by Ashley Bales

We’ve made it to another week without being blown into the ocean or blasted into a radiated hell-scape, though philosopher Byung-Chul Han thinks our values are being swallowed up in a social media “shitstorm.” Adrian Nathan West’s piece in the LARB reminded me to finish Han’s treatise, In the Swarm, a critique of the effects of the digital age on our lives, sociality and power structures. It has me glad my foundational worldview is biological not philosophical. How depressing to always be thinking about the degradation of humanistic values, much better to reject the concept of humanistic values all together. Ok, ok, our value systems are ecologically and evolutionarily embedded. They will not get sucked into Han’s “shitstorm” and go poof as easily as our disintegrating civil liberties. I didn’t say there weren’t consequences, but our humanity isn’t at stake. I had an up-side when I started this paragraph: grateful to be slaving away at self-production, about to pour over Han’s book.

In other depressing, internet-related news: Amazon ‘pays 11 times less corporation tax than traditional booksellers.’

Toni Morrison discusses her career-long exploration of writing race without color as a means to “…defang racism, annihilate and discredit the routine, easy, available color fetish, which is reminiscent of slavery itself;” Thrity Umrigar is pressured to write only characters belonging to her race; and Mountainview Alumna Nadia Owusu explores the complexity of blackness and her experience as the lighter skinned black girl at her boarding school. Owusu writes: “I used to look to literature to help me understand how to exist in an often racist world. I sought to understand the unjust rules, and admittedly, how to make them bend in my favor. Now, I read to understand how to reject them, how to rewrite them.”

This week on the blog, Phil Lemos compares writing a novel to managing a warehouse, a new poem by Curtis Graham, and Daniel Johnson considers the sensory ecstasy of Instagram slime videos.

Ashley Bales is a current student of Southern New Hampshire University's MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction. She holds a Ph.D. in Biological Anthropology, teaches in the Math and Science Department at Pratt Institute and is web editor for Assignment Magazine.

by Ashley Bales

The world is full of change and tragedy: John Ashbery died, fall 2017 semesters started across the country, and I am reading a book on my phone. That list may suffer from issues of scale and context, but not sincerity. A tragic loss is followed by the inevitable ticking forward of academic clocks to the tune of incoming freshman that will soon demand post-millennial identities, and a stubborn holdout (me) is pushed along.

The academy continues to rage at itself: down with historic-contextualism, three cheers for practical criticism. Roth’s irate review of Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History by Joseph North may go a bit too far in bashing literature departments by dismissing their central goal of “the production of knowledge” as a backward facing circle jerk. But one can only hope that the call to action from both author and critic for a more pedagogical focus in which literature may be experienced as opposed to simply contextualized will be answered. For better or worse, my students want nothing more than for me to tell them about themselves—the little egoists.

As I I shuffle my own way up the ivory tower—hearing the scholars rumble, still closer to the students—new semesters mean new jobs. Mixed feelings is how I’d describe the revelation that one of these new employers has a tenure-like system for adjuncts. Tenure-adjacent, you won’t get fired, but you won’t have the time or energy for any frivolous writing (or knowledge production). The other new employer had me interviewed by students for a week not to see if I got the job (which I had), but if my class would be a good fit for them. The pedagogy there runs deep. Perhaps there’s hope after all?

In other shocking changes to what we read and its context: a Page-Turner post on “The Promise and Potential of Fanfiction” proved portentous as “Alleged Author of…My Immortal…Announces Book Deal.” Sometimes these things happen and there’s no fighting it.

For antidote: Mountainview visiting author Joshua Cohen has a new story out in Wired, and faculty member Justin Taylor reviews Jenny Zhang's Sour Heart in the current issue of Bookforum.

This week on the blog we'll have current student Garrett Zecker discussing Zweig on the 75th anniversary of his suicide and Eddie Dzialo on the difficulty of writing war. Alumnus David Moloney finds "Devils at the Stateline."

Last Week/This Week: Shitstorms, Race, and Slime

Last Week/This Week: New Students, Old Arguments, and a Death