“What is negative in ethics refers therefore less to a normative, moral injunction than to the effect of – moral and cognitive – paralysis and blockage that often comes as a result of a hurt, a shock, an act of violence, despair and disenchantment or just by intense tedium. Negative passions destroy the self’s capacity to act as they … More On Deleuze/Guattari
Coda on my Dec. 21 meltdown: the town is icky, there are icky people in it, one of their spawn (parents are in 70s, so kid is 40s now) is brought to my house and acts icky, I lose it at him, and then I feel I misbehaved? I feel I have made a major … More It is real
I have been saying things like this: Aspects of the adoration of Cajuns to which I object include the ubiquity of the fleur-de-lys and the nostalgia for empire, along with the desire to parlay that into becoming kings in a new, corporate empire. If you want credit for being a poor peasant and you’ve decided … More The one defeated
Long ago, in another coincé job, two friends had things to say. One: that every academic must have a secret life, some hobby nobody else from campus participates in, a fancy car nobody from campus rides in. Two: that I was stressed out from campus because I wasn’t hiding enough. At the time, I did … More Managing
Someone I know, a Cajun, said yesterday that they had “deep grief” over the same kinds of issues in this culture that I complain of. In their case, they cannot see their family because of it, and they grieve this and the situation. So that is what I have, in part, deep grief. What other … More “Deep grief”
Now we are getting somewhere. It was in many ways literally true that I had to let that department chair abuse me, which he did in the name of the Cajuns, to survive. And I needed to survive. I gave up a great deal for it, and the whole experience reproduced earlier trauma, and I … More Still more on the latest episode of disgust
“After this year it seems pretty clear that universities have no backbone, the enlightenment values you and I were raised with have been abandoned (Post-modernists share a lot of the blame but that is a different essay). The process began with civil rights and anti-war movements when the ruling class decided the civics, history, and … More From friends
I wonder if my exasperation with the non-disabled students who claim to have a personality or “learning style” making it impossible for them to do the work in Spanish 4 has to do with repressed anger at an administration who also claims to be impaired and require indulgence. I mean, they’re encumbered and limited by … More Still on that topic
I seem to see the forces in the university who press to dismantle programs and work against students and faculty as a truly lethal threat. And because they wrap themselves in the Cajun flag and say they are poor oppressed Cajuns trying to support other Cajuns, and play Cajun music, I end up angry at … More So what have we learned?
Before living here I wouldn’t have said stealing was the essence of Cajun culture, but they have done everything they could to convince me that that is exactly what it is; they just use tourist paraphernalia to mask their wickedness. And the worst thing I ever heard at UL was a Cajun professor justifying hiring … More Inflammatory but secretly accurate
coldhearted scientist وداد 