Quentin's Weeknotes 9/27/19-10/4/19

This Week:

• I finished Tim Powers supernatural spy novel Declare. It was fun and strange and, according to Powers, almost completely historically accurate, aside from the Cold War fight over fallen angels.
• Thanks to my students in Hartwick College’s Collectors and Collecting course, I learned about Mother Featerlegs, a fascinating character from the American Wild West, and arguably the only sex worker in the United States memorialized with a monument.
• Also in Collectors and Collecting–I taught a lecture on the history of comics and comic collecting, in part inspired by this weekend’s New York City Comicon. I drew on what I learned from Sean Howe’s Marvel Comics: the Untold Story, David Hajdu’s The Ten Cent Plague, and Gabilliet’s Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic Books.
• Dinosaurs! I read this crazy story about North Carolina Congressman Mark Meadows and how a piece of property that he owned got embroiled in a controversy about dinosaurs, creationism, and ethics violations. Plus, great photos of allosaurus skulls!