The tupperware was to keep him from moving while they weighed him!

Amazing video of baby panda facing medicalized biopower.

Sorry about the (pseudo)Foucault. I have a one track mind.

"Downpresser man, where you gonna run to?"

I love these crisp autumn days when i can dig into my copious collection of black sweatshirts and feel the wind on my nose. There's something very comforting, but simultaneouslyt almost euphoric about it for me, much more so than even the first flowers of spring. Alright i sound like a hallmark card trying to rip off Robert Frost and failing miserably, but lemme just say that i really love the Fall. The season i mean. I like the band too.

In the supermarket buying food they were playing Martha Reeves And The Vandellas' "Nowhere To Run," which is kind of Foucauldian, or at least panoptical.

best sign ever?

(Williamsburg Bridge, Manhattanbound.)

foucault is disciplining and punishing me

Three interactions on the street with three people i went to high school with and New York's ok if you like awkwardness and gentrification and yesterday was nuts what with the five hours of union meeting but today was all about Abnormal, which is fascinating but dense, like every Foucalt book or essay i have ever read and i have 200 more pages to read before 4 pm tomorrow and i guess i will have to put off seeing Serenity until at least saturday. #%$@. I'm going to go to sleep now. I apologize for the lack of posting. Some stuff i would like to post on is too sensitive to make googlable and i'm generally just too swamped to construct the kind of legnthy, well-thought-out post that recent events would necessitate anyway, so for the moment you'll just have to deal with me ranting about baby pandas and library improprieties.

Since when are Orchard, Ashmun, Bristol, and Whalley "around science hill" or "part of the grad ghetto?" Did this reporter even bother to look at a map? Has she ever set foot on Bristol Street or Whalley "street?"

Also, yay imperialism. Boola boola.

Killer dolphins.

What the FUCK?

Because $200 will get you affordable child care in NYC for four months.

Also, the use of the variant spelling of "dependent" pisses me off.

Dear Graduate Student:
The Office of the Vice President for Student Affairs and the
Student Resource Center
are pleased to offer a Bursar credit in the amount of $200 per
semester (up to a
maximum of $400 per calendar year) for full-time graduate
students who have
dependant children requiring child care services. To be
eligible for a Bursar credit, students must be currently enrolled for full-time
study in a degree program as verified by the Registrar, and their dependant
child must not have reached his/her sixth birthday.For more information, please
visit http://www.nyu.edu/gradchildcare. The application deadline for Fall 2005 is November 1, 2005If you have any
questions about the subsidy program, please e-mail gradchildcare@nyu.edu or contact Ms. [redacted]
Coordinator of Graduate Student Life, at [redacted]. Thank you for your
interest in the Child Care Subsidy Program for graduate students.

representative students

I would have been next to speak last night had President Sexton not unilaterally ended the town hall meeting after spending a good fifteen minutes dragging on in non-sequitur non-answers to one undergad's question about increased enrollment. Sexton has this whole "I'm all down to earth" schtick that, however contentious the meeting was yesterday, clearly serves him better than Richard Levin's flustering barrage of unbelievably crass insults every time he's confronted on his agenda, words, and/or deeds. But Sexton nevertheless said some outrageous things - that the union is over, that "we" are past it, that it is behind us. Throughout, i heard Sexton speak of the union as if it were some nefarious third party, some sinister bureaucracy intent on abridging the perogatives of the corporate university, and there were heated exchanges between several GSOC members and sexton on the matter of Health Care and the administration's refusla to negotiate. I got on line because i wanted to make it clear to to President Sexton that the union was not "behind him," that he was not "past it," but that we were standing right in front of him, that we are the union, that the union is us, and that we are going to continue to organize ourselves and take action to make NYU a better place to teach and learn, and that in refusing to negotiate with us, he's following a path which will impede teaching and learning here. Maybe that's what he wants -- maybe he'd like to ransform NYU from a "tuition dependent instiitution" into one which, like Yale, could easily afford to become tuition free and depends upon corporate partnerships, NIH/DOD/NSF grants and tax exemptions, not to mention globally pillaging hedge funds for much of its skyrocketing endowment growth. Regardless, our union isn't going anywhere.

Three years ago, a bunch of us confronted the Yale Corporation at their secluded and secret meeting place at the new boathouse in Derby, with its nifty big glass walls. Those who live in glass houses shouldn't bust unions. Have you seen the Kimmel Center lately?

Ward Sutton's Take on the NY Mayoral Election

I like this not so much for the attempted Thomas Frank parallel, (I don't particularly like Thomas Frank, and you should read this instead,) but more because i think it does a good job of summing up why the Bloomberg campaign is so problematic no matter how many gestures the mayor may make in the next month.

More things for Josh to blog about.

The Abramoff stuff just gets more and more interesting

I gave directions to somebody today. In Brooklyn. It made me feel very pleased with myself.

It's September 25th now, which means, as of about 6 PM, I haven't been arrested in three years.

I'll get right on that.

Weber's a racist, a firm believer in the unique force and grandeur of Occidental capitalist modernity, something of an anti-semite, and does not, i believe, mention women much if at all throughout his magisterial work of historical sociology, The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism, in which he attempts to trace the relationships between puritanical asceticism and capitalist discipline. It's still interesting to read, but it's also pretty infuriating, and i hope the discussion on monday is a good one. Now on to Kathy M'Closkey's book on Navajo Weaving, which is interesting so far (i'm only 13 pages in) and has already cited Maria Mies' Patriarchy and Accumulation on A World Scale. Which is cool.

There are lots more pictures of the baby panda up at the National Zoo website, which will proovide me with blog fodder for weeks. For now, I just want to let you all know that if i were a baby panda, I too would hang out in large tupperware containers.


The Mets won today, and the Yankees lost not only their game against the Blue Jays, but also sole posession of first place. Oh, the Schadenfreude. Pandas probably don't do Schadenfreude. They are probably to busy hanging out in tupperware containers.

Sometimes actors venture into the realm of popular music. Sometimes this is a blatant cash-in, sometimes it's a lifelong dream fulfilled. Sometimes the products of this union are surprisingly fun, if in part for overwhelming cheese value - i point to Rick Springfield's "Jesse's Girl" or the complete works of William Shatner. Sometimes these experiments go horribly, horribly awry. I've seen Don Johnson's "Heartbreak" repeatedly referred to on MTV as the worst video of all time, but Bruce Willis's own venture into 80's schlock-pop is definitely in the running, and, in my opinion, at least, the undisputed winner is Scott Baio's "Wanted For Love," which Stereogum linked to last week. I think thi may be the worst song i have ever heard. Worse than Creed. Worse than Cousin Oliver. Worse than Puddle of Mudd. Worse than 98 Degrees. Far, far worse than Don Johnson. Sorry, Chachi.

Alright, who disagrees with me? Are there any actor/trix musical malfunctions i've neglected to mention?

Who now?

