Working my way through the latest ish of the journal Polygraph in preparation for the next iteration of the blogging group with the two Elis, I stumbled on Stefano Harney's suggestion that those who choose to turn to the "local union" for support in organizing struggles within the university/for the undercommons will have to contend with a "research department full of thugs."
Now I should first say that I greatly enjoy most of Harney's work on the university, with and without Fred Moten. And I have had, especially over the last four plus years, my share of frustrations with local and international union structures and politics. But I think this is at best silly and at worst essentialist and elitist in the way it poses the union researcher as too coarse, to blunt, for the non-work of study towards which all academics should strive to devote their time, should flee to as refuge from teaching and other forms of labor which aren't in excess of the limits of labor. I know a lot of union researchers and many of them have profoundly complex understandings of how the university works, who works in the yniversity, where endowment value comes from, etc. More importantly, I see echoes here, in study's otherness from work which contradicts some of the gestures Moten and Harney have made in previous essays to expand how we understand labor in academic contexts, and perhaps I'm being unfair, of the kinds of rhetoric that John Sexton used four years ago when the administration of New York University tried and failed to destroy the flawed and embattled, but not particularly thuggish union which has consumed the bulk of my organizing and activist energies since I moved back to the city in 2004.
Ought we to be blindly and uncritically pro-union? In this age of "Workers United" and the N/UHW fight, it's impossible to have such an orientation, and that's not what I'm arguing for. Nor am I trying to pick a fight with Stefano Harney, who i think is pretty brilliant. Instead i want to think about the implications of the presence here of a lot of the tensions I've been trying to parse lately with regard to how radical academics have accepted and adopted the autonomist refusal of work into how we theorize our own labors. It seems like what gets Harney into trouble here is the need to rescue study by understanding it as something other than or beyond labor. Maybe we need to expand or challenge our understandings of exodus and refusal in ways which allow us to recognize, as I would argue Harney's co-interviewee Marc Bousquet has, the power and subjectivity of the refuse(d). How does the discursive abjection of labor function here in relation to the class politics and labor hierarchies of university spaces? Why must that which we need to refuse be made abject? Or, conversely, can study really be rescued from labor? Can it really be redeemed as the kind of anti- or non-capitalist commons that Eli Meyerhoff and Isaac Kamola talk about persuasively in the same volume?
Check back later in the week for my response to this week's readings. Apologies for the sentence structure of this blog entry -I wrote it on my phone. I need to stop doing that.
Showing posts with label class instruction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label class instruction. Show all posts
Friday, October 16, 2009
Sunday, February 1, 2009
I spent most of the day in the panopticon, reading Thomas Sugrue's Sweet Land of Liberty instead of grading. Watched the latest episode of Battlestar Galactica on the long subway ride home, and holy fuck (I had to sit down on my couch and not do anything for like five minutes after i finished it to let my heart slow down), and then read the kakistotle (that's a greek joke. aristotle from aristos, best, kakistos=worst, also a demon in buffy season three.) I like the Sugrue book a lot, narrative but also theoretically grounded and both deeply enmeshed in the archive and demonstrating widespread knowledge of recent historiography of the long civil rights movement. I would like to see him engage more directly with some of Nikhil Singh's critiques of a few of the figures and movements he discusses, but maybe that's another book?
The ontario provincial government has ordered striking York U graduate employees in CUPE 3903 to return to work, and the workers are returning without a contract. This is no resolution.
Some folks from the Republic Window Workers' Strike stopped by Judson yesterday and it was inspiring to hear firsthand abotu what went down and what the struggle and the victory meant to the folks who fought and won it. Kudos to jobs with justice for making folks submit questions on index cards to minimize the sectarian rostrum hoggers. I sat behind the folks from DWU and next to the dissident TWU contingent, which was interesting. Ed Ott is pretty awesome as CLC presidents go. Oh, btw, Boycott Stella D'Oro. The factory, oddly enough, is a couple blocks away from where i went to high school. They tried to force the workers to accept some severe cutbacks and workers have been on strike for nearly six months.
