The Money Trick

Somehow, I had never read The Great Money Trick before. A friend uses this as an in-class readers' theater for teaching Marx. I tried it out in my class yesterday as a prelude to reviewing for the midterm, and it worked great! The students enjoyed it, plus I had an excuse to feed them all pumpkin bread. I also learned that my students can't fake a good Cockney accent to save their souls. It was both pitiful and hilarious at the same time.

'As the working classes were in need of the necessaries of life and as they could not eat, drink or wear the useless money, they were compelled to agree to the kind Capitalist’s terms. They each bought back and at once consumed one-third of the produce of their labour. The capitalist class also devoured two of the square blocks…'

FML

Here is the reaction from my colleagues in the psychology department to a proposed undergraduate general education course on Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams:

We would be concerned if students had an academic experience at [our University] that endorsed psychoanalysis as a viable approach to personality and the meaning of dreams in an era where psychological inquiry has for decades relied on scientific methods that have dismissed psychoanalysis along with phrenology, astrology and other invalid explanations of human behavior.

Salvidor Dali's 1939 sketch of Freud.

It's not that the psychology department itself has any interest in teaching courses on Freud. This we knew already. However, the fact that they wish to prevent any "academic experience" of Freud by students anywhere at our university is new.

I don't believe these objections will prevent the course from being offered, but it will consume the time and energy of many people around campus. This is the level of intellectual debate that occupies much of my time as an academic. Some days it strikes me as comic. Other days, it just makes me sad.

Perhaps the next course I propose will be "Psychoanalysis, Phrenology and Astrology." That should make for some entertaining committee meetings at the very least.

Climate Change For Gardeners

These maps are from the Arbor Day Foundation. They show the gardening zone changes in the US from 1990 to 2006. If you follow the link, you can see a nice animation of shifts.

Since gardeners are everywhere, I would have thought that such easily visible changes in the zone maps at your local nursery would be simple evidence for climate change that cut across ideological boundaries. Evidently, not.

Fight For Your Long Day

Via.

Duffleman (or "Duffy," as he is called) is the creation of Alex Kudera, a longtime Philadelphia adjunct whose novel, Fight for Your Long Day, is about to be released by Atticus Press. Duffy's narrative on this long day catalogs a list of the kinds of insults that are part of an adjunct's daily existence -- and documents, too, his continuing sense of obligation to his students.

Get Over It

Here's a picture of actor Ian McKellen at a protest over Pope Benedict's recent UK visit. Most of the protesters' shirts read "Some People Are Gay. Get Over It." Sir McKellen's is wonderfully different.

What We Used To Remix Before The Internet

Via.

Blake It Yourself!

I may have to try this. I think an authentic Nayland Blake hanging on the wall of my office would be pretty kickass.

Two phrases any contemporary artist is apt to hear are “That costs how much?” and “Hell, anyone could do that!” and what the hey, sometimes it’s true. There’s a lot of art out there I’d love to own, but can’t afford, and I have a lot of friends who can’t afford to buy my work. So here’s my solution: once a month I’ll give you step by step instructions for a piece that I have specially designed for this website. You can make your very own Nayland Blake, with a certificate of authenticity. I’ll try to keep the material costs low, the skill level easy and once you’ve got your finished piece, you can send me a picture of the results and I’ll post it here for the world to see.

Floydian Slip

LOL Jenkins

Puppet Portrait

This looks fascinating. It seems to be an adaptation of Cixous' "Portrait of Dora" with puppets. I wish I could understand it...

Wilde Zizek

From Oscar Wilde's essay, "The soul of man under Socialism:"

The majority of people spoil their lives by an unhealthy and exaggerated altruism - are forced, indeed, so to spoil them. They find themselves surrounded by hideous poverty, by hideous ugliness, by hideous starvation. It is inevitable that they should be strongly moved by all this. The emotions of man are stirred more quickly than man's intelligence; and, as I pointed out some time ago in an article on the function of criticism, it is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought. Accordingly, with admirable though misdirected intentions, they very seriously and very sentimentally set themselves to the task of remedying the evils that they see. But their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease.

They try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping the poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing the poor.

But this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible. And the altruistic virtues have really prevented the carrying out of this aim. Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so, in the present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good; and at last we have had the spectacle of men who have really studied the problem and know the life - educated men who live in the East End - coming forward and imploring the community to restrain its altruistic impulses of charity, benevolence, and the like. They do so on the ground that such charity degrades and demoralises. They are perfectly right. Charity creates a multitude of sins.

There is also this to be said. It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property. It is both immoral and unfair.

Marx, Marxist, Marxian...

... Marxitudinal, Marxical, Marxal, Marxidinal, Marxican, Marxicano, Marxy, Marxial, Marxupial, Marxinally, Marxiness, Marxiginous, Marxissity, Marxiginal, Marxicality, Marxolydian.

I've been doing some writing lately and I've been feeling the need for some alternative ways of writing about Marx in order to avoid sounding repetitious.

I'm over that desire now.