I never bought the contention that the Spin Doctors constituted the antithesis of "grunge," and this isn't the first time i've heard that claim made. It's certainly true that "Little Miss Can't Be Wrong" and "Two Princes" were lyrically, thematically, and melodically a far cry from, like, "Rape Me," that the Spin Doctors in their heyday were a poppified, proto jam band (maybe i'm just saying that cause Chris Barron looked like a neohippy) power pop act without the Gin Blossom's more melancholy, ironic sensibilities. But i still feel like, and perhaps this is more an indicator of, more than any thing else, my musical naivete in 1991-1992, but the distorted guitars which the spin doctors used didn't really sound that different fromthose played by Mike Mcready and Jeff Ament, like there was some grunge structure of feeling initially large enough to incorporate bands that sounded nothing like Nirvana and were from nowhere near Seattle and weren't remotlely linked, musically or aesthetically, to whatever project Vedder, Cobain, et. al might have shared. "Grunge" was a big tent because it was a wholly fictitious category. The stone temple pilots knew this, and they took it and ran with it until the heroin caught up with scott weiland. And Alice in Chains figured it out too and used the label to escape from the hairmetal they'd previously been playing.

Can anyone tell me why the new version of iTunes won't let me transfer pruchased music to my iPod? What the *&^%?

Thursday is the new Friday is the new Saturday reportback

First the bad news - i have read a total of three more pages of Weber all day than i had when i woke up, which is not going to get me very far. Then the good news - I had a really good day -- lunch with a friend from high school who's now an undergraduate at the university by way of a few years in Tibet and Nepal, and then dinner with BC, which renewed and increased my excitement about this fight and all the stuff that needs to get done between now and whenever we win. A year and a half ago, a certain former graduate student union lead whose intials both start with the letter W told me that I had to go to grad school somewhere were there was an organizing drive going on ("or i'd have to start one," I pointed out.) As it turns out, I wound up going to a school which already had a recognized bargaining unit, but now nevertheless finds itself in an incredibly important fight over the future of transient teacher unionization at private universities. This is a fight we need to win, not only because the Sextons and Levins of the world don't want us to, but because we need to radically reimagine and reinvent the university - not only its governance, its actions, and its heirarchies of labor and power, but also its relationship to the communities in which it is situated and the kinds of knowledge it produces and for whom it produces them.

hydrarchy (11:53:55 PM): see, i'm a total panda
Frans626 (11:54:41 PM): oh i get it blacka nd white clothes-- you ARE a little nuts
hydrarchy (11:54:57 PM): I'm NOT NUTS
hydrarchy (11:55:05 PM): I'M a f***ing panda
hydrarchy (11:55:17 PM): don't stand in the way fo my self-actualization as a panda!
Frans626 (11:55:21 PM): oh dear --get the nexium hurry!!
Frans626 (11:55:40 PM): i'm a good jewish mother who wants you to be whatever you want -- so panda -away
hydrarchy (11:56:05 PM): woohoo
hydrarchy (11:56:09 PM): i will be a jewish panda
Frans626 (11:56:37 PM): great mazel tov!
hydrarchy (11:56:52 PM): l'Panda tovah
hydrarchy (11:57:05 PM): or l'shana panda, i mean.

I really ought to be reading Weber instead of blogging, but I don't really feel like reading Weber right now, so instead I blog. The Times is reporting that people trying to evacuate from coastal Texas are lining up at Greyhound stations trying to get on buses, but there are none. Meanwhile Bush is lecturing Jewish Republicans (that is so trayf) about preparedness and patting himself on the back.

NYU's union-busting is destroying its international image: Via People's Weekly World

International support for NYU union
Presidents of three countries canceled their scheduled appearances at New York University in a show of support for graduate students there struggling for union recognition. Luis Inacio Lula da Silva of Brazil, Luis Rodriguez Zapatero of Spain, and Nestor Kirchner of Argentina were scheduled to discuss “Latin American and Europe: Challenges and Realities” on Sept. 15 when the AFL-CIO asked them not to appear at any NYU events until the university agrees to negotiate with GSOC/UAWE Local 2110, the union representing graduate teaching and research assistants.

This university's spent fifteen years trying to rebrand itself as a "top notch," globalized research institution. Their vision of the work the university does is looking a lot like Richard Levin's right down to who does that work and just how little control over it we have. But folks around the world have put forward a different vision, and Lula, Kirchner, and Rodriguez Zapatero are all pro-labor politicians who are refuing to cross picket lines and violate a boycott and should be applauded for it. It's sad that NYU is wiling to squander an event like this rather than negotiate in good faith with the folks who teach its undergraduates.

i got nine hundred problems

but leisure ain't one. This is post 900, if that was too subtle. yay for me.
Here's some Panda crotch.

Today's wednesday, and it's after five, which means i'm done with classes for the week, which means i now have to start reading for next week's classes. Before then, though, I wanted to blog for a little about nothing in particular. I could talk about how i feel really intimidated and stupid in all my classes and have no idea what teh fuck i am doing. But i'm not going to do that. (Praeteritio!) I could blog about Hurricane Rita and I hope folks get safe and make sure that people who can't leave have immediate assistance and support, but no, instead i think i'm going to blog, first, about fall tv premieres. Specifically i'm interested in three series featuring former cast members of Buffy and Freaks and Geeks. "Kitchen Confidential" stars a bunch of people i have never seen before and don't like very much, and John Cho of Harold and Kumar fame, who is a pretty good comedic actor. But it also co-stars Nicholas Brendon, who played Xander in every single episode of Buffy except the one he isn't in, and John Francis Daly, who brilliantly played one of the protagonists in Freaks and Geeks back when he was a lot more prepubescent. Both of them don't really factor too much in the first episode, which is unfortunate, because the series itself isn't particularly good. Dumb racist and sexist jokes, ("Tyrone, you're a walking can opened; this man is a chef") hackneyed extremities in food humor, etc. Also it was directed by Fred Savage, and badly.

"How I Met Your Mother" has another actor who was in Harold and Kumar, Neil Patrick Doogie Harris. It also features voice overs from Bob Saget. But again, not really giving a crap. It co-stars Alyson Hannigan and Jason Segel though, so i decided to watch the premiere. Cliche romantic comedy, brazenly orientalist fetishization of lebanese women, but Hannigan is wonderful. Segel is amazing at playing hapless masculinists, half-enearing, half-sketchy male characters whose attitudes towards the objects of their affections are possessive and at times frightening. Here, he's playing a much shallower and multidimensional character, a shlocky law student who gets engaged to alyson hannigan in the first episode.

Niether show is particularly good, but the new season of Veronica Mars starts next week, and that has another ex-Buffy cast member, and Steve Guttenberg too, so it should be pretty interesting.

first comes the TimesSelect, then come the layoffs. (Via Gawker.)

Outsource Thomas Friedman!

Interesting...

ranting

I've been feeling unproductive and frustrated for the last 24 hours, following a class discussion that seemed like it went nowhere on a book i had very mixed feelings about, and then a meeting in which nothing was accomplished. I'm feling overwhelmed with work and I'm missing the dB's show tonight because of class, or, if i decide to skip class, the 224 pages of reading plus an annotated bibliography i need to do by 2PM tomorrow.

And at ten weks old, the baby panda becomes a swimsuit model

YDNYT

Dude.

