Quentin's Weeknotes 11/21/21-11/27/21

This Week:

• I celebrated 42 turns around the sun. Got a great stack of books to work my way through, and Alanna made a sumptuous and amazing Caramel Cake.
• In MUST251, I taught a lecture on the Material Culture of Christmas, using Stephen Nissenbaum’s amazing book “The Battle for Christmas." Other inspirations came from my mentor and friend Bob Paynter, who taught a similar lecture in his Introduction to Anthropology class, as well as Tony Barrand, another mentor, whose musical group Nowell Sing We Clear provided the soundtrack.
• We did Thanksgiving in our house, though without much of the pageantry (especially given that for many Native people, it’s a day of mourning). We made Puerco Pibil, took the dog to the new Dog Park, watched some TV, and did some work around the house.
• I finished Mike Davis' masterful (and horrifying) book “Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World." Its an unsparing and astonishingly detailed history of how European negligence (or deliberate violence) in its 19th century colonial ventures collided with El Nino Southern Oscilation weather/climate events to produce one of the great famine disasters in world history. It was hard reading, in many places, to see the callousness and inhumanity of European powers on display, and it is a reminder that no disaster is ever “natural.”