Not really. You should be very worried about the government.
But this title of a Talking Heads song from their '77 LP is an invitation to visit my underused Wordpress blog Bildungs and Food (see the connection with Talking Heads?) Anyway, there's a new post up over there--Distant and close-reading in the Anthropocene--which circles around some recent developments in literary studies, tying these to ideas from Dipesh Chakrabarty's recent essay "The climate of history" and heading toward a reading of Andrew McGahan's latest novel Wonders of a Godless World.
I've been enjoying and learning from Timothy Morton's iTunes course Environment and Literature University of California Davis Campus, and this discussion of the problems with disavowing the abstractions in the concrete is interesting and a good reminder of the dangers of the rush to posit the concrete in the face of the fictions of financial derivatives etc.
3 comments:
I also recently downloaded a bunch of those Morton classes. Just on the second one but really enjoying and learning from them as well. Wish I had that guy as a teacher when I was in college.
Morton's a bit of a comedian and treats his students really well. I'd have loved someone like him as an undergrad too.
I liked your post about Wendy Brown, recently. She's disappointed me.
Yeah, I was really shocked at what Brown said, or at least the way she said it. So condescending and nasty. But I wasn't that shocked at the stance she took, as her position on the faculty board almost assures that she act as a mediator. I wish she hadn't been so enthusiastic about it though. I haven't read anything by her since then, but it's going to be really hard not to reappraise her writings in light of these events. Which, as you say, is disappointing.
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