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Swastika Counter Project launches

Anonymous — Thu, 24 Oct 2024 21:19:27 +0000

Swastika Counter Project launches Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 10/24/2024 - 15:19

Bradley Worrell

Public advocacy website envisioned by CU Boulder associate professor Laurie Gries tracks swastikas across the U.S. and offers resources to counter those hate-filled incidents

In the months leading up to Donald Trump’s election in 2016, Laurie Gries, director of the University of Colorado Boulder Program for Writing and Rhetoric and associate professor of English, became increasingly concerned about almost-daily news reports of swastikas—sometimes accompanied by hate-filled messages—showing up in public spaces across the country.

“This was the same time when various sources were reporting rising incidents of hate and bias in the United States, when Donald Trump and his racist and divisive rhetoric was just coming into political power, and when white nationalist organizations seemed to be coming out of the woodwork,” she says.

Laurie Gries, director of the University of Colorado Boulder Program for Writing and Rhetoric and associate professor of English, became increasingly concerned about almost-daily news reports of swastikas—sometimes accompanied by hate-filled messages—showing up in public spaces across the country.

Determined to address the issue of the swastikas head on, Gries began working on a project with a team of interdisciplinary scholars with expertise in visual communication, critical geography and social justice education. Their aim was to identify how and where swastikas were placed, who they targeted, what messages they conveyed and how communities responded. The coordinated results of that five-year effort—which document 1,340 swastika incidents in total—recently went live on The Swastika Counter Project website.

Recently, Gries spoke with Colorado College of Arts and Sciences Magazine about the Swastika Counter Project. Her answers were lightly edited for style and condensed for space limitations.

Question: How did the swastika project come together and why did you decide you needed to address this issue?

Gries: When Trump first came onto the political scene, I started hearing about increased incidents of hate and violence, and as a visual rhetoric scholar, I began noticing more and more reports of swastikas showing up on the streets of the United States.

On the day that Trump was elected, I woke up deeply concerned and asked, ‘What if I tracked these swastikas? What if I took the digital research method called iconographic tracking that I worked for 10 years to develop and applied it to this particular case? What might we discover?’

I didn’t really start tracking swastikas on that day; I just made the commitment because I had long wanted to use my scholarship for public humanities research. I guess, then, one might say that Trump was the motivator, but really it was fear. At the time, a lot of people—the FBI, the Southern Poverty Law Center, journalists and scholars—were attributing a rise in antisemitism and violence to his rhetoric. It was my fear that if that’s the case, those incidents were surely only going to be amplified as he rose to power.

I don’t have any comparative data (i.e., data on swastika incidents) prior to Trump’s arrival on the political scene to confirm whether that’s true or not, so I’m very careful to say that the data we collected can’t really be used as evidence for that claim, but in our data, we certainly can see that there are a lot of associations that people are making between swastikas and Donald Trump and white nationalism.

Question: Was no one else tracking and compiling these incidents in which swastikas were being placed at houses of worship, schools and other sites?

Gries: Actually, there are quite a few projects that have tracked antisemitism, and even swastikas, but they have been constrained in various ways. Some sites only track antisemitism that happen on college campuses. Some track antisemitic events that happened all over the world. Then there are sites like ProPublica, whose tracking projects were limited to a particular year. So, I wanted to create a project that would transcend some those constraints.

Question: What are some of the top findings of your research as it relates to swastika placement, any language accompanying the swastikas, maybe any surprises your research uncovered?

Data analysis by The Swastika Counter Project found at least 1,300 documented incidents of swastikas in the United States between Jan. 1, 2016, and Jan. 20, 2021.

Gries: I think it’s important to note that the swastika incidents we discovered occurred in all 48 contiguous states and in the District of Columbia, so this is a national problem. Of course, they were showing up more in cities with large populations, which is to be expected. But we were surprised that according to our data, swastika incidents most often surfaced in schools, and almost equally in K-12 and higher education settings. We thought swastikas might mostly show up on the exterior of religious institutions, and particularly Jewish religious institutions, but that wasn’t the case.

We also were surprised to discover so many swastikas surfacing in private spaces. Of course, a lot of swastikas were spray painted on the exterior of buildings in urban spaces. But our data discloses how swastikas were often drawn on people’s cars, on their homes, on the dorm doors of students, and in some cases, on the interior walls of people’s homes that had been broken into and, in one case, lit on fire.

I think the other most surprising finding was just the horrific language that was showing up alongside swastikas—from racist and homophobic appeals to white nationalism to implicit threats of surveillance and violence to direct threats of genocide. And also that such threats were directed at not only Jewish community members; a lot of Black American, Latinx, LGBTQ-plus community members and immigrants were also commonly targeted. It was just overwhelming—the multi-directional hate and very graphic violence.

Question: How did Colorado compare to other parts of the country when it came to swastika incidents?

Gries: For Colorado, there were 30 reported incidents in our data set. So, I would say it’s not uncommon in Colorado for these swastikas incidents to occur, and I’ve had a lot of people tell me about swastikas they witnessed that aren’t even in our data set.

We know, for instance, that Colorado State University in Fort Collins has had so many swastika incidents that they recently created an antisemitism task force. One of our (Swastika Counter Project) advisory board members is actually heading up that task force because antisemitism on that campus has become such a serious problem.

In contrast to the incidents of public swastikas that The Swastika Counter Project tracks, some cities worldwide have also seen anti-swastika graffiti. (Photo: Cogiati/Wikimedia Commons)

Question: Beyond tracking incidents of swastika placement around the country, what other kinds of information can be found on the Swastika Counter Project website?

Gries: Part of our challenge was figuring out how to present the data in ways that would be useful for a variety of community stakeholders—people who are dealing with swastika incidents in their communities, such as school administrators, teachers and parents, the local police force, and local and national politicians. We wanted to create a swastika tracking project that has a strong civic component to it, which I think makes this project a bit unique. So, we created an interactive map that can be filtered in different ways; data visualizations that can be easily downloaded; and educational resources and lesson plans for teachers at various levels. We also generated two different reports, one of which describes and analyzes how different communities have responded to swastika incidents, so that stakeholders can read those accounts and learn from them. That’s especially important, because in our research we found that the various stakeholders often worked in isolation in responding to swastika incidents.

Question: The Swastika ‘Counter’ Project—is it fair to say the name is a play on words?

Gries: Yes—it’s a double entendre. The goal is to both count and counter the contemporary proliferation of swastika incidents in the United States. And in that sense, the Swastika Counter Project is very much a scholarly activist project.

