Cornell

[Dennis Robert Redmond]

In the interests of livening up the summer LBO surf, I have to tell y'all
that I'm chilling my postgrad self out at Cornell, doing this summer
seminar thing, they have this Critical Theory shindig with all these top
names shuttling in. Getting to Ithaca was a pain, plane delays, bus
schedules messed up, *ugh*. But awfully nice to reexperience the East
Coast 'hood, all the multinational flavas which Eugene just doesn't have,
the accents of the brothers and sisters down at the Greyhound station like
song, and song is, as the non-human Kaoru Nagisa said, the highest
achievement of us Lillim. Ran into Fred Jameson right off the bat, who
came across as a surprisingly down-to-earth person, he's been down with a
flu or something and had to leave early, but got to mix with some of the
hoi polloi. Very nice folks, with whom you can at least have a
conversation about world events, though the number of actual activists is
as small as in any professional group.

Ah, the wide, wide world of theory. Whenever I congregate with academics,
my grad union hackles kick into overdrive: I feel like some 21st century
mole, sent here to oversee the trench-works for the global Left's
high-speed fiber connection to the academic brainpods, parked in their
sound-proofed cybernetic vats and doing whatever it is that vat-bound
brainpods actually do with their time.

No word yet on whether any riots are planned for the 4th of July. I'm
going to cruise by Cornell's labor studies program later this week and
see what's up. If anything interesting happens, I'll let y'all know.

-- Dennis