Esoteric Jargon

José Sanchez is an incredible writer I’ve admired for a long time. We did a panel a while back about Criticism and the Left, but I’ve wanted to talk more about writing with him for a while so we spoke via email recently and chatted raving, class, the DSA, Basement, Donna Summers, and Lenin as Saint Paul. As always, he had a lot of keen, fascinating, and surprising observations.

In the past, you've spoken a lot about the importance of keeping working class writers in the conversation and have been vocal about labor rights. Do you think this ever seeps into your writing? I'm thinking of your past few pieces in N+1 for example.

I’m an envious and spiteful omnivert, so I am always scrolling through social media, talking to people at parties, clubs, dives, and such. And we’ll get to talking about what we do, how we got to where we are, and, being a working person from a working-class family who’s struggled with making ends meet, I’ll definitely start to compare and contrast past and present circumstances. I’ve met writers that have had, say, a spouse or set of parents cover all or part of their rent while they pursued M.F.A.s. No one in my family has a doctorate, so I couldn’t even talk about that stuff with my blood-kin. There are so many New Yorkers around my age that I come across that have a father that co-signed a lease for a rent-stabilized place, or a mother providing monthly grocery or utility bill allowance. Or they’re sitting on a trust fund, wiggled their way into jobs that make tens of thousands or a hundred-thousand dollars more than I. And so forth. I just never had those advantages. I’ve been evicted, been on food stamps and Medicaid, visited food pantries, and have had an array of shitty, dead-end jobs. Sometimes one on top of each other, yet to little avail. My family wasn’t necessarily poor, and I, though born out of wedlock, grew up in a two-parent household in the tri-state burbs. Mom didn’t have a degree. They were quite religious, and things got so bad as a teen sometime after being found out as gay that child services swung by a few times. So I just never had the sort of private safety nets and quiet security that so many writers, actors, playwrights, and so forth rely on in this era of state abandonment, of an ever-shrinking public safety net, inflation, and deteriorating workplace conditions. I mean, so much of my headspace is just taken up by panicking over finances, where I am going to eat, how am I going to afford a medical bill, keep a roof over my head, and so much we can file under “survival mode.” And, of course, being black American and Puerto Rican has not exactly helped either.

So, I don’t think a lot of writers can actually draw on memories and experiences of material deprivation and its psycho-social impacts if they haven’t actually struggled. Some can, though I would say that most cannot. And so much of “NYC fiction” then becomes about the foibles and foolery of, I’m sorry, a lot of white woman with fancy degrees from respectable, piggy-bank families that can laze around Clandestino, the Amalfi Coast, or wherever the fuck without consequence. And just look at the whiteness and class and educational pedigrees of those that make up the publishing industry itself. So, have any of these Literary It-Girls been a nanny, a Starbucks barista, or a home health aide like so many immigrant women of color in this city? Have they waited inside an HRA office for three hours waiting to get their food stamp applications sorted out? Have they ever been on a rent strike? That’s why I, a salt-of-the-earth Brooklynite, always have hated the Dimes Square bullshit to the extent that it has existed. Just rich white people circlejerking themselves in salons like it’s the Lower East Side of Lucy Sante and Gary Indiana’s heyday. I’m sorry, but those days are over or they got priced out real, real deep into the outer boroughs! Or worse: New Jersey. That’s why “NYC fiction” qua “NYC fiction” always feels like it’s missing how the average New Yorker lives their lives. Never mind that about one out of four New Yorkers live at or below the outdated federal poverty line, or that closer to 60 percent live in near-poverty.

I truly think once the Zohran and DSA housing agenda locks in and expands then the art and literature of the Gotham scene will improve because writers that know the struggle, know the hustle it takes to both hustle for rent money while also writing their novels and shit, those writers can afford to stay here and not have to work forty or fifty hours doing some bullshit. I’m heartened by the DSA’s Workers Deserve More national platform that Fox News and others are denouncing because we have the temerity to call for the Senate’s abolition, yet the thing that I think a lot of writer and artist friends should champion in it are things like a 32-hour workweek with full pay and benefits and other pro-worker and pro-renter measures that could give us the “Freedom to Flourish,” the freedom to just laze around and write all day like some Victorian aristocrat or something in the 19th-century.