When we first began tracking swastika incidents, we planned to simply report our data and let the evidence speak for itself. And to a great extent, the data still does do that. Our findings report, for instance, is largely descriptive. But the longer we worked on the project and discovered the gross horror of violence that was ensuing, the more we felt compelled to also take more concerted action by building out the educational component of the website. So today, I don’t pretend that the data advocacy website isn’t motivated by my own desire to try to address some very real, pressing problems and to use my scholarship to try to create a more just world. This is very much a project where I’m wearing my activism on my sleeve.

Question: What kind of assistance did you have when it came to tracking and compiling data, creating visual representations, developing a website, etc.?

Gries: The central work of tracking, coding, and analyzing was done by myself and Kelly Wheeler (assistant professor at Curry College), but we soon realized we needed more help. I reached out to Morteza Karimzadeh in the geography department here at CU Boulder, and he and his former student, Jason Miller, ended up doing all the amazing work with the mapping part of the project.

Residents of Eugene, Oregon, responded against swastikas found in a city neighborhood in 2017. (Photo: SBG Photo)

I am also really proud that we received a lot of help from various students at and beyond CU. For instance, an undergraduate computer science major at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, worked on the data visualizations with us, while graduate students from that same institution helped to create some of the lesson plans. Here at CU Boulder, a team of undergraduate students enrolled in a technical communication and design class in the Program for Writing and Rhetoric did a user-centered study for us to help develop a website that would be easy to navigate and comprehend for a public audience. And then another group of tech comm students helped us figure out how to invite community participation through features under the Contribute tab of the website. In this sense, the Swastika Counter Project is really exemplary of the immense value that data humanities and public humanities education can have for both undergraduate and graduate students. I am really excited about that.

Question: People who commit several years of their life to a project will often call it a labor of love. Is that how you would describe this project?

Gries: For me, I don’t think it was about love so much as it was about committing to do social justice work and really trying to walk the walk. I mean, as you might imagine, it was not fun to track so many incidents of hate and violence around the country. …

It’s also just been a beast in terms of labor. I tell people that this project was probably more intense work than my first 350-page monograph because I had to teach myself so many new skills, not only in terms of research, but also guiding and managing team projects, doing data advocacy, and developing web content skills. I am so glad I did this project, but for the last eight years, it’s just been very intense.

Question: If former President Trump is elected to a second term in November, do you think you would take up this project again?

Gries: I’m really, really torn. Part of me wants to try to secure some national funding and put together a larger team. If I did, I would also want to research (swastika incidents during) the Biden administration, and then start tracking in the present time, too, because I think that longitudinal study would help us address certain questions that we weren’t able to address in this project.

On the other hand, I started this project in early 2017, and it became a large part of my life. My husband would tell me that on days I was doing the researching and the coding that I was affectively different. I was angry. I was upset. I was impatient.

I honestly don’t know if I want to put myself through that again on a personal level. I truly believe that more arts and humanities faculty need to be doing this kind of work, as I think we can bring an important perspective to data-driven research that addresses pressing socio-cultural problems. And maybe if I had the funding and could put together a large enough team where I didn’t have to bear so much of the burden I would consider it, but right now I just don’t know.

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Public advocacy website envisioned by CU Boulder associate professor Laurie Gries tracks swastikas across the U.S. and offers resources to counter those hate-filled incidents.

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Flying with the man behind the capes

Anonymous — Wed, 18 Sep 2024 18:44:03 +0000

Flying with the man behind the capes Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 09/18/2024 - 12:44

Doug McPherson

CU Boulder alumnus Patrick Hamilton discusses his new book on influential comic book artist George Pérez during Hispanic Heritage Month

When alumnus Patrick Hamilton was growing up, he, like many kids, found comfort in comic books. “I’m an almost lifelong comics fan, and specifically a fan of ‘Avengers’,” Hamilton says.

As Hamilton continued enjoying comics and learning more about the people behind them, he eventually came across the name George Pérez. It’s a name you may not immediately recognize, and that’s a key point Hamilton makes in his new book, George Pérez, which hit shelves earlier this year.

“The main argument of the book [is] that Pérez had a larger impact on comics than he’s generally been given credit for,” says Hamilton, an English professor at Misericordia University in Pennsylvania who earned his PhD in English at the University of Colorado Boulder in 2006.

CU Boulder alumnus Patrick Hamilton (PhDEngl'06), a lifelong comics fan, highlighted the groundbreaking work of Marvel Comics and DC Comics artist George Pérez in an eponymous new biography.

But in the comic book world, the name George Pérez and his work turn heads—not just for his impact on the art, style and story structure of comics, but because he was one of the first Hispanic artists to become a major name in the industry and helped pave the way for greater diversity in the field.

Pérez, who worked both as an artist and writer starting in the 1970s, played a significant role in blockbuster series such as Fantastic Four and The Avengers for Marvel Comics. In the 1980s, he created The New Teen Titans, which became a top-selling series for publisher DC Comics. And he developed DC Comic's landmark limited series Crisis on Infinite Earths, followed by relaunching Wonder Woman.

Hamilton says Pérez is also “pretty synonymous” with large event titles, most prominently DC Comic’s Superman revamp in 2011 and Marvel’s Infinity Gauntlet.

“And he developed a reputation for a dynamic and hyper-detailed style, particularly in terms of the number of characters and details he’d put into a page, that was highly regarded and ultimately influential in the … 1970s and 1980s and beyond.”

Hamilton says he sees his book as attempting to expand Pérez’s legacy.

“Despite his acclaim and prominence, he hasn’t really been seen as an artist that contributed to the style and genre of comics in ways artists before him … are seen,” he says. “I argue in the book that Pérez made contributions to the style of comics, not only in the layout of the page and what effects that could achieve, but especially in his way of building what we would call the story world around the characters, where he embraced the possibilities for the fantastic within comics.”

Paving the way

The book also speaks to Pérez’s interest in representations of race, disability and gender, the latter of which Hamilton says Pérez consciously strove to improve in his art over his career.

Artist George Pérez was reknown for his work with both DC Comics and Marvel Comics. (Photos: DC Comics, left, and Marvel Comics, right)

Hamilton adds that he believes a lot of other Black, Indigenous and artists of color working today likely see Pérez as “an influence and as carving out a space” for them within the industry.

“I think you can look at the significant number of Hispanic and Latinx creators working in comics today—many of them as artists—and see them as following, in some cases quite consciously, in Pérez’s footsteps.”

He adds that Pérez did much to help define the look and feel of modern superhero comics in the 1970s and 1980s, as did another Latino artist, José Luis García-López.

“Garcia-Lopez, who, among other things, created the official reference artwork for DC Comics that is still much in use today. So, you have two Latino creators working in the late 20th century, when the comic book industry was even more predominantly white than it is today, and shaping the look of it.”

