Quentin's Weeknotes 2/2/19-2/8/19
This Week:
- I started teaching again–MUST204: Collections Management
- I read this piece by Laurie Penny, outlining the cruel and grotesque class politics of Brexit. I’ll read anything Penny writes–she’s funny, and fierce, and incredibly smart. This long article makes clear that it was the Conservative (and New Labour) ideological long-commitment to austerity that spurred much of the anger that led to the Brexit vote and that weakness and indifference of the political class in England will keep it on schedule to happen in just under two months.
- I am so unhappy that the 2020 presidential season is already starting, and have actively tried to avoid thinking about it. Nevertheless, I read with great interest this piece on Cory Booker’s long commitment to defunding and privatizing public education. I’ve always felt like Booker was a fairweather friend to causes I believe in, and this well-cited essay makes clear that he’s no friend to public schools, teacher’s unions, or anything like what I believe to be enriching public education.
- I watched, with ecstatic joy, the trailer for the upcoming TV series Good Omens, based on the novel by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. The book is laugh-out-loud funny and so incredibly smart, and the TV series has, so far, done all the things I’d want to make the show honor the book. I still remember how hard I laughed when I read the passage about Aziraphale’s collection of misprinted Bibles:
And he had a complete set of the Infamous Bibles, individually named from error’s in typesetting.
These Bibles included the Unrighteous Bible, so called from a printer’s error which caused it to proclaim, in I Corinthians, “Know ye not that the unrighteous shall inherit the Kingdom of God?"; and the Wicked Bible, printed by Barker and Lucas in 1632, in which the word not was omitted from the seventh commandment:, making it “Thou shalt commit Adultery.” There were the Discharge bible, the Treacle Bible, the Standing Fishes Bible, the Charing Cross Bible and the rest. Aziraphale had them all.
- As with Laurie Penny, I’ll read basically anything Sady Doyle writes (except this). Her post-mortem on the grotesque misogyny of the State of the Union came as a welcome balm to the delicious but catty furor over Pelosi’s shade.
- Yay! We have draft language for a Green New Deal! And, man…is it spicy. Decarbonization, a jobs guarantee, transition assistance for fossil fuel workers, and real fair/ethical trade, along with a whole lot more. David Roberts at Vox has a good breakdown of what’s in it, and what’s not. Here’s a delightful, shocking, and hopeful takeaway of where we are:
the progressive movement has, in rather short order, thrust into mainstream US politics a program to address climate change that is wildly more ambitious than anything the Democratic Party was talking about even two years ago.
