Archives for the 'Soundtracks' Category

I had an essay due last week. You’ve heard this story before. I began it the day it was due.
I was sorely tempted to begin it like so:

In light of international food crises and soaring death tolls worldwide, writing academic essays seems like an unforgivable exercise in triviality, a wilful ducking of reality.

Shameless smugness at the ready for immediate and terrible deployment? Check.

I would have blithely continued in that vein of holier-than-thou irritation, except that that would have required I write fifteen pages of original content. My inveterate laziness, not to mention the laws of both physics and physiology, prevented me from accomplishing that in a single evening, which is as much time as I told myself I had (having already received a month’s extension). So, though it caused me tangible pain in the regions of my head and my heart, I revisited a paper I’d submitted the week prior for another class and revised it for length considerations.
And by revise I mean I recycled it so heavily that I prayed this didn’t constitute plagiarism, prayed harder that I didn’t get caught.
Given that I began said revision half an hour after midnight, the paper is still late.
Sorry, was that a spoiler?

It fucks with your head, staying in school for too long. Or maybe it wouldn’t, if the stuff you’re studying didn’t seem to always be about you. It’s incredibly stupid to go about school the way I have, like every single thing matters, like your entire ethical existence hinges on every word you encounter.
Of course, having said that, there is a part of me that if given the chance to redo the last few years of readwriting, wouldn’t do it any other way. Philosophy and critical theory are hugely destabilising things to immerse yourself in. But I don’t know which came first, my fear of stagnation or my having read these texts, and the question of chronology is trivial anyway. In the end, all that matters is that I am a bit crazy and school hasn’t helped.

Masochism: a way of life, wherein you wilfully decide to waste years and years of your youth in poorly ventilated rooms with fellow social misfits. Continue reading this entry »

For a core group among my friends, The Autobiography of Malcolm X was formative reading. We read it as teenagers and the book became foundational to the different ways we learned to live with the politics of race and culture. Malcolm and his life represented for us an education that we sensed only for its obvious absence in our regular schooling. Books and writers like these, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time being another example, made critical race theory important to us in profoundly pragmatic ways: it permeated our lives, our creative work, our activism. It continues to do so. This was not mere high theory; this is a practise of resistance that we live because this is the world we inhabit and the inequities we recognise.

I remember how thrilled I was when I first read the book. When I was younger, I badly wanted heroes. I wanted to read about people whose lives stretched further than my own. I wanted their energy, that surety of an early death preceded by a life that had been worth living, worth dying for. Malcolm possessed all the traits I wanted to find in myself: intelligence, charisma, force. And he was angry – a beautiful rage, sharp and disciplined.
We were all of us, this handful of people among my friends, angry adolescents, angry in specific ways. That anger stays with us still, making Malcolm X, or rather the memory of reading his life, integral to the ways we continue to relate to and function in a fundamentally fucked up world.

In a few weeks, I will be presenting on the book in class. I’m excited, but also nervous, because I’m not entirely prepared for the internal messiness that this subject threatens. Continue reading this entry »