The Mad Diary of an Adjunct Instructor

The thin line between love and hate

noreply@blogger.com (rcd2) — Fri, 23 Apr 2021 16:43:00 +0000

First and foremost, there are no blue lives, this ain’t Avatar. Being a cop is hard, it is also a job. A job that is built on and out of white supremacy – upholding laws and status quo for and by white cis hetro men, for the most part. Therefore, if you choose to become a police officer, you are choosing to join a white supremacy organization. White supremacy is what allows police officers to think they are separate from society. They believe they are the thin blue line that separates society from chaos and order (note they are not part of society then). Well, they are doing a pretty bad job. I don’t really know anyone who feels better when armed police officers are around.

Cops like to argue that they put their life on the line every day. They put citizens’ lives on the line every day with a license to harass, profile, assault, confiscate, and kill. As it has been said by many, we are supposed to comply with officers, yet they are allowed to make lethal mistakes with virtual impunity.

What about the thin line of mental health access, or quality education for all no matter your zip code or test scores. What about the thin line affordable housing, food deserts, segregated schools, and redlining. Abolish the police. Pay teachers. Abolish the military. Pay poets.

Democracy Can't Die

noreply@blogger.com (rcd2) — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 17:24:00 +0000

Well, we made it, well some of us made it. Too many died. Too many have been made to suffer. And we are starting where we left off, bringing that same energy of Biden running down the halls cheering that marriage equality became the law of the land. A more perfect union.

The racist terrorist thought they could overturn democracy by breaking windows for the gram, but the broken windows theory has been proven to be bs. Democracy doesn’t lie in a building, burn it down, it won’t matter. It will hurt, it will horrific, but it won’t kill democracy. If anything, it will make it stronger, as it has. Democracy is these cracker terrorists on no-fly lists, going to jail, losing their jobs, families and friends. Democracy don’t die, we multiply. We the people. Not what the founders intended, but what we tend in our hearts – the love of one another.

Even these mayonnaise Bettys. Their ignorance is so infuriating, because it goes against their own self-interest. They are hurting themselves and that in turn hurts us because we love them too. You most certainly don’t like a motherfucker. But you do love them. That is if you haven’t bought into white supremacy or capitalism (same/same btw).

Little Bits' Loud Bits

noreply@blogger.com (rcd2) — Sun, 17 Jan 2021 22:46:00 +0000

I hope that like most people Little Bits will experience the joys and sorrows of life in stride, yet so far I’m not sure if this will be true. Sure she can be sweet agreeable courageous and kind, and much of the time she is not. She is a stubborn flighty cantankerous B much of the time, much like me. We all hopefully want our offspring to be better than us, and she, but there is so much turd parts of me in her that the shit thrown back at us covers the family in a foul stench.

Us: hey you have 5 minutes left then it is time to get offline

LB: okay

Us: it’s been 5 minutes time to get off

LB: okay, one moment

Us: it’s been 3 more minutes

LB: okay, one moment

Us: No, it’s time

LB: I know I’m stupid! you think I’m stupid! (throws device) why don’t you want me to have any friends! I’m sorry you hate me!

Us: None of this is true

LB: yes it is! you hate me! you think I’m stupid! (starts shivering like we pulled out a switch) sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry …

This goes on for the 20 minutes or so, something shifts her attention for a moment, then she acts as if it never happened. Can even ask her about it, and she probably won’t remember.

This happens several times a day. And low and behold, sheltering in place is not helping. The collective trauma that world is experiencing will need space and time to heal. And although we have adults in the room now, it may be too late to ever get out of shelter in place. Anti-vaccers with anti-democracy will kill us all. The revolution may not be televised but the fall will.

Nag the Twitch

noreply@blogger.com (rcd2) — Fri, 15 Jan 2021 19:33:00 +0000

Sat down to write this morning. It’s later now. Was nagged into cleaning passively – I guess I’ll have to clean because I’ll have to ask you too many times to do it. Do you got receipts? Have you run the data analysis? Damn. Seriously. Responds I’m just talking out loud. But why does it feel that I’m being undercut and you play the role of the martyr? We clean. She’s annoyed, I know because she is whistling to herself.

I pout too. As I hold it in my nose twitches. Not my whole nose. Just the strip where breathe strips go. The twitch is more an irregular bounce. It happens more and more, the burying of emotions into twitchy muscles. Healthy outlets are few. Unhealthy options are plenty. Options, not outlets. Options keeps burying, ignoring, and isolating the truth. Guess the twitch is the truth wanting to get out, but I’m too caught up in my feelings for that.

The Age of the Moderate is Over

noreply@blogger.com (rcd2) — Thu, 14 Jan 2021 17:53:00 +0000

I’ve pretty much stop listening to the news. Never really watched it besides the PBSNewsHour anyway. Since March, since the question how are you doing now only causes existential dread, I’ve been off NPR. The two sides of the debate of how we got here, why people support Donnie Rump, or the evil that is Mitch the drip, has no place in a public forum. All of it is very clear and logical, it is racism – the pinnacle of ism, where all other isms flow from and too.

