To be in a Time of Incommensurability  

To sleep in your childhood bed for 14 hours the first night you get home, drugged with exhaustion. To leave your room at 2 PM. To check the fridge a few times, between trips for coffee. To hear your mother tell you to clean your room – family is coming soon. Family is coming soon. To feel exhausted again. To stay up even later in hopes of sleeping most of the next morning away. To wake up to the sound of shouting aunts and uncles. To wonder why everything has to be so large, so loud, for them. To creep out of your room to the bathroom, knowing you won’t be heard under the sound of their shrieks. 

To come downstairs and laugh barely as they joke about your ability to sleep the day away. To sleep them away. To feel other. To feel like a brat teenager. To hear your mother’s voice change. To roll your eyes when they spew “political facts.” To feel your face warm when they yell about “illegals” and China and who Jesus loves — but mostly who he doesn’t. To wish you even knew where to start. To pull out your laptop and pull up studies on immigration and crime and employment and show the table the graphics. To feel correct. To glare at your mother for not speaking up. To not be heard over the shouting and the wine and the Turkey in the oven. 

“You don’t know what it means to live in this world, little girl. To really live. I don’t need to hear your facts, I’ve got my own facts. I know the truth and I’ve seen it. I see it everyday.”

To feel small. To swallow disgust. To retreat. To sleep late.

To feel less at home at home. To return to your school and feel warmed by a cold city. To forget, soon, about the distance, the disgust, you felt for your aunties and uncles. 

Process Notes

I was most drawn to Adnan’s ability to transition from everyday happenings to dark, weighty topics in a process that seemed so natural and reflective of the way minds work, the way they forget and remember. I tried to emulate this progression from the everyday to the more weighty content. I was trying to be as accurate to my everyday experience of coming home and facing political differences I feel strongly and struggle to communicate with my family. I wasn’t sure whether I was incorporating enough irony in the description, but I wanted to prioritize being as accurate and precise to my experience as possible. I originally titled the piece “To Be in a Time of Political Polarization,” but I was not sure “political polarization” was exactly what I meant. I wanted to also capture more generally the incommensurability of my experience with my extended family’s, and the way that gap prevents us from stepping into each other’s worlds and mental processes. Thus, I changed the title to “To Be in a Time of Incommensurability,” which felt more fitting. 

I was found myself rereading passages of Hartman’s piece over and over because it seemed so critical to the questions this class inherently raises about representing suffering and injustice as writers. Her piece presented various tensions and questions and moral dilemmas around writing the narratives of silenced people, and refused to wrap a bow around this tension by providing us a clear answer. I thought Keene’s changing narrative tone aided him to, in Hartman’s words, “tell impossible stories.” Hartman calls on writers to “expose and exploit the incommensurability between the experience of the enslaved and the fictions of history, by which I mean the requirements of narrative, the stuff of subjects and plots and ends” (10). This refusal to provide as satisfying story or narrative—that is, to wrap up the conflict or violence in some sort of bow whereby readers can make sense of it—shows throughout Keene’s narrative of Carmel. There were certainly points in which I, as a reader, was confused about who was speaking as the tone of the piece changed fluidly. Closer to the beginning of the narrative, Keene’s spoke about the slaves with Carmel on the plantation in the second person. He broke up this narrative in different sections, at points asking philosophical questions about the role of duty and ethical responsibility that slaves might consider before revolting or resisting. Then, the story develops to reveal Carmel as its main narrator. Throughout the piece, she experiences agency and power in strange ways; she draws anonymously, driven by some overwhelming force to do so. And in the end of the story, she exercises magical powers hinted at before only in the story of her mother. This type of agency and expression provided to Carmel is one we can’t necessarily wrap our heads around. Sometimes it seemed to come out of the blue in the story. I found this to be a really effective way of  “exposing and exploiting the incommensurability between the experience of the enslaved and the fictions of history” that drive storytellers to create a more “cohesive” subject and plot.

