Gerry Canavan's Blog, page 4

New Year, New Pandemic Links

Depressingly relevant New Years cartoon from exactly 100 years ago, at the end of our previous deadly pandemic. pic.twitter.com/aE3HBnwqgF

— Derf Backderf (@DerfBackderf) December 31, 2021

* Brace for Omicron. Wisconsin COVID-19 case counts matching levels not seen since November 2020. Omicron is spreading at lightning speed. Scientists are trying to figure out why. Where are hospitals overwhelmed by COVID-19 patients? Look up your state. After Vaccines: Where Covid Death Rates Have Risen. Omicron Is Pushing America Into Soft Lockdown. “Things will likely get worse, experts warn.” As Omicron Looms, These Colleges Will Start Their January Classes Online. Junior year. You don’t say. In this Midwestern diner, patrons are sticking with coronavirus.

It’s honestly amazing that the CDC released guidelines lowering the time you have to isolate after COVID and the only stated reason was “well, too many people were getting sick”

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 28, 2021

not great https://t.co/EI0JJ53Q3B

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 3, 2022

* The pandemic killed so many dialysis patients that their total number shrunk for the first time in nearly half a century.
* Flood of Creative Works Enter the Public Domain on Jan. 1.

https://t.co/IAQPLJRZ6C pic.twitter.com/A6S0mYQdrv

— Chris Kohler (@kobunheat) December 24, 2021

Please note that Disney’s depiction of Winnie the Pooh is still under copyright. It’s the character from the books that entered the public domain.

Red shirt on the bear, artists beware. If nude he be, your Pooh is free.

— Tim X. Price (@timxprice) January 3, 2022

winniethepoohraunchysexcomedy.xxxversion.20220101draft.v3.docx

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 1, 2022

* Absolutely beautiful, don’t even care if it’s true.

succinct explanation for why all the people who said online isn’t the future of higher ed were 100% right https://t.co/emMVfKMn9e

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 29, 2021

Universities and the ideals they stand for die when you starve departments based on engineered crises and then create a discretionary slush fund that exists entirely outside faculty control.

— Philip Rocco (@PhilipRocco) December 24, 2021

obviously going online mitigates (some of) the harms from teaching but the only way to truly help our most disadvantaged students is to abolish education altogether https://t.co/MKTBzFzkPT

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 30, 2021

* How Will the History Books Remember 2021?
* Retired general recommends wargaming potential coup scenarios. That’s just prudent!
* America’s Electoral Future. What elections?
* Redistricting is Going Surprisingly Well for Democrats. Oh, honey.
* The Twitter Putsch. The Big Lie.
* John Roberts, Democratic hero. Joe Biden Has Been Very Good for the Military-Industrial Complex.
* Milwaukee ranks 2nd in poverty level among top 50 most-populated cities in U.S.
* Non-Mortgage Household Debt in the United States, 2003-2022.
* Fast-Moving Wildfires Burn Hundreds of Homes in Denver Area. ‘We Are in a Climate Emergency.’
* ‘The Fuse Has Been Blown,’ and the Doomsday Glacier Is Coming for Us All. The climate apocalypse is real, and it is coming. The trap of climate optimism.

I was thinking about the climate and the "it doesn't even feel like Christmas" tweet and then I remembered this off-the-cuff answer I gave to a Q&A a few years back that has haunted me ever since https://t.co/uGdbY5etlG

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 24, 2021

yikes https://t.co/xaGcMuVhaA

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 3, 2022

* We stan.
* We’re preparing for apocalypse wrong — and that could make things even worse. What The Marvel Movies Don’t Say About The End Of The World.

But taken together, at the 100,000-foot level, the fact that each property is basically about someone doing what they were doing anyway, then having to deal with some new iteration of surreal but familiar external forces invading, and never having any time to really think about what it all means because the next thing is already happening, as it turns out — now that we really do live in a notable historical period of continual surreal events that could make you question the foundations of society — everyone has to continue doing what they were doing anyway when the world is ending, and you’ll never have that much time to think about what it all means because the demands of the next thing will be upon you.

