“Real Raises! Job Security! Contract Now!” we chanted as the police approached with their plastic cuffs to arrest us Monday, taking a bust for CUNY, for a contract with real raises now at the CUNY Board of Trustees meeting. “Education is a right. Fight fight fight!!!” we chanted. Our working conditions are our students' learning conditions. We need an educated, engaged, critically engaged workforce. Our demand: REAL RAISES, JOB SECURITY and a CONTRACT NOW!
It had been almost two years without a contract. I got a message from my union: "It's Claudia w/ the PSC. We're escalating our contract fight by protesting the Mon, Oct 21st Board of Trustees hearing at John Jay College. No business as usual for CUNY until we get fair raises!... 4PM for the hearing, 5PM for protest…” when I arrived, my friend Nora was speaking about the mold in the collections at the City Tech library overtaking shelves and offices. In the meantime, management has ignored and dismissed her pleas. It becomes a bit like the Magritte, “This is Not a Pipe.” This is not mold, they tell us. Looks like it to us. Our chapter chair, Carole, testified about the mold consuming the collection at the library. I didn't get a phd to become an expert on mold, she testified. But here I am. After a few more testimonies James, our PSC President, stepped up to testify, disrupting the hearing. Sit down and wait your turn, they told him. The auditorium filled with screams. We eventually made our way outside, where we blockaded the John Jay College entrance. Thirty of us were eventually arrested, elder members, the former president and vice president, younger adjuncts, nearly thirty of us. With cuffs holding our arms behind our backs, the police loaded us onto an old school truck, turned police arrest van, and took us down to Pitt Street. On the way, we chatted about 2666 and past contract campaigns, strategies and tactics, precarious work and academic labor, and why we were doing what we were doing. Doing so, we took part in a long tradition.
“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” wrote Henry David Thoreau, in Civil Disobedience and Other Essays. “What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things..”
There is a joy in breaking the rules. We felt it at the action on Monday, screaming with a marching band, your friends around, cheering, taking the bus into the tombs. Henry David Thoreau understood this:
“If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth--certainly the machine will wear out… but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.”
But we have to be smart about this, thinking about the law, the ways we move our campaign forward.
In between conversations, the topic of the election came up again and again. I had been optimistic until I get to Allentown the weekend before, and witnessed the old polarization,the class and gender divides splitting up communities, the weekend before.
“You see its so nice here, but politics has kept people separated. It has broken up some friendships," said one observer, as reported in an essay in the New York Times.
Trump says it: He will use the military and the Department of Justice against “The enemy from within”. That’s anyone who disagrees with him. It’s me. And you.
The old fear I had was back. I had it before Biden dropped out, feeling relieved when I heard while dancing at Berghain in Berlin three months prior. But for now, the Hillary fear, the fear about the reality of a dark world, a dark future. I think it was Werner Herzog who suggested, Americans are growing to learn what the Jews learned in the 1930’s, that half of the country wanted them to parish. The other half was more than willing to stand by and watch it happen.
The mood arises, then it fades for a day or two, then it comes back.
It's been a lot lately. A few highlights from the last couple of weeks of Marching bands, a funeral, a surprise phone call, climate activists getting arrested, a conversation about Mysticism, a trip to Pennsylvania and then to see Hannah Gadsby. A joyous month of living and writing and teaching and seeing bands, before the fear and trembling started to lurk back.
Honk
There is a magic in the air as the marching bands invade Brooklyn with the Honk Festival. It's the happiest week of the year in New York. It began Thursday 10/10 at 10 PM at Barbes, Brooklyn, dancing to the small music in the back of Barbes, “a hub for the art community” on 9th street and 7th Avenue in Brooklyn. Walking inside the sweaty, crowded, red lit dance room, friends were there, singing along in Portuguese to BABADAN BANDA DE RUA, a street band from the Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte, Minais Gerais. We danced to midnite and made our way home.
The next morning, I woke early, rushed out, biking to the Governor’s office for a demo.