This morning NPR reported that security officials missed the insurrection by white supremist because they just didn’t believe this violent crowd directed by Rumpy would actual be violent. Huh, why is that? Why did they so readily believe that peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters would turn violent? Racism 101. Instead of calling it what it is NPR reported that it was a simple bias error, a blind spot if you will. No I won’t. This is despicable and dangerous reporting. This disavows the deep, violent racism in these officers (over-seers), in law, in American democracy.

Even before alt right, it was just the right, including most moderate lefts, and much of the left at that that held up and continues to hold up imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchal values (thank you bell hooks). The alt-right are not necessarily radical, as logical. If your society preaches these values, they are simply following them to the logical conclusion. Why doesn’t this happen to everybody then. I hope that it is critical thinking, I hope that love is prevailing, I hope that 10 commandments etched on our hearts is enough of a compass to bypass man made ideas of power. We must be extreme in our love. I may not like you, but I love you.

Maybe we spend too much time liking and not loving. Too much time on the surface and not enough time with the core. Too much time wanting to be liked and not enough time loving ourselves. And since I am breathing and you are breathing and we are still breathing Caesar’s last gasp – to love ourselves is to love existence completely. This love requires action and is painful. This love requires to call out imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchal values as anti-love, anti-existence, anti-you and me.

So I'm trying to write every now

noreply@blogger.com (rcd2) — Wed, 13 Jan 2021 17:48:00 +0000

I’ve spent the last month trying to find something new because I’m unemployed once again. As a part-time community college instructor who has not risen to the height of full-time instructor, our classes and our income can be cut for under enrollment. Every period I am assigned classes, re-employment preference of some sort (more like torture at this point), yet up to 2 weeks before class those classes can be cancelled. This time the news came the week of Christmas followed by several well wishes to enjoy the break. So happy holidays you broke bitches?

To get out of this unstable cycle of never knowing if I am going to work, if I going to have income, if I can make future plans, I have tried to look for other work. Shift careers I suppose. I’ve applied for well over 50 jobs in the past year and none have called back. So fuck it.

Now I’m going to do what I do, write, think, talk, listen to records. I am going to promote myself. I so deeply desire validation, often allowing people devalue how I value myself, leading to depressive entrapment. Allowing grumpy trolls to infect my value. I won’t say no more, but I will say validation is internal. So bye dirt on my shoulders, bye linkedin, and hello me I guess.

40ish and Cantankerous

noreply@blogger.com (rcd2) — Wed, 13 Jan 2021 01:34:00 +0000

When I was a teen I told people that I wanted to be bum, and by the time I entered college, I thought I would be dead by 23. No reason, just couldn’t see or imagine my future. 23 came and went and the future seemed possible simply because everyone I knew was broke and still waiting to make real moves, or so I thought.

Mediocrity is my operating system. Being white, cis male in America, the definition of mediocrity, the future is not for me. Yet I’m still here, failing into the middle. The middle of success, the middle of happiness, the middle of satisfaction, the middle of life. An ineffectual contributor, despised by many, loathed by more. I know, stories we tell are stories not truth, but I haven’t found any other story. I’ve tried to make moves and all lead to no, so what story am I left with but this.

We’ll try again tomorrow cuz that damn sun keeps coming.

The hospital where I was born

Code Meshing as an Act of Liberation

noreply@blogger.com (rcd2) — Wed, 03 May 2017 22:27:00 +0000

What follows is a paper I wrote while in grad school last year. I would like to publish/present this more formal someday - any feedback will be greatly appreciated.

In this paper I want to explore the current conversation concerning code meshing. To adequately do this, I will first place the debate in its historical context starting with previous notions of code switching to the present criticism of code meshing. The subtext of these conversations is that code switching ask people to practice Standard English. It is also asking them to join White, Middle-class Discourse (I’m using Gee’s notion of Discourse with a capital D here and through out much of the essay). Therefore SE is White, Middle-class English (WMCE), and code switching must be racist and hegemonic because it offers only one path to middle-class life and determines that this life is largely White. Denying those outside the barriers of WMCE access to the benefits of the middle-class is a radical departure from SRTOL (Students Right to Their Own Language) and our beliefs in diversity. Predominantly, composition instructors have agreed to the merits of SRTOL, but have also agreed that learning academic discourse is the surest pathway to academic and financial success (Bartholomae 1986, Gee 1989, Bloom 1996, White and Lowenthal 2010).

