I was explaining the Insurgent Summer project to an acquaintance, explaining how slow-going the reading is because I’m taking copious notes. I said that it was the first time I had ever taken notes while reading. “Ever?” he said, his eyes widened. “Well,” I said without hesitation (and totally seriously), “I mean, in school yeah, but never in real life.” I’m not relating this anecdote to prove how I’m too cool for school, but I do want to reveal my anti-academic tendency. I suspect I felt this way before ever reading this book. My opinion on the subject has bloomed over the years. I now have a pretty harsh criticism of universities. They are not real life. At their best they are investments of time and money to procure a more desirable job for oneself in the future, and at their worst they are investments of time and money in order to avoid the responsibilities of real life. If you experience real life while in school, it is your own fortune (or dumb luck) and not the result of your tuition.

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I read Letters of Insurgents as a great work on how to do criticism: a humane story about two sharp people cutting each other to size in appropriate, if harsh and perhaps mean-at-times, ways. This criticism ranges far beyond the tome of Letters of Insurgents or the dynamics between two writers on either side of the Berlin Wall. Each of us is confronted with a great isolation in modern society that we are unable to speak to or from due to lack of tools, models, or closeness to others. The critical model provided by Letters of Insurgents has been personally influential in its demonstration of each of these elements. In the first few weeks the focus was on criticism (by which I also mean closeness). Now we are discussing the tools and models by which we could break down the colossus of the existing order.

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Most people that I have been hearing from are annoyed at Mirna. They say she appears wildly insane. She makes no sense at all. Her arguments rely on intuition, mysticism and fate. And probably most importantly, she attributes great significance to unintended consequences.

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Marc is such a clod.

Is there anything worse than a know-it-all that doesn’t know anything? No, there isn’t. And that is what describes Marc to a T!  This guy wanted to be in control of everything at the carton plant, but just went around making a mess of everything. He was a spoiled-rotten brat and a snob who looked down on his fellow workers.

Marc ended up spending only six months in prison after the carton plant arrests and then began moving up the ladder of power.  Now, he has become a well-known politician.

Tissie likes girls…girls and heroin.

Tissie has some problems with communication and also gets a little depressed.  Her problems have led to her being a junkie.  She lives in the garage and works as a prostitute enough to fund her drug habit and spends the rest of the time trying to get Sabina’s attention.

The letters exchanged this time coincide with massive social activity in both countries. Zdenek’s factory is on strike as well as Yara’s school, and even Mirna’s conservative factory is starting to experience the murmurings of a possible uprising. In Sophia’s world, the local university has been occupied by students and workers and is serving as a hub for organizing strikes in neighboring factories. There is an air of excitement with most of the main contemporary characters, with Mirna and Luisa perhaps the only sour grapes of the bunch.

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Although it felt somewhat contrived and overdramatized, I think this chapter was inevitable.  Somehow, we had to witness the shift from the frozen and uptight Sophie that said “Oh really?” to a woman composed of courage and passion.  Even on the newspaper, she was unable to stand up for what she believed in or express any anger, she just sort of rolled over.  The only roles that she had found before were the roles of seeker and victim.

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Work

Yarostan’s Fifth letter is a strong argument against the institution of work. It is a criticism of the role of the knowledge worker in particular, and predates a body of work around these topics while maintaining a human touch around the topic. Bob Black (in)famously wrote an essay (which was also a presentation as provocation) called “The Abolition of Work.” While the author (and other people with a certain kind of fixation) might take the article as a literal argument against work, its real power is in asking orthogonal questions about the nature of labor and the project of Marxists who valorize labor itself, beyond any recognition of the (cough) use-value of the product of labor. The pro-work ideology is to assume work first of all – before the product of the work, before the worker, and before the impact (environmental, social, psychological, etc.) of that work. And the reactions to “The Abolition of Work” gave this thesis more energy than it probably should have had.

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She says “potato”.  He spells “p-o-t-a-t-o”.

Adrian lives to be Vera’s left-hand man. He is best friend, puppy dog and creepy stalker guy all rolled up in one package.

When he is on good terms with Vera, he is good at taking her theories and crunching the numbers to prove them.

When he is not on good terms with Vera, he really has nothing at all to say or do. He is worthless and is merely waiting to serve her again.

Ted is the strong and silent type. He is especially quiet while stealing cars.

Ron met Ted in lock-up. Ron considered him a great philosopher, although he is generally more thoughtful than wordy.  He and Ron went into business together and Ted became a pro, literally, at stealing cars.

He has an unusual and complicated relationship with many of the females at the garage, but everyone who knows him has a deep level of trust in him.