What does it feel like when the world ends? It just feels like aliens invading until something else happens.

* The Subversive Playfulness of the ‘The Matrix.’ ‘The Matrix Resurrections’ captures the real crisis of our post-truth era. ‘The Matrix Resurrections’ Is the Anti-sequel Sequel. The Matrix Resurrections is a messy triumph. Too many movies right now are “about trauma.” The Matrix Resurrections actually does the work. Why trans fans connect to ‘The Matrix’. On the Matrix Resurrections. Blank Check. Even Neo Can’t Log Off.

Even putting the oddness with the actor who played Tank aside, you still have the reboot doing multiple very weird, sidelining things with the Morpheus character, arguably the most iconic of the core three and the heart of the first movie, and don't even get me started on Niobe.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 25, 2021

.@GriffLightning and @davidlsims had some reflections on the latest @blankcheckpod on Zoom life as a sort of uncanny and exhausting performance of what used to “come naturally” that I think could be really valuable for teachers wondering why the last two years have felt so bad.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 2, 2022

pic.twitter.com/gOXoNA8Bsp

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 2, 2022

change my mind pic.twitter.com/pbF8PmJade

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 27, 2021

* Another person discovers the terrible truth about jazz in the Star Wars universe.
* The case against the trauma plot.
* Placement games were 2021’s most calming trend. Black Games Studies.
* LARB’s top-ten most-read of 2021.
* The Radical James Baldwin.
* The End of Neoliberalism in Chile?
* Space Colonists Will Likely Resort to Cannibalism, Scientist Says. Henry Kissinger: AI Will Prompt Consideration of What it Means to Be Human.
* Routine Maintenance: Embracing habit in an automated world.
* Why am I being hurt?
* The Judge Rotenberg Center, a Massachusetts school, still uses electric shock therapy to punish disabled students. How can an entire field of mental health accept this as fine?
* Death Drive Nation.
* I’m older than Frasier. I’m older than Cliff Claven.
* Behold: Star Trek: Coda.
* What are you doing? Listen to Man Bites Dog.
* And the news just gets worse: Exercise necessary for older people later in life, study says.

IN & OUT FOR 2022

out: complaining about how individual years are bad, pretending you believe in astrology

in: overthrowing capitalism, pretending you believe birth-order determines destiny

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 1, 2022

Don’t Look Up (2021) pic.twitter.com/Kz1AuFof4D

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 29, 2021

what I think my classes are like / what they’re actually like pic.twitter.com/mc2hvJPSUN

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 24, 2021

pic.twitter.com/cuw0SJMHHH

— mike (@kurtruslfanclub) December 31, 2021

pic.twitter.com/Ng0Wn7vvJB

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 24, 2021

Lost Semester Linkblogging!

For a variety of reasons, this was an extremely busy semester, and I simply wasn’t able to keep up with my open tabs (I had several hundred open at one point!). An irrecoverable browser crash killed any possibility of ever doing even an omnibus record of what I’ve been reading and thinking about — but I do have a tiny number of highlights from the semester that I will link here just to close the book on it. I’m hopeful, if not exactly optimistic, that I can get back to a more regular update schedule in the spring…

Apologies!

The podcast will also be coming back too for the end of the Achebe season! Stay tuned.

