My semester is going better than expected. I’m responding to the crisis of widespread LLM adoption and the loss of my ability to assess whether student writing done at home demonstrates having read the assigned reading by fundamentally changing how I teach. Reading happens at home; writing happens in class on pen and paper. I expected students to grumble more than they have about this, but I think they are enjoying spaces to read and think. We will see how it goes.

I do have an overwhelming sense that my current career is collapsing quite fast. Paul Musgrave sums it up here. Between the crisis of student reading and assessment, the ascendence of surveillance capital oligarchs, and the speed at which LLM tech is advancing, whether it is a human good or not, we are losing the prestige and purpose of our degrees. I strongly feel LLMs are not a human good, and what we gain from them as an efficiency tool is not remotely worth the cost to jobs, their abuse as an engine of reification of thought on behalf of capital, and their extraction of our labor without pay or consent. All that, combined with the political and economic chaos universities are facing from the Trump administration, is going to break what’s left of higher education in half. It seems inevitable that contingent service teaching jobs like mine will be early sacrifices to whatever budget crises emerge because they are easier to dispose of than the tenured and replace us with bots.

But it’s all so overwhelming as a parent who needs income, who already doesn’t make a salary that meets the cost of living, whose savings are dwindling already, that I find myself retreating from constantly engaging with it when I can.

I’ve started diving into watching a lot of films. I’ve been having a really exciting rediscovery of my youthful enthusiasms for the medium, back when I studied it at NYU and got to work in a cinema at the center of the Lower West Side film scenes (most of my co-workers were aspiring filmmakers or techs or actors). I think I am missing that moment of more open possibility and immersion in artistic communities and I’m burrowing back into it simply by watching lots of movies. There’s still a profound absence of community in my job and life right now, so this is offering me a fantasy of one.

Out of my attempt to recapture something, I’m going back through French New Wave, fairly methodically. Like many film nerds, my earliest explorations of foreign film were through the works of Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut. But as is typical of early exposures to auteurism, I viewed them in isolation and out of context of everything that was going on in Paris from 1957-1968 or so. So I’m fixing that, rewatching their films in the context of going through many major French films of the era, trying to see them less as sui generis figures and more in the context of the social and aesthetic worlds they emerged from. I’m planning on trying to write more at length about this, but so far I’ve watched a handful of films from the years before The 400 Blows heralded the arrival of the New Wave with its victory at Cannes in 1959, and while I still absolutely love that film, context improves it. Agnes Varda’s first film in 1956, La Pointe Courte, is almost more astounding in its rule-breaking inventiveness on beautiful on-location shooting than anything more concretely identified as early New Wave, (usually marked as starting with Claude Chabrol’s Le Beau Serge in 1958). Varda, like Alain Resnais and Chris Marker, is usually identified with the more literary and visual art-minded Rive Gauche scene than New Wave proper and its contingent of film critics turned directors, but the two scenes interacted enough they are worth watching together. Criterion Channel also groups early Louis Malle in with New Wave, which is a stretch—he’s more professional and polished—but he’s interested enough in exploring the medium in some ways parallel to New Wave that I’ll be watching him too.

I will have more to say soon, send us professors good thoughts and please help us find new jobs! Good thoughts and wishes to every scared and suffering under this absolute catastrophe.