2024-01-25 | Dirtbag, Chipping Sodbury
I read Amber A’lee Frost’s Dirtbag in a fitting context - three in the morning on a Monday on an e-reader taking a bath to try to alleviate
an acutely painful fever, at one point cracking a beer in the wee hours (which I of course do not recommend for a fever or for many other things,
but, well, there you have it). It’s a collection of essays/ memoir from a person prominent in the American online left over the past decade
(I was not), who was active in Occupy Wall Street and in the Bernie Sanders campaigns (I was not), on a subculture-famous bro-podcast
(that I have never listened to, but whose logo is that of the American Drug Enforcement Administration’s Cocaine Intelligence Unit, which led
me down a small
{rabbit hole}
of other drug-related official insignia the creative minds in the US federal government have come up).
As a book, I feel mixed about it. I am (hopefully?) not quite terminally online, but the internet has turned out to be pivotal to my life, and I can very much get the
appeal of its weirder corners. There was a brief moment when Twitter was genuinely fun for me, and I even met some close friends there, bizarrely,
against the backdrop of the usual infinite scroll. I am interested in a viable American left,
and so is Frost, and her grumpiness is very welcome. She efficiently
underscores the difference between the performative aspects of American liberalism and an actual left politics that is interested in
material conditions (unionized labour, accessible healthcare). I like her personal narratives —
she has a distinctive and engaging way of summarizing where she came from and is going. This
{interview}
about the book was an enjoyable listen (and contains the sentence NYU is basically a real estate venture with a side hustle in
education, which is deeply relatable to some universities I went to, and explains a lot).
However, the book doesn’t quite hang together - it’s a series of essays, some of which have been published before, but the overarching point
didn’t quite land for me (again, I read it at 3 in the morning, feverish). She warns at the outset that she has ADHD and so the voice may be
meandering, which is a forever problem of going for a beer with some people (me), but I don’t think is an excuse for not organizing the thing
that you’re writing. At points she is vulgar just for fun and it doesn’t entirely work for me. But the disjointed insights, grossness and all,
are still, I think, worth reading - a testament to a specific place and time in the American subconscious. It’s not my vantage point, and it
didn’t work out, and it might not ever, but nevertheless, a witness.
{A sizeable amount of the people who were actively interested in a viable American left went post-ironic right, which is a
{fascinating phenomenon}
and also frankly a failure of any number of things. An ongoing question for many people I know is how to stay
engaged in the public/political sphere in a long-term sustainable way.
Some pretty profoundly stupid judicial and legislative things happened in Czechia this month, of the sort that are both viscerally
painful and that I remember being angry about over a decade ago. An (as-usual-entirely-precise) friend once remarked that in Czechia an
extra frustrating thing happens in these situations - in the case of a disagreement between two sides with an unequal power dynamic,
bystanders will say “oh, just don’t fight, it’s not worth it”, and “be reasonable”. For me, expressing any emotion at all in public
has in the past borne the risk of dismissal and condescension, and I am accordingly careful of where I invest emotional energy.
I’m furthermore not interested in activism as identity, and, well, it’s none of our first times around this particular block.
In private, you can write the people responsible emails about how they are failures,
but that has limited effect & also is probably a bad habit to get into.
I haven’t solved it, but I have been
finding, not for the first time, that
really actively enjoying and noticing everyday life — walks, trees, dogs, friends, terrible jokes, pubs, music —
besides being well worth doing in its own right,
actively helps in finding a stable place from which to do any number of things, including difficult conversations.
Furthermore it’s a practice that can be trained. Get stoked, get organized?
(It's of course far from a new idea. Among many, the somewhat-pathetic-but-on-point
{dance scene}
from a somewhat pathetic film that I quite like shares that sentiment.)}
I’m back in England, and it's very nice. I had a work meeting in Bristol and took the opportunity to cycle there from Stroud, where
I saw a sound-as-hell friend that I haven't seen in years, rolling sheep meadows, marginally too many pints of ale,
many good dogs, etc. I passed a sign
for Chipping Sodbury and was reminded of
{this}
great song by John Cale, which has inspired a minor John Cale listening kick.
{So great.}