Gerry Canavan's Blog, page 9

GSV #14: Happy Birthday, Wanda June!

Gerry and Aaron tackle Vonnegut’s 1971 play Happy Birthday, Wanda June in their most dramatic episode ever! Come for the Theatre of the Absurd, stay for snippets from Aaron’s dissertation on American fantasies of Africa…

If, like me, you’d never touched the play, gaze upon it!

Thursday Morning Links!

* Hey, this is finally out! Imagining Apocalypse Now with Mark Soderstrom & Gerry Canavan.

* And the BBC has re-released its Afterwords: Octavia E. Butler series, but it’s still not available to listen to in the US.

* Presenting The Ancillary Review of Books.

* CFP: Journal of Science Fiction Special Issue on Middle Eastern Science Fiction.

* Come Unstuck in Time with Ryan North & “Slaughterhouse Five.” Everything about the new Slaughterhouse-Five graphic novel is beautiful, and nothing hurt.

* Wildfires Bring New Devastation Across the West. 500,000 people in Oregon forced to flee wildfires. 7 People Die in West Coast Wildfires. California blaze caused by firework at gender-reveal party. Your phone wasn’t built for the apocalypse. Nothing to see here, folks. I Need You to Care That Our Country Is on Fire. Think 2020′s disasters are wild? Experts see worse in future. Nature sends us a wake-up call. When the Sky Is Orange. It’s Ecosocialism or Barbarism. The coming climate migration.

To paraphrase a saying, this isn't California's worst year in the last hundred, it's California's best year in the next thousand https://t.co/InQ6Pl3BJp

— Ethan Hein (@ethanhein) September 10, 2020

Welcome to the fragile era. Overoptimized, neglected, or intentionally damaged systems will break with more regularity. Next up, watch as interlinked systems fail in a cascade rather than alone.

— joshua schachter (@joshu) September 7, 2020

When I was a child in Los Angeles any temperature above 90 F was front page news. Today my home town part of LA is 114 deg., and every place east of the Santa Monica Mtns is triple-digit, most above 110.
Few people have AC.
SoCAL is burning up

Grad School Vonnegut Lucky Thirteen: DEADEYE DICK!

This week, on Grad School Vonnegut: After Dark, Aaron and Gerry talk Deadeye Dick with Bee Gabriel! Check out Bee’s Twitter! Check out their Patreon! Sorry about the audio in just a few places; we were working with a truly messed-up record on one of the tracks and did our best…

[image error]

Saturday Morning Links! Twice the Nonsense! Half the Links!

* Everyone’s been talking about David Graeber, so here are two pieces of his that haven’t been in the conversation as much that I really like: “Army of Altruists” and “ON THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF GIANT PUPPETS: broken windows, imaginary jars of urine, and the cosmological role of the police in American culture.”

DG being so very extremely online in the last few years soured me on his work a bit but I’d put Debt, Utopia of Rules, Bullshit Jobs, “Army of Altruists,” and the Police vs. Giant Puppet Heads piece all ahead of almost anything else in critical theory I’ve read since 2010.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 5, 2020

* How David Graeber Changed the Way We See Money.

* Pray for r/DaystromInstitute, the Star Trek canonicity subreddit, going mad in the face of the Lower Decks cartoon.

As a result there’s no reason not to believe that in the Star Trek universe, the universe is (and always has been) resting on the back of a koala.

* Northeastern dismisses eleven first-year students for partying. “Their $36,500 tuition for the semester will not be refunded.” Indiana University sees ‘alarming’ spike in COVID-19 at frat, sorority houses. Immediate all-student quarantine at Gettysburg. Hundreds of Tulane students are placed under quarantine after coronavirus cases jump. University of Alabama reported on Friday another 846 students tested positive for COVID-19 between Aug. 28 and Sept. 3, bringing total number infected since classes began to almost 1,900. UW-Madison orders 9 sororities, fraternities with positive COVID-19 cases to quarantine. Back on campus, UW students make up a quarter of Dane County COVID cases. Argentina Professor with Covid-19 Symptoms Dies After Gasping for Air in The Middle of Zoom Lecture.

* 

* Covid-19’s painful, lingering legacy. ‘Carnage’ in a lab dish shows how the coronavirus may damage the heart. 3 deaths, 147 coronavirus cases now tied to Maine wedding. “The three people who died as a result of the outbreak did not attend the wedding.”

* GW History: Our Statement on Jessica Krug. Jessica Krug’s former students speak out. A White Woman Admits She’s Been Rachel Dolezal-ing Us for Years—and I Feel Fine.

* Showcasing… @MarquetteU! This campus WELL KNOWN for the St. Joan of Arc Chapel! Keeping on with the religious theme, The Gesu Church is a MASTERPIECE! Check out how STUNNING the campus city is! WOW!

