Posts Tagged ‘they say time is the fire in which we burn’
Ain’t No Sunday Like an MLA Sunday Links
* In case you missed them: the syllabi for my spring classes, which start tomorrow.
* Meanwhile MLA saves its best panel for last: 759. Guilty Pleasures: Late Capitalism and Mere Genre. Today at 1:45!
* On March 11-12, 2015, the Humanities Division at Essex County College will host its Spring 2015 Conference, “Speculative Humanities: Steampunk to Afrofuturism.” This two-day conference offers space for writers, musicians, artists, and academicians to explore, expand upon, and rethink the implications of speculative humanities. This year’s conference will feature a special emphasis on the life, work, and influence of Octavia E. Butler.
* #MLA: An Economist’s Critique of Job Market for English Ph.D.s.
* The MLA should give Jonathan Goodwin a Lifetime Achievement Award for this post about midcentury MLA job ads. Check out his Twitter feed for more.
* Really, though, huge shoutout to all the literary critics heading home today.
* #FreeCommunityCollege. Did Obama Just Introduce a ‘Public Option’ for Higher Education? Angus is happy. Who Has a Stake in Obama’s Free Community-College Plan? Of course, it’s a Republican plan. And there’s a catch. Or two.
* Contingent Faculty and #FreeCommunityCollege.
* $18 billion in job training = lots of trained unemployed people.
Sometimes you don’t get a sales pitch. It’s none of your business, it’s reactionary to even ask the question, it’s an assertion of privilege, something’s got to be done and what have you been doing that’s better? Sometimes you get a sales pitch and it’s all about will and not about intellect: everybody has to believe in fairies or Tinkerbell will die. The increments sometimes make no sense. This leads to that leads to what? And what? And then? Why? Or perhaps most frustrating of all, each increment features its own underlying and incommensurable theories about why things happen in the world: in this step, people are motivated by self-interest; in the next step, people are motivated by basic decency; in the next step, people are motivated by fear of punishment. Every increment can’t have its own social theory. That’s when you know that the only purpose is the action itself, not the thing it’s trying to accomplish.
* Securitization, risk management, and the new university.
* Administrators, Authority, and Accountability.
* Militancy, Antagonism, and Power: Rethinking Intellectual Labor, Relocating the University.
As leverage, Silvia Federici outlines the two-part process of demanding a wage for previously uncompensated labor. The first step is recognition, but the ultimate goal is refusal. “To say that we want money for housework” she says, “is the first step towards refusing to do it, because the demand for a wage makes our work visible, which is the most indispensable condition to begin to struggle against it, both in its immediate aspect as housework and its more insidious character as femininity” (Wages Against Housework). Another way to say this is: it is only with the option of refusal that not-publishing is meaningful.
It is clear that “publish or perish” is undergoing a speedup like all other capitalist work. We must all struggle for a re-valorization of living labor. And in the first step against publication’s command over living labor, we agree with Federici, who demands that “From now on we want money for each moment of it, so that we can refuse some of it and eventually all of it” (Wages Against Housework).
* Exclusive: Prosecutor in Serial Goes On the Record.
* The U.S. has more jails than colleges. Here’s a map of where those prisoners live.
* Scenes from the class struggle inside the National Radio Quiet Zone.
* Debt collection as autoimmune disease.
* Male Senators Banned Women From Senate Pool So They Could Swim Naked. Until 2008.
* Wow. F.B.I. and Justice Dept. Said to Seek Charges for Petraeus.
* “It’s clear he hasn’t been very lucky with the ladies the last few months,” West said of his client.
* Nightmare terror attacks in Nigeria using ten-year-old girls as suicide bombers.
* Clocks Are Too Precise (and People Don’t Know What to Do About It).
* Great moments in matte paintings, at io9. I had no idea the warehouse from Raiders was a matte either, though in retrospect of course it was.
* New research is first to identify which reserves must not be burned to keep global temperature rise under 2C, including over 90% of US and Australian coal and almost all Canadian tar sands.
* Rave drug shows great promise in treating depression once thought resistant to drug therapy. I hope they found some way to control for the curative effects of glowsticks.
* How Wes Anderson’s Cinematographer Shot These 9 Great Scenes.
* Here comes Wet Hot American Summer: The Prequel Series.
* The kids aren’t all right: Millennials Are Less Racially Tolerant Than You Think.
* “Men, what would you be willing to give up to live a couple decades longer?”
* Dad creates drawings based off of quotes from his toddler daughter.
* How LEGO became the Apple of toys.
* We Wish These Retrofuturistic Versions Of American Cities Had Come True.
