Jay Hoffmann

I don’t know what to call this yet

Tag: Grapes of Wrath

  • Steinbeck’s resistance

    I am finishing up Grapes of Wraith, and the back half has me convinced that Tom Joad is one of the greatest characters in fiction, and that Steinbeck’s humanist, agrarian solution to the problem of inequity is elegant and timeless.

    The novel, to me, is also half-treatise. He lays out the problem clearly. People are hungry and need work. And instead, they are met with cruelty and neglect. Centralization, the logical extreme of capitalism, results in inefficiency and inhumaneness.

    Nowhere is this more clear than in Chapter 25—a chapter that ends with the title of the book—where Steinbeck lays his message out, rejecting subtlety in favor of clarity. And the message hits home. America, and its people, are withering. Needlessly. Endlessly.

    The decay spreads over the State, and the sweet smell is a great sorrow on the land. Men who can graft the trees and make the seed fertile and big can find no way to let the hungry people eat their produce…

    …There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificates—died of malnutrition—because the food must rot, must be forced to rot.

    And the solution is simple and plain. Return to the Earth and cultivate it. Help your neighbors. Build a community. Use the government to fill the gaps of equity. And if all else fails, resist.

    Tom Joad resists. He is drawn to, and he can’t escape it.

    Tom leaves us with a powerful declaration conveyed to his story, but really told to us, the reader. It’s not a threat, but it sort of reads like one. Tom, in the wind, aims to help folks wherever he can.

    I’ll be all aroun’ in the dark. I’ll be ever’where—wherever you look. Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. If Casy knowed, why, I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad an’—I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry an’ they know supper’s ready and when the people are eatin’ the stuff they raise and livin’ in the houses they build, I’ll be there, too.

    Tom will be there. He still is.

  • Man, distinctive in the universe.

    Fall begins. My kids are sick. But several years in, I may actually know how to handle it. We’ll see next week if I’m right.

    Reading

    Continuing with Grapes of Wrath, which I completely understand most people read in High School. I did not. And I do love it. It has some of the most keen and insightful reflections on the nature of people in the faith of unspeakable adversity.

    And this you can know—fear the time when Manself will not suffer and die for a concept, for this one quality is the foundation of Manself, and this one quality is man, distinctive in the universe.

    But at the center, it’s all heart. It’s just about a family trying to get along, alone, but together

    They were afraid, now that the time had come—afraid in the same way Grampa was afraid. They saw the shed take shape against the light, and they saw the lanterns pale until they no longer cast their circles of yellow light. The stars went out, few by few, toward the west. And still the family stood about like dream walkers, their eyes focused panoramically, seeing no detail, but the whole dawn, the whole land, the whole texture of the country at once.

    Watching

    Finished the final season of Sex Education, which was a really well done show, but one that kind of falls short in its final season. For good reason, there is a lot of length given to the auxiliary characters, and they all shine (Eric especially, who finds his purpose in brightness), but Otis and Maeve fail to ever really connect with the heart of the show. Still, it was a good send off, and one that gave some time to properly explore its edges, where it was always most interesting anyway.

    Kevin Kelley on listening:

    Listening well is a superpower. While listening to someone you love keep asking them “Is there more?” until there is no more.

  • Men made it, but they can’t control it

    Thinking about HTML tables this week. Not only because I’m going to be talking to a class about that very topic soon, but because it seems that we are in the HTML tables phase of technology’s next big Internet-driven cycle (it would seem): AI and language learning models.

    Anyway, what do I mean by that? We’re forcing it, basically. We are using the technology of AI in a clunky way. It is unrefined and depends on hacks, rather than going with the grain of the technology. When the technology recedes into the background, becomes more minimal, and less intrusive, than we may truly be on to something. Until then, I can’t help but feel like we’re using tables for layout.

    Reading

    Read through The End of the Googleverse. The web has been reported dead before. The Post-Google world is more interesting to me than not.

    Speaking of Google, I could take a look at their NotebookLM, which I was surprised (and kind of pleased) to find had at its helm Steven Johnson, the co-founder of Feed and writer of many books including Interface Culture.

    Notably, much like the web, what’s absent from the next wave of AI tools are any sort of concept of transclusion. Ted Nelson never quite cracked that technological nut, and we are so well past it that nobody even thinks about it anymore.

    Bleak House continues, Chapters 31 through 37. Much is revealed and we are quite expeditiously arriving at the point at which it will all collapse. Lady Deadlock has made herself known to Esther. Richard has fallen to the Jardynce sickness. Tachyhorn is onto Deadlock. And the world continues to simply turn, in a way only Dickens can describe:

    Now there is a sound of putting up shop-shutters in the court and a smell as of the smoking of pipes; and shooting stars are seen in upper windows, further indicating retirement to rest. Now, too, the policeman begins to push at doors; to try fastenings; to be suspicious of bundles; and to administer his beat, on the hypothesis that every one is either robbing or being robbed.

    On to The Grapes of Wrath. If I could write like any author, oh man would I want it to be Steinbeck. There is so much pathos in every passage of the book. Every word choice is perfect.

    Yes, but the bank is only made of men. No, you’re wrong there—quite wrong there. The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s the monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it.

    Harrowing, and true, and poignant. But also, the rhythm of that excerpt is right on point.

    Watching

    Fully caught up to Only Murders in the Building

    Octavia Butler on writing:

    The first, of course, is to read. It’s surprising how many people think they want to be writers but they don’t really like to read books… The second is to write, every day, whether you like it or not. Screw inspiration….

    Forget about inspiration, because it’s more likely to be a reason not to write, as in, “I can’t write today because I’m not inspired.” I tell them I used to live next to my landlady and I told everybody she inspired me. And the most valuable characteristic any would-be writer can possibly have is persistence. Just keep at it, keep learning your craft and keep trying.

    Notes

    Maybe there’s someothing to a public and shared Aboard board that can be used to collect History of the Web type resouroces innto different categories, or mabe collect it there everytime a footnote is made

    For today:

    • Move Notion finances into Google Drive
    • History of the web ideas
    • Mow the lawmn
    • Do all the laundry