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Quentin's Weeknotes 1/3/21-1/9/21

This Week:

• I came back to work! Lots to do at the Yager Museum. We are planning a number of events in January and February including livestreams of Music, Film Screenings, and (possibly) an on-line gaming event.
• I finished reading China Mieville’s “Railsea”, a weird and wonderful genre-hopping adventure, set in a desert world where endless railroads crisscross each other and people ride trains and hunt the monsters that live underneath them. I’ve read a number of Mieville’s books and this may be my favorite.
• I also read Museum Vol. 1, a gruesome crime procedural Manga by Ryousuke Tomoe.
• I finished reading The Parker Inheritance by Varian Johnson, a young adult mystery novel about segregation, love, and tennis. It deals with dark and complex history in sensitive and clear ways, and my (admittedly precocious) 7 year old liked it, and asked interesting questions along the way.
• I watched with disgust and horror as inevitable things inevitably happened. Arrest the President.

My Yearnotes for 2020

This year…What is there to even say. So many people have suffered, some much more than others. I’m as okay as anyone can hope to be these days, and mostly, I  just feel like everyone else I know: tired, anxious, alternative angry and scared. I tried to take stock of my year, and found some things that anchored me, or kept me going, or of which I felt proud. AND, I know that for many people, this was the worst year of their lives, or the last. Stay safe everyone, and take care of each other.

• Professionally, I did some things that were pretty fulfilling:

  • At the Yager Museum, we found ourselves with galleries, exhibits, and programs, and no way for people to safely see them. So much of the year was a substantial exercise in improvisation and frustration, but we did get some interesting work done:
    • We hosted John O’Connor for an evening of political folk music from the history of American radicalism.
    • After years (literally) of hard work, I was finally able to bring the artwork of Luke Swinson and Cathie Jamieson to the Yager Museum for an exhibit called “dadibaajimo: Two Mississauga Artists Share Stories." We also interviewed Luke and Cathie live over zoom and facebook.
    • With an enterprising student (thanks Audrey!), we put together a video series called “The Yager Through Your Eyes” showcasing pieces of the collection that members of the Hartwick community found particularly appealing.
    • I taught Collections Management (partially in person and partially virtually) and co-taught Collectors and Collecting (hybrid). Teaching on-line sucks, and trying to balance on-line and in-person teaching sucks even more.
    • I coordinated the acquisition (and eventual accession) of material excavated from Hartwick Seminary, with the hope of making it usable for exhibits and research.
  • An article on Marxism and Historical Archaeology that I co-wrote with the mighty LouAnn Wurst, appeared in the Routledge Handbook of Global Historical Archaeology.
  • I served as a panelist for DEC grant funding, awarding grants to Central New York arts projects and organizations.

• I watched, read, and listened to a lot of stuff this year:

  • Normally I’m a person who likes going to the movies, but of course that’s gone by the wayside this year. I did manage to see The One I Love, It Comes at Night, Coherence, Ghost Stories, Atterados, The Color out of Space,Tickled, and (finally) Star Wars: Rise of the Skywalker. For TV, Alanna and I watched Sex Education, Schitt’s Creek, Atlanta, Letterkenny, and a lot of re-runs (MASH, mostly).

  • We did take the opportunity to share some movies we loved as kids with our son, on those Sunday afternoons where all of us were too tired to do much else. We watched Back to the Future, Clash of the Titans, Princess Bride, Home Alone, Ghostbusters (1 and 2), and certainly more that I can’t remember.

  • I bought a lot of music this year, largely on bandcamp Fridays, in which the website waived its fees so that artists would get more money while COVID is straining creative incomes. I picked up albums by Hallelujah the Hills, Rhiannon Giddens, the Mountain Goats, Our Native Daughters, Jean Grae and Quelle Chris, Waxahatchee, Kimya Dawson, Shabazz Palaces, clipping, Special Interest, Dogleg, Bambara, Deadly Snakes, Windborne, Run the Jewels, Finest Kind, and John Fahey.