* Every episode of Friends at the same time.
* And exciting loopholes I think we can all believe in: “He was doing research for a film,” said Sherrard. “It’s not a crime; it’s artwork… He’s an intellectual.”
Good Morning, It’s Sunday Morning Links
* A rare correction: actually your pets will burn in hell. gerrycanavan.wordpress.com regrets the error.
* Watch out, modern-day slaves, the Pope might un-denounce your exploitation next!
* Sad update: Cheryl Abbate has been run out of Marquette.
* Adding that to the explicitly military and overseas contingency funding, the real dimensions of the US military-intelligence-police-prison complex begin to come into view: a staggering $830 billion, more than 80 cents out of every dollar in the funding bill, is devoted to killing, spying on, imprisoning or otherwise oppressing the people of the world, including the American people.
* The federal government is using data gimmicks to mask the true scope of homelessness.
* To end police violence, we must end policing as we know it.
* Timelapse video reveals massive size of New York City protests.
* Ferguson to Increase Police Ticketing to Close City’s Budget Gap.
* Point/counterpoint: Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia says torture is totally legit. Ex-NFL punter Chris Kluwe says maybe not.
* But what we do know is that the histories of slavery and of capitalism look very different if we understand them in relation to each other. The next time we walk the streets of Lower Manhattan or the grounds of Harvard University, we should think at least in passing of the millions of enslaved workers who helped make some of that grandeur possible, and to the ways that slavery’s legacy persists today.
* U.S. Schools Saying Goodbye to Foreign Languages. Horrible.
* Cruel optimism we can believe in: What if Democrats had their own Tea Party–esque rebellion? Why the Democratic Party could seriously change — for real, this time.
* Ever Say Never Again: On the History and Future of James Bond.
* Scientists think the Big Bang could’ve created a mirror universe where time flows backward.
* What are the bastards ruining now? Buffy.
* Is Studying Buffy the Vampire Slayer More Important Than Studying Shakespeare? I say teach the controversy.
* I think I would say Freddie is probably the worst possible spokesperson for the conversation the feminist left should be having in the wake of the Rolling Stone UVA scandal. But no one else seems to want to talk about it at all.
* Meanwhile, Matt Fraction walks away from Twitter.
* As recruitment dips, TFA leader says New York training site to close.
* The word you’re looking for is “racism.” Just say “racism.”
* The Real Story Of Apollo 17… And Why We Never Went Back To The Moon.
* A Tolkien true believer vs. the nerds.
* Hear Philip K. Dick Talk About SF And The Mainstream In 1976.
* Playboy ranks every Star Trek episodes. “Mirror, Mirror” at #3 is a deeply weird choice. And “Arena” at #6 is just insane.
* They did a TV movie where the McCallisters get divorced? Pretty dark, Home Alone!
* Portuguese Street Artist Creates Stunning 3D Graffiti That Seems To Float In The Air.
* The Hobbit: A Middle-Earth Workplace.
* Now it’s the Kindle version of Green Planets that has inexplicably gone on deep discount for the weekend, if you’re in the market. And don’t forget to pre-order The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction, out in January!
* And they say our society is no longer capable of achieving great things: This scientist solved the mystery of belly button lint.
Friday Morning Links!
* Candyland and the nature of the absurd. #academicjobmarket
* Why some studies make campus rape look like an epidemic while others say it’s rare. ‘1 in 5′: how a study of 2 colleges became the most cited campus sexual assault statistic. Study Challenges Notion That Risk of Sexual Assault Is Greater at College. Justice Dept.: 20% of Campus Rapes Reported to Police.
* University Of Missouri-St. Louis Says Ferguson Shooting Caused Enrollment Drop.
* Greenpeace sorry for Nazca lines stunt in Peru. Oh, okay then.
* 21st-Century Postdocs: (Still) Underpaid and Overworked.
* We asked a legal evidence expert if Serial’s Adnan Syed has a chance to get out of prison. Meanwhile, allow Matt Thompson to tell you how Serial is going to end a week in advance.
* Good news from Rome: “All Animals Go to Heaven.” I’m really glad we settled this.
* My new sabbatical plan: NASA Will Pay You $170 Per Day To Lie In Bed.
* UC Berkeley Lecturer Threatened For Offering Injured Student Protesters Extra Time On Papers. On university administrations and the surveillance state.
* CIA defenders are out in force now that a historic report has exposed a decade of horrific American shame. Torture didn’t work, but why aren’t the architects of torture in jail? Every discussion of this question begins from the false premise that the torturers were well-intentioned truth-seekers who “went too far.” The CIA knew, like everybody knows, that the point of torture is to extract confessions regardless of their truth. That’s why they did it.
