Could This Be the Last of the Great American Linkposts?

This has been a really difficult month/semester/year/decade and it’s causing me to rethink the way I do these linkposts. For the next bit of time, at least, I’m really going to pull back and try to highlight only those things that I really think deserve attention; for this one in particular that means tossing out basically everything going on with Trump and Biden and the political situation of the United States more generally. Suffice it to say: everything is very bad! And now, this:

• ICYMI: Of Course They Would: On Kim Stanley Robinson’s “The Ministry for the Future.” I was also one of the scholars to pop in on Science Fiction Studies‘s new “Thinking Through the Pandemic” symposium.
• American Literature had a COVID symposium, too.
• A few more Ministry for the Future links: Imagining the End of Capitalism With Kim Stanley Robinson. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Got Ideas to Stave Off Extinction. Kim Stanley Robinson Holds Out Hope. How new novel The Ministry for the Future lays a blueprint for fighting climate change. Chicago Review of Books interviews KSR. Kim Stanley Robinson on inventing plausible utopias. Shaviro’s review. The Sibilant Fricative review. ‘There is no planet B’: the best books to help us navigate the next 50 years. We asked Kim Stanley Robinson: Can science fiction save us?
• I’d also like to plug the Marooned! on Mars podcast by Matt Hauske and Hilary Strang, which is reading Ministry for the Future right now as we speak.
• You heard the man: Rewild the globe.
• Science Fiction Film and Television 13.3 is out! “Screening Utopia in Dystopian Times”!
• I’ll be doing a little Zoom talk on N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season trilogy for the Brooklyn Public Library next month. Check it out!
• The Most Important SF Books of the Last 15 Years.
• Really cool pair of hires at UBC Creative Writing: Graphic Forms and Speculative Fiction.
• CFP: Mormonism and SF. CFP: Speculative Fiction in the Age of Hybridity. CFP: Call for Papers: Global Indigenous Literature and Climate Change. CFP: The 42nd Annual International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, Climate Change and the Anthropocene. And don’t forget to send in your proposal for the Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in Science Fiction Studies!
• Tolkien as he was always meant to to be seen.

nothing screams Tolkien like "Comfortable with Nudity? Up to $500 per day. Use reference NUDE. We need Nude people based in Auckland – age 18 plus, all shapes and sizes (Intimacy guidelines will always be followed on set)." https://t.co/AC8xGefaWp

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 6, 2020

• A good piece from my buddy Dan HF: “Setting Fire to Wet Blankets: Radical Politics and Hollywood Franchises.”
• Professors Disheartened (By Potential Layoffs). Marquette students organize sit-in in support of faculty. Our Marquette.
• Berkeley Faculty Association: The University We Stand For.
• Right-wing trolls attacked me. My administration buckled.
• 2020 Has Been A Hard Year for Higher Ed. Could 2021 Be Worse? Higher Education’s Nightmare Scenario. Extinction Event. Higher Education Needs An Actual Recovery Plan, Not Wishful Thinking. How the Pandemic Has Shrunk Higher Education. Administrative Bloat Meets the Coronavirus Pandemic. Organizing the Neoliberal University. At the Heart of Pandemic University: A Moral Vacuum. College Was Never About Education. How Working-Class Academics Are Set Up to Fail.

Essential reporting from @danbauman77. Since the pandemic began, higher ed's workforce has shrunk by 7 (!) percent. That's around 337,000 people: https://t.co/ZqVQIJ35du

— Emma Pettit (@EmmaJanePettit) October 7, 2020

have you guys heard of this new thing called ungrading? it’s a radical pedagogy where you’re too depressed to grade so you don’t

— Immanuel Content (@dee_bee_h) October 16, 2020

Well, I’m now the Secretary/Treasurer of the Marquette University chapter of @AAUP. Thanks to @uwmaaup and @nickfleisher for their help in getting us set up!

