2025
Next year, at summer’s end, I will be retiring from Kwantlen Polytechnic University. I will remain open to other contract opportunities elsewhere after that, but this will be it for me as a full-time prof. The decision conveys my acceptance that I am just not the marvellous teacher I used to be: The oil in my olive is no longer extra-virgin, and my students and I share fewer and fewer references in culture and in history.
A friend wrote me earlier: “Give a special mindfulness to every day in the classroom. These years that defined you will no longer be your lifescape. You are a teacher and took that as a trade and an obligation quite seriously and you got a lot of joy from it. Just savour all the days between now and when you’re over the wall.” I will.
Happy American Thanksgiving!
Even though I live in Canada, there is no holiday more meaningful to me than American Thanksgiving, having been raised south of here. I always obey the name, and spend the day reflecting in gratitude.
Today will likely be the last time I teach a first-year class at Kwantlen. I was assigned this class by surprise right before this semester started. It was a fun challenge getting back up to speed! These students form such a delightfully keen and courteous group. I’m grateful for the opportunity to stand in front of them one last time.
The Trotskyist position
I have been immensely delighted to see the resurgence of activity over at The Spartacist and The Workers Vanguard, communist publications I’ve read with passionate interest for more than thirty years. In recent years their pages were filled more and more by obituaries of their original editors, writers, and other comrades. But after a bitter fight within the governing organization regarding responses to the Covid epidemic – the eventually victorious position was to oppose lockdowns as they curtailed and undermined union, organizing, and protest activities – a newly fertile and urgent editorial spirit and ambition have emerged, in North America and across the seas.
Its American-election debriefing ends this way:
In the immediate period, defensive struggles will no doubt be on the order of the day. As the liberals abandon the oppressed groups they claimed to champion—black people, Muslims, trans people, immigrants, women—communists must be in the vanguard of their struggles. But they must seek to build these movements on stronger foundations, away from the moralism and sentimentalism of the liberals and intricately linked to the material interests of all workers. Ultimately, the working class will be the deciding factor. To win its allegiance, communists must show, through the course of class struggle, that unlike the traitors leading them today, they have a program that can materially advance its interests and lead to its liberation.
Phil Lesh
One of my dearest friends saw well over a hundred Grateful Dead shows (and remembers the set list from every single one). A few years ago he saw nine (!) Phil Lesh and Friends shows in Port Chester, New York, in one month. He sent me this marvellous archive from the Port Chester shows.
Phil Lesh was a musical genius who increased the musical vocabulary and swelled the listening sensoriums of everyone who paid attention, bringing worlds into us.
“The root of beauty is boldness. That is what’s brought us to one another.”— Boris Pasternak
Coming home in October
I took a bit of video crossing over the Fraser River yesterday evening, from my seat on the Amtrak, returning home to Vancouver. I love a train the way a child loves trains, so watching other trains from my train was a special delight.
“Grief Casseroles”
That is the name of Danielle Raymond’s new writing project (on Substack). Danielle is a dear friend of mine whom I met when she was a psychology student taking one of my technical report-writing classes at Kwantlen. Her memory and artistry fashion an exacting lens that renders pain and love with surpassing vividness.
The real thing
A true nephew of Uncle Ho.
While Mr. Trong was happy to open up Vietnam to the West, he remained suspicious of Western democracy.
“Behind the multiparty system in reality is still the tyranny of capitalist corporations,” he wrote in a 2022 book.
He added: “The reality is that the democratic institutions according to the ‘liberal democracy’ formula that the West tries to promote and impose on the world do not ensure that power truly belongs to the people, by the people and for the people.”
Nguyen Phu Trong, Powerful Vietnamese Leader, Is Dead at 80 (NYTimes)
“Since I Been Down”
The woman who sat next to me on the train from Olympia to Seattle this weekend directed this terrific documentary.
Simplicity is beautiful*
Filling out the customs form before crossing the border north into Canada this Sunday, I noted that I was bringing some food back. When the customs officer asked me what food I got, I explained that I had a carton of instant mashed potatoes and two boxes of Grape Nuts breakfast cereal. He said, what the heck are Grape Nuts? So I showed him the boxes. Then I added: “I am so pathetic that my girlfriend had to buy them for me!” and got a laugh. (I think I’ll quit while I am ahead – not gonna try to make a custom officer laugh again!)
A few months back it dawned on me that one could no longer purchase plain “potato flakes” in Vancouver. Each variation of instant mashed potatoes was “flavoured” and was filled with everything from soy, milk, citric acid, and wheat to pyrophosphates and silicon dioxide. I wanted hardcore *plain*. It felt ridiculous that I couldn’t find any! I found out about “Bob’s Red Mill Natural Foods” on Amazon, but it would cost an arm and a leg to ship their potato flakes to my place north of the border. That is where my partner stepped in.
During my visit she also guided me to a local Safeway so that I could stock up on Grape Nuts, that weird and crunchy cereal that was discontinued during Our Time of Covid. It has reappeared in parts of Canada – allegedly! – but certainly nowhere near me. I have long truly treasured Grape Nuts. During times of real poverty, I used to eat them with warm water instead of milk – and felt like I had just won something.
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* The title of this post comes from Juliana Hatfield’s very fine song of the same name. Love these lyrics:
Blues soul rock country
Red green blue yellow
Morning laughing talking walking
Bread rice water fruit
It’s a simple feeling
Hold feel save me
Baby brother sister parent
Buffalo’s “Old Pink” is gone …
… having gone up in flames this morning. In the days when I used to swing by (between, say, 1985 and 1993), this legendary dive bar was called “The Pink Flamingo.” There was a glorious ferment there, of artists and musicians and writers and editors and significant others and copious incarnations of riffraff. Made real friends in that place.
Click on the photo below to see a lovely panorama of photographs of the bar published in “The Scoundrel’s Field Guide“:
“La forme d’une ville / Change plus vite, hélas ! que le cœur d’un mortel.”
exile par excellence
Billionaires who promote the colonization of Mars and planets and systems beyond ours are pernicious people. To persuade others to leave our planet is to ask them to forgo Mother Earth, which created us and nourishes us and makes, with us, everything that is meaningful to us. The inducements they offer disguise their intentions. Don’t think that these visionaries of outer-space don’t understand that virtually all of these colonizers will be slaves living at the mercy of businesses who can cut off their supply of air and water at will to enforce compliance – something, to be fair, they are already working on here on Mother Earth.
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