* First, do no harm: Medical profession aided CIA torture.
* “Late in life, Michel Foucault developed a curious sympathy for neoliberalism.” A response from Peter Frase: Beyond the Welfare State.
* Also at Jacobin: Interstellar and reactionaries in space.
* Behold the nightmare Manhattan would become if everyone commuted by car.
* Why James Cameron’s Aliens is the best movie about technology.
* Why we can’t have nice things: Marvel Wanted Spider-Man For Captain America 3, But Sony Said No. But the next 21 Jump Street movie can cross over with Men in Black because life is suffering.
* 7 Terrible Lightsaber Designs From the Star Wars Expanded Universe. I love the guy who is just covered in lightsabers from head to toe.
* Censorship (Pasadena, California).
* The nation’s millionaires are #Ready4Hillary.
* Student athletes at public universities in Michigan would be prohibited from joining labor unions to negotiate for compensation and benefits under legislation the state House approved Tuesday.
* Meet The Oldest Living Things in the World.
* And this used to be a free country: One of two concealed gun permit holders involved in a rolling shootout down Milwaukee streets and freeways last year was turned down Thursday when he asked a judge to order the return of the gun seized after the incident.
Weekend Links!
* Huge congratulations to my colleague Larry Watson, three-time winner of the Wisconsin Library Association’s book of the year.
* How To Survive A Zombie Apocalypse According To Margaret Atwood.
* The climate deal with China is the distraction, Keystone XL is the grift. More unhappy news: China Is More Likely to Keep Its Climate Promise Than We Are.
* But Democratic super-billionaires will save us… by suing their pollsters. Yay?
* To end global poverty, we have to end global capitalism.
* United Kingdom universities are pioneering exciting new horizons in Mafia-style university management. Now to sell derivatives based on the proposition that the unis won’t able to pay back the money… now to force a situation where those derivatives pay off…
* Finishing a Humanities Dissertation in Six Years (or Less). There’s good advice here, though as I grousing on Twitter I don’t like the framing “with working relationships, marriage, health, finances, and sanity all still in good shape at the end.” These things are in many cases prerequisites for graduate work as much as they are things graduate study puts at risk; the “still” in that sentence is really crucial.
* More kids are getting hurt on playgrounds. Blame iPhones.
* Having just one drink doubles your risk of going to the E.R.
* Adjuncts at N.Y. College Are Fined $1,000 for Not Joining Weeklong Strike.
* Harvard to screw its adjuncts, just ’cause.
Rule of law watch!
* Why Does a Campus Police Department Have Jurisdiction Over 65,000 Chicago Residents?
* ‘Ready For War’: 1,000 Police Officers Mobilized In Advance Of Grand Jury Ruling In Ferguson.
* Police Killings in the US Are at a Two-Decade High.
* New Orleans Police Routinely Ignored Sex Crimes, Report Finds.
* In Alabama, a judge can override a jury that spares a murderer from the death penalty.
* Of course, it’s not just cops, every bureaucratic structure in America turns out to be toxic just beneath the surface: LA School District: Students Can Consent to Sex With Their Teachers.
* Harvard students take the 1964 Louisiana Literacy Test.
* Cosmonauts Used to Carry Insane Machete Guns In Space.
* These days, the idea of the cyborg is less the stuff of science fiction and more a reality, as we are all, in one way or another, constantly connected, extended, wired, and dispersed in and through technology. One wonders where the individual, the person, the human, and the body are—or, alternatively, where they stop. These are the kinds of questions Hélène Mialet explores in this fascinating volume, as she focuses on a man who is permanently attached to assemblages of machines, devices, and collectivities of people: Stephen Hawking.
* The amazing sculptures of Duane Hanson. Milwaukee Art Museum has a Hanson too.
* 200,000 brave and/or insane people have supposedly signed up for a one-way mission to Mars. But the truth about Mars One, the company behind the effort, is much weirder (and far more worrying) than anyone has previously reported.
* Against disability, kind of: Able-Bodied Until It Kills Us.
* Tarantino says he’s retiring.
* Poster for They Still Live. I’d watch it.
* Dogs Playing Dungeons & Dragons.
* And they say adults in America are infantilized: Underoos Are Back, Adult-Sized, And Better Than Ever!
* A Stunning Alt-History Map Showing A Completely Uncolonized Africa.
* DC in talks to let Michelle MacLaren take the blame for direct Wonder Woman. Good luck to her!
* SMBC: Prayer and the speed of light.
