Over at Woke Giant you’ll find some seriously cool, retro-styled “political art for third century America.” Don’t miss the downloadable protest signs!
https://boingboing.net/2018/08/16/woke-giant-retro-political-ar.html
Woke Giant, retro political art for third century America
this started as a response to that anon but then i realized it was getting hella long, so here’s a separate post about
GRAD SEMINAR PERSONALITIES.
seminar personalities are based on a variety of factors, including class size, teaching style, comfort level, preexisting interpersonal dynamics, level of investment (in seminar and grad school as a whole), and mood. there are a few constants, though, and i will characterize them by harry potter characters because that’s how my brain is working right now.
- HERMIONE. has somehow managed to get to every single assigned reading, as well as the entire bibliography of every author on the syllabus. has she slept? probably not. will she monopolize conversation? probably yes, often by bringing in critics or works you’ve never heard of. she is an invaluable resource and is always happy to direct you to useful sources. befriend her and your inbox will never run dry (of JSTOR articles that made her think of you).
- RON. did he finish any of the readings? probably not. why is he in graduate school? unclear. he spent the summer hiking and is probably the most normal dude in your whole program. a source of good cheer, off-topic questions, and reminders that there is life outside of work.
- HARRY. caught in the perpetual, resentful paradox of obsessing over the job market but wanting to retain some semblance of happiness. deals with his crushing fear of failure by employing gallows humor and writing increasingly bizarre papers on increasingly obscure topics because time isn’t real and none of us are getting jobs anyway. prefers seminars that allow autonomy and/or provide professionalization training.
- LUNA. every seminar has at least one (1) theory bro. if you are not this bro, then at least half of what she* says sounds like abstract nonsense. however! her insights are often extremely wise and meaningful, so you need to either learn to speak the language or become proficient at translating. U Chicago has a generator, in case you need practice. you could also open literally any book by judith butler and try to decode a random paragraph. (*most theory bros are male, in my experience, but my roommate is one and she is a #blessing).
- REMUS LUPIN. mild-mannered mediator. does a lot to facilitate discussions, especially if the professor favors a laissez faire approach, and can translate between the theory bro and the rest of the world. generous and helpful in a very lowkey way. can respond to any totally incoherent question you ask with an answer that makes you sound like a genius.
- OLIVER WOOD. one-track mind, god bless him. complete expert on a very specific topic, little to no interest in anything else. he’s on a mission and if the content of the discussion doesn’t fit, he will make it fit. missions range from “bring up foucault’s discipline and punish in every class” to “apply all secondary texts to works authored by dh lawrence.”
vintage back-to-school content
“The simple things are also the most extraordinary things, and only the wise can see them.”
—
Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
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(via wordsnquotes)
“We were talking about The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which was something which resembled an iPad, long before it appeared. And I said when something like that happens, it’s going to be the death of the book. Douglas said, No it won’t be. Books are sharks. And I must have looked baffled at that because he looked very pleased with himself. And he carried on with his metaphor. He said, Books are sharks … because sharks have been around for a very, very long time. There were sharks before there were dinosaurs. And the reason sharks are still in the oceans is that nothing is better at being a shark than a shark is. He said, Look at a book. A book is the right size to be a book. They’re solar-powered. If you drop them, they keep on being a book. You can find your place in them in microseconds. They’re really good at being books, he said, and books, no matter what else happens, will always survive. And of course he’s right.”
— Neil Gaiman, giving the Douglas Adams Memorial Lecture 2015 (via thinkingingallifreyan)
“Sometimes the sins you haven’t committed are all you have left to hold onto.”
— David Sedaris, When You Are Engulfed in Flames
“Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art…. It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.”
— C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
artist-durer