I found your piece on rave writing really fascinating. What was the reception like? I was interested in your idea about party reporting not being equatable with philosophy. That might be my own extrapolation though, how do you see this genre of writing? Do you enjoy it?

The reception was pretty good! Definitely was feeling my oats for a sec there, and I’m tryna have that high be some sort of motivation for my spotty and inconsistent work ethic going forward. I really wish I capitalized on the feedback and splash it made. I also wish I was back on Twitter also to spread the piece even further, yet some Elon-groupie hacked it months ago, and ... I have to thank him because he kind of freed me! I owe some folks a message back in response in my Instagram DMs. I think one person offered to get me into a party for free, and, honestly, getting paid to be a sort of nightlife and live performance reporter or something would be pretty chill. I guess I do find the phrasing of your question to be an extrapolation of your own though I perhaps don’t understand it? I think all of those “rave writers” have a philosophy or theory of sociality, what a party could prefigure socially, and so forth. I think I just thought some inflated the importance of raving or what have you. Prefiguring, cultural interventions, and such, all that’s fine and good. Yet throwing a party has to be secondary to building a party of the proletariat ... a small-c communist party if you will! I think that Emily Witt and Simon Wu’s books were of that more sober-minded opinion, so, yes, I do enjoy writing and theorizing about partying, house and disco music, and so forth. I just don’t think we’re gonna rave ourselves to the revolution. Though again, if I can’t rave in your revolution then it’s a chop, boots.

You’ve written a lot about Socialism and the DSA, especially in contrast to Afropessimism and nihilism. What do you think socialism offers your writing practice that other forms of leftist cultural critique don’t? Or do you see it differently?

Interesting question! I honestly cannot say for sure. I’ve been a dues-paying member for about a decade at this point, and I was commie even before that back in high school. I think I am always trying to think about how a piece of writing relates to its moment and circumstance. And then how there are certain blindspots, patterns, or contradictions within the writing itself that’re unexplored, unsaid, etc. I am no Marxist literary critic, yet I try to do that. If I were to do academia all over again, I might’ve done Comp Lit or English!

How do you slot your writing genre-wise? You also write fiction, of course. Do you see yourself as primarily one kind of writer over another? A novelist? A critic? A political writer?

I think I see myself more of a critic and essayist. Though I would like to be a novelist too. I haven’t published my fiction anywhere although I was a Periplus fellow being mentored by Bryan Washington. And I did the Lordship Residency along the Long Island Sound. And I did readings of the manuscript I’ve been working on last year. At 85,000 words at the moment last time I checked the Google Doc? Would love pointers on how to submit fiction to journals! It’s something that’s alien to me. I almost feel like I should not or don’t even know how to review works of fiction. I mean, for me, reviewing a history book like Deborah Baker’s for The Nation felt familiar because of my academic training. Find the argument, identify primary and secondary sources, identify a methodology, etc. Is it historical? Anthropological? More qualitative methods or quantitative ones? Intellectual forebears and inspirations? Where were they educated and by whom?

I’m curious how other writers define their own “style.” Do you think your voice has any hallmarks?

In terms of non-fiction, somewhere between comedically colloquial and pretentiously lettered. And let’s bring back pretentiousness! I don’t have much in this world, yet I do have discernment: the essential ingredient of pretentiousness, mind you. I am, as you can tell, long-winded, winding, and verbose. I can be baroque in the drafts. Bit scatter-brained. Sentences are just accumulations of clauses. I kinda like it. Why should we be miserly with our words? Have you looked around? Listened to yourself? It’s an overwhelm.

