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Wednesday, February 27, 2019

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily

Gun background checks and Medicare for All...

I'm Aliiiiiiive...

These last few years since the one-two punch of my bloody medical emergency and then this whole Trumpmerican catastrophe have often felt like a bit of a slog, with insomnia and panic attacks and depression forever rumbling threateningly in the background, even on good days, and then suddenly, you wake up after a couple of reasonably productive days, after a couple of reasonable nights' sleep, after a decent patch of amusements and engagements and patient efforts and suddenly it feels like spring may be around the corner and this grumpy superannuated burned-out has-been husk finds a smile and the mood is altogether different, you feel less defeated and more like raising hell, who knows how long, but here goes...

Tuesday, February 26, 2019

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily

Sunday, February 24, 2019

Sunday Walk

Subdued walk after more insomniac shenanigans this weekend, but quite lovely and sunny and cool I must say. Went to the rose garden with Eric, where everything is pruned back to stems awaiting spring's explosion in about a month's time. Rashly changed my usual omelette order to a grilled cheese and tomato sandwich at our diner this morning. I have a whole week to regret that uninspired decision in... Finishing up the first third of term this week, my theory survey courses have provided the groundwork -- Marx, Nietzsche, Freud -- fetish, figure, fact -- and now we turn to postmarxist, biopolitical, intersectional, ecological elaborations and applications and subversions for the next two thirds. I would be enjoying myself if it weren't for all the extra stuff I have to do, recc letters, studio visits, office hours, union stuff, independent studies, thesis students, a million little administrivial tasks a couple more of which seem to get larded onto my duties with each passing year. As it is, it's a slog and I'm always swamped and walking the buzzsaw's edge of burnout.

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily

Saturday, February 23, 2019

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily

Friday, February 22, 2019

Teaching Day

Brutal insomnia last night -- these still happen occasionally, unfortunately -- makes for a brutally long day lecturing in the City. The sun is shining, which means I don't have to walk to the train and from the bus in wind and rain at any rate. Lecture today weaves more on Marx's fetishized commodity with Freud's sexual fetishism. Plenty to talk about there, even if Freud always grosses me out a bit to teach. Before that sprawling three hours of lecturing, I'm devoting an hour or so to an independent study student working on eco-feminist texts that feel rather more exciting than the fetishism texts I'll be droning on about later...

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Dailly

Teaching day, another twofer.

Thursday, February 21, 2019

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily

Wednesday, February 20, 2019

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily

Tuesday, February 19, 2019

At Home With Amy Sedaris

Pleased to see this profile of Amy Sedaris and her latest show (now in its second season) in the Guardian. Eric and I were just commenting how the show feels fresh and wonderful like watching Pee Wee's Playhouse or the early seasons of Drag Race did (or, of course, Strangers With Candy, probably the only show certain faggots of a certain age, meaning me, quote as often as AbFab). Quite a few years ago I got Eric a book for Christmas by Amy Sedaris (we're an Amy not a David household) called "I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence" which appears to be a premonitory rumbling of the fantastic show we are getting now. I continue to expect great things, among them, great disappointments.

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily

Another twofer today:

Monday, February 18, 2019

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily

Penelope Keith

Spent much of the weekend enjoying Penelope Keith's turn as Judith Bliss in Coward's Hay Fever and many sunny silly episodes of "To The Manor Born." May pull out our old set of "Good Neighbors" next...

Sunday, February 17, 2019

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily

Sunday Walk

A blustery blue-sky day, Eric and I strolled the neighborhood streets on the way home from brunch at our Piedmont Avenue diner, looking at all the new blooms starting to come in. We finished up with a walk through St. Mary's cemetery, a smaller charming place right next to the sprawling Mountain View next door. Bustle of open houses gave a bit of buzz to the chilly Sunday afternoon, but the number of lingering vacant storefronts feels a bit ominous...

Saturday, February 16, 2019

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily

Harris Is The Frontrunner

via the generally-vile Politico:
Dolores Huerta, the iconic labor and civil rights leader who co-founded what became the United Farm Workers, is endorsing Sen. Kamala Harris for president... Huerta, who started the National Farmworkers Association alongside the late Cesar Chavez, is also signing onto Harris’ campaign as a California co-chair, joining Rep. Barbara Lee, a former Congressional Black Caucus chair, who endorsed Harris on Wednesday.
Gosh, Kamala Harris really is lining up some significant early endorsements. This suggests organizational strengths that will matter mightily soon enough. I also understand that since her campaign rollout she has been polling third behind the male pale stale Biden and Bernie (who have obvious name-recognition advantages this early out -- a billion billion local goddesses, I beg you, please, prevent their nomination!) while, interestingly, neither Elizabeth Warren nor Kirsten Gillibrand seems to have moved the needle much with their own rollouts. We'll see what, if anything, that portends. Harris is shaping up to be the frontrunner as far as I can see. That worries and encourages me in about equal measure, to be honest, and memories of HRC remain, to say the least, raw as a sawblade. As I said when I read Barbara Lee's endorsement, I'm intrigued by Harris's professionalism early out but not yet ready to commit to any of the candidates myself. I still like Warren and Brown quite well, I find Booker more than usually charismatic whatever my quibbles with him, and Beto is a real question mark for me and I am quite open to hearing his answers. Yeah, I'd hold my nose and vote for Biden or Bernie if it came, somehow, unaccountably, to that truly yucky eventuality.

