Poetic Labor Project: PAMELA LU 
September 5, 2010
PAMELA LU read by Erika Staiti
This was written by Pamela Lu, who is not here today.
I am going to try a little experiment here. I have about one hour my lunch hour before my next work meeting. This one hour pretty much represents the average amount of free time I have on any given workday. I am going to use this one hour to throw down some thoughts and feelings around the concerns of this Labor Day event. At the end of the hour, I will have to stop and I may or may not have additional free time to come back to what I’ve written. If what I have written within this time limit seems interesting enough you, you are welcome to have it read aloud at the event in my absence. But only if it is interesting enough. I won’t be hurt if you don’t decide to use it.
One hour per day. How to spend it. Time is money but time is free. Or is it? In my twenties, some of my fellow writer friends who were in graduate school or working at low-paid odd jobs to fund their minimalist artist lifestyles would occasionally give me a hard time for my bourgeois job as a technical writer. They could not understand why I was commuting sixty miles a day to hold down this job when I could have slacked more locally or gone in for an academic career that would have allowed for more time devoted to art.
To be honest, I wasn’t so sure myself. But in fact I’m sure a lot of it had to do with being a child of immigrants: this constant but underlying feeling of immigrant scarcity or immigrant marginality no matter how bougie one eventually becomes that made it where I feel I had to take care of myself financially to avoid being a burden on my family. One of my friends always defended my choice. Her father had been a beatnik hipster-type in the sixties. He was always smoking pot and going to the theater and stuff. But my friend was fed up with his act because she knew the family members who had bankrolled his lifestyle.
Hipsters live off the bank accounts of the bourgeoisie, she would generalize, leaning back in her threadbare tank-top and lip-ring, I was likely wearing tattered shorts and modified combat boots, my weak attempt at bucking the code of business professional attire. We were probably on our way to the check-cashing place on University and San Pablo to pick up the food-stamps she was receiving as a low-income student divinity hospice worker.
One question I’d like to ask is, why can’t I make it to this Labor Day event? Why do I have so little time? Capitalism divides time into work time and personal time. You only get paid for work time. Work time is the only time that has value, even if you tons of unpaid work during your personal time, which is what many people do: unpaid domestic work, unpaid family care work, unpaid citizen bureaucratic system management work, unpaid artistic work, etc.
An academic career in creative writing does this amazing thing: it takes this phenomenon that has no capitalist value in it — unpaid artistic work — and transforms it into something that earns a wage. Even if you and your publisher make zero money off your books, you can still collect paychecks indirectly for your work by teaching and publishing according to the schedule of achievement that traditionally earns you tenure as a professor. Then you get to go to conferences where you can hobnob with other poet-academics and have your room and board paid for because it’s all part of your work, all of it, not to mention summers off. Who wouldn’t want such a job and life?
But maybe you’re temperamentally unsuited to the academic life. Maybe you want to be more in the real world. Maybe you have other immediate obligations that require you to hold a different kind of job, one that doesn’t require years and years of schooling and that promises stable paychecks right away, month after month. Or maybe you’re just plain perverse, just a glutton for punishment.
Hypothesis: I’ve resisted the kind of academic career that validates my writing as paid work because at the root I want my writing to remain worthless. I want my writing to remain worthless.
And even more than that, I want my writing to be a criminal act. Like Genet, writing and thievery are synonymous to me. Except I’m not nearly as exciting a thief as Genet. I’m just a thief of the most expensive thing in the world: I steal time. Writing is worthless but the time required to do it is expensive.
By now, I have exceeded my one hour of free time and I’m cutting into my work time to write this. I will have to steal from my personal time to make up for this lost work time. The time stolen from my personal time to make up for this lost work time that was itself stolen to make more free time to write this will in fact be stolen from time I have allotted to working on a manuscript that I owe my publisher, a manuscript that is long overdue. And that my girlfriend is at this moment working hard as an editor, stealing time from her life or giving me permission to steal time away from her life to edit it. In Human Resource hours, we are each working half-time on this manuscript. Together, we make up one Human Resource. And until this manuscript is finished we will be living half-lives separately and together. … and Proust neatly solved the problem of life getting in the way of art by cutting out life from the equation through their individual methods of confinement. But I can’t afford that, and I would cause too much damage to the people around me by doing that. So I am writing, and my girlfriend and I have agreed that it is worth it. And how do we pay for the expense of this art? Sacrifice and friends. We pay for it with our own blood, sweat and toil, the most personal kind of value.
Pamela Lu has been a technical writer in the high-tech sector since 1996.
Erika Staiti lives and writes in Oakland, works in Berkeley.
