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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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.