Sunday music & reading list

"In a Town Apart, the Pride and Trials of Black Life" NY Times

Hurston is still remembered here as a vivacious eccentric who frequently returned after her family moved to Jacksonville, Fla. Augustus Franklin, 77, recalled that when Hurston sped into town, she usually arrived without notice in a thumping Chevrolet, smoking and wearing pants in a town that even today prides itself on dignified dress. Most residents were fascinated, Mr. Franklin said, while many sneered.

“People were always glad to see Zora,” Mr. Franklin said. But, he added, rocking in his chair on a back patio overlooking Lake Sabelia, where Hurston was most likely baptized, “she never did stay too long.”

"Towards a Theory of the Tenured Class" The Symptom

As members of a privileged class, tenured academics prefer the company of those comparably privileged, by contrast condescending toward everyone less privileged, beginning with non-tenured academics, but also including others. Indeed, even common socializing with the non-tenured can be problematic for them. As a single gent with a taste for women with advanced degrees, I can testify that I have never dated for long a tenured professor (and that I didn’t recognize this fact until drafting this essay). Since I’ve known intimately women in a several professions, not to mention graduate students and junior professors who weren’t yet tenured, shouldn’t I assume that tenured royalty wouldn’t accept untenured me, elite literary recognitions notwithstanding? They sleep only with their kind, I’m told. Does this restrictive preference reflect a certain insecurity about their status not unusual in privileged people who recognize that others similarly competent could do as well were they not unfortunate because of disadvantages (of timing, gender, integrity, a lack of sponsors) and closed doors?

"The Simplest of Pleasures"

When I see the funeral 'homes' in American cities I'm not just appalled by how dreadfully banal they are, as if death had to smother any attempt at imagination, but also I think it's a pity that they serve cadavers and their glad-to-still-be-alive families. Let there be some alternatives for those of little means and those who have grown weary of too much reflection so that they don't have to rely on these pre-packaged, boring and expensive expedients. For example, alternatives like those the Japanese have devised (they're called 'love hotels') for having sex. They know a lot more about suicide than we do. If you have the chance to go to the Chantily in Tokyo you'll see what I mean. You'll sense there the existence of places without maps or calendars where you can enter into the most absurd decors with anonymous partners to look for an opportunity to die free of all stereotypes. There you'd have an indeterminate amount of time - seconds, weeks, and months perhaps - until the moment presents itself with compelling clearness. You'd recognize it immediately. You couldn't miss it. It would have the shapeless shape of utterly simple pleasure.

"How the Left Saved Capitalism"

Capitalism sustains itself through its contradictions (e.g. the preponderance of the small owning class over the vast working class, the social nature of wealth-generation contrasted with the private nature of accumulation), while these same contradictions always threaten the integrity of the system itself. We know that the capitalist class benefits, for instance, from maintaining high profits and low wages, as well as from divisions in society, such as those of gender, race, ethnicity and sexual orientation. But if the workers become too impoverished, or sexism, racism and homophobia become too pronounced, the system becomes destabilized to a dangerous degree; explosion, or rather implosion, is a real possibility. If wages drop so low that workers give up shopping, this starts to cut into profits. And although it is in the interests of the capitalist class to keep workers divided on the basis of race, they don't want crazy racist militias roving the streets murdering minorities. We have a delicate balancing act here. Capitalism can't afford for the pendulum to swing too far in either direction (towards stability or instability).

"Red Alert in Cyberspace!"

The development of information superhighways confronts us with a new phenomenon: disorientation. A fundamental disorientation which completes and perfects the social and financial deregulation whose baleful consequences we already know. Perceived reality is being split into the real and the virtual, and we are getting a kind of stereo-reality, in which existence loses its reference points. To be is to be in situ, here and now, hic et nunc. But cyberspace and instantaneous, globalized information are throwing all that into total confusion. What is now underway is a disturbance of the perception of the real: a trauma. And we need to concentrate on this. Because no technology has ever been developed that has not had to struggle against its own specific negativity. The specific negativity of information superhighways is precisely this disorientation of alterity, of our relation to the other and to the world. It is quite clear that this disorientation, this `de-situation', will bring about a profound disturbance with consequences for society and, in turn, for democracy.

(REUTERS/Rupak De Chowdhuri)