I have a new article about what I'm arguing is a new approach to representing problems of geological scale in literature. the piece itself is kind of a speculative argument about the speculative fiction & nonfiction of Vollmann, Millett, Abdelhadi & O'Brien, and Romo & Foster

I have a new article about what I'm arguing is a new approach to representing problems of geological scale in literature. the piece itself is kind of a speculative argument about the speculative fiction & nonfiction of Vollmann, Millett, Abdelhadi & O'Brien, and Romo & Foster

Miscellany has published its first article! The wonderful @stevenwatts.bsky.social on Speculative Analepsis and climate catastrophe. If you like it, consider buying our print issue, which comes out in March! www.miscellanyjournal.com/alreadyinthe...

lol look at this parenthetical dawg we are so cooked

👀

driving through a town of 25k marvelling at things like a "deli"

have put 30 hours into octopath traveler 1 and realizing I wish I'd put 30 hours into doing my homework instead

this is interesting and opens up questions about what adaptation does with this settler fantasy of western expansion written by someone who grew up as a settler in the west bank

lol this is so dark

one important thing this website doesn't have still is friends who interact with my posts

does anyone have, like, a worksheet they use to walk students through close reading for the first time?

this is true because college sophomores at Occupy rallies had adequate grasps on US imperialism and it took a symptom like Trump for some people to feel comfortable with the diagnosis

some of you are playing this game for real smdh

total sum of classes taught over the last 4 semesters 🙃

any shouts for the best short story of the decade by a US author (loosely defined) to begin a "Recent American Literature" survey course with so students can see what we are working towards?

first draft for thinking, second draft for highlighting all the abstractions you've included as hand waving over the thinking

no writing until I reach my daily 1400 elo on pokemon showdown, and unfortunately I suck shit at pokemon showdown

got to stop by the Milkweed compound on this weekend's ill-advised trip to Minneapolis & I really thought having a big space where you created, promoted, & discussed literature while providing community services was what being a lit prof would be like smdh

looking forward to either A. going to ASAP this year and being distraught I ever moved out of Madison or B. getting rejected from ASAP this year and seeing everyone's tweets and photos from Madison

one cool thing about Vollmann's Carbon Ideologies is they were written to be as blackpilled as possible and yet the 2010s numbers he cites are almost quaint compared to today's numbers

writing about one of the most compelling US novels of the decade & just discovered it is already out of print 😔

ISLE let me be a real ecocritic and review Allison Carruth's very good new book academic.oup.com/isle/advance...

I get to teach video games for 1 hour/week this semester (in addition to the other 16 credits I'm teaching) which is really kind of the dream

liking Lesser Ruins so far because I too am an academic who has at times been obsessively into: coffee, house music, 16th century philosophy, and WG Sebald

wrote a little bit about a counterintuitive use of perspective stevenwatts.co/blog/perspec...

do y'all have any favorite pieces of writing where the writer is describing a painting?

SpongeBob-ass Angel of History

Too dumb to figure out how to read the ACLA schedule. If you're presenting and you are not in stream C, lmk, I'd love to virtually attend provided I can figure that out.

neither close nor distant: third way reading. coming to, idk, probably like claremont grad university or something soon

I've never encountered a book that took me longer to read on a per page basis than The Aesthetics of Resistance vol. 1, but I've finally finished it. On to vol. 2

no one talks about how The Rehearsal is an adaptation of Walter Benn Michaels' The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History

Mitch's essay is on 3 of my favorite things: Atlanta, Atlanta, and trap music (from Atlanta)

need to get a manuscript and book proposal together this summer if anyone has any advice for how a not very smart, easily distractable person can do such a thing

the only way for me to do anything even remotely considered research these days is to drive 45 minutes one way to the nearest research university, bully an undergrad hiding in a back room of their library to give me computer access, download articles to email to myself, & then drive 45 minutes home

reading riot.strike.riot during my PhD coursework changed my perception of the kind of work I wanted to do so much that I even ripped the title of my diss straight from the book. then, the first time I met joshua was at a rally for the grad student unionization drive at my school

cannot put this novel, about a hedge fund manager who finds a love of the sea and quits his hedge fund to invest in freight shipping BY a hedge fund manager who left that job to invest in freight shipping, down for even a second

get to teach things fall apart and mrs dalloway this week

vol 2 is about how knowing about and acting on the knowledge of climate change is futile in an economy that doesn't change & about how grad school steals years from you

should have been grading but instead I spent 3 hours learning what linear regression is and how to do it in python

In both Metaphor Refantazio and Percival Everett's James the protagonist speaks to a Classic Liberal Philosopher in a dialogue about core enlightenment precepts. Both texts were published in 2024, the last year of the Biden interregnum between Trump administrations. In this essay I will argue

wrote some haphazard thoughts about a book I was pretty ambivalent about just to keep in the habit of getting a little writing done stevenwatts.co/blog/allfours

Does anyone know grad students or very early career teacher-scholars who are also outstanding pedagogues? I'm seeking contributors to round out a project on teaching 21st century anglophone lit. I'd like to include more people who fit this description. Recommendations welcome and appreciated!

going to make an effort to post a little bit of writing about any newish books I read in an attempt to, you know, not only write when I have to stevenwatts.co/blog/balle