eat light:

Today, I want to do a weird juxtaposition:

Here is a local Seattle piece (linked through MSNBC) about how consumers, defying all reason, are continuing to buy "small luxuries" despite the crashing economy.

Then there's the news from Wall Street.

I have no big insights to share here, beyond the obvious: why the fuck not buy small luxuries? Who knows how much longer that shit will even be available, outside the circles of the super-rich who manage to weather the current crisis? The rest of us...we're going to feel this crunch, regardless. Why not make it a Heath Bar Crunch, for fortitude? It's just like a harvest festival, you know? Celebrate the "plenty" before the famine.

But the main thing this juxtaposition makes me think about is how slowly things like an economic disaster actually unfold, when you're experiencing them and reading about them in real time. I tend to think of The Great Depression as something that simply descended immediately on the world, as soon as the stock market crash of 1929 happened--i.e. in the space of one day. That's because I read a compressed version of the story in the various history books I've been assigned over the years. It actually took quite awhile, in reality, and most peoples' lives did not change overnight on October 29, 1929. In reality, it took months for that shit to reverberate outward--even the crash itself took more than one day to play out. We tend to blame the Great Depression on the Crash of 1929, but it was of course a lot more complicated than that. The Crash was not just a cause, it was also a symptom, of economic instability; there were other causes and other symptoms. What ensued was really kind of a "Perfect Storm" of causes and effects. It is hard to imagine what it looked like, on the ground; i.e. whether or not, or how much, the "average Jo/e" perceived in terms of the scope of the devastation to which s/he was bearing witness. It's like that This American Life episode about this guy who interviewed a bunch of concentration camp survivors immediately after WWII--before that whole network of human experiences had crystallized in the public consciousness as a concept, as what we now shorthand with the term "Holocaust." My point is that everyday life for most of us has not changed all that much. Should I add an ominous "yet" onto the end of that sentence? Probably. It's hard to say how bad things are going to get. Wouldn't it be nice to contemplate that over a nice dinner? Or maybe I should go get a new pair of shoes....

What's also interesting to me is the effect that this past week's news about Wall Street, coupled with all the news over the last year or two about the subprime mortgage industry, has on my memory: a bunch of random, mundane experiences, conversations, and texts suddenly fall into a linear, quasi-causal relationship. glaucon has been predicting the current downturn-cum-disaster for quite awhile, and we've had many different conversations about it over the last couple of years, in person and on email as he would send me a story here or there that seemed like an omen of things to come. Now, in retrospect, his predictions and the current crisis are inextricably linked in my mind, so that it seems like he predicted the specific size and shape of this unfolding disaster, down to its smallest details. If the current crisis hadn't materialized, or still yet if it fizzles out without causing any major calamity, all these bits and pieces might coalesce differently, tell a different story. Like the Y2K thing, yes? I know, that didn't become a disaster primarily because a bunch of people sounded the alarm, a bunch of other people listened, and then had another bunch of people "take steps." BUT--it played out in the press as a dud, or as a dodged shot from a BB gun at worst.

OK, that's enough for now. I have to go get ready for the Yarn Harlot event tonight. Does her new book count as a "small luxury" I wonder? I always like to stay up on the latest trends, after all...

wow! now THAT is a Very Large Bug!

doris lessing won the nobel prize for literature. she is only the 11th woman to win the literature nobel since they started handing out the prize in 1901, and only the 34th woman to win a nobel of any sort.

i still remember reading "a sunrise on the veld" in my 1st year comp class at GRJC. i was entranced. it was the first time i had read something that seemed to capture and express the implacable amorality of nature--something that i, an instinctive atheist in a city whose culture was dominated by fundamentalist calvinist christians, had always felt but never dared to express too loudly (except among like-minded friends, or, oddly, in classroom discussions...or on the paper message board in GRJC's student center, where i could remain anonymous; and also in my papers for school). lessing's essay made a huge impression on me, at a time when i was just starting to realize how much bigger, messier, and more diverse and interesting the world "out there" was, than my provincial hometown of grand rapids, MI.

it's funny, i haven't read much more of lessing's work. i would be very interested to read it with a postcolonial theoretical lens. i would expect her work to be somewhat problematic, or at least complicated by her position as a white, imperial british subject (read: member of the colonizing class) who was born in what is now iran and reared in what is now zimbabwe.

i understand her later, SF work is pretty bad, or at least has been critically lambasted. i should check it out. my curiosity is piqued.