a coupla things

probably you DID know the below. and you probably also know this, though it's not going to prevent me from saying it: being a first-year professor sucks--no sense of community; plucked from the warming bosom of your graduate advisor(s) (if you know my advisors this is very funny. but also true!); new city, and not enough time/money/company to enjoy it; no cohort of any kind; basically all you have is your little dissertation of which you may be proud, but which no one else really knows or cares about; dirty house you can't keep up with the cleaning of. of which you cannot keep up with the cleaning. maybe that last one is just me.

chad just told me about a school where the faculty engage in writing retreats. holy crap, that sounds so great. you all get together in a room and write for 3-4 hours, then socialize, then write a bit more, then get drunk (that last is my addition). the larger-scale version is that you all go to some like cabin or chalet or something on a weekend, and you all spend saturday writing, have a delicious big dinner saturday night, write some more on sunday morning, lunch, and then go home. WHO'S WITH ME???

i have a vague but nevertheless persistent irritation that can take several forms, so i'll just articulate it here with one of its forms, though this particular form isn't related to anything that's happened recently or anything. i am caught between the scylla of people who think of, say, foucault, as "navel-gazing" reading, or clichéd, played out, a name to drop to sound like a smarty mcfarty, etc.; and the charibdis of people who in fact DO fetishize, say, foucault or deleuze, usually white guys who can afford to easily reject identity politics out of hand, and who walk around puffed up using words specific to these discourses like "deterritorialize." both of these groupd make each other roll their respective eyes at one another; both groups make me feel like throwing a tantrum. to group #1: why don't you just relax for half a second and read generously enough to let the stuff work on your ideological commitments? no one wants to take them away from you, but you might just find it useful to consider things a bit differently rather than butting your head against the world all the time. and yes it's "hard," but don't you have a fucking phd? who ever told you that learning was easy and fast? sheesh. and to group 2: don't forget that those frenchies who made their name in the late-60s and early 70s were activists, very very interested in actually changing their world a bit, and their philosophy comes out of that desire, and is an attempt to rethink relations between political entities so as to achieve new and better ways of being. also, not that you have to emulate these guys or anything, but they were extremely interested in the disenfranchised and really not interested in making anyone feel dumb. their tasks were done in earnest.

imagine the BEST soup you've ever had. got it? are you sure? the absolute BEST? now have you got it? ok, now dig this: i just had soup that was EVEN BETTER!!