Wikipedia Page on the Rust Belt:

“From 1987 to 1999, the US stock market went into stratospheric rise, and this continued to pull wealthy foreign money into US banks, which biased the exchange rate against manufactured goods. Related issues include the decline of the iron and steel industry, the movement of manufacturing to the southeastern states with their lower labor costs,[9] the layoffs due to the rise of automation in industrial processes, the decreased need for labor in making steel products, new organizational methods such as just-in-time manufacturing which allowed factories to maintain production with fewer workers, the internationalization of American business, and the liberalization of foreign trade policies due to globalization.[10] Cities struggling with these conditions shared several difficulties, including population loss, lack of education, declining tax revenues, high unemployment and crime, drugs, swelling welfare rolls, deficit spending, and poor municipal credit ratings….Francis Fukuyama considers the social and cultural consequences of deindustrialization and manufacturing decline that turned a former thriving Factory Belt into a Rust Belt as a part of a bigger transitional trend that he called the Great Disruption:[35] “People associate the information age with the advent of the Internet in the 1990s, but the shift from the industrial era started more than a generation earlier, with the deindustrialization of the Rust Belt in the United States and comparable movements away from manufacturing in other industrialized countries. … The decline is readily measurable in statistics on crime, fatherless children, broken trust, reduced opportunities for and outcomes from education, and the like”.[36]“

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust_Belt

A Coal Miner’s Morning.

Some might call my life simple. Fuck me, though, I wouldn’t say that. I wake up, and before I’ve even made my goddamn coffee I’m attacked by questions I got for myself. Do I give Greg the money to fix his trailer? Even when I know damn well he’ll waste it and lose it and ask me again in 3 weeks? He’s family. But handouts don’t do him no good. They don’t do nobody no good. I outta make him come out stripping with me. Stripping land for coal, that is, ladies. Don’t get too excited! Ha.

Aw hell. Little Jaylee is already up. 5:30 AM. That rascal. “What do you want, you cute little monster? You want some of Daddy’s coffee don’t you, you fucking crazy child. ” 

Of course she’s already hanging from my arm like a little monkey. Fucking Simone Biles type little girl really. Her arms are bigger than her 24 year old big brother’s. He ain’t do shit though, since he moved in with Monica. Got weak. His fuckin baby sister pulls more of her own weight.

“Hell Jaylee, look at me. Speak back to your daddy. Do you want some coffee little one? Some breakfast? Go wake up your mama.”

Damn kid’ll run away and won’t come back till it’s 11 AM and she’s screaming and crying for some goddamn cocoa puffs. Kid knows what she wants. Can’t fucking talk. 5 years old, can’t fucking talk but she knows what she wants and she gets it still. Little rascal. 

“Well well well, if it isn’t the sexiest women I’ve ever seen. Come here mama give me a kiss. I think Jaylee wants some breakfast. Don’t know why that kid won’t ever fucking sleep.”

“Gracie needs a leotard or some shit, Cor”

“What the hell do you mean a leotard? Like a onesie? Fucking get her one then I guess. This is for that dance shit at church?” 

“Yea and she says she need’m today for practice, babe. Otherwise she can’t go and she’ll be breaking your heart again crying. I gotta go to Walmart. Do you think your sister could cover my shift at the diner?” 

“Hell Stayce, you can’t just be asking Sandra to do this. She got her own job selling that makeup shit and she don’t owe us nothing. Nobody got time to drive an hour to fucking Walmart for a fucking leotard. Go up to Papa’s cabin and see if he got some shit or something in the attic. Hell if I know just don’t go to fucking Altoona for a fucking 6 year old’s dance shit”  

“Babe please. I just wanna give my little girl something. She’s so sad. All the fucking time. ”

“Hell Stayce I know you’re gunna do what you fucking want. Just go. Here’s some cash. Have the truck back when I’m done working. Pick up some of that sauce shit too. Tim and I are hunting this weekend and he wants to make Jerky for little Jimbo’s birthday party. Kid fucking loves deer jerky.” 

