"the wreckage of a profession"

The Chronicle's "The Disgusting New Campus Novel" was based on Kristina Quynn's peer-reviewed academic article: "Drudgery Tales, Abjectified Protagonists, and Speculative Modes in the Adjunctroman of Contemporary Academic Fiction."

In her academic article, Professor Quynn writes:

Kudera’s Fight for Your Long Day. . . reflect[s] the cycles of poverty and the effects of deprofessionalization on a highly educated workforce. Among academics, such fiction can hold an even more weighty and didactic purpose. In a recent interview Moseley asked Kudera about his decision to write Fight for Your Long Day. Kudera (2016: 124) responded that he looked around and decided, “I can’t believe these are our lives.” Like victims of a disaster brought about by forces beyond our control, we identify with Kudera’s stunned disbelief as we survey the wreckage of a profession turned piecework teaching labor. This wreckage of adjuncting when represented in the story structure of the Professorroman, however, has no place to go, literally. There is no pathway for promotion, no promise of future job security, no innovating in or adding to scholarly fields or libraries of knowledge. Such tales do not progress. Nor do the protagonists—unless they escape the rubble.

how risky it is. . .

"The tendency of people so invested in art to turn their lives into novelistic plots demonstrates how risky it is to ask life to take the shape of a story."

~~ from L.A.R.B.'s "Delicate Mundanity: On Maxim Osipov's 'Rock, Paper, Scissors: And Other
     Stories'"

So here I was, home again. . .

"So here I was, home again after all those years. Standing in the main square (which I had crossed countless times as a child, as a boy, as a young man), I felt no emotion whatsoever. . . During those years, there was nothing to attract me to my hometown; I told myself that I had grown indifferent to it, which seemed natural: I had been away for fifteen years, had almost no friends or acquaintances left here (and wished to avoid the ones I did have), my mother was buried among strangers in a grave I had never tended."

~~ from The Joke by Milan Kundera

On Ellison and Houellebecq

Commentary Magazine recently included Christopher Caldwell on Michel Houellebecq in "A Bellow from France" and Joseph Epstein's "Ralph Ellison in Opposition."

A 75th for Dresden. . .

"The Allied destruction of Dresden wasn’t the biggest or deadliest aerial bombardment of a German city during World War II. But it is by far the most infamous, largely due to Kurt Vonnegut’s anti-war masterpiece Slaughterhouse-Five. February 13 marks the 75th anniversary of what Vonnegut, who survived the bombing as a prisoner-of-war, called 'carnage unfathomable.'"

more discount shopping

Prepare for the read of your life.

K-12 homelessness

A record-high 1.5 million students were homeless during the 2017-18 school year, 11 percent more than the previous year and nearly double the number a decade ago. . .

food deserts

And then I stumble upon the food deserts of Mississippi, Philadelphia, Memphis, Virginia, and more.

Stephen and James Joyce

The Irish Times profiles Stephen Joyce and his guardianship of his grandfather James Joyce's literature.

“Wharnow are allenher childer, day? In kingdome gone or power to come or gloria be to them farther? Allalivial, allalluvial! Some here, more no more, more again lost alla stranger.” #FinnegansWake #JamesJoyce #books pic.twitter.com/WmXUs3WzX0

— Allison Timmins (@AllisonBTimmins) February 12, 2020

In the spring of that year, the Year of the Dragon. . .

"In the spring of that year, the Year of the Dragon in the Chinese calendar, was old-fashioned--then the summer was eccentric. It snowed twice in July, and once the dawn never came, so the night lasted for forty-eight hours. And so on, day after day. Nothing happened. Just like in earlier years, when the summers were more respectable. Our tiny whims exist just to camouflage our desperate emptiness. I thought: when the time comes, I will have nothing to write about, and my next book, like the preceding ones, will be brimming with loneliness, boredom, and nullity. Now, it is possible that wasn't thinking about that; I was gathering material for future works of fiction: an abundance of nausea, loads of fears, huge bins overflowing with feelings of failure and numbness--all the tedious material of modern storytelling. But I wrote nothing down. God is my witness. Suddenly, an interesting reason to write popped up. My friend, N.V., made sure of that. He committed suicide. A classic: a hundred barbiturates and sliced veins. But that's still no kind of story line. What's strange about that, that one of my friends kills themselves? A year does not pass without two or three of them committing suicide."

~~ from The Mongolian Travel Guide by Svetislav Basara

full of potholes. . .

"In any case, on the wall of Juan Stein's house, there hung a rather ornately framed portrait of Chernyakhovsky, and that, I dare say, incommensurably more important than the busts and the cities named after him and the countless Chernyakhovsky Streets, full of potholes, scattered through the Ukraine, Belorussia, Lithuania and Russia. I don't know why I've kept the photo, Stein said to us."

~~ from Distant Star by Roberto Bolano

his work lived on. . .

"Nevertheless his work lived on, precariously, desperately (as he would have wished, perhaps), yet it lived on. A handful of young men read it, reinvented him, tried to become his followers, but how can you follow someone who is not moving, someone who is trying, with every appearance of success, to become invisible?"

~~ from Distant Star by Roberto Bolano