But I believe this paradigm is false because the job landscape is shifting so rapidly that academic Discourse becomes a highly specialized, and saturated, mode of communication that it is no longer needed on such a large scale. In other words, the need for academic language specifically is dead outside of the academia (and perhaps inside too). Furthermore, as economics has shown us, financial success does not guarantee long term financial success, personal growth, or happiness (McKibben 2007). The question becomes what jobs of the future are we preparing our students for, and is economic stability the main role of higher education?

History of SE and Code-Switching in Composition

In the late 1820s, Harvard noticed that their freshman needed English composition remediation because a larger pool of their applicants did not possess the written language of aristocracy. Their approach to remediation is often called the “current-tradition” method that focuses on error correction. Essentially, that there are rules that must be followed, a standardized way of writing. Even as Adam Sherman Hill in the 1870s, who was in charge of the entrance exam at Harvard, notes that the work of scholars shared similar non-Standard usage in their writing, Harvard and other universities see Standard English as a lost art (Clark 2012). Yet, Harvard’s institution of the entrance exam itself, help lead to the birth of ETS (Education Testing Service), the SATs and much of the standardized testing we have throughout education. This standardization is based on the belief that the standard exists and that it is something that can be explicitly taught. Hence, if you are told a grammar rule, given an uncontextualized example of the rule, and practice using the rule, then you will learn the rule. There is much evidence that explicit instruction, especially when concerning grammar, does not work, and that most grammar rules in English can be broken depending on context. Therefore, what is the reason for holding such a high standard to Standard English, if it does indeed not exist?

Many instructors deal with this question by seeing their roles as gatekeepers. And I think this is a role the University is comfortable giving them. As most students do not possess the codes of academic discourse, many scholars and educators argue for teaching students to code switch, that is use their home dialect in private and Standard Academic English in public. It is believed that switching will produce academic and career success, while not requiring the student to completely neglect their home discourse. To complicate matters, Carol Severino, in “Where the Cultures of Basic Writers and Academia Intersect: Cultivating the Common Ground” (1992), argues that as members of the institution and gatekeepers to its privileges, we often see our freshman students, especially our basic writers, as belonging to a deficient literacy community. However, she believes this is a false assumption. In fact many of our “under prepared” students have very complex and multiple literacies before they enter our classroom. She stresses that it is our job to build common ground with those literacies so that students can build a bridge to go back and forth between their home literacies (maybe even combine) with their growing academic literacies. Still switching, but with a nod to meshing.

In full celebration of students’ home discourse, Peter Elbow often runs the other direction and ask his students not to code switch at all. Elbow and other expressivists believe that code switching is a skill that students are not ready for yet, and that it will be picked up naturally as the student progresses through their major. Instead, they believe that students must learn to work metacognitively in their home discourse first. Expressivists do understand that adopting to the codes of academia is inevitable. For example, Lynn Bloom notes that Freshman Composition is setting students on the road to middle class livelihoods by teaching how to code switch (Bloom 1996). It is in this moment Bloom is linking financial success with Standard English, and instead of instructors being the gatekeeper; it is the language itself that keeps students in and out.

The constructivist, David Bartholomae, makes no bones about it, he believes we, as composition educators, must teach our students to be academics, or at least to act like one. In his seminal article, “Inventing the University” (1986), he addresses the need for students to enter the dominant discourse of privilege in order to receive said privileges. Use of what Bartholomae refers to as “common” language or codes, are most often what deny people access to discourse communities of privilege. The student who uses “common” language cannot infer different meanings, nor can he find the nuance in his own discourse. The arguments that come out of such students are often moralistic and egotistic. Students fall back on this language and these arguments because their deep identification with the “common” language (Bartholomae does note that all discourse communities have common language, but he is using quotes to indicate non-privileged language). Still many students can grasp this new academic discourse community through what Bartholomae calls “imitation or parody,” or rather learn to code switch.

James Paul Gee builds upon Bartholomae’s work by trying to understand why some discourse communities thrive in the academy, while others struggle to get by (1989). He sees discourse first as primary, the discourse of the home we are born into; next is a secondary discourse of the outside world. Secondary discourse can be forever added onto but it alters, rejects, and critiques each previous discourse. By breaking down the characteristics of the changes that occur into sub categories, Gee reveals the dialectical nature of discourse communities in each individual person, as all people can be said to belong to at least two Discourses (Gee changes discourse to a proper noun to include values, costume, manners, social identity, etc.). Gee also marks the differences between learning or being taught and apprenticeship or performance. He argues that successful students have had early secondary discourse, perhaps primary discourse, which mimics academic discourse. Therefore when they enter school they don’t have to learn the rules of the discourse, they can simply practice it. On the other hand, unsuccessful students primary and secondary discourses do not share traits with academic discourse. Therefore when they enter school they are being tested on proficiency of discourse standards that they never been able to practice. Gee stresses the need for code-switching because of the liberating nature of aquiring a secondary discourse as it will often lead to a metacognition of previous discourses. And though this may happen, Vershawn Ashanti Young argues that since the secondary discourse of academia in most cases is Standard English, many non-White, Middle-Class students will fail at acquiring it, or at least have to deny part of themselves in order to be successful in the institution.

