Around the time I was learning from Letters of Insurgents I was reading a lot of other things. For around an 8-month period when I was absorbing the book I was reading about a book every day. I was working in a graveyard job and living out of my van in Ann Arbor. I was using this as an opportunity to raid bookstores in the area, the U of M library in general, and, in particular, the Labadie collection. This was my chance to hold on the original set of SI Journal and to really dig deep into the material that has shaped my life since. I’ll probably never have another intellectual period in my life as intense as this. The problem with absorbing material in an isolated vacuum (which is what I was in at that time) is that some things you get right, some things you get wrong. I enjoyed the incredible volume of material I was consuming. Later I learned that the mixture of science fiction, post-structural classics, and everything available in English from “the milieu” would garner me a decade of being called incoherent, dense, and postmodernist.

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As we head towards the climax of the novel, I continue to appreciate the progressively unfolding politics of our now familiar insurgents. We’ve known from the very first exchange of letters that we can never be sure anyone is genuinely on the same “side.” Now, Yarostan sees that it is impossible for Alberts and Titus to have fought, in that long-ago revolution, on the same side as Manuel and Nachalo.  Albert’s role in the army is clearly exposed, and I am even beginning to be suspicious of Titus.

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Wow, what a week. There are a number of issues that pop up this time around, but I think that the Vesna situation kind of trumps everything. After the dance performance that Mirna and Yara orchestrate to visually interpret Mirna’s sexual experiences with the devil in all its permutations, Mirna gives Yarostan a slightly fuller description of the circumstances leading up to Vesna’s death. The tale so far is that she fell into a catatonic state, the doctors describing it as a brain injury and Yara calling it a game gone wrong. Before Mirna’s full confession in Yarostan’s 8th letter, the impression had been that perhaps this had something to do with Yara catching Vesna kissing herself in the mirror and suggesting that their father would kiss her when he returned from jail.

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I find the back and forth about who really loved who or who loved an apparition instead of the person tiresome. The flatness of Perlman’s character development is apparent here and I don’t love Letters of Insurgents because the characters are plausible. I love Letters of Insurgents because of the way that the ideas are validated by the characters and situations in the book. I don’t think a more skilled novelist would have made Letters of Insurgents a better book. They would have made a different book with different emphasis, different political bias (of course), and different themes. They would have made a better story but it would have had flattened the sophisticated political problems that I, and most of my peers, have experienced. This lack of character development isn’t the biggest problem I have with the book.

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Infinite Tasks and I are rewatching The Sopranos, which is our all-time favorite TV show.  We just passed (*spoiler alert!*) the part of Season 6 where Vito is outed to the mob family, and soon his whole community, as gay.  He runs away and stumbles upon a small, gay-friendly community in New Hampshire and begins to fall in love with Johnny Cakes.  As their heads tilt for a first kiss, Vito freaks out, calls Johnny a fag and starts a fight.  Luckily, Johnny is one tough dude and Vito doesn’t kill him.  Soon, Vito realizes that he has fucked up what may be the love of his life, or at least his first opportunity to actualize a relationship with a guy. He shows up at Johnny’s cafe and says,

“When you have lied about something for so long, you don’t know when to stop.  You don’t know when it is safe.”

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