Weeknotes July 22-28, 2018
This week…
- I finished reading Ursula K. LeGuin’s “The Lathe of Heaven”. It’s undoubtedly a classic, by a giant in the world of speculative and fanastic fiction. It didn’t grab me as much “The Dispossessed”, but still filled me with the same deeply rooted hopefulness about humanity and its potential for progress. At the same time, it’s a moral complicated book, and politically anarchist in its insistence that simplistic central planning, no matter how nobly intentioned, is doomed by its unforeseen consequences and will lead to a more homogenous, less exciting human world.
- I watched A Dark Song, a wonderfully subtle horror movie about (occult power, revenge, and faith. )[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvQ2ClKbRcU&w=560&h=315] The basic plot is that a woman whose child was murdered pays an odd and eccentric man to help her perform a complicated occult ritual that will take many stressful and strenuous months. They retreat to an isolated welsh manor house and the movie follows them through the process of this ritual and the consequences of the two of them locking themselves in with each other and the forces they may or may not unleash. I loved this movie for its ambiguity, rich characters, and frankly gorgeous setting and design. I was hipped to it by Sady Doyle, who wrote a beautiful review focuses on the movie’s exploration of patriarchcal violence and female desire.
I cut off all my hair! I’d been losing my hair since I was in my mid-20s, and have thought about shaving my head a lot since then. This week, on the recommendation of The Wirecutter, I bought a Remington Virtually Indestructible Haircut and Beard Trimmer , and took the plunge.- I worked on the syllabus for a fall semester course at Hartwick called “Collectors and Collecting”. This First Year Seminar, which I’m co-teaching with Dr. Doug Kendall, will explore collecting as a social practice, in contemporary and historical arenas. I’ve really enjoyed reading about collecting in ancient Mesopotamia, putting together a wikipedia editing assignment, and talking about coffee lids in the same breath Hans Sloane, whose collection started the British Museum. Syllabi often feel like a never-ending project, and we’re coming down to the wire on getting this one done, but I feel good about the whole thing.
- I’m a sucker for an interesting map, having spent a lot of time learning how to make them for archaeological purposes. This map, which is an intensively detailed breakdown of the 2016 election results, is like catnip for me. Having said that, it also reveals a version of the Modifiable Areal Unit Problem, where individual or point data is aggregated into variable spatial areas. In short, the map looks really red/republican, but when weighted/resized for population density, the map warps and the picture changes dramatically.
- I read this long-form history of Wendy Pini, creator of the legendary Elfquest comics on Boingboing. I’m not an Elfquest fan, but this history focused attention on Pini as an independent creator, and I love hearing people talk about how and why they make art. Aside from the history of Elfquest and how Pini’s personal and professional life fed the astonishing art and story she was making, it also reveals Pini’s early interactions with the mainstream comics world in the 1970s and 80s, and her enthusiasm for cosplay (check out the video of her dressed as Red Sonja, menacing M.A.S.H. actor Jamie Farr on the Mike Douglas show!)
- I listened to Pseudopod’s production of the ecological horror story “Beyond the Dead Reef” by James Tiptree Jr. Besides being a wonderfully creepy, slow burning piece of ecological horror with some fanastical and wonderous imagery, it was fascinating to hear about the author (real name Alice Bradley Shelton) and her frankly astonishingly exciting life, which involved extensive world travel, a career in US Army intelligence, a PhD in psychology, and an extensive career as a a painter and art critic.