Over/Under

Lenin - Misunderstood. If Lenin was alive today then he would be in the DSA. If Marx is Christ, then Lenin is Paul. Stalin? Billy Graham.

Donna Summer - Underrated. Sexuality, glamor, theatricality, the pipes, the innovations with Morodor. There is no Madonna or Bey without her. Dance music and the histories of other genres can be periodized as before “I Feel Love” and after “I Feel Love.” Synthesizer-lushness and the vocals brewed together? Trailblazing. “Macarthur Park” came on at this underwear party at Ice Palace over the weekend. Everyone was belting the words, hundreds of shirtless men. It felt euphoric. Overall, the tracks were forgettable and brash circuit-y remixes of Britney, Whitney, and the usual suspects.

Basement - Underrated. Yeah, I said it. I’m a member. Love telling people that in the hopes of seeming cooler than I am. Probably one of if not the best club in the city, as cringe as that sounds. All dancefloors should put stickers on people’s phone cameras. I typically stick to the second dancefloor, Studio, inside it where the music’s a lil’ bouncier and lighter in vibes. And, literally, the lights are brighter too. Honestly? No complaints. Sometimes the night’s a flop and the darkroom’s empty or full of heteros, but that’s usually because I picked the wrong party. Go for Carry, Wrecked, or the other fag-fests if you’re family like myself. Those nights the darkroom area is packed, and I’m suckin’ n’ fuckin’ a storm. Look up the D.J.s too before you go. Mama, let’s research, y’know? I love Kilopatrah Jones, Dee Diggs, Nita Aviance, Juan Sterling Diaz, and others.

Taylor Swift - Gowns. Beautiful gowns. Rest in peace, Aretha.

Queer Theory - Underrated. You should know how to be queer and what that means currently, and how it has come to mean whatever the fuck that means. I’m a gay guy, so I’ve tended to read stuff about gayness. And some of the stuff goes to weird places if not grounded in the material, the historical. Love Foucault and stuff, yet it helps to have an idea of from whence in real-life power comes from, or else you get this nebulous, pervasive, and fatalistic conception of power that. There’s sorta been a re-examination of past theoretical and historical work that deals with questions of capital and class which I think is quite necessary in the Americas and broader so-called West since, post-legal equality integration or assimilation has meant having to confront gay and lesbian capitalists, Zionists, and imperialists. Think Mayor Pete or pinkwashing Israel’s genocide. I think everyone should read Freud’s 1905 Three Essays on Sexuality and then Foucault’s History of Sexuality to start, yet John D’Emilio’s Capitalism and Gay Identity from 1979 is probably an even more important touchstone if you want a more straightforward Marxist analysis. Kevin Floyd’s The Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism is a fave as is Rosemary Hennessey’s Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late-Stage Capitalism is great too. And Politics of Everybody: Feminism, Queer Theory, and Marxism at the Intersection by Holly Lewis is an easy read too that avoids a lot of esoteric jargon. Pinko, this collective of queer communists, has a magazine that’s excellent. Max Fox, one of the Pinko editors, also brought to life the posthumous work of Christopher Chitty with the aforementioned’s Sexual Hegemony: Statecraft, Sodomy, and Capital in the Rise of the World System published in 2020. Another Pinko editor, M.E. O’Brien, has done great work on family abolition which is a word that has engendered some pooh-poohing from lefties that wanna be as ‘normal’ as possible to win elections and such. But I’ve always loved O’Brien’s work, and, finally, definitely check out the Transgender Marxism collection out of Pluto Press too! ... Oh, but, finally, finally--the best work of gay, queer, etc. history is George Chauncey’s Gay New York. Actually, start with that one and then go from Freud onwards. The Bad Gays podcast is also top-tier. They’ll go through the biographies of queers like the gay head of the S.S., a man named Ernst Röhm or Jeffrey Dahmer, or, like, Alexander the Great or Little Richard. ... Okay, I’m done nerding out!