Posts Tagged ‘content’
Monday Morning Links!
* If you only read one Star Trek: Discovery postmortem this week, it’s got to be Abigail Nussbaum’s. But if you read too, here’s mine at LARB! No Follow-Through.
* Then this one #3: In Its First Season, Star Trek: Discovery Asked Hard Questions It Never Really Wanted the Answers to.
* Original pitch for Star Trek: The Next Generation had a hologram captain. Fake Research Paper Based on Star Trek: Voyager‘s Worst Episode Was Published by a Scientific Journal.
* Science Fiction Film and Television 11.1 now available! With a special section on the science fiction of Scarlett Johansson, essays on District 9 and dating simulators, and a review essay on Get Out!
* Meanwhile, the 2019 CFP for the MLA’s speculative fiction discussion group, of which I am now the immediate past chair:
Activist Speculation and Visionary Fiction
How “visionary fiction” (Walidah Imarisha’s term for stories imagining “newer, freer worlds”) contributes to speculative fiction theory, pedagogy, practice. 200-word abstract, CV by 16 March 2018 to Alexis Lothian (alothian@umd.edu).
* I got the chance to watch this documentary on Flannery O’Connor last week as part of a Marquette English event. It was great! Can’t wait for it to find a home.
* Nothing but respect for my president.
* Horrified Florida students beg the adults: Please, do something about guns.
* I have a thing to say about growing up after tragedy.
* On the imperative of content. No one knows.
* The goal was to create “products,” which could then be monetized, but according to Leslie, who took over oversight of the institute in 2015, “There was not the foundation of a business plan” at the institute’s inception. This is perhaps not surprising, given that the “Framework for Excellence” which midwifed the Institute was literally dreamed up in two days by Chancellor Francisco Cigarroa and his advisors and passed by the regents “without asking a single question.”
* We should just create “incentive” / punishment structures that force college presidents to retire at 64 1/2, just like they all did to faculty.
* When the White Supremacists Come to Campus.
* When the suits killed Barnes and Noble.
* The august sport of (checks notes) curling may never be the same.
* Male privilege is having never thought about this possibility.
* Ban The United States From The Olympics.
* Cleaning products as bad for lungs as smoking 20 cigarettes a day, scientists warn.
* How banks block people of color from homeownership.
* ICE really doubling down. Man who called 911 about suspected burglary detained by ICE. He can’t get proper HIV treatment in Venezuela. But he’s being deported anyway. ICE Arrests in the Pacific Northwest Increased 25 Percent in 2017. Washington officials gave activist’s info to ICE. Refusing an interpreter to a deaf detainee. How ICE Works to Strip Citizenship from Naturalized Americans. ICE Arrests Man at a Green Card Interview. Tearing families apart.
* Like Uber but for human trafficking.
* Westchester School Leaves Behind Disabled Students in Fire Evacuation.
* This List of Every Reason Banner Hulks Out in the Classic Hulk TV Series Is Hilarious.
- Receiving a lethal injection, and then having the person say, “Oh. I just gave you a lethal injection. Sorry, David.”
- Wandering around in the service ducts of a hotel (predating Bruce Willis) only to accidentally yank several of the pipes loose and get a full blast of hot steam
- Being tied up and fed soup by an elderly Japanese woman who doesn’t
understand words like “You’ve GOT to cut me loose!” - Being thrown under a New Orleans Mardi Gras parade float by a mean guy in a gorilla suit who gives David a few kicks for good measure
- Receiving a speeding ticket
- Wandering around inside a carnival funhouse, only to have someone turn on the machinery so that David is somehow caught in a rolling tumbler and flipped over a few times and then thrown down a convenient slide
* ‘Minecraft’ Data Mining Reveals Players’ Darkest Secrets.
* How should we talk about Trump’s brain?
* The Security Clearance Situation in the White House Is Bonkers.
* The case for impeaching Clarence Thomas.
* Here’s What Critics Are Saying About Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs.
* New York Federal judge rules that embedding tweets can violate copyright law.
* Black Panther killed it. Black Panther and the Invention of Africa. Black Panther Is Not the Movie We Deserve. The Man Who Made Black Panther Cool.
* Winners of the 2018 Underwater Photographer of the Year Contest.
* The Donkey Kong Timeline Is Truly Disturbing.
* Let kids have a sense of control over their own lives. The research is clear, let’s ban homework. In Defense of Picky Eating.
* First ship crosses Arctic in winter without an icebreaker as global warming causes ice sheets to melt. Miami could be underwater in your kid’s lifetime as sea level rise accelerates.