To Code Switch is to Divide the Self

Young points to W.E.B. DuBois and his notion of double consciousness to ground his argument in the need to code switch has always been known to minoritized people. It’s similar to when Talib Kweli emotes one of the reasons the receiver of his affection is a “Hot Thing,” he raps, “I love the way your crib smell like Votivo candle incense/The white voice you use on the phone when you handle business” (Green 2007). Or rather as Du Bois proffers, African-Americans are always part of at least two consciousnesses that quite often force the holder to practice cognitive dissonance, like using a “white voice...[to] handle business.” A Black person in America must be fully conscious, that is versed in the codes of the white man’s Discourse as well as their own, in order to be accepted and generally survive in both worlds. This is code switching, and where much of the ideology, I believe, resides why we still focus on teaching students to code switch. Part of the belief is that discourses and identities are not intersectional, nor are their exigencies. By keeping rigid lines between discourses, we essentially burn the bridge to ever go home. Which is a very violent act. Which is why Du Bois calls for a merging of identities, and latter Young calls for merging of discourses.

Academic writing is important and can serve as a growth point for students to explore other avenues, but by allowing students to apprentice in blending their home language with a emerging academic language, hence practice code meshing, will allow for growth of an authentic self. In other words, that the language they write in should reflect where they are from and where their education is taking them (White and Ali-Khan 2013). By asking students to keep their identity separate and place a hierarchy on them, we are asking students to deny a part of themselves in the name of capitalism.

Furthermore, those outside of White, middle-class Discourse are often held to a higher level of scrutiny in towing the line laid out by the Discourse than those inside it. In other words, Black people are held to higher standards in regards to speaking and writing Standard English, even as Whites are not held to the same standard or are expected to know the standard. A Black colleague, Beth (not her real name), told me a story when she was working in a different industry and her boss accused Beth of not using SE on a report. The boss told Beth that she understood that Beth spoke a different language but she needed to be more careful in the future. At the time, Beth was working on her third Masters degree and had a more than proficient grasp of SE, but she simply made a mistake and was accused of forgetting to code switch. Though anecdotal, it does illustrate how SE is not only used to put Black people in their place, it is also a power move, because the boss was employing the function of white man’s guilt by first pitying Beth, then by stating she understood Beth’s culture and language, which also tells Beth which culture she belongs to, denying her the ability to define it for her self.

As Young argues, Standard English itself is a myth, which is further supported by Lippi-Green in her book English with an Accent (1997). It is here that Lippi-Green explains how even as lexicographers acknowledge that learned people pronounce and scribe in different manner, they still maintain that there is such a thing as Standard English that is most widely used by learned Americans. What lexicographers forget to add, though Lippi-Green spends considerable time explaining, is that the variations used by learned Americans also reflect their social, economic, and ethnic affiliation and that those that affiliate closest to White, Middle-class standards, also speak and write in Standard English. So instead of Standard English being a standard that is organic or natural or correct, it is yet another tool that is used by educators to whitewash language, and therefore identity. And by instructing students to code switch to Standard English we are telling them that speaking and writing as a White, middle-class person is the only path to success in academia. As June Jordan’s students discovered, you can speak in your own dialect and be true to yourself knowing that your message will not get across, or you can adopted the language of your oppressor which alters the message for the oppressors sensibilities (Jordan 1988). Either way you have failed.

In the face of the binary options that fail to fulfill our needs, Victor Villanueva (2006) makes the case that code meshing might be the close the subaltern comes to speaking. As he asserts, “an international blending of dialects…is more than simply a great concept; it is right; it is some assertion of the subaltern speaking. But before code meshing could work…outside the English classroom, we would have to educate an awful lot of educators. We’ve been trying for over forty years now, but some notion of “proper English” continues to hold sway” (Villanueva 2016). This is akin to when I told White colleague about the merits of code meshing, and she said it sounded great but a lot of teachers are “gonna have to die first.” But that is only part of the problem as many new and continuing instructors hold steadfast to grammar conventions and an idealized notion of SE. I believe much of this is due to having spent so much time being educated in SE that we end up telling our students essentially that they have to learn the rules of SE to understand how to break them in the future. Which in of itself is a crazy notion: that we must apprentice (Bartholomae 1986) in academic Discourse (Gee 1989) in order to gain entrance into the academe, that which is the gatekeeper for the power bloc, so that we may make changes from within. If this is the story we tell our students, and the story that was most likely told to us, then we are forever kicking the proverbial can of radical progression down the road.

What does code meshing look like?