The ontario provincial government has ordered striking York U graduate employees in CUPE 3903 to return to work, and the workers are returning without a contract. This is no resolution.
Some folks from the Republic Window Workers' Strike stopped by Judson yesterday and it was inspiring to hear firsthand abotu what went down and what the struggle and the victory meant to the folks who fought and won it. Kudos to jobs with justice for making folks submit questions on index cards to minimize the sectarian rostrum hoggers. I sat behind the folks from DWU and next to the dissident TWU contingent, which was interesting. Ed Ott is pretty awesome as CLC presidents go. Oh, btw, Boycott Stella D'Oro. The factory, oddly enough, is a couple blocks away from where i went to high school. They tried to force the workers to accept some severe cutbacks and workers have been on strike for nearly six months.
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Other schools are canceling searches and imposing hiring freezes, but not my mala mater. Yale, instead, has decided to hire war criminal and death squad pal John Negroponte to join union-buster Paul Kennedy's grand strategy program along with John Gaddis and fellow neocon iran contra figure Charles Hill.
This despite a 25% drop in the university's endowment which has led administrators to impose a freeze on salary increases and swear to continuously trim budget costs from employee benefits. So is Negroponte, who holds no PhD, whose hands-on experience should land him not in front of undergraduates but rather in front of the international criminal court, worth it? Or, put differently, what does this say about the "scarcity" dynamics of university job markets (academic and otherwise) and what does it tell us (as if we didn't already know) about the priorities of the "global" university?
This despite a 25% drop in the university's endowment which has led administrators to impose a freeze on salary increases and swear to continuously trim budget costs from employee benefits. So is Negroponte, who holds no PhD, whose hands-on experience should land him not in front of undergraduates but rather in front of the international criminal court, worth it? Or, put differently, what does this say about the "scarcity" dynamics of university job markets (academic and otherwise) and what does it tell us (as if we didn't already know) about the priorities of the "global" university?
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
inaugurations
First day of lecture is tomorrow after a break of hermitude, gramsci, and autonomia. I'm suddenly extremely stressed out. It snowed a lot yesterday. I walked through Green-Wood cemetery - whence originate that picture of those geese, snow covering their backs. It was quiet and beautiful, and a nice escape from reading/writing/worrying, though no substitute for the way MLK day should be commemorated, which is in struggle, not shirking from critiquing the more problematic aspects of King's ideology while nevertheless adamantly refusing the neoliberal attempts at cooptation of a leader and organizer who demanded a "radical revolution of values" and was murdered fighting for striking service workers in Memphis, on the very spot where today a crowd watched Barack Hussein Obama's inauguration as the president of the U.S.
I watched the inauguration from my home, flipping back and forth between ABC (cheesy insert shots of the golden gate bridge and various sundry national icons during Aretha's performance, ugh) and PBS (David Brooks and the two historians not named Peniel Joseph, ugh) because ABC got the best picture on my bunnyt ears and PBS had a historian who wrote a book about the black power movement commenting on the inauguration speech instead of like, Doris Kearns Goodwin, who I'm sure is a perfectly nice person and who people tell me is a good historian, but is also a convicted plagiarist and writes books i find entirely uninteresting. Rick Warren apparently asking god's forgiveness for his homophobia was a bizarre spectacle, as was wheelchair-bound Emperor Palpatine. Were i less sympathetic to disability studies critiques, i might conjecture that we had seen medeival literature come to life, not so much physical defacements reflecting inner and innate corruption as the vice president having been literally crippled by his own secrets as he tried to spirit them away from the eyes of historians to god knows where. But of course i don't know what was in the box, and my logic here is complicit in the privileging of certain kinds of bodies.
Anyway, i found a couple of things problematic about the speech - the nationalism, although what else can you expect from a president's inauguration, even this president. The foreign policy stuff, however much more muted and qualified than with the last guy - smart, diplomatic imperialism is still imperialism and it's still in crisis - and that the extremely powerful nods to sweatshop workers, to thie history of the working class, had to be framed by invocations of the gospel of work a la Joe Leiberman on Beinecke Plaza in August 2003. (Joe the traitor kept asserting that "they" - the workers - weren't asking for a lot, kept excusing their struggle's righteousness with fictitious, thankfully, claims as to its narrowness.)
