This video tells you everything you need to know about the writers' strike. (Thanks to E.C. Myers for the link.) I'm also happy to see that SFWA has officially come out in support.

As the SFWA statement says, "'it's as if book publishers of the early twentieth century had told authors that movies would be made out of their books, but they shouldn't get any money because the movies wouldn't be profitable and were being made just to promote the sale of books."

The SPUSA statement is also very good, and sums up a lot of what I think about this.

"This strike has many potential educational benefits. If successful it will demonstrate to other workers in 'new' media forms that strategies traditionally associated with manual labor are still viable. In fact, the one constant in all forms of labor – mental and manual – is the desire by owners – be they managers, supervisors or producers – to maximize profits at the expense of workers. Unionization, collective action and worker solidarity are still the most effective means to reclaim some part of the profits generated by our work.

"Perhaps most important beneficial effect of the WGA strike is the lesson delivered to the millions of television and movie viewers. As the strike continues, patterns of television and movie consumption are sure to be disrupted. This should serve to shatter the illusion that these mediums are exempt from the everyday reality of most working people. Behind the teflon smile of your local newscaster, the witty charm of John Stewart or the precision timing of the humor of David Letterman lays the real human labor of dozens of writers. In this world behind the screen a CEO like Robert Parsons of Time-Warner commands $22 million in yearly compensation from revenue generated by the labor of a working writer such as Craig Hoetger who struggles to piece together a yearly salary of $40,000. Now is the time to put aside the remote control for a few minutes and recognize the type of human solidarity necessary to end such gross inequality."

I'd add that, beyond this specific fight, the number of well-liked celebrity showrunners doing the right thing and speaking out in solidarity with their writers has potential value as a contribution to shaping public perception of the importance of the labor movement.

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I myself, sadly, am still hard at work in a job that--thanks to a ruling a few years back by Bush appointees on the National Labor Relations Board--makes me ineligible for collective bargaining rights. (The NLRB ruled that grad students at private universities being paid to teach classes were primarily students rather than teachers, and thus didn't have a right to unionize.)

OK, that was a lame transition, but I couldn't come up with anything better on the spot.

I've actually been quite enjoying my teaching lately, and not finding it all that taxing. Not all collections of students are created equal in terms of forming a rapport with them, but this semester's UM class has been a blast. I have, however, been ridiculously hard at work with the stuent half of the gig. As I mentioned in my last post, my dissertation topic was just approved, and last week the Director of Grad Studies also officially checked off that all of my coursework is done.

(This is just as well. I figured it out the other day with my housemate while we were off at some Mexican restaurant in Coconut Grove, and at this point I've actually taken 31 Philosophy classes--11 as an undergraduate, 11 in my MA program, and 9 in Miami. Of course, to really make the numbers start to sound weird, I've been involved in some capacity with 46 Philosophy classes--31 as a student, 15 as the instructor--not even counting the classes taught by other people that I've TA'ed for. There's a certain danger of monotony there, which is why I'm trying strategies for mixing it up a little. Next semester, I've assigned Philip K. Dick's novel "A Scanner Darkly" as one of my Intro textbooks.)

So now I'm just scrambling to work on what are--well, unless I give into temptation and get an MFA somewhere down the line--the last few term papers of my life, all of which will be due in the coming weeks. (There are, at this point, two weeks of classes left before finals week.) I've also been driving myself crazy writing a paper for the Miami Forum tomorrow, called, "Parconsistent Tense Logic and the Metaphysics of Change." (If you really want to know what that means, I'll tell you. I suspect that you don't.) This, however, I have no one to blame for but myself. Last year, as a first-year PhD student, there was some pressure to give a Forum presentation, but this year I didn't have to. I actually chose to. Originally, it was because I was going to present at a conference at the end of the month, so I wanted to rehearse that paper. That didn't end up happening, so instead of doing something rational like cancelling the presentation, I thought, "well, I've committed myself anyway, so I might as well take this as an opportunity to try out some arguments related to a different aspect of my project. It'll save work for me down the line anyway, and it'll be a good chance to discuss and clarify with faculty members before they finalize my reading list, so I should probably do that."

Yeah, what do you want? What's done is done.

So I've spent pretty much every night for the last week sitting in front of the TV, so I can split my attention the re-runs on Comedy Central or whatever--see above, for why just re-runs--while I flip through "In Contradiction" and "Doubt Truth To Be A Liar" and type away at my laptop, a page here, a paragraph there, a...wait, did I get Graham Priest's argument accurately here? Flip flip flip, read read read, let some month old Jon Stewart bit filter into my awareness, laugh, and then start typing again. Oddly enough, I've actually gotten a lot of work done--24 pages over the course of about five nights, of light fluffy stuff like paraconsistent tense logic--but it's also *all* I've done lately. When I finally decide that I've done as much as I can stand at the end of the night, getting any fiction writing done, much less blogging, has been pretty much out of the question. Last Friday and Saturday I revised some stuff and send off some submissions, but that's been as writerly as I've gotten.

The fact that I've put my head above water means that I finally finished this particular paper, and am forcing myself to take a breather for a day or two before writing the next one, so I can go swimming, grade papers, smell the roses and palm trees, and, I don't know, maybe even try to crank out a new chapter of the w.i.p. We'll see.