* A History of the United American Socialist Republics.
* Here’s All 290 Star Wars Movies Officially in Production Right Now.
* I loved this read of “The Voice of the Dolphins” at LARB, but it’s odd that the piece never notes the very strong suggestion in the story that the entire dolphin project was a hoax.
* What was only a trial run was taken seriously.
* And in a time without heroes: Cow escapes on way to slaughterhouse, smashes through metal fence, breaks arm of man trying to catch her then swims to safety on island in lake.
New Fall Syllabus #2: INFINITE JEST!
And here’s the Infinite Jest syllabus. This one turned out to be a surprisingly difficult puzzle to put together, just because I felt strongly that the book absolutely had to be finished by the class period before the class period before Thanksgiving (and later determined that we really needed a whole week to talk about the book just as a whole) — while I also felt (after the experience of the Tolkien class was so great) that it would be really good to have a slow start where we talked a bit about Wallace as a thinker and read some of his other work. This seemed especially urgent to me because of the fact of the suicide, which really does seem to risk retrospectively poisoning some aspects of the book and Wallace’s larger career (I’ve included the MLA panel we’re doing explicitly in the course as a last-day exercise, though I realized yesterday while prepping the course that I seem to have completely cryptomnesically ripped off Tom Bissell in my panel abstract — very embarrassing).
I decided early on that “beginning with the end” was the way to do this course, discussing the suicide openly and concretely at length at the very start of the class. My workshopmates in my Jesuit pedagogy seminar last semester very helpfully suggested some strategies for making the course a comfortable place to talk about some very uncomfortable things, and strongly suggested that I include an explicit content note in the syllabus (which as you can see, I did, a fairly lengthy one; I don’t think I’ve ever done one before, except in briefly offering the possibility of an alternate assignment for Lolita in a sophomore-level survey).
The result of all this is a syllabus that I’m pretty happy with and that I hope won’t be too demanding. I’ve thought a lot about not just trying to generate buy-in and a spirit of shared endeavor, but also how to make sure I don’t lose a ton of people along the way. In the end, with a MW class meeting trying to read a 1,079-page novel in nine weeks while leaving space at the beginning and end for other conversations about Infinite Jest, I decided I just couldn’t do much better than around 50-70 pages per class period for the long haul, especially in the back half. I hope the assignments and the structure of the course pull them through, and give them space to get something valuable out of it, even if (as seems inevitable) some number of them completely hate both the book and me by the end…
As before, full syllabus with course procedures and all assignments at the link, but here’s the day-by-day schedule:
| M | Aug 29 | FIRST DAY OF CLASS
audiobook: “This Is Water” (Commencement Address to the Kenyon College Class of 2005) (in class) |
| W | Aug 31 | “Alas, Poor Yorick” monologue from Hamlet, Act V, sc. i [D2L]
George Saunders, “Informal Remarks from the David Foster Wallace Memorial Service in New York on October 23, 2008” [D2L] Jonathan Franzen, “Informal Remarks from the David Foster Wallace Memorial Service in New York on October 23, 2008” [D2L]
roundtable discussion: How to Talk About Sad Things, Together
(after class) Mandatory D2L Post #1 |
| M | Sep 5 | LABOR DAY—NO CLASS |
| W | Sep 7 | David Foster Wallace, “The Planet Trillaphon as It Stands in Relation to the Bad Thing” (1984) and Afterword by Kevin J. H. Dettmar (2016) |
| M | Sep 12 | David Foster Wallace, “Octet” (1997/1999)
Guest Lecture: Tom Moore
(after class) Mandatory D2L Post #2 |
| W | Sep 14 | David Foster Wallace, “Octet” discussion continues
Infinite Jest forewords by Dave Eggers (2006) and Tom Bissell (2016) [D2L]
roundtable discussion: How to Talk About Literature, Art, Artists, Genius, Greatness, Pretension, Ambition, “Trying Too Hard,” Success, Failure, Annoyance, Fondness, Commitment, Honesty, Community, Solitude, Work, Intellectual Experiences That Might (or Might Not) Change Your Life, &c.