  • I read 58 new books, totalling around 14,000 pages. That’s a new personal best for me, at least for as long as I’ve been keeping track. Some particular highlights included:  

    • We Who are About to…” by Joanna Russ. This is a feminist critique of space exploration science fiction, wrapped up in a meditative, thoughtful novel about choice and freedom.
    • Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff and The Broken Hours by Jacqueline Baker. Grouped together because they both tackle and revise HP Lovecraft in interesting and critical ways. For Ruff, Lovecraft’s racism and broad reach offer an opportunity for inversion–20th century genre fiction seen through an African-American lense. For Baker, the Lovecraft family’s experiences with mental illness present a vantage point for seeing early 20th century Providence as a space of haunted minds and listless, impoverished bodies, and people telling stories to stave off a reckoning of their failures.
    • The Cabin at the End of the World by Paul Tremblay, who continues to run away with the title of “best horror novelist” by managing to write creepy, unexpected, and deeply human works. “Cabin…” is no exception, utilizing a home invasion narrative as a way to ponder what architecture we build in our minds to make sense of suffering and chaos, and how 24-hour media both supports and warps that process. A prescient book in the age of science-denial, QANON, and conspiratorial racist violence.
    • I read some great non-fiction this year, including Epidemics and Enslavement by Paul Kelton, The End of Policing by Alex Vitale, and House of Cards: Baseball Card Collecting and Popular Culture by John Bloom.

  • My go-to podcasts continued to be WTF w/ Marc Maron, Intercepted, Greetings Adventurers, Why is this Happening?, and Pseudopod.

  • However, this year, I was delighted to also get hooked on

    • Explorers Wanted, a Numenera actual-play podcast run by my old friend The Minister of Intrigue and a delightful player-cast;
    • Double-Threat, a comedy-podcast with Tom Scharpling and Julie Klausner, which probably gave me more laugh-out-loud moments than anything else I encountered;
    • Blowback, Weird Studies, The Memory Palace, Our Opinions are Correct, Scaredy Cats, Louder than a Riot, and the BBC Radio 4 Lovecraft Investigations of Charles Dexter Ward, Whisperer in Darkness, and Shadow Over Innsmouth.

• This was a year of wild politics, alternatively hopeful and demoralizing. We tried to show up and support righteous people when we could, and gave money when we couldn’t. We took our kids to the Rallies for Black Lives in Binghamton and Delhi, which felt like a small but consequential thing. I also made some phone calls and wrote some postcards trying to help put decent people into positions of power.

• I tried very hard to hard to write fiction, but found that I had little time and little energy for creative endeavors. I finished one short story and am currently revising another, for a total of around 12,000 words. So much for my goal of writing ten stories (!)

• This was a year spent mostly at home, and as such, we tried to make our home comfortable and pleasant with some improvements to the interior, in furniture and fencing and growing our garden and backyard.

• I lost some weight; around 20 pounds. Of course, much of it was weight I gained towards the end of last year, but loss is loss.

• My wife and I celebrated our ten year anniversary. Here’s to ten, twenty, a hundred more!

• I got to see my friends, the Minister of Intrigue, and Nate (aka 1/2 of House Shuttle–Hi Emily too!) at friendly but safe distances.

Like many of us, I spent the year with my family.  I got to watch, be with, and be inspired by my children up-close, in ways I wouldn’t have if daycares and schools were up and running. My wife and I did our best to take care of each other, and it’s moments like this, when the times are dark, that I’m eminently grateful and lucky to have married someone so clear-eyed, funny, and loving.

Here’s to a new year as a new day dawning, for us all.

