josh blog
Ordinary language is all right.
One could divide humanity into two classes:
those who master a metaphor, and those who hold by a formula.
Those with a bent for both are too few, they do not comprise a class.
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'Nothing survives transcription, nothing doesn't survive transcription' / 'Against Access' (h/t LH)
2024 ALBUMS
Abhorration, Demonolatry (Invictus)
Autechre, AE_2022 – (Warp)
Bootlicker, 1000 Yd. Stare (Neon Taste)
Lia Bosch, Polar Code (Glacial Movements)
Cave Sermon, Divine Laughter (self-released)
Chat Pile, Cool World (The Flenser)
The Chisel, What a Fucking Nightmare (Pure Noise)
Coffins, Sinister Oath (Relapse)
Convulsing, Perdurance (self-released)
Darkthrone, It Beckons Us All…… (Peaceville)
Dissimulator, Lower Form Resistance (20 Buck Spin)
Doechii, Alligator Bites Never Heal (TDE/Capitol)
Tashi Dorji, We Will Be Wherever The Fires Are Lit (Drag City)
Fake Fruit, Mucho Mistrust (Carpark)
Floating Points, Cascade (Ninja Tune)
Glassing, From the Other Side of the Mirror (Pelagic)
Godspeed You Black Emperor!, ”No Title as of 13 February 2024 28,340 Dead” (Constellation)
gum.mp3, Black Life, Red Planet (Gum Studio)
Boldy James / Harry Fraud, The Bricktionary (Boldy James/Srfschl)
Julie, My Anti-Aircraft Friend (Atlantic)
Kendrick Lamar, GNX (PGLang/Interscope)
Kneecap, Fine Art (Heavenly)
LL Cool J, The Force (Def Jam)
Low End Activist, Air Drop (Peak Oil)
Roc Marciano & The Alchemist, The Skeleton Key (Pimpire International/Marci Enterprises)
Mk.gee, Two Star & The Dream Police (R&R)
Moin, You Never End (AD 93)
Oneida, Expensive Air (Joyful Noise)
Othismos, Sottrazione (self-released)
Oxygen Destroyer, Guardian of the Universe (Redefining Darkness)
Jeff Parker ETA IVtet, The Way Out of Easy (International Anthem/Nonesuch)
Paysage d’Hiver, Die Berge (Kunsthall Produktionen)
Prisoner, Putrid | Obsolete (Persistent Vision)
Tim Reaper & Kloke, In Full Effect (Hyperdub)
Zaho de Sagazan, La symphonie des éclairs (Le dernier des voyages) (Virgin)
2nd Grade, Scheduled Explosions (Double Double Whammy)
Shellac, To All Trains (Touch and Go)
Nala Sinephro, Endlessness (Warp)
Skee Mask, Resort (Ilian Tape)
Sumac, The Healer (Thrill Jockey)
Suzi Analogue, ONEZ (Never Normal)
Thirdface, Ministerial Cafeteria (Exploding in Sound)
Thou, Umbilical (Sacred Bones)
Ulcerate, Cutting the Throat of God (Debemur Morti)
Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats, Nell’ Ora Blu (Rise Above)
Underworld, Strawberry Hotel (Virgin)
Water Damage, In E (12XU)
Jim White & Marisa Anderson, Swallowtail (Thrill Jockey)
Wormed, Omegon (Season of Mist)
Xylitol, Anemones (Planet Mu)
REISSUE, ARCHIVAL, & LIVE
Bardo Pond, Melt Away (Matador)
Horse Lords, As It Happened: Horse Lords Live (RVNG Intl.)
Tsunami, Loud Is As (Numero Group)
Even the Forest Hums: Ukrainian Sonic Archives 1971–1996 (Light in the Attic)
Neil Young & Crazy Horse, Fu##in’ Up (Warner/Reprise)
Since the pandemic, everything has collapsed. No one’s enrolling, no one’s finances are good, adjuncts were the first and easiest cut to make.
A friend vacating a long-reliable institutional perch at yet another liberal arts college drops my name to lend me a hand. But it’s not my area, not even my discipline. That’s OK, political theory, political philosophy, they’re practically the same, besides, I can teach anything, right?
As it turns out, I can. But with this job comes a reminder that what I know or who I am may not matter as much as where I am.
Between semesters, national controversy over what on campus they call ‘the incident’ or ‘the thing’ rises to a crest. Academic freedom, scholarly knowledge, sacred community values, labor politics—it’s got everything. I’m actually kind of rearing to use it in the classroom in the spring.
On the first day, I try to talk about it; but students are not sitting easy with it. Some are testy, some wary, some quiet. An issue of real pertinence and it’s too close, too raw, to be treated using a teacher’s casual, almost opportunistic way of intellectualizing everything. I don’t know that they trust me with this, that I can pull it off without sacrificing the good will I will continue to need as their teacher. I envision my course being derailed, my carefully plotted schedule being ruined; I back off.
Things get better with time as we return to academic routines, but from my perspective they never get a lot better; the campus doesn’t, I would say. The students are sticking in there as best they can but I—mind full of the social contract theorists we’re reading—feel like I have never truly addressed them as one group, never succeeded at eliciting from them, with what I say, a collective consent to be taught. They’re not relating to each other in the ways I need.
Eventually, what I think is: I don’t know that they trust each other with this. And there’s the lesson I’m looking for. My responsibility for the structure in which I work is often purported to be total, comprehensive. But that’s a fiction we’re encouraged to embrace under the institutional arrangement that exploits my labor.
The reality is that the university sets the background conditions under which I work, and ‘the incident’ is just a particularly exposed instance of the steady erosion of trust in education that comes of adjunctification, the corporatization of university administration, the ceding of shared governance, all of it.
How can the students, becoming aware of this, muster any trust or shared enthusiasm for the stuff in the admissions brochures? They are cows for the university to milk, and they know it.
Adjuncts mythically teach ten courses at once at four or five different schools, but I’ve never found work to be all that plentiful. My next job at another liberal arts college really marked the first time I was first ever in a position to combine teaching assignments into a closer approximation to a whole job, making up for missing courses at one institution with one or two at another.
Looking back on my assignments now, the courses I received don’t seem all that much. I suppose walking on a campus, standing in a classroom, makes all the difference; these have more reality to me than several years of asynchronous online courses. The students have more reality.
But things changed. During the pandemic, the school demanded synchronous teaching to mollify students and parents anxious about paying for college without a true campus experience. Students would zoom in from vacant dorm rooms, or wearing masks alone in study rooms, or from their cars, or while waiting in line to pick up takeout.
You could see how painful and awkward it was for some of them. They needed contact, friction, relation. Zoom left them adrift, mute. In one class, I tried most to teach to one student, more advanced than the others, who knew what to do in our circumstances and even modeled it for her classmates. Every time she got on camera, she ignored it and sat like a person who was intent not on looking but on listening.
When taking myself on walks between zoom sessions, scripting future sessions in my head, I would ask myself: what are they listening for?