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 30, 2020

• Home with the Humanities: American Engagement during the Pandemic.
• Colleges Comb Diversity Programs for Content That Could Trigger Feds.
• Colleges should offer a major in sports. It could solve some problems.
• Decolonizing Cornell English. LitLab at Harvard.
• “Many respond ‘and you’re surprised?!’ whenever news of some fresh Trumpian horror drops; it’s a reflex that suggests we are medicating hopelessness with a know-it-all jadedness and mistaking cynicism for control.”
• How “Am I the Asshole?” Created a Medium Place on the Internet.
• How Wisconsin Became a Bastion of White Supremacy.
• Remembering a White Supremacist Coup.
• Abolish the Senate! Please! Please! And it’s only a start.
• We Need a Truth and Reconciliation Process for the Trump Era.
• Glücky!
• RIP, Duke TIP.

The millionaires who run billion-dollar institutions are killing low-cost, high-reward programs that have been successful for decades because of one bad quarter. It’s utterly deranged thinking driven entirely by treating Excel spreadsheets as holy scripture. https://t.co/7Eq7iGKhUC

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 8, 2020

• Miracles and wonders.
• The Island Brokers Are Overwhelmed.
• Today in unexpected consequences: Car Seats as Contraception.
• Every HBO Show, Ranked. The 100 Scenes That Shaped Animation.
• Winter is coming. Is it safe to socialize indoors? Sitting with the rage. Bodies on the line. Schools don’t appear to be super spreaders. When can we safely reopen schools? Nearly 4 million US jobs have vanished forever. Forget Shutdowns. It’s ‘Demand Shock’ That’s Killing Our Economy. 8 million Americans slipped into poverty amid coronavirus pandemic, new study says. ‘I Feel Like I Have Dementia’: Brain Fog Plagues Covid Survivors. A ‘second wave’ of mental health devastation due to Covid-19 is imminent, experts say. No semblance of normality before 2022.
• He went down the QAnon rabbit hole for almost two years. Here’s how he got out. How the GOP learned to love QAnon. A Game Designer’s Analysis Of QAnon. How to Talk to a Conspiracy Theorist. What Is The Internet Doing To Boomers’ Brains? I’m a scholar of the “prosperity gospel.” It took cancer to show me I was in its grip.
• DCist uncovers what looks like a massive eviction-notice scam in DC.
• Perfectly normal: Unions Are Beginning to Talk About Staving Off a Possible Coup.
• idk why “reads like fanfiction” is used as a way to dunk on books lol if someone says a book “reads like fanfiction” I’ll just assume that means they stayed up all night reading it then spent the next few weeks constantly thinking about it
• AOC, streamer.
• Nemonte Nenquimo, leader of the Waorani people in Ecuador: This is my message to the western world — your civilisation is killing life on Earth.
• Prepared for the Worst: Disaster Nationalism.
• Some Planets May Be Better for Life Than Earth: Researchers Identify 24 Superhabitable Exoplanets. Somehow this just makes being stuck on Earth all the worse…
• Imperfect Rhetorics: Neurodiversity in YA Literature and Popular Culture.
• Transcending Gravity: The View from Postcolonial Dhaka to Colonies in Space.
• Long Live the Zoom Class Chat.
• What we can learn from the Baltimore Museum of Art’s recent deaccessioning announcement.
• “We Don’t Know Our Potential”: A new book argues that socialism is necessary because innate differences in intelligence expose meritocracy as a sham. Socialism is indeed good, but this particular argument fails utterly.
• The Town That Went Feral: When a group of libertarians set about scrapping their local government, chaos descended. And then the bears moved in.
• The Small, Midwestern Town Taken Over by Fake Communists.
• The Game That Ruins Friendships and Shapes Careers. Such a good game.
• Dragonlance changed how we read fantasy.
• How Sierra Was Captured, Then Killed, by a Massive Accounting Fraud.
• Revisiting Nabokov.
• Always look on the bright side of life.
• How will 2020 end?
• And just one good old fashioned doom scroll, for old time’s sake: Thousands of Dead Birds Are Dropping Out of the Sky and Nobody’s Sure Why.
• Amazon near tipping point of switching from rainforest to savannah – study. California Has Its First ‘Gigafire’ in Modern History. ‘God intended it as a disposable planet’: meet the US pastor preaching climate change denial. ‘Video game planes emit real carbon’: why gaming is not merely guilt-free escapism. The great unravelling: ‘I never thought I’d live to see the horror of planetary collapse’. Stop! Stop! Stop before I get depressed again!

the reason the US government covers up the existence of extraterrestrials is because they talked to them and found out they are communists

— i bless the rains down in castamere (@Chinchillazllla) October 10, 2020

pic.twitter.com/VcyJtdFq17

— dinosaur (@dinoman_j) October 10, 2020

Fall Syllabus #2: ENGLISH 3000: Utopia in America!

