food for seven long year

Poor Tom, that eats the swimming frog, the toad, the todpole,
the wall-newt and the water; that in the fury of his heart, when
the foul fiend rages, eats cow-dung for sallets, swallows the

old rat and the ditch-dog, drinks the green mantle of the
standing pool; who is whipp'd from tithing to tithing, and
stock-punish'd and imprison'd; who hath had three suits to his
back, six shirts to his body, horse to ride, and weapons to wear;

But mice and rats, and such small deer,
Have been Tom's food for seven long year.

~~ from Shakespeare's King Lear, Act III, Scene IV

interview w/LL on inequality in SF

Lavinia Ludlow's Single Stroke Seven drops on March 1, and I had a chance to ask her questions about the writing life, unaffordable housing, and Bay Area inequality.

From JMWW:

Lavinia Ludlow’s debut novel alt.punk (Casperian Books 2011) immersed us in a world of music, ambition, sex, drugs, and life on the margins of music and the mainstream, so much so that we were left gasping for air. Now Ludlow is back with her second novel, Single Stroke Seven (Casperian Books, March 2016). Her spunky prose packs in so much raw rich detail that I burned through an advanced-review copy. Ludlow describes a San Francisco Bay shadow world of drummers and scroungers I know little about, and her punchy prose kept me engaged in the lives of characters trying to sustain their dreams and themselves under our “new normal” of extreme income inequality, contract work, and a winner-take-all music industry. Single Stroke Seven is the stuff you read in one sitting or return to as soon as work or family allows.

In the following interview, I first asked Lavinia about surviving as a writer/artist on the margins in the increasingly unaffordable San Francisco.

Alex Kudera: You encourage people to read (or re-read) your debut novel, alt.punk, before reading Single Stroke Seven. Why?

Lavinia Ludlow: Single Stroke Seven departs from alt.punk’s extreme narrative voice and...

Follow this link to read the full interview.

2014-15: inequality, unemployment, poverty

One reason Fight for Your Long Day is worth reading is that the novel clearly predicts the direction we are heading in--toward contract work (35% of all U.S. Workers), increased inequality, and global "flattening" for most of us even as the elite prospers. In 2014, from Robert Reich's "Why There's No Outcry" to Stu Byfosky's "Throwaway Americans," inequality, unemployment, and poverty articles remain the easiest ones to find between Miley, Bieber, and Sochi headlines. Apologies again for pasting in URLs, but I'll update this list as I see them, and I'm sure it will prove impossible to capture even "the 1%" of the total. So to speak.

Inequality:

http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/the-state-low-wage-america

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-11-03/how-401-k-plans-have-fueled-inequality-in-america?campaign_id=yhoo

http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-us-income-inequality-is-bad-20141024-column.html

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/oct/24/tale-of-two-cities-new-york-inequality-john-tim-freeman?CMP=fb_gu

http://mashable.com/2014/09/25/this-really-depressing-graph-about-the-u-s-economy-is-turning-heads/

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/09/upshot/how-are-american-families-doing-a-guided-tour-of-our-financial-well-being.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=HpSumSmallMediaHigh&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0&abt=0002&abg=0

http://news.yahoo.com/americas-wealth-gap-unsustainable-may-worsen-harvard-study-110255435--business.html

http://phys.org/news/2014-08-great-recession-americans-unhappy-pessimistic.html

http://www.vox.com/2014/8/25/6063831/two-numbers-that-show-how-badly-america-s-middle-class-is-hurting

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-reich/why-theres-no-outcry_b_4666330.html

http://barrygrahamauthor.com/post/74927339360/guest-blog-post-a-brief-primer-on-inequality-by-larry

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/03/business/the-middle-class-is-steadily-eroding-just-ask-the-business-world.html?action=click&contentCollection=Europe&module=MostEmailed&version=Full&region=Marginalia&src=me&pgtype=article

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/02/how-inequality-hollows-out-the-soul/?_php=true&_type=blogs&hp&rref=opinion&_r=0

http://www.newstatesman.com/economics/2014/02/gender-inequality-costing-global-economy-trillions-dollars-year

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/14/opinion/krugman-inequality-dignity-and-freedom.html?_r=0

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/21841-paul-krugman-redefining-the-middle-class

Unemployment:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/31/america-unemployment-map_n_5744656.html?ncid=txtlnkusaolp00000592

http://news.yahoo.com/30-percent-retirees-return-labor-093000852.html

http://news.yahoo.com/long-term-unemployed-improving-us-economy-39-hope-155005064.html

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/20140214_Throwaway_Americans.html

http://www.ibtimes.com/us-january-jobs-report-2014-unemployment-rate-falls-66-nonfarm-payrolls-rise-113k-1553925

http://www.philly.com/philly/wires/ap/business/20140213_ap_97aa78f9a8514fc2a176869f28786b75.html

Poverty:

http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/majority-children-us-public-schools-are-low-income

http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-child-poverty-20141021-story.html

http://qz.com/282841/who-and-where-americas-poor-people-are-in-charts/

http://news.yahoo.com/us-losing-generation-poverty-094500940--politics.html

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/nation-jan-june14-povertysuburb_01-11/

http://www.freep.com/comments/article/20140818/NEWS07/308180088/Hunger-America-1-7-rely-food-banks

http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/the-hunger-crisis-americas-universities#

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/breaking/20140822_Hunger_survey_shows_46_5_million_Americans_hungry.html

from "Education Preserves Class Inequalities"

"Thirty years ago, there was a 31 percentage point difference between the share of prosperous and poor Americans who earned bachelor’s degrees, according to Martha J. Bailey and Susan M. Dynarski of the University of Michigan. Now the gap is 45 points."