Gerry Canavan's Blog, page 6
May 24, 2021
Monday Morning Links!
* The era of high fertility is ending. Every child on their own trampoline. Police-Free Childhoods. The Seismic Generational Shift in Worldview: Millennials Seek a Nation Without God, Bible and Churches.
* Selfies, Surgeries And Self-Loathing: Inside The Facetune Epidemic.
* The empty brain. Your brain does not process information, retrieve knowledge or store memories. In short: your brain is not a computer.
* My theory, Philip K. Dick style, is that we didn’t survive the Cold War. All the evidence points that way.
* We still know basically knowing about COVID policy.
* Life Under Occupation: The Misery at the Heart of the Conflict.
* An interview with Emily Wilder, recent Stanford grad fired from AP job over criticisms of Israel.
* Science Fiction and Fantasy by Palestinian Authors.
* They tried to overturn the 2020 election. Now they want to run the next one. Republicans Move to Limit a Grass-Roots Tradition of Direct Democracy. 27 possible voter fraud cases in 3 million Wisconsin ballots. What if the Renegade Arizona Audit Declares Trump Won? Republicans Want You To Forget January 6 Ever Happened.
* Some Republicans may talk the talk, but this one walks the walk.
an entire social movement relentlessly opposed to *vaccination* is just the bleakest possible shit https://t.co/GW20bAAjgY
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 23, 2021
This is an interesting point. In retrospect, an early harbinger of GOP radicalization was the refusal to raise the debt limit as a point of leverage against Obama. We also see this tendency now in the refusal to seat Dems who win elections. And the debt limit is coming up again. https://t.co/a3tN1twPtl
— Greg Sargent (@ThePlumLineGS) May 22, 2021
* How UFO sightings went from joke to national security worry in Washington. How Washington Got Hooked on Flying Saucers.
* California climate refugees. Indigenous Land Management Is The Solution to the Wildfire Crisis. World’s largest iceberg, nearly four times size of New York City, forms in Antarctica. If these trends continue…
Occupied bald eagle nests in Wisconsin. 1974 vs 2019. Growth credited to the Clean Water Act pic.twitter.com/nKOiwMTjpM
— Epic Maps(@Locati0ns) May 19, 2021
* Indigenous Cinema and the Limits of Auteurism.
* How could anyone doubt it? “Generous” Billionaires Are Part of the Problem.
* Rebellion in the Faculty Lounge. For Colleges, Vaccine Mandates Often Depend on Which Party Is in Power. Why Did a University Suspend Its Mandatory Diversity Course? Conservatives Control Public Higher Education: UNC Chapel Hill Edition. What is at stake with Nikole Hannah-Jones being denied tenure. The Real Reason UNC–Chapel Hill Is Withholding Tenure From Nikole Hannah-Jones. A Statement from the UNC AAUP. Guess Who’s Coming to the Lecture?
This morning I am trying to understand how the humanities can be irrelevant and obsolete and also simultaneously a recurring and seemingly irresistible site for partisan intervention by donors, politicians, pundits, and boards of trustees.
— Matthew Kirschenbaum (@mkirschenbaum) May 21, 2021
* ‘I am seeking justice’: Tulsa massacre survivor, 107, testifies to US Congress.
* Decolonizing Education: A Conversation with Linda Tuhiwai Smith.
* #ReleaseTheSteinbeckWerewolfThing.
* Has science fiction become too serious? Apocalypse movies need to imagine climate solutions, too.
* Bring on the Forgotten Realms!
* Bring on the Summer Slowdown!
* And I think I linked this one before, but we’re in the endgame now.
May 20, 2021
Thursday Links!
* Call for Papers: Trans-Indigenous Science Fictions. CFP: Activism and Resistance at the London Science Fiction Research Community. And don’t forget about the mini-ICFA in October!
* In a lousy year, Phil Wegner’s Invoking Hope was something that made me feel really good about the work I do, and gave me hope for the possibilities of the university (despite its managers). Read my review at Ancillary Review of Books!
* On the other side of things: The Hopeless University: Intellectual Work at the end of The End of History.
* The New Republic has another review of the Butler LOA volume.
* Science Fiction & … Economic Crisis! with Sherryl Vint, Hugh O’Connell, and Malka Older.
* While I’m recommending stuff: my 21C students loved Zadie Smith’s 2020 mini-memoir Intimations — it was their favorite book of the semester — and I’ve had great fun playing Clank: Legacy and Scooby Doo: Escape from the Haunted Mansion with my third-grader lately.
* I also wanted to buy every game listed in this fun YouTube study of Tomb of Horrors, because I’m just that game-crazed right now.
* Gloomhaven sequel Frosthaven will change to address cultural bias.
* Teen Vogue: Colleges are right-wing institutions.
Conservatives continually cite statistics suggesting that college professors lean to the left. But those who believe a university’s ideological character can be discerned by surveying the political leanings of its faculty betray a fundamental misunderstanding of how universities work. Partisan political preferences have little to do with the production of academic knowledge or the day-to-day workings of the university — including what happens in classrooms. There is no “Democrat” way to teach calculus, nor is there a “Republican” approach to teaching medieval English literature; anyone who has spent time teaching or studying in a university knows that the majority of instruction and scholarship within cannot fit into narrow partisan categories. Moreover, gauging political preferences of employees is an impoverished way of understanding the ideology of an institution. To actually do so, you must look at who runs it — and in the case of the American university, that is no longer the professoriate.