Quentin's Weeknotes 12/13/20-12/19/20

This Week:

• I finished reading Robert Jackson Bennett’s first novel “Mr. Shivers”, a dark, violent tale of vengeance and magic, set against the backdrop of the devastation of the Great Depression. The prose was rich and gorgeous, even when it was used to highlight cruel violence.
• I also finished reading Knights Vs. Dinosaurs by Matthew Phelan, with my son. It really is what it says on the package, but was welll writen, and has good lessons in it about teamwork, gender, and subtle heroism.
• Our students in MUST250: Collectors and Collecting took their final exam, and we’re currently grading a few outstanding assignments. The class was much more scattered this year, due to the complications of distance learning, especially for a class about materiality, but we made it work and I hope the students enjoyed it and got something out of it.
• I worked on program planning for Hartwick’s J-term, which the Campus Activities Board is really trying to both ramp up, and align with Hartwick’s new Flightpath course structure. We’ve got some good stuff coming at the Museum!

Quentin's Weeknotes 11/29/20-12/5/20

This Week:

via GIPHY

• Students in Collectors and Collecting shared their Collection Analysis presentations. We had analyses of baseball cards, comic books, dolls, nativity figurines, designer handbags, and more. It’s one of my favorite parts of the class and I’m always delightfully surprised at what the students find.
• I finished reading the third Dactyl Hill Squad book (“Freedom Run”) with my son. We’ve really enjoyed this early Young Adult series by Daniel Jose Older, and particularly the way in which it blends irreverance (dinosaurs in the Civil War?) with serious topics, such as race, slavery, colonialism, and collective action.
• I finally watched “The Rise of the Skywalker”. Meh. The lightsabre battle on the sunken Death Star was pretty cool.
• I worked on getting some spring programs together, and on some collections research. No spoilers, but some exciting stuff coming up at the Yager Museum.
• Weirdly, I had never got around to reading the prequel to Jeff Smith’s “Bone” Series, entitled “Rose”. I love Bone, and it’s been a great delight to read it with my son. He had grabbed “Rose” from the library, and read it, and recommended it to me, returning the gift. It was a lot of fun; exciting in its own right, and with great callbacks to and enrichment of the original series. Plus, Charles Vess’s art is astonishing and lively.
• I watched the documentary “Tickled”, an amazing story about a cultural journalist from New Zealand who decides to write a light-hearted piece about a series of internet videos purportedly showing young men competitively tickling each other. What follows is a dark and astonishing film that feels almost like a spy thriller, but ends up being a harsh commentary on class and privilege.

Quentin's Weeknotes 11/15/20-11/21/20

This Week:

via GIPHY

• In Collectors and Collecting, we taught hoarding as a kind of collecting that resonates with our cultural anxieties about mass consumption. We also heard from Ava Fognell, the curator of the Thaw Collection of American Indian Art at the Fenimore art museum.
• I finished listening to the Blowback Podcast, which chronicles the story of the Iraq war with equal parts humor and rage. The Iraq War was a pretty formative political event for me and a lot of people my age, and this masterful recounting was both familiar and shocking, reminding me of names, events, and other things I had forgotten. It’s absolutely worth your time.
• I worked on putting putting together some student programs for Hartwick College’s J-Term, and added another episode to our growing list of “Yager Through Your Eyes” videos.

Quentin's Weeknotes 11/8/20-11/14/20

This week:

• Last Saturday, I visited the gorgeous Seven Tubs nature preserve in Pennsylvania with the Minister of Intrigue. It was good to see my old friend again, and the area itself is astonishly beautiful, with waterways that have eroded labyrinthine channels through the rock.
• We taught our students in Collectors and Collecting about the American Indian Movement, NAGPRA, and the resistance to the desecration of Native American graves and culture in the late 20th century. We also taught Kleptomania and its origins in the growth of mass consumption and department stores in the late 19th century.
• I finished reading Michael Griffin’s collection of short fiction “The Human Alchemy”, and wrote up a brief review. It was good–stylish, character driven dark fantasy, indebted but not beholden to Lovecraft. At the same time, Griffin really likes exploring his characters inner lives and motivations, and this made for both some long passages that I occasionally wanted to skip, and also a more muted and understated horror than I was expecting. Still, good stuff all around.
• I also finished reading Junji Ito’s horror manga “Dissolving Classroom”. Ito is a master, and though I didn’t like this as well as his masterpiece Uzumaki, it’s a great read.
• On Bandcamp Friday, I bought the album “Ode to Joy” by the Toronto band The Deadly Snakes. I first heard the song “Oh My Bride” on Letterkenny and couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Quentin's Weeknotes 10/25/20-10/31/20