And likewise I'm glad President Obama recognizes the selflessness of workers who accept cutbacks, but i don't think that workers should be expected to, as they say in Italy, "pay for your crisis," that there is a difference between selflessness and exploitation, that who is called upon to sacrifice what for whom is never a neutral set of relationships, always fixed within the shifting ideological and historically produced matrices of race, class, gender, sexuality, and citizenship.
Among the most powerful moments of the speech was
This was extraordinarily powerful, both because the emotion, the desire for the fulfilment of the dream King described 46 years ago remains a strong component of liberal nationalism, the idea that we can progress towards, are progressing, even have progressed towards an abstract equality that has now reached in the form of president obama, its apotheosis, retains every bit of its hegemony even as the multiculturalism of the 1990s has long since, it seems, given way to the libertarian "post-racialism" of 30rock and south park (which is often just "new racism" in disguise). But, historical objections aside (segregation in DC did not end in the 1940s) this is also powerful because it commemorates what it's stupid to claim as anything other than a victory in a deeper and more profound struggle against histories of race and racism not confined to juridical or representational arenas, that antiracists and pro-POC organizers and activists, workers and thinkers, produced, in a sense, this President in all his contradictory brilliance (here i'm thinking about something Nikhil Singh said at the Policing the Crisis panel back at ASA in october), that his victory (here i'm on my own but inspired by the hope from people bloc) is not simply the victory of neoliberal racial ideology, that he is no mere "centrist," that calling him a neocon in blackface (as i have seen some 'radica;s' allege in the wake of Ken Salazar and Robert Gates and Tim Geithner) is stupid and wrong, however much we need engaged, perceptive critique in the days ahead. To summarize, there were parts of the speech I found deeply moving, not simply as oratory, because they meant that we, at least the we i would like to identify myself with, had won a victory in a struggle that's nowhere near done.
Elizabeth Alexander said it best, more powerfully, my mother thought, bringing to the fore what was and is at stake in what has transpired and what is to come than even the momentous speech her poem followed.
And I would be remiss if I failed to mention Rev. Lowery, who brought my anarchist ass to tears as soon as he started speaking, and who offered not the platitudes of Warren's invocation but instead lessons in organizing.
I watched the inauguration from my home, flipping back and forth between ABC (cheesy insert shots of the golden gate bridge and various sundry national icons during Aretha's performance, ugh) and PBS (David Brooks and the two historians not named Peniel Joseph, ugh) because ABC got the best picture on my bunnyt ears and PBS had a historian who wrote a book about the black power movement commenting on the inauguration speech instead of like, Doris Kearns Goodwin, who I'm sure is a perfectly nice person and who people tell me is a good historian, but is also a convicted plagiarist and writes books i find entirely uninteresting. Rick Warren apparently asking god's forgiveness for his homophobia was a bizarre spectacle, as was wheelchair-bound Emperor Palpatine. Were i less sympathetic to disability studies critiques, i might conjecture that we had seen medeival literature come to life, not so much physical defacements reflecting inner and innate corruption as the vice president having been literally crippled by his own secrets as he tried to spirit them away from the eyes of historians to god knows where. But of course i don't know what was in the box, and my logic here is complicit in the privileging of certain kinds of bodies.
Anyway, i found a couple of things problematic about the speech - the nationalism, although what else can you expect from a president's inauguration, even this president. The foreign policy stuff, however much more muted and qualified than with the last guy - smart, diplomatic imperialism is still imperialism and it's still in crisis - and that the extremely powerful nods to sweatshop workers, to thie history of the working class, had to be framed by invocations of the gospel of work a la Joe Leiberman on Beinecke Plaza in August 2003. (Joe the traitor kept asserting that "they" - the workers - weren't asking for a lot, kept excusing their struggle's righteousness with fictitious, thankfully, claims as to its narrowness.)
