Mary Versus the Trumpeting Legions of Apathy

So it's been rainy and I've been grumpy, but I do have a few things to be proud of this week: 1- I told the yoga teacher who had us listen to jarring music that while I normally like such music, I'd prefer something a little more mellow for the pm flow class instead of just passive aggressively holding it in. 2- When I stayed up WAY too late one night I used that time to clean out my drawers & filing cabinets. 3- I did go to bed on time one night this week. 4- I've gotten a little work done on my dissertation, even though it hasn't been always easy. 5- I graded all of my students' close readings in one day. 6- I went to happy hour with the admitted visiting students, even though it would have been easy to just go home. 7- I was able to say "no" to something I really wanted to do on Saturday because I knew I had prior commitments and I didn't want to over-schedule myself. 8-Had a really interesting, open and personable conversati...

We all agreed that Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer was racist. At first, we hated her, but then, after I taught a lesson citing Gramsci and Memmi on cultural hegemony’s persistence in determining individual attitudes, we only pitied her. Poor well-meaning, white, liberal racist. I opened up the class to include our discomforts in reading July’s People , a piece of speculative fiction written in 1980 about what the fall of Apartheid might look like. It’s a post-apocalyptic story where the apocalypse is Black Africans getting power. We read some sections where Gordimer describes the “descent” of her white protagonists as they adjust to life in a small, traditional Black village and shook our heads in appropriate discomfort. My French student said, “I’m not used to feeling white guilt, but this book, I definitely felt it while reading.” Maybe Gordimer was a white, liberal racist, but we could pity her.             I told my stud...

I have a very complicated relationship with Las Vegas, and by Las Vegas I don't mean the normal, real-people Las Vegas, I mean WOOO-HOOOOO, LAS VEGAS!! like girls in straw cowboy hats and little short shorts leaning out the window of a Hertz rental car at 2:00 am while stuck in traffic on the Strip. I like regular Las Vegas, the pretty landscaping of the temple, the good people I've met from there. But Woo-hoo, Las Vegas? I have a sympathy for it, even an affection. That being said, I wouldn't touch it. It's almost exactly the same way I feel about a stray dog in the third world. I spent this last week in Las Vegas at a convention for the College Composition and Communication group. English teachers. Here's our tattoo offer: And here's the sweet party up in the Stratosphere, a hotel best described as "scrappy." We did have a DJ and bright lights and lots of food.  Speaking of food, here is some of the many unhealthy foods of which I partook...