My good friend Josh Zelesnick has been written about quite admirably in Moshe Z. Marvit’s “Many Be Called, But Few Chosen: Duquesne University Adjuncts’ Fight to Organize.” Josh is doing some of the most interesting and important work of anyone I know.
Author: Bradley J. Fest
More Geeking Out On Usage
My good friend Adriana Ramirez just put up a pretty interesting post, “Can Grammar Solve Politics?” on grammar, the second Presidential Debate, and the Benghazi attacks over at her blog. Check it.
Because it Looks Unbelievable
Are we All Just Living in a Simulation(/Archive)?
Physicists say they have come up w/ a method for determining whether or not we live in a simulation. Didn’t Nick Bostrom already address this?
“Cyber-Pearl Harbor” and a Thomas Pynchon Talk
Reported today in The New York Times, “Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta warned Thursday that the United States was facing the possibility of a ‘cyber-Pearl Harbor’ and was increasingly vulnerable to foreign computer hackers who could dismantle the nation’s power grid, transportation system, financial networks and government.”
Also, today I will be giving a (hopefully quite) short talk entitled “Nuclear Luminosity: The Fabulous Metahistorical Textuality of Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon” for the Univ. of Pittsburgh English Grad Student Scholarship Collective Fall Symposium, Language & Visuality. The event will be taking place in CL 501 @ 1pm. In addition, Kerry Banazek-PhD in Comp/Rhet, Jacob Spears-MFA, and Katie Bird-Phd in Film will be speaking.
Surviving an Atomic Bomb
This’ll surely work:
Archives Require Eneregy (Just Not THAT Much)
In something that’s been making the rounds recently, James Glanz writes in the NY Times about how data centers waste vast amounts of energy in, “Power, Pollution and the Internet.”
Mary Karr on DFW
Poetry magazine published a poem by Mark Karr last month addressing her relationship w/ DFW, “Suicide’s Note: An Annual.” Quite the read. (I’m also randomly teaching her introduction to The Waste Land later this week, “How to Read The Waste Land So It Alters Your Soul Rather Than Just Addling Your Head.”)
Jonathan Franzen’s Liberté
A student from my New Literature class last spring, “US Fiction in the Wake of Postmodernism,” just sent me this picture of a giant advertisement for the French translation of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom.
Infinite Atlas
A few months ago I reported about how William Beutler was photographing locations around Boston that appear in Infinite Jest. I don’t know why I haven’t yet linked to his next project, Infinite Atlas, but its pretty amazing, mapping every single geographic location mentioned in the novel. Cool. And a map of ONAN and “Territorially Reconfigured North America”:
The Hyperarchival Parallax 