Posts Tagged ‘pleasure’
Elite Saturday Links Enter CANAVAN at Checkout for 20% Off
* A version of this xkcd has been running continually in my brain for two years.
* February 26-27 at Duke University: Pleasure and Suspicion: An Interdisciplinary Conference.
* Open access SFFTV! A special issue on The X-Files from 2013.
* Louisiana universities are facing the largest midyear cut in state history, Governor John Bel Edwards said in a televised speech last Thursday. Even if the Legislature can find additional revenue, higher education will need to cut $42 million this year. Louisiana’s total higher education budget is $769 million, and if the Legislature cannot raise more revenue, higher education could face a $200 million cut.
* RIP, Umberto Eco. What Is Harper Lee’s Legacy After Go Set a Watchman?
* The New Inquiry reviews The Witness.
* The Slow Violence of Climate Change.
* At LARoB: How should we periodize comics?
* I’d been talking just yesterday to a student from my Lives of Animals class about the urban legends involving pigs and pig corpses and the war on terror. I said something like “No politician who wanted a national reputation would talk this way, though. Well, maybe Trump.” And lo, it came to pass.
* Steve Martin Performed Stand-Up Last Night for the First Time in 35 Years.
* Chinese travel blogger likes Chicago but loves Milwaukee. Endorsed!
* ‘Black Sludge’ Pours Out Of Texas Town’s Faucets Days After FBI Arrests Nearly Every City Official.
* The Shocking Truth of the Notorious Milgram Obedience Experiments.
The trouble was that this zombie-like, slavish obedience that Milgram described wasn’t what he’d observed.
* Hero K is the Highly Anticipated New Novel by Don DeLillo. I’m in.
* Half The World Will Be Short-Sighted By 2050? Half of America will be freelancers by 2020?
* In an email to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton shortly after the U.N. Security Council in March 2011 authorized military intervention in Libya, a former senior State Department official praised her achievement in “turning POTUS around on this.” Meanwhile, America Is Now Fighting a Proxy War with Itself in Syria. So that means we can’t lose, right?
* And elsewhere in smart battles wisely chosen: St. Louis Archbishop Urges Priests To Cut Ties With The Girl Scouts.
* In her new book, Elaine Frantz Parsons re-traces the origins of the 19th-century KKK, which began as a social club before swiftly moving to murder.
* Proposals for new chess pieces.
* Reds in Space: Socialist Science Fiction.
* Beloved: The Best Horror Novel the Horror Genre Has Never Claimed. That’s something I talk about a lot when I teach the novel.
* Seems like a lowball: Husbands create 7 hours of extra housework a week.
* The weirdest, best photos I found in an old Bernie Sanders archive. Arrest photo of young activist Bernie Sanders emerges from Tribune archives. Footage Shows 21-Year-Old Bad Boy Bernie Sanders Being Arrested at a Protest.
* Clay Shirky: social media turned Dems, GOP into host organisms for third party candidates.
* Bloomberg yes! Bloomberg no!
* Also at Boing Boing: Forced arbitration clauses are a form of wealth transfer to the rich.
* The Guardian reports on an accusation by a former Muskegon County, Michigan health official claiming that a Catholic healthcare provider forced five women between August 2009 and December 2010 to undergo dangerous miscarriages by giving them no other option.
* The Singularity’s all right: A 19-year-old made a free robot lawyer that has appealed $3 million in parking tickets.
* We already knew Doc Brown was a monster, but how deep does the rabbit hole go?
* Financialization and the end of journalism.
* “on a scale of luke skywalker to jaime lannister…”
* The universe may have existed forever, according to a new model that applies quantum correction terms to complement Einstein’s theory of general relativity. The model may also account for dark matter and dark energy, resolving multiple problems at once.
* Elsewhere on the deep time beat: What sparked the Cambrian explosion?
* The Warriors’ Odds Of Going 73-9. Written before last night’s loss.
* This one misses me, but it may help some of you feel better: Coffee May Reduce The Damage Alcohol Does To Your Liver.
* This one’s a real emotional roller coaster: Chimp Abandoned On Island Welcomes Rescuers With Open Arms.
* From the SMBC archives: Lucy, the football, and existential dread.
* And they said my work was useless.
Infinite Summer #9: A Brief Comment on the Narcissism of Grad Students and My Own Arrested Adolescence
The salience of this particular moment fades a bit as we get further and further from Friday’s spoiler-line, but I feel compelled to comment briefly on the conversation between Marathe and Steeply that begins on page 638. How can I, or anyone who has chosen a life in academia, read this week’s material without feeling interpolated by it? How could any academic, would-be or otherwise, avoid asking him- or herself more than once just what it is that separates us from Steeply’s M*A*S*H-obsessed father beyond the razor-thin veneer of professional legitimacy? It’s my job, allegedly, to develop intricate and sometimes bizarre readings of pop-culture artifacts, which means it’s perfectly okay for me to (still) spend all my time reading science-fiction novels and watching science-fiction movies just like I did when I was twelve. Heck, I wouldn’t be doing my work if I didn’t! And if I can just trick somebody into paying me to do it I’ll never have to stop.
Herman Blume:What’s the secret, Max?
Max Fischer: The secret?
Herman Blume: Yeah, you seem to have it pretty figured out.
Max Fischer: The secret, I don’t know… I guess you’ve just gotta find something you love to do and then do it for the rest of your life. For me, it’s going to Rushmore.
Intellectually, of course, I’ve always been able to recognize the tragic irony of this exchange—Rushmore, you’ll remember, doesn’t offer a post-graduate year—but I wonder sometimes whether deep down I’ve ever really come to terms with it.
Is this addiction? Does pursuing a academic career studying literature and pop culture—a preoccupation which over the years has diverted me from any number of more financially lucrative pursuits—mark me as the writerly equivalent of a functional alcoholic? Do I even qualify as functional? And it occurs to me now, reading this section against not only my own life and those of my grad student associates but against the life of anyone who has ever been a “fan” of anything—anyone, that is, who can recognize themselves in the way Steeply’s father looked at M*A*S*H—that the danger DFW is highlighting is central to the construction of modern subjectivity. If everything is at least potentially bad for us—even/especially the things that give us pleasure, the things that make life appear to be worth living—just what is it we’re supposed to be doing? Where is the authentic, healthy, free life, if there was ever such a thing to begin with? When even the things we love conspire to destroy us, what is left?
Infinite Math
Kottke highlights a nice Infinite Summer forum thread about mathematics and Infinite Jest that, in a pleasing recursive loop, eventually links back to this blog.
Also in Infinite Summer news, Ezra Klein makes everybody sad by not really liking the book. I agree with Daryl both that (1) it’s perfectly okay not to like the book and (2) your not liking the book isn’t David Foster Wallace’s fault. I often find myself reminding students that “pleasure” isn’t necessarily what’s most important about literature, or art in general; sometimes reading can and should be hard work.
Gerry Canavan 