Compare and contrast - if you can.

Nickel and Dimed: Undercover in Low-Wage USA - Barbara Ehrenreich

Dirt Cheap: Life at the Wrong End of the Job Market - Elisabeth Wynhausen

Both authors are journalists who took a year out of their comfortable, well-paid journalistic lives to spend awhile on the other side of the poverty line. The most telling difference is that Ehrenreich is American, whereas you may know Wynhausen better from her work for The Australian - or if you're either older than me or as much of a nerd as I am, from The National Times (a weekly and now defunct paper which specialised in investigative journalism).

Quoting from the blurbs:

'Millions of Americans work full-time, year-round for poverty level wages. Distinguished journalist Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them, in order to find out how anyone survives on six to seven hours a day. Ehrenreich left home, took the cheapest lodgings she could find and accepted whatever job she was offered, from cleaning to care work, waitressing to folding clothes at Wal-Mart. So began a gruelling, hair-raising and darkly funny oddyssey through the underside of working America."

"Elisabeth Wynhausen has often written about the lives of the working poor. Dirt Cheap is her account of the year she joined them, going undercover to work as a factory hand, checkout chick, kitchen hand and cleaner, and attempting to live on her meagre earnings ... Caustic, courageous and often funny, Dirt Cheap is a unique view of class, power and middle management seen from the other side of the serving counter, and a very personal experience of what it is like to be underpaid, under-appreciated and part of Australia's emerging underclass."

Can YOU find all ten differences?

Nope, me neither.

I read Nickel and Dimed a couple of months ago - am about to start reading it again, as I've got a paper to write for next week - and when I heard that Elisabeth Wynhausen had undertaken a similar project, I went down to the Writer's Festival this morning to hear her talk about it. I was sufficiently intrigued by her talk to lay out for the book, went along to have it signed, made a snarky comment about what it's like to work three or four days a week, while going to uni four days a week, and how this was my first Sunday off in nearly eight months - the usual Sunday sorts of things. (Then I went to see Philip Nitchke, aka Dr Death, talk. Fun stuff.)

So, then I spent the afternoon reading. I've got to say, I'm not quite sold on Dirt Cheap. It's a bit over-familiar, if that makes any sense. While the subject matter is very similar to Nickel and Dimed - and Wynhausen does say that book was her inspiration to undertake the project - the turn of phrase and the emotional tone of both books is very similar, too.

It reminds me very much of the experience of reading The Naked Husband after I read The Bride Stripped Bare. You'll have heard of the latter - it made an enormous splash when the anonymous author (Nikki Gemmell) was outed in the British press before the book was even published. Meant to be a wild, sexy, no-holds barred novel - so raunchy that the author couldn't decently put her name to it. Now, that was clearly a marketing ploy, and a very clever one at that. Publishing that absurd book anonymously was the smartest thing Nikki Gemmell ever did. Anyhow, some guy whose name eludes me for the moment wrote a response to The Bride Stripped Bare, and he called it The Naked Husband. Instead of having a cheating wife, he had a cheating husband. Apart from that, it might have been the same damn book. Right down to the way both authors used punctuation. It was a highly confusing and odd experience. I don't think I even finished reading the second one, which is unusual for me.

To get back to minimum wage jobs, though, I'm still trying to decide how I feel about these books. On the one hand, I spent an hour this morning talking about the ridiculous state of Australian labour laws, and in a room that was dominated by sensible people, not members of the loony left - people I have little patience with. I think that packaging discussion like this in an amusing book is a good way to get the message out to people who, like me, have no time for the loony left.

On the other hand ... well, I think William Shatner - or was it Pulp? - said it best:
Everybody hates a tourist,
Especially one who thinks it's all such a laugh ...

Discuss.

Just a quick couple of digital poems today - I'm feeling a little more convinced of the wonderfulness of the wacky things that happen on the internet.

The Dreamlife of Letters

My Type

I prefer the first - I don't have the attention span to sit happily through the discomforting slowness of My Type - but both have me thinking about alternative ways of thinking and writing.

"Savage Girls and Wild Boys: A History of Feral Children"

If I ever have kids, I'm going to have them raised by wolves.

I've thought about it seriously. For awhile, I thought I'd have them raised by the state, but then I thought about it, and I decided that wolves would probably do a better job. Plus, since there aren't any wolves in Australia, I could take the kids to some socialist paradise in Europe where, in the unlikely event that the wolves fail in their parental duty, the state can take over and raise the kids to be happy, singing comrades. Or something like that.



"On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War"

This may well be the most compelling work of non-fiction I've read - and I read a lot of non-fiction. Dave Grossman is a former paratrooper, instructor at West Point, psychologist and now Professor of Military Science at Arkansas State University. His understanding of killing draws on his vast experience in these widely divergent fields, and so he brings a great deal of insight into what he sees as a relatively recent concept.

'Licked all over by the English tongue'

Today I'm going to post some poems by the African-American poet Harryette Mullen. I've recently fallen head-over-heels in love with her work - that phrase above! awesome! - and since I've found out that she's a professor of English at UCLA, it has only furthered my determination to spend some time studying there in a few years time. There, and Berkeley, where both Judith Butler and Eve Sedgwick teach (these guys, together with Foucault, are really the Big Three theorists on which gender studies is built).