New issues of Science Fiction Film and Television, Extrapolation, and SFRA Review. SFRA 2022 in Oslo!No Need for Cuts: Marquette University’s Own Audits Confirm the Results of AAUP’s Independent Analysis. Austerity Is Not a Jesuit Value. The Triumph of the Money Managers. The Failure of Financialized Higher Ed. The Ivy League’s Legitimacy Crisis. Uncovering $265M in Rutgers athletics debt. RCM budgeting, a failure hiding in plain sight.The Secret Lives of Adjunct Professors.

the personal and professional incentive structures that reward university presidents are linked to basically everything *but* the actual performance of the university they administer https://t.co/WBJbFwctZr

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 13, 2021

So you want to go to graduate school in the humanities?The Mysterious Case of the Nonsense Papers.Marquette students create map showcasing Indigenous history of Milwaukee landmarks.White Utopia: How a Segregated Milwaukee Created the Arrogance of Suburbia.The Political Theology of Watchmen.Diagnosing Billy Pilgrim: On Tom Roston’s ‘The Writer’s Crusade.’Kim Stanley Robinson: The Best-Case Scenario You Can Still Believe In. “You Need to Use Hope like a Club to Beat Your Opponent.” Kim Stanley Robinson on Climate Change and Fiction. Kim Stanley Robinson on Science Fiction and Reclaiming Science for the Left. Possible Worlds. How We Put Out the Fire.The Second Coming of Octavia E. ButlerThe United States is now averaging a billion-dollar disaster every 20 days.Earth is getting a black box to record events that lead to the downfall of civilization.Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings: Return of the King needed one more ending: The case for the Scouring of the Shire.Why Are We Stuck Here: “Squid Game,” Trauma, and Repetition.2021 Pinnacle Awards: The Cyborg Jillian Weise, Tallahassee.Notes toward a theory of the Dad Thriller.If you’ve been looking for the right moment to get into Gloomhaven, the digital version is great and on sale right now.Muppet corner: 1 2 3 4 5And they’re baaaaaack.

[the Ring of Power is destroyed in the fires of Mt. Doom, causing the armies of Mordor to scatter on the wind and the dread tower of Barad-dûr to collapse, with Sauron himself turning to dust, the final fate of all wicked things]

ARAGORN (Chris Pratt): well, THAT happened https://t.co/zJ5IztKflu

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 11, 2021

it’s the 2020s now pic.twitter.com/eWmWBvYdSg

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 22, 2021

another world is possible pic.twitter.com/AioTP5zlwZ

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 25, 2021

SFFTV Call for Reviewers

SFFTV is looking for reviewers for a few recent books:

Becky Bartlett’s BADFILM: INCOMPETENCE, INTENTION, FAILUREhttps://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-badfilm.html

Jayna Brown, BLACK UTOPIAS: SPECULATIVE LIFE AND THE MUSIC OF OTHER WORLDShttps://www.dukeupress.edu/black-utopias

Arthur Krker and Marilouise Kroger, TECHNOLOGIES OF THE NEW REAL: VIRAL CONTAGION AND DEATH OF THE SOCIALhttps://utorontopress.com/9781487540227/technologies-of-the-new-real/

Michael Pitts, ALTERNATIVE MASCULINITIES IN FEMINIST SPECULATIVE FICTION
https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781793636614/Alternative-Masculinities-in-Feminist-Speculative-Fiction-A-New-Man

Robert Yeates, AMERICAN CITIES IN POST-APOCALYPTIC SCIENCE FICTIONhttps://www.uclpress.co.uk/products/178921

Contact Gerry Canavan (gerrycanavan@gmail.com) if you are interested!

Grad School Achebe #8: “The Voter”

The long-anticipated to The Many Saints of Newark bonus episode is finally here: “The Voter”!

GSA #7: A MAN OF THE PEOPLE!

Gerry and Aaron talk about what may be their favorite Achebe novel yet, A Man of the People, originally published in 1966. Also they try to figure out whether or not America had a coup.

Spring 2022 Courses!

Marquette’s English department has put up its course descriptions for the spring, which you can find here: https://www.marquette.edu/english/courses-offered-spring-2022.php

Here are mine!

