I apologize for the long hiatus, but I've been busy conducting my mid-term ritual of alienation. After some unpleasant experiences in my classes, and a taste of the kind of work grad students are supposed to do, I've been mulling over why I'm in school.

These are my reasons... reasons for wanting you (Kurtis Blow)

Sure, I'm learning a lot, but that's because I'm reading - something I could do on my own time.

It's not about being a better Marxist: if anything, I was politically clearer when I read what I wanted to, not what I'm forced to. If I wanted to be a great Marxist, I'd go to a turbulent country in South America, where socialism is debated in the streets, not in stuffy corridors far removed from power. (Or I could help coordinate the Mass Games in North Korea, where 100,000 gymnasts, musicians and colour-card-carriers perform for Kim Jong Il and each other. If you haven't seen A State of Mind yet, check it out. I never thought I'd feel nostalgia for campy Stalinist realism, but I really wanted the athletes to succeed. Too bad about the mandatory state radios in every kitchen that can't be turned off.)

Never thought I'd sympathize with jocks... - Mass Games, 2003

If student life was just about reading and then saying what you think of the reading, that'd be a panacea. I'd read all day. But you have to tailor your thoughts to what the prof wants to hear, because they have grading power over you; you have to prepare for a ever-smaller number of tenured academic jobs by publishing, attending conferences and getting your degree done asap; you have to accept the likelihood that you'll end up at 45, earning $20,000 a year on semi-annual contracts with no job security, bad skin and no hair. Academia isn't about escaping the kind of competition that exists in the private sector: it's an excruciatingly personal form of that competition.

Sociopathy vs. neurosis

In the corporate world, competition rests on being amoral, screwing over your colleagues to get ahead. Most well-meaning academics (though not all) eschew this sort of life; they want the rarefied world of book-learning and conferences. But the rules of the game depend on how 'smart' you are (a strange sort of intelligence: how well you can absorb books and critique them.) Academia values intellectual accomplishments, so academics live through their intellects, denying big chunks of their selves to get ahead. Grad students, be honest: is it a coincidence that your profs are some of the most fucked up people you've ever met? (Some of the warmest, most principled people I've met are profs. But they're noticeable because they stand out.)

But then, what are the other options for over-educated, under-skilled introverts?

It's a hell of a town

Go on vacation. I went to New York City for a week. Manhattan is big, impressive and exhausting. It appears New York's economy rests on Manhattanites going for lunch, and people from the other boroughs serving them lunch. Stephen Sondheim wrote a song about it, and he was from New York, and it's true today: all the security guards are black, the cooks are Latino, the manicurists are Korean and the men jogging with their dogs are white. I enjoyed gawking at the tall buildings and consuming the cultural commodities, but, unless I suddenly come into a million dollars, I couldn't live there.

Manhattan, home of fashionable commodities (thanks A.C. for the pic)

The method of modern art

The Museum of Modern Art renewed my faith in art. Art does have value, it's not just about navel-gazing or silly theories of social change that just create more artists. Back in the 'modern' period, artists thought their art should speak to real people i.e. non-artists. Some of that was in the message, and a lot of it was in the form.

I loved the Soviet constructivists, the expressionists, the surrealists. Reflecting reality back to us, in a different form, suggests it can be changed.

I saw this! Socialist design rules.

I hated Monet and tolerated Matisse; I guess it was revolutionary in its day, but it lends itself far too well to offices and dentist waiting rooms.

The design galleries were my favourite. All these beautiful lamps, chairs, posters, functional things made for ordinary people to use. It was so sad that they were stuck in museums, forcing us working stiffs & parasites to use ugly things in our everyday life. Wal~Mart gets the hideous, cheap functional stuff; the bourgeois get the beautiful, expensive things. But form wasn't always divorced from function.

I love the Bauhaus

You say he's just a fwiend

My favourite part of the trip was Brooklyn, where I walked for 7 hours and saw 5 neighbourhoods. It's where ordinary, poor people live. Not to celebrate poverty, but it felt a lot more real than Manhattan. Fulton Street Mall - where Biz Markie hung out, and they've immortalized him with a sign - was full of people, shopping and socializing. Downtown was smallish. Brooklyn Heights behind it was wealthy and white, but even it felt a little rough around the edges compared to the Upper West Side.

Local boy

The Navy docks nearby were massive concrete warehouses (maybe they weren't docks, I couldn't see what they were doing inside), but oddly enough, surrounded by pockets of houses, and crumbling, fenced off, beautiful rowhouses covered in ivy. I walked through Hasid-town and smiled at all the stern-faced merchants going about their daily business; though obviously an insular community, the bakery I visited was friendly. Then I chanced upon hipster-land, in the warehouse district of Williamsburg. It's disconcerting to realize that hipsters cause gentrification, pushing rents up and local people out. But they bring good restaurants and bars that, at the moment, I can afford, so I feel pretty conflicted.

Right, back to reading a page, mulling, reading another page, sighing heavily, getting some coffee, etc.