The Mad Diary of an Adjunct Instructor

In Memory of Anne Sexton and In Hope for Baby Cece

2011-03-13T14:56:00.000-07:00

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

2010-12-06T12:50:00.000-08:00

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

2010-10-10T09:39:00.000-07:00

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

2010-10-01T10:27:00.000-07:00

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

2010-07-14T15:18:00.000-07:00

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

2010-07-12T16:19:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-18T11:36:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-12T19:36:00.000-07:00

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

2010-02-21T09:25:00.000-08:00

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

2010-02-11T14:54:00.000-08:00

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

2010-02-09T13:56:00.001-08:00

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

2010-02-05T14:50:00.001-08:00

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

2010-01-29T13:45:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-15T07:48:00.000-08:00

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.

Trust Me...

2009-08-21T09:32:00.000-07:00

Trust me. I lived 4 months in Seoul, I know what it means to be hungry. Not that hungry where there is no food to eat. A hungry that stems from not knowing what to eat is a hunger that last. Starring at rows of food vendors, fish mongers, fruit sellers, and restaurants piled on top of each other too, that keep their food on display in the front window. And grocery stores with whole rows of seaweed and paprika (where is the spice I’ve been hearing about). That is at least what we saw.

Like most places, the truer places were local and behind frosted glass and a battering of Hangul. We mostly ate at KFC, the expensive Korean BBQ that our boss took us to our first day, Popeye’s from time to time, and Comma – our local chicken joint. This is where language skills were formed, “_________” – Two draft beers please. At least once a week we would split a fried chicken and four beers (if we were feeling spendy). But the special part was this corn nut rice crisp that came with pickled dikon and mustard for the chicken. Recipes were formed too – take above, sprinkle with salt and pepper, eat.

In an attempt to explore beyond our chicken fried state – that was mildly interrupted by mushy stir-fry dinners made on a hotplate – we decided to take a walk. We spent a good hour and half walking through a semi-industrial part of NE Seoul strolling for food. Bundled in our hastily purchased layer of light jackets and sweaters sent from home, we finally looked at each other and took a taxi back to our neighborhood and were yet stuck again with the same dilemma – ah fuck it Comma.