Gerry Canavan's Blog, page 61
May 23, 2015
Weekend Links!
Seeing nonsense about the humanities as a luxury again. The humanities are a cheap profit center that subsidize other university operations.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 21, 2015
* If I weren’t going to DC on June 4th, I’d be going to this in Madison: Undercommoning the University: A Workshop.
* How writers of endangered languages are embracing sci-fi.
Ireland hasn't just said "Yes"…
Ireland has said:
"F❤️CK YEAAHHHH"
— Aodhán Ó Ríordáin TD (@AodhanORiordain) May 23, 2015
* With the recession over, are states investing in higher ed? Oh, honey.
* This Is What Happens When You Slash Funding for Public Universities.
lol at this article that completely erases liberals' active participation in slashing budgets for public higher ed: http://t.co/nhkCib0RNS
— reclaim UC (@reclaimuc) May 23, 2015
* A local-interest explainer: Assata Shakur was convicted of murder. Is she a terrorist?
* New York University’s labor record epitomizes everything wrong with the neoliberal university.
* Report Blasts ‘Fantasy World’ of Presidential Benefits.
Stuff like the Rand Paul filibusters scrambles the usual moralism of Republicans vs Democrats so deliciously. I wish it happened every day.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 23, 2015
P.A.T.R.I.O.T. ACT
F.R.E.E.D.O.M. ACT
T.H.I.S. D.E.M.O.C.R.A.C.Y. I.S. A. S.H.A.M. ACT
P.U.P.P.I.E.S. ACT
I.C.E. C.R.E.A.M. ACT
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 23, 2015
* FBI admits no major cases cracked with Patriot Act snooping powers.
* TIE Fighter and American Exceptionalism.
* The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.
I have to believe that in 30 years all these "Centers for Innovation" on campuses will be thought of like we think of Cold War bomb shelters
— John Pat Leary (@JohnPatLeary) May 23, 2015
ie, like 1950s bomb shelters "innovation centers" are ostensibly practical, obviously ideological, & indices of the anxieties of their age
— John Pat Leary (@JohnPatLeary) May 23, 2015
* While 45 percent of the roughly 1,000 respondents said they feel “somewhat prepared” to begin a career after college, slightly more than half said they did not learn how to write a résumé. And 56 percent did learn how to conduct themselves in a job interview.
* The Myth of the Garbage Patch.
* Up to 90 per cent of the world’s electronic waste, worth nearly US $19 billion, is illegally traded or dumped each year, according to a report released today by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).
* 7 in 10 schools now have shooting drills, needlessly traumatizing huge numbers of children.
* North Carolina receives NCAA notice of allegations in academic fraud case.
* New Study on Suicide Among College Athletes.
* BREAKING: Being competent is bad for you.
* io9 says the Supergirl pilot isn’t as bad as you’re expecting.
* This 85-Year-Old Nun Just Spent Two Years In Prison For Protesting Nuclear Weapons.
* Does Mike Huckabee Know Where the Ark of the Covenant Is Buried?
* A Handful Of Bronze-Age Men Could Have Fathered Two-Thirds Of Europeans.
* Home, the latest animated kid flick, is actually about colonialism. No, really.
* Can Racism Be Stopped in the Third Grade?
* Modernism is back, baby! A Plea for Culinary Modernism.
* Friends from grad school still tease me about the day I basically went off on this rant in a seminar day discussing Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals.
* #abolishmen: Men get into fatal car crashes twice as often as women.
* And another round of gender-swapped Disney characters.


May 22, 2015
Friday Links!
* I’ll be speaking at this event on June 4th in DC: Resolved: Technology Will Take All Our Jobs.
* SF-flavored art exhibit at the Racine Art Museum.
* I think it’s fair to say Marquette has had a pretty rough year.
* Mass contingency is not compatible with shared governance.
* How Austerity Killed the Humanities.
* “If Students Are Smart, They’ll Major in What They Love.”
* Why Technology Will Never Fix Education.