And likewise I'm glad President Obama recognizes the selflessness of workers who accept cutbacks, but i don't think that workers should be expected to, as they say in Italy, "pay for your crisis," that there is a difference between selflessness and exploitation, that who is called upon to sacrifice what for whom is never a neutral set of relationships, always fixed within the shifting ideological and historically produced matrices of race, class, gender, sexuality, and citizenship.
Among the most powerful moments of the speech was
This is the meaning of our liberty and our creed, why men and women and children of every race and every faith can join in celebration across this magnificent mall. And why a man whose father less than 60 years ago might not have been served at a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath.
This was extraordinarily powerful, both because the emotion, the desire for the fulfilment of the dream King described 46 years ago remains a strong component of liberal nationalism, the idea that we can progress towards, are progressing, even have progressed towards an abstract equality that has now reached in the form of president obama, its apotheosis, retains every bit of its hegemony even as the multiculturalism of the 1990s has long since, it seems, given way to the libertarian "post-racialism" of 30rock and south park (which is often just "new racism" in disguise). But, historical objections aside (segregation in DC did not end in the 1940s) this is also powerful because it commemorates what it's stupid to claim as anything other than a victory in a deeper and more profound struggle against histories of race and racism not confined to juridical or representational arenas, that antiracists and pro-POC organizers and activists, workers and thinkers, produced, in a sense, this President in all his contradictory brilliance (here i'm thinking about something Nikhil Singh said at the Policing the Crisis panel back at ASA in october), that his victory (here i'm on my own but inspired by the hope from people bloc) is not simply the victory of neoliberal racial ideology, that he is no mere "centrist," that calling him a neocon in blackface (as i have seen some 'radica;s' allege in the wake of Ken Salazar and Robert Gates and Tim Geithner) is stupid and wrong, however much we need engaged, perceptive critique in the days ahead. To summarize, there were parts of the speech I found deeply moving, not simply as oratory, because they meant that we, at least the we i would like to identify myself with, had won a victory in a struggle that's nowhere near done.
Elizabeth Alexander said it best, more powerfully, my mother thought, bringing to the fore what was and is at stake in what has transpired and what is to come than even the momentous speech her poem followed.
Say it plain, that many have died for this day. Sing the names of the dead who brought us here, who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, picked the cotton and the lettuce, built brick by brick the glittering edifices they would then keep clean and work inside of.
And I would be remiss if I failed to mention Rev. Lowery, who brought my anarchist ass to tears as soon as he started speaking, and who offered not the platitudes of Warren's invocation but instead lessons in organizing.
Amen.
And while we have sown the seeds of greed -- the wind of greed and corruption, and even as we reap the whirlwind of social and economic disruption, we seek forgiveness and we come in a spirit of unity and solidarity to commit our support to our president by our willingness to make sacrifices, to respect your creation, to turn to each other and not on each other.
And now, Lord, in the complex arena of human relations, help us to make choices on the side of love, not hate; on the side of inclusion, not exclusion; tolerance, not intolerance. And as we leave this mountaintop, help us to hold on to the spirit of fellowship and the oneness of our family. Let us take that power back to our homes, our workplaces, our churches, our temples, our mosques, or wherever we seek your will.
Bless President Barack, First Lady Michelle. Look over our little, angelic Sasha and Malia.
We go now to walk together, children, pledging that we won't get weary in the difficult days ahead. We know you will not leave us alone, with your hands of power and your heart of love.
Help us then, now, Lord, to work for that day when nation shall not lift up sword against nation, when tanks will be beaten into tractors, when every man and every woman shall sit under his or her own vine and fig tree, and none shall be afraid; when justice will roll down like waters and righteousness as a mighty stream.
Thursday, January 15, 2009
This is going to be one of those semi-narcissistic blog entries about me in which i try to work in stuff about the rest of the world too. I'm mostly kidding with the disclaimer. I don't think i'm much of a narcissist. You may disagree, of course.
