It bugs me to see Nazis in WWII referred to as “white supremacists” in these silly memes that are making the rounds. Hitler never proposed the rule of all whites. He wanted to eradicate Jews and Slavs who are plenty white. Hitler’s victims were overwhelmingly white. 

So enough with the stupid WWII memes, folks. They are not funny and they serve no useful purpose. All I’m perceiving in them is smug self-congratulation for what exactly I’m not sure. 

Nothing good has happened here, folks. Nobody has won any victories, there’s nothing to celebrate.

Finally, I met a Mommy here in town I want to hang out with. She’s Peruvian, not young (I’m finding it very onerous to hang out with 22-year-old mommies because it’s like being at work), with a 21-month-old daughter Klara really likes. It’s funny how easily toddlers make friends. After 5 minutes, it was like they’d known each other forever.

This woman used to be a dancer in New York but had to move here for her husband’s job. Which he almost immediately lost. So we have a ton in common. Again, it’s not easy with people who have only ever lived anywhere but here. They look at me like I’m trained monkey with a traveling circus. 

Meeting somebody like this was one of my summer goals, and now I feel very accomplished.

An act of terror just happened in Barcelona, it seems. A can rammed into a crowd on Las Ramblas, in a tourusty spot that’s always filled with people. Two are dead. 

Also:

Two armed men are also believed to have stormed a nearby restaurant after police said the driver had fled the initial scene. Gunshots have also been reported at the food market of La Boqueria, which is a major tourist attraction. 

Police said they are treating the incident as terror. 

The best thing about summer is that it ends. I like summer but I’m also loving the idea of going back to work. Especially since it’s only 2 days a week that I have to be on campus. I was so psyched about the beginning of the academic year yesterday that I freaked out N.

I’ve done most of what I planned for the summer except:

1. Didn’t write the MLA talk and didn’t even start thinking in that direction.

2. Didn’t finish the major house cleaning and reorganizing project. I’ve done the bedroom and the reading room but that’s it. There’s a lot left to do. 

On the positive side, I met all the submission deadlines even ahead of time. So that’s good. Came up with the topic of the new book. (Which of course is going to change a million times in the process of work).

Today is my housework day and tomorrow it’s back to work. Yippee!

So do you know how when you wear a sweater for a while, tiny balls of wool are formed all over the sleeves? And they make the sweater look worn and untidy?

Please, folks, what do you call these teensy knots of wool in English? Or the process by which they are formed. 

What’s the point of bringing a cloth tote to the grocery store if the packer will double bag every object in the store in plastic bags while the cashier distracts me?

I hate plastic bags. I think they should be outlawed, like in Florida.

Bannon is making a very clumsy attempt to paper over Trump’s gaffes. I like it that he’s so worried. 

This quote from Dardot and Laval is perfectly applicable to the father of the neo-Nazi we’ve been discussing:

“The perversion that is clinically characterized by consuming partners like objects, whom one chucks when one finds them inadequate, has arguably become the new norm of social relations”

This father is even more perverse because it’s not a partner but an actual child he chucks off the second he no longer pleases. This is the pinnacle of neoliberal subjectivity.

This is one of the books I have read on neoliberalism, and I loved it. If somebody ever told me that it’s possible to find French theorists who wrote an accessible, easy to read book, I’d ask what they were smoking. But this stuff is good, folks. If you are looking for material to offer your students to give them an introduction to the history of neoliberalism, this book will be perfect. I can see students actually enjoying this. Highly, highly, highly recommended.

You know how I’m only excited about stuff that tells me things I disagree with. It annoys me to waste time on authors who say shit I already know and agree with. Dardot and Laval are all how there is no collapse of the nation state and no retreat of the state at all. And it’s not dumb disagreement. It’s a powerful argument on how the state fakes retreat while simply changing its function yet remaining as strong as ever.

There are, of course, limitations to the authors’ argument. What I found to be deficient is the insistence on competitiveness as the only defining feature of the neoliberal subjectivity. I don’t have my own answers about the way neoliberal subjectivity is constituted but I think that it’s a lot more than just competition. The New Way of the World: On Neo-Liberal Society is a huge influence on Rendueles, the author I talked about recently, so if you are choosing between the two, pick The New Way. Seriously, it reads almost like a mystery novel, not because there is a lot of mystery but because it’s reasonably easy to read.

And keep clicking on the book that really matters.