This Week:

• It’s Halloween! via GIPHY
• This week, the Yager Museum hosted “The Horror in the Museum”, its annual Halloween storytelling event. Due to COVID-19 related concerns, we live-streamed over facebook instead. As always it was a ton of fun, and a great way to get in the Halloween spirit.
• In MUST250: Collectors and Collecting, we discussed the history of the Yager Museum as a collection, and also heard from the staff of the Greater Oneonta Historical Society about their collections.
• I finished reading Jess Nevins' book Horror Needs No Passport: 20th century Horror Literature Outside the U.S. and U.K. and wrote up a scattered review. It was genuinely interesting, but such a rich subject that I ultimately found myself overwhelmed by the end of it. I think it’s meant to be more of a reference guide than a popular introduction and that made it hard to digest it all. Still, there were many authors I had never encountered before, and whose work I look forward to exploring in the future, thanks to Nevins' championing of them.

Booknotes: Horror needs no Passport by Jess Nevins

Finished 10/30/20

It is what it says on the can–a wide-ranging bibliographic essay on Horror fiction outside of its more commonly known “haunts” of the UK and the US.

It’s hard to synthesize a book like this, which is essentially a compendium of regional essays–more of a reference guide than a standard piece of non-fiction (and Nevins is both a fantastic fiction scholar and a librarian, so this makes some sense). What follows are some general notes that I made along the way, things that struck my interest, etc…

The book is organized chronologically, with three main periods: 1900-1939, 1940-1970, and 1970-2000, and then regionally within those time periods. In some regions, discussions stretch backward into the 19th century or earlier–there is an interesting discussion about Chinese and Japanese Horror literature going back hundreds or thousands of years. And some of the sections straddle the periods. But generally speaking, Nevins finds a way to bring coherence to the chronology and geography around which he has organized the book, highlighting broader cultural or political trends that impacted horror fiction or fiction more generally, and locating the authors he documents within the regional/chronological literary milieau he sketches. Within these sections, Nevins provides critical biographical sketches of significant authors.

It was fascinating to me to see what an impact the translation of Edgar Allen Poe outside of English or Romance languages had on global horror writing. Poe’s work pops up again and again as influential when it was translated into local or regional languages, whether this was for early 20th century authors in South Africa, Argentina, Iran, Japan, or much later authors influenced by Poe’s eventual translation into Indian languages in 1985(!) Other interesting inspirations came from the spread of Stoker’s Dracula, which inspired early vampire novels in Honduras (Turcios El Vampiro, 1910), Turkey (Gecesi’s Night of Terror, 1958), or India (the anonymously-authored Pischacho ki Mallika, 1997). In each case, local authors took these western sources as an ingredient in their own work, mixed with local folklore, political events, or cultural formations.

Nevins takes a wide view of what constitutes horror, relying on John Clute’s term “fantastika” to encompass a range of fiction with the promotion of fear or dread as a primary or secondary authorial goal. He ends up including everything from dark magical realism to modernist ghost stories to folklore tales rooted in indigenous traditions. This makes for a wide-ranging survey, and eradicates standard distinctions between “High” and “low” literature.

Much of 20th century American horror is rooted in pulp magazines and other popular periodicals. It was fascinating to read about the equivalents to these in other regions, as they too formed a locus of early horror writing. For instance, the “Indian state railways magazine” was an astonishingly widely read periodical (Nevins suggests in the “millions or tens of millions” in the 20s and 30s alone) that routinely featured stories of horror and the supernatural, though often by anoymous authors who brought together British horror forms with Indian folklore.