Incomplete number two is about three pages or so from being done. I will finish it tomorrow, i think, then work on my diss proposal for a day or two, then start the final incomplete, which is, i think, going to be a review essay on race and financialization. It was originally going to be about the Birmingham School's race analysis, and maybe i'll decide to go back to that instead. I feel like the financialization stuff is important for understanding the past year and would be an excuse to read Christian Marazzi's Capital and Language, Ian Baucom's SPecters of the Atlantic, and Randy Martin's recent stuff, all of which could be useful for my project(s) broadly concieved.
I spent the majority of "break" in the library, researching, writing or trying to. Bobst is slightly more tolerable when it's less populated, but its fascist (literally, i learned last night) architecture has always unnerved me, far more so than SML's imperialist cathedral to orientalist and colonialist knowledges, say, or the fact that the NYPL was in Ghostbusters and Slimer could phase through that wall at any second, and then, i mean, who ya gonna call? Someone said recently that I reminded them of Jeanine. Not Louis, Jeanine.
Still, there's a feeling of satisfaction on the one hand in vold in making headway on this crap that's been hanging over my head for so long - like i'm actually getting stuff done, mixed with fear, because the papers are going to suck, because now i actually have to be evaluated on this stuff, because what now, because i don't want to be a professor if that means this. (Not to say that i don't respect the hard decisions folks had to make, but if hotel workers ask you to boycott the hotel you boycott the hotel. End of story. Whatever the problematic politics of the same sex marriage movement when they're making alliances with immigrant service worker unions and the American Historical Association fails to stand with them, that is a sad day. Anyway.) I'm also feeling stressed out, because this is taking so long, because I have so much to do this senmester, and because my Plato is rusty - i just remember there's that dude named Kephalos, which means "head" in Greek. I found this funny in high school, not for prurient reasons - get your head out of the gutter, nonexistent reader! More because of the absurdity, maybe the irony of a philosopher or philosopher's consilgliere named "Mr. Head." Also it sounded like the sock puppet from south park which i had not yet fully repudiated then. It's hard to recognize something as libertarian when they're mocking Atlas Shrugged and you're fifteen. Or sixteen. I guess i was sixteen. I'd contextualize the Plato remark, but this is the interwebs and google can come back to hurt your favorite alderpeople.
Still no cease fire in Gaza, no contract in chicago, (and we don't want no peace, we want equal rights and justice.)
At some point in the soonish future i want to write something about Moore and Gibbons' Watchmen before they turn it into a really shitty movie in which the writer has no stake (having forsaken it in protest of DC Comics' refusal to let the copyright revert to him.) And at some point i should really resume critical analyses of the university. Let's start with this.
Back to work for a bit, then sleep, then more work.
EDIT: forgot this last week, and i'll do another tomorrowish
Marnie Stern: Healer
Wally Cox + The Natives: House Party. rare funk track from california. Lot of hammond.
Charlie Parker - Donna Lee
Joe Lovano and Greg Osby - Truth Be Told sadly hadn't listened to this since high school
Mirah -- Exactly Where We're From. Isn't she from like Wynnewood or Bala Cynwyd?
Darkness - Gamith
Run DMC - Hollis Crew. they are going in the rock and roll hall of fame with metallica. They should team up for the black tracksuit album.
Specials - Blank Expression.
De la Soul - Supa Emcees
The Monks - Complication. This song is ridiculous.
Incomplete number two is about three pages or so from being done. I will finish it tomorrow, i think, then work on my diss proposal for a day or two, then start the final incomplete, which is, i think, going to be a review essay on race and financialization. It was originally going to be about the Birmingham School's race analysis, and maybe i'll decide to go back to that instead. I feel like the financialization stuff is important for understanding the past year and would be an excuse to read Christian Marazzi's Capital and Language, Ian Baucom's SPecters of the Atlantic, and Randy Martin's recent stuff, all of which could be useful for my project(s) broadly concieved.
I spent the majority of "break" in the library, researching, writing or trying to. Bobst is slightly more tolerable when it's less populated, but its fascist (literally, i learned last night) architecture has always unnerved me, far more so than SML's imperialist cathedral to orientalist and colonialist knowledges, say, or the fact that the NYPL was in Ghostbusters and Slimer could phase through that wall at any second, and then, i mean, who ya gonna call? Someone said recently that I reminded them of Jeanine. Not Louis, Jeanine.
