Sam Creely, INVENTORYS / @omnidawn.bsky.social ; robmclennan.blogspot.com/2025/12/sam-...

Todd Haynes's sublime CAROL is turning ten. I once wrote about it about, it, and the problem of the happy lesbian, for @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social.

Our special issue of differences is out! Claire and I were asked to suggest one article that would be open access, and (although it was VERY hard to choose) we picked Whitney’s, which is about Claudia Rankine’s “American lyric” in Ibero-American translation: read.dukeupress.edu/differences/...

Thank you, @aplenice.bsky.social, for this generous review! @nupress.bsky.social

Happy anniversary of the Sudden Departure to all who celebrate. For an @atpost45.bsky.social cluster edited by @ericafretwell.bsky.social and @annakrauthamer.bsky.social, I wrote about the trauma of living to tell (and retell) the tale. post45.org/2025/01/bein...

Congratulations to Jennifer Scappettone on the official publication day of her much-anticipated new book, POETRY AFTER BARBARISM: THE INVENTION OF MOTHERLESS TONGUES & RESISTANCE TO FASCISM. Use the code CUP20 and save 20%: tinyurl.com/4xatbnkd @xenoglossic.bsky.social @columbiaup.bsky.social

We are so excited to announce the shortlist for the ASAP/16 Book Prize! Congratulations to all the nominees! We’ll announce the winner of the prize at the annual conference in a few weeks in Houston! See the ALT ID and thread for more information. 1/4

Cinema & Media Arts at York is hiring a TT Assistant Prof in Film & Media Industries with a focus on AI Practices. Please share widely--and don't hesitate to contact me if you have questions about the place! www.yorku.ca/vpepc/facult...

Cinema & Media Arts at York is hiring a TT Assistant Prof in Film & Media Industries with a focus on AI Practices. Please share widely--and don't hesitate to contact me if you have questions about the place! www.yorku.ca/vpepc/facult...

The sudden pervasiveness of AI is infuriating. I'm doing final proofs on my book and Acrobat is asking me if I want an AI summary because the document is long. So the ostensibly neutral "tool" has a built-in anti-literacy nudge?

Do you have brain worms?

Since ppl love campus anecdotes so much, here's one: I have colleagues who give students they know to be MAGA an A (in one case I'm aware of overlooking clear AI use), because the colleague is on a Green Card or H1B, and they know: one complaint like at Texas A&M, and they're on a flight home. (1/3)

I'm an alum of the University of Chicago, and I wrote Dean Deborah Nelson a letter today.

GTA pals, I’m reading at Coach House tomorrow evening in their 5 à 7 series with Sam Creely. It’s planned for outside, but we’ll move indoors if it rains. Would be lovely to see you there!

Ah, yes, so... cheating.

I’m thrilled that Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction, coauthored with @jttremblay.bsky.social, is a finalist for the ASLE #ecocriticism book award 👀🔥 Congrats to the other finalists. @nupress.bsky.social

I'm happy to share that Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction, coauthored with @stevenswarbrick.bsky.social, has been nominated for the ASLE Ecocritical Book Award. The winner will be announced on July 9. @nupress.bsky.social

Great work from the graphic designers at CTV on yassifying the various party leaders.

ICYMI: watch The Climate of Critique colloquium on our YouTube playlist. Featuring Axelle Karera, Dixa Ramírez D’Oleo, Jean-Thomas Tremblay, Lynne Huffer, and Elizabeth A. Wilson. Organized by the journal differences. buff.ly/iKlFqFJ @jttremblay.bsky.social @elizwilsonemory.bsky.social

Nowhere in North America or Europe is not currently actively destroying its universities; it's just usually through austerity. 10k UK university workers are losing their jobs *this year.* A "brain drain" would be an optimistic scenario.

Today! ↘️

Thanks to the panelists and moderator for the second differences colloquium: The Climate of Critique. Video coming soon! @jttremblay.bsky.social @elizwilsonemory.bsky.social

Looking forward to UofT's Cinema Studies & Comparative Literature Grad Conference this weekend! Keynote address, "Calamity as Defacement": March 14 at 16:00 in Innis Town Hall. Roundtable on exits and extinctions: March 15 at 16:00 in the Centre for Culture & Technology Seminar Rm.

The first essay from my Solanas project @criticalinquiry.bsky.social 🖤 "Corroded with SCUM: Valerie Solanas’s Theories of Mind" www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/epdf/10.... bit.ly/valeriesolanas

Karla Sofía Gascón's racist tweets perfectly espouse the logic of Emilia Pérez. So do the other cast and crew members' claims that she, a trans woman, is desecrating the film, and thus extraneous to it. Apologies for the light deconstruction, but all of this lives within Emilia Pérez, the text.