To combat this cyclical gatekeeping paradigm code meshing honors the necessity of rhetorical exigency to dictate choice, but it also honors the right to choice and hence SRTOL. One of the ways code meshing can be accomplished in the writing classroom, and other classrooms that demand writing, is to provide students with assessments that require them to use multiple voices interwoven together. For example, in my first year composition course I have my students read Joe Sacco’s non-fiction, graphic-novel, Palestine (1996), because it is an honest portrayal about a subject most of my students are unfamiliar with and curious about. I pair this reading with the Part I of Edward Said’s “Introduction” to Orientalism (1978). Students often comment how moved intellectually and emotionally they are by delving into such tense subject matter. Therefore, I have created an assignment that asks students to write passionately about what they have learned. One part is analytical, academic English, and the other is more personal self-reflection. However, both styles require the student to use their intellectual growth and emotional growth as grounding points for composition. This weaving, perhaps differentiated by italics, is what we see most often by professional writers; yet often deny as a means of expression to our remedial writers. I too have been guilty of this in not allowing students to use personal voice when writing, or saying that an argument is too conversational. But when we do this, we are telling students that the most truthful honest part of them is not acceptable for public consumption. Code-meshing does not accept this and presses that no discourse is better than another, yet all have merits unique and shared.

Moving beyond the English classroom, code meshing seems most akin to learning communities and their program of support and accountability. What is special about learning communities as it relates to code meshing is that learning communities acculturate a small group of students into academic Discourse in multiple disciplines simultaneously. And since self-reflection and group sharing are often part of the learning community experience, this group of students will practice communicating with each other with their home, natural language, along with the discipline specific discourses they are acquiring. Even if the assignments don’t ask them to code mesh, their natural conversations will be exhibiting code-meshing qualities. Therefore, if educators within learning communities incorporated more assignments that asked students to code mesh, which they are already doing naturally, maybe we would have fewer at risk students and more successful students. Not merely financial success, but self-fulfilled civic liberation.

Work Cited

Bartholomae, David. “Inventing the University.” Journal of Basic Writing. 5.1 (1986): 4-23.

Bloom, Lynn Z.. “Freshman Composition as a Middle-class Enterprise”. College English 58.6 (1996): 654–675.

Clark, Irene L. “Processes.” Concepts in Composition: Theory and Practice in Teaching of Writing, 2^nd ed. New York: Routledge (2012).

Gee, James Paul. “Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics: Introduction.” Journal of Education. 171.1 (1989): 5-25.

Green, Talib Kweli. “Hot Thing.” Eardrum (2007).

Jordan, June. “Nobody Mean More to Me Than You And the Future Life of Willie Jordan.” Hardvard Education Review. (Fall 1988).

Lippi-Green, Rosina. English with an Accent: Language, Ideology, and Discrimination in the United States. New York: Routledge (2012).

McKibben, Bill. Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durible Future. Henry Holt and Company (2007).

Severino, Carol. “WHERE THE CULTURES OF BASIC WRITERS AND ACADEMIA INTERSECT: CULTIVATING THE COMMON GROUND”. Journal of Basic Writing 11.1 (1992): 4–15.

Villanueva, Victor. “Subversive Complicity and Basic Writing Across the Curriculum.” Journal of Basic Writing 32.1 (2003): 97-110.

WHITE, JOHN W., and CAROLYNE ALI-KHAN. "The Role Of Academic Discourse In Minority Students' Academic Assimilation." American Secondary Education 42.1 (2013): 24-42. Academic Search Complete. Web. 26 Feb. 2016.

White, John Wesley, and Patrick R. Lowenthal. "Minority College Students And Tacit "Codes Of Power": Developing Academic Discourses And Identities." Review Of Higher Education 34.2 (2010): 283-318. Academic Search Complete. Web. 26 Feb. 2016.

Young, Vershawn Ashanti. “Nah We Straight”: An Argument Against Code Switching.” JAC 29.1-2 (2009): 49-76.

top 3 downloads 2012

noreply@blogger.com (rcd2) — Thu, 27 Dec 2012 09:13:00 +0000

Skratch Bastid & The Gaff - Soul Sisters, Stand Up!

Soul, soul. Soul, and more soul. Most of which you will recognize, but ya probably didn’t know.

Me & Mr Jones: Terry Urban

Honestly I don’t really know the back story on this, but it’s lovely. Nas at his grown ass manest and Ms. Winehouse is the dream even she couldn’t fulfill.

Save.Our.Souls.: Add-2

Add-2 steps his game up here. He noted that before this, he knows that he could always be clever, but he wanted to say something too. His video for “CottonFields” best expresses this sentiment.

RIP Cousin Yauch

noreply@blogger.com (rcd2) — Sun, 06 May 2012 03:38:00 +0000

It was the mid eighties and rap was still being heavily debated on its ability to be music. Run DMC, LL Cool, even DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, had all made debuts, along with Biz Markie, 2 Live Crew, Slick Rick, and a grand host of others, but it wasn’t till The Beastie Boys that I finally got my hands on an actually rap album, or rather tape. Derek Tyl had the rest, and my moms wouldn’t allow them in the house, definitely on the side of rap as noise. By grace of god, my uncle’s girlfriend gave me License to Ill, because my uncle also didn’t like rap.