Still, there's a feeling of satisfaction on the one hand in vold in making headway on this crap that's been hanging over my head for so long - like i'm actually getting stuff done, mixed with fear, because the papers are going to suck, because now i actually have to be evaluated on this stuff, because what now, because i don't want to be a professor if that means this. (Not to say that i don't respect the hard decisions folks had to make, but if hotel workers ask you to boycott the hotel you boycott the hotel. End of story. Whatever the problematic politics of the same sex marriage movement when they're making alliances with immigrant service worker unions and the American Historical Association fails to stand with them, that is a sad day. Anyway.) I'm also feeling stressed out, because this is taking so long, because I have so much to do this senmester, and because my Plato is rusty - i just remember there's that dude named Kephalos, which means "head" in Greek. I found this funny in high school, not for prurient reasons - get your head out of the gutter, nonexistent reader! More because of the absurdity, maybe the irony of a philosopher or philosopher's consilgliere named "Mr. Head." Also it sounded like the sock puppet from south park which i had not yet fully repudiated then. It's hard to recognize something as libertarian when they're mocking Atlas Shrugged and you're fifteen. Or sixteen. I guess i was sixteen. I'd contextualize the Plato remark, but this is the interwebs and google can come back to hurt your favorite alderpeople.
Still no cease fire in Gaza, no contract in chicago, (and we don't want no peace, we want equal rights and justice.)
At some point in the soonish future i want to write something about Moore and Gibbons' Watchmen before they turn it into a really shitty movie in which the writer has no stake (having forsaken it in protest of DC Comics' refusal to let the copyright revert to him.) And at some point i should really resume critical analyses of the university. Let's start with this.
Back to work for a bit, then sleep, then more work.
EDIT: forgot this last week, and i'll do another tomorrowish
Marnie Stern: Healer
Wally Cox + The Natives: House Party. rare funk track from california. Lot of hammond.
Charlie Parker - Donna Lee
Joe Lovano and Greg Osby - Truth Be Told sadly hadn't listened to this since high school
Mirah -- Exactly Where We're From. Isn't she from like Wynnewood or Bala Cynwyd?
Darkness - Gamith
Run DMC - Hollis Crew. they are going in the rock and roll hall of fame with metallica. They should team up for the black tracksuit album.
Specials - Blank Expression.
De la Soul - Supa Emcees
The Monks - Complication. This song is ridiculous.
Friday, September 26, 2008
and sometimes i just ain't in the mood to take my place in back with the loudmouths
So i got those remastered versions of Tim and Pleased to Meet Me today. I was somewhat skeptical about the need for remasters on the twin tone cds. They always sounded perfect to me as is, and the graininess of the earlier CD mixes of Let It Be in particular felt more appropriate to what the album is and is trying to do than the remaster, which gave certain songs a vh1-y feel. But Pleased to Meet Me always sounded terrible on CD - distant, muted, brackish. I'm listening to the remaster now, and the songs that always sounded great sound better - those horns on "Can't Hardly Wait," for instance, now evoke the Memphis soul they were supposed to rather than Huey Lewis and the News, and i can hear subtleties of the guitar riff on "Alex Chilton" that I can't on the original CD version. The songs i usually skip on the album also sound better - "The Ledge" is explosive now, and the lyrics of "Shooting Dirty Pool"'s first verse are now almost comprehensible. "Nightclub Jitters" sounds hte most radically different - the remaster brings the bass way up, and it almost sounds like Sinatra meets Portishead or something.