Fuckin Stayce. She ain’t gunna come back with no leotard. Cash’ll be gone though. Fuckin handouts. Don’t do nobody no good. 

Process Notes

I wrote this piece in the voice of my uncle. He’s a coal miner in Western Pennsylvania—a place most deem part of the “Rust Belt”—and an avid Trump supporter, as are the rest of my relatives there. I wanted to capture some of the everyday things he thinks about and the ways in which he is a caring and good father, as well as the motivation for some of his (very strongly held) political beliefs. I was worried the tone might seem exaggerated, but I really tried to write everything exactly as he’d say it. I definitely read it in his voice when I go through it. I wanted to capture the sound of his accent (which to me sounds almost southern), in the way that Keene’s had captured Carmel’s voice by writing out her journal entries. It was not hard to write this counter-history as I was essentially writing around the gossip and drama my mom tells me about her siblings. It was an interesting exercise to step into his mind, because usually when I talk to friends about him (or about most of my extended family), it comes much more from a place of shame and disgust. I think it could be interesting in an expanded version to somehow include my own voice in this narrative. Maybe I could be telling a friend about the crazy things he says and does, or how stereotypically Pennsylvania he is. 

Echoing a few other posts, I was struck by the simplicity of faces in Drnaso’s drawings. Despite the tragedy surrounding most of the characters in the novel, the stick-figure-esque faces painted an aura of detachment throughout the plot. To me, the most emotionally elucidating parts of the book were revealed through writing rather than through images of the characters themselves feeling the emotions. For example, I found the worksheet displaying alcohol intake, sleep levels, as well as feelings of sadness and stress that Calvin filled out upon arriving to work each day an interesting device to reveal his mental state. Even reading the story most explicitly following Calvin’s life, we, as readers, gleaned useful information from this explicit recounting of Calvin’s emotional state. To me, this reinforces how easy it is for people to lose track of each other’s experience and suffering, especially as they live and operate in increasing levels of isolation. This provides some explanation for how strangers on the internet could direct so much cruelty towards Sandra, Calvin, and Teddy. We see cycles of suffering throughout the story; how the characters’ disillusionment drives them to anger and conspiratorial ideas that only further perpetuate suffering of themselves and others. Saddened and angered as she was bombarded by hate mail, Sandra calls Teddy telling him he meant nothing to her family. The depression over Sabrina’s death drives Teddy to consume media that questions the very existence of his dead girlfriend. We see evidence of their suffering through their consumption and actions, not through the depiction of their faces. So much of the display of emotion throughout the story was not face-to-face, and the lack of facial nuance and detail seems to simulate this disinterest in face-to-face interactions even among the story’s readers.

Professor: Hi everyone. Welcome. It looks like a few people are yet to filter in but we’ve got a lot to cover today so let’s go ahead and get started. I hope you all saw my email where I clarified that, yes, your critical reading responses are due next class. While I know there is a lot of reading to cover in a short amount of time, I want you to focus on concision and on producing original ideas. I think this class will be a useful time to pinpoint moments in these texts where you feel you can pushback and perhaps present an equally compelling, contradictory idea. Most importantly, I want you all to remember to bring in examples to ground your argument. So who wants to start us off? 

A Student, Canada Goose draped over his wooden chair, Pret a Manger latte and breakfast sandwich on the table in front of him, Beats resting around his neck: Reading Kant’s outline of the categorical imperative made me think of my favorite presidential candidate, Bernie Sanders. And I guess well…I know a lot of people say that Deontology is really at odds with Utilitarianism, which I have read a lot about in high school. And I think the thing is, those people just don’t understand how someone like, well, someone like Bernie could, like, synergize both of those ideas in the socialist movement. 

