I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: STEREOLAB-Transient Random Noise Bursts with Announcements (1993).

Stereolab are a bizarre band.  They make bubbly electronic music, with all sorts of bleeps and whirls and buzzes.  They even describe their music as space age pop.   Their album cover art is overexposed or simply silk screened.  (This is a hi-fi needle getting dropped on an LP).  The back cover looks like it’s a hi-fi test record.

This disc is a bit less electronic than future releases.  It’s more guitar drone (appropriate circa 1991, frankly).  When the songs start, Latetia Sadler’s voice is angelic and beautiful.  Delicate and sweet.  And you sort of realize that you don’t quite understand what she’s singing.  Because the song is in French!  No kidding.

And then you get to “Jenny Ondioline.” It’s 18 minutes of droning guitars and noises.  It has several parts (the song actually stops at one point and at another it plays a sample from “Channel Recognition Phasing and Balance.”  And if you listen carefully to the lyric, you’ll hear:

I don’t care if the fascists have to win
I don’t care democracy’s being fucked
I don’t care socialism’s full of sin
The immutable system is so corrupt
What is exciting is the triumph as the new nation.

A little later on the disc, on “Crest,” there’s more subversive songwriting.

If there’s been a way to build it
There’ll be a way to destroy it
Things are not all that out of control.

This is all done by those sweet, yet alien-sounding vocals.  When she’s not singing in French, Sadler sings in a fascinatingly broken English, emPHAsizing the wrong sylLABes.

Although I think my favorite moment comes in “Golden Ball” when the CD skips like a vinyl record.  It’s surreal.  Electropop and Marxism: perfect together.

[READ: Week of June 11, 2010] Letters of Insurgents [First Letters]

And so begins Insurgent Summer.

This is the first week of my second Summer Reading Book series.  I’d never heard of this book before getting the invitation to read.  But when the book was described as 800+ pages of letters between insurgents, well, how could I pass that up?

And that is indeed what you get here: Yarostan (Vochek) has not spoken to Sophia (Nachalo) in twenty years.  And he writes to her to her because she had written to him twelve years earlier (when he was in prison).  He writes back to bring her up to date on his life and to find out what’s going on with her.

Interestingly, no context is given for where the writers are.  (I had to look up where Perlman is from to get an idea of what was going on).  But what we learn up front is that Yarostan is writing because:

Part of my reason for writing you now is that the activities of our omnipotent and omniscient police have been blocked. Letters aren’t being read by the eagle-eyed censors and letter writers aren’t being escorted out of their homes by middle-of-the-night visitors (3).

So that gives us a vague context.  And he is writing to her specifically because of one of the stranger introductions I’ve read:

I wouldn’t even remember your name if you hadn’t written me twelve years ago. My wife Mirna memorized the name and address on the envelope because she attributed a strange power to your letter. Unfortunately I never saw that letter and never learned its contents (3).

Yarostan has been in prison (which is why he never saw the letter).  He was released three years ago (and spent the first two running from place to place).  But he is slowly taking in his environment.  Until one night he says hello to his neighbor Mr Ninovo who at first ignores him and then (when Yarostan commiserates “the evening obviously can’t be good for someone who is about to spend it cleaning up after drunken bureaucrats.” [Ninovo] responded by shouting, “You people are trouble-makers! They should never have let you out!” (5).  Yarostan despaired that this attitude, this calm acceptance of official propaganda, was the norm now.

Then his ten-year old daughter Yara informed him that she protested the disappearing of one of her teachers. In fact, all of the school joined in.  This particular teacher tried to teach them independent thought, and he was sent away.  Mirna, his wife, smiled with pride and embraced her daughter and this seemed to snap Yarostan out of his funk:

I can’t convey to you what this meant to me. Mirna too emerged unscathed. All those long years of repressed humanity were overturned with a simple gesture and a few words (6).

And so, Yarostan emerged from his internal exile and had become aware of the world.  And he wants to know what kind of world it is.  He reaches out to Sophia, one of the few people he remembers from his past and he sends out feelers.  But first a rather casual introduction turns out to be a very significant comment: “I have no way of knowing if you’re still the person I once knew” (3).

Sophia’s reply informs him that yes, she is the same person he knew, but she believes that he has radically changed.  But before getting into that, Sophia catches him up on things.  Her friend Luisa (whom he surely remembers) delivered the letter.  And her roommates Tina and Sabina all read the letter together.  And they were flooded back to the past that they shared.

But before we learn about the details, there is already disagreement among them.  Luisa and Sophia have nothing but fond memories of the events twenty years ago, while Sabina is disgusted by the whole thing.

So, what happened?

“An old boss was thrown out and a new one replaced him, that’s all. The contentment, enthusiasm and initiative were just a vast put-on,” Sabina told her.
Luisa turned indignantly to Sabina and shouted, “You don’t know what you’re talking about! You were only twelve at the time!” (8).

In Sabina’s memory of things, workers (Yarostan and others (including Sophia)) marched into Mr Zagad’s office (he who ran the carton factory) forcing him out of his position.  And that is what happened, but it’s only part of it.

