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Quentin's Weeknotes 12/28/19-01/3/20

This week:

• [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSgHGFuPNus&w=560&h=315]
• I started the week on vacation in Toronto and ended it back at work, in a new year and new decade. I’m mostly trying to get back into the rhythm of the Museum, which will be fairly busy this coming Spring. We’ll have a new exhibit in early February, multiple programs (including our first-in-a-long-time concert next week, featuring John O’Connor), and a big push for some intensive collections work. Also, I’m teaching Collections Management again, which will probably be slightly different this year than in previous iterations, as we have some big external projects that we are going to help with.
• I grabbed a copy of the new Hallelujah the Hills album “I’m you”. It’s a tuneful, strange, exuberantly hopeful album. I’m thinking a lot about this lyric, from the title track:

Don’t quit, it only makes your enemies glad
They’d celebrate your decision, then feast on what you had
The rolling hills of lifer-arcs reflect the light from distant stars
Don’t quit, it only makes your enemies glad

• I finished reading Ann Leckie’s Ancilliary Justice. This is the kind of sci-fi I love, filled with deep, thoughtful meditations about complicated historical issues (in this case, colonialism, slavery, class-conflict, and gender identity) wrapped in unusual and weird narratives. The story centers around the human host of an Artificial Intelligence that once ran an entire spaceship, and how he/she seeks revenge for the ship’s destruction. It’s not surprising to me that she studied with Octavia Butler–both of them share a fascination with working through humanistic ethics, in the face of non-human (or inhuman) conditions.

Book Notes- Marx at the Arcade--Consoles, Controllers, and Class Struggle

Marx at the Arcade: Consoles, Controllers, and Class Struggle

By Jamie Woodcock

Finished 12/22/2019

A Marxist analysis of video games, along the axis of production (historical-material and labor relations) and consumption (games as play/anti-work, hacking, and online communities).

Woodcock takes Stuart Hall’s call for understanding popular culture as a site of social struggle. He uses video games as a locus for such analysis, examining their history, the class composition of their production, their links to imperialism and state violence, and their consumption.

His history of video games is rich, though still partial, highlighting their connections to military technological development as well as the anti-work philosophy and lifestyle of the counter-cultural people who ended up working on the earliest computers at Universities and corportions.  These two trends (hierarchical control and experimental “hacking”) for the nexus of video-game labor relations to this day, with big multi-national companies attempting to regiment, deskill, and control a labor force (programmers and designers) that is still rooted in creativity, loves their own product (he uses the term “playbour”), and rejects the ideas of work handed down from fordism, particularly a clock-punching eight hour day. As a consequence, the major labor issues inherent in the video game industry are the problems crunch time (long, hard hours as a project nears its end) and a tolerance for White, masculinist ideologies among workers, leading to the exclusion of women and people of color from success and advancement. He concludes with some discussions of efforts at unionization in the gaming industry, and the problems and possibilities of organizing a highly precarious but well paid labor force.

The second half of the book focuses on the consumption of games, and the ways in which the messages of many games repeat dominant ideologies that reify class relations and state power. At the same time, he also focuses on some alternative games that play against such ideologies, as well as the idea that experimental play inherent in video games may allow players to reconfigure or improvise alternatives to powerful ideas and social relations. There is also a simple but thorough discussion of the Gamergate phenomenon, largely framed as an anti-diversity patriarchal backlash movement. Overall, it was nice to see an analysis of games that recognized some of the ways that their ideas are problematic, while still locating them as an important site of cultural production, community-building, and counter-hegemonic activity.

As a gamer, it was fun and enlightening to read a critical history of an activity that I’ve loved for a long time. As a progressive with an interesting in labor politics, it was enlightening and inspiring to read about the complexities of organizing in the new flexible-information economy, in a way that provides pathways for future action.

My yearnotes for 2019

via GIPHY

My year, professionally:

