Having and Being Had

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Toward the end of the book, Biss writes "if I were paid wages for the work of making art, then everything I do...would be subject to the logic of this economy." This presents several conundrums that Biss, for once, does not scrutinize. She is in fact paid for her art, namely for this book (though it is her rule to disclose specific amounts of money, she does not do so for her advance). She would not have her job, nor would she have been awarded a Guggenheim fellowship, were it not for her art. And without that value placed on her art, she would not own a home. There aren't issues to have opinions on, there's this is what her income means to her, and her personal relationship with money over time, and where reading this book took her next, and here is a work of art that explores this concept, and so on. The hardest realisation was that she had put earning power at the pinnacle of what was valuable, even as someone creative who defined herself as an artist. You cannot remove your own appendix. So you had it removed. That is, you took action to have another person remove it.

Her book references fellow writer Elizabeth Chin, who wrote My Life with Things: The Consumer Diaries. In that work she summarizes Karl Marx's economics, borrowing from his deeper ontological analysis that workers are leached of their human essence and become a commodities within the production process, a market ‘object’ to be exploited, whereas conversely, products they produce take on human attributes, and are imbued with value. She says this inversion rang true in her lived experience. Eula Biss is known for stepping off the plank into turbulent waters that others might fear or avoid, armed with wry wit and a radical lucidity. Having and Being Hadcontinues this journey, offering us a probing tour of capitalism and class that sidesteps posturing and jargon in favor of clarity, humility, and incitement.” —Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts And I wanted to read it, because I am very discontent with capitalism as it is currently functioning in the US, ie., the least good for the most people. And then I heard his babysitter saying to him, were you a smart negotiator? And I thought, oh, no. What are we doing? This kid is only 6, and we're already training him not to be generous and to get as much out of an exchange as he can possibly get out of it even if he doesn't care about the thing he's giving away. While the discrepancies explored in Having and Being Had are not as vast or as maddening as this one, Biss' ability to note their madness and inequity might be just what we need right now.I only caught the very tail end of a radio segment about this book: not much more than something like, and this is approximate because I was driving at the time A meditation on race, consumerism and the American caste system. And a wry, vivd assessment of our spiritual moment. It is no accident that Having and Being Had reads like the poems money would write if money wrote poems.’ a non-finite subordinate clause with ‘after’ + ‘having/being’ + ‘-ed’ form, before a main clause, to refer to past time. BISS: Yes. So the definition that was most useful to me was David Graeber's from "Debt: The First 5,000 Years," and his definition was the art of using money to make more money. And I think that that's a revealing definition in part because it exposes one of the fundamental problems with capitalism, which is that if you don't start out with money, you don't have much hope of making more money. Incisive, impressive and often poetic . . .The marvel of this book, and of Ms. Biss’s prose in general, is the spare and engaging way she interrogates such complex and abstract concepts. With references to Adam Smith and Dire Straits, Karl Marx and Scooby-Doo, she turns what is essentially a chronicle of white guilt and anxious privilege into a thoughtful and nuanced meditation on the compromises inherent in having a comfortable life.” — The Wall Street Journal

It was a social temptation she too had to resist. “I was caught off guard how deeply uncomfortable, excruciating it was to name the sums of money involved in my life, name my salary, of instance, or the amount my father paid for me to go to college… All of these were surprisingly painful moments.” Despite my frustrations at the beginning of the book, even I, who definitely grew up in some semblance of an upper (what my parents would call 'upper middle' if generous; they firmly believed they were working class) class family and community, but am now thoroughly in a lower middle, precariat class, relate to her experience in contextualizing capitalism through having to research it instead of live it. As an institutionally trained musician, I understand her explanation of being a class traitor as a writer or participant in the arts (although I feel like its particular experience in French romantic 'Bohemian' life was not as fleshed out as it could have been; but this isn't a research book, it's one of parables and anecdotes). Her slow coming to realization, and development of a more nuanced and observant position, is realistic if anything. To keep the house, she must keep her job. Working for the Man, she has less time to write. She sees a financial adviser about retirement planning. The financial instruments are impossibly complicated and replete with moral hazards – a company she might invest in may treat its workers well, but endanger the environment. None of them seems truly ethical. “I ask him if he can imagine this system of investment coming to an end. No, he says, your money is safe. But that’s not what I’m asking. I’m asking if there is any way out of this.” I once had a girl / Or I should say, she once had me, the car radio sings. John and I both fall silent. It’s been a long time since I’ve heard this song. And I don’t know if I’ve ever really listened to the ending. What happened there, I wonder. Did he make a fire in the fireplace while the girl was at work? No, John tells me, he burned her place down. He is sure of this, but I am not so sure. Having” indicates that a task was finished, without expressing who finished the task. What will clarify the information is the sentence, with the overall message it conveys. “Having Had”, however, indicates that the subject had something done by a third party, perhaps something he couldn’t have done by himself.

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Maybe from inside capitalism . . . every other system looks impossible and nostalgic, and every other way of life is hard to believe" (267). Biss writes with] confidence, accessibility, and provocation. . . [Her] writing is calm and precise, without flourish, so clear it belies the difficulty of writing prose so crystalline.” — Chicago Tribune The former owners of our house, who were white, made extra money by allowing the house to be used as a set for commercials. John discovers this when he gets a call from a casting agent who wants to know if the house is available. It’s not available – we live here. But then we learn how much we will be paid. All we have to do is leave the house for three days and two nights and we will earn 8,000 dollars. If a person is not a liberal when he is 20, he has no heart; if he is not a conservative when he is 40, he has no head,” goes the saying, ascribed to Churchill and also John Adams. And if you are not deeply discomfited by the time you finish reading On Having and Being Had, you have no conscience.

We can write ‘ after having spent…‘ in another with the same meaning: ‘ After I had spent’= past perfect simple. The most common past participle after ‘after having’ is ‘been’. The search for collocates pictured above shows that a passive structure is very common after ‘after having’. For example: A typically thoughtful set of Biss essays: searching, serious, and determined to go beyond the surface.So yeah, just really interesting reflections on money by one well-read person, arranged in a way to provide structure to some random inputs. I'll be reading more of her books, out of respect for the seriousness with which she reflects on what she has read and learned. Fascinating to see how someone else thinks. And a little meditative. Biss tries on different sets of ideas to answer her quandary: she flirts with communism, coming across a speech by Lenin which argued “we must stop the spread of global capitalism before all the wealth of the world is held by very few”, which, she notes, no longer sounds revolutionary now that the wealth of the world is indeed held by very few. She considers spies, and their ability to live within the system, while not believing in its aims. Is she a spy within capitalism? Or is that too generous a word for what she’s doing?