Having and Being Had

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The lyric I burned a hole in the dining room table is tethered, in my mind, to the liner notes of a Billie Holiday album that I borrowed from the library in college. She was singing songs written by someone else, the notes explained, but she rewrote them with the way she sang. Her delivery transformed a banal portrait of moneyed life into a wry critique of that moneyed life.

Having Had” can be redundant in some cases. When it happens, just “Having” would convey the same message, and “Having Had” could be too much (or unnecessary). In On Immunity: An Inoculation, it is the image of the vampire as a reflection of societal anxieties about disease that still lurks in my memory, especially as a pandemic now rages. For her new book, Having and Being Had ,the searing image is the juxtaposition of Biss herself, a homeowner and successful writer, against her mother, who struggles to stay in the middle class: "She still has white privilege, but she often doesn't have hot water." Such a locution implies that "I" had done the task alone. If you wanted to involve others, it would be: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 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.” At least in pre-pandemic numbers, the middle-class in the US was shrinking slightly, but it was shrinking because more of the middle-class was becoming rich… It is an indication of the country becoming more and more stratified, more unequal. The inequality is growing.”

A collection of essays circling elegantly around the object of her study. . . . [that is,]the moments we realize that consumerism has begun to rust our souls.” — The New Republic 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.’ Because we had completed the task, I was free to go. or Because we had completed the task, we were free to go.

The style is deceptively simple and often declarative. The arguments are also impressively concrete compared to the cliché- and abstraction-filled ways most people talk about money. Her house in Evanston, Illinois, near Northwestern University, where she is an artist-in-residence, comprises one of the book's choruses. In the end, all the furniture we buy will feel like lyrics written for someone else’s song, except the dining room table made by the Amish. This table will be solid cherry, a beautiful wood. It will be well made, but not quite as well made as the table I grew up with, the table I burned. To get a table like that, we would need to spend much more money. Or we would need a German cabinetmaker to move in with us. My foot is stretched out in front of me. bleeding because of a fall from my bicycle. This fall was entirely my fault -- I ran straight into a post after having too much to drink. There was no traffic, no car to blame. But if I had been in a car I would have hurt the post, rather than myself."

The system is made by people for people and if it’s not working we should change it. Reading economists who have emphasised that did give me hope actually.

By Dean Jobb

I don’t share all these critics’ assessments of all the books in question, but, broadly speaking, I’d say they’re onto something. And while they’re talking about novels, the conundrum of self-aware privilege and what to do about it is perhaps even more apparent in nonfiction prose. Recent years have seen a glut of personal essays in which, for at least a paragraph or so, writers list “all of [their] structural advantages, and basically argue against [themselves] writing the piece before returning to the piece,” as critic Amanda Hess once observed. Sentences 4 and 5 exemplify the use of “Having” to indicate how an act led to a consequential second act (indicated in the second half of the sentence).

The essayist Eula Biss focuses her new book on what seems to be a simple question. What is capitalism? For her, the answer to that question is complicated and elusive and comes in the form of short, often funny essays that make up her new book, "Having And Being Had." In her notes, Biss writes: "My work on this book was driven in part by the question of whether it was possible, given the game [of capitalism], to play by my own rules." Biss is not a writer who sets out to provide solutions, but the answer that appears to emerge is that it isn't — that is, not if Biss is unwilling to give up the comforts that she has invested in. Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator. 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. Teaching is transformative, paperwork isn't. Writing feels less like labor but being "in service to the art." And, oddly, she doesn't want to be paid for it.The social taboo is based around a sense of preservation, she suspects. It’s something that serves those who have the most financial wealth, helping to protect what they have. “It hides the extent of our inequality.” a non-finite subordinate clause with ‘after’ + ‘having/being’ + ‘-ed’ form, before a main clause, to refer to past time. For me this is a very dangerous attitude to have as an artist, because art-making and writing do not reliably produce money within capitalism or is undervalued.