we decided yes. 

at a party, a guy who had just gotten his MFA in graphic design from yale said that the school still uses aliza as an illustration: “you can make whatever art you want. you just can’t expect the institution to support it. look at chris burden.” i was telling this story to tina and she said “what about the institutional support that is the patriarchy?”  

big sur. we stayed in the same place as jake gyllenhaal and taylor swift, and paddled around the cliffside infinity pool in a fog storm, by ourselves, twice, and felt sorry for the girls whose boyfriends or husbands failed to make dinner reservations in time to see the sun set. the guy who drove us the 30 seconds from our place to reception said “come back three times a year. give me job security.” i was starry-eyed. 

"…productivist values that i want to problematize."

kathi weeks, the problem with work: feminism, marxism, antiwork politics, and postwork imaginaries 

renata adler, speedboat

renata adler, speedboat 

my college friend rebecca, with whom i once edited a zine (i don’t even think i knew it was a zine, i was just like “fuck the school newspaper, i want to write a long essay about multiculturalism”), wrote a piece for slate on why you shouldn’t go to grad school. karen gregory, who i also went to college with, but didn’t know until grad school and tumblr, wrote a rebuttal. 

rebecca is right, i am in the right program, plus i have unusual experience, access, and backup plans with several components, plus vague backup plans should the backup plans fail. this could all fail, but i think i am currently as non-precarious as i can be given my given and chosen precarities.

something i might say to someone considering graduate school is something that jill nelson, who wrote volunteer slavery (seriously, go read it), once said at a feminist conference: “diversify yourself.” i didn’t really do it on purpose, and in fact i think in a lot of academia it works against me, but in life it makes me feel pretty calm. 

"Grandiosity is of course a term itself rich with theoretical inflection, much of it derived from psychoanalysis keyed to object-relations, where it is largely a term of disapprobation. Grandiosity marks the infant’s delusional sense that the world is, and should be, co-terminus with its wishes: marks, that is, a position that in the more normative registers of “development” must be abandoned. We, on the other hand, are lovers of Whitman—and are also, in our loves, people who have passionately, stubbornly resisted the notion that we cannot, with the force of our desire, remake the world as we wish it to be. So we incline to think grandiosity more kindly. It names for us a quality of abundance, of an achieved amplitude on the scene of self-relation, that is willing to risk a lot on behalf of the revised constellation of possibilities such an orientation can bring into relief. Grandiosity is a willingness to risk, first, not being critical, at least not in the modes we’ve come to know. It marks a detachment from irony or camp, as well as the various exteriorities of “critique,” as modes understood to be exhaustive or exclusive. And it names too, in ways the Kleinians would be quick to recognize, an openness to the kinds of wounding that might follow from grandiosity’s perhaps inevitable disappointments—or, we might say, from its collisions with intractability in its many guises."

From Peter Coviello and Elizabeth Freeman’s ”Never the Usual Terms: A Song for 21st Century Occupations,” in the latest issue of Periscope. (via lazz)

taylor fulfilled like 70% of my normative desires tonight, while exacerbating my other 30.