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.