Remember that hyphen post i was working on?

It's postponed indefinitely until i get the chance to read Trinh T. Minh-ha's When The Moon Waxes Red, which has a great deal to say on the subject of hyphens. Until then, sorry to K and any other readers who were looking forward to reading it. I suck.

Not that i desperately want to read David Brooks, Thomas Friedman, or John Tierney, but Times Select is an extraordinarily dumb idea. Why would a paer want fewer people to read it?

question for all you poststructuralist philosophy fans out there

While i dodn't really have time to do so at the present moment, I would really like to read some Deleuze and Guattari at some point, and I'm wondering if folks know a good place to start. Anti-Oedipus, maybe?

Now that i'm being blockquoted by sites that actually address issues of substance run by people i've never met, i feel like it's time to ruin whatever cache of respectability I have and announce that I just saw Lily Taylor on the corner of 13th and Broadway on my way to the R train. How cool is that? Ok, screw you, i like Lily Taylor. She was great in everything i have ever seen her in. Yes, Six Feet Under included. Don't hate on Lisa.

There's a huge hunger strike at Guantánamo, in response to incidents of prisoner abuse. This is, reports the Times, at least the fourth such strike, and possibly the largest, most widespread, and most threatening to the Gitmo brass. The Times does not say how long this particular strike has been going on and reveals that earlier hunger strikes were hushed up by the military and Red Cross and not reported by the major news media. The Times reports that as many as 200 prisoners may be participating, though the army figure is significantly lower (105.) A previous strike won a prisoner grievance committee, but apparently the base administrators only allowed the committee to function for several days before they disbanded it.

One law enforcement official who has been fully briefed on the
events at Guantánamo said senior military officials had grown increasingly
worried about their capability to control the situation. A senior military
official, also speaking on the condition of anonymity, described the situation
as greatly troublesome for the camp's authorities and said they had tried
several ways to end the hunger strike, without success.
The comments of the
officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity, probably because their
accounts conflict with the more positive descriptions in official military
accounts, generally mirrored the statements of lawyers for the detainees, who
have received their information from face-to-face interviews with their clients.
Clive Stafford Smith, a British lawyer for several of the detainees, said he
was visiting some of his clients in August when the most recent strike began. He
said that a detainee, Omar Deghayes, told him that the strike was largely to
protest their long imprisonment without being charged with any crime as well as
the conditions of their confinement.
He said that Mr. Deghayes, a Libyan who
has lived in London, told him: "Look, I'm dying a slow death in this place as it
is. I don't have any hope of fair treatment, so what have I got to
lose?"

apologies for the rant, the product of a weekend spent reading about Anti-Americanism, the development episteme, and, althoughy i'm by no means there yet, the racialization of citizenship and immigration. (The good news is that the Escobar book, with its explorations of the "professionalization and institutionalization" of development discourse points directly towards some possible trajectories for my own project as i am currently attempting to figure it out. I like the tenth floor better than the eight floor at the moment, possiblt the proximity of the Tamiment and Wagner archives, full of all that leftitude and labory goodness.

I hate this library a lot. I've already discussed its panopticism, but then there's the whole "you can't so much as walk through the door without an ID card" thing, and people talk loudly despite the presence of thousands of people trying to get reading done, and people type loudly on their laptops in rooms where you are not supposed to bring your laptops and loudly much on whatever ridiculously expensive food and drink they have purchased at Dean & DeLuca or insert bourgie eatery here. And they shout on their celolphones in the middle of the fucking library with only a glass panel separating them from those of us making vain attempts to read, and it realy does remind me of Godard's panning back and forth through walls of the occupied '68 factory in Tout Va Bien. Sterling, like much of the Yale campus, is a monument to a certain kind of 19th century/early 20th century imperialism for which i have no nostalgia or sympathy, but Bobst's postmodern, mid-late twentieth century imperialism, kind of militarized CCL on crack, isn't an improvement but rather a frenzied reconfiguration which is deeply problematic, and hard to study in and someone just stole my fucking table.

profoundly true statement of the day

"Since 9/11, Everything's been fucked up."
-Middle aged guy in black tank top on southwest corner of Grand and Bowery, approximately 1:45 PM, today

Of course the causal relationship implied here is problematic - shit was fucked up before 9/11, or else 9/11 would never have occurred, but things have certainly been especially fucked up since.

Oh, the other good thing about today is that i now know who my advisor is, for the next year anyway, which seems like a good thing.

"Geso Cristo?"

Something else about the Ward 1 election stuff - bashing the UOC is dumb. I say this as an "outsider," not as someone who helped create the comittee, because the UOC is and has always been a group of undergraduate students working to change the relationship between Yale and New Haven. Referring to committed, activist students as a "special interest group" seems an unwise tactic for someone running in a ward comprised almost entirely of students. And again, i refer visitors to the disclamer at the bottom of the page.

I think i'm going to get to see Pedro pitch against John Smoltz tonight.

Serge Lang was a brilliant mathematician, i'm told. (I haven't tlooked at a math book, since, well, first semester senior year of high school. Sorry about second semester, Mr. Potter) He was also pretty wacky, what with the rennaisance music and all. Sometimes he was even nutty. Dav Corson-Knowles introduced me to him one bizarre night during my Freshman year of college, during which we all wound up going back to Lang's office in LOM and he launched into a tirade against Dan Kevles and gave me a dossier six inches thick about how HIV didn't cause aids, pills did. This scenario was made all the more bizarre by the fact that at the time, i hardly knew Dav at all, let alone why this strange math professor was giving me reading assignments. Lang died Monday. I'm sorry he's gone.

While I'm linking to the YDN, i want to know why, exactly, the guy who works for the Yale Investments Office with no campaign other than accusing Rebecca of being a tool of the unions (we've heard that one before, haven't we?) and the UOC (guess that means someone did something right) and loving Cancer, and bragging about how he used to be the captain of the Yale Hockey Team, and claiming that membership of the Yale Entrepreneurial Society constitutes active involvement in New Haven politics, gets a puff piece in the YDN without a similar courtesy being extended to his opponent.

Here's something i find interesting:

For Shalek, the impetus to run for office came during a packed
public hearing on the Yale-New Haven Hospital Cancer Center in July. As he sat
at the Board of Aldermen meeting that night, Shalek said he first became aware
of what he said was the strength of interest group influence in New Haven
politics.

Kruger, you will recall, announced his candidacy to unseat Ben amidst the farce of the ONHSA "protest" against the Board of Aldermen fair share vote on July 7, 2003. Kruger's entire platform consisted of berating Healey for not sending Emails to ward residents, accusing him of being a tool of the unions ("Go Yale!") and attempting to blame the Honorable Ben Healey for the entire strike. Kruger lost the election by an overwhelming margin, winning only around 15% of the vote. Maybe Shalek coul avoid a similar outcome if he were able to articulate a progressive vision for the city, rather than the same old reactionary propaganda.

Holy shit, the Wowz are on Pitchfork.

too much mule, not enough variations

Tom Waits is suing General Motors for ripping him off by hiring someone to sound exactly like him after he refused to do an advertisement for them.

