Comments on: Appendix to cheap motels and a hot plate

By: mike

mike — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 01:27:27 +0000

Dear Jacob,

Thanks for these comments. I lived in Arizona for large parts of the past two years. Lots of problems there too. I hope WalMart gets unionized everywhere!

What made you uneasy?

Michael Yates

By: Jacob

Jacob — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 21:59:23 +0000

I read the book in August 2007 while vacationing at Kohl’s Ranch, Arizona. It left me strangely moved and uncomfortable. This “Appendix” might have been a good conclusion – although the matter is of course never solved because the target is moving. We moved back from Arizona to British Columbia in February 2008.

The current economic malaise (and I leave the question unanswered whether we are in the beginning of it, in the middle or already in a recovery mode) might be an occasion to publish a second edition including this Appendix and perhaps more current information.

One particular current issue is the unionization of Wal-Mart in Canada – right now before the Supreme Court of Canada. Now I know that whatever the Court decides has no legal status on another country (the USA), but it might stil have some impact.

By: J.P.Lucas

J.P.Lucas — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 18:19:43 +0000

Dear Mr. Yates: I have just finished reading your book and found it mostly quite interesting. I liked the idea of judging places both by interest and economic value. I must admit that I thought you sort of changed directions after the Portland stay – with much less emphasis on the politics of a certain area (what ever happened to your sons? Did they ever find a place where they could follow their chosen professions in an acceptable manner?) Is it possible that snce the book seems to be a combined venture that the outdoor activities suddenly surged to the forefront? I am also surprised that you did spend more time traversing the back roads – I hate freeway driving – so I cannot imagine why anyone else would want to do it – and visiting oddball places such as Slab City and Salvation Mountain off the Salton Sea in Southern California. I have done many road trips since the 60′s and find the Least-Heat Moon “Blue Highways” a valuable place to start – no politics of any great consequence, unfortunately. Travelling by oneself is a lot different than with another as it gives somewhat more freedom of movement and a lot more time to be introspective. I was hoping that your book would do one of two things: 1. Give a guide to places where a person might want to retire – yours does this to some degree – but more emphasis should have been spent on the politics of the different places 2. Attempt to define “Life in America” in an analagous way to Sven Lindqvist’s “Exterminate All the Brutes” where he goes on a Trans-Sahara journey mixed with discussions of Conrad”s Heart of Darkness and the many acts of European genocide in Africa – ending in the Burkina Faso town of Zinder where the infamous Central African Expedition of 1899 took it’s greatest toll. If you would like to have an e-mail correspondence regarding any related items I would be more than pleased to do so. JPL

By: mjosef

mjosef — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 12:22:29 +0000

Mike, you should have included this in your book. To work from an instructive chance encounter to an overview of the dilemmas of our modern capitalism was fine. Okay, I’m damn close to what DC could call a petit bourgeois liberal (I weigh less than 170, have a mortgage, and yet I don’t think there is a single political cause with potential – call my view nihilism with HDTV!) , and the Marxist theory can only go but so far with me, but your descriptions of modern work and its degradations and contradictions are far more lively than debate points with the unresigned. In your other section, you describe being a professor in the Happy Valley. I grew up there, and left willingly because of its noxious insularity. Let’s just say I hear one too many folk songs in those, yes, over-rated hills. Elite academia, I will note, is the background shared by Rumsfeld, Eric Kerouack, Bush, George Steinbrenner, all the “class enemies” we love. I’m going to end with praise – your lecture on “Injuries of Class” was outstanding. My private theory is that we all subject to the workings of the Supersystem, the invisible, mutually supportive arrangement of tradition, practice, myth, human instinct, culture, and whatever else in the kitchen sink keeps every institution humming and devolving, and as one protoplasm caught within it, I am going to exist pretty much as you describe yourself, with unearned variations. Thanks for including your personal story in your work.

By: D C

D C — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 11:48:14 +0000

You DEFINITELY should have included this section in your book. It would have made it far more enlightening without sacrificing any of its entertainment value. To be honest, I was disappointed with your book. The sections you released promoting it made it appear as if it was going to be a solid Marxist critique of American society. Instead I discover it written in crypto-Marxist language and larded with what I believe borders on an unhealthy form (read: fetishistic) of nature worship. It’s all well and good that you love nature. But the soul of this book seemed divided between a desire to earnestly criticize capitalism for its destructive effects on both humans and nature and the fear that if you make the Marxist theoretical tools you rely on to make this analysis too overt you might alienate the petty bourgeois liberals you hope will read it. You erred on the side of popularity, and the book suffers for it, reeking of demoralization and, even worse, resignation.