* new demographic cliff just dropped
* First the U. of Vermont Announced Cuts. Then Enrollment Spiked. Now What?
* North Carolina schools are re-segregating. A Wisconsin county completely loses its shit at the very idea of equality.
* The shocking MOVE bombing was part of a broader pattern of anti-Black racism.
* Can Climate Fiction Writers Reach People in Ways That Scientists Can’t?
* Cory Doctorow has been having some 
threads on Twitter lately: 1, 2, 3…
* The Secret Life of Deesha Philyaw (or, why we need university presses).
* How Much Money Do Authors Actually Earn?
* Krakoa as libertarian haven. A Clockwork Orange and #MeToo. Fear of a Black Superhero. Putting an animated series on the blockchain seems like a Rick and Morty bit, doesn’t it? Apparently the Brontës all died so early because they spent their lives drinking graveyard water.
* For some Navy pilots, UFO sightings were an ordinary event: ‘Every day for at least a couple years.’
yeah I mean I like science fiction too but if the US government is pushing UFOs this hard it’s probably because they found a way to turn orphans into spy satellites and don’t want anyone to know https://t.co/6JxiRFXUuD
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 19, 2021
* Ominous: Alien life looks more and more likely. Catholics are ready.
* Africans in Space: The Incredible Story of Zambia’s Afronauts.
* The Strange Story of Dagobert, the “DuckTales” Bandit.
* Randall Kennedy and Eugene Volokh have the case for allowing the use of the n-word and other slurs in the classroom.
The concept of “hard cases making bad law” applies very strongly here. Just because you can craft the intellectual case for why it’s okay to mention a slur in quotation doesn’t mean it’s actually a good idea or useful in most or any pedagogical contexts.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 16, 2021
* they say your first Amazon order defines your future
*
* At only $20,000/month, you’d be a fool NOT to rent it.
they say your first Amazon order defines your future pic.twitter.com/azRaEp28W1
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 16, 2021
* Just 12 People Are Behind Most Vaccine Hoaxes On Social Media, Research Shows.
* How the world missed more than half of all Covid-19 deaths. Is this the end?
* Meet the Nun Who Wants You to Remember You Will Die. No, I don’t think I want to!
* Decolonization is not a metaphor. Imperialism: A Syllabus.
* But on the miracles and wonders beat: 1st Group Enrolled in Trial of uniQure’s AMT-130 Gene Therapy for Huntington’s Disease.
I've never trusted Klingons, and I never will. They have no startup or innovation culture
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 16, 2021
solidarity with our brave comrades the Mongolian vampires pic.twitter.com/IXJH3SQ1WC
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 14, 2021
The key to respectability in this culture is pretending you don’t understand the obvious truth about what is going on.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 18, 2021
man, I wish I’d seen this yesterday pic.twitter.com/D25mGZpZfz
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 18, 2021
May 13, 2021
Thursday Night Links!
this is a great blog post that also clarified for me why as a grad student I've always experienced teaching as something physically and emotionally draining: I have never been provided the material tools and space to do the job as well as I ethically feel obligated to https://t.co/vwwkpNU9ua
— Jeffrey Moro (@jeffreymoro) May 11, 2021
reverse tenure, administrators aren’t allowed to leave unless faculty and staff agree they did a good job https://t.co/Nlyi5wMgN3
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 12, 2021
Journal of Posthumanism has launched. CFP for issue two!Failed state watch: Target to Halt Pokémon Card Sales ‘Out of an Abundance of Caution.’some personal news: I’m leaving academia https://t.co/XGWSpnbCGG
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 12, 2021
Elsewhere in my failed state: Wauwatosa PD’s high value target internal investigation.You and me both, kid. Bunny, the dog that can “talk,” starts asking existential questions. These days, he argues, most of Israel’s leadership falls into what he terms the “annexation” camp or the “control” camp. Israel’s Violence Shows Why Now Is the Time for BDS. The end of the green line.This is a land of peace, love, justice, and no mercy. Breaking. NBC News confirms: The CDC will announce that Americans who are fully vaccinated against COVID no longer need to wear masks or physically distance, indoors or outdoors in almost all circumstances. Elsewhere on the COVID beat: a hilarious troll. A century of research has demonstrated how poverty and discrimination drive disease. Can COVID push science to finally address the issue?Drastic as the decision may seem, particularly given that Pokémon cards aren’t the only things people wait in line for hours to buy, it comes days following a fight in a Brookfield, Wisconsin Target’s parking lot in which four people attacked a man, who then pulled his legally-owned gun on his assailants, prompting them to flee before later being arrested by the police. Target’s decision also comes just weeks after the company implemented new policies to curtail people camping out overnight at their stores. Beyond telling people not to line up like this, an asked them to consider calling the police in order to force people to disperse.