The raw party punk attitude and masculine boasting lyrics gave my young ears a language to explain what life was like, how the world had unfolded, but we weren’t allowed to say in polite circles. And they were white boys saying it in a predominantly black male musical genre.

Years later I had another gracious encounter, this time with knowledge. In attempts to have a family reunion, it was discovered that Adam Yauch, MCA, was a distant cousin. I believe his great-grandmother and my great-great-grandmother were sisters, or something like that. Either way, I feel blessed and honored to be able to say cousin Yauch. I also find it interesting that he is Jewish, and as far as I know, there is no Jewish identity in the family that I have met.

One final note, I am moved by how the Beasties, but especially cousin Yauch, became a peace loving, Buddhist hippie that helped the world grow

Stevie's Gonna See Me

noreply@blogger.com (rcd2) — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 02:28:00 +0000

it had to be 1983, parents were still together. we were in the Detroit airport not going anywhere meeting someone I suppose. those terminals haven't changed much since except the Brian Eno walkway has been down graded to silence. I can picture the gate and pass it often that I met Stevie Wonder in his floor length fur coat. as the story goes, I shouted 'he's on my album.' photo; family portrait plus Stevie in the DTW is early memory number 2.5.

In Memory of Anne Sexton and In Hope for Baby Cece

noreply@blogger.com (rcd2) — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 21:56:00 +0000

I was born to middle working class parents on the out skirts of Detroit’s city limits. My parents where from semi-large religious families who had located there for the jobs the auto industry had offered. Both of my grandfathers came from the north, one The Oopper and the other Canada, but same same. My paternal grandmother was Polish; at least that was what I was told. I’ve never been told where my maternal grandmother hails from, but all indications are the South (anything south of the Michigan border is considered Southern for Michiganders).

We lived in a nice brick 3-bedroom house that my mother had grown up in and was now renting from her parents. Part of the arrangement was that her parents and sister were allowed to park their pop-tent trailers in the two-car garage. This always confused me, since they both had garages of their own that didn’t have vehicles in them. Shortly after moving here just shy of my 2^nd birthday from California where my father was stationed and I was born, my parents divorced. I say often now that that is my earliest memory.

End of the Year Dump

noreply@blogger.com (rcd2) — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 20:50:00 +0000

Here is a list of my top ten music downloads of the year. Note these are all free promotional material is is widely available to download and encouraged by the artists themselves.

Revolutionary But Gangsta Grillz: Dead Prez
If you thought they were militant before, just wait.
The Madness (Onye-Ala): J. Periord & Nneka
Beautiful, amazing Nigerian soulstress, and she might just be mad.
The Cleveland Show: Chip Tha Ripper
Name sames a lot. but the flow will have you hooked.
Late Night With The Roots: Various Artists
Fallon's show is painful to watch. Roots, as always, rock the house. Now here is a way around all that
Mos Dub: Max Tannone
Simple and plan, Mos Def over classic reggae and ska. what more do you want.
Roses N’ Guns: Nikki Lynette
Hard, raw girl from the Chi - a little Axel Rose, a little Nina Simone, all just Nikki Lynette.
Live at Southpaw BK: Quadron
Amazing soul, electric pop duo from Denmark. This is a must have, watch their videos too.
Enter the Magical Mystery Chambers: Wu-Tang vs. The Beatles
Mash-Ups for the most part are what ever, but this effort is solid. Unfortuneately it is no longer available for download
Winter Skank Mix: 100dBs
Just a nice old skool mix of ska using original equipment.
NBA LIVE 10 Mixtape: Mick Boogie
From De La Soul to Matt & Kim to Zion I to Six Sense, this mixtape is awesome. The two tracks from De La alone is worth it.

Anywho, Happy Christmas and remember, the best type of giving free.

Silly politics silly nostalgia

noreply@blogger.com (rcd2) — Sun, 10 Oct 2010 16:39:00 +0000

Working backwards, Joe Kline of Time Magazine, said on the Meet the Press this morning that the Health Care Bill has a provision in it that requires “small” business owners to provide space for women to breast feed/pump। He thought this was silly, because his dad owned a small business and would of told the women to use his office. Awe, Joey gots a nice daddy. And if more people were like him we might not just need a government at all. Right?

Well the sad fact is that women, pregnant women, and women with children are discriminated across the board. In this country once you become pregnant you are on the road to disability. Most employers don’t even offer maternity leave. So I’m sorry Joe, healthcare reform might have some funny provisions, but we can’t all be your daddy.

