women.

    Indeed, solitude would seem to be a natural good, as Sara Maitland observes, of a culture that values individualism, voice, and autonomy. Unfortunately, this culture only nominally values these things. Maitland observes:

    We declare that personal freedom and autonomy is both a right and good, but we think anyone who exercises that freedom autonomously is ‘sad, mad or bad’.

    Enter the monstrous woman artist who demands time, autonomy, and freedom.

    This battle for solitude is also the heart of Sheila Heti’s Motherhood, which could have just as well been called Solitude. In an echo of Maitland and Dederer, Heti writes about the myriad ways in which women’s labor is captured: taking care of men, having children, thinking about having children, having to argue about why they do not want children. Heti is distraught by the ways in which women shrink themselves in space and time, calls women especially “miserly” in the time they allow themselves, whether for their creative processes or for their own self-development.

    I’m thinking about this as I’ve finished a second draft of my novel, the final 30,000 words written while I was alone in Durham, NC and before I moved to Montana to join my partner. The first draft of the novel was written last February in an Airbnb in Raleigh where I was free of any responsibility and literally trapped in the rental which had only a coffee maker, toaster, and microwave. (Okay, trapped is a strong word: the neighborhood wasn’t that walkable and there was no way for me to distract myself with shops, walks, making elaborate meals, or going to the gym.) That airbnb cost me about $200 and it was possibly the best money I’ve ever spent in my life.

    Why? Because in that space, I felt no implicit or explicit demands on my time, either by my partner or my dogs. I could unspool in time and space. There was nothing to bump into, no one to interrupt my thinking, no one for me to snarl at or project my insecurities onto, I did not have to make myself useful. It was not strange for me to lay in a bed for 7 hours straight and write in a tiny notebook. That this is what it took to write the novel is not surprising but it made me think about my day-to-day life much differently. I could not do the serious work I wanted to do in my own home, as if that space were hostile to who I was and who I wanted to be, a site only of labor and not of rest, creativity and self-exploration.

    I think about those brief months of solitude in Durham and wonder about what I have given up in the move: the trade-offs I’ve made. You win some things, like enjoying someone’s company, sharing life with them and all their uniqueness, sharing a meal, not having to commute. And some things are lost or more scarce like solitude (after all, I still have to do that most disagreeable thing, waged labor). Every moment of writing feels hard-won, eked out among interruptions and bad feelings rather than emerging from a jittery excitement like when the space around me was charged with possibility rather than its curtailment. A life of solitude frightened me at the time: but there’s a possibly such a the fright did not belong to me.