Tim sounds mostly the same to me, and for me, that's a good thing. I've never had any problem with Tommy Erdelyi's production on that CD. One thing the remaster does is make Left of the Dial slightly cleaner, but not so much that it doesn't sound like what it is, a paean to the 1980s 'alternative' scene. At any rate, "Bastards of Young" and "Here Comes A Regular" sound as good as always, just a little louder, and I'm fine with that. Between them, the two discs have four different versions of "Can't Hardly Wait," one acoustic (which doesn't really work at all), with three different versions of the lyrics. The "Studio Demo" of "Kiss Me on the Bus" has Dinosaur Jr. levels of distorted guitar. "Nowhere is my home," an unreleased track from the Tim sessions, shows how great a guitarist Bob Stinson could be. Pleased to Meet Me has TEN bonus tracks. Some of the unreleased stuff, like "Birthday gal" and the incredible "photo," whose pre-chorus is awesomely reminiscent of Blue Oyster Cult's "burnin' for you," are wonderful. Chris Mars's take on "Cool Water" anticipates Cool Dump (and predates it by two decades.)
My three day-long stint in post-nasal hell caught up with me in the classroom today. It wasn't that I was underprepared so much as that my brain wasn't making the connections i wanted it to, that I just kind of blanked on where I wanted class to go and about a third of the connections i wanted to push people to make. Which sucks, because it was an important week in terms of the readings -- racialized domestic work. emotional labor. affect. Grr. Bobst Library is much more fun at 7 AM.
Mets are currently down 5 to 1 in the eighth. Here's hoping they pull out of it...
\EDIT: in lieu of Arlie Russel Hochschild's work and following Kathleen Barry's own work on flight attendant labor, i should note that "Waitress in the Sky" is an obnoxious, bad, and offensive song from a guy who once expressed admiration of ronal dreagan and said some dumb shit about Vietnam but writes (mostly) amazing songs.
Case in point: "Swingin' Party"
Tim sounds mostly the same to me, and for me, that's a good thing. I've never had any problem with Tommy Erdelyi's production on that CD. One thing the remaster does is make Left of the Dial slightly cleaner, but not so much that it doesn't sound like what it is, a paean to the 1980s 'alternative' scene. At any rate, "Bastards of Young" and "Here Comes A Regular" sound as good as always, just a little louder, and I'm fine with that. Between them, the two discs have four different versions of "Can't Hardly Wait," one acoustic (which doesn't really work at all), with three different versions of the lyrics. The "Studio Demo" of "Kiss Me on the Bus" has Dinosaur Jr. levels of distorted guitar. "Nowhere is my home," an unreleased track from the Tim sessions, shows how great a guitarist Bob Stinson could be. Pleased to Meet Me has TEN bonus tracks. Some of the unreleased stuff, like "Birthday gal" and the incredible "photo," whose pre-chorus is awesomely reminiscent of Blue Oyster Cult's "burnin' for you," are wonderful. Chris Mars's take on "Cool Water" anticipates Cool Dump (and predates it by two decades.)
My three day-long stint in post-nasal hell caught up with me in the classroom today. It wasn't that I was underprepared so much as that my brain wasn't making the connections i wanted it to, that I just kind of blanked on where I wanted class to go and about a third of the connections i wanted to push people to make. Which sucks, because it was an important week in terms of the readings -- racialized domestic work. emotional labor. affect. Grr. Bobst Library is much more fun at 7 AM.
Mets are currently down 5 to 1 in the eighth. Here's hoping they pull out of it...
\EDIT: in lieu of Arlie Russel Hochschild's work and following Kathleen Barry's own work on flight attendant labor, i should note that "Waitress in the Sky" is an obnoxious, bad, and offensive song from a guy who once expressed admiration of ronal dreagan and said some dumb shit about Vietnam but writes (mostly) amazing songs.
Case in point: "Swingin' Party"
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Alison Richard, universities, and social justice
As provost of Yale University for the first eight or nine years of Richard Levin's presidency, Alison Richard, an anthropologist by discipline, actively fought the attempts by Yale TAs and research assistants to win union recognititon and negotiate with the university. At worst, this was complicity with the multiple administrative harassment and intimidation campaigns which were promoted by the administration and often prosecuted by an all too willing tenured professoriat. At best we might imagine Richard a mere ideologue of a university with close relationships to "the marketplace" (scroll down) but to which collective organizations of employees were nonetheless anathema. (See pages 11-12.)
It shouldn't really surprise anyone, then, that Richard has recently come under fire for remarks asserting that the prosperity of universities depends in part on their autonomy from the demands of social justice movements.
