Quentin's Weeknotes 9/15/18-9/21/18

This Week

• I finished Rebecca Roanhorse's debut novel Trail of Lightning. Roanhorse is an award-winning Dine (Navajo) author and sets her novel in a post-climate change Dinetah, walled off from the chaos of a world that has mostly drowned. This event also re-charged the supernatural forces of the Dine, and the world is thus populated with monsters, gods, and people with astonishing powers based on their clan membership. Roanhorse wrote a wonderful essay on Indigenous Futurism which is well worth your time for its re-configuring of some standard sci-fi tropes:

 the landing of Columbus is no longer the discovery of the New World celebrated in children’s songs and on national holidays, but the start of an earth-shattering zombie apocalypse

• I watched Frances Ha, the 2012 movie directed by Noah Bambach and written by Baumbach and Greta Gerwig (who also stars as the titular character). I had really mixed feelings about it, the same way that I felt about the characters in Martin Amis's legendary 80s novel Money. Both works feature entitled, relatively priveleged characters whose bad decisions and poor relationships are held up for both criticism and humor. Unlike Amis's book, Frances and her friends actions mostly harm themselves, not other people. And because Gerwig is frankly magical and charming as the lost and rootless Frances, it is easy to find relatable and human moments in the movie, despite the smugness and entitlement that pervades it.

Quentin's Weeknotes 9/8/18-9/14/18

This Week

• I visited the Oneonta Grand and Glorious Garage Sale, and I bought some stuff. I collect H.P. Lovecraft paperbacks from the 1970s (which often have spectacularly weird art) and I found one in a box of other paperbacks. I also found a two-volume Oxford Compact English Dictionary. It didn't come with a box or a magnifier, but I'm going to assemble this thing one piece at a time.
• I read Owen Hatherley's fascinating and detailed article "What should a 21st century socialist housing policy look like?". Hatherley is a british architectural critique and writer of a bunch of great books about 20th century architecture in the U.K., a subject around which people have striking and often conflicting opinions. Hatherley's argument in this piece is that the new Labour (not New Labour) government's 2018 manifesto makes some good strides towards dealing with what he calls "the most important of all issues: housing", but could be strengthened with a focus on de-commodifying and more democratically and communally managing U.K. housing. There's some interesting insights here that are perhaps specific to the unique history of the built environment in the U.K., but are clearly portable to the US, where gentrification and urban renewal have made major US cities unliveable to anyone but the extremely wealthy.
• We taught our students in "Collectors and Collecting" about wikipedia, with the goal of having them do an assignment where they edit a wikipedia page. We have made great use of the resources provided by the Wikiedu foundation, and the voluminous material on teaching wikipedia in college course.
• I heard Marc Ribot and Tom Waits' version of the Italian anti-fascist song "Bella Ciao." I'm kind of in awe of it, actually

Quentin's Weeknotes 9/1/18-9/7/18

This week:

• My son started kindergarten. Yikes!
• I read the amazing Adam Serwer's pessimistic take on what is at stake in the Supreme Court. Serwer has an amazingly broad grasp of US history and politics, and he focuses his attention on the late 19th century Supreme court which he refers to as the Redemption Court. This court did so much damage by allowing or whole-heartedly endorsing the most violent and repressive aspects of Jim Crow segregation. Serwer points out that courts have never been ideologically neutral, but have often been pushed by the mood of the country, though perhaps that is no longer the case:

The Redemption Court was arguably constrained by the broad public consensus among white people of all political stripes that black people were inferior and undeserving of full citizenship, a consensus that hobbled enforcement of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 even before it was struck down. The new Roberts Court will pursue its ideological agenda even in the face of majoritarian opposition.

His view of the future is that we are entering a dark time in which an entrenched court will use "the anvil of Judicial Review" to strike down any progressive legislation enacted by the young activists and motivated politicans that seem to be emerging in the base of the democratic party.  I don't dispute the darkness, but I am less convinced of the court's ideological shielding from popular opinion, both because of recent examples that seem to point to holes in the shield and also the long view, taken by Howard Zinn in one of his later published essays that the Supreme Court has almost never been a force for progressive change and we shouldn't fetishize it is some kind of ultimate arbiter. Change comes not from accurate or ideologically neutral interpretation of established law, but from mobilization and power-building.

• I followed a link provided by the brilliant activist/number-cruncher Samuel Sinyangwe to the Department of Education's data portal, which I had somehow never seen before. Like all government agencies, the DOE produces tons of information about schools around the country, and Sam's point is that such data makes all kinds of inequalities and problems strikingly clear. For instance, my school district has an african-american student population of 6.5%, but African-American students make up 11.5% of in-school suspensions and 12.5% of out-of-school suspensions. In other words, Black students are twice as likely to be suspended relative to their population in the district schools. At Washington High School in Cedar Rapids, Iowa (my alma mater) the situation of race and punishment is even more lopsided.
• I read the op-ed that everyone is talking about.

