Kyla Wazana Tompkins

Let’s read each other’s books and call it day!

Atrocity | Stanford University Press Exploring literary representations of mass violence, Bruce Robbins traces the emergence of a cosmopolitan recognition of atrocity.

@brucerobbins.bsky.social at Columbia won the prize for his book Atrocity!

www.sup.org/books/litera...

Deviant Matter Winner, 2025 Alan Bray Memorial Book Prize, given by the American Studies Association's Q/T Caucus and the Modern Language Association's GLQ CaucusHow devian...

I found out last night that Deviant Matter got honorable mention for monograph at the American Comparative Literature Association. The Rene Wellek was a dream of mine because Lauren Berlant won it in 2013 for Cruel Optimism and it is the scaffolding for DM. I miss her.

nyupress.org/978147981922...

We will never wash ourselves of these sins against the planet and its inhabitants

Buffalo is a refugee resettlement site and a city eternally recovering from economic neglect and the fallout of segregation and indigenous displacement. People are so vulnerable they die during weather crises. This is a sin.

*also

I talk about it in my jelly chapter. All Denise Gigante did this work quite a while ago as well

Eating:Aesthetics as Disgust:Taste —> “we’re not so different you and I” etc.

Etc etc the usual deconstructive opposites attract etc etc

Derrida has this great meditation on taste viz Kant, in his essay “economimesis.” In it, Derrida argues that eating is at the heart of the discourse of aesthetics but in particular “dégustation” or eating is intricately tied to “dégoût” or disgust.

If you taste, you are sampling. If you are sampling, you are exercising judgment, and appreciation. If you are tasting, you are in control of your appetite, or suppressing them. Also, it’s not driven by need.

in part because to taste is the opposite of gorging, which is more base but also the result of hunger.

Oh boy where to start

Correct

Unions are how we save post secondary education. Right now.

Scorpion

Astrid; except for the main cop the others are Moroccan and Arab

Elementary

Ummmm let’s have a contest to name them:

I’ve been saying for years that the common question is he racist or is he neurodivergent is both racist and ableist. Here I would point to the 10000000 tv shows about some anti social spectrum-y white guy (often boy or girl) genius who is rude to the less intelligent people of color around him:

A whiteboard leaned against a shelf with many trinkets. On the whiteboard, it says “When you look at a blank page, think of who you love”

In his acceptance speech for award for best screenplay, Ryan Coogler said “when you look at a blank page, think of who you love” and I dunno, that really moved me so I wrote it down and sat it on my desk to look at while I work

When we sit in meetings for decades at a time tiptoeing around incompetence and smiling through mediocrity. How hard they work to cover up the opposite of what they are saying.

Lower level thinking

In a free floating field of new publishing genres in which reporting norms have not been defined

Not only that, but between what could or could not be a grounded criticism of LARB coverage in a self-publishing medium, what the larger story to me is here is we don’t have journalism anymore and therefore we don’t have standards against which to measure *coverage*

Organizations don’t know how to create structures that depersonalize conflict.

Just chiming in. Having been the target of a personality driven hit piece that missed the larger narrative of institutional failure and dysfunction, my back goes up when I read pieces like this.

Miss blogs so much. They didn’t pretend to be what they were not.

Yeah I mean — 😢 😞 😔 for having to take shitty jobs though? But just — ugh poor journalism. Remember journalism?