Quentin's Weeknotes 11/28/21-12/4/21

This week:

• MUST251: North American Material Culture finished up our classes, with a focus on two objects of modern material culture: bottled water and cell phones. The students have a final object biography due for their final. It’s been a fun class to co-teach, and I hope the students enjoyed it as much as I did.
• I finished reading Matthew Bartlett’s “Gateways to Abomination” a collection of short and weird fiction centered in (and occasionally directly about) the Connecticut River Valley of western Massachusetts. This is a place I spent almost a decade of my life, and that I love deeply, so it was delightful to read this creepy and hallucinogenic collection of stories that revelled in a shadow/nightmare version of it.
• I was very proud of my wife, who gave the Richard Siegfried lecture at SUNY Oneonta, and won the Siegfried Prize for Junior faculty. The kiddos and I went to her talk, which was both fascinating and entertaining because, she’s both of those things!
• I watched “Jupiter Ascending” or “Jupiter Bewildering” as I took to calling it. I’ll say this for this incoherent and nonsensical film: I was never bored!