quo usque tandem abutere, Zache, patientia nostra

Marc Bousquet has posted video of the interview he did with Andy, Monika, Rana, Steve, and me at last April's Rethinking the University conference in Minneapolis. View it here. Monika has many insightful things to say in the latest installment. I am the fidgety bearded man in the back.

I'm feeling ambivalent yet again about graduate school, about professionalization, about my project, about New York, about the skillsets required to perform the administrative labor of the professoriate, and to play the game of marketing my self and my project as a graduate student, but this will seem like whining to folks not in the academy, and, i am sure, many in it so i will stop there. I believe very much that another university is possible, i'm just not sure i want to stick around and wait for it much longer, and, with teaching, my diss proposal, and my incompletes all weighing on me, i'm not really doing enough to bring it about at the moment. Enough about that.

I'm flying to Aluquerque tomorrow for my first American Studies Association conference. My passport is a mess and i really hope they let me fly on it. Right now i'm sitting here in my apartment preparing to return to planning my lesson for tommorow, wanting to go to sleep, and wanting more to figure out a way to do work that has a very different relationship to institutional logics of exclusion, control, discipline, and privilege. I'd rather be (figuratively) storming woodbridge (not as a return, which is impossible and politically useless, but as a continuing ethic) than sequestering myself in bobst, two floors beneath sexton, revisiting two year old trauma.

Cleaning up my apartment a bit tonight i accidentally ripped my picket sign from the March '03 strike. My superstituos side, the side that had to go to sleep with a stuffed animal into my tweens lest Freddy Krueger murder me in my sleep, feels gnawing anxiety about this. The rest of me feels gnawing anxiety about lots of other things.

I slept ten hours last night. I hafd a very strange dream involving some kind of battle of the bands at NYU and a vociferous argument between me and a male version of someone i "dated" when I was 15 about the drawbacks of Takamine and Ovation acoustic electric guitars when not plugged in. I am not sure what to make of it all. I very much wish spring break were not ending monday, and i'm particularly not looking forward to the forty midterms i'll have to deal with in two weeks' time.

Two more strange dreams these last two nights, the first a sexual (sort of, anyway) fiasco turned bloody encounter with a half-shark half-whale in a swimming pool turned having my foot stuck in a display of massively multiplayer online games at a book signing by none other than Ana, who as far as I know has not yet written any books. And yet still i reject Freud.

And last night was more about dealing with the past, with death and transition and thirteen year old friendships and these feelings of inadequacy and uselessness graduate school is so adept at promulgating.

Faculty and staff at the Community College of Philadelphia are on strike, and the administration has been forced to cancel classes with no one to teach them.

I dreamt last night that I had left grad school for a research job with unite-here that turned out to actually be an organizing job that no one told me would be an organizing job, and i was very confused. Also, i think i didn't so much leave grad school as take the job on top of grad school so i was juggling the two. I'm very bored. Spring "break" sucks.

Edit: Also, in my dream, i was running around the Upper West Side writing anti-war slogans on the sidewalks with big peices of chalk and ran into a friend from high school whom i have not seen in over five years. Why i thought chalking was a revolutionary activity i don't know. Perhaps it evinces the evacuation of politics and organizing I've felt in New York these past few years, or perhaps I simply need therapy. Fuck it, I'm going for a walk.

I awoke from a bizarre dream this morning. It beganin the cubicle labyrinth of the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, with Andy yelling at me because of some undergrad I was supposed to call about GSOC, which, in reality, never happened because no such situation existed. Things shifted to the other side of the department and a large classroom which does not in fact exist, and a meeting with the first years about the union was interrupted by heckling right wing racists, everyone stormed out, and i scurried after them trying to conduct the meeting, only to find myself at a UOC rally at which the UOC was inexplicably and improbably performing orientalism in the figure of some supposedly Turkish woman clad like a bellydancer in some old movie and then that turned into a civil disobedience and everyone got arrested, including me, next to Meghan D whom I have not seen in like 3 and a half years, and then the cops put iron masks on our faces (like the kind they use for welding) and tortured us by pouring acid on our skin.

Thoughts?

Fell asleep reading. Had a strange dream involving Grove Street in New Haven, a non-existent bus station, Josh, one of my high school ethics teachers, and Dee-Lite of "Groove is in the House" fame.

Woke up fromw ierd dream about people i sort of knew in college and couldn't get Nickelback's execrable "This is how you remind me" out of my head. Torture.

cat scratch fever

Spooky, the racially-insensitively named black cat for whom I am babysitting until the 11th, has been getting way too comfortable around me. For the most part, this is good, because she gets all affectionate and nuzzles me and jumps up on the couch, and it's really cute. But she also sometimes confuses my hand with her stuffed mouse, grabs me in her claws, and tries to bite me. For a small cat, Spooky has some very sharp claws, and both my hands are now covered in red scratch marks.