ENGLISH 4762/5762: Neuroscience and Literature
101 TuTh 9:30-10:45 Professor Gerry Canavan

Course Title: Disability and Narrative

Course Description: From the Shakespearean soliloquy (famously credited by Yale’s Harold Bloom with “the invention of the human” as such) to James Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness narration, and beyond, literature has long been fascinated by the inner workings of the mind, and the so-called “cognitive turn” in literary studies of the 2000s created a vast subfield devoted to understanding these representations with more specificity and in more detail. Marquette’s new “Neuroscience and Literature” course, included in the Cognitive Science interdisciplinary major, draws on this critical archive to explore how literature understands consciousness, particularly in the way literature has posited disability and neurodivergence. Narratives about disability follow predictable and often quite hurtful patterns, typically centering compulsory optimism around concepts like “cure” and “inspiration,” or else fixating on inexorable decline—but emerging narratives about neurodivergence also register the efforts of social and political movements to expand awareness about the lives of people whose minds and brains are not neurotypical, and to change social structures, especially in education and medicine, in order to improve the quality of those lives. In literary terms, representing neurodiversity raises questions such as: What narrative strategies do writers use to represent various ways of perceiving the world? What are autistic voices, or amnesiac voices, Tourettic voices, sociopathic voices? Do these differ, and in what ways, from so-called neurotypical voices? How do fictional voices compare to autobiographical ones? How does centering neurodivergence impact the way we tell and understand stories? Modules in the course will pair scientific and therapeutic writing with literary examples that center the lived experiences of disabled people. 

Readings: The final reading list is still being developed, but this semester’s reading list will likely focus on autism, Huntington’s disease, addiction, and depression. Readings will be balanced among fiction, memoir/nonfiction, popular science writing, and literary and philosophical theory around disability studies. Interested students are invited to contact the instructor in advance of registration to discuss material that will be studied in the course.

Assignments: Enthusiastic class discussion; two papers and one final project; online discussion posts; presentations 

ENGLISH 4717/5717: Comics
101 TuTh 11:00-12:30 Professor Gerry Canavan

Course Title: Comics as Literature
Fulfills English Major Requirement:  Post-1900
Discovery Tier: Cognition, Memory, and Intelligence

Course Description: This course surveys the history and reception of comics and graphic narrative since 1945. We will explore the history of the comics form from its origins to the present moment, watching as the medium shifts from a predominantly American, predominantly male fixation on the superhero towards an increasingly popular international art movement crossing gender, class, and ethnic lines. What are comics today, and who are they for—and why, as Thierry Groensteen has pointedly asked, are comics still in search of cultural legitimization? As in previous instances of the course, we will consider science fictional and superheroic comics alongside high literary novels and confessional autobiographies to gain a full understanding of the medium and its possibilities. In addition to studying comics as literary scholars, along the way we will also consider alternative modes of comics reception, including the great comic book panic of the 1950s, the underground “hippie” counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, film and television adaptation, and Internet fandom today.

Readings: I will poll the class for their particular interests once registration is done but core texts I have taught in this course in the past include Warren Ellis and John Cassady’s Planetary; Mark Millar and Dave Johnson’s Superman: Red Son; G. Willow Wilson, Jacob Wyatt, and Adrian Alphona’s Ms. Marvel; Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead; Art Spiegelman’s Maus I and II; Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home; Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth and Building Stories; Ben Passmore’s “Your Black Friend”; Marjane Satrapi’s The Complete Persepolis; David Mazzuchelli’s Asterios Polyp; Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon’s Daytripper; and Richard McGuire’s Here. I am, of course, always open to suggestions of new texts.

Assignments: Enthusiastic class discussion; two papers and one final project; online discussion posts; presentations

Grad School Achebe #6: ARROW OF GOD!

We are all but faulty microphones in the podcast of an angry God! Grad School Achebe is back with its very-long-awaited discussion of Arrow of God:

Thanks to Aaron Bady for his absolutely heroic efforts to recover the audio from this nearly lost episode and thanks to all of you for your grace and forgiveness on the sound quality. In this one we close out the so-called African Trilogy with Arrow of God — lots of religion talk for all you religion-heads, and a lot more to talk about besides…

Next week: A Man of the People!

