Sunday Brunch and Walk

Time flies when you're flying to the grave hole. A week already since the last trip around the neighborhood? Yesterday we had our usual stroll to the Rose Garden after brunch. Our diner was packed and the Garden was too -- there were three separate dogs being walked (two without leashes among the delicate plantings) in a park that forbids dogs and for which a dog walking park was constructed literally one-half block away, but, you know, asking anybody to do literally anything ever is obviously too much, so. Last week's teaching was arduous and I am hoping this week's will be less so -- Debord and Naomi Klein are always fun to lecture about, that's coming up Wednesday, and then Aristophanes' play Wasps for Thursday and some general notes on writing argumentative papers based on close reading. So far, no canceled classes, and I'm hoping we make it through Spring Break still intact as a community. Teaching remotely feels like it will be a real challenge and I'm already trying to find time to read up on strategies for effective teaching mediated by online assignments and interactions. It's hard to predict what will happen, but observing the way the pandemic is playing out in other places it seems we might face a real shift very soon, and to be honest, I wonder if the academy will ever be the same once neoliberal administration gets it in its head it can use the emergency to just replace instruction with chatrooms and podcasts and surveillance tech as they've been itching to do for over a decade by now.