Say the activists:
“Fossil fuel companies are making hurricanes worse and they aren't paying for the damage. Climate Defenders & Summer of Heat to demand Gov Hochul take decisive climate actions. M Friday 10/11 8:30 am at Hochul's office (633 3rd Ave).”
People lined up on front of the office, with banners shortly after I arrived, chanting and blocking the doors:
“1234 climate chaos at our door. New Yorkers lives are at stake.”
“Hey Kathy get off it. The planet over profit!!!! Hey Hochul, climate change is calling.”
At 850 AM I rode back to Brooklyn to make the 930 AM yoga class, the day popping in front of us. By that evening the kid from Boston popped by on the way to a show.
Saturday
I met Mom at the Met for the majestic .... "Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300–1350.” The show “examines an exceptional moment at the dawn of the Italian Renaissance and the pivotal role of Sienese artists—including Duccio, Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti, and Simone Martini—in defining Western painting."
Walking through the show, we talked about our old friends, the myth of St Catherine of Siena, looked at the Mexico Revolutionary prints, the folios in the Islamic wing, the rugs and glass, toasted to a lifetime of trips to Italy, the Met and back.
Mom caught a ride home and I rode to Elizabeth Street Garden in danger of being developed.
There, Ron, Ray and I read poems, and had a few pints at Botanica, our old Lower East Side Collective hang out on Houston Street.
And broke the fast with Al and Bear.
Robby and Juniper stopped by. And we danced with Monica and Josh and Ella and the majestic Funkrust Brass Band ending the Honk Festival on a jam packed bright October day.
Energy is always flying everywhere at this time of year here.
Sunday
No one could come to book group.
Friends come and then they disappear.
And others reappear.
Everyone is going through a lot.
A few of us met at Strawberry Fields, a few steps from the Dakota, on West 72nd Street where John Lennon took his last breaths, to say goodbye to a friend. The pandemic had many casualties, including those left to make due during the pandemic, unable to get the preventive healthcare, services or support they needed.
Still, Aunt Gladys smiled and made friends with strangers, and befriended bike activists, and made common cause with teengers, including our own, reminding them they were a star, going to their high school exhibitions, joining us for Passover diners, moved by the struggles of others. reveling in the joy in singing together. Caroline recalled a trip with her to the Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust. The two were moved by the sentiment of a survivor:
"You who are passing by
I beg you
do something
learn a dance step […]
because it would be too senseless after all
for so many to have died
while you live
doing nothing with your life."
- Charlotte Delbo, Auschwitz survivor (1971)
And we said goodbye.
RIP AUNT GLADYS.
Monday
The teenager grabbed a bus back to Boston. We walked to the bus stop in Chinatown and I said goodbye.
With fall in full bloom, I got a message about a show from my friend Quincey.
"Hello hello. There's a little show this Monday. Me and my friend Myla Goldberg are playing a set of our songs at Barbès, 7pm. Our first time! Swing by if you're around...." We biked over to see the sweetest set of old French songs at Barbes, chatting with buddies, the fall wind blowing, New Yorkers dreaming about a subway series, or Dodgers Yankees rematch of the 1977 when the managers, Tommy and Billy reprised their fist fight during the 1955 series when Brooklyn finally won. Falls in the air.
And the week lunged forward.
Tuesday, Oct 15, 2024
Found myself in Red Hook listening to Cornel West and Simon Critchley, thinking about shamanism and mysticism. “Why mysticism? It has been called “experience in its most intense form,” and in his new book the philosopher Simon Critchley poses a simple question..: Wouldn’t you like to taste this intensity? Wouldn’t you like to be lifted up and out of yourself into a sheer feeling of aliveness? If so, it might be worthwhile trying to learn what is meant by mysticism and how it can shift, elevate, and deepen our sense of our lives and those around us. Mysticism is not primarily a theoretical issue. It's not a question of religious belief but of felt experience and daily practice… freeing yourself of your standard habits, your usual fancies and imaginings so as to see what is there and stand with what is there ecstatically. Critchley’s Mysticism is a book about trying to get outside oneself, to lose oneself, while knowing that the self is not something that can ever be fully lost. It is also a book about Julian of Norwich, Anne Carson, Annie Dillard, T.S. Eliot, and Nick Cave. It is a book of learning and puzzlement, that also shows how listening to music can be secular worship. It opens the door to mysticism not as something unworldly and unimaginable, but as a way of life.”