However, Peggy Noonan doesn’t want to be your mommy either. Noonan lamented that for the first time in her lifetime (ooohhhh) there is real prospect that children won’t do better than their parents. I’m sure those older to me can attest to other times that this has been true, in fact I remember as one of the platforms that Bill Clinton ran on in 1990s. But furthermore, do we need to strive to do better than our parents. Doesn’t this affectively say that our parents were some kind of failure? And what do we mean by better?

My parents spread the middle-class economic gap, and I hope to land somewhere in the middle. But that does not constitute better in any real way. I asked my students that other day to define success, and one said, “the ability to take care of others.” My parents have definitely done that. Taking care of others does require money, but it requires much more than that, stuff that is not related to money. In fact, money often corrupts the desire to take care of others. This could be because gaining money often requires for you to think of yourself in competition with others, as oppose to community.

I think that the rap group Chiddy Bang says it best, “I know I’m privileged because while I’m in the booth, my cousin is in the village.”

Stroking

noreply@blogger.com (rcd2) — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 17:27:00 +0000

I’m sure by now that most of you have seen Colbert’s testimony to congress। His performance was spot on as they say – bitting satire at some of its finest। But what was even funnier, or shall I say, what congress found funnier, was their own questioning to the panel of testimonials, which included Carol Swain Professor of Political Science and Professor of Law at Vanderbilt University and Farm Workers President Arturo Rodriguez.

Reductive reasoning and pigeon holding seemed to be what is taught and fostered by our congress। Not to mention a sense of superiority that dismissed everyone on the other side of their bench. One line of questioning went something like this to Colbert from senator Lamar Smith (R-TX), who also recently said to Rupert Murdoch, “Gosh Fox News is great.”

‘how many workers did you work with that day’

Colbert looks to Rodriguez and confirms ‘about 100’

‘Do you know how many were legal or illegal working’

‘I didn’t ask them for their papers’

‘So you don’t know’

‘No’

‘So since you didn’t ask, we can assume that most were legal’

What the fuck। The line of questioning, and part of the reason for Colbert’s testimony, was precisely to say that Americans don’t do this work, nor would they willing do this work.

It is this reductive, self & national aggrandizing logic that is killing us. Even senators from the “left”, who were primary African American on this sub-committee, held the same arrogance and dismissiveness. It was sickening on all fronts.

Napkin Poem

noreply@blogger.com (rcd2) — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 22:18:00 +0000

1st baseball game @ tiger
stadium I booed the
national anthem to
be silly cuz there
was a moment of silence
The shock of the sound
was surprising - I was
wearing a Los Angels hat
that I bought in the
parking lot - I was 9.

USownians

noreply@blogger.com (rcd2) — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 23:19:00 +0000

So I had a student give me a note the other day. It roughly said that since it is summer quarter I assume that students don’t want to be in class, but many of them actually enjoy being in class. Either way she shows up late the next day.

As I’m reading over her first essay on the military industrial complex and the Jarecki film Why We Fight, she writes in her intro, “One of the most recent wages of war was September 11^th where Iraq waged war on the U.S. by bombing the twin towers in New York.”

WTF!

My Blood's Boiling

noreply@blogger.com (rcd2) — Tue, 18 May 2010 18:36:00 +0000

My blood’s boiling
I have hate
Little bit of fear
And no room to explode

My fingers and genitals
Are trembling
My eyes are open
My lids are half closed

I want out
Of this skin
Out of this style
Into a new way

No more wishing
No more wanting
Just accept this is
De Anza Town

ABC Workshop

noreply@blogger.com (rcd2) — Thu, 13 May 2010 02:36:00 +0000

This is just a quick stab at an alphabet poetry writing exercise. enjoy!

Abandon hope and fear
Benevolent now
Castrates
Distinctions between yous
Elder yous
Forever yous

Gathering the force of
Hurricane thoughts
Inflamed souls
Jumping Jumping Jumping
Keep Jumping
Longer farther higher
Make yourself more yourself
Make yourself more the moon
Naked, grey, and bare
Original sun god
Placed in the sky for all to see

Quick, don’t blink
Run after the dawn
Start a yelling match
Tear your opponent apart
Universally
Victory is to
Win nothing
eXtradite your past
Yawn @ the thought of pleasure
Zig Zag Zig
Arm Leg Leg Arm Head (allah)

Sunday Morning

noreply@blogger.com (rcd2) — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 17:25:00 +0000

So it’s Sunday, so I watch Meet the Press. General David Petraeus said a lot things I liked. Abu Ghraib continues to bite us in the ass. Guantanamo Bay should be closed. The field guide to interrogation given to them by Congress has proven to work. And implied that don’t ask don’t tell is no longer needed.

Next was the republican hopeful for the 2012 presidential race, Governor Tim Paw-lenty (hypen’s mine) of Minnesota. Besides being your general conservative butt-nugget, he tried to spin cutting state and city bus drivers’ future pensions was a good thing. Also the 12K jobs in his state didn’t mean much because they were mainly government jobs and that only means larger government – doesn’t he work for the government?

