Spring Roundup

Hey there, here’s a special bonus post of what I’ve been reading and thinking about lately. As always, thanks for supporting Footnotes!

I am loving this story about an adjunct professor—a grimly comic read about the precarious life of academics. Nowadays exceedingly few PhDs land tenure-track jobs; instead, most careers are cobbled together from short-contract visiting assistantships, postdocs, and adjunct positions. During grad school, I watched a lot of talented friends and smart people head down this hard, hard road.

Adelmann tells the sordid story of adjunct life—the lack of healthcare, commuting between campuses to pay the rent, trying to squeeze in research between lesson planning and grading. She also captures the broader weirdness of intellectual life on campus in the 21st century: the performative progressiveness of the tenured (who tend to be from wealthy families from LA, New York, Chicago, or San Francisco), how social justice causes are warped in service of petty department politics, and fucked-up power relationship between advisors and grad students.

He struggled, hands and feet free of the ground—like Superman in flight, but all wrong. He couldn’t get traction on anything. The metal door cut into his skin and crushed his larynx; he couldn’t get air through. Dennis couldn’t breathe. He was asphyxiating, and he was alone. With his head still upside down, the blood ran out of his nose. His limbs ceased their frantic motions. Superman’s heart stopped.

An investigation into the surprising number of homeless people killed by donation bins, including a popular street performer who performed as Superman on Hollywood Boulevard.

I thought about this piece this morning, as I listened to several neighbors at a cafe plan to stop the latest attempt to build housing in the area. Lord, save us from ourselves.

I heard about the Absolute series from DC on the Imaginary Worlds podcast and am devouring it. Essentially, it’s a variant DC universe, turned slightly darker: Batman isn’t born rich, Superman arrives on earth as a moody teenager, and Wonder Woman isn’t raised by Amazons … she’s raised in Hell.

I love how Kelly Thompson reweaves Greek mythology in a way that stays true to the character but refreshes the whole world around her.

Also, she’s buff and hot as hell.

Ack, why did it take me so long to read this? I deeply admire Orwell for his balance of crisp political expression with lovely prose:

“So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information. It is no use trying to suppress that side of myself. The job is to reconcile my ingrained likes and dislikes with the essentially public, non-individual activities that this age forces on all of us.”

Goodness, I love that: “to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.”

Not being a trained writer, I can’t tell a participle from a predicate (I’m basically Roger Sherman from 1776), so I try to fill the gaps when I can, including with Fish’s delightful little book, which argues that a sentence’s form is as important as its content:

“Despite the familiar proverb, it’s not the thought that counts. Form, form, form and only form is the road to what the classical theorists called ‘invention,’ the art of coming up with something to say.”

It’s also filled with amazing sentences from the Western canon.

• Shea Serrano’s beautiful ode to parenthood in his Toy Story 3 review: