Notices by Carrie Shanafelt (carrideen@c18.masto.host)

@FlashMobOfOne Oh, I haven't heard of that one!

#Letterboxd was asking for lists of the 10 best underseen (<50k views) queer films, so this is mine. As I said there, it's more feel-bad than feel-good, but all of these are great.

https://letterboxd.com/carrideen/list/my-top-10-underseen-queer-films/detail/

There are reasons why many college professors don't do open discussion formats. The material doesn't lend itself to that kind of model, often. But the other big problem is that students are genuinely a lot more sensitive and politicized. They're nervous about looking dumb or saying something that a classmate will take the wrong way. The stakes can feel very high, and neither instructor nor student wants to accidentally say something offensive that ends up circulating in the group chat forever.

But I really can't imagine teaching literature or philosophy by standing at the front of the room and talking for 75 minutes while everyone silently writes down what I say or sleeps. Sometimes I have a pretty clear goal, but the class is a lot more interesting and productive for students when we have days set aside for creative thinking. For Wieland, we did conspiracy theory day: What's your wildest take on why everyone in the novel is like this? The conversation was utterly bizarre.

And then, for the rest of the semester, about once a week, we'd be talking about something much more rational and normal and someone would say, "I'm gonna put on the Tin Foil Hat" and share a bizarre thought or strange connection. It was a way to call attention to something that wasn't fitting in, something that couldn't be reconciled to the model of analysis we were using. Having that escape valve for conversations gave everyone license to shut up the superego of "don't overanalyze, you nerd."

Course evaluation time! It's always fascinating to see how students unaccustomed to a discussion format respond to it. Even the people who felt like it wasn't calibrated perfectly to their liking (too much or not enough direction/feedback/lecture) said things like that they wish the English department could do a tutorial for other professors about how to make discussions intellectually productive and engaging. (I especially appreciate that my colleagues are receiving this praise with me!)

@skinnylatte I used to enrage my students my making cookies for them, but with flavors like mahlab or salty chocolate. Why make us cookies if they're going to be weird and not sweet??

@evan I write about sexuality in the eighteenth century, and the term that Jeremy Bentham used then (as a neutral, inclusive term) was sexual nonconformity. "Nonconformity" at the time usually referred to members of dissenting religious sects; I like the way it suggests that one can be a gender/sexual dissenter as well.

Queer doesn't work an umbrella term. It implies public, political solidarity. It is important to recognize the existence of many LGBT people who are not queer, even if I am.

So, there's something I've been rolling over in my brain for a while: is "the queer lifestyle" basically the same thing as "witches"? In that most of the features of them were devised by bitter angry people who didn't want to murder the people they hate, but would be happy to shrug if someone else murdered them, so they came up with all this bizarre stuff that, later, anyone who wanted to piss them off then did make a whole identity out of, so now there are self-identitied witches/lifestylists?

@kims They've found that tomato juice tastes way better on airplanes. https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/local/whyy-why-do-we-drink-tomato-juice-on-planes/67404/

I would be a lot more excited to announce today that I have been accepted to participate in the NEH's Slavery and Early Modern Philosophy institute at Georgetown University this summer, but it also comes at a time when the NEH and all its staff are under Sauron's eye at DOGE.

If you are in the US, please take a moment to contact your representatives in defense of the (incredibly cheap and effective) work that the NEH supports. https://p2a.co/1gzPVYl

Aaaand of course we got the email today that DOGE has illegally defunded us.

I feel like I just saw an ICE disappearance crew assemble on the 1 train? A bunch of middle-aged guys wearing similar logo-less ball caps got on and stood facing the doors, but each at a different door, acting like they weren't together, but clearly making little whistles and beeps into their logo-less jackets. They got off at 145 and one had his hands out wide, and another guy quietly said "137." They slowly all emerged and walked toward the exit, pretending to be separate.

Just heard that at the university where I was tenured in Philosophy and Literature, there is no longer philosophy or literature. Fairleigh Dickinson University is cancelling these majors:

Art
Chemistry
Creative Writing
Entrepreneurship
Environmental Studies
Fine Arts
Government and Law
History
Literature
Management
Marine Biology
Mathematics
Philosophy
Social Studies
Sociology
Theater Arts

Heads up to Pixel phone users who type in multiple languages: apparently Pixel phones have been having an issue for the past month that makes them default to languages other than the primary one you've set. (For me, this means all my work emails from my phone have been sent with automatic tags in Japanese.) I don't know if a fix is coming, but, with the month I've had, it was helpful to know this one thing isn't my fault.
https://support.google.com/pixelphone/thread/324893944/quick-settings-change-language-unexpectedly

Dolores is feeling demoralized. #CatsOfMastodon

In this case, no, the student was misremembering the name of a poet he read last semester. But, unable to identify a poem on that topic by Phillis Wheatley Peters, Google just made one up.

I've had problems all month trying to put the publication dates of texts next to the titles on the syllabus--quickly searching for a bunch of dates in a row, a lot of them are off by a few decades--just small enough that if you're not really thinking hard about it, might seem plausible.

Last night, one of my students thought he had read a specific poem by a poet we're about to read, but I didn't recognize his description of the content of the poem. So he opens up Google and types in the poet's name and the topic, and it just spat out a fabricated poem in her style. This is what's really unnerving--"AI" is not adding value to a search service that works; it's flooding the search results with so much crap that you can't even verify a date or the existence of a text anymore.

@FlashMobOfOne 10 days though? That's some prescription-grade BBQ

My sweet dad has been struggling with a mystery illness for about 10 days that I fear could be part of the tuberculosis outbreak going on near them, but my mom (via text) has been blaming "too much BBQ," which is 1) the Kansascitiest thing to ail of, and 2) indicative of the kind of etiological medical thinking I know will take root in my brain over the next ten years.