Interesting essay on “toxic melodrama” & the overwrought aesthetics that mediate the felt impossibility of containing industrial chemicals in late capitalism (communicated, in part, by way of "flaunting a commitment" to the "rank interpretative pathology" of paranoid criticism)

In Representations' new issue on "Elementality," edited by Jim Porter and Mario Telò, I wrote about forever chemicals and the liberal melodrama of legal and symbolic containment they activate. Featuring Ibsen, Haynes, Nichols, Soderbergh, and a guest appearance by one Amy Jellicoe.

join us in Providence on March 7th for Limits of Legibility: The Climate of Critique — a colloquium featuring Lynne Huffer, Axelle Karera, Dixa Ramírez D’Oleo, and Jean-Thomas Tremblay, moderated by Elizabeth A. Wilson: events.brown.edu/pembroke/eve...

Don't miss this colloquium feat. Lynne Huffer, Dixa Ramírez-D'Oleo, Axelle Karera, @jttremblay.bsky.social and @elizwilsonemory.bsky.social.

MLA 2027. Four of the then-remaining seven tenured literary scholars, all independently wealthy, delight the audience with fresh takes on the "novel of tariffs." Groundbreaking stuff: Knausgård, Rooney, Pynchon. All panelists agree: "These are no Little Dorrit."

For funsies I started reading @stevenswarbrick.bsky.social and @jttremblay.bsky.social NEGATIVE LIFE, and it scratches my itches, bc I too am irritated by the 'only connect' clichés of so much ecocriticism + I'm a fan of the movies they're doing, eg, FIRST COW, Pösler's THE WALL.

Very fun book!! I also really like their critique of “entanglement” tropes in ecocriticism—that word always makes me think of a sea turtle caught in a discarded net!

Absolutely not, leave me alone, lose this number.

Almodóvar, in The Room Next Door, takes an ethical stance and admits that John Turturro remains very attractive.

Oh, phew!

Today and tomorrow! 🍃

Ami.e.s à Montréal: this, with @stevenswarbrick.bsky.social, is happening Thursday and Friday at McGill. January 16 lecture open to all / January 17 workshop by registration only at www.sexintheory.org. 🐄

Thirty percent discount on NEGATIVE LIFE: THE CINEMA OF EXTINCTION & hot-off-the-press titles by @nupress.bsky.social comrades @sarahmdowling1.bsky.social and Ian Fleishman until Feb 10.

I'm afraid I'm already sick of the critical questions about AI industry. Universities are fine with critical questions about AI as long as they are never allowed to affect the policy of shoveling all available resources toward private tech companies

NEW EPISODE: NEGATIVE LIFE STEVEN SWARBRICK ( @stevenswarbrick.bsky.social ) and JEAN-THOMAS TREMBLAY ( @jttremblay.bsky.social ) name the misalignment of individual and species survival, as condition of thought and film. hightheory.net/2025/01/08/n... @nupress.bsky.social #AcademicSky #PodSky

MLA-goers, please mark your calendars for “Freud’s Ecology” on Jan 10 at noon! There will be spit, critters, and symptoms galore! 🐀 mla.confex.com/mla/2025/mee...

Very excited that this cluster is out in the world. 🙏🏼

Nice way to start the new year? I wrote about knowledge, family, desire, and primal scenes for this great cluster on The Leftovers for @atpost45.bsky.social edited by @ericafretwell.bsky.social and @annakrauthamer.bsky.social post45.org/2025/01/fami...

Does New Year's Day feel like Groundhog's Day? If so, please read these brilliant essays on THE LEFTOVERS that @annakrauthamer.bsky.social & I shepherded into 2025--a collection of meditations on what is acutely timely and always untimely about the emotional vicissitudes of structural dispossession

Happy new year! I wrote about the problem of witnessing the rapture and living to tell the tale in a thrilling new @atpost45.bsky.social cluster coedited by @ericafretwell.bsky.social and @annakrauthamer.bsky.social.

"We, too, are symptoms of a broken world, The Leftovers insists," writes @jttremblay.bsky.social. "We’re here, and we’re confronted with the unfixable problem that is our compulsion to pantomime the world’s brokenness" post45.org/2024/12/bein...

🚨 NEW CLUSTER 🚨 AFTER THE LEFTOVERS This cluster, editors @ericafretwell.bsky.social and @annakrauthamer.bsky.social explain, doesn't "resolve the problem of remainders but responds to the impossibility of wholeness by inquiring into how that impossibility is produced.” post45.org/2024/12/afte...

Did Harvard University Press never print a paperback of Rei Terada's Looking Away: Phenomenality and Dissatisfaction, Kant to Adorno? And we all just stood there?

❤️

My mother's one-sentence review of Conclave (and most other films): "I didn't know this was happening." "This" = cardinals being catty, people being intersex.