And here’s the other course for this fall, “ENGLISH 3000: Utopia in America.” Like the Watchmen class, it will be using a mix of synchronous and asynchronous instruction to muddle through this weird semester…

101 MWF 11:00-11:50 Professor Gerry Canavan

Course Title:  Utopia in America

Course Description: 2020 marks the 505th anniversary of Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, which inaugurated a genre of political and social speculation that continues to structure our imagination of what is possible. This course serves as an entry point for advanced study in the English discipline, using depictions of political utopias from antiquity to the present as a way to explore how both literature and literary criticism do their work. We will study utopia in canonical historical literature, in contemporary pop culture, and in the presidential election, as well as utopian critical theory from major thinkers like Fredric Jameson, China Miéville, Derrick Bell, Toni Morrison, Ursula K. Le Guin, and N.K. Jemisin — but the major task before us will be exploring the role utopian, quasi-utopian, dystopian, and downright anti-utopian figurations have played in the work of major authors of the 20th century, among them Gabriel García Márquez, Vladimir Nabokov, and Octavia E. Butler.

Assignments: Class participation, including individual and group presentations; discussion posts. Students will also construct their own utopian manifesto.

W	Aug 26	S	FIRST DAY OF CLASS Introduction to the Course What Is Utopia?
F	Aug 28	A	New Criticism How to Interpret Literature: “New Criticism” Robert Frost, “Mending Wall” [D2L]
M	Aug 31	S	Sir Thomas More, Utopia, “Concerning” and Book One
W	Sep 2	S	Sir Thomas More, Utopia, Book Two
F	Sep 4	A	China Miéville, Introduction to Utopia (2017): “Close to the Shore” and “The Limits of Utopia”
M	Sep 7		LABOR DAY—NO CLASS
W	Sep 9	S	Structuralism How to Interpret Literature: “Structuralism” Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” [D2L]
F	Sep 11	A	Intertextuality N.K. Jemisin, reply to Le Guin [Web]
M	Sep 14	S	Marxism How to Interpret Literature: “Marxism” Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels, “The Communist Manifesto” [Web] Mark Bould, “The Futures Market: American Utopias” [D2L]
W	Sep 16	S	Utopia Fredric Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture” (first half; second half optional) [D2L] Black Mirror: “San Junipero” [Netflix]
F	Sep 18	A	Sandbox: Fredric Jameson, “Utopia as Replication” [D2L]
M	Sep 21	S	Postcoloniality and Race Studies How to Interpret Literature: “Postcolonial and Race Studies” Derrick Bell, “The Space Traders” [D2L]
W	Sep 23	S	Toni Morrison, “Recitatif” [D2L] Toni Morrison, excerpt from Playing in the Dark [D2L]
F	Sep 25	A	Sandbox: #BlackLivesMatter Syllabus [Web]
M	Sep 28	S	Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Chapter 1
W	Sep 30	S	One Hundred Years of Solitude, Chapters 2-3
F	Oct 2	A	Sandbox: One Hundred Years of Solitude, Chapters 4-6
M	Oct 5	S	One Hundred Years of Solitude, Chapters 7-9
W	Oct 7	S	One Hundred Years of Solitude, Chapters 10-12
F	Oct 9	A	Sandbox: One Hundred Years of Solitude, Chapters 13-15
M	Oct 12	S	One Hundred Years of Solitude, Chapters 16-18
W	Oct 14	S	One Hundred Years of Solitude, whole book Gabriel García Márquez, “The Solitude of Latin America” [Web] Gregory Lawrence, “Marx in Macondo” [D2L]
F	Oct 16		FALL BREAK—NO CLASS
M	Oct 19	S	Feminism How to Interpret Literature: “Feminism” Karen Joy Fowler, “Game Night at the Fox and Goose” [D2L]
W	Oct 21	S	Sexuality How to Interpret Literature: “Queer Studies” Alice Sheldon as James Tiptree, Jr., “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” [D2L]
F	Oct 23	A	Sandbox: Octavia E. Butler, “Bloodchild”
M	Oct 26	S	Environmental Studies How to Interpret Literature: “Environmental Criticism” Ramin Bahrani, “Plastic Bag” [YouTube]
W	Oct 28	S	Disability Studies How to Interpret Literature: “Disability Studies” Octavia E. Butler, “The Evening and the Morning and the Night” Octavia E. Butler, “Speech Sounds”
F	Oct 30	A	Sandbox: Octavia E. Butler, “The Book of Martha”
M	Nov 2	S	Historicism and Cultural Studies How to Interpret Literature: “Historicism and Cultural Studies” Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire, “Foreword” and “Pale Fire”
W	Nov 4	S	Pale Fire, “Foreword and “Pale Fire” continued
F	Nov 6	A	Sandbox
M	Nov 9	S	Pale Fire, Commentary, Canto I
W	Nov 11	S	Pale Fire, Commentary, Canto II
F	Nov 13	A	Sandbox
M	Nov 16	S	Pale Fire, Commentary, Canto III
W	Nov 18	S	Pale Fire, Commentary, Canto IV (including index)
F	Nov 20	A	Reader Response How to Interpret Literature: “Reader Response” Pale Fire, whole book and interpretations
M	Nov 23	S	FINAL PROJECT WORKSHOP
F	Dec 4 5:30 PM		FINAL PROJECT DUE IN D2L DROPBOX

