Dear Marina,
████ ██ ████████ ███████ I understand, and hope so much that ███ ███████ ███ ██████. I also understand how that kind of stress can be paralytic, and would likely also react in a similar way. ██ ███ ███ ████ ██ ████ █████ █████ ████ ██████ ██ █████!!
On a somewhat related note –related to the over-sharing / blurring between personal and professional relations– I want to bring up a request relevant to the second portion of The Employee publication. As Lauren has been managing the critical texts reflecting on the work, I have been working through the project archive, which will be published on a website sibling to the printed critical theory volume. This online archive will assemble the project’s development through the amassed emails composing the correspondence and communications generative of The Employee.
The work has stretched far beyond its initial one-year scope, as you have no doubt noticed. People who I initially tapped to be involved in the publication have had to drop out, or have just stopped answering emails. In many cases this has been because of the pandemic, but it is also the fallout from the already-underlying over-extension of many peers and colleagues, normalized pre-pandemic, which atrophied into a sort of soft-collapse, silent expression of incapacity. These silences, or admissions of personal or physical limitations are relevant to what the work is trying to make visible. For these reasons, the email archive seems like the perfect vehicle for conveying this personal-professional-administrative narrative.
You and I have been in correspondence about the work and the publication, and our emails fall also within the scope of the project archive. That being said, I have no intention to publish anything without consent. I have finished archiving and organizing the project emails (it took some months of tedious work), and I am sending you an attachment with the complete collection (today’s most recent correspondence has yet to be included). Because some of our emails have disclosed ████ ██████ ██████, I am not sure how public you want to be about this information. If there are emails you want to redact, or sections of emails, please let me know, and I will put in their place boilerplate text to that effect. (I intend to redact email and physical addresses).
(For the invoice, please use my address ██ ███████
██████████████ ███
█████ ███████
thank you so much, and all fingers crossed for ████ ██████ my dear!
Josh