Watching the two speak at Pioneer Works, I found myself thinking of Simon’s books On Humor and Bowie, as well as Cornell’s books on race and The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought, of meeting, asking questions, of Stanley, our mutual friend and mentor, and more layers of questions. There’s a curiosity about religion, posits Critchley, a passion, an obsession we keep to ourselves, even if it is part of a bicameral mind with interconnecting doors, ever opening and closing. For Critchley, Christianity is a way of thinking about meaning in a meaningless cosmos. Mysticism is a way of acknowledging the shamanistic practices we see, I see in the Berlin all night techno clubs, the trance states we find ourselves in, souls reconnecting with bodies, helping us heal, finding something out there we can be a part of, even when the outside world is falling apart, spinning to pieces. It's a way of pushing back against melancholy, a faith in sacred places and practices. Life is a playlist, songs we play, giving our journeys meaning, connecting poetry and faith, a desire to connect. With his usual flair, West welcomes the cosmos. What does it mean to be human, he wonders. He recalls TS Elliot’s last public talk. 'Lips only sin when they can't kiss,'' said the bard. Elliot reminded us to hold onto the pieces. “These fragments I have stored against my ruins,” he concluded in The Waste Land. Hold them, even as we crumble.
Religion disappoints, still we turn to it. I do. My dad did when he was sick, fulfilling a promise he made if he survived. Still it lets us down. All human organizations do. We look for help, as well as a little grace. In the Varieties of Religious Experience, William James reminds us:
“Good-humor is a philosophic state of mind; it seems to say to Nature that we take her no more seriously than she takes us… one should always talk of philosophy with a smile.”
We are a wretched species, says Critchley. Yet, friends help. He recalled stumbling into Cornell drinking Courvoisier in a bar downtown after a conference in which the two had been on opposite sides. The two spent the rest of the afternoon drinking together, the snow drifting outside. Cornell was on his way to Toni Morrison’s birthday party. At that moment, Critchley knew he adored him. He adored Cornell the reader, the philosopher. Finishing up, a car showed up out of nowhere and picked up Cornell, taking him to Toni Morrison ‘s new york apartment in Tribeca. And Critchley took the 4 line back to Brooklyn.
Shipwreck vs shipwreck, we lunge forward, Critchley argued. It's always been a catastrophe, tragic and helpful and tragic and pessimistic. We could argue it's better not to have been born. But some of us are glad to still be here.
Critchley read a quote Cornell had referred to by Flannery O'Connor, touching on our longing.
“Dear God, I cannot love Thee the way I want to. You are the slim crescent of a moon that I see and my self is the earth’s shadow that keeps me from seeing all the moon. The crescent is very beautiful and perhaps that is all one like I am should or could see; but what I am afraid of, dear God, is that my self shadow will grow so large that I block the whole moon, and that I will judge myself by the shadow that is nothing. I do not know you God because I am in the way. Please help me to push myself aside.” confessed Flannery O Conner in 1946.
The talk went on and on. They were late starting and I was late meeting my friends, Greg and Emily and company were at Sony’s nearby. I snuck out to catch them in the quirky bar on the waterfront.
Thursday
I got a strange email and phone call. from Texas.
A friend from years and years ago, a part of my class, a signature in a class yearbook, years of rides from football games, smiles, friendship, campaigning, singing, “what have i done to deserve this…” grins, smiles, a hug when Grandma died, through the ups and downs of growing up, graduating, off to college, throughout the lifecourse.