 

Sunday Afternoon Links

* A Symposium on the Gender Gap in Academia.

* How the University Gets Laid Off: The University of Texas at Austin plans to drastically downsize its workforce, according to a draft of a plan obtained by the Texas State Employees Union that was confirmed by the university Friday afternoon.

* The House GOP’s Little Rule Change That Guaranteed A Shutdown. Why did Obama force Boehner to change the rules to guarantee a shutdown? The man’s a monster.

* National Cancer Institute director warns staff of increasingly dire effects of shutdown on science. Cancer research, classic big government bloat; I don’t even have cancer.

* Sobering reminder: What Democrats call victory.

* When Ditka shrugged.

* Those who urge us to “think different,” in other words, almost never do so themselves. 

* Breaking Bad: The Text Adventure.

* Stay safe Durham: What Is This Photo Of The Duke Basketball Team Handling Assault Rifles?

* Family Gets Driven Out of Missouri Town After Daughter Gets Raped.

* What Happens When a 13-Year-Old 4Chan Cam Girl Grows Up?

* The Soaring Cost of a Simple Breath.

The arsenal of medicines in the Hayeses’ kitchen helps explain why. Pulmicort, a steroid inhaler, generally retails for over $175 in the United States, while pharmacists in Britain buy the identical product for about $20 and dispense it free of charge to asthma patients. Albuterol, one of the oldest asthma medicines, typically costs $50 to $100 per inhaler in the United States, but it was less than $15 a decade ago, before it was repatented.“The one that really blew my mind was the nasal spray,” said Robin Levi, Hannah and Abby’s mother, referring to her $80 co-payment for Rhinocort Aqua, a prescription drug that was selling for more than $250 a month in Oakland pharmacies last year but costs under $7 in Europe, where it is available over the counter.

Wait. Repatented? That’s a thing?

* It begins: Tennessee, North Carolina Football Players Sue NCAA Over Concussions.

* Yet another take at getting to the bottom of Pale Fire: this one’s all about the gulags.

* Scenes from the abandoned Mark Twain Branch of the Detroit Public Library.

* And Alfonso Cuarón talks Gravity. Still haven’t seen it, alas…

Saturday Night Tab Closin’

* If it’s possible to miss the point of Pale Fire any worse than this, I don’t want to know about it. Via PCEgan.

