Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Sunday, May 24, 2009

Never Turn Down Work

End of term is fairly harrowing in turns of work load -- I'm sure my lower posting frequency and the diminishing substance of my posts the last few weeks has attested to this. I've been looking forward to a few weeks off before my summer intensives begin at Berkeley and at the Art Institute in the City, looking forward to having some time to just dwell and read and write more elaborate posts attesting to the things I've learned this last term and so on. But it's looking like there's no rest for the weary... Friday afternoon I got a frantic call from my Department that the professor assigned to teach Rhetoric 10 Session A had some sort of emergency knocking him off course, and so I now find that I'm teaching not two but three intensives this summer, the first starting this Wednesday. This means that from now through August I will actually be lecturing on Nietzsche and Euripides and Kant and Fanon and Burroughs and Arendt and Barthes and Marx and Solanas and Haraway and Wilde and Freud and Latour and Butler and Cronenberg and Benjamin and Debord and Klein and Davis and King and Gilroy for something like six hours all told, nine in the morning to five in the afternoon, with a couple hours' break in between for the commute via MUNI and BART from San Francisco to Berkeley and to grab a bite somewhere. Of course, it's a joy to teach these things, it's a privilege to have work that both suits you and has a real chance of making a difference in the lives of creative intelligent earnest young people, it's a miracle for a precarious lecturer to have so much work at all in the midst of this economic crisis, and so on. I don't mean to complain. I could have turned down the job in principle, spent a couple of weeks in the bathtub reading science fiction and re-reading Arendt like I always do when I have time off, but some weird vestigial work ethic thing in me makes it impossible for me ever to turn down an offer of paid work unless it literally conflicts with another paid commitment I've already made. It's sick. I completely disapprove of this skewing of personal priorities, this weird willful wage enslavement, and yet I just can't shake it, I couldn't live with myself if I passed up the opportunity to make a little to save a little more, not to mention passing up the opportunity (amounting to a duty, seems to me) to provoke more fledgling students into the critical awareness that will make them better fellow citizens. Where on earth did I get these ridiculous apparently unshakable attitudes? I'm supposed to be a lazy muzzy cynical liberal aesthete! It's appalling. Anyway, who knows what havoc this will wreak on my blog over the summer months. Summer intensives are, well, intensive. When I'm not blogging my ideas and annoyances into the murk I feel the lack of it like the itching of a phantom limb. We'll see how I weigh these competing demands as they play out in real time. I have to admit I'm a bit nervous about the load. Incredibly, the break between my last summer intensive and the beginning of fall term and another new set of three courses is less than ten days. Scary.

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