The semester is finally on track after an extensive comedy of errors finding classroom space. It took four weeks, an even more ridiculous fall start than normal. Howard always comes on board after summer like the whole campus has been caught unawares that classes are taught here. I think it’s only getting worse now that administrators are, post-Covid and post-Chat GPT, thinking less and less materially about what instruction looks like. I’m sure I’ll have more to say about LLMs and education at some point—I spent my summer writing inputs for training them—but I’m still gathering those thoughts and looking into more grounded sources.

I’m also getting back on track with professional networking and scheduling more regular informational interviews, as I work on my transition outside of higher education. I’d be very interested to connect and speak with anyone who has transitioned to other careers from teaching, especially with people who have moved to the federal government or into education consulting. I’m particularly interested in grant agencies, but I still have a wide net. So please connect with me! Or connect me with someone you know.

I want to share this fascinating, if difficult, article about Ashli Babbitt’s mother living in DC. I don’t have much to say other than that the author and her partner were my neighbors when I lived in Northeast, and that is still where my son lives half-time with his mom and goes to school. They are really good people and I’m moved by the radical empathy they are trying to practice here, even as I’m disturbed by having people I consider fascists down the street. I don’t think people realize how visceral and frightening January 6th was for DC residents, and this starts to get at that and the aftermath of the different traumas that emerged from that terrible day.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/10/jan-6-capitol-attack-ashli-babbitt-dc-residents/679563/

I’m still writing about Stephenson’s Quicksilver, although I may ditch that essay. I’ve been trying to think about the image of the Baroque era he offers and what critical leverage it offers about the present of global finance and computational logic, but I’m running aground on contradictions between my desire to think as a dialectical materialist and Stephenson’s own ideological sympathies (which have always felt libertarian light to me). The book is great and perhaps “less” libertarian than his more famous books, but I wonder if I’m writing about his book or just my own reading of the period through the lens of thinkers I have more in common with politically—while using his novel as a pretty specious historical source. This doesn’t seem like a particularly honest or useful way to write about these topics, but I’ll see.

It has led me to want to get back into reading Fredric Jameson, particularly the huge wave of books he’s produced in the last decade or so. I devoured early works like Marxism and Form, The Political Unconscious, and The Prison House of Language early in graduate school and was lucky enough to take a few seminars with him at Duke. As I got more into my research topics in early American Literature, I fell away from his high Marxist/high modernism writing, even as his formulation of “history is what hurts” and his concern with the impossible but necessary task of mediating history through aesthetic forms were in many ways at the center of my dissertation and book project. Still, I haven’t read him in years. I finally picked up his late 80s book on Adorno that has been sitting on my shelf for ages and I’d like to catch up with his more recent work, particularly the new book on the global novel. I’ve heard mixed things, but I imagine it’s all fascinating reading. I’m open to any suggestions for where to start with the last decade or so of writing.

In the meantime, I’ve started Orhan Pamuk’s Snow. It’s a great postcolonial novel about national identity and the double bind of Western progress and fundamentalism in Turkey. It’s also about art and theater and poetry and a satire of sorts of the artist/intellectual getting lost amidst these conflicting forces. It has a unique tone that I haven’t quite put my finger on—satirical political tragedy perhaps? It’s part of why I’m interested in Jameson’s take on the global novel, assuming it may have some relevance for how we read and think about big international Nobel prize winners like Pamuk who probably represent the only experience many American readers have with modern Turkey in print.

I think two posts a week was probably an ambitious goal to start, so I’m scaling back to one for now, and seeing if I have any coherent ideas for more focused essays in addition to posts like this, but without forcing that output every week. Maybe I will write through the dead end I have with the Stephenson novel or maybe I will take up something else.