* Alex Rivera on Hollywood and the War Machine. See also!
* Games Without Wages. The video game industry has long relied on the unpaid labor of “modders.” Is it ready to finally pay up?
* Nice work if you can get it: Yale Gives Former President $8 Million Retirement Gift.
* Professors Face Long Odds in Court Battles Over Speech Rights.
* Everybody Calm Down About Breastfeeding.
* The dangerous trick here goes like this: someone fantasizes about a world in which rape frequently occurs and consistently goes unpunished; to explore this emotional fantasy, they set it in a premodern narrative fantasy world where they can displace their own desire onto “history.” The dark impulse or desire isn’t theirs, then; it’s the world’s. It’s history’s. And once a dark personal fantasy becomes “realism,” gazing upon this dark thought or idea isn’t a kind of humiliating or dangerous self-reflection, it’s laudable: it’s an honest engagement with truth.
* I suspect even Notre Dame can’t really explain why it’s suing the federal government over contraception anymore.
* The New Mexico Law Review just published an issue dedicated entirely to Breaking Bad.
* Canadian Aboriginal Group Rejects $1 Billion Fee for Natural Gas Project.
* Study Links Record Dolphin Die-Off In The Gulf Of Mexico To Deepwater Horizon Spill.
* They paved built an oil rig in paradise.
* The $10 Hedge Fund Supercomputer That’s Sweeping Wall Street.
* Nearly one in four financial services employees say it’s likely their co-workers have acted outside of the law. Dismaying as that statistic may be, it is nearly double the 12 percent who said the same in 2012.
* This senior level position is responsible for developing and implementing best practices in fostering the development and launch of companies based on innovations generated from University faculty. Percent Effort: 100.
* We Are Spending Quite a Bit of Money on Jails.
* A Dishonest History of the Last War. Jeb Bush Says His Brother Was Misled Into War by Faulty Intelligence. That’s Not What Happened. Bush and Cheney Falsely Presented WMD Intelligence to Public.
* Here’s how much of your life the United States has been at war.
* America Has Half as Many Hypersegregated Metros as It Did in 1970. Somehow, Milwaukee soldiers on.
* Scrabble adds even more garbage words to its dictionary.
* U.S. Releases Contents Of Bin Laden’s English-Language “Bookshelf.”
* Is there anyone who won’t run for the Republican nomination in 2016?
* Why Have So Many People Never Heard Of The MOVE Bombing?
* “We do not think anyone is going to dispute this at all,” he said.
* Uber, but for putting gas in your car.
* I can’t understand why on Earth Marvel wants to emulate the New 52.
* Not the E.T. sequel we need, but the one we deserve.
* Great moments in “our bad”: Norway’s ‘We’re Sorry’ Monument to 91 Dead Witches.
* You say “equality” like it’s a bad thing.
* How The Soviet Union Tracked People With “Spy Dust.”
* A Professor Tries to Beat Back a News Spoof That Won’t Go Away.
* The health insurance regime: still the worst.
* Israel knew all along that settlements, home demolitions were illegal.
* Very surprising, given the lawsuit: Emma Sulkowicz allowed to bring mattress into Class Day ceremony.
* These numbers are horrifying.
* Irregularities in LaCour (2014). Amazing story.
* An oral history of Industrial Light & Magic.
* Western canon, meet trigger warning.
* 9. Should a nuclear apocalypse happen, The Sound of Music will be played on a loop.
* I wish to outlive all my enemies.
* Everything about this pedagogical model is insane.
* Study Suggests Intelligent Aliens Will Probably Be The Size Of Bears.
* Does Shakespeare pass the Bechdel Test?
* Monkey Day Care: Growing Up as a Child Research Subject.
* “Keep Foreskin and State Separate.”
* And Matt Weiner is sick of your bullshit misinterpretations of his genius. Do you hear that, Limbaugh?


May 19, 2015
All Your Tuesday Morning Links
* If You Leave Open A Million Tabs, ‘The Great Suspender’ Chrome Extension Is For You. Gamechanger.