Waits is seeking damages and any profits derived from the ads
for violating his personality rights, Schumacher said.

"Apparently the highest compliment our culture grants artists nowadays
is to be in an ad -- ideally naked and purring on the hood of a new car. I have
adamantly and repeatedly refused this dubious honor," Waits said in a statement.
"While the court can't make me active in radio, I am asking it to make me
radioactive to advertisers."

There's a hinted masculinism here I find troubling, this stress on the feminized position of the artist as sexualized commodity, but iut's the nakedness, the prostration that's problematic for Waits -- and the notion of personality rights might preclude my whole "Richard Levin major league cardboard cutout" plot, plus, what's good for GM is good for, um, corporate plutocrats.

someone found this blog by searching for "teachers from woodbridge fucking." Congratulations.

WHOOMP

there it is.

hello, patent office?

I had a brilliant idea while walking across the Manhattan bridge on my way to the doctor this morning. Inspired by Major League, I buy a life size naked cut out of For every book i finish in grad chool, i stack it in front of the cutout, until he's not only modest, but all walled up "Cask of Amon Tillado" style. It's totally practical cause all i would need would be a, uh, lifesize cut out of a.. university... administratoooh, fuck, Well, I'll figure something out

Dear Friendster,

I have a question:

What exactly do you mean by "Activity Partners?"

Thanks,

ZSW.

To paraphrase the guy from the A-Team, I love it when a boycott comes together.

The UFW Boycott against Gallo of Sonoma ends with a victory

I'm all happy now!

i finished my first book of grad school tonight - Steven Hahn's A Nation Under Our Feet. Feels good to know i can still read. Or something. It's an interesting book. Occasionally brilliant, occasionally frustrating. I feel like I say that about every book on this blog. Apologies. Particularly interesting is Hahn's look at the racial politics of the Populist movement in the 1880s-90s.

Next book up is Andrew Ross and Kristin Ross, ed., Anti-Americanism, for the core seminar, which is a collection of papers from an NYU conference held in February 2003. The contributors are mostly, if not all, NYU faculty and include people I haven't met but have read and whose work I am intrigued by. Should be interesting.

There was a massive secret service presence outisde the building where my class was tonight, anda cavalcade of four cars with diplomatic plates. Part of the whole UN Week thing, i'm assuming - though my initial response was to suspect that it might be President Bush, which just made me feel angry and powerless

2 good things (PAID IN FULL)

alright, so two good things happened today, or thereabouts. The first is much more important than the second.

1. "The San Francisco Chronicle is reporting that another hotel, The Palace -- which is where that stupid blogger business convention was held last month - will agree to a 2006 date. Looks like Starwood has recognized that disrespecting working people and attempting to keep them separate and unequal is simply not acceptable in this industry (or any other.) One hopes the other 12 hotels on the MEG won't take till 2006 to figure this out for themselves,

2. I got PAID. No eviction for me!

i found the free printing

and i also found the anti-union faculty op-ed, which, compared to, say, the Peter Brookses and Annabel Pattersons of the world, is rather tame. I haven't had any teaching experience and have no sense of what the demographics of TA work and adjunct instruction look like here. My guess is that they are pretty massive. The amount of MA students here, most of whom are getting screwed royally (no sexual violence metaphor intended) is staggering. My cohort initially had more MA students than doctoral students, though one of the MA students has apparently dropped out already. I tend to think that no one should have to pay for graduate school, particularly when one plans to work twards a PhD and will teach undergraduate classes. This is very much work - taxing, difficult, involved. I do need to ask around and figure out whether the union has any sense of what the casualization statsitics look like. If it has not already been done, then I doubt anyone has time to do this research now, with the possibility of a strike looming, but it's something that will be good to know and will doubtlessly be a valuable organizing resource.

Grad school is a lot of work, much of it interesting, but i'm feeling nervous about my ability to do this work and a little overwhelmed. Also feeling like NYU ges out of it way to make things partcularly difficult for us -- like making us pick up our checks at "One Half Fifh Avenue", which is actually not on fifth avenue, but in a fucking alleyway like half a block from fifth avenue, and reminds me of the 91/2th floor from Being John Malkovitch. and s just generally impossible to find. Also they make you print out the direct deposit form yourself, unless you talk to enough people to figure out that you can get a copy at the stipend office on the second floor of the very OPS-like 726 broadway, which is a very intimidating cubicle labyrinth (and it's an AFT shop with ots of union stuff in the front office, which is cool. Didn't know they organized C&Ts, and i thought everyne on this campus was in 2110 (the UAW local to whch I now belong.)

The Bush NLRB strikes again.

Unbeleivable.

Well, not really. Actually, given the history of this board, particularly since the recess appointment gave the reactionary anti-worker corporate schills the majority, this is pretty much par for the course. And the only hting we can do about it is organize, now.

Seriously. Stop reading this. Go organize.

the right, report the NYT, is trying to coopt March of the Penguins as an "anti-abortion", pro-"monogamy," "intelligent design" kind of movie. To that, i say: Meet Wendell and Cass. And Roy and Silo. Yes, I know, you think New York is such a den of sodomy that even our penguins are gay, but maybe they were just designed a little too intelligently.

and here's an op-ed about SCA and how the Dean's office seems, sadly and infuriatingly, intent on undermining the project before it even gets off the ground.

"no sweatshop in the ivory tower"

or skyscraper, as it were.

Here's the link to that article i mentioned earlier

university paper round-up, i guess.

No no no, storm Woodbridge, silly. You got the wrong building. Plus, a Benz? That's really tacky and bourgie. Next time, battering ram.


There's a nice piece in today's Washington Square News (not on their websie, frustratingly,) by an undergrad urging other undergrads to support GSOC. It's nice to read. I kind of want to talk to the undergads about their strategy and goals, and get a sense of what they do differently than folks in new Haven and how their stuff works here. The conventional wisdom about NYU activism is that the ISO just controls everything and does very little. I'm curious aboutthe Grad-UnderGrad-Solidarity people's links to the financial aid/anti-tuition hike people. It seems like there's potentially a very powerful campaign around teaching and financial aid lurking somewhere. I'm glad that there are undergraduates organizing around this/us. That's always a good sign. And speaking of which.

By the way, what the fuck, Yale?

Beinecke Director Frank Turner denied any such exchange has
taken place."There's no controversy there," Turner said.

"It's their property, and we have no problem with
that."
George Miles, Beinecke's curator of western Americana, also
said his office had not discussed a renegotiation of ownership before Pequot
filed its court application.

He said the University learned of the Pequot grievance from
items in the local press.

But Pequot trustees tell a different story. Christopher Rosow,
president of Pequot's board of trustees, said Miles spoke with trustees in 2003
and he asserted that Yale should be granted full legal custody of the
collection.

And this is just a full-on atrocity of an article.

Working Life reports that Unite-HERE! will leave the AFL-CIO Wednesday. Hopefully this will spearhead some changes in the ways in which the "House of Labor" thinks about organizing.

This is pretty interesting. Meanwhile, does anyone know why half my sidebar seceeded from the totality of sidebardom?

anyone know why half my sidebar suddenly migrated to the bottom of the page? Think i could entice it back with some fat-free saltines and diet A&W root beer?