Marquette really is beautiful. I love it here. https://t.co/uxahWrjHDG pic.twitter.com/uxYZlcKESn

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 5, 2020

* This is important. And no one is talking about it.

* “Past perspectives on the present era of abrupt Arctic climate change.”

We find that warming rates similar to or higher than modern trends have only occurred during past abrupt glacial episodes. We argue that the Arctic is currently experiencing an abrupt climate change event, and that climate models underestimate this ongoing warming.

* Kenosha’s looting is a symptom of a decrepit democracy.

If looting and rioting have no place in a well-functioning democracy, then perhaps we should pause to consider that these are signs that Americans are not, in fact, in a functioning democracy.

* this is why it is so vitally important that we attack and dethrone god

* the fucking wheelers man

* This class is really fun and I don’t see how what I do is work exactly.

* And I know she’s a complete wackadoo, but seriously, imagine it.

Imagine a world where the bottom line of all public policy was the amelioration of human suffering. It would be radically different, radically more peaceful, and radically more prosperous.

— Marianne Williamson (@marwilliamson) September 5, 2020

Surprise Friday Night Links for a Day You’re Probably Surprised Is Actually Friday

[image error]* Don’t sleep on Grad School Vonnegut’s Jailbird episode! Next week: Deadeye Dick, (genuinely) my sleeper hit of the summer…

* One of my better citations: “Fitness Fanatics: Exercise as Answer to Pending Zombie Apocalypse in Contemporary America.”

* I’ve got book chapters in two new books: Monsters: A Companion (talking about District 9) and Literary Afrofuturism in the Twenty-First Century (talking about Black Panther).

* Also out now: SFRA Review 50.2-3!

* Octavia Butler just made the NY Times Bestseller List for the first time ever — 14 years after her death.

* Afrofuturism, Africanfuturism, and the Language of Black Speculative Literature.

* “The daily blitzkrieg of the news,” bemoans Tom Barnard in leftist science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson’s 1990 novel, Pacific Edge. “Every day everything a little worse.”

* A Message from Future Generations.

* Announcing the Ancillary Review of Books.

* “Can we talk abt the fact that Liu Cixin supports internment camps for minorities?”

* Post45 kicks off the academic year with a stunner: The 7 Neoliberal Arts.

* After emotional gathering, Marquette agrees to Black students’ demand for cultural center, scholarships, other support. This comes after some occupations and street closures last week. Update from president and provost following meeting with Black student leaders.

* Which doesn’t count the die-in.

Here is a statement of support issued by the executive committee of Marquette’s English department yesterday. pic.twitter.com/0fIEiMkdMB

— Devi Shastri (@DeviShastri) September 4, 2020

Anti racism is what would actually save literature departments if people would only get out of the way.

— Kyla Wazana Tompkins (@kwazana) August 31, 2020

* One of the things I’ve had go most viral on Twitter was a simple call to be kind to students.

Speaking as a college professor, the most overawing comment about the American educational system I can make is that students experience schooling as terror. Every semester it takes me a month to convince my students I’m not going to try and hurt them.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 29, 2020

* Elsewhere in my social media empire: On Voting Twice. On the Wisconsin gerrymander. On firing university administrators. On self-dealing boards of trustees. On that same thing. On Duke. On running the government like a glitch-exploiting speed-run. It’s happening here. Private insurance. UI. If you want a vision of the future. And when Kurt Vonnegut tells the future, he simply does not fuck around.

* We are calling for a Scholar strike #Scholarstrike on September 8-9 2020 to protest ongoing police violence and murders in America.

* Unsurprisingly, this is shaping up as the worst year ever on the academic history job market; less than half as many TT jobs listed through August 31 than even in 2009, and a quarter what there were last year.

Unsurprisingly, this is shaping up as the worst year ever on the academic history job market; less than half as many TT jobs listed through August 31 than even in 2009, and a quarter what there were last year. pic.twitter.com/4QrG4ndBMQ

— Benjamin Schmidt (@benmschmidt) September 1, 2020

* Tenured GWU professor reveals she has been pretending to be Black her entire career. (It’s GW’s second case of this this year.) Why Did Jessica Krug Create The Jess La Bombera Persona? The view from her students.

* Yale Law Professor Jed Rubenfeld Has Been Suspended for Sexual Harassment.

* CFP: The Journal of Fantasy and Fan Cultures is an annual journal of scholarly work and creative non-fiction by undergraduate and graduate students. Our first issue, on Harry Potter, will be published in Spring 2021. Submissions for this issue are now open until December 2020, but they are limited to UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS. CFP: “Race and Science Fiction: The 5th Annual City Tech Science Fiction Symposium.”

* Stop them before they kill again! Game of Thrones’ Benioff and Weiss to adapt sci-fi epic The Three-Body Problem at Netflix.