The Real Reason Behind the Misinformation Epidemic in Online Moms’ Groups.A GOP Civil War? Don’t Bet On It.Joe Manchin’s surprisingly bold proposal to fix America’s voting rights problem. Reminds me a certain other Joe…The pandemic is the pinnacle of social media content because petty differences of manners and judgment became not just “political” but a Matter of Life and Death — at the precise moment no one was allowed to do anything *but* sit in their house and doomscroll.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 12, 2021
Humans Need to Create Interspecies Money to Save the Planet. Only if it turns out after a few years that it’s made up of ground-up animals and after a few more years of transactions will take up all the biomass of Planet Earth!The Intelligent Forest.2050 Is Closer Than 1990.How the computer broke the human body.Once more for safety, the Problem of Susan.Untitled Earth Sim 64.Who Should John Mulaney Be Now?Dark Souls in the dark night of the soul.Cory Doctorow mega-thread on The Ministry for the Future.All of man’s dreams turn to ash: The Jenga sublime. The only CEO I trust.Even if You Think Discussing Aliens Is Ridiculous, Just Hear Me Out.reminds me of when Joe Lieberman tried to scuttle Obamacare by cynically proposing a Medicare buy-in and then had to walk it back after the weekend after everyone agreed https://t.co/TcU0OuRrRv
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 13, 2021
May 11, 2021
Ceremonial End of the Semester Tab Purge and Semi-Annual Apology for Being So Busy
this one hits a bit too close to home https://t.co/qhnjuEB5CQ
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 24, 2021
Between my research, service obligations, Zoom teaching, the kids’ virtual schooling, and getting a new puppy, I’ve been just incredibly busy. Another man might say: hey, this is the perfect opportunity to let the blog you’ve been updating continuously since 2004 die! But I am no ordinary man...
First, just a few things I’ve been doing:
I spoke with Sherryl Vint and Kim Stanley Robinson at UCR on the subject of “Science Fiction and Climate Crisis.” It was a fun talk!I spoke with Nisi Shawl, Irenosen Okojie and Shahidha Bari about Octavia Butler on the BBC, which was an amazing experience.I also spoke with Nisi about Fledgling at the Rosenbach Library, but I don’t think the video from that one has gone up yet.We did an interview for the Library of America site, too!I had some very silly thoughts about WandaVision and late style at ArtReview.I was on the Novel Dialogue podcast with Kameron Hurley: “Military Sci-Fi Minus the Misogyny.”My “Hokey Religions: Star Wars and Star Trek in the Age of Reboots” article from Extrapolation 58.2-3 is free to read right now at Liverpool University Press.I don’t think I linked to this yet, but a preprint of my article “Science Fiction and Utopia in the Anthropocene” is up at American Literature.I was even on another Random Trek, talking (ugh) TNG’s “Masks.”And I’ve agreed to be Associate Chair and Director of Graduate Studies for the English department next year, so about that whole “incredibly busy” thing…“I was planning on having a drink with you in Miami, but things got weird.” – Hunter S. Thompson to Kurt Vonnegut in June 1973
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 12, 2021
“…but things got weird” is now officially my go-to excuse whenever I don’t do whatever it was I was supposed to do.
And a carefully curated, deliberately and self-consciously incomplete list of some things I’ve been reading this spring:
SFRA Review 51.2 is out!Announcing the 2020 Nebula Awards Finalists.Truly one of the best SF short stories I’ve read in years: MMAcevedo.Call for Proposals for Trans/Inter/Cross: A Symposium on The Fantastic Between Genres, Media, and Cultures; The International Association of the Fantastic in the Arts.CFP: Alternatives to the Anthropocene.What Happens When Republicans Simply Refuse to Certify Democratic Wins? Yes, the Georgia election law is that bad. The Right Created Boot Camps for Destroying Democracy and Voting Rights. The (literal) right to crash cars into people. Trump and the Trapped Country. Great Griefs: Notes on the US Election.The war on critical race theory.The faces of higher education’s historic layoffs. U of A opens bargaining with proposal that staff pay back money already earned. Successful Conclusion for Oregon Tech Strike. “This Agreement Protects Jobs”: Four Unions at Rutgers University Reach Historic Deal to End Layoffs. UVM faculty vote to ratify a 4-year agreement: “The strength of our union prevented the admin. from imposing deep, lasting cuts to base salary & benefits that they proposed, and our pressure helped tip the balance toward the restoration of staff pay that had been cut.” AAUP Survey Spells Bad News for Faculty Wages Amid Pandemic. Monmouth College Faculty Call for President’s Removal. The Era of Artificial Scarcity: Administrators have rushed to embrace austerity measures. The faculty should call their bluff. Colleges Are Using COVID as a Pretext to Make Draconian Cuts to the Humanities. The New Politics of Higher Education. The Future of Tenure. Tenure’s Broken Promise. Organize or Perish.The strange case of the ‘$100m deli’ and the universities that own a slice. The Crushing Contradictions of the American University. The faces of student debt. The long fight to cancel student loans. The other side of debt: American universities are buried under a mountain of debt.Adjunct Hell: The rise of a new kind of campus novel.Course Evaluations: All Cost, No Benefit.Ground operations.Reflections on the Market.Word of the Day: ARIGATA-MEIWAKU (Japanese) – a favour someone does for you against your wishes, which will inevitably end in disaster, but for which you must thank them anyway.
— Quite Interesting (@qikipedia) April 22, 2021
I'm sure young people getting told "don't go into this industry it's a sinking ship" from literally every industry is a sign of a healthy society.
