“Shaping, handling, and doing something with the psychic stuff.”
Subscribe
A working library is a project about work, reading & technology by mandy brown
- Author
- mandy brown
- Rights
- Copyright 2008–2026 mandy brown
- Public lists
- davewiner/blogroll
- Fetched
Undersense
Knowledge that you can feel in your bones.
The Empusium
In 1913, a young Pole arrives at a health resort in the Silesian mountains, a place known to be free of consumption due to the still, damp air.
An imaginative activity
“We should dissociate ‘work’ from the Herculean labor and return the idea of work to the example of the dream.”
The Dream and the Underworld
“When we wrong the dream, we wrong the soul.”
We were angry
To heal a wound is to account for the wounding.
Beyond credibility
To believe in supremacy is to refuse to see what’s right in front of you, over and over and over again.
Trauma and Recovery
Herman’s canonical work focuses on the necessity of understanding trauma within a social and political context.
Hurry-up-quick!
The purpose of haste is to prevent any semblance of rest.
Self-exploiting workers
Competitors instead of comrades.
Capitalism and the Death Drive
A person dies, but capital is forever.
Waking the Moon
An ancient secret order finds itself up against its most powerful foe: the Moon Goddess has returned.
To live
Do not let anyone take your regret from you!
We, the Heartbroken
“Heartbreak is the heart of all revolutionary consciousness.”
Apocalypse
An apocalypse is always both an ending and a beginning.
Everything
Workers must identify with everything they do.
Exit strategy
“We must learn to see [work] differently: no longer as something we have—or do not have—but as *what we do.*”
Reclaiming Work
“We must dare to prepare ourselves for the Exodus from ‘work-based society’: it no longer exists and will not return.”
The other side
However real and strong a memory is, it is still an echo, still a reflection, not the experience itself.
Slow River
Lore wakes up in an alley, naked, a huge gash running down her back, her identity implant—the only proof of her heritage in one of the world’s richest families—gone.
Ammonite
Marguerite (“Marghe”) Taishan is about to step foot on the planet Jeep when she receives a warning: if she goes on, she will never come back.
Always
Aud is back in Atlanta, teaching a self-defense class to a ragtag group of women, when one of her students takes her lessons in a direction she didn’t imagine.
Stay
Aud Torvingen is tucked away in a remote cabin, grieving and alone.
Obligation to possibility
“We have witnessed transformation too often to dismiss its possibility, and we have an obligation to that possibility.”
Let This Radicalize You
“Radical” means “pertaining to the root,” that is, the foundation or center of things, the point from which something grows.
The Blue Place
Aud Torvingen is a Norwegian living in Atlanta, a former cop moonlighting as security, an expert in several forms of martial arts, and six feet tall.
Autonomy
An autonomy that’s as integrated into society as the healthcare it enables is integrated across mind, body, and spirit.
For Health Autonomy
After austerity measures pushed nearly a million people in Greece out of the healthcare system, dozens of social solidarity clinics emerged, providing free preventative and integrative healthcare to thousands of people.
De-caring
Freedom requires uncertainty.
Non-things
“We are becoming blind to small, inconspicuous things, to what is common, the incidental and the customary—the things that do not attract us but ground us in being.”