If you’ve ever wondered whether white men failing upward really is a thing, observe that Netflix watched these idiots ruin Game of Thrones and then handed them the most conceptual sci fi adaptation of our generation https://t.co/wMu4Otoc4W

— stefanielaine

Grad School Vonnegut #12: Jailbird!

Gerry and Aaron discuss 1979’s Jailbird! Labor, prison, massacres, communism, Reagan, Watergate, finance, Einstein, Jimmy Carter, Judas Iscariot, and Kilgore Trout, too…

[image error]

Monday Links!

I’m pretty deep into the procrastination cycle of shame so don’t miss these still-perfectly-fresh Sunday Morning Links.

* Protests and state of emergency declared in Kenosha after a black man is shot seven times in front of his children after breaking up a fight. Despite erroneous social media reports, Jacob Blake remains alive and will hopefully survive this attack.

* The Pandemic Recession Is Approaching a Dire Tipping Point. ‘Not just a low-wage recession’: White-collar workers feel coronavirus squeeze. Goldman Sachs Confirms Roughly 4 Million Employees to Remain Unemployed Into 2022.

It’s Sunday so you should know that if the minimum wage had increased at the rate of productivity since 1960, it would be $22.50. Instead, it’s just $7.25. Meanwhile tens of millions of Americans today head to a second or third job because they can’t afford life’s basic needs.

— Joe Sanberg (@JosephNSanberg) August 23, 2020

* Chinese government releases new guidelines for science fiction.

* How Can We Plan for the Future in California? An extremely dire description of the situation.

1. This year, there will be no way to make even a dent in the fires with our tools. There is no small chance that vast swaths of major cities there will burn. I know, because I've fought wildfires, and everyone on my crew agrees: this month is the beginning of the end.

— Daniel Boguslaw (@DRBoguslaw) August 22, 2020

And if she could smell it with her heavy head cold, it must be a tremendous fire!

  “We ought to call the brigade!” she exclaimed. “Is it a hayrick?”

  “The brigade would have a long way to go,” the doctor told her curtly. “It’s from America. The wind’s blowing that way.” https://t.co/n9AFiltXDx

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 23, 2020

* Zoom Is Down at the Worst Possible Time wheeeeeeeee

* The Corner That State Universities Have Backed Themselves Into. Blame Game.

* William Faulkner’s Southern Guilt.

* Seven missing Doctor Who episodes identified, in negotiations to be returned to the UK.

* Progressives have gotten all they can out of the election season. After November, they will have to raise a ruckus to secure victory. The Biden Era Will Put the New Left to the Test.

On balance I think things are so messed up that Biden will probably win but if not I want to lay down my marker that I think “Granddad likes ice cream” was the wrong message for four straight days of the DNC convention

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 24, 2020

I think we’ll see the US break up within my lifetime. Just don’t know if I’ll live fifty years or five. https://t.co/oxmSYSKOYq

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 24, 2020

* 27 GOP ex-lawmakers back Biden on first day of Republican National Convention. No Sitting President Was As Far Behind As Trump Going Into The Conventions. Can Biden’s Center Hold?

* Un-Adopted: YouTubers Myka and James Stauffer shared every step of their parenting journey. Except the last.

* Job insecurity, low pay, working from home: we’re all millennials now.

* Yes, I know how shops work.

* Neopets: A True Crime Story.

* 2020’s got my head so turned around Chuck Schumer made me laugh.

* And finally, some is making sense: Could We Force the Universe to Crash?

[image error]

Sunday Morning Links!

* Released yesterday: Grad School Vonnegut #11, Cat’s Cradle with Patrick Iber! We had some minor but annoying audio problems with this one, so the editing took a bit longer than usual — so please enjoy, and look forward to, well…

As @zunguzungu’s enthusiasm for the podcast wanes, the randomizer heroically gives us… JAILBIRD followed by DEADEYE DICK.

Grad School Vonnegut #11: CAT’S CRADLE! (with Patrick Iber)

Like boko-maru for your ears, it’s episode 11 of Grad School Vonnegut, on Cat’s Cradle, with UW’s Patrick Iber!

Now, of course we don’t want to be sin-wat, especially in the context of the current global pool-pah, but the stuppa behind this karass have been busy, busy, busy producing this wampeter for your vin-dit — so please saroon to your zah-mah-ki-bo and give these foma a listen…

— gradschoolvonnegut (@gradschoolvonn) August 22, 2020

The Syllabus as Apology

My full Fall 2020 syllabi are done, so I thought I’d post them as an example of one way to talk about format and special circumstances this semester. The key language is below as a screenshot. My thanks for my colleagues for their help in thinking through this stuff, especially to Angela Sorby, who gave me the original “special circumstances” language that I modified below.

ENGLISH 4717/5717: Watchmen

ENGLISH 3000: Utopia in America

[image error] [image error]