Hamilton says one of the more interesting findings about Pérez that meshes with how Pérez has been overlooked is a kind of “invisibility or transparency” in his art.

“It [his art] is never meant to overshadow and … is always in service to the story or narrative. What surprised me is how much this was a conscious choice on Pérez’s part, that he never wanted his art to draw attention to itself in a way that was detrimental to the overall storytelling. It’s kind of ironic, and … surprising, because Pérez does have one of the most recognizable styles in comics, but his goal as an artist was always to do what’s best for the realization of the story first.”

Perez died in 2022 at age 67. You can see examples of his Marvel Comics art here and his DC Comics art here.

Top image: A group scene of DC Comics characters drawn by George Pérez (Photo: DC Comics)

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CU Boulder alumnus Patrick Hamilton discusses his new book on influential comic book artist George Pérez during Hispanic Heritage Month.

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Stephen Graham Jones slashes his way into Texas literary history

Anonymous — Fri, 06 Sep 2024 19:34:25 +0000

Stephen Graham Jones slashes his way into Texas literary history Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 09/06/2024 - 13:34

The CU Boulder Ineva Baldwin Professor of English is part of a Texas Literary Hall of Fame induction class that includes Cormac McCarthy and Molly Ivins

Stephen Graham Jones, author of bestselling horror novels The Angel of Indian Lake and The Only Good Indians, among other award-winning works, has been inducted into the Texas Literary Hall of Fame.

Born in Midland, Texas, Jones relocated to Boulder in 2008, where he continues to serve as the University of Colorado Boulder Ineva Baldwin Professor of English.

CU Boulder Ineva Baldwin Professor of English Stephen Graham Jones has been inducted into the Texas Literary Hall of Fame, a recognition whose previous recipients include Larry McMurtry and Sandra Cisneros.

“When I moved away from Texas for Colorado, I kind of suspected Texas might forget about me, even though a lot of my novels since then have been set there,” he says.

But if Jones’ admission into the state’s Literary Hall of Fame is any indication, Texas didn’t forget about him.

Established in 2004, the Texas Literary Hall of Fame recognizes the literary contributions of the Lone Star State’s most celebrated writers. Inductees are announced every two years by the Texas Christian University (TCU) Mary Couts Burnett Library, the TCU AddRan College of Liberal Arts, the TCU Press and the Center for Texas Studies.

“The Texas Literary Hall of Fame showcases top literary writers across the nation,” Sonja Watson, dean of the AddRan College of Liberal Arts, says on the Texas Literary Hall of Fame website. “This group of inductees follows a long list of others who demonstrate how Texas has shaped the cultural landscape of their writings.”

Joining Jones this year as he enters the Hall of Fame are Sergio Troncoso, Cynthia Leitich Smith, Jan Seale, Molly Ivins, Tracy Daugherty and Cormac McCarthy. Past honorees include Larry McMurtry and Sandra Cisneros.

“Colorado is home now, but Texas will always be where I'm from, and I'm honored and thrilled to be inducted into the Texas Literary Hall of Fame,” says Jones. “My father-in-law’s photo is in the Texas Capitol, which I always thought pretty special. This, to me, is that same kind of special.”

The official induction ceremony will take place on Oct. 29.

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The CU Boulder Ineva Baldwin Professor of English is part of a Texas Literary Hall of Fame induction class that includes Cormac McCarthy and Molly Ivins.

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Jim Halpert is looking at all of us

Anonymous — Mon, 05 Aug 2024 20:21:18 +0000

Jim Halpert is looking at all of us Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 08/05/2024 - 14:21

Rachel Sauer

In a recently published paper, CU Boulder PhD student Cooper Casale interrogates Jim Halpert’s direct-to-camera gaze in The Office and its similarities to what he calls the ‘fascist look'

A couple of years ago, Cooper Casale was dating a woman who loved the American version of “The Office.” Despite having watched seasons two and three on repeat in middle school so he’d have something to talk about with a girl he liked, a decade had passed and he wasn’t really a fan anymore.

“But I end up being sucked into it,” recalls Casale, a PhD student in the University of Colorado Boulder Department of English. “I watched all the way through multiple times—it becomes a kind of hypnosis. It was just always on.”

Through nine seasons and repeated watching, Casale began to wonder: Is Jim Halpert looking at me?

In a newly published paper, CU Boulder PhD student Cooper Casale argues that the Jim Halpert gaze represents the punitive aspects of mainstream culture that are foundational to enforcing and maintaining capitalism.

In the 650 times that Jim Halpert (played by actor John Krasinski) looks at the camera through those nine seasons—there’s even a 10-minute compilation video of them on YouTube—Casale began considering what or who he was seeing in the Jim Halpert gaze: the pitiless scientist, the capitalist boss or the fascist father? Or perhaps all three?

In a paper recently published in the Journal of Popular Culture, Casale considers how the Jim Halpert gaze is also the fascist look.

“The Fascist Look enlists its subjects into their make-believe hero's service, a role audiences want to occupy,” Casale writes. “They want to please Halpert, as the worker wants to please the foreman. Their peculiar loyalty partly explains ‘The Office's’ remarkably enduring popularity…

“Halpert's Gaze arms people against their feckless bosses, slovenly neighbors and annoying coworkers. At the same time, his frozen glare, his pranks and his sarcasm represent the punitive aspects of mainstream culture that are foundational to enforcing and maintaining capitalism. Halpert does not critique his corporate arrangement but merely masters it. He becomes its boss, and viewers enamored by his cruel fiction but powerless to act it out, choose, in Halpert, a more nightmarish boss than they had before. Furthermore, viewers are thankful because he reminds them that the great can still overcome the small.”

Microdosing work

First, though, a sorry-not-sorry: While Casale appreciates a lot of the humor in “The Office,” he increasingly resents its popularity now that remote work is so common. He wanted to understand how the “almost liturgical pattern in which some people watch it” has become a sort of surrogate to having an in-person, so-called work family, he explains. “There are some who never turn it off. When I was in publication for this paper, my editor was like, ‘You can’t prove that,’ and I can’t, not yet, but there’s an observably strange practice in people watching this show on rotation all the time.

“So, the initiating question was ‘Why do people come home from a 9 to 5 and immediately watch a show about 9 to 5?’ Theodor Adorno wrote about this in his essay ‘Free Time,’ about how free time is itself a kind of work. We have to spend those hours after work preparing to return to work, so people watching ‘The Office’ is almost like microdosing having to go back to work.”

In the character of Jim Halpert, Casale says, “The Office” established an everyman protagonist—a frustrated dreamer and creative type who somehow ends up in a meaningless job at the world’s most boring business. When he looks directly at the camera, he conveys that he recognizes the absurdity and ridiculousness around him and that he is somehow above it.