* When Birds Squak, Other Species Seem to Listen.
* Two-Thirds of Risk Managers Say Frats Are Major Liability. The other third are on vacation, check back next week.
* This sort of thing is a problem in academia too. If a male prof refuses to mentor female students, that’s also bad.
* “Neoliberalism is the real affront to higher education — not Kanye West’s honorary doctorate.”
* The idea of using “drive-up advising” to reach these students started as a joke, Murray said, but it quickly turned into a reality.
* Low cost college isn’t enough. I’ve tried to argue that plans like #FreeCommunityCollege will actually be a strong accelerant to some of the other problems David is talking about, but it hasn’t exactly set the world on fire.
* The humane and the anti-humane.
What matters more is the loose agglomeration of practices, institutions and perspectives that view human experience and human subjectivity as a managerial problem, a cost burden and an intellectual disruption. I would not call such views inhumane: more anti-humane: they do not believe that a humane approach to the problems of a technologically advanced global society is effective or fair, that we need rules and instrumments and systems of knowing that overrule intersubjective, experiential perspectives and slippery rhetorical and cultural ways of communicating what we know about the world.
* Academic Freedom versus Academic Legitimacy.
* Public universities are using non-need-based aid to recruit out-of-state students, at the expense of low-income and in-state students.
* Three New Jersey colleges are appearing to be more competitive than they are in admissions by counting incomplete applications, NorthJersey.com reported.
* academiaiskillingmyfriends.tumblr.com. beingawomaninphilosophy.wordpress.com.
* Hamburger U: As more firms have set up their own “corporate universities”, they have become less willing to pay for their managers to go to business school.
* The best historical model for the transition from the WWIII-devastated Earth to the post-First Contact regime may be the rise of the Soviet Union.
* Strange result, what could explain it? Students Who Attend Class Outperform Those Online, Study Says.
* Like Dylan plugging in, Simon Pegg Worries The Love Of Science Fiction Is Making Us “Childish.”
* “Keep Foreskin and State Separate”: Battle Over Florida Boy’s Circumcision Heads To Federal Court.
* N.C. Senate bill would criminalize, fire teachers for having political views.
* Why Did NY Ban Fracking? The Official Report Is Now Public.
* Fossil fuels subsidised by $10m a minute, says IMF.
* Canada Approves Nuclear Waste Site on Great Lakes Shore.
* Texas Elementary School Accused of Locking Boy up in a “Focus Room.” Why did we turn all our schools into torture chambers?
* Homework is a Social Justice Issue.
* Obama to Limit Military-Style Equipment for Police Forces.
* Washington State Is In A Drought ‘Unlike Any We’ve Ever Experienced.’
* Sure it looks as if things are getting more peaceful. But, looking at the mathematics, that’s exactly what we should expect to see, even if we’re most likely due for a much more violent future.
* Spies, they’re just like us.
* In fan fiction, even the Dursleys can potentially be redeemed.
* Counterpoint: Republicans Are Not on the Edge of Extinction.
* The White House Is Archiving Every Tweet Begging @POTUS for Sex.
* The truth about poo: we’re doing it wrong.
* Scientists examine why men even exist.
* Like Uber, but for stopping this from happening all the time.
* Great moments in spin: “New Jersey voters say they don’t think I would be a good president because they want me to stay.” It might just be because they’re jealous.
* “That’s an extraordinarily high number of medications in a state with less than 2 million people.”
* Generation gibberish. I think a version of this sort of thinking organized around the penetration of consumer technology is probably viable, but a lot harder to wrangle than assigning arbitrary birth years.
* Mad Men and the Coke Jingle Theory. Mad Men and the Movement.
* And from the archives: As good as it gets: Mad Men and neoliberalism. And today’s followup: The commodity is the better Jesus: On the Mad Men finale.
In any case, I regard the genre of television as completed now. The most critically acclaimed, culturally prestigious, artistically ambitious television show of all time — and judging by current trends, I include the future here too — has culminated in a tacky commercial. By doing so, it made us experience its moving utopian qualities and its sinister cult-like qualities. There’s nowhere else to go at this point. That’s “the real thing.” That’s “it.”