I had a strange dream last night involving some sort of dating bazaar and a lot of people i went to high school with and haven't seen in at least six years. I think Phoebe was there too. And someone made a lame joke about workers and capitalism so I said something about striking and dating, and then I woke up.

dreams, dreams, union busting, and bancshares

Just woke up from tow very crazy dreams, one involving my roomate being a serial killer, the other involving an impromptu party in some random hotel room at some random airport and much interpersonal drama. I always have weird dreams when I'm stressed out though, going back to first semester of my first year of college when i had this intense dream about my high school girlfriend being a hermaphrodite (which she is not) and then one about being in my grade school cafeteria with a friend from grade school and a friend from college only it wasn't my grade school cafeteria (either one) and it was all offputting and uncomfortable. So i guess the two dreams from last night are basically par for the course. I just used a fucking golf metaphor. WTF.

New Haven Register story on yesterday's events at the hospital is vastly inferior to the NHI coverage, which, given the Register's close institutional links to the University and the Hospital, isn't particularly surprising. No mention of Card Check or DeStefano's call to disband the board, both of which seem pretty important, in the schme of things. And also in New Haven news, everybody's favorite get richer quicker scheme for city plutocrats keeps on acquiring.

Nightmares, Torture, Coursework, Ska

I had an upsetting dream last night in which my undergrad advisor was calmly relating to me his dissapointment in my many failures as a graduate student. I felt like shit. Then my brother showed up, but he was all like 17 and beardless and rolling his eyes at me. It was all very disconcerting, well, except for Lev rolling his eyes at me, because that's a fairly common occurence.

I went to hear Judith Butler speak last night in Hemmerdinger Hall. The last time I was there was for this. Hemmerdinger's really not all that large, and the cops locked the doors as some folks banged on the glass trying to get in, and it looked for a few moments as if there might be some real violence exercised on people's bodies even as Butler spoke eloquently about torture, photography, Abu Ghraib, and the limits of the secular - specifically secularization's coercive aspects and the ways in which torture is constructed as a coercive technique/technology of modernization. Butler's speech was very smart, at times funny - she cracked a couple of jokes at the expense of Thomas Friedman (who has "apparently never read Boaz" - an offhand reference to the racist essentialsm inherent in how Friedman constructs "The Orient") and Bill O'Reilly, and very much on point - she even joked about her own writing at one point. which was slightly surreal. The last time I saw her speak was this lecture she gave on Nietzsche in the Whitney Humanities Center in fall of 2003 and i had no idea what the fuck was going on. Whether I got everything and appreciated it and thought it was really smart this time around because i've read Precarious Life and found it really useful, or because it just wasn't on Nietzsche, or because Butler was simply talking about politics in a much more immediate and tangible sense of the term I will leave to the reader to decide. After the lecture, another GSOCer and I went up to Butler and thanked her for her support for our strike last year, and she wished us luck moving forward.

I'm really swamped at the moment - a presentation on C.L.R. James (aka J.R. Johnson) in MarcoPoco next tuesday immediately followed by a paper due Wednesday, so if I have been bad about getting in touch with folks or returning e-mails, i apologize and will get my shit together asap.

In the meantime, please respond to this post with, in addition to any salient points, your favorite original song by the (English) Beat. No covers - i.e., no "Jackpot," (originally by the pioneers) "Rough Rider," (Prince Buster, but you knew that already,) "Whine or Grine," (also Prince Buster) or "Tears of a Clown," which was originally performed by Smokey Fucking Robinson and the Miracles.

Mine's "too nice to talk to," although it switches every five minutes.

It's been a long time (since anything other than blockquotes, it seems.) I shouldn't have left you without a dope beat to step to.

My apologies. I've been busy with a combination of GSOC, coursework, and, our group research project on piracy. The current state of my piece of the project proposal is below:

"The University of Pirates and the Pirate University: Academic Knowledge Production, Intellectual Property, and Utopia,"

The neoliberal university's position as a site of knowledge production and relationship to the licensing of the products of publicly funded research as intellectual property to be farmed out, often, to partnerships with private corporations, means that for academic capitalism, production and "piracy" are now increasingly intertwined. I propose a project which understands the current predicaments of so-called cognitive capitalism, (see Nick Dyer Witheford's essay in the European Journal of Higher Arts Education : http://www.ejhae.elia-artschools.org/Issue2/1b-dyer.htm) intellectual property, and academic labor. I will rely specifically on theorizations of immaterial labor by autonomist marxists like Dyer Witheford, Negri, Lazzarato, Tiziana Terranova (particularly this interview with Marc Bousquet: http://www.metamute.org/en/Recomposing-the-University et alii, and on some case studies of recent struggles within and against the global university's logics of ownership and work. I will also look at attempts to envision a nomad space of knowledge production against and/or outside of the post Bayh-Dole patent machine - what Dyer Witheford theorizes as the pirate colonies on the margins of David Noble's digital diploma mills. (yarr.)

Clearly, it needs work, but i think it's headed in a productive direction.

