letterboxd review of tenet by fran hoepfner reading "just fully weeping with laughter. absolute nonsense. finally someone has made a movie about grad school"
though, also, Fran Hoepfner has the useful genre/running bit of "movies about grad school"
Novel of ideas sun, campus novel rising: Drive My Car
Campus novel sun, novel of ideas rising: A Serious Man
Was not counting on being moved by any "Infinite Jest"-at-30 essays. And but then @pauline2k.bsky.social performed a tour de force of reparative reading. This is so lovely! www.oaklandreviewofbooks.org/infinity-plu...
Yamamoto in DeWitt's The Last Samurai!
Brandon Taylor calls himself one (which is not necessarily the same as being one, but): theadroitjournal.org/issue-thirty...
new issue of MEDIATIONS! "Transitions"
globalization, commodity form, financialization, development and so many genres thereof
mediationsjournal.org
From 1880 to 1920, institutions of higher education reformed themselves along the lines of the German model, replacing generalist scholars with specialist “investigators” who clustered around particularized fields of expertise.7 Much of what we accept as the normal organization of the academy today emerged during this time: the unit of the department took on “connotations of disciplinary specialization and administrative autonomy,” Graff explained; administrators founded journals and university presses to ensure that academic research had a means of dissemination and an audience; universities established gradu- ate programs as a formalized credentialing process, with field-specific courses and a doctoral dissertation; and a network of department chairs, deans, provosts, and presidents rapidly proliferated to oversee all these intricate and interrelated developments.8 The bureaucratic subdivision of the university proceeded “in an astonishingly short period of time and with relatively little variation from one institution to another,” Vey- sey observed, with the process gaining in intricacy and reach over the twentieth century and all the way up to the present day.9 It impressed onto the figure of the scholar a relatively delimited disciplinary affilia- tion—the antithesis of the polymath, who, in retrospect, would appear to modern intellectuals as a dilettante, an amateur, or a philistine.
The second development, related to the first, is the precipitous de- cline of classical and vernacular language education. What Albert S. Cook described in his 1898 MLA presidential address, “The Province of English Philology,” as “the estrangement of the study of language from that of literature” was a process that had started decades before with the separation of the Latin and Greek languages, oratory, rhetoric, linguistics, and forensics (along with mathematics, logic, and theology) from the teaching of the modern languages and literatures as a college subject.10 Modern languages and literatures subsequently split off into individual language departments, including English, which ascended to prominence through the postwar period.11 By the 1960s, the separa- tion between English and non-English languages and literatures was institutionalized in the MLA by sub-dividing it into the Association for Departments of English (ADE) and the Association for Departments of Foreign Languages (ADFL, which recently rebranded as the ALD). The sub-division of the organization made transparent “the division be- tween those who teach English and those who teach foreign languages,” Michael Holquist observed in “Why We Should Remember Philology”: “Members of the ADE are more often than not, on their campuses, the moving force in the textual humanities, with all the implications of that fact, not just as cultural capital but for tenured slots, salaries, graduate stipends, and funds for development (i.e., money!).”12 The ADFL had more members, but these members had seen disproportionately shrink- ing enrollments in their language courses and a growth in the number of literature courses they taught in English translation. Administrators, Holquist observed, had responded by converting “formerly independent departments” into “larger and more homogenized units,” “formed by combining erstwhile departments into such institutionally mandated gerrymanders as German-Slavic-Chinese or the all-pu…
The final development is the feminization of language education subsequent to its estrangement from the study of literature. By feminiza- tion I mean, first, the fact of gender in the demographic composition of language teachers across the school system; they have been, and continue to be, overwhelmingly female-identifying.14 But I also mean the devaluation of the labor of teaching relative to research in the contemporary Anglophone university. Like teachers of grammar and composition (which they often also are), language educators were treated as members of a lower-level, preparatory, and technical work force and were described as the feminized “handmaid” to the masculine “master” that is literary criticism.15 Their teaching was, and is, regularly allocated to graduate students, adjunct faculty, or non-tenure track professors, who were paid at lower rates and had comparatively little, if any, job security. This devaluation secured what Sianne Ngai has described as “contingent labor’s articulation with female labor”—that is, the alignment of the work performed by contingent employees in the school with the unwaged work performed by domestic or affective laborers in the home.16 Language education made the interarticulation of labor and gender especially ap- parent because, for scholars and policy makers alike, the proper domain of language education often shifted. Sometimes language education took place in the home, where it was treated as the responsibility of unwaged caregivers. Other times, it took place in the school, where it was treated as the responsibility of waged teaching professionals.