May 18, 2015
Monday! Morning! Links!
* With respect to the Mad Men finale, kudos to Eileen Sutton and Todd VanDerWerff. And to this guy too.
That last shot really was “The Princess Bride” ending, btw. Beautifully, wonderfully cynical. https://t.co/JaA2EzF9Bl
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 18, 2015
What you call narrative catharsis was invented by guys like me to sell nylons.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 18, 2015
Okay, so let’s all meet back here in ten years for the premiere of SALLY DRAPER. #MadMen
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 18, 2015
* Davis stayed with the agency for 19 years as a music director, creative concept writer, composer and producer, rising to senior vice president. He would popularize and create new “song-form” advertising that won every award the industry offers. He wrote Coca-Cola songs which are some of the most popular advertisements in existence today, including, “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing,” “It’s the Real Thing,” “Have a Coke and a Smile,” “Mean Joe Green,” “Coke Is It” and “Country Sunshine.” He also wrote songs for Miller Brewing Company (“If You’ve Got the Time”), Campbell’s Soup and Sony.
* Meanwhile last night’s Game of Thrones was prurient and horrible.
* Nnedi Okorafor on magical futurism.
* A Duke University professor has reportedly been placed on leave after posting racist comments online that included talk of “the blacks” and “the Asians.”
* Why Salaita Was “Un-Hired”: The Missing Facts in the AAUP and CAFT Reports.
* Marquette in the ne…. oh come on. (UPDATE: Actual Journal-Sentinel story here.)
* Early men and women were equal, say scientists. Stealing the illustration directly from the Guardian:
* “But Game Of Thrones goes to absurd lengths to present full-frontal female nudity.”
* “People would look at us and say, ‘Oh, so you’re gay Amish?’ ” Johannes said.
* Sweden is not a member of NATO and spends a relatively small amount on its military. How could it hope to deter the Russian navy on its own? The answer, according to one Swedish group, is simple: The Swedes must send out gay propaganda via Morse code.
* “It is the strangest of bureaucratic rituals,” write two New York Times reporters. “Every week or so, more than 100 members of the government’s sprawling national security apparatus gather, by secure video teleconference, to pore over terrorist suspects’ biographies and recommend to the president who should be the next to die.” In Washington, this weekly meeting has been labeled “Terror Tuesday.” Once established, the list of nominees is sent to the White House, where the president orally gives his approval to each name. With the “kill list” validated, the drones do the rest.
* The Forgotten Female Shell-Shock Victims of World War I.
* Can there be a feminist world?
* Death of a Yuppie Dream: The Rise and Fall of the Professional-Managerial Class.
* Columbia Examines Its Long-Ago Links to Slavery.
* Seattle’s unbelievable transportation megaproject fustercluck.
* Reviving the female canon of philosophy.
* Special issue of Contexts on the sharing economy. Via (as always!) Sunday Reading.
* How Many Americans Are Married To Their Cousins?
* I can’t help it: I just love reading about EVE Online.
* And stop me if you’ve heard this one before: The GOP Is Dying Off. Literally.


May 17, 2015
Sunday Morning Links!
As Marquette’s faculty gathers in the basement of the Bradley Center for commencement, some links…
* I have sat in philosophy seminars where it was asserted that I should be left to die on a desert island if the choice was between saving me and saving an arbitrary non-disabled person. I have been told it would be wrong for me to have my biological children because of my disability. I have been told that, while it isn’t bad for me to exist, it would’ve been better if my mother could’ve had a non-disabled child instead. I’ve even been told that it would’ve been better, had she known, for my mother to have an abortion and try again in hopes of conceiving a non-disabled child. I have been told that it is obvious that my life is less valuable when compared to the lives of arbitrary non-disabled people. And these things weren’t said as the conclusions of careful, extended argument. They were casual assertions. They were the kind of thing you skip over without pause because it’s the uncontroversial part of your talk.