Grad School Sopranos #0: THE MANY SAINTS OF NEWARK

We’ve had some audio problems with the Arrow of God episode, which Aaron is working hard on and which should be out soon very soon. In the meantime, please enjoy this emergency b-b-b-b-b-b-bonus episode of our brand-new season that is absolutely not a one-off joke, all about The Many Saints of Newark…

Brand New Semester, Same Old Pandemic

I’ve finally beaten my syllabi into shape for the semester:

ENGLISH 3241: “Crafting the Short Story” (my summer/J-term lit/creative writing hybrid, now in person!)

ENGLISH 4716/5716: “Classics of Science Fiction” (featuring Slaughterhouse-Five, The Female Man, Kindred, Ted Chiang, The Fifth Season, and a NCAA-style tournament to determine which 1980s SF movie we’re going to watch instead of reading Neuromancer)

Comments and suggestions welcome, as always!

Just Another Monday Morning, Just Another Set of Monday Morning Links

Grad School Achebe #5 is up! This one is on “Chike’s School Days,” “The Sacrificial Egg,” and “Akueke,” two stories in which singularly nothing happens (and also “Akueke”). Check it out!Coming to Marquette in 2022: J.R.R. Tolkien: The Art of the Manuscript! I’ll be teaching a course in relation to this exhibit.Fellowships at the Käte Hamburger Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-apocalyptic Studies (CAPAS) 2022-23.Fighting for the humanities at church-related colleges.We Asked, You Answered: Your 50 Favorite Sci-Fi And Fantasy Books Of The Past Decade.Cixin Liu novels coming to comic books.A Dazzling Octavia E. Butler Biography Explores the Sci-Fi Legend’s Early Life.In games, the environmental crisis is just another bedtime story. SimCity wasn’t built for the climate crisis. These games are. Kim Stanley Robinson: a climate plan for a world in flames. Activists Call It A ‘False Solution.’ But UN Scientists Say We Need To Suck Up CO2. Rewriting the Ecological Imagination. Imagining the climate-proof home in the US: using the least energy possible from the cleanest sources. In a First, U.S. Declares Shortage on Colorado River, Forcing Water Cuts. The best books about the post-human Earth. And we talk a lot around here about ideology at its purest, but folks…

Kim Stanley Robinson: ”We are in terrible trouble, and not everyone agrees that we are; never will everyone agree on this, even though droughts and fires, storms and floods, are coming faster than ever.” https://t.co/I3Nrqm1wFK

— Jonatan Hildén (@jhilden) August 23, 2021

Athens Is Only Getting Hotter. Its New ‘Chief Heat Officer’ Hopes to Cool It Down.Everything You Need to Know About What’s Happening in Afghanistan. The Afghanistan Debacle: How Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden Bamboozled the American Public. The War in Afghanistan Was a Scam. Cable News Military Experts Are On the Defense Industry Dole. What percentage of your life the U.S. has been at war, by birth year. Meanwhile. The long durée. Here we go again!UWM clears 5 million dollars in student debt using stimulus funds. College sports injected with millions in federal COVID funds.

Universities used COVID relief funds to subsidize athletic department lost revenue aka pay the salaries of people not actually doing athletic work.https://t.co/TPffiist9V pic.twitter.com/RtjXE35htx

— Nathan Kalman-Lamb (@nkalamb) August 20, 2021

Inside Mississippi’s 4th Covid wave: Younger patients, crying nurses and 7 ICU beds left. Alabama Hospitals Have Run Out Of ICU Beds As COVID-19 Cases Surge. Children hospitalized with COVID-19 in U.S. hits record number. “We Are Running a Giant Experiment on Children”: Covid Deniers Put Kids at Risk. Study suggests young children most likely to spread COVID at home to family members. Why Is It Taking So Long to Get Kids the Vaccine? Go Ahead, Vaccinate the Kids. The Deeply Unfair Question Parents Must Answer. New School Year, Same Old Covid Chaos. Parents are not okay. Here we go again.

