pogibation (& yet nostalgic now)

from my 7/23 tumblr

I had decided to reread Thomas Ligotti's 2009 My Work is Not Yet Done before selling it; i remembered it as distinctly weaker than his books of the 90s, but now i think it is its own thing & if possible, more finely attuned to the current debacle. The mouldering city of Detroit where TL was living, is here more creepily evoked, and in making his setting a Kafkaesque corporate office, reveals i suppose what his own work life was like--as much as he's ever going to tell us. The themes of malevolent "restructuring" & pointlessly sadistic precarity (which i had thought were rather half-baked attempts to create a horror atmosphere in an uncongenial setting) now have been reproduced in my own work experience: the bookstore (founded on decidedly flower-power lines) & the junior college (reliably liberal, at about the same time, early 70s) both went on to reduce benefits, hours, & security, amid fulsome & irresponsible "adjustments"--all for no good business reason--& accompanied by language farther & farther removed from either sincerity or communication. Altogether, what i have named "pogibation" (from the Russian verb for 'perish', Погибать) or the felt consequences of the transfer of so much wealth from the middle classes to the upper 1 or 1/10th of 1 percent, became not just an occasional occurrence but the new normal, during the last decade or so leading up to the Pandemic. So i may decide to keep this one, if nothing else because i don't see any awareness of this in contemporary writing. (The Great American Adjunct Novel remains to be written.) From my point of view, stories about people with regular 9-to-5s & healthcare benefits, living the way they did in America from the 60s through the 90s, are now just science fiction. Kind of like the way masks have disappeared from every movie & TV show. Sidonius, i think, knew all about pretending that Rome was still a thing.