Jap-Nanak Kaur Makkar

When your toddler is experiencing a developmentally appropriate interest in four-wheeled vehicles, but you tend to take a dark view on things.

A major philosopher says yes to a 1.5 hour discussion with a group of critical theory enthusiasts: good things happen sometimes.

Loving the badass opening of the ACLA newsletter by the current President, Karyn Ball.

Something unworked in us but all-determining, a terrible negativity. (Freud on melancholia.)

Returning to Bluesky, with hesitation.

I get whole body hives when I hear robots read to me.

Harder and harder, darker and darker.

Today toddler said a complete sentence, the second of his whole life. "I ate it," pointing to a window sill, when I asked him how he made himself bleed.

Nice! & very clear.

When a colony is founded, wrote Nathaniel Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter, 'among [the] earliest practical necessities [is] to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.'

Hawthorne, early theorist of the settler-carceral-state?

but we must vigilantly remember and reckon that other face into our sense of the concept while remaining within it in the old way and continuing to use and think it. — Jameson

We are now asked to think another side, an outside, an external face of the concept which, like that of the moon, can never be directly visible or accessible to us:

[Adorno's] Negative Dialectics gives us another way of characterizing the dialectical process.

so much hurt

For the duration of this frozen moment the stars are locked in a configuration in which they are not themselves but stand for other things.

Another giant of cinema departs. Souleymane Cissé is best known for Yeelen (1987), which is a pretty magnificent film, but Baara (1978) is an absolute favourite. If one is interested in factory labour on screen, then one must, at some point, watch Baara and be awed.

I am grateful for colleagues that have decided to do this with me.

Often, scholarly work can feel hard (& when institutional conditions are rough, unrewarding), but it is one of the more rejuvenating aspects of the job that it can sometimes give you a space to inch your thinking forward, further toward liberation.

I am deeply pleased to be facilitating a discussion on "Crisis, Temporality, and the Novel" at the upcoming Society of Novel Studies conference! Check out this line-up of stars. 1/2

Wish we had it together enough to invite you to Kentucky! Oh, well. Next time!

YouTube video by Kronos Quartet - Topic String Quartet No. 5: III.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyeI...

If this is an online reading group, can Martin & I join? No worries if not!

temporalities of the value-form

Autofiction, the oddest possible antipode to the contemporary prevalence of historical fiction.

Loss of a loss: a doubling and intensification. Freud reminds us—it is the loss of undefinable or unknown objects that can trigger the most rageful melancholy. Abstractions leave a searing burn.

Oh, wonderful! Let's do it! I'd love to. :)

Sinan Antoon, Book of Collateral Damage
Adania Shibli, Minor Detail
And, yes, of course, Austerlitz

It must be unbearable, your grief. I'm very sorry for your loss. And yet she will stay with you because you will keep her with you.

you got it!