Hello, hello,
Here’s the latest update for this fortnight!
I published three new pieces including one on The Chair, the Netflix series about academia that everyone is talking about. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the show has yielded some conflicting and contradictory responses from various academics and these have all proven to be so interesting that I might write a follow-up. As someone who still refers to herself as an academic, I’m sympathetic to the many emotions around The Chair because I understand what it feels like to be simultaneously invested in and appalled by and in love with an institution or a complex like academia. A friend and I had a conversation about whether or not people not formally affiliated with any university or college should actually refer to themselves as “academics.” After much deliberation, I think the answer is, yes, they can and I’ll expand on that much more in a forthcoming piece. Academia is an odd entity but if I thought it was completely bereft of any meaning, I’d have ended any engagement with it a long time ago. But the question, “What makes an academic?” is one worth exploring, I think. Mind you, it’s entirely possible that by the time I’m done thinking through the issues much more I’ll end up with a different opinion, but this is where I’m inclined right now.
And speaking of institutions of learning: so many friends and colleagues are being forced to return to in-person teaching and I remain worried about them. That being said, as my friend pointed out, remote learning is often double or more the work, especially in institutions which haven’t updated their bureaucratic practices and endless amounts of paperwork to accommodate remote learning. And in-person contact seems increasingly crucial to life itself.
I despair about COVID, and I despair that we, especially in the United States, are so busy pretending that everything is or will go back to normal that we’re completely unprepared for the psychosocial effects of this vastly changed world. I’m especially concerned about the extent to which we’re not coping with the massive amounts of grief that we keep trying to throw off, like a too-warm cover on a summer night.
In the months ahead, I have to focus on four large projects and, also perhaps unsurprisingly, two of them are directly about mourning. I’m going to keep accumulating material for the projects I’m committed to and keep checking them off (I will have news on one or more of them next time) but I’m also going to have to finish up the work that needs to be done on these four. In the meantime, I’ll keep writing pieces on current affairs and Pandemic-related matters. This past fortnight, besides the piece on The Chair, I also wrote about the Obamas and our contempt for the nouveaux riches (frankly, I’d be happy to join their ranks) and COVID and grief and death. Death is all around us and it seems clichéd to even write that, but we’ve not understood the full extent of death today nor are we willing to confront the reality of what it really means to us in this time.
A big thank you, always, to my subscribers, benefactor, and donors: your support is what keeps me going. I’ve been thinking a lot, as always, about how to support writing and writers in a world that persists in believing that writing is a hobby or not labour. It seems harder to do that when even writers increasingly see themselves as celebrities and influencers rather than as writers. But I’ll have more thoughts on that soon or ish, about how to create new and better institutional support. I’ve never been the kind of writer who changes her ideas or politics because they become unpopular at particular moments, and your support is invaluable.
More next time. Stay well, stay masked, and away from large crowds.
WRITING
I wrote “The Chair Is Everything You Expect, And That’s the Problem.”
Here’s “The COVID Deaths We Can’t Count.”
And here is “On the Obamas As Nouveaux Riches.”
POSTS FROM THE ARCHIVE
“Gay Marriage Hurts My Breasts.”
“From Queer to Gay: The Rise and Fall of Milo.”
“On Malayalam and Melancholia.”
“How Zionism’s Brutality Reaches from Gaza’s Beaches to US Academia.”
“Domesticus Scientifica: Or, How Temperance Brennan Lost Her Mind and Became a Woman.”
“Grief.”
“Travel, Passports, and the Differences between Expats and Immigrants.”
IN OTHERS’ WORDS
Here’s Lindsay Ellis on getting a book deal, one of the few honest accounts out there. Ellis is, with Kaveh Taherian, the co-host of one of my favourite podcasts, MusicalSplaining.
Speaking of podcasts, The LitPickers, my absolutely favourite literary podcast, co-hosted by Supriya Nair and Dipanjana Pal, is bAAAAck!
I’ve been thinking a lot about Afghanistan and the question of refugees: here’s Louis Yako (a friend and supporter), in an older but still deeply relevant piece, “Can Westerners Help Refugees from Non-Western Countries?”
And finally, here’s Gordon Lightfoot’s “Sundown.”
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Don’t plagiarise any of this, in any way. I have used legal resources to punish and prevent plagiarism, and I am ruthless and persistent. I make a point of citing people and publications all the time: it’s not that hard to mention me in your work, and to refuse to do so and simply assimilate my work is plagiarism. You don’t have to agree with me to cite me properly; be an ethical grownup, and don’t make excuses for your plagiarism. Read and memorise “On Plagiarism.” There’s more forthcoming, as I point out in “The Plagiarism Papers.” If you’d like to support me, please donate and/or subscribe, or get me something from my wish list. Thank you.
Photo: “Imagine Art Here,” by Yasmin Nair