August Reading List - "It's Giving"

Another difficult month in the books - I appreciate your patience and grace as I support loved ones in my personal life, and go all-hands-on-deck in DC. Thank you.


In Fair Trade (link), Jessica Creane and I invited participants to consider how they determine Value by bringing items from home for possible exchange. Often enough, we found that in the process of coming to know each other, the two participants began to think less of what they could get from each other and more of what they’d like to give.

This month I’m reading a favored book from a new friend that gets right at the heart of what makes giving function so differently from commerce, and how the rules and conventions that govern gift giving help us understand how Art moves through the world.

“The Gift; Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property

Lewis Hyde

As Lewis Hyde sees it, there are at least two different systems of transaction; that of commerce and that of gifts. These systems function with distinctly different aims, outcomes, and conventions, many of which counteract or negate each other. In this book, Hyde explores the tension that arises from Art (making and consuming) straddling them both. While the text is certainly steeped in theory, his engagement with the questions within is distinctly practical; in one passage, he recollects from his own experience as a poet and translator: “Inevitably the money question comes up; labours such as mine are notoriously non-remunerative, and the landlord is not interested in your book of translations the day the rent falls due.”

What renumeration really matters? Do money questions have answers? How many times will we have to read the word “Tribal” in a piece of social anthropology from the ‘80s? How can we understand labour and work as separate and connected—and as a rubix cube we must constantly solve in the face of the Rent, ever Niagara-Falling due?

Come find out with me.

RELATED READING

“Margaret Atwood on The Gift that keeps on giving”

Margaret Atwood, originally published by Canongate, reprinted by Prospect Magazine

Incidentally, the subtitle to this book would eventually be updated to “ “
Being as I am a stickler for the sexier title (despite “Erotic” being used in the very etymological sense of “bringing together/seeking connection,” rather than in the actually spicy fashion), I got myself a copy of the old version before learning that in later printings Margaret Atwood wrote a lovely introduction from her future, lamented the loss of the original cover art, and brought new perspective into the work from the changing world since it’s first publication, including a really interesting and profoundly “sticky” point about the supposedly “free” internet dreamed of at the web’s inception (and evoked aplenty in the push towards “web 3.0”).

No matter. Meeting here, in our future, we can forgive many things, and Frankenstein-together the version of our preference; beginning with Atwood’s beginning, found here.

Pay Up

(oh hello it’s me)

Yes, this book is all so on the nose for the whitepaper I’ve been gradually editing the past (checks star-chart) 11 months(?!), that I felt compelled to attach the latest draft; whether you eagerly followed or cannily dodged the 5 part monstrosity as it emerged onto the Patreon month-by-month over the past year, you can grawk it attached below in its full, 23 page glory. In it, I track my own adventures in experimenting with payment systems sitting somewhere in the middle between the two economies Hyde articulates here, and strive toward some kind of accountability by trying to form a metric to understand what these experiments have and have not accomplished.