“Does Marx distinguish between productive and unproductive labor?”

I wish I could say the middle age, British, adjunct professor’s voice reverberate in the room, but too bad this cramped space was originally designed for music practice.

Silence reverberates in the room as everyone looks down at their thick block of Capital. Outside a tiny window, barren branches sway in lukewarm January wind, blocking my view of the adjacent building.

“Jonathan?” Now the self-identified Anarcho-Maoist softens his tone. Jonathan is a good kid, but even he averts the Englishman’s bespectacled glance–before uttering a few dry blinks and half an awkward smile. Meanwhile, Emily flips through the assigned chapter vehemently.

The (adjunct) professor teaching fellow reads out a page number, then a few lines of dense, terse writing.

“So, someone tell me if Marx thinks there are different kinds of labor?”

“Uh, there isn’t ?” Jonathon volunteers, still blinking.

“Damn, how much did you guys drink last weekend?”

Now laughter fills the holes in all five sound-absorbing walls to the brim. Bodies frozen in silence shake loose in giggles.

The teaching fellow resigns and begins a minilecture, chalk-on-blackboard style. It’s admirable he held on to the ideal of class discussion for more than a semester. After so many failed attempts.

//////

I pretend to do important business things while waiting for Eve to finish talking to him after class. She definitely has a crush on him.

You gotta admit, love is powerful. For someone who hasn’t done any reading since the last paper, Eve has a lot to ask. What do you think of this sentence? Is Marx still relevant? Oh also, what do you think about the Zizek-Peterson debate?

“I didn’t see it, what do you think?”

“Oh… they were both blabbering. It was really bad. Zizek makes no sense at all. It’s like he’s reading from a paper with random patterns. Peterson didn’t even know Hegel was. Maybe he was googling it on his laptop.”

“That sounds about right. Excellent critique.”

Writing Notes:

It was difficult to construct a narrative in which a meme is somehow actively involved. This made me reflect on how memes are usually circulated without comments beyond “haha” and subsequent emulation. However, I notice that a lot of our speech and personal opinions are shaped by this silent consumption. In the case of the recent WW3 meme wave, it seems memeing has substituted for opinion and response.

I added the I perspectives during editing, took it out, and put it back in. The piece reads somehow a lot more critical and harsh without a self-described narrator. When the “I” is added in, however, the narrator seems a bit sarcastic. My intention is not to condemn but to describe people and phenomena, but I enjoy the sarcasm so I kept it in there.

I enjoyed reading Nick Drnaso’s Sabrina partially because of the novelty of reading a graphic novel and partially because I was intrigued by the story and characters.  I am wondering how the effect of this story would have differed in various formats, and also how integral the graphic novel features were to the development of the plot. I thought the ability of the graphic novel to transport the reader into different settings and mind frames is superior to traditional books. For example, while emphasizing the fake news narrative through emails and radio, the author only had to display an image of the inbox and radio to set the scene and the reader could focus on the content of the narrative. I was very aware of how much the pace could vary depending on the amount of text on a page. I think this created a cyclical effect that made it seem like more time had passed in the story.

I found the combination of illustration with text in Nick Drnaso’s graphic novel Sabrina to be especially intriguing in that it allowed Drnaso to alter the emotional perception of a scene by deciding for example which aspects of a frame are not depicted with as much detail and which colors are used in a panel to portray feeling rather than just the naturally expected shading. In daily life, our psychological states determine which aspects of the sights we see around us should stand out in detail, be left unfocused on, and be perceived as dull or vibrant due to how our personal experiences and expectations shape the world around us, but Drnaso takes on our mind’s work in Sabrina by showing us scenes through the lens of his own perception. As Kat noted, Drnaso’s minimalistic illustration style does seem to speak to how the news should display the truth: “in a black-and-white manner.” In considering this, the final dream Calvin has in Sabrina particularly stood out to me. This dream is illustrated in black-and-white, potentially representative of the idea of truth, yet Sabrina’s murderer is presented as a masked figure whose words are merely repeated phrases from various characters throughout the graphic novel rearranged to create his voice during an imagined conversation with Calvin.  This concept of past voices of others, even of oneself as Calvin’s words are spoken by the dream attacker, falsely constructing a present “black-and-white” reality of the murderer’s identity, and in turn masking the potential for seeing any truth, stood out to me as a final marker for displaying the terrifying capability for false narratives to both become and conceal the truth.