Work, craft, sex

Fast bikes, slow food, and the workplace wars: Kalefa Sannah writes in the NYer: Shop Class as Soulcraft “is, in large part, a treatise on the joys and frustrations of manliness in a post-manly age.”

I was interested to read this, because my reaction to the excerpt was that it had a lot more to do with those issues than it did with the (alleged topic of) joy/satisfaction of working with your hands. I haven’t read the book, but I couldn’t shake the feeling in the essay that Crawford was bent on signaling his fundamental man-ness. It’s interesting to me that some forms of DIYism are positioned in gender terms, and others (like Crawford’s book) are treated as more transcendental statements about American life.

On a related note, I think Sanneh’s very good essay would have been even better if it had somehow worked in Handmade Nation and the considerable subculture (or culture) it represents, and how its participants think about consumption, gender, work, and so on.