Proximal Processes
 the aim of this page: to see a world in a grain of sand
from Willliam Blake, Auguries of Innocence

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour


Blake and Conrad provide a framework for this page.

 . . . to see the world in a grain of sand

. . . fiction is history

what is "truth"?
from Joseph Conrad's "Henry James: an Appreciation" (1905), The North American Review, Vol. 180, No. 578 (Jan., 1905), pp. 102-108

Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing.  But it is also more than that; it stands on firmer ground, being based on the reality of forms and the observation of social phenomena, whereas history is based on documents, and the reading of print and handwriting--on second-hand impression. Thus fiction is nearer truth. . . .  A historian may be an artist too, and a novelist is a historian, the preserver, the keeper, the expounder, of human experience.





white supremamcy/racism at the dinner table
from Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections (FSG, 2011)

It was true that Alfred believed the only thing wrong with the death penalty was that it wasn’t used often enough; true as well that the men whose gassing or electrocution he’d called for, over dinner in Chip’s childhood, were usually black men from the slums on St. Jude’s north side. (“Oh, Al,” Enid would say, because dinner was “the family meal,” and she couldn’t understand why they had to spend it talking about gas chambers and slaughter in the streets.) p. 128




encounter with the base
Rehema Ellis interviewed Janis Sunderhaus, CEO of Health Partners of Western Ohio, on March 27, 2017 re. Obamacare

from “Health Care CEO: ‘People Don’t Have a Real Clear Understanding’ the Services Made Possible by ObamaCare”


Ellis: And you have said to me many people don’t even understand where this health care is coming from.  You told me the story of one woman who was helped who was a Trump supporter.  What was her reaction to the fact that she was able to get this health care?

Sunderland: Well, she was able to qualify for the Medicaid expansion, and she said to me, “Thank goodness I didn’t have to get Obamacare.”  And I looked at her and I said, “ Guess what?  This is Obamacare.”  And she was kind of taken aback; and said “Uh!  Well let’s just keep that between you and me.”  So people don’t have a real clear understanding of what types of services have been made possible by the Affordable Care Act passing Medicaid expansion.  This site here has now medical, dental, pharmacy services—that’s all because of Medicaid expansion.


Franzos (“Schiller in Barnow”) and Munro (“Family Furnishings”) are works of fiction.  In "Schiller in Barnow" Franzos shows

how, in the spirit of Enlightenment universalism, a love of Schiller brings together members of three oppressed groups: the Jew Israel Meisels, the unhappy monk Fransiscus (a victim of clerical tyranny), and the Ruthenain schoolmaster Basil Woyczuk.  Their favourite Schiller text, appropriately, is the 'Ode to Joy' . . . with its appeal to all humanity to join in an embrace. (Intro, p, 111 )

Alcorn's Narcissism and the Literary Libido is an incredible study that takes us into the heart of Figure 1, Bildungsproletarians and Plebeian Upstarts.  Schiller Hall in Detroit should be viewed as a radical salon. 

Munro, on the other hand,  provides a portait of a deadly, stultifying existential domain (the dinner table).  There are millions of such deadly proximal zones, where the potential for cogntive development is crushed.  The Sunderland and Johnson videos provide isights into two such Proximal zones:


Karl Emil Franzos, "Schiller in Barnow" (1876), in The German Jewish Dialogue: An Anthology of Literary Texts, 1749-1993, Ritchie Robertson, ed. (Oxford University Press, 1999)


Mercer L. Sullivan, "Getting paid": youth crime and work in the inner city (Cornell Univesity Press, 1989)

Carl Husemoller Nightingale, On the edge: a history of poor black children and their American dreams  (Basic Books, 1993)

Zena Smith Blau, Black children/white children: competence, socialization, and social structure (Free Press, 1981)

Jack Katz, Seductions of Crime (Basic Books, 1988)

Modernist Sensibilities on Detroit's East Side, circa 1930s
from the Joe Adams (Dodge Main Local 3, socialist) interview conducted around 1975-76
My background on unionism.  Mostly it was like on my dad with the newspaper socialism.  He believed in socialism.  He used to sit there and talk.  I had seven brothers, and hell, the old man used to sit down.  He was a pretty intelligent guy, like the Reuther boys we used to listen to the old man.”

Religion was a bunch of bullshit.  As a statesman Reuther got to be where he went to some church and just went there once in a while just to make it look good, but shit when he died he [they] let nobody near him—any of them—godddamn rabbis or preists or ministers, he felt the same way about all of them there like [Roy] and him, up your bunhole, just burn it and get the hell over with it.  That’s the way I feel about it.

 “There are a nucleus of people in any organization that make all organizations function.  I don’t care what you say.  You can have a million members and there can be fifty of them that makes the UAW function, which is what happened there for the last thirty five years.  The Reuthers, the Woodcocks, myself.  You know when a guy like me brings in 250,000 members into this goddamn union he has to have a semblance of some intelligence.  he just can’t go out and say ‘I’m an organizer’.  In Patterson NJ there was 32,000 people in Wright Aeronautical, and I got 23,000 votes out of them people for the UAW.



Modernist Sensibilities: Ed Lock on Schiller Hall
from the Ed Lock (CP, UAW Local 600) interview:

I was very active in MESA --- Ford in USSR  petered out in March of 1933, and I was laid off.  Several months later I found employment in a job shop as a milling machine operator.  I got signed up in the MESA, that was a unionized plant. The  job didn't last long.  

In that period I would hang out at the MESA hall, Schiller Hall on Gratiot Ave. . .  It was very much a Left hall.  I became very interested in union . . .  I was very young, 20 yrs old.  My father was AFL, a ship carpenter, but I didn't assimilate much from him.  But I became very interested in the MESA, and one of the characteristics of the time was that large numbers of radicals of all descriptions IWW, Communist, Socialist . . . would come to this hall, and we would sort of sit around and have big bull discussions with the old timers from the IWW and the Communists and whoever was there . . .  We would all participate in these discussions, each of them would bring their literature round . . . I got involved so to speak, I was unemployed, but I would still go because I found these meetings fascinating, and I would participate in the distribution of leaflets.

I would go out with some of the leaders, and go with John Anderson or John Mack, who was a leader at that time.  I went to--not so often to Fords--but I went to the Cadillac plant, Ternstedt, places like this, and GM, and would distribute organizational . . . I got involved in the Detroit Stoveworks strike . . .  The MESA had undertaken the organization there and had a bitter strike there.  A matter of fact I had guns put in my ribs in this strike threatening to kill us.  But this was part of my education in the trade union movement.


 on cogntive and cultural "awakening" in Flint immediate post-war years


Wellman: Flint is what I consider to be the asshole of the world; it's the roughest place to be.  Now we recruited dozens of people to the Party in Flint, and they came out of indigenous folk.  And those are the best ones.  But we couldn't keep them in Flint very long, once they joined the Party.  Because once they came to the Party a whole new world opened up.  New cultural concepts, new people, new ideas.  And they were like a sponge, you know.  And Flint couldn't give it to them.  The only thing that Flint could give you was whorehouses and bowling alleys, you see.  So they would sneak down here to Detroit on weekends--Saturday and Sunday--where they might see a Russian film or they might . . .  hear their first opera in their lives or a symphony or talk to people that they never met with in their lives. . . .

On the other hand the reality of joining a movement of this type is that the guy who is in the indigenous area looks around and says this is idiocy, I can't survive here.