Just ran into a guy i went with to, and later worked with at, a summer camp like 9, 10, 11 years ago and whom i had not seen in almost five years. Some things about New York don't change, Spetember 11th and housing bubbles and miltarized gentrification be damned.

That said, watching a couple walk up my block today, the man wearing a button-down shirt with the images of the WTC on it, listening to the radio broadcast of the reading of the names of the dead, was jarring, and moving. And then i recognized Giuliani's voice, and all i could think about was how maliciously these fuckers have exploited this grief and tragedy for financial and political gain. Judith Butler urges us to consider what may be made of grief besides a cry for war, and i agree. But i think it's also worth looking specifically at those like Giuliani who have reaped massive profit from our grief, and to include this dynamic when we think about what other kinds of social relations grief might be able to bring about.

EDIT: Grammar corrected, slightly. Sentence still incomprehensible. Also, i may not have heard Giuliani's actual voice, because i'm not certain he was actually there. That i could have imagined his voice says something about the sucess of his branding and the completeness of his wholesale expropriation and exploitation of all that 9/11 is suuposed to signify. (Though i am one of many who feel that there are other possibilities Giuliani immediately forclosed four years ago.)

It's september 11th, and yet again we find ourselves dealing with the aftermath of a disaster in which the politics of empire and race play a central role. The problem here is not only, and never was, solely the calculated indifference and refusal to respond of the Bush administration, but as much the striated social geography of Souths urban and global, and the rapidity with which the reactionaries turn now (and then) to fantasies of finance capital and post-urban cities shifted from basins to stately, society of control, hills, the "certain schemes to improve the human condition" already profoundly shaped by anxieties about the subaltern and how it can best be managed in or excluded from the new New Orleans or to Freedom Towers jutting out from an ash-strewn city increasingly uninhabitable by folks who make less than $40,000/yr and in which none of us are free while the mayor can rent out the city and police force as a private military for corporate plutocrats like the Republican Party and New York University and immigrants live in fear of abusive employers who lock workers in grocieries at night and of the INS and the FBI who round them up for deportation or infinite detention.

We are in the midst of a global crisis which began neither with Katrina nor with the invasion of Iraq, nor, certainly, with 9.11.2001. Perhaps in grief and rage we can forge or locate the solidarities we need in order to create new social relations and emerge from this global moment of crisis into one of jsutice, of peace, and of a democracy neither propelled by the peculiar imperial logic Paul Gilroy has termed "armored cosmopolitanism" nor confined to categories of citizenship and belonging violently policed by jingoistic nationalisms. It's up to us.

The Hahn book is very good. I need to finish it and read hundreds of pages of Latin American Subalternist stuff between now and Tuesday night. I'm going home now, figure I can get more reading done if I take the R instead of the D. Tomorrow I desperately ened to do laundry. I figure I can read in the laundromat.

It's saturday night. I'm - you guessed it - in the library. I did get to hang out with Amelia, though, which was fun. I want to blog about the suspension of Davis-Bacon, the politics of the right to return to New Orleans, and the various fantasies of bourgeois urban amusement parks which have been advanced by opportunistic pundits, all of which seem to exclude, sometimes very much intentionally so, not only the input of the city's large poor and working class African American population, but indeed the very possibility that they might play any role in the city which would suceed the desolation wrought by hurricane and neoliberal/neoconservative indifference.

I'd liek to blog about all of this, but i really ought to be reading instead, so that's what I'm going to do. Instead, I'll just link to this Naomi Klein piece and give you all* a pop quiz in the morning.

*By "you all" i apparently mean "Julie C. Gonzales.".

from the library, at 10PM on a friday night.

I'm really not feeling Bobst Library at all. Earlier I made reference to its panopticality, the sense that anywhere one goes to study, one can be seen and surveilled easily. The great thing about SML (and there are many not great things about SML, like that manager who was in all the TV commercials) is that it's very easy to hide, which makes it also very easy to find places to write and read in relative tranquiity. Bobst has ridiculous amounts of open space and not too many actual books. It looks like a corporate headquarters more than an actually used library, a monument to the corporate university rather than an enclosed paean to an equally enclosed historical vision of universities as repositories and seminaries of the human and humanist, although Bobst's supposedly democratized corporatism is ironically or not so ironically harder to access - in fact impossibly so, to access if one lacks an ID card than Yale is. The lack of books, the massive amount of opens space, and the glaring flourescent lighting make the library more a center of a certain kind of nervous asociality and insanity (the man loudly yawning on the 4th floor reading room today, to the consternation of everyone else there, the two undergrads talking very loud just now in one of the study carrels about nothing in particular before returning to whatever they interrupted) and of being watched than of doing work. It feels empty and lonely and dead and it scares the shit out of me. But perhaps i just havcen't found the right areas to work in yet, like back when i used to try to write papers in the SML music library and drove myself nuts.

It's been a decent week. I'm excited about at least one of my classes, I'm getting less afraid and more excited about organizing again, I'm happy that my brother's in New York for the next week or so, and I like the folks in the department and the union i've met thus far, and I'm excited, if a bit overwhelmed and decisive about trying to figure out an intellectual project for the next few years.

Back to A Nation Under Our Feet.

housekeeping

I haven't updated much lately, which is to say posted very much substantive content, mostly because of the massive amount of reading I have to do, something not likely to change anytime soon. I won't write much now, as my brother's currently visiting, but be assured that this blog will continue. In the meantime thanks for the link to Simon Reynolds at Blissout.

Uh, yo Roland, i think your piers are sinking.

Apparently Harry Potter grew up to become a historian of the death penalty.

Speaking of disciplining and punishing, Bobst Library is a total panopticon.

Yeah, forget about that little racism-induced catastrophe: it's time to build some tract housing!

It could be just like West Rock!!!!

The C is for casualized.

Went to an organizing committee meeting, sat next to none other than Brenda, who i'm really glad is here for this fight. I took on some organizing commitments even though i still need to be organized on stuff - not that i disagree with anything the union's doing, but i need help figuring out how to articulate what's at stake in this for both me and the folks i'm talking to and to figure out how to approach this from a place that isn't just rage and indignation, both of which can sometimes be productive organizing tools but i think i need to have been here a little longer before i start advocating full scale rio--- err, fracasizing. At the moment, what i would like to do is locate John Sexton when he gets back from Renquist's funeral and tell him that I've seen what happens to "collegiality" at universities that try to crush graduate student unions, and that he doesn't want that and he has an opportunity here to be a real leader and make history by standing up to rather than collaboratiung with one of the many egregiously horrific acts committed by the neoconservative anti-worker capitalist elite over the last five years.

Organzing is still a little scary right now. I need to find my footing here a bit, but i also know what I need to do and plan on doing it.

It's my dad's birthday. So happy birthday to him.