— Eva ''Bisexual Lighting Girlfriend'' (@ayyy_vuh) March 10, 2021
Dark academia.How to Subvert the Capitalist White-Supremacist University.The Well-Heeled Professoriate: Socioeconomic Backgrounds Of University Faculty.The Humanities Have a Marketing Problem.Labor board withdraws rule to quash graduate students’ right to organize as employees.Firsting in Research.A Student Stole My Academic Work, Copied My Tattoos and Gave Talks Pretending To Be Me. “A full-time undergraduate student who attended UC for the four years from 2016 through 2019 paid more than $5,000 to subsidize deficits in the UC Athletic Department.” Reagan broke everything.The Pandemic Hit the Working Class Hard. The Colleges That Serve Them Are Hurting, Too.Imagining a New Deal for Higher Education.Book Review: Putting the Humanities PhD to Work: Thriving In and Beyond the Classroom by Katina L. Rogers.All Possible Humanities Dissertations Considered as Single Tweets.A billionaire-funded website with ties to the far right is trying to “cancel” university professors. 40% of professors featured in Campus Reform articles in 2020 were subsequently threatened with harm, including physical violence or death. The Social Justice Purge at Idaho Colleges.University administrator and faculty pay in the new Gilded Age.The Post-Covid Future of Distance Learning is Now.‘Climate emergency’: Hawaii is the first state to call it like it is. Americans Are Already Deciding Where to Move Based on Climate Change. Antarctic ‘doomsday glacier’ may be melting faster than was thought. Third of Antarctic ice shelves ‘will collapse amid 4C global heating’. Study predicts the oceans will start emitting ozone-depleting CFCs. Historians rethink the Green Revolution. Climate journalism enters the solutions era. The race to net zero. Death to America’s manicured lawns. Climate dystopia in Northern California. The end of water.Search and destroy: How to take action against the climate crisis. When Does the Fightback Begin?Every day a new sadness.Humans Have Destroyed 97% Of Earth’s Ecosystems.How Contemporary Novelists Are Confronting Climate Collapse in Fiction. Part Two.Climate Refugees in the Greenhouse World: Archiving Global Warming with Octavia E. Butler.Kim Stanley Robinson on Cities as a Climate Survival Mechanism.Jeff VanderMeer’s Climate Fiction Reading List.
— Mark Bould (@MarkBould3) April 28, 2021
Capitalism requires infinite growth or it collapses. It cannot solve climate change, ever. End of discussion.
— Existential Comics (@existentialcoms) March 12, 2021
this radicalized me pic.twitter.com/ln8NRYL9cJ
— shenanigans (@shenpilled) March 26, 2021
How Capitalism Is Driving Covid Disaster in the Global South. GDP Didn’t Save Countries From COVID-19. How the West Lost COVID. Vaccine Nationalism Is Putting the World at Risk. Did the coronavirus leak from a lab? These scientists say we shouldn’t rule it out. Nightmare scenario in India. ‘We are witnessing a crime against humanity’: Arundhati Roy on India’s Covid catastrophe. Science Fiction and the Pathways out of the COVID Crisis. David Graeber: After the Pandemic, We Can’t Go Back to Sleep.Why Do We Forget Pandemics?Kati Kariko Helped Shield the World From the Coronavirus.We sampled tap water across the US – and found arsenic, lead and toxic chemicals.Miracles and wonders: Oxford malaria vaccine proves highly effective in Burkina Faso trial.The Airline Safety Revolution.Easily the most dystopian thing I’ve read in ten years.Amazon’s ‘The Lord of the Rings’ to Cost $465M for Just One Season. Merry and Pippin Are Going Podcasting. Orcs, Britons, And The Martial Race Myth, Part I: A Species Built For Racial Terror. Part II. Marquette University Is Looking for Oral Histories From J.R.R. Tolkien Fans. Soviet TV version of Lord of the Rings rediscovered after 30 years.Eugenics from Morlock to Shoggoth: The Origins of Cosmic Racism. Antiracist Cosmic Horror. Them as degradation porn.It Began as an AI-Fueled Dungeon Game. It Got Much Darker.No script, no cast, no problem: The Next Star Trek Movie Has a Stardate in 2023.A Tiny Particle’s Wobble Could Upend the Known Laws of Physics.Much-feared asteroid Apophis won’t hit Earth for at least 100 years, NASA says. The Asteroid Impact Simulation Has Ended in Disaster.Russia is testing a nuclear torpedo in the Arctic that has the power to trigger radioactive tsunamis off the US coast.The Muppets’ secret weapon doesn’t work in the Disney era.The Fermi Paradox is a sci-fi strategy game about avoiding extinction.Dolphin Intelligence and Humanity’s Future.The Quest for a Floating Utopia.How much money does a writer need? Against Conglomeration: Nonprofit Publishing and American Literature After 1980.The Novel in the Age of Contemporaneity.Shaviro v. the NFT. As NFT Sells for $69M, Artists Question Environmental Impact of Blockchain. Bitcoin Mining Could Use More Energy Than All of Italy by 2024.The Woke Meritocracy. The Abiding Scandal of College Admissions. The Case for More Cancelling. A plea for anti-anti-wokeness.It’s Not Cancel Culture — It’s A Platform Failure. Twitter is a MMORPG.if you want a vision of the future pic.twitter.com/VfxX2JpDfM
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 8, 2021
Your Success Probably Didn’t Come from Merit Alone.So you want to acknowledge the land?Decolonize Oregon Trail.Breakout tabletop RPG by Native designers imagines an uncolonized North America.Who Cares? Before Covid-19, American women were already in crisis.Neofeudalism: The End of Capitalism?How Austerity Destroyed the Public Good. Financialization Created Chicago Public Schools’ Fiscal Crisis.There Is Growing Segregation In Millennial Wealth.Huge, if true: Chipotle Is a Criminal Enterprise Built on Exploitation.My working theory is that we're seeing a generational turnover in centrist politics, and the new American "center" is reconstituting itself around an opposition to what it describes as expressions of political irrationality: "cancel culture," qanon, and "foreign influence."