• I taught classes at Hartwick College in Collections Management, and (with Dr. Doug Kendall) taught Collectors and Collecting, a First Year Seminar. Both were fun and interesting in their own ways, and both keep me on my toes as a Museum professional and an educator.
• I curated my first art show at the Museum: “Art/Politics: Power, Persuasion, and Propaganda” which features political art from the Yager Museum’s collection. It was a daunting but rewarding experience, and I’m looking forward to doing more curation and exhibition at the Museum in the future.
• I assisted in the installation of “Earth/Water/Sky”, “Silent Lakes and Flashing Rivers”, and “From Viking to Insight."
• I concluded a funded Native American speaker’s series at the Museum, with visits and talks from members of the Tuscorora and Mohawk communities of New York State.
• I co-organized a First Nations Film Series, featuring movies about Indigenous impacts on popular Music, cultural reclamation and renewal, and the American Indian Movement, respectively. We hope to continue this type of event, moving forward at the Museum.
• I attended the Museum Association of New York conference in Cooperstown, and saw the wonderful and inspiring work of my colleagues across the State.
• I also attended the New York Archives conference, where I presented a co-authored paper about archaeology and archives at Hartwick College.
• Though the work has been ongoing for several years now, this year finally saw the publication of a special issue of the journal Historical Archaeology, co-edited by myself and two colleages (who I’m lucky enough to also call friends), and featuring work by scholars studying the archaeology of the Connecticut River Valley. I’m proud of this publication, and honored and delighted to have such intelligent and generous colleagues.

My media consumption was a bit more sparse than in previous years, but I still found some interesting things to read and see and listen to this year.

• I didn’t buy a lot of music this year.  Digitally, I acquired albums by Ibeyi, Trans Am, and Purple Mountains. I also picked up vinyl copies of Fairport Convention’s “Liege and Lief”, Husker Du’s “Zen Arcade”, Ian Hunter’s “You’re Never Alone with a Schizophrenic”, Led Zeppelin IV, Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark’s “Dazzle Ships”, and the Halloween party record “Monster Rally." I also bought a few things at Oneonta’s Grand and Glorious Garage Sale.
• By the end of 2019, I will have read 36 books and a little more than 9000 pages. A lot of what I read was pretty good, but the works that stood out to me included:
  • Viroconium by M. John Harrison. This collection’s masterful prose and oblique but stark deconstruction of the high fantasy genre has continued to sit with me as I read other things (and try to write myself). Also, Harrison’s blog is is full of bite-sized but nutriciously enlightening posts about writing, politics, and aesthetics.
  • Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler. I actually read two books by Butler this year, but this one has stuck with me, as its depiction of life after the end of the world (in a manner not disimilar to the one we seem to be facing down) feels daunting but hopeful.
  • Barraccoon by Zora Neale Hurston. I wrote some notes about this book, but the truth is that it was a really monumental achievement, and I’ve found myself recommending it to everyone this year.
  • Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968 by Ryan Walsh. I spent four amazing years living in Boston, and have visited many times since (including in late October. At a basic level, I’ve always been drawn to its patchwork of old and new things, spaces, and ideas, and what Walsh’s book on the music of Boston in the late 1960s shows us is that “old” and “new” are a circle that continue to loop around us as we step uncertainly into the future.
• I didn’t go out to the Movies much this year, and what I did see was mostly movies that appealed to my six-year old. Thus, my theater experiences consisted of seeing How to Train your Dragon: The Hidden World, Aladdin, The Secret Life of Pets 2, and Us (he didn’t go to this one).
• On the home front, I also saw Apostle, A Serious Man, Await Further Instructions, The Banshee Chapter, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, Bone Tomahawk, Bruce Springsteen on Broadway, John Wick, The King, Lincoln, Midsommar, The Perfection, The 13th, and Under the Skin.
• For podcasts, my regulars remain WTF w/ Marc Maron, Drunks and Dragons/Greetings Adventurers, The Best Show, Pseudopod, and the Memory Palace. This year I’ve played around with listening to Why is this Happening?, the Writer’s Almanac, Deconstructed, Our Opinions are Correct, Odyssey Bookshop podcast, Podside Picnic, Intercepted, and This Land.

Other things:

• Our street hosted a block-long garage sale, which combined three of my favorite things–community building, material culture, and sitting outside.

• I wrote about 25,000 words of fiction this yea. I had planned on trying to finish a novel this year, but that wasn’t really in the cards. I struggled with a YA novel for the first part of the year before abandoning it after about 12,000 words. Since then I’ve been trying to find the time to finish editing a long-ish short story (close to 8K words before it’s done) that I’m going to finish before the year rolls out.

• I took care of my family, and they took care of me.