Citing another Adorno work, “Dialectic of Enlightenment,” which observes that enlightenment and barbarism are often linked, Casale notes that “Jim Halpert represents this enlightened corporate subject. He’s presented as smarter than everyone else, but we see how fast that enlightenment has to express itself through barbarism or violence in the pranks he’s constantly pulling on Dwight.

Actor John Krasinski played the character Jim Halpert in "The Office" and looked directly at the camera 650 times over nine seasons. (Photo: NBC Universal)

“Dwight’s biggest crime in the whole show is that he likes his job. He’s presented as naïve, sentimental, he likes beets and ‘Battlestar Galactica,’ and because of his sentiment he must be punished. We’re meant to believe that Jim really deserves to be somewhere else, and he’s only there because he’s unlucky, but it’s everyone else’s fate to be there. Kevin will never do better, Stanley will never do better, but it’s Jim’s fate to overcome the circumstances of his life. We’re meant to find his cruelty affable.”

“The Office” reaffirms the strange hierarchies of corporate America but sells them as quirky, Casale says. Its documentary style becomes a two-way mirror between Jim Halpert and viewers—in Jim’s disgust, annoyance, resentment or bemusement, viewers have a proxy in lieu of their own documentary camera recording their reactions to the clowns and fools around them.

Interrogating power

The Jim Halpert gaze becomes the fascist look when considered through the lens of power, Casale says: “We have this TV show teaching me that the best way to express my power is to lend it to somebody else who can punish people in my stead. It’s similar to how a vote for an autocrat is a vote to not have to vote anymore. We see it in the working class voting for Donald Trump, who’s only going to give tax breaks to the rich. But because they want to be rich, there’s an aspect of living out their dreams through him.

“I think people always struggle with how members of the working class can vote against their self-interest. Part of it, I think, is that people’s resources to express themselves or express some kind of autonomy are so impoverished that their last opportunity to be free is to live in surrogate through someone else. If Jim Halpert can prank these people and humiliate all his coworkers, then I can live vicariously through Jim Halpert.”

Casale adds that rather than interrogating the structures of power and capitalism that Jim Halpert ostensibly gazes against, “The Office” emphasizes a message that mimicking the behaviors of power will lead to having power. In “The Office,” Jim Halpert is in control—not Michael, not Dwight, nor any of the other characters to essentially serve as his minstrels.

“I think that’s the fascist myth,” Casale says. “It’s a desire to be dominated so I can learn the procedures of how to dominate others. In my own domination, I learn what it feels like and how I can do it. We see this with any kind of autocrat, including Jim Halpert. When Donald Trump says he wants retribution, there are thousands upon thousands of regular, pretty nice people who say, ‘I want retribution, too.’ And because they won’t direct their anger to capitalism, the real culprit, they have to have proxy wars about DEI, gender, immigration, whatever else, so they won’t have to focus on the real cause of their powerlessness.”

Top images: NBC Universal

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In a recently published paper, CU Boulder PhD student Cooper Casale interrogates Jim Halpert’s direct-to-camera gaze in The Office and its similarities to what he calls the ‘fascist look.'

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We fear them like the plague

Anonymous — Thu, 18 Jul 2024 15:44:39 +0000

We fear them like the plague Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 07/18/2024 - 09:44

Rachel Sauer

After a human case of bubonic plague was confirmed in Pueblo County last week, CU Boulder scholar Thora Brylowe explores why it and all plagues inspire such terror

Of all the specters humanity fears—the storms and wars, the failures and disasters and vagaries of nature—perhaps none is so pervasive and terrible as plague.

Not just Plague with a capital P—bubonic plague, caused by the Yersinia pestis bacterium, the Black Death of 14th-century Europe that killed anywhere between 25 million and 200 million people—but all plagues, real or fictional, that sweep in from other places or rise from Earth itself, scything through populations with maddening indifference, toppling cities and civilizations, swapping hard-won humanity for the animalistic instinct to survive.

When Pueblo Department of Public Health and Environment officials confirmed a human case of bubonic plague last week, the announcement made national news. Even though we have long known that Yersinia pestis is transmitted by fleas and cycles among wild rodent populations, and even though it can be treated with antibiotics and human cases are now extremely rare, mention of this plague—and of all plagues—still can spark fear.

Thora Brylowe, an associate professor in the CU Boulder Department of English, covers plagues real and fictional throughout history in the course Plague and Pandemic.

In an era of vaccines, antibiotics and multi-platform public health campaigns, and of more accurately terming them epidemics or pandemics, why are plagues still so terrifying?

“One reason is that plague can have this intense moral valence,” says Thora Brylowe, an associate professor in the University of Colorado Boulder Department of English who has taught a course called Plague and Pandemic. “For a lot of history, people have viewed plagues as God’s punishment. We saw that at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, where some people were saying God was punishing certain populations.

“And if it’s not God’s punishment, then it might be framed as survival of the fittest, which we saw during COVID. We’re desperate to find reasons for why this thing we can’t control, or don’t think we can control, is happening.”

A history of plague

The fear of plague, the horrible death it brings and its inexorable and ruinous march through entire populations, countries and continents has informed human history keeping and art almost since the beginning of such things. The 10 Plagues of Egypt detailed in the book of Exodus in the Old Testament—estimated to have been written in the 13th century BCE—still hold a terrible fascination.

Likewise, the Plague of Thebes, ultimately attributed to Oedipus’ sins in Sophocles’ 429 BCE play Oedipus Rex, can still stir anguish two millennia later:

For all our ship, thou see'st, is weak and sore

Shaken with storms, and no more lighteneth

Her head above the waves whose trough is death.

She wasteth in the fruitless buds of earth,

In parchèd herds and travail without birth

Of dying women: yea, and midst of it

A burning and a loathly god hath lit

Sudden, and sweeps our land, this Plague of power;

Till Cadmus' house grows empty, hour by hour,

And Hell's house rich with steam of tears and blood.

Oedipus Rex is one of the works that Brylowe uses or references in teaching Plague and Pandemic, a list that also includes Daniel Defoe’s 1722 CE Journal of the Plague Year and more modern works like Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2002 novel The Years of Rice and Salt and the 2021 board game Bristol 1350.

Through art and historical documents involving plague, certain themes emerge, Brylowe says, including a desire to “other” certain populations as plague bringers or plague carriers; to frame plague as something that came from outside or faraway places; and to answer the possibly unanswerable question of what it means to be human.

Plague is morally fraught, Brylowe adds—from forced inoculations for smallpox and involuntary removal to isolated colonies for people with leprosy (ostensibly undertaken in the name of population health) to willfully ignoring plagues happening on other continents.