Professor: That’s a really great example of something concrete—I’d love to hear that argument fleshed out in a paper.

Another Student, reading “The Skim” daily news update on his email as he speaks: Building off of…(gesturing to the other side of the room) his…idea about politicians and ethical systems, I guess it makes me wonder, like, what type of systems of ethical logic most speak to voters. Like I guess, one thing about Deontology is that, it takes a pretty high level of intellect to really understand its nuances, and that just seems like something voters aren’t willing to invest in today. So then it’s like, do we just settle for another system? For Chaos? 

Another Student, with 3 Glossier Stickers on her MacBook Pro: I actually explored this sort question in my political theory class. Like, what do we do, as lovers of democracy, when most people just can’t really understand what’s best for them, or more broadly, what’s best for society? I’m thinking of writing about voting, actually, and how maybe votes could be weighted on education about candidates and policy. I just think education is so important, and like, it would be best for everyone in the end. It seems like the best way to put a clearly superior candidate like Sanders or Yang or Warren in power.

Canada Goose boy: I mean, not to get too personal, but this is really what motivates me to get up in the morning. I really think, like, we need to be the change we want to see in society. And it can be super hard but I think, like, the thing that’s cool about socialism is it’s like, everyone is at a similar starting point and then…it’s like, you can have better dialogue. Like in an ideal society, we could all be reading the greats, you know, and like, it wouldn’t be a matter of us as leaders having to like, simplify these really nuanced important ideas into terms that an uneducated populace can understand. We wouldn’t be held back from intellectual progress by trying to catch everyone in our Democracy up. 

Process Notes

I struggled not to write a lot more with this assignment. I have so much experience in a discussion setting, especially one based around ideas—one that sometimes feels very insular and echo-chamer-y—that it felt like I could go on magnifying points of irony for a long time. Ideally, in the future, I’d like to write more in this setting, and then cut down to the parts that most emphasize the different ideas I want to present. Sabrina’s primary use of dialogue (outside of illustrations) to drive the narrative inspired my primary reliance on dialogue in this narrative. I think I could have done a better job to display the type of abstraction and assertion of half-baked ideas that often overlooks the everyday lives and opinions implicated in that discussion. I got sort of caught on displaying this indulgence in a feeling of intellectual superiority that often comes hand in hand with a veneration of intellect at a place like UChicago. 

First Observation Attempt:

More than a bubble—which it is often compared to—Mansueto has the shape of a hard boiled egg, sliced in half hot-dog (as opposed to hamburger) style. The egg-shaped dome walls are glass, and held up by long, curved metal pipes that create a sort of checkerboard structure. That is, the pipes span the dome both vertically and horizontally, and each vertically-running pipe crosses a horizontally-running one around every six feet or so, creating little square checkerboard-esque squares where one can see through the glass to campus outside. There are also ten—to my knowledge, completely useless—thicker metal poles. They present more as pillars but I would emphatically argue they are not, as they perform no pillar function. These poles stick up from the light wood floor and are probably 15 feet tall. Almost everything that is not a metal pole or clear glass is the same light wood. There are dining-room-table sized tables that seat four people in chairs made of the same wood and are usually taken by those who arrive early to the dome. Most people settle for the four long wooden tables that seat around 15 people on each side of them. These tables have a slight wall coming up in the middle of them. Between every two chairs the wall has an outlet and a little grey switch to turn on and off a light that illuminates the 5 feet allotted to each pair of chairs between respective outlet-lightswitch square. The wooden chairs have 4 metal legs—the metal is the same silvery color as the poles—that hold up the wooden body of each chair, which is shaped sort of like a bending tongue, with the curvature of new york subway seats. Most chairs have jackets draped over them and backpacks leaning on the metal legs. Nearly every chair is full at 3 PM on a Saturday. People really have terrible posture. They all slouch over their computers, which have notebooks and water bottles and coffee cups from Ex Lib on either side of them. Almost everyone has headphones in their ears, rendering useless the ambient noise machines that fill Mansueto with a machine-like buzz. 