  • Sometimes this took the form of getting our house into the home we want it to be. We painted two rooms, put up a lot of artwork, re-worked our living room, and whipped our garden into better shape. I used a stump grinder for the first time, which was an exhiliarating experience.
  • Sometimes it took the form of visiting new places. Various combinations of us went to the Museum of Science and Technology in Syracuse, NY, Robot City Games in Binghamton, NY, Longwood Gardens in Chester County, PA, and riding the Cooperstown and Charlotte Valley Railroad. Additionally we visited King of Prussia, PA and Salem, MA, and both times in the company of the Minister of Intrigue and his family. He and I have been friends for a long, long time and we are finally living in (basically) the same part of the world. It was delightful to see him and his family and I’m looking forward to getting together more regularly from now on.
  • Sometimes it took the form of celebrating. I turned 40! I had a legitimately great birthday, thanks to my lovely wife who went to Leslie Nope-levels of planning and forethought to make it special
  • My son continues to delight, confuse, and inspire me with his boundless curiousity, energy and creativity. This was a year where I felt like I could start sharing some of my favorite things with him, in music, literature, and film.
  • My wife is an unparalled and devoted partner in everything I do, and I love her so much for her humor, her moral clarity, and her perseverence in adversity.
  • Finally, my year was overshadowed and forged and propelled by the birth of my daughter in late December of last year. Basically everything I did (or didn’t do) was a product of her presence, and her growth into the delightful and curious person she’s becoming, and which I’m honored and bewildered to watch and shepherd. So this was her year, even as it was also mine.

Quentin's Weeknotes 11/30/19-12/6/19

This Week:

• I read about the Disney Animators strike of the 1940s. A guillotine was involved–They did not mess around.
• I turned 40! Well, actually that was two weeks ago, but it’s taken me this long to admit it.
• I finished reading both Jonathan Metzl’s “Dying of Whitness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America” and Sylvain Neuvell’s “Sleeping Giants.” I just haven’t had tme to review either of them, but may still once I can dig myself out of being sick, and getting through Christmas.
• I finished co-teaching the last class of MUST250: Collectors and Collecting at Hartwick College. The class went really well–the students were engaged and (mostly) enthusiastic participants, and I’m starting to feel like the course is coming together and getting more focused.

Quentin's Weeknotes 11/2/19-11/8/19

This Week:

• I voted!
• I discovered The 1865, an African-American radical punk rock group. Their song “John Brown’s Gat” is…well, just listen: [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CimRL7dcDuM&w=560&h=315]
• I finished Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials. It’s a fictionalized series of essays that, if you blink, you won’t notice turning into a cosmic horror. Truly strange but very interesting.
• I watched the trailer for the upcoming Richard Stanley/Nicholas Cage adaptation of HP Lovecraft’s “The Colour out of Space”. Initial reviews of this film, which draws on Lovecraft’s (probably unfilmable) masterpiece, are pretty positive, and I’m cautiously optimistic.

Quentin's Weeknotes 10/26/19-11/1/19

This week:

• Yours truly, near the Salem Burying Ground and Witches MemorialThanks to my delightful and amazing wife, I went on a surprise trip to Salem, Massachusetts. Salem is an absolute zoo around Halloween, full of tourists, vendors, costumed weirdos, and local residents all ambiguously pulled together in a touristy mess centered around the town’s dark history. I had a great old time, not the least of which because my wife arranged for the Minister of Intrigue and his family to join us.
• I read this wonderful article about Nancy Rowe, an incredible woman I met in the brief time that was privileged to work for the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation. Nancy is an educator, knowledge-keeper, and activist, not to mention the founder and keeper of the Akinomaagaye Gaamik lodge, and this article talks about her current work at decolonizing Ontario education around Indigenous Issues.
• Once again, the Yager Museum hosted its annual Halloween storytellling event “The Horror in the Museum." We had a great slate of student, faculty, and staff readers, with performances of works by Poe, Lovecraft, Atwood, and many others. Happy Halloween!
• Every Halloween, I try to make time to watch one horror movie that I haven’t seen before. This year, I watched the Banshee Chapter, an interesting but scattered film that draws on US covert experiments with mind control, the Lovecraft story “From Beyond”, and the life of Hunter S. Thompson (really!), and wrapping all of that into a found-footage pastiche. It was certainly entertaining Halloween fodder, amplified by a great performance by Ted Levine, though like many horror movies, it couldn’t really cash the checks that it wrote.

Quentin's Weeknotes 10/19/19-10-25/19

This Week:

• I went to western Mass (Springfield, Holyoke, and Brimfield) for the celebration of a deceased friend.
• I read this monumental article about the recitation of the Haudenosaunee Great Law of Peace and its implications for the coming climate crisis.
• In the class I’m teaching on Collectors and Collecting, we have talked about the phenomenon of “touching greatness”–a mode of collecting that is rooting in connecting onesself to larger forces or people through objects. Lo and behold, I see this story in Rollingstone, on the history of the sweater that Kurt Cobain wore during the taping of Nirvana Unplugged.