(after class) Mandatory D2L Post #3 |
INFINITE JEST
| IJPPD(A)(NCF)* | |||
| M | Sep 19 | Infinite Jest through p. 17
brief primer: How to Read Infinite Jest [in class] |
14 |
| W | Sep 21 | Infinite Jest through p. 63 | 46 |
| M | Sep 26 | Infinite Jest through p. 127 | 64 |
| W | Sep 28 | Infinite Jest through p. 171 | 44 |
| M | Oct 3 | Infinite Jest through p. 226 | 55 |
| W | Oct 5 | Infinite Jest through p. 283 | 57 |
| M | Oct 10 | Infinite Jest through p. 342 | 59 |
| W | Oct 12 | Infinite Jest through p. 398 | 56 |
| M | Oct 17 | Infinite Jest through p. 450 | 52 |
| W | Oct 19 | Infinite Jest through p. 503 | 53 |
| FALL BREAK | |||
| M | Oct 24 | Infinite Jest through p. 589 | 86 |
| W | Oct 26 | Infinite Jest through p. 648 | 59 |
| M | Oct 31 | Infinite Jest through p. 711 | 63 |
| W | Nov 2 | Infinite Jest through p. 775 | 64 |
| M | Nov 7 | Infinite Jest through p. 845 | 70 |
| W | Nov 9 | Infinite Jest through p. 911 | 66 |
| M | Nov 14 | Infinite Jest through p. 981
“CONVERGENCE” DUE |
70 |
| W | Nov 16 | Samuel Cohen, “To Wish to Try to Sing to the Next Generation: Infinite Jest’s History”
N. Katherine Hayles, “The Illusion of Autonomy and the Fact of Recursivity: Virtual Ecologies, Entertainment, and Infinite Jest” OPTION #3 PROSPECTUS DUE BY TODAY |
|
| M | Nov 21 | Research Workshop with Heather James (Raynor)
Bring in the general topic you think you might want to write about, as well as some useful research questions. |
|
| THANKSGIVING BREAK |
* Infinite Jest pages per day (approximate) (not counting footnotes)
CODA: AFTERLIVES
| M | Nov 28 | OPTION #1 and #2 PROSPECTUS DUE TO ME ON D2L
Michael Pietsch, editor’s note, The Pale King (2011) [D2L] David Foster Wallace, “Good Old Neon” (2001) [D2L] |
| W | Nov 30 | Lee Konstantinou, “No Bull: David Foster Wallace and Postironic Belief” [D2L]
Adam Kelly, “David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity in American Fiction” [D2L] |
| M | Dec 5 | Ed Finn, “Becoming Yourself: The Afterlife of Reception” [D2L]
Kathleen Fitzpatrick, “Infinite Summer: Reading, Empathy, and the Social Network” [D2L] MetaFilter.com, “RIP, DFW” [Web] The Howling Fantods, Wallace-L, etc. |
| W | Dec 7 | FINAL THOUGHTS: MLA 2017 panel: “Infinite Jest at 20” [D2L]
PROJECT WORKSHOPS Bring in four copies of the prospectus for your final project.
LAST DAY OF CLASS |
| W | Dec 14 | FINAL PROJECT DUE BY 12:30 PM |
Weekend Links!
* I have a short essay in the New Orleans Review‘s science fiction issue. Check it out! (Sorry, it’s not online.)
* CFP: Special Issue of American Literature: “Queer about Comics.”
* Academics of color experience an enervating visibility, but it’s not simply that we’re part of a very small minority. We are also a desired minority, at least for appearance’s sake. University life demands that academics of color commodify themselves as symbols of diversity—in fact, as diversity itself, since diversity, in this context, is located entirely in the realm of the symbolic. There’s a wound in the rupture between the diversity manifested in the body of the professor of color and the realities affecting that person’s community or communities. I, for example, am a black professor in the era of mass incarceration of black people through the War on Drugs; I am a Somali American professor in the era of surveillance and drone strikes perpetuated through the War on Terror.
* Cornell Grad Students Form Unrecognized Union.
* The Irony of Catholic Colleges.
* Fake traffic is rotting the Internet.
* So weird: John Boehner, House Speaker, Will Resign From Congress.
* The College President-to-Adjunct Pay Ratio.
* The Journal of Academic Freedom has a special section devoted to Steven Salaita.
* Science proves you like being ripped off by airlines.
* Fordham, Marquette rescind honorary degrees they gave Cosby.
* Here’s More Evidence That Galactic Super-Civilizations Don’t Exist. Yet!
* What a massive sexual assault survey found at 27 top U.S. universities. Counterpoint: The latest big sexual assault survey is (like others) more hype than science. Counter-counterpoint: The University of Chicago’s message to the Class of 2019: Don’t be a rapist.
* Speech and the campus newspaper at Wesleyan. And from the Southern Poverty Law Center: Campus Newspaper Thefts since 2000.
* Today in the apocalypse: Why some scientists are worried about a surprisingly cold ‘blob’ in the North Atlantic Ocean.
