Noah Cicero -- Treatise

A few weeks back Ryan Manning was nice and sent me a copy of Noah Cicero's Lulu version of Treatise. I know the book was written in 2006 or something and I know a lot of people have written about it but I am very excited by it and so decided to write words for it.

The book is basically about a college-educated twenty-something who gets sick of the emptiness in his entire social class. He decides to drop a class and takes up a job at a factory where he works for very little money and has no health insurance. Other things happen but I more want to write about how I felt about the book.

I have been trying to find words to write about but I have many opinions and thoughts but I can't put down anything substantial. Here are some things that express my opinion and critiques about the book but which are not 'legitimate' or 'conventional' venues of criticism. I am pretty sure this will be disjointed and terrible.

gmail chat with alicia pernell about noah cicero's Treatise

have you read treatise

yes
and burning babies

what did you think about treatise

well, i must say that i've never experienced the situations presented in noah's books

me neither
i felt like some of them were contrived
can i throw some thoughts out
i just finished reading it
i've been writing a blog about it for the past week or so but it's all jumbled

i read it a long time ago
but go ahead
tell me what you think

ok
i mean i don't think it's anything monumental to say he wrote with this kind of righteous (almost self-righteous) anger, that's even nihilistic kind of

i definitely agree that his writing is angry

i think it comes down to a combination of his perception of reality, of how he talks about truth, and of his writing style itself. the way he talks about his reality makes it seem like the blue collar class are the ones who are really experiencing reality or something. the way he talks about truth it makes me believe like there is some form of absolute truth which i don't believe in, and finally his writing style which has a objective tone much as any 'treatise' would.

kind of like documenting the lives of wild animals?

yeah right. i feel like he perceives humans as animals, and that the human animal has detached itself from the elements and from its specie, from nature with asphalt and concrete and indoor plumbing and so maybe the working class is the only strand of human animals to be close to nature because of how they live you know?
yessss exactly

like working class people don't discuss the meaning of life.. they just get up everyday and follow their instincts
and, naturally, instincts lead them to do things that will (hopefully) decrease their own suffering

yes and he is saying that this is how humans should live. it's seem he's fetishized it or romanticized the working class lifestyle much like the transcendentalists romanticized nature. but in the end what i see him doing is substituting a subjective reality in which people are careless and pompous and detached -- a reality which he perceives as immoral -- with another subjective reality that is just as arbitrary and unsatisfying and as pompous as an empty rich one

it took me a couple of reads, but i get what you're saying

and he reinforces this proposed reality with pseudo-values, like when he says 'poor people are honest about what they want, if they think you're an asshole they will tell you, if they want what you have they will steal it'. like he is trying to convince us of his reality with these values that are inflated with just as much emptiness and arbitrariness. i don't understand how this 'value' is more enriching or more contingent on this 'cicerian ultimate reality' than any other arbitrary moral i assign value to. i feel like the book is a retarded kid at a puppet show who suddenly stands up and starts screaming that these puppets are not real 'you're all puppets! you've all got a hand up your asses! you're not real! don't believe them!' and then he throws himself into the curtain and collapses the entire set and then the evening is ruined and everyone has to go home does that make sense? thank you for being patient, words are hard to do

i know, my dear, words are very hard to do

i think i am just going to copy and paste this as my review of his book

A Drawing I Made of What I Imagine Noah Cicero's Brain Looked While Writing Treatise (This Probably Does Not Matter)

A Song I Recorded That Makes Me Feel Like I Felt After Reading Treatise by Noah Cicero (This Probably Does Not Matter Either)


Treatise.mp3


Words About How I Perceive Social Classes After/Before Having Read Noah Cicero's Treatise

This summer I worked at a cannery. For one day. I got hired through a temp agency and worked from 8 PM to 6:30 Am. I absolutely hated every minute of it. I guess I really wasn't made for physical labor. I only lasted one night and it was miserably hot and as temp workers we were given the most pointless and shittiest cleaning jobs on the entire site. The next morning I came home and crawled into bed with green beans in my hair.

However, we were paid very well and although we didn't have health insurance as temp workers, the factory was eager to hire in new staff. This was probably because they went through cleaning workers like hotcakes. The permanent workers I talked to worked up to 60 hours a week at $10+/hr depending on how long they had been working there. With overtime these guys were easily making over $30,000 a year. (I don't even know if that is a right number for yearly earnings. I just made it up.) Anyway, it was supposed to mean that they could live very comfortably within their means, even with a family. But a lot of them would buy boats or houses or giant big screens. Or even blow a lot of it at the casino here. I used to tutor a guy named Marcos and he told me how his supervisor at the factory would go to the casino during her lunch break. She came back one day from lunch really pissy because she had lost $3000 in 45 minutes.

There was also a weird sense of identity they all had to the factory. There was loyalty and everyone tried to help everybody get out on time. It was very obvious their identities were entwined with their job. I mean, they spent up to 70 hours in there a week. Marcos told me he cried at his supervisor's funeral and he'd hadn't even cried at his own mother's funeral. He said he didn't really know his mother but that he felt like his supervisor was the closest thing he'd ever had to a mother. He said his supervisor got sick and started working with a respirator pouch or something. Soon she couldn't even work like that but she still kept coming to work. She wouldn't get paid but she just kept coming. She liked to sit and watch and joke with the workers. They were her family.


Closing Comments/Pseduo-intellectual 'Post-Modern' Insight Dribble on Noah Cicero's Treatise


Humans, specifically these humans, can find meaning in anything, in working for a corporation, even in working a mundane factory. I am not sure how much workers would really care for Treatise. I feel that the book was written for the middle/upper classes as a guilt trip. If so, it does it very well. But then book runs the risk of its audience thinking they 'get it'. That they consider reading the book really 'roughing it'. And then they will justify their worldview to convince themselves they are not rich or needy.


I finished the book this morning while giving plasma. I looked around at the people laid up in beds with pencil-sized needles poked into their arms. Many of them had baggy jeans on, piercings, and were reading books about World of Warcraft or Tom Clancy books or something. The people who come here are poor and need $20 for the weekend to get drunk or buy weed.

Noah's character Nikolai seems to be literate and an intellectual. He lives in a trailer house and finally presents the protagonist with some kind of 'blue collar manifesto'. Nikolai's characteristics seem to depict the Noah himself. But I wonder how many people like Nikolai there really are in the working class or how greatly Noah romanticized him. I don't feel like Treatise would be something people at the plasma center would read or care about. If so, then what's the point?