In “Having and Being Had,” author Eula Biss captures the American value system of buying and owning — and what we trap ourselves in when we invest in the trappings of the middle class.
." The essay is, in a sense, about literal debt—Biss had recently bought a house with a mortgage—but she immediately takes us beyond the prosaic meaning of the word.
I themed my courses around race, identity, and narrative, and assigned the Biss essay. We put Biss in conversation with James Baldwin's"Notes of a Native Son," Ta-Nehisi Coates'sI thought then that it was enough to expose young writers to work that dismantles the narrative of race in America.maps out the ease of colluding in capitalism. Once again Biss uses the purchase of her home north of Chicago—she is a professor at Northwestern University—as a jumping off point.
Each piece begins in the present tense, dropping the reader in medias res into a scene from Biss's life, followed by associative riffing. Receiving a deluge of catalogs causes Biss to pause at the IKEA catalog's cover message,"Designed for people, not consumers," amused over the"implication that consumers are not people.
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.
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