* There’s tons of great stuff in issue 17 of Jacobin, from the Peter Frase editorial on automation to a call to democratize the universe to ruminations on edutopia and the smartphone society.
* Mad Max: Fury Road Is the Feminist Action Flick You’ve Been Waiting For. 3 Brief Points on Mad Max: Fury Road.
* Alastair Reynolds Says What It’ll Take To Colonize Other Planets.
* University of Wisconsin flunks the financial transparency test.
* Juxtaposition watch: Maryland governor vetoes $11 million for schools, approves $30 million for jails.
* The awful truth about climate change no one wants to admit.
* Hillary Clinton personally took money from companies that sought to influence her. The next couple years are going to be a bottomless exercise in humiliation for Democrats.
* People Who Opposed The Iraq War From The Beginning Are The Best Americans.
* History is a nightmare for which I’m trying to hit the snooze: NJ Republican Introduces Resolution Condemning ‘Negative’ AP History Exam.
* City leaders approve plan for National Slave Ship Museum.
* Let the Kids Learn Through Play.
* Why Are Palo Alto’s Kids Killing Themselves?
* I also won’t accept that Someone Did a Shit So Bad On a British Airways Plane That It Had to Turn Around and Come Back Again.
* When Sandy Bem found out she had Alzheimer’s, she resolved that before the disease stole her mind, she would kill herself. The question was, when?
* If Catch-22 appeared a few years before Americans were ready to read it, Something Happened jumped the gun by decades, and the novel was already forgotten when its comically bleak take on upper-middle-class life became a staple of fiction.
* Jurors In The Boston Bombing Case Had To Agree To Consider The Death Penalty Before Being Selected. This is a very strange requirement of the law that seems to strongly interfere with the “jury of your peers” ideal.
* Deleted scene from Infinite Jest. So bizarre.
* Dibs on the young-adult dystopia: Teenagers who show too much leg face being sent into an “isolation room” for breaching the new uniform code.
* New Zealand Legally Recognises Animals as ‘Sentient’ Beings.
* Schools are failing boys because lessons have become “feminised”, says a leading academic who wants to see outdoor adventure given greater emphasis in the curriculum. That’ll solve it!
* What Even Can You Even Say About The Princess-Man of North Sudan?
* What Would You Do If You Could Censor Your Past? A Visit to the UK’s Secret Archives.
* The Ecotourism Industry Is Saving Tanzania’s Animals and Threatening Its Indigenous People.
* “On the occasion of David Letterman’s retirement after 33 years of hosting a late-night talk show, Jason Snell presents his take on Letterman’s significance, told with the help of a few friends.”
* Friends, they may call it a movement.
* And I’ll see you again in twenty-five days.


May 15, 2015
BAMFAs: ‘Entire USC MFA 1st Year Class is Dropping Out’
See here. I suspect MFA programs will generally be more prone to these sorts of work actions than PhD programs: they’re often require more debt, are paid worse, have an even more ephemeral link to future job prospects, and are shorter, so easier to walk away from…
I’m just glad to see a higher ed administration finally pay a concrete, immediate price for behaving abusively.


Friday Links!
* CFP: In More’s Footsteps: Utopia and Science Fiction.
* CFP: The Comics of Art Spiegelman.
* In case you missed it: the syllabus for my summer science fiction course.
* Your official Mad Men finale odds sheet.
* Stop sanitizing the history of the run-up to Iraq War.
* In this small suburb outside Milwaukee, no one in the Menomonee Falls School District escapes the rigorous demands of data.
* Academic Freedom and Tenure: University of Southern Maine.
* Bérubé and Ruth (and Bousquet) on their plan to convert adjunct positions to teaching tenure.
* Everything But The Burden: Publics, Public Scholarship, And Institutions.
* Obama’s Catastrophic Climate-Change Denial.
* Honeybees (still) dying, situation ‘unheard of.’
* A brief history of the freeway.
