Now that I’m out of Spanish class (got a c+), I have a lot of free time. At work, I have 10 hours a week with internet access. However, the computer I use will not allow me to post to WordPress, and I’m finding that I use my spare time for anything but internet.
I’ve been reading (Anzaldua’s Borderlands, Allison’s Bastard out of Carolina) and getting a lot of writing done. I just got my first acceptance in a loooong time and it felt pretty nice. As usual, things are looking up.
Academic city here I come. My proposal for the International Writing Center Association’s annual conference just got accepted. I’m really pumped, because to be going to this as an undergraduate is pretty freakin’ sweet. Our topic = how to activate an anti-oppression agenda within the WC.
Best part = the conference is in Las Vegas . . . Halloween weekend.
A noted professor who has taught Marx’s Das Kapital for several decades now has videos of his lectures online, free to all. I’m thinking with my few weeks off, maybe I’ll finally make my way through the book, guided by the lectures. Could be fun.
Also on the list to read:
As expected, my Spanish class has become draining. Yesterday was the final exam. I needed to get a 66% to keep a B in the class, and I’m not sure that I even got that. A B would have been nice, but I’m OK with a C. Glad for it to be over, and I now have 6 weeks to myself before fall semester begins.
This is incredible, almost not to be believed. A press kit was handed out, with descriptions of world leaders. It described Italy’s Berlusconi as “hated by many” and “a political dilettante (amateur) who gained his high office only through use of his considerable influence on the national media.”
Getting too near the truth, Bush fell over himself to apologize.
Acknowledging the error, White House spokesman Tony Fratto issued an apology.
“A biography of Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi included in the press package used language that is insulting both to Prime Minister Berlusconi and to the Italian people,” Mr Fratto said in a statement.
“We apologise to Italy and to the prime minister for this very unfortunate mistake.
“The sentiments expressed in the biography do not represent the views of President Bush, the American government, or the American people,” he said.
Mr Berlusconi was a key supporter of the US-led war in Iraq.
Nice to know the White House spokesperson also speaks for the American people, apparently.
The final quote from Kafka’s The Trial. Getting more bleak by the moment . . .
“[I]t never occurred to the lawyers that they should suggest or insist on any improvements in the system, while . . . almost every accused man, even quite simple people among them, discovered from the earliest stages a passion for suggesting reforms which often wasted time and energy that could have been better employed in other directions. The only sensible thing was to adapt oneself to existing conditions . . . one must lie low, no matter how much it went against the grain, and try to understand that this great organization remained, so to speak, in a state of delicate balance, and so that if someone took it upon himself to alter the disposition of things around him, he ran the risk of losing his footing and falling to destruction, while the organization would simply right itself by some compensating reaction in another part of its machinery – since everything is interlocked – and remain unchanged, unless indeed, which was very probably, it became still more rigid, more valiant, severer, and more ruthless. One must really leave lawyers to do their work . . .”
July 4th, Bush is at a ceremony for people about to become US citizens. He is called a fascist and a war criminal. As the people are carried off by various security forces, Bush declares:
To my fellow citizens to be, we believe in free speech in the United States of America.
I few days ago, I linked to an article about a woman ignored until she died in a US hospital. For whatever reason, that post spiked my readership, normally less than 10 hits a day, to almost 150. Weird.
I’ve flushed turds down my crapper that had more sense than this guy.
I don’t think you can underestimate the importance of the president’s leadership in the days and weeks after 9/11.
I’m not much one for celebrating, but I do have one Fourth of July ritual: a reading of Frederick Douglass’s speech “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro.” Every year, I hope that it rings less true than the year before. Every year, it’s enduring honesty strengthens my resolve.
What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.
