Abject Academics – AKA Adjunct Commuter Weekly

ADJUNCTS HAVE LATELY much been in the news (the NY Times here). Or the New Yorker, or here on how we’re exploited and here and here. The include clarion calls for raises, etc, etc. Well while we’ve been in the news, we now have our own newspaper, The Adjunct Commuter Weekly. That last bit of the title should be in quotes. We’ll see how Weekly it ends up being as it’s put together by adjuncts... But for now it’s in a show at the ICA in Boston and was organized by painter and writer and adjunct supreme, Dushko Petrovich, one of the founders of art magazine Paper Monument. It’s been covered in ArtNews not once but twice and in Blouin’s Art Info. For it I wrote about Grand Central Station:

 “The paving deep in the station had a frosty glitter, and she wondered if diamonds had been ground into the concrete.” This is Alice Malloy, rube, hick, innocent –stepping forth into Grand Central Station, full of dreams, this the John Cheever story “O City of Broken Dreams” (you can guess what happens to hers). Her husband Evarts on the street outside sees, “Faces purposeful and intent as if they belonged to people who were pursing the destinies of great industries.” He’s also stunned by the youth and beauty of those faces, and they remind me of how Edith Wharton described Lily Bart a half century earlier also just outside the station: “She must have cost a great deal to make… a great many dull and ugly people must, in some mysterious way, have been sacrificed to produce her.” 

Those words could have been applied wholesale to the station itself (and Cornelius Vanderbilt’s hubris in building it). Or, to the city: expensive, sacrificial and glittering with diamonds – and dreams – crushed into it. James Salter probably nails it best in his novel Light Years, “The city is a cathedral of possession; its scent is dreams.”

This scent, these dreams, those rubes– they are me, they are mine.