Anyhow, I'm just going to post three of her poems from her book 'Sleeping with the Dictionary'. Read and discuss.


MANTRA FOR A CLASSLESS SOCIETY, OR MR ROGET'S NEIGHBOURHOOD

cozy comfortable homey homelike
sheltered protected private concealed covered
snug content relaxed restful sedate
untroubled complacent placid serene calm undisturbed
wealthy affluent prosperous substantial
acceptable satisfied satisfactory adequate
uncomfortable uneasy restless
unsuitable indigent
bothersome irritating painful
troublesome discomfiting disturbing
destitute impoverished needy
penniless penurious poor
poverty-stricken embarrassing
upsetting awkward ill-at-ease
nervous self-conscious tense


PRESENT TENSE

Now that my ears are connected to a random answer machine, the wrong brain keeps talking through my hat. Now that I've been licked all over by the English tongue, my common law spout is suing for divorce. Now that the Vatican has confessed and the White House has issued an apology, I can forgive everything and forget nothing. Now the overdrawn credits roll as the bankrupt star drives a patchwork cab to the finished line, where a broke robot waves a mended tablecloth, which is the stale flag of a checkmate career. Now that the history of civilisation has been encrypted on a medium grain of rice, it's taken the starch out of the stuffed shorts. Now as the Voice of America crackles and fades, the market reports that today the Euro hit a new low. Now as the reel unravels, our story unwinds with the curious dynamic of an action flick without a white protagonist.


WE ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE

We are not responsible for your lost or stolen relatives. We cannot guarantee your safety if you disobey our instructions. We do not endorse the causes or claims of people begging for handouts. We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone. Your ticket does not guarantee that we will honour your reservations. In order to facilitate our procedures, please limit your carrying on. Before taking off, please extinguish all smouldering resentments. If you cannot understand English, you will be moved out of the way. In the event of a loss, you'd better look out for yourself. Your insurance was cancelled because we can no longer handle your frightful claims. Our handlers lost your luggage and we are unable to find the key to your legal case. You were detained for interrogation because you fit the profile. You are not presumed to be innocent if the police have reason to suspect you are carrying a concealed wallet. It's not our fault you were born wearing a gang colour. It is not our obligation to inform you of your rights. Step aside, please, while our officer inspects your bad attitude. You have no rights that we are bound to respect. Please remain calm, or we can't be held responsible for what happens to you.

now reading ...

Mostly for uni, which is kind of depressing, but also kind of exhilarating. I've got some fun ideas about violence running around in my head, and with that in mind am deep in Fight Club and American Psycho. This is the first time I've read AP, but the movie has the dubious honour of being the only movie to keep me up at night. In retrospect, watching it in a darkened room when I was the only one home may not have been the best idea I've ever had. If there are any burly males out there that want to keep me company while I watch it again, drop me a line.

Please note that we'll be watching the movie in a well-lit room, for the purposes of taking notes.

I've just finished The Virgin Suicides for the fourth or fifth time. I know a lot of people aren't wild about this book - quite a few people have told me they find it unsatisfying - but I'm not one of them. I think you just need to be in (one of) the right mindset(s) to read it. My first time, I was in a slitting-my-wrists bad mood. You'd think that would make the whole book make sense, huh? Nope, I was carried away by the language, and found myself feeling much better about the world. Go figure. Later, I found the ambiguity of the text magical, and have always felt that there's something universal about the story. The idea of the Lisbon girls as modern myth has always made sense to me.

Anyway, I'm now rereading it for my 'Contemporary American Prose' class, and while I'm not sure about the spin the lecturer is putting on it (an allegory for the Clinton presidency? Come on), I'm considering this one as a choice for my final essay.

Theory-wise, I'm reading Butler's Undoing Gender, Connell's Masculinities, and continuing to struggle with Spivak's Can the Sub-altern Speak? This is for my 'Gender, Race, Australian Identities' class, and when the tutor told us that the material would, quote-unquote, make our ears bleed, I didn't take her seriously. After all, the last time they told me that, it was about Foucault's History of Sex -- and Foucault is my Favouritest Theorist Ever. I love Foucault. Foucault didn't make my ears bleed. Hell, I read Foucault for fun. Spivak, on the other hand -- well, it didn't make my ears bleed. It just made me want to gouge out my eyes with a spoon.

I'm just not convinced that, over the course of 38 pages, she manages to say much that's useful -- or much, full stop.

In the just-for-kicks barrel, I've got Annie Sprinkle's Post-Porn Modernist on the go. I pulled it out last week when I was looking for an article I knew I'd read somewhere (I spend a lot of time looking for things I've read or seen somewhere), checked the index, then decided to read it cover-to-cover. If you're not familiar with Ms. Sprinkle, check it out - she's the original porn-queen-turned-Ph.D with some fantastic sex-positive material. Plus gender-fucking, which is one of my favourite things in the whole world.

And lucky last, Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. If you haven't read this, do so immediately. Right now. Don't wait for me to tell you about how it's the first book my mum's read all the way through in probably five years. Or how she finished it and phoned me to ask if I'd send her Chabon's other books. Just read it. It's awesome.