— ktb (@kevinbaker) March 23, 2021
We should celebrate trans kids, not crack down on them.How Star Wars‘ Biggest Fan Wiki Found Itself in a Fight Over Trans Identity.Whatever happened to the Star Wars expanded universe? And a flashback to the Timothy Zahn books, while you’re at it… What Mr. Miyagi Taught Me About Anti-Asian Racism in America.A Q&A with the Man Who Keeps Uploading My Feet to Wikifeet.What If Everything We Know About Gymnastics Is Wrong?Why Is Perimenopause Still Such a Mystery?30 Years Ago, Romania Deprived Thousands of Babies of Human Contact. Here’s what became of them.The Jesuits pledge $100M to “atone” for slavery.The Stealth Sticker Campaign to Expose New York’s History of Slavery.I have one of the most advanced prosthetic arms in the world — and I hate it.How Humanity Gave Itself an Extra Life.Why Disability Studies Scholars Are Protesting a Prominent Textbook.“I’m an agent of the 28th Amendment, the abolition of the 2nd.” “Retriever” by Stephen Kearse.‘I’m bursting with fiction’: Alan Moore announces five-volume fantasy epic.Sci-Fi Writer or Prophet? The Hyperreal Life of Chen Qiufan.Two from Ted Chiang: “The Author Behind ‘Arrival’ Doesn’t Fear AI. ‘Look at How We Treat Animals” and “Why Computers Won’t Make Themselves Smarter.”Women Who Fly: Nona Hendryx and Afrofuturist Histories.Sertãopunk.The Game of Critique: a review of Pat Jagoda’s Experimental Games. Bugs and Features: On Video Game Glitches and Interpretation.Lucocomics: Play and Interactivity in Comics, Games, and You Are Deadpool (2018).The Ecological Imagination of Hayao Miyazaki.The Children’s Classic That Secretly Brought Existentialist Philosophy Into American Homes.Kurt Vonnegut’s Socialism From Outer Space. Two Good Humans: The Friendship Between Carl Sagan and Kurt Vonnegut.The best game I’ve played since Hades is apparently getting some unexpected DLC.Top 20 Irishisms.Point: Civilizations don’t really die. They just take new forms. Counterpoint: We’re Hurtling Toward Global Suicide.5 Unexpectedly Awesome Domestic Cities to Fuel Your Wanderlust. Why Is Everyone Surprised by How Cool Milwaukee Is? Out-of-state corporate landlords are gobbling up Milwaukee homes to rent out, and it’s changing the fabric of some neighborhoods. Colectivo Could Soon Become the Largest Unionized Coffee Chain in the U.S. And if you want a vision of Wisconsin’s future.https://t.co/x0t0aFWEDZ pic.twitter.com/fhEfAlAUMC
— Amalgamated Tsundoku Psychohazard (@enkiv2) March 12, 2021
it’s weird to be from a post-industrial Midwestern city and idk kind of walk around until adulthood implicitly thinking that being half abandoned and crumbling was a general property of cities
— bean (@christapeterso) March 12, 2021
March 27, 2021
Teaching PARASITE!
I’d solicited Parasite readings on Twitter and Facebook, and there was some interest in the results, so I figured I’d consolidate what i’m doing on the blog for anyone who wants to see what I’ll be doing.
This is for the course on the “hypercontemporary,” all texts that were either created or rose to prominence between 2019 and 2021. It’s one of two films the students chose for the film sequence in the course; the other one they picked is Soul, which makes for a nicely odd one-two punch.
I landed on a two-day structure. Day one is politics:
Dan Hassler-Forest, “Bong Joon-ho: Love in the Time of Capitalism”Matthew Flisfeder, “Capitalism is the Parasite; Capitalism is the Virus”ADDED LATE! Alex Tabarrok, “The Gaslighting of Parasite“Anne Anlin Cheng, “The Shell Game: From Get Out to Parasite“Jason Read, “On Class and Subjectivity in Parasite and Knives Out“Day two is devoted to matters of form, both with respect to the way Bong puts the film together but also the complicated way we read Parasite as Westerners encountering a subtitled film from an Asian nation whose politics and culture are not especially well-known to the US and European audience:
Ju-Hyun Park, “Reading Colonialism in Parasite”Su Cho, “Subtitles Can’t Capture the Full Class Critique in Parasite“Bettina Makalintal, “In Parasite, Food Is a Violent Weapon of Class Struggle”Sara Coughlin, “The Signature Noodle Dish in Parasite Tells a Complicated Class Story”The sandbox post is wide open this week but I do invite their thoughts about what the rumored HBO adaptation might do differently.
As I noted on Twitter, Parasite was the last film I saw in a movie theater before the world ended so this is very much a “nature is healing” moment for me personally. I can’t wait to talk about it.
I got a good question on Twitter: “Did you come across any pieces critical of the film?” Here’s the answer, such as it is…
Not really! I think it goes to the prejudices and preferences of academics and critics in an almost laser-guided way.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 27, 2021
The negativity comes in more in the way US audiences are missing out on big parts of the film because of cultural context stuff they don’t even know they don’t know.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 27, 2021
March 12, 2021
Friday Links!
