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.
“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 always have liked Benjamin and actually, I would learn German to read him in the original, and maybe Goethe. The true picture of the past whizzes by. Only as a picture, which flashes its final farewell in the moment of its recognizability, is the past to be held fast. “The truth will not run … More Epigraphs for my novel, and revelations
From a Cajun friend: “There is a certain variety of active ignorance that is treated as virtue by white Louisianians. You hear them browbeat each other over their shitty beers at get-togethers, etc.” That’s exactly it. On French vs. Spanish, Spanish is far more cosmopolitan, and French is far more standardized.Spanish has more tenses, more … More The political analysis
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
Are the differences between Cajuns and other white Southerners actually so great? We know the atmosphere and vibration are different, and we can cite Catholicism, Tabasco sauce, French roots, accordions, and so on as specific signs of cajunisme. But in terms of the grievances they cite, don’t others have them? They lost their land and … More And
I wondered for years what my chair meant when he would insist I was oppressing the instructors. They were licensed to harass me, but I wasn’t doing anything to them except support them academically in every way I could, as he had asked me to do. Still, I kept hearing that I was oppressing them, … More Also
coldhearted scientist وداد 