Had the Yudice class last night. Three hours is a long time for a class - longer than anyof my classes in college, even the grad seminars, except for the Agrarian Studies seminar which was about that long. The syllabus looks interesting, though i'm nervous about some of the developmentalist politics. Basically it's going to make me work harder than even the very large amount of reading will. Interestingly, we didn't have to buy any books - they burned everything onto a CD which they sold us for five bucks. Granted, if i want to read stuff not on a monitor, which would be a good idea, I'll have to print it out, but supposedly there are somre free places to print on campus a la the Yale Law Library, if you're surreptitious, that is. Lots of Steve Sterns and Florencia Mallon and John Beverly and people writing from the US Academy in general. Kind of wish we could read some Enrique Dussel. I don't think Garcia Canclini is on the syllabus. (Beatriz Sarlo is, albeit as recommended reading. I read most of that book in Michael Denning's class three years ago, but didn't finish it, and feel like reading it again would be a productive enterprise.) I probably should have waited a week to bring up Mignolo's attack on US Latin-Americanists's expropriation of chunks of the Subaltern Studies project from academics in the South Asian diaspora writing about South Asia, but I think the answer Yudice gave was helpful for me in terms of figuring out where the class was heading.

Oh, forgot to mention: It's a seminar. With 38 people. That's two times 19, which would be a large seminar in itself. Should be interesting.

I still feel like an undergraduate. I think this is because I have no idea what i'm doing most of the time.

ahem.

and thank you John Darnielle

Death Arcade for the Clap Shin Eyes Wine cover Duran Duran. A tree falls in the forest. Seriously though - how much more schlocky and uninspired can you get? Fucking Goldfinger's (horrible) cover of "Rio" was less insulting. Duran Duran covers are not "ironic." They are not "witty." Unless you are sleater-kinney. In which case you can do horrible drunken covers of Boston's More Than A Feeling and I will still love you, but you redeem yourself anyway by out-Danzigging Glen Danzig. Covers can be good and fun. Booker T and The MGS covered like every song extant up to the time in which they were performing, and they still were great. Today i was listening to a pretty hot reggae cover of "don't stop till you get enough." But a band that was borderline emo to begin with covering a covered-to-death new wave pop standard and adding nothing to it other than nostalginc irony doesn't do anything for me.

disertissime Romuli nepotum

Last night I watched the first two episodes of HBO's Rome with my brother, who had seen both previously. Rome is kind of a cross between empire porn, the O.C. (B.C.,) (Octavian's mother as perpetually naked, patrician Julie Cooper sans the humble origins and crippling sense of pudor)and The West Wing, if the West Wing had been called, oh, Ala Occidentalis and was about a lot of scheming old senators, like Cato the censor, who i used to call "Cato the houseguest" back in eighth grade, and a surprisingly handsome Marcus Tullius Cicero. Cicero means "chickpea." They portray Marc Antony as an immature, rakish womanizing asshole who makes an entire batallion wait on horseback while he copulates standing up with a shepherd woman behind them, and then concludes the encounter by purposefully scattering her sheep. What would Catullus say about that? "Hoc salsum esse putas? Fugit te inepte?" Or would he be too busy engaging in masturbatory misogynist rants against the entire female gender? (Actually, in 44 B.C., he would have been dead for a decade, but who's couning.)

(The title of this post comes from Catullus 49, in which the poet heaps praise upon Cicero only to reveal wryly in the poem's concluding lines a subversive irony by gross exaggeration. Catullus disliked Cicero, this website claims, because Cicero had delivered an invective against the woman with whom Catullus conducted a three year affair. Following the affair's conclusion, Catullus said stuff about her (Clodia/Lesbia) that would probably have made Cicero blush.)

small favors

Chilton is alive and ok

At least two of the non dub-version tracks on the LKJ anthology clock in at exactly four minutes and twenty seconds. Make of that what you will.

I went over to my parents' place tonight primarily to see my brother, who is home for a couple weeks before returning to Chicago to start his last year of college. But i also brought back a lot of stuff from my room - my course packets from Paul Gilroy's class, some assorted DVDs, a book or two, and a bunch of accumulated documents from the UOC and the federation I wanted to have accessible. While I was able to bring some of the materials I used in my senior essay research home today, I still need to find a bag big enough to carry the reams of newspaper microform photocopies - primarily old YDNs and Modern Times i made in between 1967 and 1973-4 (from the aftermath of the New Haven riot and the SDS split through the city's defeat of the 13th college plan, the aftermath of the '72 grade strike and the TAO, and the fracas which ensued after students disrupted a speech on campus by a racist ideologue. In the meantime, maybe some of the stuff i did find will inspire some paths for further inquiry. At the very least, i'm sure there are a few security-culture safe blog entries to be made.

I start class tomorrow.

oh, wikipedia

Bored on Labor Day, so i do what I have often done when terminally bored - I read the YDN. Please help me. Couple thoughts:

Not a good reflection on an incumbent board when, in an article about a woman trying to challenge Joyce Chen in the general election, they claim that "Of the city's 30 aldermen, all are Democrats except Arlene DePino, a Republican." Unless Joyce's expulsion from the Green Party has led her to join the folks who tried to oust her last time around, (and the BOA website still lists her as a Green,) this statement seems incorrect. Correct me if i've missed something.

And, uh, "quid pro quo" politics? Yeah, we used to bribe Healey with donuts and assault rifles. And strippers. Baby panda strippers. With magical and shiny nipple-tassels. You really have a handle on the way the UOC works. Don't tell anyone though.

EDIT: I'm wrong on the Board of aldermen stuff, which isn't particularly surprising given my track record blogging on New Haven electoral politics. (I point you all to the disclaimer at the bottom of this page) but there is one more comment i would like to make.

Pirate Days

I'm listening to Culture's Two Sevens Clash for the first time in a good five or six years, and it's far better than i remember it being, which is saying a lot, because i liked it quite a bit back in high school. The lead singer/songwriter's name is Joseph Hill. Joe Hill. Hmmm. (I had forgotten that the great Tommy McCook, one of the foundational figures in Jamaican pop music, who passed away in 1998, played tenor sax on the album, but given McCook's prolific ubiquity, I probably shouldn't be to surprised. I repurchased Two Sevens Clash last week along with that fantastic Linton Kwesi Johnson anthology (Independant Intavenshan)that came out back in 1998 that convinced me for quite a while that "Reggae Fi Peach" was simply the single most powerful song ever written. (I's still up there.) (My original copies of both of these CDs were lost when I went to college and forgot to bring them with me.) Also listening to The Heptones's Party Music, which, political commitments aside, sounds nothing like their work from the Rocksteady and Ska eras, but is pretty powerful synthy, popp roots reggae, and Amadou et Mariam's Dimanche á Bamako.

I've been thinking for some time about a possible project which might even turn into a dissertation. I want to write a history of the institutional relationships of the modern university with imperial capitalism and racialized knowledge, specifically looking at the centrality of not only the university as a site of knowledge production to the strategies and tactics of empire, but also at the centrality of empire to the organization and ordering of the university itself. I first began thinking about this as a concrete project earlier this summer, but it really comes out of the questions i tried to consider in my senior essay and out of themes raised by some of the organizing going on in the Yale fight. (d4T, etc.) I have no interest in writing solely about Yale at this point, but it's also impossible to ignore Yale's own imperial history and present if I'm going to try to grapple with the themes i want to take on. And of course the Farallon campaign's attempts to create a network of university students and casualized workers to expose the imperial dimensions of university endowments and articulate alternative and better possibilities for universities' futures merits some careful consideration. I'm nervous about writing about Yale while not involved in the struggles there, and I'm thinking it might make sense to look at the Western university as a transatlantic formation, but I don't even know if this proposed uniformity is a valid assumption to make...