* Britain is too tolerant and should interfere more in people’s lives, says David Cameron.
* Free market watch: Having everyone’s account at a single, central institution allows the authorities to either encourage or discourage people to spend. To boost spending, the bank imposes a negative interest rate on the money in everyone’s account – in effect, a tax on saving.
* In the last academic year, Rutgers athletics generated $40.3 million in revenue, but spent $76.7 million, leaving a deficit of more than $36 million. In other words, revenue barely covered half the department’s expenses.
* The crazy idea was this: The United States Army would design a “deception unit”: a unit that would appear to the enemy as a large armored division with tanks, trucks, artillery, and thousands of soldiers. But this unit would actually be equipped only with fake tanks, fake trucks, fake artillery and manned by just a handful of soldiers.
* The top 25 hedge fund managers earn more than all kindergarten teachers in U.S. combined.
* I honestly found this a pretty devastating brief, though not everyone on Facebook found it as useful or persuasive as I did: The Progressive Case Against Public Schools, or, What Bleeding Heart Libertarians Should Say.
* Disney Spent $15 Billion To Limit Their Audience. But the news gets worse, friends: Disney under fire for fairytale film based on true story of American dad who claimed African land to make daughter a princess.
* Here’s Which Humanities Major Makes the Most Money After College.
* Jury Acquits Six Philly Narcotics Cops On All Corruption Charges. Wow.
* The Texas Prison Rape Problem.
* Honolulu Mayor Learns The Hard Way That Criminalization Isn’t The Answer To Homelessness.
* First Supergirl Trailer Really Does Feel Like An SNL Parody.
* The last of the renegade Nazis living in a self-sufficient lunar colony has died, aged 95.
* “It’s about this little girl who finds a little kitten”: Mark Z. Danielewski is back. Did Mark Z. Danielewski just reinvent the novel?
* The arc of history is long, but Harry Shearer is quitting The Simpsons.
* Same joke but Alex Garland confirms zombie sequel 28 Months Later is in the works.
* Not since Jewel’s A Night without Armor have we seen a poet like James Franco.
* The Agony of Taking a Standardized Test on a Computer.
* Bill O’Reilly: America will fall like Rome if the secular “rap industry” has its way.
* Georgia Man Arrested for Trespassing After Saving Dog From Hot Car.
* Group petitions White House to add Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill.
* Dean Featured in ‘Rolling Stone’ Article Sues Magazine for $7.5 Million.
* And it’s not all bad news: Telltale Promise Something ‘Major’ From The Walking Dead Franchise This Year.
Darkness on the Edge of Town
Incident on 57thStreet
Something in the Night
Spirit in the Night
Human Touch
@unrealfred
#LovecraftSpringsteen
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 12, 2015


May 14, 2015
Syllabus: Science Fiction in the Summertime
I find teaching in the summer very agreeable in some ways and very difficult in others: I really feel as though a “life during wartime” spirit of camaraderie develops in the classroom, which is nice, but at the same time it can be difficult to cover the amount of material I’d normally cover in a semester (especially since it’s so hard to assign the usual amount of either reading or writing). This summer in particular I’ve really had to accept that summer classes are just different — my class meets only two days a week, for an impossible 3 1/2 hours at a stretch.
My plan is to break each class period into roughly three one-hour chunks, with two short breaks between each. There’s a lot more in-class stuff than I usually do, and even more little clips and exercises that I have planned that won’t be the major focus of the day and so aren’t listed in the syllabus. No papers — just take-home midterm, take-home final, forum posts, and quizzes.
People who know my classes or my work can probably tell that I’ve chosen texts I know inside and out, including a bunch I’ve written on. This is not an accident.
With all those caveats, here’s the gameplan:
M
June 29
INTRODUCTION TO THE COURSE
in class: Ted Chiang, “Liking What You See: A Documentary”
in class: excerpts from Star Trek, Star Wars, Firefly, Battlestar Galactica (2000s), Interstellar, Mass Effect, etc.
