Gotham Diary:
Baked Brain
18 March 2014
Taking a quick break from Inside Llewyn Davis, the Coen Brothers movie that we were all supposed to see last year but didn’t. Why? Because it’s the most depressing movie since Eraserhead, and not nearly as fascinating. I’ve reached the point where Davis looks about ready to fall asleep at the wheel on a highway in Ohio somewhere, and I can’t take it.
I’ve spent the day reading Hannah Arendt on labor. Tremendously interesting, but I’m still digesting it. For the first time in my life, I regret ignoring Karl Marx in school and thereafter: Arendt makes him sound interesting! Even if I am holding on for dear life. Yesterday, after Ray Soleil helped me with a tedious annual chore involving the HVAC filters, we went out to lunch and I was a bit too jolly, happily exploiting St Patrick as a pretext. (Some nice Irish people taught me how to say “Taoiseach.”) We had to go to a second restaurant because the fries at the first one were off. After which I dropped in front of the video screen in the blue room and watched three new DVDs: Captain Phillips, Fifth Estate, and The Dallas Buyers’ Club. Baked my brain, basically.
Llewyn Davis is the sort of person I was afraid of turning into, once upon a time. It scared me so badly that I ran off and joined the law school.
***
Well, he didn’t fall asleep at the wheel after all. But I was sorry to be stuck watching the movie, and even sorrier that I’d bought the DVD. It was like being locked in a tank from which the air was being sucked out. And I love Oscar Isaac! He is always great, and he is great even here. I hope that playing the feckless Llewyn doesn’t hurt his career.
At several points in her discussion of labor, Hannah Arendt seemed on the point of making interesting observations about housework, but she never did. This may have been a field with which she was little more acquainted than her male colleagues. Although Arendt is aware that modern technology has made labor a lot less laborious, it doesn’t seem to have occurred to her that the dangers of the rich life — centering on deadly boredom — might be mitigated by regular, unceasing, but not very arduous housekeeping. Even if it had, she might not have mentioned it. Even today, intelligent women who intend to compete with men for intellectual prestige have every reason not to mention a taste for baking or vacuuming. When she was young, Kathleen made a point of not learning how to touch-type. Much as she rues that now, she can’t imagine having done differently.
But Arendt’s principle, which she draws from Marx, is that labor is the expression of human metabolism; it is what we do to stay alive. This is what distinguishes labor from work, which creates the world of human artifice that houses our meanings as well as our productions. I believe that it is in housekeeping that labor and work become parallel efforts, singing in unison as it were. To argue thus for Arendt, I should have to revisit my thinking about the bourgeois household, which unlike earlier households is not entirely private — not in this country, anyway. And I should have to get a better understanding of precisely what it is that Arendt means by “society.” I’m hoping that help on this point will be forthcoming in her discussion of action, a few chapters ahead.
I’m having a terrible time trying to convince Kathleen that Nebraska is funny!