UPDATE: Dimanche á Bamako is incredible. Find some way to hear it. Now.

The week in review piece on the "cleavages" of race and class and the aftermath of the hurricane is woefully incomplete but worth reading nonetheless for it's analysis of the city's social geography and a few powerful quotations.

Richard Bernstein's piece on European reactions is also interesting. I think the phrase "intellectual looting," levied against critics of the racialized dimensions of the federal response, or lack thereof, to the hurricane and its victims, really ought to be turned against the administration which so callously ignored the plight of poor New Orleans residents in the days immediately before the hurricane hit and four nearly half a week after it passed on as the city drowned and corpses floated in the streets, yet nevertheless engaged in self-congratulations like those proferred by Cherttoff, Brown, and Bush throughout the last several days. We need to be very clear about how and why what happened happened, because to do anything less would be to spit on the memories of all the people who have lost their homes, their livelihoods, loved ones, and/or lives.

shamelessly stolen from the national zoo website. I wish i had a talking baby panda sidekick. I could take him for walks and we would discuss Foucault and coloniality. Then he would be my panda wingman like in that stupid NYT article about the women who you pay to get you dates at parties. Only he would be a talking baby panda, possibly with a slight Yiddish accent. (There were mad jews in Beijing.) Also every time i look at the panda, i want to be all [baby talk:]"look at that punim!" Why my imaginary baby panda friend speaks with the accent of great grandparents i never knew, i really couldn't tell you.

The backstreet boys have apparently remade themsleves with massive amounts of post-sum 41/American Hi-Fi emo retro metal chic. I guess that's the zeitgeist. They're eerily reminiscent of Blink 182 parodying, um, The Backstreet Boys. My head is going to explode.

quo usque tandem abutere giuliani patientia nostra (II)

Right. Great idea. Because what the hurricane victims need is a self-aggrandizing racist to exploit another massive catastrophic tragedy for political and fiduciary gain. Give this dude a Macarthur Foundation grant!

This is awesome. Not panda awesome, necessarily, but awesome nonetheless. Penguins, pandas, orcas -- what do they all have in common - other than the orcas being penguiniverous? Maybe i'm secretly colorblind. That might explain my proclivity for blacvk clothing.

I watched the clip of Kanye's comments on ifilm.com. He comes off not so much as polemical as simply and utterly shellshocked and overwhelkmed by the enormity and horror of the past week's events, the murderous rhetoric of the Louisiana governor, and the federal government's complete indifference to a city in which rotting corpses were drifting down streets flooded with toxins in a disaster which may well have been preventable. I am finding it very difficult to feel Trent Lott's pain. The things West was saying seemed pretty spontaneous, like, with the cameras on him, he had to say something other than the empty and self congratulatory platitudes Bush and Chertoff have been spewing over the last twenty-four hours.

When you walk over the Manhattan Bridge you can see into the windows of the massive Jehova's Witness complex that sits between the two bridges. It's basically hallway after hallway of numbered closet-size cells, like Manhattan Mini-Storage, only Jehova's Witnessy. It looked pretty claustrophobia-inducing for a massive complex the size of several city blocks...

happier news

The MEG seems like it is starting to buckle on its refusal to negotiate a 2006 contract expiration date.

Also, happy eight week birthday to the baby panda.

Unite-HERE has set up its own relief fund to help members in the Gulf region. So have SEIU and other unions. I'm reticient to plug the red cross stuff because i think they have a very fucked up relationship to imperial violence, but I also think it's possible to donate and still be very critical, so if that's what makes the most sense, do what you can, and organize to rebuild and create networkks of solidarity to counter what seems to be quickly descending into militarism and cronyism.

Pitchfork is reporting that Big Star frontman Alex Chilton is missing and may be among the casualties of the hurricane.

I've donated $20 to the relief effort through the AFL-CIO's Union Community Fund. I have mixed feelings about this because I have mixed feelings about the AFL-CIO at the moment and also because the money to help the refugees and to rebuild should be coming from the estate tax Bill Frist wants to repeal. It should be coming from the oil companies who are now charging as much as six bucks a gallon for gas in some places. It should be coming out of the defense budget which should have been used to fix the levee system in 2001 in the first place. So I'll donate in the spirit of mutual aid and solidarity, but I frankly find the emphasis on Reaganite voluntarism voiced by many Federal officials and politicians incredibly offensive.

EDIT: $20 is not a lot of money, and I would have donated more, but I just paid rent, don't get paid for two weeks, my checking account is rapidly dwindling, and there are things i am going to need to spend money on before the "stipend" checks come in, like food, metrocards, and bills. So i may donate more once i'm a little more stable.

Guess who gets to profit from the Bush administration's murderous indifference?

I'm furious, and disgusted, but not surprised.

(via Nathan Newman.)

UPDATE:
Kanye West, on TV:

"I hate the way they portray us in the media. "If you
see a black family it says they are looting if you see a white family it says
they are looking for food.

"We already realize a lot of the people that could help are at
war now fighting another way and they’ve given them permission to go down and
shoot us.""George Bush doesn't care about black people."

At the New Orleans Convention Center, another place where more than 1,000 refugees have sought shelter, an overwhelming sense of abandonment permeated the arena as much as the stench of overflowing bathrooms. In one corner, an older woman and a teenage boy were having seizures in the arms of relatives.

Louis Martin Sr., a truck driver who has been at the convention center since Tuesday, said: "The trucks kept passing us up - they just kept going farther east. We have no security, no security."

***

"Hell no, I'm not glad to see them," said Michael Levy, 46, whose remarks were cheered by those around him. " They should have been here days ago. I ain't glad to see 'em. I'll be glad when 100 buses show up. We've been sleeping on the ground like rats."

Evacuees at the center told a reporter that they had seen
seven dead bodies on the third floor, and said a 14-year-old girl had been
raped.

commodities will save you

Alright. Who stole my copy of Soul By Soul?

I bought a black messenger bag. It makes me look very hip circa eight years ago. But it feels less ridiculous than my backpack, which makes me feel like I'm in high school whenever I wear it.

I bought my books for the core seminar. Luckily I already owned many of the coursebooks, like Harry Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capital, Lisa Lowe's Immigrant Acts, David Harvey's The Condition of Postmodernity, and Hazel V. Carby's Reconstructing Womanhood, so I didn't have to pay too much for the others. I haven't yet read the Harvey book or Reconstructing Womanhood. I'm ashamed to admit this. Both are supposed to be pretty fantastic. And i took two classes with Hazel and worked for her from April through July of this year. Bookstore didn't have Foucault's Abnormal, but I just saw it at St. Mark's books a couple days ago, so I can get it there. Other coursebooks looked interesting, except for Weber's The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism, which i hope we'll be ripping to shreds.