Finally, the round table that attempts to make some sense of it all. Meet the Press round tables are somewhere between Newshour and well I don’t know, it’s a notch over I guess in shouts. Besides the two congressmen, E. J. Dionne of the Washington Post and Peggy (I’m the rich bitch in the room) Noonan of the Wall Street Journal were on. E. J. is kinda cute, because he’s fair and his gray hair flops around slightly. And I fucking hate Peggy Noonan.

This is the type of republican that would never associate with the republican base – the base that is poor, uneducated, and white. Harsh, but it is not against the base, it is against Noonan. Noonan in her gold jacket, slow dramatic speech, and face that reeks of contempt, cannot see beyond her own reflection. In this case, the indistinguishable gentleman from some republican rhetorical state, who even received Noonan’s trademark head-shake of disapproval.

Final question – Are American’s tired of big government or a haphazard government?

The Suspicious Reason of Reasoning

noreply@blogger.com (rcd2) — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 22:54:00 +0000

Our attempt to give narrative to our life, ask us to apply reason to our decisions. This is classic economics. You make decisions based on clear desire – I guess they never read their Freud.

The ideological soup that nourishes our decisions, their histories and failures, fight to make logical conclusions, logical conclusions of their version of success. Veaganism, Capitalism, Environmentalism, Buddhism. –ism discourse is the way we apply reasoning. –ism discourse is not empirical (not that all claim to be, nor should be). –ism discourse has directed our everyday lives to the point that there are no original ideas (not that there need be).

Reasoning through –ism is reasoning with the self for meaning. Meaning for not necessarily higher meaning, but meaning, whay do I do the things I do, why why why why why.

We carry our ancestors in our breathe.

Familial ideology is an –ism. So is addiction. So is poetry. So is hate. So is love.

syllabus freewrite

noreply@blogger.com (rcd2) — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 21:56:00 +0000

I want my students to learn that Victorian and Modern British Literature is England’s last great hope at culture, and it comes from everywhere but their tiny little island. Just as our modern military chases oil around the world, private and public money was extensively spent defining the Other and reaping its resources to maintain a way of life based on commodified goods. The second Industrial Revolution gave rise to a middle-class, but the wealth gap continued to grow as well, making the working middle-class just a paycheck over the poor. But larger than that, the Industrial Revolution really means the start of stuff.

Wealth shifts from community to the individual, to our modern hyper-individual (afterall it’s Margaret Thatcher who pronounces that “there’s no such thing as society”). What this means is that people move from community sustaining practices to urban survival of the fittest. The fittest however has little to do with health, welfare, or peace. Fitness becomes the GNP, and for that to happen people have to buy stuff: experiences, treasures, comforts. The staggering swirl of goods does not bring an end to this drive, but it does bring an end to the British Empire.

The places where most of this raw stuff came from (and still comes from) had a different experience. They had the culture that the Victorian Empire built herself upon. They had the resources to maintain a way of life too – had. The collapse of the British Empire who held sway of a quarter of the earth’s population, gave rise to a dramatic influx of cultures, languages, customs, technologies, musics, and ideologies around the world. This is the beginning of our global life.

i want to write

noreply@blogger.com (rcd2) — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 22:50:00 +0000

I want to write. I am not a painter I am a poet, at least that what I play on here. Words are abstract as brushstrokes. Languag3e and syllibias are ment to be played with and know it was better better to play. No plan only goals to be here and now the nice thing is it is always now. Plans melt and are adapted to greater, not greatest, but greater forces of time and space. Time beyong the roman calendar based on roman numbers a failed mathematical system. Time that stretches and holds space together time that exist through all 12 plus dimensions of space time that is the same in the past as it is in the present just as space is perpetually new with nothing added just chance colliding with itself shifting space and marking time.

Mantras

noreply@blogger.com (rcd2) — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 21:45:00 +0000

Get your Mona Lisa on.

It’s either something or nothing. Usually something ends up being nothing.

You got any place to be? Ala Lenny, “I’m making great time, if I only had someplace to be.”

Kiss the earth with your feet.

poetry.

Buenos días
Dos cervezas por favor.

2 choan maegjujuseyo. (2 초안 맥주주세요)
gamsahabnida 감사합니다

photo and art by kb.

Sun Salutation

noreply@blogger.com (rcd2) — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 15:48:00 +0000

I don’t think that my head is screwed on right. It feels misshapen with large dents. When I close my eyes I can see my eyes swimming in the goo of a leveler bouncing back and forth against my nose – my Y-axis – that is dented and deformed from arrogance and a picnic table and many a punches. When I can finally see the balance of my eyes peering over the goo my body feels contorted and twisted like a lazy eye. Relax and my body turns straight and my head turns off.