And then a few alumni events and then a phone call.
Breast cancer.
A smile and then she was gone.
No one knew
“The Greenhill Alumni office is sad to share the passing of Karma Gardner Von Burg on October 6, 2024.
From Karma's mother:
"Karma Gardner Von Burg, my amazing daughter fought and completed her heroic battle against breast cancer at 11:11am Sunday, October 6, 2024, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York.
As a Dallas, TX native, Karma spent her formative years in Dallas and graduated from her beloved Greenhill School in Addison, TX. She was a devoted Dallas Cowboys fan and loved everything Texas. Karma's intellect, creativity, and vibrance carried her far in her professional life…
RIP Karma
Later in the day, the Voice of the Gowanus, posted a presser.
National Grid Files Suit Against 40+ Entities to Roadblock Gowanus Cleanup After Misusing State Program
EPA Official Confirms Improper Use of NYS Brownfield Program in Corrupt Bid to Shift NatGrid Cleanup Costs onto Taxpayers & Ratepayers
GOWANUS, BROOKLYN - National Grid, the largest responsible polluter in the Gowanus Canal federal Superfund, filed a major lawsuit in federal court naming NYC, Con Edison, Kraft Heinz, Verizon, federal agencies and other parties (here), asserting that the company’s gas customers cannot afford the skyrocketing costs of cleaning up the historic pollution in Gowanus.
National Grid looks to blame other parties responsible for the pollution, stating: "By their intransigence, the recalcitrant, remaining responsible parties are threatening to undermine the entire effort to clean up the canal.” But despite attempting to be seen as advancing the cleanup, the practical effect of NatGrid’s lawsuit will actually be to endanger and delay the cleanup.
The lawsuit, along with recent public comments from Brian Carr, lead EPA attorney for the Gowanus Superfund Site, reveals and confirms a litany of sins:
The long list of EPA-identified polluters haven't been paying as required by law but instead are passing the cleanup costs to both ratepayers (their customers) and taxpayers;
EPA knew that the main toxic source material in the Canal was coming from the uplands surrounding the Gowanus Canal but has tried to avoid federal Superfund responsibility for those sites despite a clear nexus;
EPA has not exercised full oversight over the Gowanus uplands and has allowed NYC, NYS and NatGrid to use the NYS Brownfield Program improperly in order to shift clean-up costs to taxpayers and ratepayers across the region;
NatGrid has never had any intention of doing a comprehensive cleanup in Gowanus that is protective of human health and the environment despite being responsible for the vast majority of the pollution.
Voice of Gowanus (VoG) previously sent an extensive and damning letter to EPA on September 23rd, 2024 (here), urgently calling for a federal takeover of the upland sites around the Canal. The letter also outlines the shady financial engineering by NYC and NYS that aims to shield National Grid from liability and maximize taxpayer subsidies flowing to developers while at the same time limiting the cleanup. These upland issues are currently under investigation by the EPA Inspector General, who has already called out EPA Region 2 for its failure to properly exercise federal authority in Gowanus (here).
Meanwhile, EPA’s Superfund cleanup is already failing the community. Carcinogenic coal tar from National Grid sites continues to present a health risk and a risk to the Superfund remedy. The lagging 100 block-wide investigation by NYS DEC into Soil Vapor Intrusion in Gowanus shows that toxic contamination continues to spread under homes, schools and businesses. As shown in the VoG letter to EPA Region 2, National Grid is trying, in particular, to minimize the remediation of the most toxic site — the Citizens MGP site — which is slated for low income families and a school in a redevelopment project called “Gowanus Green.”
In shocking comments to the Land Use Committee of the Gowanus CAG on October 8th, EPA Assistant Regional Counsel Brian Carr validated VoG’s positions and revealed new information, stating:
“National Grid is doing everything it possibly can to stay in compliance while dragging everything out as long as they can to keep the money in the bank.”
“They have an incredible amount of liability for a lot of these Brownfield sites where there are coal tar cleanups.”
