Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

Why does it make you want to scream, exactly.

I will double down. The headline says "literally." Okay, let's add the Daily Show book. Now:

Literally NO human owns all six of these books.

(Doesn't count if they passed through your hands at one point or your family members had them. Either it should make sense or it doesn't, and I'm not even insisting on the 70+ books nonsense here)

Would also like to ref my argument of about a month ago that such lists are insanely insensitive to non-whites who happen to like any of this stuff.

"You like that book? Hey you are acting white, did you know that?" is one not-unlikely result, and people shouldn't dilly around with it to make cheap points.

Many xp

Visiting the past is like visiting another country, and you know who I really don't want to go visit another country with? Tourists whose first response to every cultural difference is "YOU PEOPLE ARE DOING IT WRONG."

^ This is good true I think so as long we are definitely visiting (as opposed to being shipwrecked) and are tourists (as opposed to being paraded as POWs) etc etc

thanks, but just sticking with America, who exactly is ever forced to do more than visit the canon?

Whereas I'd say in schools, with the whole business-community-approved discourse around "success" "achievement" etc., all students are POWs with that stuff.

https://24.media.tumblr.com/19177eba80e2b84b0531f1ffad78e8ad/tumblr_n1xwonc0Ad1qedb29o1_500.gif

vic perry is . . . doubling down

I keep seeing references to "the canon" in regard to that list of books. They certainly didn't comprise any canon I am familiar with. About the only book I recall from it that could conceivably fit into a canonical list of literature would be Heaney's translation of Beowulf. Surely no one is inserting Tuesdays with Morrie into the canon of western lit. If they are, I want to die a hermit.

i was just sort of assuming it was a mix of things ppl think they're supposed to read to be well-rounded humans, not nec. entirely made up of english class approved books or whatever, but with that element—didn't see tues with morrie, don't even really have cultural associations with that book

but apparently it was pretty random so nm i take it all back i hope they crowdsourced enough idiots to keep the lights on

by 'ppl' i mean 'white-man-ppl,' obv, lol

reactions like this to it

atlas shrugged & the tin drum & shogun & lolita & tuesdays with morrie

this is what is called an incoherent list

make me want to scream

Instead of screaming, can you explain its coherence in terms a non-tribal member might understand?

it's high school classics (hemingway, salinger, nabokov) + neolib propaganda (gladwell, friedman, clancy) + ambitious pulp (king, jordan, rand). middlebrow boys ask you if you've read these books, or they start telling you about them regardless. as with most of this sort of stuff it rings true but also can be written one-handed while asleep and being converted into fuel.

oh ok nm then i think i was otm itt

tho nb tucker max seemed like a weird outlier to me and i've never been sure what tuesdays with morrie is.

no one is sure

i don't mind the list in itself but so many of the friendly comments seem to be along the lines of "PHEW I ONLY OWN TWO!" or "I FEEL SO GUILTY FOR OWNING [X]" and that makes me :( because a lot of these books are rly good and the post didn't say they weren't and policing your own identity is kinda lame

that list is good for a knowing, slightly bitter chuckle or two as you read it. obvs the point is not to self-flagellate for liking the great gatsby.

the thing about the list is it was clearly thrown together in about 5 minutes without much thought; only now that it's blown up and the reactions are what they are are people trying to scrutinize every pick.

i mean the author is probably laughing at all this now. nabokov would be proud

DFW estate must be happy that literally every white man bought a copy of Infinite Jest (probably last week)

list also functions well as "Books Often Seen at Goodwill Stores"

the month dfw died i remember literally every copy of anything disappearing from his shelf at powell's except for about 25 untouched copies of mccain's promise

the biggest laugh for me was ayn rand because i had a masculinist english teacher in high school who taught a senior elective on political lit, which i took because i thought it was going to be what it said it was. the only female author he assigned in years, nay decades, of teaching "political lit" was ayn rand. he never, to my knowledge, assigned a black writer, but he did assign a bunch of cultural criticism gobbledygook about how multiculturalism is the real menace.

the list isn't coherent. it's meant to elicit a knowing chuckle amongst those of us who've wryly noted what literature it's okay for serious men to enjoy. you encounter these men across different social cohorts, though. some of them talk about nabokov, some about tucker max. (i will never forget the moment a seemingly nice, much younger than me guy hit on me and then asked me if i'd read any tucker max. i was like, have you? why would you ask a woman you wanted to like you that?)

(i will never forget the moment a seemingly nice, much younger than me guy hit on me and then asked me if i'd read any tucker max. i was like, have you? why would you ask a woman you wanted to like you that?)

ha see this is exactly the scenario i couldn't conceive

some things are still tribal

my tribe prefers large books, especially Rand and DFW--better to use as missiles

those of us who've wryly noted what literature it's okay for serious men to enjoy

Oh god, so now I'm not a serious man!

