An English major goes shopping & other stories

Shopping has never been one of my fortes. I can't make decisions quickly. I don't like spending money. I have mini panic attacks in dressing rooms. I worry about buying clothes that were made in poor nations. And malls completely overwhelm me.

This was before I took my Object(ive)s of Lit class.

The class is about objects, and earlier I wrote about how we had been studying fetishes. We've also been looking at Karl Marx's commodity and how we as a society interact with this particular type of object. There are two main parts of the commodity form: use value and exchange value. (Although I have heard that there are four parts.) As far as I understand, an object starts off with use value and then changes when given an exchange value. Today, exchange value takes the form of monetary value. Once an object has earned this value, it becomes a commodity. Marx argues that we have fetishized commodities because we believe in the allusion that an object inherently contains value.

Walking into a store, everything has a price. We forget about who made the object, where it came from, how it got to the store... the exchange value, seen through the price, makes us blind to the actual labor that went into the object.

Today we discussed the essay "Unwrapping Use Value" by Susan Willis. The most interesting part of her writing was her discussion of packaging and its significance. Willis argues that when you buy something in a package, you are buying many other ideas with it... information, purity, branding, identity, a certain standard of living, cleanliness, desire...

According to Willis, plastic packaging sexualizes an object because the plastic covers the object but you can still see what you think you're buying. Plastic creates anticipation. I found this to be a bit of stretch. Maybe she's read a bit too much Freud.

Her main point was that the commodity form abstracts value from an object. Then the class had long discussions about farmer's markets and organic foods. The organic foods and "knowing where your food came from craze" is almost a reversal of the abstracting value because now you're buying the object because you know where it came from and what labor was put into its production.

I thought I had enough shopping problems. When I went to H&M for an excruciating, yet successful, Easter clothes hunt today, I could only think about what I've been learning in Object Lit. Exchange value, use value, packaging, advertising, where the clothes came from, how easy it is to forget that someone made the clothes and they didn't just magically appear in the store. Also, I kept checking the labels to see where the clothes were made... India, Bangladesh, China, Turkey... Cambodia. I couldn't buy a single piece of clothing made in Cambodia. Kept seeing those Khmer children and their smiles.

Even when we try to buy fair trade and locally grown, we're still fetishizing the label. We're still part of this crazy commodity system. Lose lose situation.

I've decided that English majors like to complicate everything. We don't just stick to literary texts. Applying these object theories to An Invisible Sign of My Own and Frank O'Hara's poetry has been quite good fun though,

In other stories:

I went to a poetry event here at the UW with Philip Levine and Ken Arkind. Breathtaking and beautiful. Separated by age, style, and experiences, both poets presented a passion and faith in their art that was stunning and inspirational. My favorite poem by Philip Levine was "The Mercy." The final lines physically took my breath away:

"... A nine-year-old girl travels

all night by train with one suitcase and an orange.

She learns that mercy is something you can eat

again and again while the juice spills over

your change, you can wipe it away with the back

of your hands and you can never get enough."

Ken Arkind is witty and sarcastic. His slam poetry puts you on the edge of your seat, wanting more. I adore his poem, "An Experiment in Noise, in A Sharp Major."

I also heard some brilliant poets at a New Abolitionist Movement Dance Concert. They spoke in between dance numbers performed by karen stevens dance and the modern dances were choreographed to the songs of the local non-profit band, Jubilee. The entire evening was dedicated to the fight against modern day slavery. Very moving.

The only other news is that tomorrow is Good Friday and Earth Day, an interesting combination.

I know a perfect book for that combo: The Tale of Three Trees by Angela Elwell Hunt.

"At that wonderful, tragic, mysterious tree,

On that beautiful scandalous night you and me

Were atoned by his blood and forever washed white

On that beautiful scandalous night."