Non-academic bf: You could have borrowed my copy of that book
Me: Well thanks but I needed a copy for teaching
Non-academic bf: It’s ok if you write things in the margins of my books. Like ‘leitmotif’ or whatever
In 1995 my best friend mistakenly thought Coolio was singing that we were living in a gangster’s paradigm. I have thought about this once a week for 25 years.
Did I get through all the things I was supposed to this week? No.
But did I do what I could with the resources I had? Also no.
But did I prioritize self-care and protect my time? Um, still no.
"I'm an English professor"
- nerdy
- dowdy
- people at parties ask you not to correct their grammar
"I marshal the power of art to bring young people to tears"
- significant
- mysterious
- subtly conceals that my profession is chronically under-resourced and in fact collapsing
In honor of Libra season, I would like to niche-tweet that most canonical critical theorists are Libras:
Freud (Sept 23)
Anzaldúa (Sept 26)
Culler (Oct 1)
Johnson (Oct 4)
Arendt (Oct 14)
Nietzsche (Oct 15)
Foucault (Oct 15)
Althusser (Oct 16)
Fellow Uni instructors! COVID-19 f2f class cancelations are inconvenient! But remember you're salaried employees. Maybe call/email HR or your union & demand to know how hourly workers (clerical, food-service, custodial, etc) will be compensated during campus closures?
Ask anyone who does serious research on US popular culture and they will confirm, sooner or later, you will find yourself literally reading Playboy for the articles.
Having felt for many years of my professional life like a failure who never published a book, I am overjoyed that from today forward I can feel like a failure who *did* publish a book.
@johannawinant
Crusty baguette, salted butter, eaten standing up and over the kitchen sink (no plate, no napkin), always alone, and whenever someone walks in I feel vaguely like I’ve been caught in a shameful situation, despite the fact that it’s a baguette and I’m 42
Me at 22: *dreams about sex*
Me at 42: *dreams about teaching "Hegel and Haiti" to mostly Hispanophone comp lit majors who have really specific questions about sugar production in Cuba*
2019 Prof: Read the frickin syllabus!!
2020 Prof: This course is about abolition, beginning with the university. Our goal is to unlearn oppressive structures and radically change the way we live...
Sure, I labored for ten years on an academic monograph, but was it worth it in the end?
Yes, now that the book has received this amazing, batshit hate-review, it was most certainly worth it. 🥂🔥🌈
This is my face when I realize ten minutes into a Zoom from a vacation house that everyone including University leadership can see the giant Tom of Finland dicks on the wall.
Today Feb 21, 2022 is Nina Simone's 89th birthday. It's also the day I completed the first draft of my book about her. It's about what comes after her too, what she made and makes possible.
Or as I put it on page 240, "The future is always about history."
A colleague put a "Back in 5 minutes" post-it on her office door, like, 3 years ago, and just left it there. Every time I walk by I am in awe of her power.
You spend 10 years in archives. You read the theory. You write a book. You teach a class on the basis of it all. A student in class says, "It seems like archival studies are just about frustration." You realize at once this insight could have saved you 10 years.
#bookhistory
Ah, Thanksgiving break, the time in the academic calendar when you open a doc and learn that essay you "just want to finish" is actually a page and a half of nonsense notes and a list of references to things you haven't read
It's 3:30am in New York and I'm reading uncollected Gayatri Spivak essays from the 90s, which hold up remarkably well because we never addressed the problems she was diagnosing, so that's how things are going.
People on TikTok: it’s my birthday I’m 17!
People on Instagram: it’s my birthday I’m 28!
People on Twitter: Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly enco
We always say "we don't talk enough" about this or that, but we really, honestly, indisputably do not talk enough about the time Zora Neale Hurston photographed a zombie
Fellow syllabus writers! Remember that you're not including Black-authored texts to create diversity. You're including them because Black lives, Black history, Black thought, Black expression all matter on their own terms.
Them: How have you never read <acclaimed popular fiction that everyone is talking about>?
Me: Well how have YOU never read <obscure batshit nineteenth-century non-fiction on microfilm>?!
Bersani memorial thread:
C. 2005, I attended a lecture at NYU. It was advertised it in some newsletter at the beginning of the semester and, very uncharacteristically, I added it to my calendar. They forgot ever to advertise it again. 1/5
@jalbacutler
I tried to explain postcritique to my non-academic bf this morning and he instantly was like, “How could you think critique wasn’t love? Does no one have an immigrant mother?"
They do not tell you in grad school that someday you will put a text on your syllabus only to realize that the last time you read it was literally before your students were born
Love creative anachronism but in Bridgerton S2E7, when the guy in the print shop was loading the paper AND inking the plates with the SAME hands, reader, I wept and gnashed teeth
@V21collective
Expectations for the English dissertation in 1965: single author, archival, no argument necessary
By 1990: sing or multi-author, theory heavy, argument
Now: multi-author, archival, theory informed, field-shifting argument, AND funding is down to 5-6 years
In last night’s dream I received a reader’s report that was pretty mean though there was one sentence I found heartening: "The author clearly has no understanding of the workings of heterosexuality”
Ladies, if they're:
- working from home
- making sourdough starter
- reading late James
- mixing any old drink and calling it a "quarantini"
That's not your man. That's literally any white person with a liberal arts degree trying to seem like they're coping with this hell.
Tenure-Track: Global Anglophone Literatures of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, Fordham University English Department
CV and cover letter by 10/15/24
Fellow people burned out by escalating pandemic workloads! Can we agree that it will almost always be better to admit that we can’t do something than to try insistently and make it worse?