* I second both Steven Chu’s call to paint our roofs white and Atrios’s call for “Green Recovery” government stimulus to pay people to do this work.

* Learned helplessness watch: Congressional Democrats, obviously feeling the heat from my persistent calls to use reconciliation to get around Republican filibusters, have now taken reconciliation off the table altogether. Idiots.

* At least Elaine Marshall is ahead in Carolina.

* Speaking my language: Dreamlands, one of the temporary exhibits currently at the Pompidou Center in Paris, highlights Kandor-Con from artist Mike Kelley, with these observations:

The comics present a different image of the Kryptonian city on each occasion, and Kelley sees in this a complex allegory, the diversity of representations signifying the instability of memory. The installation Kandor-Con includes architecture students who continuously design new Kandors, feeding them to a Superman fan site. For the artist, the inability of the original draughtsmen, the new designers or the hero’s internet fans to fix the form of Kandor once and for all illustrates “the stupidity and ridiculousness of technological utopianism.” The capital of the planet Krypton, says Kelley, is “the utopian city of the future that never came to be.”

You had me at “Bonjour.”

* I was kidnapped by lesbian pirates from outer space! A comic, via MetaFilter.

* Added to my Netflix queue: Brick City, a documentary about Newark said to be “a real-life version of The Wire.” Also via MeFi.

* And added to my torrent queue: The Yes Men Fix the World (legal!). Via Boing Boing.

"Synecdoche, New York"

Lately I’ve shied away from reviewblogging, partly because I don’t think I’m especially good at it but mostly because I haven’t been moved to write about anything I’ve seen. Synecdoche, New York moves me, but only to say “Go see it.”

Almost certainly the best film of 2008—only Dark Knight really comes close—and Kaufman’s best film since Being John Malkovich, Synecdoche can’t really be described without being reduced to a series of gimmicks. I wouldn’t even read reviews of it. Just go.

For those who have seen it, or who plan to flaunt my sage advice, the best writing I’ve seen about Synecdoche has been from Adam Kotsko, who writes, insightfully:

While watching Synecdoche, New York this week, a thought occurred to me: the reviews that presented the movie as an elaborate puzzle requiring multiple viewings to unravel are wrong….

[T]here is, within the frame of the movie, no “underlying reality” that can be uncovered through the work of decoding, not even that of Caden Cotard’s dream. All the action is taking place directly at the surface. That’s what the proposed title “Simulacrum” is telling us (a name he suggests to Claire, not Hazel, pace Dargis).

“What really happened” is only what you can see: Kaufman is being brutally direct. No amount of plot summary can get at what it feels like to be watching this movie, and to get to caught up in trying to decipher “what’s going” on is to run the risk of failing to feel what it feels like to be watching this movie.

I’d even go so far as to suggest that Synecdoche should really only be viewed once. The novels to which one might be tempted to compare it—Ulysses? Pale Fire? If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler?—are surely not “elaborate puzzles” to be solved but do possess rich textual subtleties that reward an nth reading. Synecdoche, I fear, may not only lack these subtleties, but may in fact be significantly worse when re-viewed in the context of a known whole.

In particular I’m afraid any rewatch would just direct us more and more towards the notion that [SPOILER—HIGHLIGHT TO READ] Cotard is in the process of dying, likely from suicide committed either very early in the movie or perhaps slightly before it began, and Synecdoche is his dream. To the extent that the suggestion of any “underlying reality” can be deciphered in Synecdoche, it seems to me it can only be this one—and just the slightest taste of that is more than enough.

But wherever they point us, I feel fairly certain the uncovering of any “clues” upon rewatching would only throw the movie’s vital ambiguity off-balance. It’d ruin it. Synecdoche‘s a truly great film, that is to say, but probably just the once.

UPDATE: Copied from Facebook wall scribblings:

my fave reader review from the nyt:

This movie was really boring! Just like life! This movie thought it was original and cutting edge but wasn’t! Just like life! This movie has been made before about seven trillion billion times! Just like life! This movie was way too long! Just like life! The first half was okay but the second half made up for it! Just like life! I almost walked out of this movie! Just like life! Some people don’t realize how awful this movie is and actually think it is good! Just like life!