Tag: reading

Burn out, game development, plant scraps, and other things that have stuck out this past week to me

On By BrettIn Things that have stuck outLeave a comment

Hey all, it has been a busy time of the year, and my post has not come together in time. So I figured I would do another “things I ran into this week.” This time, no particular categories.

The first thing is this new forward to her forthcoming book on Millennial burnout that Anne Helen Peterson wrote, written with COVID-19 in mind. I read it today, and it really hit home, both for its eloquence and thoughtfulness.

This section in particular stood out to me:

Like the generations before us, we were raised on a diet of meritocracy and exceptionalism: that each of us was overflowing with potential, and all we needed to activate it was hard work and dedication. If we worked hard, no matter our current station in life, we would find stability.

Long before the spread of COVID-19, millennials had begun to come to terms with just how hollow, how deeply and depressingly fantastical, that story really was. We understood that people keep telling it, to their kids and their peers, in New York Times editorials and in how-to books, because to stop would be tantamount to admitting that it’s not just the American Dream that’s broken; it’s America. That the refrains we return to — that we’re a land of opportunity, that we’re a benevolent world superpower — are false.

I am looking forward to her book–and have kept an eye on her twitter feed to look at books she drew from, given my own interest in work v. play. For more like this, there is an interview with Peterson and Derek Thompson, of The Atlantic, on the Ezra Klein Show and Peterson’s viral Buzzfeed piece on Millennial burnout.

On a lighter note, my adviser alerted me to this weekly newsletter by writer Robin Sloan (Sourdough and Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore) as he develops a new narrative game. I’ve liked each newsletter a lot so far, and as someone who has never built a game, I am fascinated by the journey and decisions. The updates can get a bit technical, if you are interested in typography, sound design, coding, etc., but Sloan’s clear, concrete language and friendly tone make a transparent, fun, and fascinating Sunday read.

Meanwhile, if you are interested in more low-tech gaming, this New York Times article has advice how to play board games over teleconferencing apps. Although, if digital games are your thing, Kotaku has a list of Indie games you now have time to play and The Guardian has a list of games especially suited for socializing long distance.

More in line with Peterson, I have been thinking about Laurie Penny’s reflections in Wired about apocalypse and the odd normality of this current, disruptive crisis:

There’s an important difference between apocalypse and a catastrophe. A catastrophe is total devastation, with nothing left and nothing learned. “Apocalypse”—especially in the biblical sense—means a time of crisis and change, of hidden truths revealed. A time, quite literally, of revelation. When we talked about the end of every certainty, we were not expecting any revelation. We were not expecting it to be so silly, so sweet, and so sad.

Indeed, it’s worth remembering, as Mary Harris does at Slate, that “We’re not ‘Going Back to Normal,'” and that technologies, like test and trace (The Economist & The Atlantic) will be with us for some time. As per usual, Ed Yong’s cogent writing is clear on the matter:

The pandemic is not a hurricane or a wildfire. It is not comparable to Pearl Harbor or 9/11. Such disasters are confined in time and space. The SARS-CoV-2 virus will linger through the year and across the world. “Everyone wants to know when this will end,” said Devi Sridhar, a public-health expert at the University of Edinburgh. “That’s not the right question. The right question is: How do we continue?”

Until things ease to the next steps, however, we should remember the harrowing experiences of the “necessary” front-line workers, like the author of this must-read diary of an E.R. worker in New York and the hospitality and delivery workers.

We also may grow some plants from grocery scraps in the windowsill, for us apartment dwellers, or for more the more industrious, prepared, and spatially endowed, turn our homes into food producers, with advice from Alice Waters.

Last, if you are looking for a little historical perspective, here is a fascinating collection of historic letters in The Atlantic reflecting hardship, ranging from the Dust Bowl to Georgia O’Keeffe. Or, you could always go online, which is either been especially retro and good lately or our familiar dumpster fire, depending on who you ask.

Disability and Curriculum

On By BrettIn disability rhetoric, disability studies, LiteratureLeave a comment

“in the air     the slant snow

the bird rising away

from the wild and bare tree”  -Larry Eigner

Born with cerebral palsy in 1927, Larry Eigner spent most of his life using a wheel chair. He also wrote more than 40 collections of poetry, according to The Poetry Foundation. Often grouped with the Black Mountain Poets–and more broadly, the poets of the groundbreaking New American Poetry anthology–Eigner’s poetry has always struck me. Something about his wandering line breaks and latched-together images gives his poetry the spontaneous clarity of a Zen haiku. But it feels freer, spilling out of its forms. He composed most of them from his front porch.

About 100 years earlier, another poet named John Clair penned “I Am” from within the walls of an asylum:

I am—yet what I am none cares or knows;
My friends forsake me like a memory lost:
I am the self-consumer of my woes—
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes
And yet I am, and live. . .
Allegedly broken by the weight of poverty and grief, Clare was institutionalized for suffering delusions the final 20 years of his life. Some biographers trace his breakdown with the rise of industrialization and the death of the commons.
To me, both poets represent powerful writing. They also represent work from people with disabilities–Eigner’s cerebral palsy, and Clare’s psychosis. When approaching Linton’s Claiming Disability, I wasn’t sure where to begin. Maybe the clarion calls it makes throughout for a more integrated, critical outlook on disability. Or the way it deconstructs the traditional curriculum. The stances it makes on language.
But, I think the point that likely struck the most from Linton, and what drew me back to this poetry, is her point about the dominantly medical mode of disability and the role of this sense of the term has. As she writes at one point, “What is absent from the curriculum is the voice of the disabled subject and the study of disability as an idea, as an abstract concept, and it is in the humanities that these gaps are most apparent.”

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Reading without Principle

On By BrettIn digital humanities, researchLeave a comment

Along the banks of the Allegheny River on a tepid September day in 2009, a college freshman decided to read the complete works of Henry David Thoreau.

Needless to say, he never reached his goal.

Reading the entire corpus of an author is pretty difficult. Not only for the sheer volume it contains, but also for the access it requires, with some books relegated to expensive collections. It’s also a question of utility: Why read an entire author’s oeuvre, when you’ll probably forget most of it?

But in digital humanities, the use of technology allows a range of new practices–new “reading” and analysis–that makes this act a little more feasible. Franco Morretti’s “distant reading,” for example, can allow a scholar to sift through millions of texts, using different data-driven lenses to pry out patterns.

And while this ability to access large swaths of text is helpful in itself, technology can play with texts in other ways, highlighting certain words, collecting certain patterns, making visualizations. As Tanya Clemens points out, such methodologies “defamiliarize texts, making them unrecognizable in a way (putting them at a distance) that helps scholars identify features they might not otherwise have seen.” This defamiliarizing lies at the heart of literary scholarship, finding new ways to understand texts.

But for now, I want to get back to my freshman self, sitting on the riverbank, reading an old library book of Thoreau.

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Crinkled, old books

On By BrettIn Personal9 Comments

The school library gives away excess books, usually obscure philosophy titles that have lingered on shelves for years, dusted with age and the prints of wizened grad students. Wednesday, they had a table full. I survey the jumbled piles on a table by the main entrance, pluck and shuffle them as I scan the titles.

Now and then, I open one. The binding crinkles, as if glued into place, and the yellowed pages exhale their pale aroma, a warm, dusty tang that has always reminded me of cigars and cedar wardrobes.

I can’t help but steal a few: some Heidegger, Dostoevsky, a Kaufmann anthology of Existentialist writings. I slip the delicate volumes into my backpack and continue.

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