Quentin's Weeknotes 8/25/18-8/31/18

This Week

• I discovered The Weird Fiction Review, a website set up by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer, to, in their words provide "Reviews, interviews, short essays, comics, and occasional fiction...on all facets of the Weird". They edited the enormous tome that I'm currently slogging through, and the site has a section called 101 Weird Writers that provides critical essays of each author in that collection. As if I didn't have enough to read already...
• I read a birds-eye view account of the recent prison strikes in the US. US prisons are overcrowded and prisoners are routinely exploited as laborers, perhaps most evocatively in recent memory when prisoners in California were tasked with fighting wildfires and paid almost nothing to do so. The current strike, which is meant to draw attention to awful prison conditions and change them, is being enacted on the anniversary of the Attica, New York prison uprising of 1971, an important historical event for improving prisoners' rights and conditions. Participating prisoners and allies have issued a list of demands, all of which look reasonable to my eyes.
• The first page of our syllabusI started teaching a new class, in Hartwick's Museum Studies program entitled "Collectors and Collecting." It's an interdisciplinary First Year Seminar, with the goal of using collecting, as a cultural and historical practice, to get students to better understand the world they're in and their place in it. So far, it's been a ton of fun, as we've looked at Coffee Lids, "Mantiques", and WWII shrapnel.
• I read with great interest this history of some of the first women to work at Rollingstone magazine in the 1960s. Rollingstone was a hub for high quality alternative journalism in the 1960s, with guys like Hunter S. Thompson, Joe Esterhaus, and Cameron Crowe cutting their teeth there. And yet, as with many Famous Male Auteurs, this article makes clear that they benefited from a sexist environment, and were materially aided by the mostly unsung work of women.
• I read Alex Pareene's fascinating article about the weird cognitive dissonance of seeing Confederate Flags in the contemporary North. When we moved to Central NY and saw confederate flags on houses, vehicles, and at county fairs, my Canadian wife was profoundly confused, given New York's heroic and widespread contributions to the Northern war effort. But, as Alex points out, the idea of Confederate flags as some kind of abstract heritage is basically a sham, and northern confederate flags make that point exactly:

Every Confederate flag in the North is a confession. Each one gives away the entire charade. How can it possibly be about heritage or the other tired euphemisms its Southern defenders trot out?...Every Confederate flag flown outside the slave states is as close as we will get to an admission that the flag represents whiteness, not Southernness.

I listened to the newest episode of the amazing podcast The Memory Palace. Walter Knott speaking at the dedication of "Independence Hall", 1966. This week's episode was focused on the origins of Knott's Berry Farm, an amusement park in Orange County that was founded by a farmer named Walter Knott. I knew of Knott's Berry Farm from a throwaway line in the musical Smile, of which I was a cast member in High School. I had no idea that Knott was an arch-conservative, and focused both the park and his political activism around conservative causes. He built a replica of Philadelphia's Independence Hall, supposedly to push people away from socialism, anti-war agitation, and civil rights. 

Quentin's Weeknotes 8/18/18-8/24/18

This week:

• I read a History of Horror Comics on NPR's books website. I have a deep love for horror in general, and horror comics in particular (I wrote a rather lengthy review of a book about them on my old blog), especially the legendary E.C. books of the 1950s. Note that the author of the NPR piece is none other than Stephen Graham Jones, an excellent modern horror writer in his own right. Jones is a member of the Blackfeet nation and weaves Blackfoot and Indigenous life and culture into his wonderfully creepy and evocative fiction. My son, playing on the beaches of Lake Ontario, with the Toronto skyline in the distance.
• I went to Toronto. My wife is from there, and we got in a visit to family and her friends before the furor of the fall semester. I also took a jaunt out to the Reservation of The Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nation, where I used to work, to visit friends and colleagues.
• I watched this crazy video on Boingboing explaining the 1990 art heist from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, to this day the largest single Museum heist in history.
• I finished reading Volume 8 of Brian K. Vaughn and Fiona Staples' massive and enchanting graphic novel Saga. Alana and Marko and their baby at the start of the seriesYou should be reading this series, if you're not. The summary is that there are two planets at war with each other, and they've roped in most of the rest of the planets in their galaxy to fight with (or for) them. A guard from one planet falls in love with a captured soldier from the other, and they have a baby together. The story is what happens as they try to make a thriving family in the face of the chaos and destruction around them. The storytelling is brilliant and gripping and the art is absolutely breathtaking. I haven't been as emotionally invested in a comic book series since I read The Sandman when I was a teenager. 
• The Museum hosted Hartwick's Matriculation Ceremony for new students. Over 800 people consisting of incoming Freshman and their families came through the Museum and signed the Matriculation register with the college President. It was a long but enjoyable day. Congrats, class of 2022!