* And MetaFilter celebrates Asimov’s Foundation. Bonus Golden Age SF@MF! The Great Heinlein Juveniles, Plus The Other Two.
For His Unwavering Devotion to Weekend Links, Gerry Canavan Has Been Awarded the Nobel Prize for Linkblogging
* Every so often the Nobel Committee accidentally picks a genuinely deserving, genuinely inspiring recipient of the Peace Prize. This year was one. A 2013 profile of Malala Yousafzai. A speech to Pakistani Marxists. What did one Nobel laureate say to the other?
* Every so often the Supreme Court accidentally makes a good decision. Last night’s overturning of Wisconsin’s voter suppression law was one.
* What would the twentieth-century history of English studies look like if we had thought to preserve the records of our teaching? How could that history be different if we had institutional archives of syllabi, student notes, lecture drafts, handouts and seminar papers, just as we have archives of journal articles, drafts of novels, recordings of performances, and committee meeting minutes? What if universities had collected classroom documents alongside other records and traces of the knowledge they create and culture that they value?
* Another lovely Chomsky rant on the university.
So the university imposes costs on students and on faculty who are not only untenured but are maintained on a path that guarantees that they will have no security. All of this is perfectly natural within corporate business models. It’s harmful to education, but education is not their goal.
* Recent cuts have unfortunately made future cuts inevitable: The University of Wisconsin System is about to do some wholesale, strategic belt-tightening, according to its president. But it’s not all absolutely miserable news:
Regent Janice Mueller noted that of the $1.6 billion total paid to unclassified staff on UW campuses, faculty accounted for $550 million, leaving more than $1 billion going to non-faculty. “That seemed a little out of whack to me,” Mueller said. “I would think faculty salaries would be the larger share.”
I didn’t think Regents were allowed to notice things that like.
* The Excessive Political Power Of White Men In The United States, In One Chart.
* Phil Maciak on the greatness of Transparent.
* Why we need academic freedom: On Being Sued.
* Neoliberalism is the triumph of the state, not its retreat. The case of Mexico.
* On the cultural ideology of Big Data.
* It Would Actually Be Very Simple To End Homelessness Forever.
* It seems that all of Pearson’s critical foundational research and proven classroom results in the world couldn’t get the question 3 x 7 x 26 correct.
* Federal spending was lower this year than Paul Ryan originally asked for. Ha, take that Republicans! Another Obama-led triumph for the left!
* But things will be different once Obama finally becomes president. Obama Plans to Close Guantanamo Whether Congress Likes It Or Not.
* Nightmares: Could Enterovirus D68 Be Causing Polio-Like Paralysis in Kids?
* NYC airport workers walk off job, protesting lack of protection from Ebola risks.
* SF in everything: Malware needs to know if it’s in the Matrix.
* Lady Ghostbusters will be a reboot, almost assuredly a terrible one.
I love origin stories. That’s my favorite thing. I love the first one so much I don’t want to do anything to ruin the memory of that. So it just felt like, let’s just restart it because then we can have new dynamics. I want the technology to be even cooler. I want it to be really scary, and I want it to happen in our world today that hasn’t gone through it so it’s like, oh my God what’s going on?
* It’s happening again: Vastly Different Stories Emerging In Police Shooting Of St. Louis Teen. The Associated Press is On It:
* Teenagers in prison have a shockingly high suicide rate.
* Roger Ebert: The Collected Wikipedia Edits.
* The many faces of capitalism.
* The University of Wisconsin at Madison Police Department issued an apology Wednesday after a list of safety tips posted to the department’s website was criticized for appearing to blame victims of campus crimes, particularly survivors of sexual assault.
* What We Talk About When We Talk About Trigger Warnings.
* Today in theology: Europe’s history of penis worship was cast aside when the Catholic Church decided Jesus’s foreskin was too potent to control.
By the 15th century, the Holy Prepuce had become the desirous object of many mystics’ visions. Bridget of Sweden recorded the revelations she received from the Virgin Mary, who told the saint that she saved the foreskin of her son and carried it with her until her death. Catherine of Siena, the patron saint of Italy, imagined that her wedding ring—exchanged with the Savior in a mystical marriage—had been transmuted into the foreskin. In her Revelationes (c. 1310), Saint Agnes Blannbekin recounts the hours she spent contemplating the loss of blood the infant Christ must have suffered during the circumcision, and during one of her contemplative moments, while idly wondering what had become of the foreskin, she felt the prepuce pressed upon her tongue. Blannbekin recounted the sweet, intoxicating taste, and she attempted to swallow it. The saint found herself unable to digest the Holy Prepuce; every time she swallowed, it immediately reappeared on her tongue. Again and again she repeated the ritual until after a hundred gulps she managed to down the baby Jesus’ cover.