Quentin's Weeknotes 10/12/19-10/18/19

Quentin’s Weeknotes:

• M. John Harrison, ladies and gentlemen:

Try to understand the science. Try to tell the truth. Try to find a medium in which to tell the truth. Try to extend the envelope in which you will be permitted to tell the truth. Prophecy is over. Persuasion is over. Action is the last thing left. Rebellion is the last thing left. Stay steady in the face of it all. Do what you can. Write that. Record that. Try to pass helpful messages between practical, determined people.

• I read archaeologist Paul Mullins' lengthy blog post on recent (and historical) attempts to exhume the body of gangster John Dillinger in Indianapolis. Dillinger’s fame as a criminal and his legacy have spurred many ad-hoc (and sometimes vandalizing) memorialization efforts, including possibly the removal of his body or parts theoreof from his grave. Mullins uses the recent efforts by Dillinger’s descendants to exhume the body for verification as a vantage point for thinking about fame, spectacle, memorialization, and death, and the ways in variable ways in which we remember public figures.

Book Notes: Landscapes: John Berger on Art

Landscapes: John Berger on Art

by John Berger

Finished 10/8/2019

I only knew John Berger by reputation. His book Ways of Seeing (and the accompanying BBC series) were the onramp of many of my friends and colleagues to Marxism and critical theory.

This book collects some of Berger’s essays on art, though that catch-all is rather loosely interpreted, given the broad tonal and thematic content herein. There are memoir-like reminiscences of his youth, essays on marxism in a post-soviet world, travelogues in palestine and Israel, and thoughts on Walter Benjamin and Rosa Luxembourg. These subjects seem perhaps unrelated to what we generally think of as “art” but it comes through in Berger’s insistence that we not lose sight of the aesthetic and emotional qualities of political struggle, and the ways in which we apprehend (and therefore understand) our political and social situation is conditioned by our relationship to art and aesthetics. Likewise, his fierce ethical compass shines through, especially his belief that art, as a social category, must be disentangled from property.

The essays I enjoyed the most included a deep dive into the revolutionary nature of cubism, and his thoughtful analysis of drawings as a medium and as a way of imperfectly capturing intangible experiences like memories. I also found myself nodding along reading his essay on the history of Museums, and thinking about whether they are redeemable, given their origins in propping up power. But I also liked several of political essays, including his thoughts on the fall of Berlin Wall, with its deeply humanistic though cautious championing of the collapse of Soviet-style communism. Likewise, his essay “Ten Dispatches about Place” in which he addresses the question of whether one can be a Marxist absent a living model of a socialist society. 

His writing is always clear and impassioned, complex and rich but not dense. This book was a great introduction to Berger, and I’m looking forward to reading more of this brilliant, ethical, and thoughtful scholar.                     

Quentin's Weeknotes 10/5/19-10/11/19

This Week:

• I finished reading Landscapes: John Berger on Art. As with all essay collections, it was varied, but I came away with a profound respect for Berger’s deeply humanistic vision of Marxism and his sincere belief that art should be disentangled from property.
• Just in time for Halloween, I found this wild 1959 children’s/novelty record called “Monster’s Rally." The cover art, which was what attracted me at first, was drawn by the legendary EC Comics/Mad Magazine artist Jack Davis! I stuck around for such winning songs as “The Dracula Trot” and “Take Us to Your President”
• I read this great essay by Gabriel Winant on the origins of the term “Professional-Managerial Class” and its implications for the growing fight between Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders' Supporters. Drawing on the politics of the New Left in the 1960s and 70s, Winant argues that the term (coined by the Ehrenreichs) is meant to encapsulate the complicated ideo-technical mess that greased the wheels between labor and capital in the Fordist 20th century. Now that that fordism (and the post-fordist neoliberalism that replaced it) has basically fallen apart as a political-economic formation, the “PMC” is fragmenting and fractions of it respectively gravitating towards various political solutions, some of which seem contradictory. Winant ultimately argues that political differences between Warrenism and Sandersism are meaningful, but perhaps less signficant given that both candidates are drawing support from an increasingly frustrated and fragmenting social strata. It’s long, but worth your time.
• After being bewildered and amazed by an excerpt of it in the Vandermeer’s massive anthology “The Weird”, I started reading Reza Negarastini’s “Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anomalous Materials”. It’s dense and strange, so wish me luck as I fall down an oil well.