Beaten white male body on the cover of the Daily News (New York, not Yale.) The cameras construct the crisis through racialized lens. The ruins of New Orleans become South Central Los Angeles circa April 29, 1992 and the reactionary blogs fill column after column condemning the hurricane victims not only for looting, not evcen only for remaining, but for being (black/poor.) Meanwhile Condoleeza Rice has finally ended her prolonged New York shopping expedition and Bush has only now, with the corpses floating through the streets left his ranch and scheduled photo ops and press conferences. This didn't have to happen.

My mother was forwarded this email, which is apparently excerpted from the Washington Monthly.

CHRONOLOGY....Here's a timeline that outlines the fate of both
FEMA andflood control projects in New Orleans under the Bush administration.
Read it and weep:
January 2001: Bush appoints Joe Allbaugh, a crony from Texas,
as headof FEMA. Allbaugh has no previous experience in disaster
management.
April 2001: Budget Director Mitch Daniels announces the Bush
administration's goal of privatizing much of FEMA's work. In May, Allbaugh
confirms that FEMA will be downsized: "Many are concerned that federal disaster
assistance may have evolved into both an oversized entitlement program...." he
said. "Expectations of when the federal government should be involved and
the degree of involvement may have ballooned beyond what is an appropriate
level."
2001: FEMA designates a major hurricane hitting New Orleans as
one of the three "likeliest, most catastrophic disasters facing this
country."
December 2002: After less than two years at FEMA, Allbaugh
announces heis leaving to start up a consulting firm that advises companies
seeking to do business in Iraq. He is succeeded by his deputy, Michael Brown,
who, like Allbaugh, has no previous experience in disaster
management.
March 2003: FEMA is downgraded from a cabinet level position
and folded into the Department of Homeland Security. Its mission is refocused on
fighting acts of terrorism.
2003: Under its new organization chart within DHS, FEMA's
preparation and planning functions are reassigned to a new Office of
Preparedness and Response. FEMA will henceforth focus only on response and
recovery.
Summer 2004: FEMA denies Louisiana's pre-disaster mitigation
funding requests. Says Jefferson Parish flood zone manager Tom Rodrigue: "You
would think we would get maximum consideration....This is what the grant program
called for. We were more than qualified for it."
June 2004: The Army Corps of Engineers budget for levee
construction in New Orleans is slashed. Jefferson Parish emergency
management chiefs Walter Maestri comments: "It appears that the money has been
moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq,
and I suppose that's the price we pay."
June 2005: Funding for the New Orleans district of the U.S.
Army Corps of Engineers is cut by a record $71.2 million. One of the hardest-hit
areas is the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, which was created
after the May 1995 flood to improve drainage in Jefferson, Orleans and St.
Tammany parishes.
August 2005: While New Orleans is undergoing a slow motion
catastrophe, Bush mugs for the cameras, cuts a cake for John McCain, plays the
guitar for Mark Wills, delivers an address about V-J day, and continues with his
vacation. When he finally gets around to acknowledging the scope of the
unfolding disaster, he delivers only a photo op on Air Force One and a flat,
defensive, laundry list speech in the Rose Garden...

I don't think that guy we were shouting "arrest John Sexton" at was John Sexton. Point still stands though. Registration stuff pretty much all taken care of, though i still need to figure out if i can audit a spanish class without having to pay for it.

I walked across the Manhattan Bridge today for the first time in my life. DUMBO, with its yuppie condos with rooftop tennis courts, is pretty ridiculous. The fis markets make the corner of East Broadway and Market Street smell like Ana and Jia Lynn's elevator. There's a point while walking across the bridge where if you look south it actually looks like the Statue of Liberty is standing on the Brooklyn Bridge. And at one point the Q Train was stopped on the tracks and people were staring out the windows at me, which was kind of fun. I'm such a narcissist.

my favorite lower manhattan street name is probably Great Jones. You might say that i have a great jones for Great Jones. My favorite upper Manhattan street names are up in Inwood, where Cummings almost intersects with Siemen Ave., for all the ridiculously prurient 8th grade reasons. The Bronx has some great street names too, like Moshulu Parkway and Nereid Ave. And hell, i mean, what could beat Spuyten Dyvil? Don't get me started on Brooklyn, though - Schermerhorn? Herkimer? Nostrand? Flatbush? I think Brooklyn beats everyone else hands down for great street names.

Have I omitted anything? Let me know!

hurricane

Anya Kamenetz's piece on the Village Voice site is worth reading. Nathan Newman has a series of posts on culpability, and the pork-barrel politics of FEMA relief. They NYT looks at the racialization of hurricane victimhood. And as looters desperately search for food and supplies, the federal government which did nothing to prevent what happened assures us that they will be pacified as refugees struggle to leave the city or attempt to negotiate substandard environments elsewhere.

Meanwhile, the situation in New Orleans continued to
deteriorate. Angry crowds chanted cries for help, and some among them rushed
chaotically at helicopters bringing in food. Although Mayor C. Ray Nagin
speculated that thousands might have died, officials said they still did not
have a clear idea of the precise toll.

"We're just a bunch of rats," said Earle Young, 31, a cook
who stood waiting in a throng of perhaps 10,000 outside the Superdome, waiting
in the blazing sun for buses to take them away from the city. "That's how
they've been treating us."

an ecstasy of fumbling

NYU's registration system is absolutely batshit insane. You get access codes representing spaces in classes which you have to contactdepartmental registrars to obtain. No access codes left means no spaces in the class and no wiggle room. No shopping period, which is good if you're a TA because you're less likely not to lose your job, but bad if your'e a first semester first year student with no idea what you're doing. The online registration system is also reallys cary and says i have a financial stop on my registration, which is odd because my fellowship should cover all my coursework, but i think this is just because i haven't registered for all three courses yet, which is in itself a mess - the third class i wanted to take (George Yudice's Intro to Latin American Cultural Studies) is full with a waiting list, and the other class i wanted to take and got in to (a course on the Sociology of Knowledge) is apparently meeting now not on Tuesday as advertised, but on Monday at the same time as my required core seminar. Gah.

On the plus side, I now have an NYU ID so i can get in to buildings and use the library, not just watch people get arrested outside of it, and i'm wishing i'd taken the arrest too, but i'm sure there'll be more opportunities. I've registered for two of my three courses, and the three of the other four PhD students in my cohort whom i have met seem great. I also met all of the five M.A. students, one of whom I went to high school with and taught in the Bronx with six years ago, so that's pretty crazy, although not really. And late yesterday afternoon as i was walking down East 4th street, i bumped into my friend Sara, who i also went to high school with, allegedly stalked back in the summer after 6th grade, though i deny this outright, and last saw two and a half years ago while hanging out with Victor and Katie up at Columbia when Sara was still a student there. Turns out she's now transferred to NYU. (Sara graduated with me from high school but spent two years before college in Nepal and India and also took some more time after starting school.) I'm excited that she will be around.

I haven't told the pee story yet.

They're now saying that there may be thousands of deaths from the hurricane in New Orleans alone. This is overwhelming.