* Two Bad Tastes That Taste Bad Together: The US Doesn’t Have Enough Railroads to Keep Up With the Oil Boom.
* For some unfathomable reason somebody handed Cary Nelson another shovel: A Civility Manifesto.
* Another piece on the law and Tommy the Chimp.
* And maybe there are some doors we just shouldn’t open: I’m Slavoj Žižek, AMA.
Saturday Morning Links, Just Like When We Were Kids
* The Department of English invites applications for an entry-level, tenure-track Assistant Professor position in medieval literature, language, and culture, primarily British, before 1500. Marquette English is hiring!
* Maybe my new favorite page on the Internet: r/DaystromInstitute’s list of long-running Star Trek what-ifs and what-abouts.
* I think I’ve linked this thread before, at least a different version of it: “I want to see a sci fi universe where we’re actually considered one of the more hideous and terrifying species.”
* Syllabus as Manifesto: A Critical Approach to Classroom Culture.
* Creative Destruction: Tech and the evolution of the desk, 1985-2014.
* Bousquet breathes some fire: This change in appointment types is not accidental or caused by outside forces. The adjunctification of faculty appointment has been an intentional shock treatment by campus administrations. Of course, there may be some claims regarding saving money; however, most critical observers note that “saving” on $70,000 faculty salaries generates a vast, expensive need for $80,000- to $120,000-per-year accountants, IT staff members, and HR specialists, plus a few $270,000 associate provosts. Not to mention the $500,000 bonus awarded to the president for meeting the board’s permatemping target and successfully hiding the consequences from students, parents, and the public. It should be obvious to most of us that any money left over from bloating the administration is generally directed to consultants, construction, and business partnerships.
* The National Association of Colleges and Employers conducted a recent survey that questioned the correlation between internships and full employment upon graduation.The findings were astonishing. Hiring rates for those who had chosen to complete an unpaid internship (37%) were almost the same for those who had not completed any internship at all (35%). Students who had any history of a paid internship, on the other hand, were far more likely (63%) to secure employment.
* What’s wrong with college? Plenty. What’s wrong with journalism about college? Everything.
* Casinos are the autoimmune disease of city planning. They destroy everything else in the area, then die when the host is dead.
* From nuclear bombs to killer robots: how amoral technologies become immoral weapons.
* Preliminary Studies Show Potential Health Risk For Babies Born Near Fracking Sites.
* AAUP writes Chancellor Phyllis Wise over the Salaita firing.
* BREAKING: Elizabeth Warren won’t save us.
* Will Zephyr Teachout save us?
* Unskew the polls! Democratic Senate edition.
* Today in climate change neologisms: “Megadroughts.”
* California, before and after drought.
* The arc of history is long, but: “Doctor Who ‘lesbian-lizard’ kiss will not face investigation.”
* A unique experiment at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory has started collecting data that will answer some mind-bending questions about our universe—including whether we live in a hologram.
* Asst. Principal Fined for Changing His Son’s Failing Grades 11 Times. This story has everything:
According to the New York Daily News, Ali has been reassigned away from Bread and Roses, but has not been placed at a new school. He remains on the Department of Education’s payroll with a $104,437 annual salary.
…
The school, the Daily News reports, is expected to close by 2016 for poor performance.
* Study suggests autism rates have plateaued since 1990.
* ALS Foundation floats trademarking the concept of an “ice bucket challenge,” but immediately gets talked out of it.
* Thoughtcrime watch: Dorchester County discovers one of its teachers is a novelist, completely flips its wig.
* Fox developing a drama about a world without sleep.
* The inexorable march of progress: This Cheap Exoskeleton Lets You Sit Wherever You Want Without a Chair.
* Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker: What’s the point of studying history?
* The Politics Of Every Major U.S. Religion, In One Chart. Way to claim the vital center, Catholics!
* The 12 Most Obnoxious Dungeons & Dragons Monsters.
* Suddenly I’m up on top of the world: They’re rebooting Greatest American Hero.
* An Annotated Reading Of Multiversity #1.
* How the growing generation gap is changing the face of fandom.
* A eulogy for Twitter. Twitter as misery factory.
* Give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man.
* If you want a vision of the future, imagine Mitt Romney running for president, forever.
* Why Aren’t Women Advancing At Work? Ask a Transgender Person.
* And just this once, everybody lives: Family Cleans House, Finds Pet Tortoise Missing Since 1982.
