Vallejo: Language Itself [I am not sure this title covers it, but a better one is not coming to me, and this has been improved since I posted it … but I am still interested in the question of the title] Borges said Quevedo was a poet of language: “La grandeza de Quevedo es verbal” (“Quevedo,” … More Getting that MLA proposal down to less than 1000 words
It is true: my great-great grandfather studied with Alexander von Humboldt. He was born in 1816 or 1817, making him a close contemporary of Karl Marx. We know that he and Marx corresponded later, as the letters have been conserved, but it occurs to me that they may have met first as students. Humboldt was … More Alexander von Humboldt
The theme of the 2016 MLA convention is Literature and Its Publics: Past, Present, and Future. In the meantime, I am told there are two types of academic worker: intellectual knowledge workers and educational service workers. This is my problem: I am supposed to be the former, but pressed to be the latter. It is all well … More The MLA, and a diagnosis, and some fascinating questions
I should read him more, and I should have seen this sooner. To borrow some inflammatory language from Marc Bousquet, the second is a waste product of the first. If the MOOC providers are like meatpackers, then the flipped classroom is how they’re going to get us to eat their offal. Now, we should look … More Jonathan Rees
“The brain is a hierarchical system,” Carhart-Harris said. “The highest-level parts”—such as the default-mode network—“have an inhibitory influence on the lower-level parts, like emotion and memory.” He discovered that blood flow and electrical activity in the default-mode network dropped off precipitously under the influence of psychedelics, a finding that may help to explain the loss … More Michael Pollan
El mal que aqueja nuestro departamento, según mi estudiante, c’est la mauvaise volonté. Laquelle? –ai-je demandé. Bien, a-t’il répondu: c’est le narcissisme d’un chef, et l’égoïsme de l’autre, que hacen que todos se odian y se agreden entre sí. Es importante reconocer esto. Mi analista, el real, el de carne y hueso, dice que tengo … More Sur la mauvaise volonté
The abstract. Reading Vallejo against the grain of identity Taking as its point of departure not only the poetic subject in Vallejo as primordially fractured but the intimations in his prose works that like his contemporary Borges (“La nadería de la personalidad,” 1925) he eschewed the idea of a unified self, this presesentation will interrogate … More MLA 2016
This is a preliminary PDF, released for reading groups in Oakland and elsewhere, and not wide-release (the final version of the reader). It was a joint project of the Communist Research Cluster and Viewpoint Magazine. It is the rough draft of what will become volume 2 of the CRC series “Communist Interventions.” The first volume, … More Communist activity: black radical texts
An old student came by; it had been ten years. She said our workplace is a sad one, that many traumatic events have taken place, but that I look the same as ever and seem happy. I changed her life, she said, by convincing her she could do the professional things she did not think … More Dieci anni
…about the introjected torturer. About the feeling of being imprisoned. You must go back in your box, back in your cage. The way I dissociate ever so slightly with this. Important: who has imprisoned me? I do not think it is the university. I think it is family and friends who imprisoned me here after … More A flash I had
coldhearted scientist وداد 