Da Vinci Code certainly serious lit /s

i dunno, being that I've invested a lot of energy in certain areas of music over the past decade or whatever, and thought a lot about why I like things and what I like about them, I find it hard to judge ppl for being kinda "entry level" about certain stuff. Bc I certainly recognize my own ignorance when I'm at a bar with, like, someone knowledgeable about craft beer or whatever, and I have friends for whom this list would completely go over their head who are not, like, dumb people! And read. So if I have any issue with it its just along those lines I guess, i dunno though, Ive certainly gone on dates where someone's cultural choices made me eye bug. but not thaaat often to notice trends

On the other hand I'm sure women get hit on with book discussions esp in like grad school more often than I'm dating so

Nb speaking more to ppl reading the list who don't get it than dudes who are super enthusiastic about like tucker max

Is anyone on this thread talking abt prof saida or is that on a different thread

Sorry prof grundy, saida is her first name

this would be the one

where?

i don't think anyone ever did, i thought about it but

oh, i see ... i personally don't have anything intelligent to say about it, but was thinking the ILE brain trust might

yeah i had nothing either… it's just, another one of those. personally i have no feel for the ~~tensions~~ of 'well MAYBE ppl are RIGHT to be critical of professors making public statements like that'. nope - and college presidents (or regents etc) scolding / responding punitively to any extramural speech is some bullshit

saida hits home to me for various reasons.

its just right wing political theatre and a craven campus administration (but its bu so they have a huge record of that, and honestly it is a better response than the "not just under the bus but driving the bus" response you might have gotten from the admin there 15 years ago).

like they played the trick once with tweets over israel which is hot-button and they think they can keep doing it over "lol white people" tweets just the same, but i think the play will die out way faster in this case, or at least i hope it will.

otoh i think this happening repeatedly will have a huge chilling affect on already over-anxious-about-the-market young academics ever saying shit on twitter. otoh idk if that's a huge loss in any sense except a moral one. also note the twitter acct is locked now but i appreciate in the bio: "i regularly neglect to codeswitch on this personal account. " so, welp.

did the administration reprimand her? Last i heard they stood by her. dumb if so

They haven't fired her but released a statement condemning her for 'stereotyping people based on race'.

twitter is a very unchill place imo

otm

i just spent my first half hour on twitter, catching up w my old network of progressive teacher leaders / change agents, where is the thread where people talk about how fucked up twitter is, i think i'm having an anxiety attack

there's a few threads about twitter alright

sense i have about the grundy kerfuffle is that nothing of note has happened

grundyfuffle, fufflegate

same goes for the book list, i guess? lazy snark, kind of funny, kind of nothing. srs books, pop books, dude books, sure.

i've read about 20 of them, most of which i enjoyed. i've attempted & abandoned and/or disingenuously claimed familiarity with a bunch more. funny thing is that, of the small number i have read, quite a few were recommended to me by women who liked them a good deal more than i did: angela's ashes, the curious incident of the dog in the night-time, the man who mistook his wife for a hat, the tipping point, etc.

wau is this one ever in this thread's sweet spot

http://www.universityherald.com/articles/18983/20150514/kennesaw-state-student-accused-of-harassment-for-waiting-on-meeting-with-advisor.htm

https://twitter.com/hashtag/ItsBiggerThanKSU?src=hash

Kennesaw State University (KSU) in Georgia acknowledged it received and is looking into a complaint from a student who was accused of harassment for waiting on an academic advisor to meet with him.

A student named Kevin Bruce posted a video to Twitter Wednesday night with the message: "Rude advisors at Kennesaw. [ Shaking my head ]." In the video, an advisor Bruce identified as Abby Dawson approaches him and tells him he is harassing her and her assistant and leaves to call campus security.

holy shit this person looks terrible.

but yeah it reminds me how "disrespect" and "harassment" have entered into business-speak as all purpose ways to get people to shut up.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Z2X-fRYjZ0YJ:chronicle.com/article/A-Plague-of-Hypersensitivity/229963/%3Fkey%3DTmJ3IFc3bCVHYXFrMzZEZz1VaH1tMEl4NSYaOXBzbl1XFQ%253D%253D%3D%3D+&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

columbia sociologist/journalism prof todd gitlin

i had been waiting to read this, it's paywalled (didn't think to use the cache until now). i don't know anything about gitlin but i would have thought he would have been more clued in?? blasts the phenomena with 'data' in a skeptical fashion but seems oblivious to the activist roots of the phenomenon he starts with

and the ovid-related thing by the columbia humanities students (don't remember seeing that above?):

http://bwog.com/2014/05/10/reading-lit-hums-rapes/

there's a tweet out there from some other student advised by that advisor, where the student re-asks a question, yknow, tryin to feel out whether an exception to some policy can be made, and the advisor emails back like, 'i refuse to answer that question again'

yeah there's a huge swell of ppl posting emails with that advisor that are just sorta nuts