"Bring Out Your Dead," a ca. 1864 wood carving by artist Edmund Evans, depicts a town crier on a medieval street during the Black Death. (Photo: National Library of Medicine)

“If you look at the Ebola narrative, initially it was that this was happening in a little remote village in western Africa and nobody was doing anything about it, but then somebody got on an airplane and now it’s going to kill us all,” Brylowe says. “We were able to ignore it until suddenly it’s in Virginia.

“It doesn’t help that plagues have been really sensationalized, and the way we talk about them isn’t always accurate. I remember reading (Richard Preston’s 1995) The Hot Zone, and my takeaway was that Russia has huge, sloshing buckets of smallpox lying around. I’m not sure that’s a great way to talk about what we fear.”

Fear of the uncontrollable

Fear, however—especially fear of what we seemingly can’t control—does inspire art. What is the zombie genre, Brylowe asks, if not an exploration of plague? “There also are a lot of arguments for vampirism being a form of plague, if you think about it as a disease spread through blood,” Brylowe explains. “So much of the plague narrative is exploring how it makes you either not human or less human.

“It’s interesting when that runs into our desire for human beings to ultimately be good, for humanity to triumph in a ruined world. In Train to Busan, which is a movie I love, the single dad saves his daughter and saves the day by sacrificing himself in a zombie outbreak, and we see that as a very good and moral outcome. When that equation is flipped, like in The Walking Dead, and the plague is not God’s punishment, but humans are the monsters, that’s a moral complication that’s maybe more realistic but probably can’t give us a happy ending.”

Plague in art often reflects humanity’s fears and uncertainties specific to the time in which it’s created, Brylowe says, which may help explain why current books and films dealing with plague are often associated with climate change—plague-causing viruses emerging from razed rainforests, plague species growing uncontrolled in rising and warming oceans.

Exploring plague in art also is a way of exploring and understanding self, she says: “At a basic level, plague is about our bodies. This is where we really see the subject-object dichotomy. It’s saying, ‘If this thing that is not me infects me, what does that mean for my body as an object?’ We talk about plague as a way to explore the relationship between mind and body. I think that’s part of the reason why monsters that look like humans but are not human are so scary. The body as an object has taken over, and we don’t know where self exists anymore.”

Top image: Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

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After a human case of bubonic plague was confirmed in Pueblo County last week, CU Boulder scholar Thora Brylowe explores why it and all plagues inspire such terror.

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Ghost stories: understanding a present haunted by the past

Anonymous — Fri, 07 Jun 2024 17:49:15 +0000

Ghost stories: understanding a present haunted by the past Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 06/07/2024 - 11:49

Blake Puscher

A CU Boulder poet considers the socioeconomic and political environment of the turn of the 20th century through the history of her own family

Mud, Blood, and Ghosts is not a typical history book.

To write it, Julie Carr delved not just into archives and manuscripts, but also into her own family’s history—specifically, the story of her great-grandfather Omer Kem, a People’s Party politician who served three terms in the U.S. House of Representatives representing Nebraska between 1891 and 1897. Kem’s story weaves everything from populism to eugenics to spiritualism, and represents a broader narrative of a particular time, place and people in the American West.

Subtitled “Populism, Eugenics, and Spiritualism in the American West,” the book, through Kem, tells the story of how factors as disparate as economic inequity, water scarcity and scientific racism, among many others, shaped the region and the country and still resonate politically and socially today.

Julie Carr, a CU Boulder professor of English and chair of the Department of Women and Gender Studies, plumbed her family's history to write Mud, Blood, and Ghosts.

In crafting the book, which was published last year, Carr, a University of Colorado Boulder professor of English and chair of the Department of Women and Gender Studies, blended historical exposition with poetic language, a way of writing that she says is essential for expressing complex emotions. Because of the personal nature of the subject, Carr says, she was interested in speaking from her own perspective in the present as well as from Kem’s perspective in the past, demonstrating the idea that history is always with us.

In this sense, the reference to ghosts in the title has a double meaning, not just refering to 19th century spiritualists, but how “we are haunted by our pasts. They are with us all the time, and they are directing what we do,” Carr says.

“To acknowledge that is to take responsibility for it, to think, ‘Given all of that, what is my responsibility to the future and to the present?’”

A farmer’s populism

Omer Kem was born in 1855 in Hagerstown, Indiana, to an itinerant and largely unsuccessful farmer who often moved his family to find better work. Kem’s family was ravaged by disease and continuing financial instability, so he set out on his own, ultimately moving to Nebraska. As a young man, he farmed through government programs like the Swamp Lands Act and the Homestead Act, but failed due to infertile conditions. Many farmer settlers in Nebraska were in a similar situation, falling into debt as the seeds they sowed blew away in the hot winds of the region’s 1889-1899 drought.

When Kem ran for and won a seat in Congress, his experiences inspired him to join the populist movement of the time along with many rural farmers and other people living in poverty. The movement was a response to the economic and social conditions of the Gilded Age, according to Carr:

“Both urban laborers and rural laborers were left in the lurch,” as the former lacked protections like the eight-hour workday and the latter faced unregulated crop prices and railroad rates, among other issues. Meanwhile, with no graduated income tax, the people at the top did not pay more, and there was no significant social safety net at that time.

Mud, Blood, and Ghosts details how factors as disparate as economic inequity, water scarcity and scientific racism, among many others, shaped the American West and the country and still resonate politically and socially today.

“All of these things combined with the problem of weather and climate in the Plains states,” Carr says. Many poor farmers had moved to states in the Great Plains region during the mid- and late-19th century following the Homestead Act, but in dry climates, the land couldn’t produce without massive irrigation. In the South, where climate was not the issue, “we’re looking at a totally different dynamic having to do with the end of Reconstruction, and poverty among Black farmers especially.”

What unites the People’s Party with today’s populists might be its criticism of the societal elite, Carr says, “coupled with the demand for greater representation in politics. I think a lot of people would say that many contemporary American populists, on the right or the left, are people who for various reasons have not felt included in the political system.”

American eugenics at the turn of the 20th century

Kem also was influenced by the racial segregation and fear of “mixing races” that was both commonplace and largely unchallenged for several generations after the Civil War. Along with large swathes of the American public, Carr says, Kem came to believe in the ideology of eugenics, a term coined to describe attempts at increasing the number of people with “superior” mental and physical traits through the human equivalent of selective breeding. It grew, in part, from elements of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, particularly the heritability of traits.

“The science itself was not very detailed,” Carr explains. “It was the beginning of an understanding of how genetics works. That science got married to criminology, ideas around welfare, the problems that came with urbanization, the first wave of the Great Migration and the huge numbers of immigrants coming in during the beginning of the 20th century.”

