I think we should loudly, publicly start planning the trials for Trump et al for When This Is All Over. Some NGO should pay lawyers to start tracking crimes, preparing legal theories, crafting enabling legislation, etc. It should be the legal equivalent of constructing a gallows in the town square.
It’s me; I’m no one. 🙃
Take this as your sign that YOU too can fight back against ICE. Everyone has a part to play when it comes to resistance!
The eventual reveal of those birds' names is so unsettling and strange!
A man asked me last night what publishing needs to do for literary fiction to begin appealing to men again. I said, as nicely as I could, that, with over 2,000 books published every Tuesday, of which many would appeal to men, it’s not a publishing problem, it’s a men problem.
I'm seeing the Met's new production of Tristan und Isolde at the end of this month, and already all I want to do is listen to several dozen different recordings of the Liebestod and write a lot of unhinged essays. Send help.
NANCY MACE: What is a woman? Have you learned that lesson?
WALZ: I'm the governor of Minnesota. I'm not here to be a prop for your obsession.
I was just reading about the backwards Bohème in A New Philosophy of Opera and thinking, damn, I'd go see that.
Ooh. Downloading!
Years ago a bunch of my colleagues at various special collections around NYC were talking about how they could collectively put together an entire exhibition on Hair in Archives. I still want to see that actually happen someday!
Getting ready for some writing retreat time where I'm planning to see how far I can go with an idea for a future Queer Bibliography talk (or maybe article) on Edna St. Vincent Millay's queer readerships. Whatever I end up writing, I'm citing this poem:
Big W from Tish James here.
I have seen a lot of cursed stuff in my time in academia but this is among the *most* cursed.
Grammarly is generating miniature LLMs based on academic work so that users can have their writing ‘reviewed’ by experts like David Abulafia, who died less than two months ago.
brb, writing a poem sequence using "Miss Magnesium Lamp," "Miss Fire Prevention," "Miss Photoflash," and "Miss Roquefort Cheese" as titles (I'm only half kidding)
For months I thought I'd lost my favorite pen, but today I found it in...a cup full of pens. I must have performed the Banishing Ritual* at some point.
*i.e. saying "I'll put this away somewhere sensible" and then putting it somewhere sensible, thus guaranteeing you'll never find the thing again.
Algorithmic thinking—the idea that anything you see must be intended for you, individually, the sole audience, leading you to misunderstand the context of practically everything.
It's so good! I'm overdue for a rewatch too.
we were probably all up last night staring at the ceiling with our own version of the same thought running on endless loop, but mine looked something like this:
I hate these people to a degree that feels simultaneously corrosive to the soul, and also the only righteous response to this kind of evil
“Silence is not neutrality; it is permission. The record that university chancellors, presidents and trustees create in this moment — who spoke, who acted and who stayed silent — will be studied long after today’s political actors are gone.”
So mad at myself that he walked away down the platform before the shock even wore off and I didn't have the presence of mind to yell "FUCK YOU AND FUCK YOUR NEPHEW TOO, SHAME ON YOU BOTH, MOTHERFUCKER" at him.
To the asshole on the subway who saw my "Melt ICE" pin and felt the need to tell me his nephew just joined ICE:
May everything that you put out in the world come back to you *and* your shitty nephew a thousandfold.
May both of you feel the shame you deserve, and may it crush you into the earth.
Call your reps about this. Every time a book ban has been overturned or shut down, it's because the vast majority of people who believe in the freedom to read spoke up.
Find your reps' info at reps.fyi.
The companies that do this are (naturally) the ones who also don't bother verifying email addresses. My email doppelgangers, who always type my address when they mean to type theirs, currently have a *lot* of unpurchased items in their carts. I am blocking SO MANY businesses right now.
There are, of course, much bigger things we should be prosecuting, but I really think the person or persons who thought up the whole "you have unpurchased items in your cart" email thing should be pelted with rotten tomatoes every day for the rest of their life.
I keep reminding people that admins hate English departments because they are popular (read: inefficient), not because they aren’t. AI is in a long line of technologies that promise to solve that problem for them.
I once went to a marathon reading where the first reader delivered that line as "Call me --" [pause, slight shrug] "Ishmael." I've heard it that way ever since, like he's making up a name on the spot. 🐋
hey, remember when the transphobes started coming for gender-affirming care for minors and it was framed as “concern for children” and trans folks said “lol they just want us to not exist” and our society full of rubes and people with turnips for brains took the transphobes’ arguments at face value
Amazing sentence from the Wikipedia page for writer and lesbian activist Barbara Deming: "Deming experimented with heterosexuality at college, and then for a final time in her mid-thirties, in a misadventure that convinced her once and for all that 'I am not the one to unteach' men their 'inanity.'"
Cover of book universities under dictatorship edited by John Connolly and Michael Grüttner. Cover is abstract yellow and orange shapes with a fragmented black tower.
2. Ideological purging of teaching staffs and student body. With the exception of Poland, the dictatorships examined here witnessed mass dismissals of university professors on political grounds. As we leam from Miguel Ángel Ruiz Carnicer, these were particularly destructive in a country like Spain, where the establishment of the Franco dictatorship had involved three years of bloody civil war, leaving over half the professorships in Spain vacant. In addition, the dictatorships examined here attempted with varying success to consider only " "politically dependable" candidates in making appointments. 3. Exerting political control over access to the university. Political selection of students was an important instrument for confrolling uni-versities, especially for Communist parties who were initially confronted by skeptical or hostile students from the traditional elites. Communists therefore attempted to recruit a student body loyal to state and party that was drawn chiefly from previously underprivileged social strata. Similar projects are also found in noncommunist dietatorships, although in these instances—as for example the "Langemarck program" in the Third Reich —they remained marginal. 4. Restricting or abolishing the self-government of the universities. To ensure that the governance of the universities was in the hands of "politically reliable" individuals, the free election of rectors and deans was de facto abolished. Instead, either rectors were appointed by the state or the actual governance of the universities was handed over to party functionaries. To the outside world universities therefore presented themselves as an integral component of the regime. 5. Restricting the international contacts of universities. The motivations for doing this varied. In the case of National Socialism, it resulted from nationalistic and racial resentment against the idea of "international scholarship and science."
For the ruling elites of dictatorships, universities have various functions to fulfill: they are potential multipliers of the reigning ideology, but also institutions for training future elites such as doctors, scientists, teachers, and engineers. In addition, they offer research potential that can be useful in realizing political, military, and economic objec-tives. Regardless of ideological differences, control over the universities was therefore a vitally important goal for every dictatorship. The essays in this volume suggest five different paths to this goal: 1. Aligning research and teaching with the ideas of those in power. especially through the founding of institutes, fields of study, and lecture courses that propagate ideology in the guise of science. The essays collected here contain numerous examples of this approach: while university institutes for Marxism-Leninism, political economy, and the history of the workers' movement appeared in the Soviet Union and its satellite states, in Mussolini's Italy the new subjects included corporatism, colonialism, and racial science. Under the National Socialists, racial hygiene, folklore, military science, and prehistory enjoyed special support from the regime. In addition, existing institutes and chairs came under pressure to adopt the official ideology or at least to avoid anything that might place them in opposition to that ideology, especially in fields traditionally
A colleague recently said that as a scholar, his first impulse always, when confronted with a problem is to make a bibliography. We all laughed but it’s not a bad thing to do. Here’s a book that will help us all understand what’s happening in US higher education.
I have too much going on in March and April to keep up, but I will be cheering you all on from the sidelines and waiting for you to get to the moment when [SPOILER REDACTED]
