You go, Brianna Rader!

My favorite Angela Davis quote:

" It is both humiliating and humbling to discover that a single generation after the events that constructed me as a public personality, I am remembered as a hairdo."

“By virtue of the way it has organized its technological base, contemporary industrial society tends to be totalitarian. For "totalitarian" is not only a terroristic political coordination of society, but also a non-terroristic economic-technical coordination which operates through the manipulation of needs by vested interests.”
“One-dimensional thought is systematically promoted by the makers of politics and their purveyors of mass information. Their universe of discourse is populated by self-validating hypotheses which, incessantly and monopolistically repeated, become hyponotic definitions of dictations.”

....Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body. . . . The poet shall not spend his time in unneeded work. He shall know that the ground is always ready ploughed and manured . . . . others may not know it but he shall. He shall go directly to the creation. His trust shall master the trust of everything he touches . . . . and shall master all attachment.

....Walt Whitman ,From the Preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass

"Haslam Scholar?"

Lay off my girl Brianna. She's fierce and fearless and brilliant and one day I'll be telling peeps in the nursing home that I knew that girl.

And the Haslam Scholarship is a pretty fine thing. Attracts and keeps some brilliance that UT sorely needs.

(link...)

I'd love to hear Angela Davis speak (actually, I'd love to ask her what she thought of her character in Network, which was freakin' hilarious).

But alas, I have a Tuesday night class.

One of my prif friends is involved with selecting Haslam Scholars and then dies a seminar with them during the academic year. She can't say enough about what they contribute to the campus.

Yep, it is. I thought I had checked my typing, but sometimes the iPhone can trick you. ;-)

As it is, she's sometimes eccentric, but very much alive.

Toby, I wasn't talking about Davis. I was talking about a UT prof who helps select and teach Haslam scholars.

Excellent presentation by Davis on the political economy of slavery, convict leasing and the effects of contemporary prison privatization. References included the text of the 13th Amendment (see below) and the writings of W. E. B. Dubois (Black Reconstruction), Douglas Blackmon (The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans) and others.

Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.