These major demographic and political changes made some people afraid, especially members of dominant groups, Carr says. Because of the widespread belief that many traits and behaviors were inherited, eugenicists justified ostracizing or marginalizing people who were Black, poor, disabled, criminals and immigrants, insisting they would “taint” the gene pool.

“Many people who believed in ‘progress’ believed in eugenics,” Carr says, including those who might be considered left-wing. “That’s important to say because it points to the ways in which white supremacy and fascistic thinking can bleed into different political mindsets or belief systems.” Even prominent feminists of the time like Margaret Sanger espoused eugenic beliefs, though she never fully bought into forced sterilization as Kem did, Carr says.

The spiritualist movement

In addition to eugenics, Omer Kem believed in spiritualism, a movement centered around the idea that it is possible to communicate with the spirits of the dead. Carr notes in her book that spiritualism was common in Midwest Populist circles as well as among the general public; there were an estimated 5 to 6 million adherents by the 1860s, according to a historian cited by Carr.

A number of scholars document spiritualists’ involvement in progressive political causes. For example, the Bland family, Washington, D.C., activists whom Kem met when he moved to the capital after being elected to Congress, were populists as well as the founders of the National Indian Defense Association, a reform organization that opposed the forced assimilation of Native Americans.

CU Boulder Professor Julie Carr focused on the story of her great-grandfather Omer Kem to explore the history of spiritualism, populism and eugenics in the American West and the United States.

At a dinner that Kem had with the Blands after he had been placed on the House Indian Affairs Committee, the Blands’ niece Maggie, a purported medium, described the ghosts of Kem’s mother and beloved sister Ellen as glowing orbs hovering near his head. This led to a series of encounters with his dead family members, including his son Bert.

Carr suggests that the Blands might have been using their spiritualism as a form of lobbying, as after these encounters with his dead relatives, Kem became very close to the Blands and did, in fact, advocate for their cause in Congress. Later, Kem’s spiritualism took another turn when he began to “see” a Native American “spirit guide” who he believed had entered his body.

Historians understand the prevalence of Native spirit guides differently. Some interpret it as yet another form of removal, reducing Native Americans to spectral presences, while others argue that spiritualists were generally sympathetic toward Native Americans, and sometimes used the “voices” of Native spirits to advocate for reforms (though these generally involved coerced assimilation through institutions such as the Indian schools). While this may have been a form of social justice work, it was a distorted one, according to Carr, based as it was on both appropriation and projection.

“In my great-grandfather’s case,” Carr says, “he started having visions of the ‘spirit’ of a ‘Native American healer’ entering his body in the 1890s when he was in Congress. He maintained this imagined relationship with this ‘spirit’ for the rest of his life. I think there’re some interesting psychological dynamics going on there, one being a desire to identify with Native Americans because of the way that he understands Indigenous people as having a legitimate right to the land.

“The other complexity is that, even as he’s making speeches on the congressional floor advocating for at least some level of Native sovereignty, he is also legislating for the further removal of Native people from land. In that split, you can see a kind of crisis. If nothing else, it has to be a crisis of conscience. Creating for himself, in a sense, an imaginary friend in this spirit guide he calls ‘Fleet Wind’ is a way, I think, to respond to that crisis of conscience. Perhaps this is true of many forms of appropriation and projection.”

Kem’s “complex history of bad and good luck, of power struggles, and of property,” as Carr describes them, highlights how the past haunts the present like a ghost, despite the flaws of its actors. Carr finds stark contrast between the past and the present in the People’s Party platform: “This Republic can only endure as a free government while built upon the love of the whole people for each other.”

“Though this word love, like the phrase the people, has so often been cheapened, distorted and mobilized for violent ends,” Carr writes, “I still want to ask: What if we took them at their word?”

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A CU Boulder poet considers the socioeconomic and political environment of the turn of the 20th century through the history of her own family.

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English alum flunks grades in new book

Anonymous — Thu, 16 May 2024 01:16:22 +0000

English alum flunks grades in new book Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 05/15/2024 - 19:16

Daniel Long

Jesse Stommel compiles two decades of eyebrow-raising in Undoing the Grade: Why We Grade, and How to Stop

It was the summer of 2023, sometime in June or July, and Jesse Stommel (PhD, English ‘10) had big weekend plans.

He said to his husband, “I’m going to write a book this weekend”—a book about grades, in particular, and all the trouble they’ve caused.

It was a tall order for such a short period of time, no doubt, but it wasn’t as though Stommel were starting from scratch. He’d been taking a critical eye to grades for two decades and had published numerous essays on the topic, several of which had been read by tens of thousands of people on his website.

Jesse Stommel (PhD, English ‘10) Undoing the Grade: Why We Grade, and How to Stop partially in response to his realization that grades are performative.

“I was already starting to piece these things out in public and have conversations,” says Stommel, who teaches writing at the University of Denver. “That’s how my writing process always works. All of my books are adapted from previously published stuff. This is because I don't think in a vacuum. I need to think alongside other people.”

All Friday, Saturday and Sunday, Stommel toiled away, editing previously published materials, organizing those materials into chapters, writing three brand-new chapters and then bookending everything with a foreword by Martha Burtis and an afterword by Sean Michael Morris (MA, English ‘05).

“And come Sunday night,” he says, “I had a draft of the book.”

That book, titled Undoing the Grade: Why We Grade, and How to Stop, was published on Aug. 14.

I can give you A’s

Growing up, Stommel loved school. Grades, however—grades he didn’t love.

“I did really well throughout elementary school. I was super engaged,” he says. “Then I hit middle school, where I was being graded in the traditional way for the first time, and I got almost straight D’s and F’s in sixth grade.”

His grades improved the following year, but not by much. Being graded had sapped him of his motivation, he says. “All of a sudden I didn’t want to do any of the work.”

But things changed in eighth grade, thanks to his dad and brother.

“They bet me I couldn’t get straight A’s,” he says. “And so, the first semester of eighth grade, I got straight A’s.”

His teachers couldn’t believe it. They were flummoxed, and perhaps a little suspicious. How could he turn things around so quickly? What on earth was going on?

“They sat me down and asked me what had happened, and I told them about the bet,” says Stommel.

Yet that meeting opened his eyes more than it did his teachers’, he says, because it led him to the realization that grades were performative, character traits of a role he was being asked to play. “If what you want is A’s,” he recalls thinking, “I can give you A’s.”

This discovery, and the good grades that arose therefrom, freed Stommel up, he admits, relieving him of the pressure and judgment that often came with D’s and F’s. But it also made him aware of the stakes involved in the pursuit of high marks, stakes he continues to think about to this day.

“Whenever I see a perfect grade point average, what that represents to me is a willingness to compromise yourself, because that's what we're constantly expected to do in traditional grading systems.”