I think this is part of the story that Emre proposes to tell in her "Post-Discipline" book, whenever that comes out -- but there's a walkthrough in her Helen DeWitt essay for NLH: muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/articl...
Mukherjee kicks this around re Eliot and Coetzee, Conrad and Said in her "What is a Classic?" www.sup.org/books/litera...
...but idk if I'm ready to concede that my impatience with Lerner, Oyler is JUST wanting to reassert the prestige of better-disguised (more time and skill expensive) research and curation)
(which: not so far removed from "my kid could paint that" philistinism, but if RR wants to focus on the work of the curatorial subject then a desire for Distinctive how-did-they-do-that curation makes sense, at least as an attempt at reasserting a kind of prestige...
small, but: I get that the Manov critique of Oyler's borrowing from wikipedia looks, to Ruby, like small potatoes relative to Melville -- but the difference is that it's trivially easy to trace Oyler's steps, so that "well then what did I need Oyler for" feeling isn't nothing
my hotter take here is split the difference and drop both for Kim
Fleming? I hear you on HoD slog but it grounds so much of what follows, Achebe/Roy especially
Rosa Press has collated a folio of tributes in memory of our friend Joshua Clover. Please read pieces by @lalouverouge.bsky.social @sarahbrouillette.bsky.social @charmainechua.bsky.social Oki Sogumi, Mark Steven, @andrew-brooks.bsky.social + @alorange.bsky.social here: rosapress.net/joshua-clove...
*ten minute sound bath*
Reading Big Swiss in coffee shops has yielded consistent gushing from baristas
Clear-eyed, strategic analysis from @emanabdelhadi.bsky.social at @thedrift-mag.bsky.social: "I’m not sure that the [pro-Palestine] movement has saved a single life, and that’s extremely sobering. It speaks to the fact that we don’t live in a democracy; +
www.thedriftmag.com/we-will-not-...
The song lists a series of things that you will do for the last time. The examples are universal but sort of dudely, wide-ranging but white as fuck, and steeped in small town nostalgia: using a fake ID, making out in a car, asking SuperCuts for a mullet, last time for everything. What distinguishes these from things you do for the first time is not that it’s the last time but that you do not know it’s the last time when it’s happening. You think you will come back to this beach, have another summer, feel this love a second time. You won’t, last time for everything. This is what the boys of summer don’t yet know, and it is about them. Lit by heartland virtue, the song seems sort of sentimental and possibly boring. Then it scales up. At the end of the second verse, Paisley remembers “Watching Glenn Frey sing “Already Gone” at the Forum in LA.” Run the chorus, now gone dark: “last call, last chance, last song, last dance.” Frey was already gone two years. There’s a last breath for everyone. But we still don’t know what’s coming. We find out 100 seconds later.
That could be it but it isn’t. With 21 seconds left, already too late for anything new to happen, after an almost bored “last time for everything,” we arrive at the final enumeration, there’s a last item for everything, “…hearing Prince sing “Purple Rain,”” but this he sings with a sudden abandon, breaking into falsetto that heads for the heavens as it trails off and I want to assure you it is the first Black reference in the entire song and you suddenly recognize that this is not a blind spot but a strategy, that the song’s naïveté and predictability and invocation of the fucking Eagles were all a long and patient way to make it okay for country to talk about this, except that all talk ends there, there’s a last line for everything, and it is at this moment that you can hear how the guitar’s rolling arpeggio has been calling down “Purple Rain” the whole time, since the very beginning, and that the song is the first great elegy for the last great star. It’s heartbreaking. Prince is dead and Glenn Frey is dead and Don Henley is the “Boys of Summer” guy. Your tomb is Paisley Park or the Hotel California or it’s Eighties Radio. Henley is there, “Boys of Summer” was the last time for him, the last song he made that mattered, he is there looking backward from the autumn of 1984 from which he would not escape, suspended there between never go out of style and already gone.
last time for everything