Friday, February 15, 2019

Barbara Lee Speaks For... Kamala Harris

I cheerfully voted for Kamala Harris for Senate and would do so again for President in a year's time -- I will vote for any Democrat, including awful superannuated white males like Biden or Bernie if it comes to that -- but this is too early for me to sign on to an endorsement this time around. Please, fauxvolutionaries, refrain from "informing" me in comments of the many reasons Harris is "canceled" etc etc. I already know well and disapprove much of Harris's law-enforcement history, and I respect if that's a line too far for anybody so long as that line is then applied judiciously (Biden may be more execrable on this score than Harris and Klobuchar deserves comparable scrutiny she doesn't usually get, eg -- and none of this makes ANY Democrat worse than a Donald Trump "re"-"election" and I would hope all such critiques, all efforts to productively pressure future Presidents to progressive policies and accountability, on whatever issues, would remain better attuned by now to reactionary opportunism in a time of ascendant authoritarianism amid climate catastrophe -- not that I put anything past preening parochial bros once the purity cabaret begins again). Anyway, nearly every day I post some news item under the title "Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily" because I am that rarest and luckiest of citizens, an anti-racist democratic eco-socialist feminist queer atheist vegetarian aesthete who gets to live in the most beautiful and diverse city in America, Oakland, California, represented by one of the most actually-progressive Democrats in the Party, Barbara Lee. When Lee endorses my Senator for President, you better believe I stand up and pay attention to that... but for a little while at least, Barbara Lee is speaking in this case, just for herself. I want to see what Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, and Sherrod Brown have to say for themselves for a few months as well...

Thursday, February 14, 2019

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily


Another twofer, since I'll always post her Green New Deal promotions, whatever else I boost.

Trolls Under The Bridge


Republicans are smacking their lips at the prospect of getting Democrats on the record that they actually don't want to destroy the planet because Republicans are apparently as suicidal as they are genocidal.

Wednesday, February 13, 2019

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily

Twofer today...

Rainy Days And Wednesdays...

Days and days of rain in the forecast, so we trundled out on foot with our black metal handcart in the downpour and marched to Safeway for groceries. And now, my new eyeglass frames have finally become available, so we're off again into the gray mist so that my vision might sharpen past its present gray mist... Chilly and wet tho' it has been, shoes soaked through, cars sending up icy waves onto the sidewalk, Penny grumpy at being neglected, still errands with Eric are always fun, too (nice to know somebody loves me). Is it too early to hope for the world to be waking...?

Tuesday, February 12, 2019

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily

Monday, February 11, 2019

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily

Teaching Day

Off to the City I go, to meet an MA thesis student then lecture for a few hours on Nietzsche. If it weren't for the commute, I'd be looking forward to it.

Sunday, February 10, 2019

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily (Weekly Address Edition)

Sunday Walk

Chilly but at last a sunny Sunday after over a month of rainy days and workaday weeds kept postponing our cherished long walks... Said hello to our friends at our favorite diner on Piedmont Avenue, then roved across Mountain View cemetery for the first time in weeks. Everything is lush and green after all the rain, but you have to look a little to find the blooms, tiny fuzzy in shades of blue and lavender and purple especially. There is a row of plum trees along a path near the hill of massive stone monuments we call Numenor (better known as Millionaire's Row) where the year's first pink blossoms usually appear in profusion like a shower of petals and, indeed, just as we hoped you could see the first buds popping up like a spray of stars. In a couple of weeks it will be a showcase -- and then we are just a couple of weeks from the tulip festival, then Morecom will explode with roses, then the red bougainvillea will stuff the leafy boughs with flames and then Spring Break is upon us...

Saturday, February 09, 2019

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily

Read The Real Green New Deal Resolution

Rainy Days

Hoping we won't get rained out of our weekly walk and brunch this week, but the cold gray rain keeps on pouring down... Drizzle made an icy companion at the bus stop last night waiting to return home after my long teaching day in the City. Cloudcover makes the short days of winter seem shorter still, day after day. Nice to think of the snowpack and reservoirs getting plump and replenished before drought and fireseason wreak their climate-catastrophizing hellfire next summer and fall, but still it's a bit depressing to be housebound in this damp winter dark week after week, I honestly don't know how folks in Portland and Seattle cope.

Friday, February 08, 2019

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily

Stacey Abrams' Doctor Is Tom Baker



I find this delightful, indeed. And a fine choice, tho' not my own (and don't ask).

Thursday, February 07, 2019

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily

Wednesday, February 06, 2019

Barbara Lee Speak For Me Daily

Tuesday, February 05, 2019

SOTU STFU (And Now For Something Completely Different)

Think I'll watch this instead:

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily

Monday, February 04, 2019

Teaching Day

Off to the City to meet with a thesis student and then lecture for a few hours more, Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns, Kant's existential panic, paradox and critique in DuBois and Wilde. Hoping the promised rain showers don't drench me on my walk to and from the train. My hopes these days, as you see, tend to be modest.

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily

Sunday, February 03, 2019

Today's Random Wilde

Football is all very well as a game for rough girls, but is hardly suitable for delicate boys.

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily

Sunday Walk

Looks like gray drizzle is keeping us from yet another Sunday walk and brunch. I hope all the snowpack and reservoirs are plump and full for once and that perhaps next summer will be less droughty and next fire-season less hellacious. Spending the day reading an MA thesis and prepping a lecture, back to the thankless grind of adjunct routine.

Saturday, February 02, 2019

What Did You Expect?

Northam was a Republican until 2000 and voted for Bush.

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily

Friday, February 01, 2019

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily

Teaching Day

Off to the City this morning -- thrilled not to see the torrential downpour the weather report has been predicting. Quite a buffet in critical theory today: Fontenelle on Europe's first modern culture war, Kant on the meaninglessness of historical evil, DuBois on how it feels to "be" a problem, and Wilde's paradoxical socialism. We'll see just how far I manage to get with all these weird and wonderful texts.