From grader to ungrading

Stommel began his teaching career as a grader, evaluating the work a professor had assigned to students.

“The experience of doing nothing but grading gave me an interesting perspective on what grading is and how it works,” he says. “It had nothing to do with the relationship between me and students. It was just this abstraction of their work and the quality of their work, as though that can be separated from who they are and who I am.”

Stommel wanted to do something different when he became an instructor of record. But what?

His first source of inspiration was CU Boulder English Professor Marty Bickman, who taught Stommel a total of four times, twice when Stommel was an undergraduate and twice when he was a graduate student.

“I really admired Marty’s approach. He didn’t put grades on individual work. Instead, he had students grading themselves and writing self-reflections.”

Stommel also found inspiration in CU Boulder English Professor R L Widmann, with whom he co-taught courses on Shakespeare. Widmann encouraged Stommel to think of assessment not as a judgment laid down from on high but as a conversation between student and teacher.

“She would develop deep relationships with students and then be able to tell them exactly what they needed to hear at exactly the moment they needed to hear it. And they trusted her.”

Stommel combined Bickman’s and Widmann’s approaches in his own classes, along with what he learned about teaching and learning from books like John Holt’s How Children Fail and Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. And thus ungrading, which Stommel defines as “raising an eyebrow at grades as a systemic practice,” was born.

But that’s not to say Stommel believes his ungrading practice is the only viable option. Not even close. In his essay “How to Ungrade,” a revised and expanded version of which appears in Undoing the Grade, he provides a smorgasbord of options for the ungrading-curious, including grading contracts, portfolios, peer assessment and student-made rubrics.

The goal of ungrading, he says, is not to replace one uniform approach to assessment with another. It’s for educators to develop an approach that best fits them and their students.

“The work of teaching, the work of reimagining assessment, is necessarily idiosyncratic.”

Myths and paradoxes

But in a world without grades, wouldn’t academic standards fall? Wouldn’t students lose motivation? Wouldn’t they be rewarded for learning less?

The experience of doing nothing but grading gave me an interesting perspective on what grading is and how it works. It had nothing to do with the relationship between me and students. It was just this abstraction of their work and the quality of their work, as though that can be separated from who they are and who I am.”

Questions like these, Stommel says, reflect the cultural anxiety surrounding grades. And while it’s important to remember that this anxiety is itself real—“It’s based in real feelings that we have as human beings,” says Stommel—it’s equally important to remember that the problems from which it stems may not be.

Take grade inflation, or the awarding of higher grades for the same quality of work over long periods of time, as an example. Like Alfie Kohn, author of Punished by Rewards, Stommel calls grade inflation a myth, but he also believes concern over it points to a real phenomenon: the desire for education to be taken seriously.

“We're seeing all kinds of pushes on the education sector,” he says. “People are saying that education isn't doing what it's supposed to be doing, or it’s actually doing harm.”

That many teachers’ jobs lack stability, especially in higher education, doesn’t help, Stommel adds.

“When you see the utter precarity of educators—where most educators are not making a living wage; where 70% of educators in higher education are adjunct or on one-year contracts, sometimes even on one-semester contracts. When you see all of that happening, there is a desire to have some relief. And I think that’s when we talk about something like grade inflation.”

Nevertheless, Stommel argues, the claim that lower grades means better teaching is a misleading one. High standards and high grades are not mutually exclusive.

Stommel cites a former student to prove it. “Jesse’s class was one of the hardest I’ve taken in my life,” this student wrote of one of Stommel’s classes. “It was an easy ‘A.’”

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Jesse Stommel compiles two decades of eyebrow-raising in Undoing the Grade: Why We Grade, and How to Stop.

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A guy, a gun and a dangerous blonde … and why we like them

Anonymous — Thu, 28 Mar 2024 19:52:42 +0000

A guy, a gun and a dangerous blonde … and why we like them Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 03/28/2024 - 13:52

Rachel Sauer

Remembering writer Raymond Chandler at the 65^th anniversary of his death, a CU Boulder English scholar reflects on the hard-boiled investigator and why this character still appeals

Philip Marlowe was in a grubby waterfront hotel room “with a hard bed and a mattress slightly thicker than the cotton blanket that covered it.”

A neon light outside the window illuminated the room in red. He got up to splash cold water on his face, feeling “a little better, but very little. I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.”

Call him hard-boiled or hard-bitten, call him jaded, call him a relic—he’s all those things, and one of the most alluring and enduring archetypes in fiction. As written by Raymond Chandler, who died 65 years ago this week and who is increasingly recognized for the artistry of his writing, Philip Marlowe is the private investigator who’s seen it all and is surprised by little. He drinks too much, smokes too much, cracks wise, cracks the case and is, above all things, alone.

Mary Klages, a CU Boulder associate professor of English, notes that part of the appeal of the hard-boiled investigator character is he's a "knight in soiled armor."

Many consider Marlowe the patron not-saint of all the hard-boiled and hard-edged private investigators who followed, the semi-heroes of literature and film who solve crime, yes, but generally by immersing themselves in the sordid world of it—at the expense of relationships, health, happiness and sometimes the law.

What is the continued appeal of the hard-boiled investigator character, who’s brilliant and kind of a jerk, handy in a fight and charming when it’s convenient, all kinds of trouble—or troubled—and the ultimate cipher?

“What Marlowe and other characters like him bring in is being more of the people,” says Mary Klages, an associate professor of English who teaches a course called Crime, Policing and Detection. “(Marlowe) doesn’t have a partner, never has anybody he works with, doesn’t need a Watson figure to explain how the great brain works. He’s just a guy, and he’s not apart from the dirty world that he has to investigate. He doesn’t have this sensibility of, ‘Oh, bad guys and criminals, they’re over there and I’m something different’ that you get with other detectives or investigators.”

A desire for story

Understanding the appeal of the jaded investigator whose native habitat seems to be dark and rainy city streets begins with understanding the basic human desire for story, Klages says.

“Human beings love narratives, we love telling stories, and with mysteries there’s that added element of, ‘Can I figure out who the villain is?’ Then we get the reward of a sense of justice—somebody out there is fighting crime and that makes us feel a little bit better about living in a dangerous real world. As a reader, I can go to mystery novel and say, ‘Oh, if only there were a Sherlock Holmes or a V.I. Warshawski in the real world solving crimes and making us safer.’

“Also, stories—especially mysteries—give us all that in nice container. Anything can happen, but it’s not going to happen. Reading words on a page lets us empathize with characters and have a vicarious experience that we don’t want to have happen in real life. We experience it in a way that makes it vivid, and that has shape and that wraps up in the end with a nice, neat bow. That’s the convention in most mystery stories.”