Great looking one-day symposium: Queer Utopias.CFP: Camps, (In)justice, and Solidarity in the Americas – Commemoration of the 20th Anniversary of the Guantánamo Bay Detention Camps. CFP: Kinship in the Fiction of N. K. Jemisin: Relations of Power and Resistance. CFP: SFRA Panels at ASLE 21. CFP: Migration and Exile in Science Fiction. CFP: Black Feminism on the Edge. CFP: The Routledge Handbook of Ecofeminism and Literature. CFP: Alternatives to the Anthropocene.Sci-Fi Writer or Prophet? The Hyperreal Life of Chen Qiufan.In this situation, safeguarding the planet requires building a counter-hegemony. What is needed is to resolve the present cacophony of opinion into an eco-political commonsense that can orient a broadly shared project of transformation. Certainly, such a commonsense must cut through the mass of conflicting views and identify exactly what in society must be changed to stop global warming—effectively linking the authoritative findings of climate science to an equally authoritative account of the socio-historical drivers of climate change. To become counter-hegemonic, however, a new commonsense must transcend the ‘merely environmental’. Addressing the full extent of our general crisis, it must connect its ecological diagnosis to other vital concerns—including livelihood insecurity and denial of labour rights; public disinvestment from social reproduction and chronic undervaluation of carework; ethno-racial-imperial oppression and gender and sex domination; dispossession, expulsion and exclusion of migrants; militarization, political authoritarianism and police brutality. These concerns are intertwined with and exacerbated by climate change, to be sure. But the new commonsense must avoid reductive ‘ecologism’. Far from treating global warming as a trump card that overrides everything else, it must trace that threat to underlying societal dynamics that also drive other strands of the present crisis. Only by addressing all major facets of this crisis, ‘environmental’ and ‘non-environmental’, and by disclosing the connections among them, can we begin to build a counter-hegemonic bloc that backs a common project and possesses the political heft to pursue it effectively.If voting worked, they’d make it illegal, and they’re going to.I’d like this to stop: Drone comic.Undergrad and incarcerated students are learning side-by-side at Marquette. The result is transformative.“No one gets fired.” Protest to reinstate 39 eliminated faculty ends up in the street. ‘It’s criminal’ : How Marquette’s languages department is trying to stay afloat amid budget shortfalls and failed support.Tenure’s not the problem; administrative bloat is.$40 Billion for Colleges. Accreditor Places Wheeling University on Probation. Faculty union at Elon declares victory as university agrees to bargain. Spring Enrollment Keeps Slipping. Some Notes on Romulans from Michael Chabon. Shockingly compelling!History Channel Launching ‘The Center Seat’ Docuseries All About Star Trek.Zoom isn’t carbon-free. The climate costs of staying home.The Rules for Race: Dungeons & Dragons in the Suburbs.Satanic Panics and the Death of Mythos.How I (Barely) Survived the Abject Failure of My Much Hyped Debut Novel.I Shouldn’t Have to Dehumanize My Son to Get Him Support. Parenting as a Radical Act of Love.A Marvelous History of the Vision’s Penis.We will never let them cancel Pepe le Pew.Curation is not cancellation.This is why we can’t have nice things.The "cone" is an absolutely insane shape. What if a triangle was a circle. A nightmarish vision from the deranged mind of H.P. Lovecraft
— stu (@rinbcage) March 5, 2021
The Robots Are Coming for Phil in Accounting.Andrew Cuomo Should Resign.Having a monarchy next door is a little like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and has daubed their house with clown murals, displays clown dolls in each window and has an insatiable desire to hear about and discuss clown-related news stories. More specifically, for the Irish, it’s like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and, also, your grandfather was murdered by a clown.“Can you please paint The Artist Formerly Known As Prince having a fight with Prince Harry over who is least known as Prince now. In the background we can see the The Queen, and Queen (the band) also fighting over a similar thing.”Misogynoir Nearly Killed Meghan Markle.Unions Are Cool Now.The Lost Year: What the Pandemic Cost Teenagers.‘There’s a lot of nasty stuff’: the people living with long Covid.Life after vaccination.“Scientists” should call their publicist, I think someone’s talking out of school: Scientists want to send 6.7M sperm samples to the moon.The Invention of murder.Inside the incel.‘My body is unserviceable and well past its sell-by date’: the last days of Avril Henry.The arc of the moral universe is long, but Texas school scraps assignment that had girls ‘obey any reasonable request of a male’.We don’t belong on Mars, we haven’t landed on Earth yet.Scientists Announce a Physical Warp Drive Is Now Possible. Seriously.The New Star Wars Trilogy Wasn’t Worth It.Against WandaVision.Watch a supercut of sci-fi movies that use Asian bodies without casting Asian characters.What took so long? FX Orders Pilot Based On Octavia E. Butler’s ‘Kindred’ Novel From Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Courtney Lee-Mitchell & Protozoa. More Butler content! Reviews of her career in the New Yorker and Bookforum.This is why we can't have nice things. pic.twitter.com/8D8lkEij6k
— Amy is rightfully pissed off now ☭ (@Amysaysfuckalot) March 7, 2021
Call me Space Ishmael. Some space years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no space money in my space purse, and nothing particular to interest me on space shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the spacey part of the world.
— Space Moby Dick (@space_moby_dick) March 7, 2021
March 8, 2021
March 6, 2021
March Links!