It shouldn't really surprise anyone, then, that Richard has recently come under fire for remarks asserting that the prosperity of universities depends in part on their autonomy from the demands of social justice movements.
Maybe Richard is right. Maybe the sort of "business-facing" institution she here asserts that Cambridge is can't afford to worry about such things, though not even Richard's former colleagues Richard Brodhead and Richard Levin would go so far in public - all that rhetoric about training leaders is, after all, an elitist neoliberal version of a theory of the university's role in promoting social justice, or at least "progress" in managerial and corporate terms. But really I think this invites us to do two things - one, to recoil at the "leadership" that universities like Yale are exporting all over the world in the form of academic administrators like Richard, Andrew Hamilton at Oxford, Susan Hockfield at M.I.T., Brodhead at Duke, etc., as well as in the form of politicians it trains - neoconservatives like Ashcroft and Bush, and neoliberals like the Clintons and so many others, and protofascist journalists of multiple generations. Two, i think we should take Richard's remarks as an occasion to reflect upon what new university we might bring to birth from the ashes of the old (campus,) what a university that is indeed an engine for promoting real social justice might look like, if such a thing is indeed possible (and I think it is.)
The quality of what we provide and our capacity to attract talent are both at risk. Ironically, in my view one of the greatest risks is driven by the growing appreciation of the relevance of universities, in many ways so welcome: the problem is that the conception of relevance is often narrow while the fact of relevance encourages meddling. As institutions charged with education, research and training, our purpose is not to be construed as that of handmaidens of industry, implementers of the skills agenda, or indeed engines for promoting social justice. Responsive to and helping shape the national policy context, we need the independence and autonomy to chart our individual institutional courses, and to experiment.
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Some thoughts on a shitstorm
I don't have much to say about the Aliza Shvarts mess other than that Yale should not be censoring artists who are doing innovative, politically complex and well-thought out work.
I'm particularly interested though, in a little-explored (at least in commentary I've read) aspect of the administrative fallout, which is the academic labor politics of the Dean's response.
From Peter Salovey's most recent statement:
I'm particularly interested though, in a little-explored (at least in commentary I've read) aspect of the administrative fallout, which is the academic labor politics of the Dean's response.
From Peter Salovey's most recent statement:
Both the instructor and the advisor are almost certainly adjuncts or otherwise contingent. (As a lecturer, the advisor is the former, albeit a highly credentialed one.) What is "appropriate action" here? How this act of censorship affect the employment status of these teachers? Without job security, academic freedom is a fiction.After investigation, Dean Storr and I have determined that there were serious errors of judgment on the part of two individuals. In one case, the instructor responsible for the senior project should not have allowed it to go forward. In the other, an adviser [sic] should have interceded and consulted others when first given information about the project. Appropriate action has been taken in these two cases.
Friday, March 28, 2008
Talk about burying what should be the lede...
Paragraph 13:
The registrar sent its bills to the deans of Florida State’s various colleges and made them pay up; some deans have historically paid the tab out of the colleges’ budgets, while others have passed the costs on to departments or even to the faculty members themselves, which can take a particularly heavy toll on less-well-paid teaching assistants and beginning instructors.
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
burn unit
This morning, as I began to take attendance for my 8:00 AM section, a security guard knocked on the door of my classroom on the basement of 25 West 4th Street and told us to evacuate the building, which was, we learned, on fire. This was news to me, there having been no alarm or any other indication that there was a rather large electrical fire in our immediate vicinity, which, as we exited the building quickly, started releasing massive clouds of smoke onto west 4th street. After a few minutes of indecision, and as it became clear that there would be no immediate resolution to the fire, i elected, rather than to immediately cancel class, to try to conduct my section outside on the granite plaza in front of the business school. It was too loud, though, and there was a building on fire behind us, which was really distracting, for some reason. Still, in the forty or so minutes before i let them go, we had a halfway decent conversation about Vijay Prashad's "Crafting Solidarities." This is a testament, I think, to how cool and engaged my students are this semester. I think I freaked out all the Sternies by talking about Prashad's Marxist praxis though.
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