Battle over CAFTA Rages in El Salvador
by Michael Busch
As El Salvador transitions from decades of conser– vative rule to the administration of leftist President Mauricio Funes, the country faces an international showdown triggered by a restrictive free-trade agree– ment between the United States and Central Ameri– ca. Canada’s Pacific Rim Mining Corporation is suing the government for its refusal to allow it to mine […]
W. B. Ofuatey-Kodjoe
by admin
Ofuatey was a proud man. He was proud of his accomplishments, of his culture, and of his family. Yet he was also a modest man. In relation to his faculty, the role of an Executive Officer is very much the first among equals, and this is how Ofuatey interacted with his colleagues. I would say that the love he inspired among his students will become legendary. In relation to me, Ofuatey pretty much gave me free reign in managing the office. He always entertained my ideas as to how we could improve management of the program, and there was great synergy to our relationship. Of course there were times when Ofuatey and I disagreed, but in any good working association, it’s natural. The key factor to our relationship was the knowledge that, during a crisis, Ofuatey and I would back each other up.
Films I Saw This Summer
by Nicole Wallenbrock
Thirst
With all the teen-vampire fanaticism, the foreign art-film take on Dracula might pass you by. However, Swedish filmmaker Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In, and the Korean Park Chan-Wook’s Thirst are original romances where bloodlust is anything but skin deep. Park is best known for his vengeance triology, (Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Old Boy, and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance). In these films, characters who are subjected to violence become heroes when they retaliate with elaborate murder schemes. One suffers through gore in his films’ first half, but the conclusive proof of justice is in fact more blood and pain. Eventually, the carnage becomes more delicious than disgusting, for it is all bloodshed in the name of fairness.
On the Musical Genealogy of Neko Case
by Justin Rogers-Cooper
This review is an attempt to assess the latest work of Neko Case within a broader genealogy of mostly North American guitar songwriters. It imagines these songwriters as a collective voice cut into discrete consciousnesses, contributing to one long, dissonant narrative on the rolling American stone. For the sake of argument, then, Neko Case’s Middle Cyclone might […]
Student Health Services: Still there, Still Needed, Still Yours…So Speak Up!
by Collette Sosnowy
In the wake of the hard-fought-and-won NYSHIP health insurance for student employees of CUNY and the (unrelated) creation of a new student position, the Health Education Coordinator, I’d like to review the role that The Wellness Center — Student Health Services (SHS) can and still plays in health care services for Graduate Center students. Obtaining basic health insurance […]
Poetry in the Age of Bush
by Jason Schneiderman
State of the Union: 50 Political Poems, Edited by Joshua Beckman and Matthew Zapruder, Wave Books, 2008, 112pp, $14.00
There’s no introduction to State of the Union, a new collection from Wave Books composed of, as the subtitle puts it, 50 Political Poems. There’s no afterword, no manifesto, no explanation of how the word “political” might be meeting the word “poem.” Even the press release is silent on just what editors Joshua Beckman and Matthew Zapruder might have had in mind when making their selections. But while it might be easier to review a book that is clear on what its politics are, this refusal of explanation returns the poem to centrality. Dan Chiasson, in reviewing an anthology of poems by Guantanamo detainees wrote, “It is hard to imagine a reader so hardhearted as to bring aesthetic judgment to bear on a book written by men in prison without legal recourse…You don’t read this book for pleasure; you read it for evidence.”
Archive Art: A Rosler Project Revisited
by Sarah Mills
By Sarah Mills
Martha Rosler’s homeless project is back, only this time in archival form. The exhibition, “If You Lived Here Still…,” currently on view at New York’s e-Flux gallery, revisits numerous materials on homelessness and housing, which Rosler first began collecting for the exhibition, “If You Lived Here…,” held at the Dia Art Foundation in 1989. In the […]
A Riot of their Own
by From the Editor
“White riot –I wanna riot White riot — a riot of my own”
—The Clash “Government…bullshit Black and white… fight”
—The Subhumans
At first the talk was all about the prospects of a “post-racial” America. Obama’s success among white voters (he received a larger percentage of the white vote than any democratic candidate since Carter) and the lack of any recordable “Bradley […]
The Second Language of “Standard English”
by Alison Powell
A recent editorial in the New York Times by Stanley Fish, “What Should Colleges Teach?” generated enough controversy and enthusiasm to merit that he write two follow up pieces. In the first, Stanley Fish argues that the problem with English composition courses is they don’t teach composition at all; rather, they are poorly masked cultural […]
DSC Page
by Shawn Rice
A New Start
As you know, this year started off with the biggest payroll fiasco that we’ve seen to date. And, as student representative and student advocates, we in the Executive and Steering Committees of the Doctoral Students’ Council have responded as quickly as possible. We have met with many different levels of administrators, trying to work out […]