“Citizens [MGP site]…is the single biggest polluting site on the canal.”
“New York City and National Grid have what should be a State Superfund site in a brownfields program… and have we gotten a cleanup?”
“[Citizens] should be a State Superfund site. It was mere political will by the City of New York, who was trying to avoid liability…together with National Grid to do that. That’s just a fact. It may be scandalous for me to say that, and I know you’re taping this, and I don’t care, but it is the truth.”
“[EPA] has always been able to take over” the Citizens site.
###
Saturday
We spent the day canvassing in Allentown.
"Well we're living here in Allentown
And they're closing all the factories down..."
It's very purple. “I'm not voting for that monster," said one man, referring to Trump. Another mixed couple split their vote, one for Trump, another Harris. Others quietly said they were voting Harris, but didn't want their friends to hear. Another man in a catholic sweatshirt said he was not going to vote. It's my right, he said. His girlfriend supported Harris. It's Philly and Pittsburgh with Alabama in between, said James Carville. The people who answerred the doors said they were for Harris. But a lot of people didn't answer the door. Obama and Biden saved the US auto industry in Michigan. But the state went to Trump in 2016. Getting out the vote is everything. We knocked on 48 doors. A third answerred. Did any one pull out a gun on you, asked one organizer. No, but there were some closed doors and insults, a car driving by honking, not in a friendly way. A lot of closed shades, ominous feelings. People seem.scared to speak out. Allentown still felt empty, particularly downtown. Trump has not encouraged the best in us. We can move beyond this. Let's vote. Driving back to Brooklyn, it felt great to be back in our multicultural metropolis.
Turns out everything is.
Sunday
Looking at the polls tightening, my heart sank.
Don’t read the polls.
Walked through Washington Square Park to a makeshift memorial under the arch; with kids surrounding it. Whose this is for, I asked. "One Direction singer Liam Payne died after falling from a Buenos Aires hotel balcony," a young woman told me. A hint of doom was in the air with the election tightening, the Gaza war, etc. We walked to Viilage Works to talk about poetry, and to Tompkins Square Park, where Dana was sitting by the Hare Krishna Tree, and Ray got us a coffee, Michael dropped by and we talked about Hal and ai and the machines that woke up, and the Dodgers beat the Mets and Yankers made it to the Workd Series and so on into the night.
And got ready for the Civil disobedience the next day that started this story, stumbling between faith and fury.
Wednesday
A quiet day grading student papers, looking at ways to live with life’s difficulties, observing classes, making plans for gotv this weekend, thinking about the worst that might be coming, taking in a little stand up philosophy. "Are whales sad or am I just projecting?" wonderred Hannah Gadsby. "Content is spelled the same as content." Where do we find ourselves in the whirlwind? "Call me Ishmael."
"More than six years after Nanette propelled them to international stardom, Hannah Gadsby is learning how to process the new world, with all its catastrophes and hypocrisies, from a new perspective. Hannah now finds themself yet again in a place of cultural dissonance… casting their atypical eye over the fundamental contradictions of life. In this new show that could be seen as the mischievous echo of Nanette, Hannah brings it all – their worries, their wisdom, and their whimsy – to the 330-seat Abrons Arts Center for an intimate and unforgettable evening."
“Do you know why we have the sunflowers? It’s not because Vincent van Gogh suffered,” argued Gadsby. “It’s because Vincent van Gogh had a brother who loved him. Through all the pain, he had a tether, a connection to the world. And that is the focus of the story we need – connection.”
We need that connection, looking at the days ahead. After all, Gadsby reminded us:
“To be rendered powerless does not destroy your humanity. Your resilience is your humanity. The only people who lose their humanity are those who believe they have the right to render another human being powerless. They are the weak. To yield and not break, that is incredible strength.”
Thursday
Word of a New York icon passed on my morning feed:
"America ... loves the successful sociopath and thinks it’s normal to dream of becoming like him."
RIP Gary Indiana
Turnout is everything.
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