W
July 1
in class: film, Avatar (2009)
M
July 6
Avatar discussion continues: Annalee Newitz, “When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like Avatar?” [web]; Slavoj Žižek, “Return of the Natives” [web]
Kim Stanley Robinson, “The Lucky Strike”
in class: Kim Stanley Robinson, “A Sensitive Dependence on Internal Conditions”
W
July 8
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five (first third)
M
July 13
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five (second third)
W
July 15
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five (whole book)
M
July 20
TAKE-HOME MIDTERM DUE TO D2L BY 5:30 PM
James Tiptree, Jr., “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” [ARES]
in class: Ursula K. Le Guin: “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”
in class: film, “The Space Traders” (1994)
W
July 22
Mark Bould, “The Ships Landed Long Ago” [ARES]
Samuel R. Delany, “The Star Pit” [ARES]
in class: TV, Star Trek: Deep Space 9: “Far Beyond the Stars” (1998)
M
July 27
Octavia E. Butler, Dawn (parts one and two)
W
July 29
Octavia E. Butler, Dawn (part three)
M
August 3
Octavia E. Butler, Dawn (whole book)
in class: excerpt from Octavia E. Butler, Adulthood Rites
W
August 5
Robert Kirkman, The Walking Dead, Volumes 1 & 2
in class: zombie film and television, zombie games
LAST DAY OF CLASS
M
August 10
TAKE HOME FINAL DUE TO D2L BY 12:00 PM
May 12, 2015
Parrots and the Fermi Paradox
Tuesday Links, So Many
Historicizing the concept of the inevitable in literature presents many challenges. For inevitability is itself a theory of historical agency, and an adequate critical account must confront inevitability’s claims without simply falling back on conventional notions of freedom, originality, or creative expression. Indeed, the inevitable is not merely a discourse to be cataloged by positivist historiography; it names a threat to any attempt at making humanity the author of its own experience. In its antique versions, women and men chalked their situation up to fate and diagnosed their historical condition through prophecy. In the late medieval era, more sophisticated but equally deterministic accounts of humanity’s relationship to historical change came into circulation, such as Calvinist predestination, fatalism, modern compatibilism, probabilism, and the acceptance of political economy as a science. Eventually, Charles Darwin’s natural history posited the inevitability of extinction in conditions of scarcity. The politicization of inevitability and conflicting visions of civilizational collapse followed, with communism and capitalism each decrying the other as a doomed system to be overcome. Friedrich Nietzsche’s eternal return recast inevitability as the nonlinear recurrence of intensifying crises. Walter Benjamin wrote of an angel of history who is condemned to look back on the wreckage of civilization. Today, in the wake of both historicopolitical optimism and existential pessimism, notions of the Anthropocene present a fatal paradox: the effects of human industry have set in motion a geological transformation that modern civilization might well not survive. The concept of the inevitable spins these discourses into a common thread, as so many attempts to diagnose the fundamental problem of human agency’s internal limits as expressed in time, along with whatever consolatory freedoms we might draw from our constraints.
* It is easy for left academics to be seduced by a rhetoric of public consumption for our work, since most of us see theory and practice as intermingled. But the American case should stand as warning for British academics. For many years, Usonian scholars chased the mirage of being “public intellectuals”. Few realized, however, that this means depending on their institution to protect them from the onslaught of a rabid conservative media machine. When the dogs of reaction barked in the culture wars, though, American deans slunk away, fearing damage to their own managerial careers. Progressive scholars without the protective benefit of a strong Left were abandoned to fend for themselves against unfair odds, since the spectacular “public sphere” is never a level playing ground in the age of Fox News.
* The New York Times Confirms Academic Stereotypes: Two months of opinion essays on higher education.
* A Medievalist on Savage Love. Hi, Matt!
* “2015 is my 25th year of adjunct teaching.” Oh, oh no.
* Complaint Claims University Where Student Was Killed Failed To Act On Relentless Yik Yak Threats. Horrifying story on every level.