SFRA Review 51.1 is out! SFFTV 14.1 is out!Congratulations to the winners of the 2021 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in Science Fiction Studies! I’m so excited to work with Michelle Clarke on From Wilderness to Anthropocene: The Frontier in African Speculative Fiction.My presentation for ICFA42 is up at YouTube. I have an episode on the new Novel Dialogues podcast dropping April 8. I speak with Aarthi and the great Kameron Hurley.My work on Butler has had a nice second life since the release of the first Library of America volume, with reviews in the New York Times Review of Books, Harper’s, and LRB. Marquette English is doing March Movie Madness.And if Seuss news is what you choose, my Lorax article is free to read right now at Science Fiction Film and Television.
— Manish (@ManishEarth) March 1, 2021
CFP: Tolkien and Diversity. CFP: SFF and Class. CFP: 50+ Shades of Gothic: The Gothic Across Genre and Media in US Popular Culture.A substack we can believe in: 50 Years of Text Games. 1977’s entry is a personal favorite, Zork.How to Build a World.How to Land on Mars.Who Is R. A. Lafferty? And Is He the Best Sci-Fi Writer Ever?“Octavia Butler: Visionary Fiction” at NPR Throughline. And a little OEB love from JPL.The unpublished Lord of the Rings epilogue is lovely in comics form. And some more Tolkien content: Lord of the Rings tabletop RPG The One Ring is getting a second edition. Everything You Need to Know About Lord of the Rings‘ Second Age. Tolkien’s Orcs: Bolg, Shagrat, and the Maggot-folk of Mordor. Making or Creating Orcs: How Thorinsmut’s Free Orcs AU Writes Back to Tolkien. As a Black Lord of the Rings fan, I felt left out of fantasy worlds. So I created my own.
Is Wanda’s ‘paradox’ of control not central to the forms of decentralized control that the suburb seeks?
I went on my own Wandaverse journey on Twitter and I think this is where I landed.So my pitch for a retcon:
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 6, 2021
* Westview is a place where Something Bad happened; say, a place where they rebuilt the school after a fire during the five years and a bunch of kids un-Snapped into solid walls.
* Wanda is openly in charge of the bubble and trying to help them and her.
An abusive reckoning for “Buffy,” a badass, occasionally feminist show created by a monstrous man. The Quiet Misogyny of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Joss Whedon’s ‘feminist’ shows all concealed toxic ideas about women. What It’s Like to Be a ‘Buffy’ Fan In the Wake of These Joss Whedon Revelations. From the archives: The Assassination of Cordelia Chase. And once more with feeling: Whedon Studies after Whedon.The Lies Hollywood Tells About Little Girls.The Resurrection of Kelly Marie Tran: On Surviving ‘Star Wars’ Bullying, the Pressures of Representation, and ‘Raya and the Last Dragon.’If the core of Wandavision were “everyone got a miracle, but I/we didn’t” I think that would be a lot more interestingly specific than the flattened thing about generalized grief.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 6, 2021
President Superman, coming from Ta-Nehisi Coates and J.J. Abrams?The Dr. Doom Podcast, only on the Voice of Latveria.Stan Lee and the Dotcom Disaster.Five game mechanics legally protected by the companies that made them.New Retro-Style ‘Star Trek: Kobayashi Maru’ Web Game Promises To Be “Nearly Impossible” To Beat.Just when you thought it was safe to go back to Johannesburg: here comes District 10. The demise of secure work and the rise of ‘precarity’ is a theme of the modern world – and now, it’s finding its way onto the big screen.So many Batman: The Animated Series episodes end with the villain in tears, unable to process their fears and obsessions, while Batman, a looming presence born of the inability to rationalize terror, is the only one there to comfort them.
— Daniel Dockery (@dandock) February 19, 2021
It's, umm, a really sad show. pic.twitter.com/sCYTFkFCdx
‘This Crap Means More to Him Than My Life’: When QAnon Invades American Homes. ‘I Miss My Mom’: Children Of QAnon Believers Are Desperately Trying To Deradicalize Their Own Parents. QAnon and the Cultification of the American Right. The Democratic Party Has a Fatal Misunderstanding of the QAnon Phenomenon. Where the Far Right Goes After January 6.When will the US reach herd immunity? Can I gather with friends and family after getting the COVID-19 vaccine? Can I travel? Here is what health experts say. A Quite Possibly Wonderful Summer. Massive 1-Year Rise In Homicide Rates Collided With The Pandemic In 2020. ‘What’s the Point?’ Young People’s Despair Deepens as Covid-19 Crisis Drags On. David Graeber: After the Pandemic, We Can’t Go Back to Sleep.The Great Art Behind Hunter S. Thompson’s Run for Sheriff.English departments rethink what to call themselves.A New Beginning in Shared Governance at Marquette University. But the struggle goes on.Are Endowments Damaging Colleges and Universities? Citing budget issues, John Carroll University fundamentally alters tenure — to the point that professors say it and academic freedom no longer exist. Former professors file lawsuit against Canisius, citing “breach of contract.” Disaster Capitalism for Higher Education: A Farewell to Ithaca College. A Governance Investigation Update from the AAUP. Michigan’s small liberal arts colleges are in fight for survival. The “Amazonification” of Higher Education Has Arrived. It’s Not Pretty. Can Higher Ed Save Itself? The Great Contraction.When asked about fears of automation in 1969, Arthur C. Clarke famously said that we shouldn't worry about automation: "the goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play." I have never seen his answer quoted in full. pic.twitter.com/36Wk0MhAkA
