That feeling when you realize everything around you is designed to align your perspective with that of authority. It’s what I realized this month about Cajun culture, how the attempt to be kind to it and enjoy it is wrongheaded, I cannot make peace with it and it can never include me, because it is … More My research project
I’m going to have some self-respect this semester. That is the most fundamental thing the Cajuns took from me. I’m taking it back. YES my field has validity, YES I am a valid person, NO I am not ashamed to be research faculty, NO I am not oppressing you. YES I believe in shared governance … More As in
Trying to turn myself into someone who can live with the Cajun victim narrative … it’s the same operation as in 19th century Latin American literature, they are trying to say the perpetuation of slave society is liberation. I will work on this. Axé.
So again, it is: their political problem is not my psychological problem, or should not be. And it is political. Also: the psychological problems they have created with their politics are not my responsibility to solve. For instance, if they have made someone feel awful, I do not have to become a sacrificial victim to … More The program
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
The Reeducator said this and also said I was too intellectual, too “thinking.” (Thinking was bad, because it involved reason, which to him meant false reason and rationalization, and of course he was very anti-intellectual.) I didn’t understand what he meant, because I have deep feelings and also a lot of emotions; I was insulted … More “Feel your feelings”
I don’t ever want to feel as I did [yesterday] again. Or for the past 27 years living in Lafayette. Therefore, this is what I have to say to the Cajuns of that Cajun Renaissance: yes, I have a PhD, and if you say so, yes, it’s better than yours. Yes, I’ve got broader academic … More Epistle to the Cajuns
Right, in a broader sense the revolution I’m in was lost 50 years ago and I know it. But my not wanting to be defeated is this: I don’t feel like quitting the university without another university job, it’s just that in my particular department religious adoration of the suffering Cajuns is required at all … More Something I said to a friend
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 