There is a critical bibliography of scholarship on various authors, regions, and time-periods, but I do wish that Nevins had included an author bibliography for the authors he documents, and with a particular focus on whether the works have been translated into English or not. As a fan of horror, it’d be nice to know beforehand whether I’ll have to learn a second language to enjoy an author whose work he champions.

The book is ultimately a great reference, but ended up being a bit bewildering to read in one sitting. It’s clear that the non-Anglo world of 20th century horror is astonishingly rich, diverse, and complicated, to the point where I felt like I was losing the thread by the end. Having said that, there are several authors whose works I had never heard of and will investigate, thanks to this volume, and for that, I’m glad I read it.

Quentin's Weeknotes 10/18/20 - 10/24/20

This week (and last week, as I was off work, but still, you know, did some stuff):

• I wished my brother a happy birthday. He continues to be a source of interesting stuff in my life, from video games to lefty politics. Happy Birthday, Conner!
• I watched Aterrados (Terrified), an Argentinian horror movie that made some waves when it came out in 2017. It was very good, though its quick pacing was a striking contrast from It Comes at Night, the last horror movie I watched, which was so slow as to be almost soporific.
• I finished reading Michael McDowell’s “The Elementals”, a fantastic southern Gothic ghost story novel.
• I finished reading “The Broken Hours” by Jacqueline Baker. The basic plot is that it’s about a man in the 1930s who goes to work for an ailing HP Lovecraft in a decaying house in Providence, RI. But really it’s about class, mental illness, and the ways we try and fail to break out of the roles into which we are thrust.
• I hosted the Yager Museum’s conversation with Luke Swinson, whose artwork is currently featured in the exhibit “dadibaajimo: Two Mississauga Artists Share Stories.” We had a great chat, which you can still watch on the Museum’s facebook page.
• Along with a Museum studies student, I launched a new video series for the Museum called “The Yager Through your Eyes” featuring Hartwick college faculty, staff, and students talking about their favorite objects. The first installment, featuring Hartwick student Gabriel Valenzuela (‘23) can be viewed on Youtube and facebook.
• In MUST250 “Collectors and Collecting” we learned about the history of Oneonta from historian Mark Simonson, the students took their mid-term exam, and we worked more on the wikipedia project.
• I was shocked and saddened to learn of the sudden death of Professor Mary Beaudry. An eminent and prolific scholar in Historical Archaeology (what a CV!), Beaudry was a major figure in the study of the material culture of the modern world, and conducted rich and important research projects in New England, Scotland, and the Caribbean. She wrote about gender, class, race, and the role material objects play in those social forces in really sophisticated and interesting ways. She was a firm advocate for women in a field mostly dominated by men or seen as a masculine pursuit, and she both wrote and spoke eloquently about sexism in the profession. She was also my undergraduate advisor, an important mentor who let me know that my eclectic and often scattered interests could find a home in archaeology.  She inspired, pushed, and helped me to go on to graduate school and that decision has shaped every aspect of my life since, and she remained a supportive and generous colleague years later. My sense, in seeing the responses from others, is that her considerate and deep support for her students was widely shared. Rest in Peace and in Power.

Quentin's Weeknotes 10/4/20-10/10/20

This Week:

• This week in Collectors and Collecting, we taught about the history of collecting in Deerfield, Massachusetts, a place I spent a lot of time in graduate school (and wrote several publications from the time). I also taught the history of comic books and collecting, which is one of my favorite classes of the entire calendar year. This year I’m trying out an excerpt from Chris Ryall and and Scott Tipton’s illustrated history of the genre.
• I finished reading John Bloom’s study of baseball card collecting, and wrote up a rather long review.
• I finished reading Annalee Newitz' “The Future of Another timeline”, a wild time-travel novel about feminists and reactionary patriarchal conservatives who edit the timeline like Wikipedia in a battle for women’s economic and reproductive autonomy. I found the characters to be a little wooden and rote, but the novel is filled with wonderfully rich historical details that span human (and terrestrial!) history and the plot and concept are really clever.