* Another moral panic against a left-wing academic. Six more weeks of winter.
* The University of California, Santa Cruz, was established in 1965 and has long been known for its radicalism. But officials’ reaction to a recent protest against tuition hikes suggests that times have changed.
* The rise of “mama.” Interesting to see something we didn’t even know we were doing laid out like this.
* Alberta Loses Its Goddamn Mind for the Fourth Time: A Guide for the Perplexed.
* The End of Labour. Labour, Pasokified. The University after Conservative Victory.
* Baby kangaroo, goats stolen from Wisconsin zoo.
* For what it’s worth I think the latest big Hersh story is probably mostly garbage.
While I’m making myself unpopular: my advice is don’t trust reporting from celebrity journalists w/ spotty track records citing anon sources
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 11, 2015
Don’t bet credibility on celebrity journalist scoops, esp. unreliable ones, esp. when they won’t pay out any dividends even if you’re right.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 12, 2015
I understand pressures on left-leaning people to try to find some intervention point, but we need to learn not to be made to look stupid.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 12, 2015
* Report: Defense Dept. paid NFL millions of taxpayer dollars to salute troops. Would you like to know more?
* The University of Nevada, Reno, a land grant research university, is recruiting for a Coordinator, Innovation and Transformation. This could be the most buzzwordy, administrative-bloaty job ad of all time. It gets better/worse.
* Are we reading and watching Game of Thrones wrong?
* Apples for the Teacher, Teacher is an Apple.
* After 46 years of playing Big Bird, Caroll Spinney has some great stories.
* The Joss Whedon Avengers 2 podcast.
* Marvel accidentally made a great female superhero, and now they have no clue what to do with her.
* Judge Dismisses Nebraska Woman’s Lawsuit Against All Homosexuals.
* Daily Express And Mail Celebrate The End Of Human Rights, A Horrified Twitter Despairs.
* The US payday loans crisis: borrow $100 to make ends meet, owe 36 times that sum.
* New York and the slave trade.
* Headlines from the nightmare future. And again. And again.
* How $45 worth of drugs landed a Baltimore man 20 years in prison.
* The most senior Baltimore police officer charged over the death of Freddie Gray used his position to order the arrest of a man as part of a personal dispute just two weeks before the fatal incident, prompting an internal inquiry by Baltimore police department.
* The mathematically proven winning strategy for 14 of the most popular games.
* The ghetto was a deliberate policy invention, and investing in a path out of it would have been completely contrary to the point of creating it.
* “I think we’re ready for capitalism, which made this country so great,” he said. “Public radio is ready for capitalism.”
* How Marvel Is Killing the Popcorn Movie.
* Berkeley to Stop Adding Lecture Videos to YouTube, Citing Budget Cuts.
* How to Talk to Your Child’s Wary Professors.
* Don’t let the police teach your kid a lesson.
* Man Banned From Airline Over Frankly Hilarious Pinocchio Tattoo.
* An Interview with the Publisher of a Magazine Printed Using HIV-Positive Blood.
* In the Suburbs of Amaurotum: Fantasy, Utopia, and Literary Cartography.
* Why cloth diapers might not be the greener choice, after all. I’ll believe anything on this subject to be honest.
* Dictionary of Regional American English funded through summer 2016.
* People Have Misconceptions About Miscarriage, And That Can Hurt.
* “She’s likely to be in her twenties or thirties, middle-class, probably married, probably Christian, probably average intelligence,” Harrison said. “I just described, you know, your next-door neighbor.”
* Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal forever.
* The Pope just gave me the thumbs up.
* The arc of history is long, but.
* Mother Still Searching For Preschool That Focuses Exclusively On Her Son.
* Great TNG prehistory from David Gerrold on this Mission Log supplemental.
* Kim Stanley Robinson explains his great new novel, Aurora.
* Bigfoot Truthers Turn On Their Leaders.
* Four Myths About the “Freelancer Class.”
* The best way to nab your dream job out of college? Be born rich.
* And another great list of words that can’t be easily translated.


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