As Luisa explains,

Masses of workers filled the streets for the second time in three years. The first time, when the liberation armies marched toward the city surrounded by enemy military forces, thousands of workers joined the resistance and fought to free their city.  The second time, when they learned that reactionary elements were again powerful enough to resume the counter-offensive, they called a general strike.”
Sabina snapped, “The workers didn’t call that strike; the trade union called it.”

But for Luisa and Sophia, the event was very significant.  In fact, this incident was a foundation point for young Sophia.  She became a person that day, and her whole life following that event has been one of resistance:

The starting point of my life was the experience I shared with you…. No outside force, no institution, boss or leader defined our project, made our decisions, determined our schedules or tasks. We defined and determined ourselves. Each of us was free in the fullest sense. We briefly succeeded in creating a real community, a condition which doesn’t exist in repressive societies and therefore isn’t even understood. (14).

But when Tina asks, if the revolution was successful and the bosses were ousted, how did they (Sophia, Yarostan and the others) get arrested?  And Sophia replies, ““What happened was exactly what Luisa had feared would happen. The workers were betrayed; they were stabbed in the back by their own allies” (12).

The rest of Sophia’s letter concerns Luisa and Sophia dissecting Yarostan’s letter.  They profoundly disagree with any association with the jailers (Yarostan feels sympathy for them since they were just doing a job).  But Sophia hates them:

The people who arrested me weren’t workers but police agents.  They had never been committed to the self-liberation of workers; on the contrary, their lifelong commitment was to establish a dictatorship over the workers, to transform society into a beehive and themselves into queen bees, to become the wardens of a vast prison camp. They won and we lost. That sums up the entire history of the working class. (13).

And then Sophia gets to the heart of another issue: family. Luisa is shocked by the revelation in Yarostan’s letter: “You’re “married,” you have a “wife” and a “daughter.” (14).

And suddenly I started to think that Sophia was going further and further over the top.  Especially when she reveals:

You speak of “mother and father, wife and daughter” as if these were the most natural relations in the world, as if people had never lived outside these categories. Of course these things are “natural” to most people, but at one time they weren’t “natural” at all to you.  They were as alien to you as religion, the state and capital. Was I mistaken? Was this only the way I imagined you? Or have you changed? (14).

By dint of the letter we learn that Sophia and Sabina are related and Luisa is Sophia’s mother (or “mother”).  Also, Sabina is Tina’s “mother.”  And yet despite this “familial” connection, no ties exist.  Sophia and Luisa haven’t spoken in years.  And Sabina feels that “all of Luisa’s attitudes can be summarized in two short sentences: whenever a worker farts, the ruling class trembles; whenever a worker pisses, the tidal waves of revolution begin to flood the world” (18).

But enough of the criticisms. Why did Sophia write to him in the first place?  She explains:

I had been looking for someone like you from the day I arrived here and the people I found weren’t enough like you to put an end to my search. So I decided to try to reach you, and in case you
couldn’t be found, I tried to reach the other people in our group. I had just “finished” college (I
should say it finished me: I was expelled). I had taken part in one of the earliest actions of what
was later called the “student movement,” and it had all come to nothing (19).

Aside from a few more philosophical ideas (which I can’t decide how to incorporate into a post just yet), that’s the crux of the situation.  Two people shared an important event. Each person was affected very differently.  And now, twenty years later, they are looking back at the event with very different eyes. It’s an engaging start to the story.

What’s intriguing about the way the story is written is that since the second letter is from Sophia’s point of view, you sort of automatically align yourself with her (since we don’t hear Yarostan’s version of things yet).  And yet she espouses some really radical views.  And as her letter progresses her views get more strident.  To the point where I didn’t really like her by the end. And yet despite this, I was totally in alignment with her when she ends her letter with:

I want to know everything, and in detail. I want to know about the things you did and the things that were done to you, about the people you met and the people you liked. I want to know what you thought about the experiences and the people, and what you think of them now. I want to know about Yara and Mirna and about the people I knew twenty years ago (20).

And so, on to Yarostan’s reply, then.

When looking at the Chapter list, I was pretty surprised to see that some of the “letters” were 40+ pages long.  This seems unreasonable to me both for sheer mass of a letter but also for the practical nature of getting thee letters to one another (the censors are gone, but it still, sending 40 pages can’t be easy!).  However, when reading Sophia’s first letter, the fifteen or so pages all seemed perfectly reasonable for a person with a lot to say.  So we’ll see if that holds up.

I’m really intrigued by this story.  The fact that I don’t know where it is set (I don’t think I’m supposed to know that, right?  I mean, I have a general idea, but specifics are left off, right?) is fascinating, especially given the rest of the detail.

I can also say that these two people are so very different from me.  I think if someone sent me a letter like Sophia send Yarostan I would simply never write back, but as the rest of the book makes clear, Yarostan does write back  (wouldn’t be much of a book is he didn’t).