Second Attempt, replacing vague words with exacting ones:

Some playfully characterize Mansueto as a bubble. Its shape is closer to that of a hard boiled egg sliced in half from top-to-bottom, rather than side-to-side, thus maximizing the length of each half. The walls are glass and held up by curving metal pipes that cross each other in a checkerboard pattern. That is, the pipes span the dome both vertically and horizontally. Each vertically-running pipe crosses a horizontally-running one around every six feet or so, shaping square quadrants where one can see through the glass to the intersection of 57th Street and University outside. There are also ten—to my knowledge, completely useless—thicker metal poles, each with a diameter of around 2 feet. They pose as pillars but hold nothing up; protruding from the light wooden floor until they reach a height of  15 feet, they cease to grow and connect to nothing above them. Almost everything that is not a metal pole or clear glass is the same beige wood. There are dining-room-table sized tables that seat four people in chairs made of this wood. These tables are usually taken by those who arrive earliest to the dome. Most people settle for the four long, thin wooden tables that seat around 15 people on each side of them. These tables have a slight wall rising from their middle, forming a barrier between you and the mansueto-dweller studying across from you. Between every two chairs the barrier provides a rectangular outlet on either side. The outlet also includes a grey switch to turn on and off a light that illuminates the 5 feet allotted to each pair of chairs. The wooden chairs have 4 metal legs—the metal is the same silvery color as the poles and “pillars”. These legs hold up the wooden body of each chair, a slab of wood bending like a tongue with curvature similar to New York subway seats. Most chairs have jackets draped over them and backpacks resting on their metal legs. Nearly every chair is full at 3 PM on a Saturday. People have terrible posture. They slouch over their computers, which have notebooks and water bottles and coffee cups from Ex Lib on either side of them. Almost everyone has headphones in their ears, rendering useless the ambient noise machines that fill mansueto with a machine-like buzz. Outside people bundled in coats look down and hurry somewhere, and the mansueto-dwellers, headphones in, slough over their screens, deeply focussed on the work before them.

Last Rendition:

Mansueto is modern, bright, and open. The simplicity and craftsmanship of its makeup highlight beauty stemming from things other than Mansueto’s own architecture. In theory, the glass bubble provides perfect protection from Chicago elements allowing its inhabitants to appreciate the buzzing of hyde park outside. Yet, most anyone who enters mansueto understands that it is not a place one goes when they want to look outward. Even within mansueto itself, despite the inherent openness of its design which allows students to see almost everyone around them, studiers look at their laptops with a laser-sharp focus. This flow state creates a sort of energy abounding within Mansueto; I study there because it makes me feel a solidarity with the hundred people grinding around me, and it pressures me to continue focussing, even when I’d rather look outside. 

Process Notes:

I found it quite difficult to describe Mansueto with exactitude. Franky, it was quite a relief to be able to look at Mansueto through a different lens in the third rendition, as I really struggled with the first two. I think part of what made the assignment so difficult was the abundance of things to describe about Mansueto, as well as my own limited architectural vocabulary. I really appreciated how Calvino’s voice and inner monologue entered his own detailed descriptions, and I tried to allow that to influence my third iteration more. My third iteration was also inspired by the fact that, during my own “looking up” in Mansueto as I tried to describe it, I stuck out like a sore thumb because everyone else was focusing so intently on the work below them. This is part of why I wanted to write about Mansueto. Although I only hinted at it in my descriptions, I think it is an interesting parallel for the intellectual bubble surrounding elite institutions, which is what I think I’d like to explore throughout the quarter. I found it difficult to not write more abstractly about ideas, or even about people (rather than objects) during this exercise, and it made me realize that I have a sort of gap in my ability to use exacting language because I’ve mostly had to use it to express ideas.