In seven states, hospitalizations from Covid-19 have passed their previous peaks because of the surge in cases this summer.

There are few signs that the rise in hospitalizations is slowing nationally. https://t.co/XrFm7pJTky pic.twitter.com/2UUmKXrU4C

— The New York Times (@nytimes) August 17, 2021

Your Pandemic Sadness Is Called ‘Ambiguous Loss’. The coronavirus is here forever.Those Anti-Covid Plastic Barriers Probably Don’t Help and May Make Things Worse.‘No concept of how awful it was’: the forgotten world of pre-vaccine childhood in Australia.As evictions rise, people may have to give up their pets. Animal shelters are calling for help.‘Like fire through dry grass’: Documenting the Cuomo administration’s cover-up of a nursing home nightmare.Superhuman workloads cannot become the new normal.

the blip remains a great metaphor for coronavirus and associated phenomena of denial and deliberate forgetting, and all completely by accident https://t.co/Z7M6MC6UAJ

— flglmn (@flglmn) August 21, 2021

The reopening challenge. When to go remote. Where is the university? Public Education Is Set Up to Fail in the Pandemic.Feds Deliberately Targeted BLM Protesters To Disrupt The Movement, A Report Says.South Dakota DOE removed Indigenous topics from social studies standards before final draft.Hospitals and Insurers Didn’t Want You to See These Prices. Here’s Why.How David Foster Wallace Used Compromise Aesthetics to Sell Infinite Jest.The Board Game Pandemic: Cooperative Sociotechnical Imaginaries Obscuring Power Relations.The meaning of the Paris Commune.“A Smile With Sharp Teeth”: Mike Richards’s Rise to ‘Jeopardy!’ Host Sparks Questions About His Past. Critic’s Notebook: A ‘Jeopardy!’ Host Search So Blundered It Almost Feels Intentional. Before Jeopardy! Can Choose Its Next Host, It Needs to Decide Who Its Audience Is.A Chair Reviews The Chair.7 Thrillers About the Dark Side of Academia.How to Fix the Jobs Crisis. The Groves of Academe Are Always on Fire.

It's critical to the future of U.S. higher education that we put it this plainly: (1) The typical college professor is an adjunct. (2) The typical adjunct doesn't make a living wage. https://t.co/Dl9FncWfN2

— Jonathan Wilson (@jnthnwwlsn) August 7, 2021

I mean if I’m being *real* the Paw Patrol movie’s depiction of traumatized children trying to bring to justice the malignant politicians who have brought climate disaster to their city might have more relevance to the 21st century than anything on THE CHAIR.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 22, 2021

Teaching Classic Lit Helps Game Designers Make Better Stories. See? I’m HELPING.[98] Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Field Experiment About Dishonesty.

Say what you will about the discipline of English but my analysis of science fiction texts (they are about how socialism is good) is universally valid across all time and space

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 19, 2021

Attack of the Superweeds.Tracing the Crisis of Desertification to Colonization.Why Transphobia Is at the Heart of the White Power Movement.Bill Aims To Change North Carolina’s Reputation As The Place For Adults To Marry Kids.The left eats itself, Current Affairs edition.

if it’s good enough for universities it should be good enough for journalists https://t.co/ywbDk4jJbg

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 18, 2021

Stanley Aronowitz Knew That Freedom Begins Where Work Ends.Why I’m Ditching Grades This Semester: Saying goodbye to a 120-year-old failed technology.The Bob Dylan sex abuse lawsuit. His tour schedule is now at the core of this.The Fierce Legal Battle at the Heart of the Fight Over Reclining Airline Seats.Berlant v Jameson: Dawn of Justice.OnlyFans to shut down in November.The most thrilling film I’ve seen in years.It’s a bop.

sources confirm it is a bop pic.twitter.com/8NkGuaG6DV

— sara david (@SaraQDavid) August 16, 2021