swing state blues. plus Kafka
Washoe County I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down
I am assuming Donald Trump will win the presidential election. I hope I am wrong. But if Nevada is any indication, there is something foul afoot. I have seen so many Trump signs in places where there were none in years past. I saw a sign claiming Democrats are Marxist, Socialist, and Communist; how I wish they were. Worst of all, and this is really difficult for me to write about, the culture war about transgender people has swooped in, and I am afraid my hometown is on the wrong side of history.
The panic was brought to local attention when the UNR Women’s Volleyball team refused to play San Jose State’s team because they may have a trans player on their team. This player has been competing with SJSU since 2022, and until this year aroused no suspicion or opposition. (NCAA rules allow trans women to compete so long as they have been on testosterone-suppressing drugs for one calendar year.)
The most insidious and deceptive part of this, in my opinion, is that it is cloaked in a false feminism; I see people framing this issue as protecting what women have worked so hard for! Women’s sports, the pinnacle of liberation, must be protected! Of course this is the perpetual drumbeat of white feminism; progress for white women at the expense of every other non-male demographic.
There was a truly vile election ad that came on while I was watching baseball, the literal only Trump ad I have seen on TV. And it was of course about the trans panic, with the slogan–I kid you not!–“Kamala is for they/them, Trump is for you.” It’s really horrifying that the campaign believes attacking the trans community is a fruitful political strategy. And even more horrifying that, given this volleyball bullshit, they might be right. The target of Trump’s fascism has been immigrants since 2016, but it is really chilling and upsetting to see trans people brought into the fold. Where is Caitlyn Jenner in all this, you may ask? She literally just wrote an op-ed about keeping trans women out of women's sports!
I went out canvassing for a state assembly candidate (DOWN BALLOT RACES MATTER! Vote down ballot even if you can’t bring yourself to vote for a presidential candidate!) It has been deeply strange to knock on doors and see that I know the people, that my dad’s friend from the park opens the door, that a girl I went to elementary school with is now registered as a libertarian. Similar experience being in Washoe County generally; rolling my eyes at the mall as a pack of Trump hat-wearing boys carouse in line in front of me, and then this lurching moment of wait… I know that guy. Emotionally it feels akin to processing a joke, and I was reminded of David Foster Wallace’s speech on the humor in Kafka’s short stories: “Both [jokes and short stories] depend on… a certain quantity of vital information removed from but evoked by a communication in such a way as to cause a kind of explosion of associative connections within the recipient.” Wallace goes on: “the effect of both short stories and jokes often feels sudden and percussive, like the venting of a long-stuck valve.” That is the feeling of seeing someone I knew once in a nakedly fascist milieu, sudden, percussive, an explosion of associative connections.
Incidentally, I have also been reading short prose by Kafka, and I feel sorry and somewhat ashamed to say that apart from the bangers (Metamorphosis, The Penal Colony, The Hunger Artist, The Judgment) I find his stories hard to read and kind of dull. I certainly don’t find them funny, apologies to DFW. I think Kafka is at his best when he is tightly focused on familial relationships and interactions, locating absurdity in family/society rather than in the individual. He goes on these extensive and rambling character studies that I found really exhausting and pointless, and not even weird in a satisfying way, only Kafkaesque insofar as Kafka wrote them. A description, almost journalistic, of an airshow in Brescia felt so dry as to be academic.
But, as Sontag said, let’s judge the author not by their worst works but by their best. I found the story about children running through fields and ditches after dark weirdly thrilling, the line about falling asleep in a ditch delighted me. Metamorphosis I found deeply moving and emotional; my copy (published by Schocken) had a blurb by Zadie Smith using it as an allegory for Jewishness–out of context it sounded inane, the quote she used was nowhere in the book and anyway it felt too heavy for a springy and upbeat jacket blurb. I felt blown away by the force of tragedy of Samsa’s experience, which to me resembled neurodegeneration. Spontaneously, and through no fault of his own, he becomes something other than himself, no longer recognizable by his family members, his altered behavior, desires, and sensitivities suddenly rendering him shameful. And his immediate reaction to his transformation is that he still must find a way to get to work, to provide for his family, to attempt to function despite his permanent and worsening situation.
In that light, discovering that Metamorphosis is widely memed on Tiktok depresses me somehow.
In a similarly bleak vein, I’ve realized I’m forgetting as much as 50% of each book/movie I read/watched over 2 years ago. My dad says that every book that’s worth reading is worth rereading, which forces me to the conclusion that most of what I read has not been that noteworthy. Speaking of, I also decided to read My Year Of Rest And Relaxation because I wanted an easy dumb fast book to focus my attention on at this time. What better than the bestselling Girl Book of 2018 to pull me out of my ennui and despair? It reminds me of that one Cat Marnell essay if she’d been lobotomized and was deliberately erasing any trace of agency in her life.
This went longer than I intended, congratulations if you read this far. Send me your takes on Marnell, Moshfegh, Metamorphosis. Art, music, literature: these are the greatest consolations in dark times. Send me a song that has moved you lately. Send me an email saying whatever you want.