* Ahmed’s Clock, Banneker’s Clock, and the Racial Surveillance of Invention in America.
* “Declining Student Resilience: A Serious Problem for Colleges.”
* A recent study suggests that acetaminophen—found in Tylenol, Excedrin and a host of other medications—is an all-purpose damper, stifling a range of strong feelings. Throbbing pain, the sting of rejection, paralyzing indecision—along with euphoria and delight—all appear to be taken down a notch by the drug.
* Volkswagen and the Era of Cheating Software. Volkswagen hires BP’s Deepwater defense team as the lawsuits start. But it’s not all bad news.
* Stojcevski was sent to the Macomb County Jail in Mt. Clemens, Mich., on June 11, 2014, to serve a 30-day sentence after failing to appear in court over a ticket for careless driving, according to the lawsuit. During the 16 days between his imprisonment and his death, the lawsuit alleges, staff at the jail knowingly allowed him to suffer through “excruciating” acute withdrawal without treatment.
* Inside the collapse of Scott Walker’s presidential bid.
* Inside Salvador Dali’s Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.
* Rather than fighting for more and better work, we should fight for more time to use as we please. Proposals like a universal basic income may well lead to this. Most importantly, in thinking about the time bind, we should keep in mind what it would mean to be really free from it. We should keep in mind the full possibilities of liberation: what we want is not to be allowed to work more or in better conditions, but to be allowed to live as we see fit.
* Counterpoint: Against UBI.
* I had nightmares like this: What If the Answer Isn’t College, but Longer High School?
* A Urine Collection Bag from Apollo 11 marked with the initials “NA.”
* The Bowe Bergdahl case is a weird choice for Serial season two, but I suppose nearly anything would be.
* Netflix Data Reveals Exactly When TV Shows Hook Viewers — And It’s Not the Pilot.
* …the digital apocalypse never arrived, or at least not on schedule. While analysts once predicted that e-books would overtake print by 2015, digital sales have instead slowed sharply.
* Honestly this would work pretty well for academics too.
* Listen, this is just getting silly now.
* We have burned all the furniture for fuel and we’re starting to chop away at the deck. We are a terrible, dispirited society and we finally have the terrible, dispirited Muppets we deserve.
* What Can ‘Star Trek’ Teach Us About American Exceptionalism?
* Rude hand gestures from around the world.
* And I’m devoting the rest of my career to the Mysteries of the Unknown books, now that I’ve been reminded they exist.
Special Bonus Sunday Reading: ‘Keywords for an Age of Austerity’
On Twitter Adam Kotsko pointed me to a great blogging series from John Patrick Leary: “Keywords for an Age of Austerity.”
1 – Innovation
2 – Stakeholder
2.5 – Learning Outcomes
Like the other words in this series—innovation and stakeholder—learning outcomes is a superficial concept that crumbles under even slight scrutiny. But its empirically verifiable meaninglessness conceals the zeal for empirical measurability that it demonstrates. And in the education world, these kind of measurements are only ever about cutting back.
3 – Nimble
4 – Entrepeneur
5 – Curator
The word’s combination of moral purpose and creativity aligns it closely with the “innovator” and the “entrepreneur.” In the most enthusiastic celebrations of each, marketing ingenuity and aesthetic imagination are scarcely distinguishable from one another.
6 – Conversation
7 – Silo
8 – Accountability
Measurement is key in enfocring the notion of accountability in schools, and it is what many critics of NCLB fixate on: the high-stakes testing regimes, teacher evaluations, school grades, and so on. And yet there is something persistently vague about its usage. In my cursory reading of the text of NCLB, the term is never defined more clearly than it is above, except to specify that it refers to common standards and enforcement provisions. The law at times also seems to conflate the sanctions for failure—that is, being “held accountable,” or punished—with meeting the standard itself, or “being accountable,” a big difference.
9 – Content
10 – Sustainability
As a lifestyle and marketing term, “sustainable” can paradoxically express the same capitalist triumphalism—of an ever-expanding horizon of goods and services, of “growth” without consequences—that the conservationist concept was once meant to critique. “Sustainable development,” fuzzy as it is, was intended to remind us of the limited supply and unequal exploitation of natural resources. But if “sustainable” most literally means an ability to keep on doing something, its popularity as a consumerist value suggests that there is a fine line between “sustainable” and “complacent.” We can “sustain” grossly unequal cities—that is, they won’t fall apart utterly—with Lyft and Airbnb, rather than mass transit and affordable housing. For a while, anyway. Whether we will sustain our desire to live in them is another question.
11 – Civility
12 – DIY
Gerry Canavan 