— Aaron Benanav (@abenanav) February 10, 2021
Fired for Tweeting? A Professor Says She Was Cut Loose in Retaliation. US universities hit by protests over cuts, tuition, right to unionize. Two-thirds of New York City’s Arts and Cultures Jobs Are Gone.What We’ve Lost in a Year of Virtual Teaching: Our professional identity has suffered, and so have our students. But we’ve learned, too. Faculty Members Are Suffering Burnout. These Strategies Could Help.Electricity needed to mine bitcoin is more than used by ‘entire countries.’ Fight Carbon. With Coin. Sci-fi carbon coins could actually save our planet.More Ministry content: Catastrophe and Utopia: Kim Stanley Robinson’s ‘Ministry for the Future.’The enormous risk of atmospheric hacking. In the Atlantic Ocean, Subtle Shifts Hint at Dramatic Dangers. Mars Is a Hellhole. Shifting baseline syndrome: causes, consequences, and implications. Love in the time of climate change: Grizzlies and polar bears are now mating.‘I don’t have money for food’: millions of unemployed in US left without benefits. Millions of jobs probably aren’t coming back, even after the pandemic ends. The Democrats are blocking a $15 minimum wage.Kazuo Ishiguro: ‘AI, gene-editing, big data … I worry we are not in control of these things any more.’Voyager’s Native American consultant was a fraud. Well, you’d never be able to tell from the series’s careful, authentic treatment of Native identity…Why we (still) can’t have nice things. The situation is not good.from "financial exigency" to "budgetary hardship" as the justification for firing tenured faculty https://t.co/mcSs19CHVK pic.twitter.com/C3Z9x6bCu0
— reclaim UC (@reclaimuc) March 5, 2021
NEW: We calculated 3 decades of the Senate "popular vote" & how many people each party represented. The results are astonishing: The GOP hasn't won more votes or represented more people than Dems since the 1990s but has run the Senate > half the time since https://t.co/H7iqVmbK4K pic.twitter.com/YfYYILMSPb
— Stephen Wolf (@PoliticsWolf) February 23, 2021
The Cost of Miscarriage is High — Not Just Emotionally, But Financially. Cedarburg woman fighting cancer and insurance after they cover removal of one breast but not other.Parents of daughters are more likely to divorce than those with sons.The Tyranny of Parents.Are You Smarter Than a Cephalopod?A brief history of the bizarre and sadistic Presidential Fitness Test.Kentucky bill would make it a crime to insult police officers. Alabama Senate committee votes to criminalize treatment for transgender minors.Deepfake porn is ruining women’s lives. Now the law may finally ban it.The realest tweet.I'm not sure people get this. Several US states no longer qualify as "democracies" in any meaningful sense and the US federal gov't is rapidly moving in the same direction. https://t.co/pXX0Eex2NV
— David Roberts (@drvolts) February 13, 2021
kind of a bummer to have been born at the very end of the Fuck Around century just to live the rest of my life in the Find Out century
— Heinz Baked Jeans (@Merman_Melville) February 22, 2021
1900s: Fuck Around
— Kelsey D. Atherton (@AthertonKD) February 23, 2021
1910s: Find Out
1920s: Fuck Around
1930s: Find Out
1940s: Find Out
1950s: Fuck Around
1960s: Fuck Around & Find Out
1970s: Find Out
1980s: Fuck Around
1990s: Fuck Around
2000s: Fuck Around
2010s: Fuck Around
2020s: Find Outhttps://t.co/eUK1eQyR77
Chess is bad now. This is good.Statement of Teaching Philosophy. Deconstruction.The Problem With the Postcolonial Syllabus: Against a peculiarly Western allergy to the pleasure of the text.Finally, someone is making sense.Scientists Have Proposed a New Particle That Is a Portal to a 5th Dimension.Bring back the nervous breakdown!Is This the End of Tipping?The Sadism of Eating Real Meat Over Lab Meat. I really need you to read Vladmir Nabokov’s Superman poem and understand that it was accompanied by a hilariously serious exegesis by the Times Literary Supplement. All 17 base Twilight Imperium factions, ranked by number of war crimes (Updated).And there’s just one rule that I know of, babies.the 2020s are going to be just countless climate disasters and massive insfrastructural failures in quick succession, destructive events that ruin & end lives en masse caused by govt & private cruelty, all blamed on acts of God or personal responsibility or political allegiances
— found a new type of widening gyre (@Boringstein) February 16, 2021
During every disaster big and small, I think of this quote from @doctorow Be kind and help when you can. pic.twitter.com/FzZzrDT8j7
— Dr. Reverend Rob Walker (@timidwerewolf) February 17, 2021
February 19, 2021
GSV24: “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow”!
Stay tuned for the very long, very fun season one finale, coming soon!
February 17, 2021
Marquette English Has Podcast Fever!
Marquette English has podcast fever! In addition to the world-famous Grad School Vonnegut (new episode coming this week!), there’s Sub Titles (substituting each entry on Spin and AFI “Best of” lists), The Annotated 80s (turning a scholarly lens on 80s pop culture), and the brand new, very fun Mismatched Texts (talking about two texts you wouldn’t normally talk about together, together). And these are just the ones I know about…
Have a listen!
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