by Quentin Lewis

Quentin's Weeknotes 4/18/21-4/24/21

weeknotes books family teaching museum books indigenous poitics

This Week:

 

  • And last week too–I have to take four weeks off from my job, and last week won the prize,  so this kind of smushes things together.
  • I finished reading “Wool” by Hugh Howey. It was good, especially the thrilling second half, but it definitely took its time getting there.
  • I read the brilliant first volume of Gail Simone’s “Clean Room” which is a story about conspiracy, trauma, and the supernatural. It’s as weird as anything I’ve read from a mainstream comic publisher in a long time.
  • This week, my students in MUST204: Collections Management are starting the project period of their course, where they do a collections project in the Yager Museum.
  • The Yager Museum, with the support of other people and programs on campus, submitted an application to the Haan Fund for Native American Studies to bring Haudenosaunee speakers to campus to talk about acknowledgement and recognition of Hartwick’s place on Indigenous Land.
  • I started and finished Kameron Hurley’s award-winning novel “The Stars are Legion”–a wild and imaginative space opera/single-gender sci-fi epic that is almost too weird to easily explain. Suffice it to say, it’s about a series of living space-ships orbiting each other, and the women (only women) who live and work and die on them,  and what happens to two of the women who try to change that arrangement. I couldn’t put it down, and its accolades are well-deserved, imho.
  • I finished Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser’s “Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto”, which I liked both as a piece of rhetoric and as a platform. Arguing for an intersectional vision of contemporary feminist activism, the authors helpfully parse how contemporary neoliberalism has continued and expanded contradictions between production and reproduction, as well as culturally segmenting identity from the structural conditions that birth and organize it. I still have a hard time thinking through the complex relationships of race and class and gender in abstract ways, but this short book is a good model for how to do it.