I haven't had a good night's sleep all week and i'm not really sure why. I just toss and turn and never feel rested. And i have these bizarre, surreal, intimate dreams which have been haunting me for the last couple of nights and i don't really get where they're coming from and why now. And right now i'm exhausted and
feeling mildly unproductive, not to mention a bit hungry. My major accomplishment of the day was buying new shoes - which boast - instead of gapoing holes where the heel should be, strong rubber soles as yet uneroded by the seven miles I walk every day. Also I think I have a better sense of the organizing that has to happen in my department, so I feel good about that. Really, though, I kind of just want to find something soft right now and lie on it for a few days, but i have what looks to be a busy weekend followed by a busy week, so that's a pipe dream. I'd really like to get out of the city for a little while, to go somewhere where leaves change colors and fall air is actually crisp. One of those moments where learning to drive probably would have been a good idea. But I am thinking maybe i should wait until things are a little more settled, until Fall has fallen a bit more, until I've finished an incomplete or two. Argh.

One night years ago, sleeping in my bed in my apartment in New Haven, i had a dream. In my dream, Richard Levin was gloating, prancing, even. While he rejoiced in his autocratic power over the globalized neoliberal university, he proclaimed, following LL Cool J, "Deepest. Bluest. My head is like a shark's fin."

I dream of GSOC

Strange dream last night in which I was playing some sort of comparative colonialism trivia gane with an anonymous GSOC organizer who was really oribably an amalgam of several different people. It got interrupted by a phone call from my dad, which woke me up. I don't remember the specifics of the game at all.

Also, at some point last night i dreamt I was at a Wowz show thanking Simon for sending me Cool Dump, which I still need to write something about, but not until i've finished this friggin paper.

In my dream last night I ran into Marissa (L.) and Helena. They were with a bunch of women i had never met. Helena was holding a baby which i don't think was hers, but it was mad cute. There was some banter about the OC, and then i noticed that Marissa's hair was died and uncharacteristically straight. No idea what it means.

In my dream last night, honorable benjamin goldman healey (D-1) snuck up behind me when i was talking to someone, and, with an impish grin, chopped off a large amount of my hair in an asymmetrical pattern from the back of my head. I was very upset about this until i realized i needed a haircut anyway.

Make of this what you will.

only in dreams?

I just awoke from one of the more bizarre dreams i can remember having. The Yale administration or the united states government or both had abducted activists from all over the country and put us in a training camp somewhere in some city (Boston I think. Definitely wasn't NY or New Haven) so they could test out their activist busting methods on us. The only other person there whom i knew was Lauren M. Burke. They made us do all kinds of stuff (maybe i was thinking about torture and Abu Ghraib, although this may have been more a meditation on graduate school or possibly reality television. At any rate i don't think they made me masturbate or hooked me up to electric shock crap or anything like that, just made us sit through bad lectures and kept us confined to this place. At one point Johnnie Cochrain was was wading through th mud outside with his entourage, and the place had turned into some suburban manse in long island or maybe arizona, though maybe i just thought that cause lauren was there.



today's ydn has like thirty billion angry responses from GESO folks, which is why i actually still read that sad excuse for journalism, so that makes me kind of happy.



"Heathers" has the best dialogue of any movie ever.



Pitchfork's redesign is cool, but Nick Sylvester's ODB review is badly written and treads on some problematic ground.

wildly innapropriate ydn headline contradicted by the actual story. but good money quotes from julie, helena, and marissa, which made me happy. also in the picture you can see that someone wrote "Support Unite Here 34/35 GESO" on the big board, which is obviously cool.



i woke up this morning from a dream in which noah crowley and i were being videotaped while walking through the fieldston girls' locker room. I have never been in that locker room, nor would i ever have allowed myself to be videotaped doing so. I haven't seen noah in almost two years, and that was for about five minutes outside of dublin house on 79th street that weird night when i saw like eighty kids from high school. the dream was weird because of its exteriority -- i was peering through the lens at myself (but it was the myself of now - with short hair and facial hair more substantial than what matt nick once described as "pubes on" my "face." Noah, who last time i saw him looked quite different from how he did in high school, was himself from four or five years ago. Like i said, the whole thing was bizarre.



I have a lot of work, i may have to give up my weekend, i'm totally stressed out, and i am not sure that i should be doing this job.

Weirdest dream yet last night. Yuppies turn into insane murderous dinosaur aliens and me, Julie, Lauren, and a bunch of other UOC people have to defeat them or something. And my 87 year old grandmother was somehow involved (on our side, i think.) It was really scary. I read too many comic books when i was a kid.



I've been here for over two months now, and i'm kind of fed up.

I just woke up from a dream in which Judith Butler and Antonio Banderas were in love.  Antonio Banderas asked Judith Butler to marry him, but Judith Butler was all like "i don't think so, buddy."

Yet another upsetting dream: I was visiting my high school and saw friends from my grade - Dawn, Vicky, Leah, some others - sitting on the upper quad.  When i walked over to say hi, they scattered, clearly not wanting anything to do with me.  Lauren was there for a second, until my dream-mind registered that as an impossibility, which was pretty heart-wrenching, to say the least.  I've been trying to decide whether this dream was thematically linked to the one i reported yesterday.

 

Last night's "nostalgia" post was in retrospect pretty pointless and i'm not sure where it cam from or why i felt compelled to post it.

 

The new issue of businessweek has two interesting articles about card check that are worth reading.

 

That's all for now, maybe more later, maybe not.