And while there are as many types of mystery solvers in fiction as there are audiences for them—from elderly knitting enthusiasts and roadster-driving teens to insufferable British geniuses with superhuman powers of observation—the hard-boiled private eye character brought a new and interesting layer to the mystery genre.

Both Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett honed the literary hard-boiled investigator writing for Black Mask magazine.

A knight in soiled armor

The character really came into his own—and in the beginning, it was always a “he”—when the pulp magazine Black Mask was launched in April 1920 by H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan. One of the first iterations of the hard-boiled investigator slouched through its pages in December 1922, embodied in Carroll John Daly’s novella “The False Burton Combs.”

The titular false Burton Combs memorably introduces himself in the story's fourth paragraph: “I ain’t a crook; just a gentleman adventurer and make my living working against the law breakers. Not that work with the police—no, not me. I’m no knight errant either. It just came to me that the simplest people in the world are crooks.”

His progeny includes Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade, Mike Hammer, V.I. Warshawski, Harry Hole, the Continental Op, Kurt Wallander and further generations of fictional investigators who often exist as shadow opposites to the upstanding police detectives, the crime-solving priests, the kooky Southern bookstore owners who happen upon murder, the otherwise decent people in whom readers like to think they see themselves.

Both Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, who wrote hard-boiled investigator Sam Spade, published in Black Mask and brought dimension to an essentially unknowable—and sometimes unlikable—but always compelling archetype.

“In Philip Marlowe, Chandler gives us guy who’s educated, who’s been to college, who quotes Shakespeare, but works with lowlifes,” Klages explains. “He gives us a portrait of a very dirty underworld where you can’t trust anybody, the police are corrupt, rich people are corrupt, and he looks for a kind of moral compass to guide him. I think of Marlowe as a knight in soiled armor, and Chandler makes that image at the very beginning of ‘The Big Sleep.’ He has Marlowe go into the house of a very rich client and he’s looking at this stained-glass window that shows a knight trying to free a woman from being chained up around a tree. Marlowe says something like, ‘I wanted to go up and help the guy, but then I realized he was never going to get that woman free.’

“Marlowe’s attitude is, ‘I know there’s supposed to be nobility and self-sacrifice in world, but I don’t see them, and I don’t’ believe in them. But I still want there to be some kind of morality, some kind of code,’ so he makes his own. He doesn’t follow anything traditional, he’s not religious, not spiritual, not a law and order and justice guy, so he makes his own code, and that’s part of the ongoing appeal of this character, this knight in soiled armor.”

Humphrey Bogart (left) starred as Philip Marlowe in "The Big Sleep" with Lauren Bacall. (Photo: National Motion Picture Council)

Trench coats for a modern audience

Philip Marlowe was notably embodied on film by Humphrey Bogart, as was Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade, and he’s the image many people bring to mind when they think of the hard-boiled investigator, Klages says—trench coat, cigarette and, by today’s standards, appalling attitudes toward women.

In fact, some might claim that the hard-bitten investigator is a relic of the past, but Klages argues that this character and what he (and not as often, she) represents and embodies remains relevant for modern audiences.

“It’s this idea of, ‘Why should we believe in anything when we’ve had time after time the proof that the politicians are corrupt, the police are corrupt, it’s all over the place,’” Klages says. “I think the question is, from a hard-boiled perspective, why would anybody give a damn about anybody else? You have to be in it for yourself, and I think the genius of Chandler’s portrait of Marlowe is that you have to be in it for yourself, yes, but it has to be something bigger that you stand for rather than just your own selfishness and your own greed and desires.”

She notes that Marlowe sees the world with very clear eyes, without delusion or traditional notions of hope, yet he still crafts his own kind of hope and his own code of morality, which resonates with readers and viewers today.

“I just watched first season of ‘True Detective’ and that’s a perfect example,” Klages says. “You’ve got two guys with torn up, terrible lives and part of the plot is, let’s find out how these guys with messed up lives can pursue justice. How do you take somebody who is flawed as a character and make them be the vehicle for something as elevated as truth, justice and the American way? As people who love stories, we like that complication.”

Top image: Humphrey Bogart (center) as Philip Marlowe in "The Big Sleep." (Photo: Warner Bros.)

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Remembering writer Raymond Chandler at the 65th anniversary of his death, a CU Boulder English scholar reflects on the hard-boiled investigator and why this character still appeals.

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Writing a final girl’s last stand

Anonymous — Mon, 25 Mar 2024 18:52:20 +0000

Writing a final girl’s last stand Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 03/25/2024 - 12:52

Daniel Long

The Angel of Indian Lake, book three of CU Boulder Professor Stephen Graham Jones’ Indian Lake Trilogy, comes out Tuesday.

Stephen Graham Jones is no stranger to fear. The Ineva Baldwin Professor of English at the University of Colorado Boulder has been dishing the stuff out for decades, with prize-winning rippers like The Only Good Indians, Night of the Mannequins and Mapping the Interior.

But while writing his latest novel, The Angel of Indian Lake, which will be published Tuesday, he became acquainted with a fear even he hadn’t imagined: the “abject terror” of finishing the third book in a trilogy—the Indian Lake Trilogy, to be exact.

The trilogy follows horror-flick superfan Jennifer “Jade” Daniels as she fights to stop the real-life slashers wreaking havoc in her home of Proofrock, Idaho, a small mountain town snuggled up against the cold, ominous waters of Indian Lake.

Stephen Graham Jones, a CU Boulder professor of English, closes out his Indian Lake Trilogy with the release of The Angel of Indian Lake Tuesday.

Jones assumed writing The Angel of Indian Lake would be just like writing any other book: “Have fun and see what happens. Maybe we’ll break everything, maybe we won’t.” But he quickly learned otherwise. It wasn’t like writing any other book. It posed a distinct set of challenges.

One had to do with how he treated his protagonist, whom readers had grown to love in My Heart Is a Chainsaw and Don’t Fear the Reaper, books one and two of the trilogy.

“I suddenly had a responsibility to both handle Jade Daniels with a certain amount of care but also put her through the meatgrinder,” says Jones. “I had to be mean to her, but do it in a way where the audience didn’t feel betrayed.”

Another challenge was tying up loose ends.

“I had to answer all the questions I’d been intentionally not answering in book one and book two, and I had to do it in a way that didn’t feel mechanical. Man, it was tricky.”

A change of plans

Jones admits that he never intended to write a trilogy. My Heart Is a Chainsaw was meant to be a standalone novel. But a meeting with his editor, Joe Monti of Saga Press, changed that.

“What if everybody didn’t die at the end?” Monti asked him after reading an early draft of the book.

Jones laughed. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Not everyone dying at the end? In a slasher? Was he serious? “Come on,” he told Monti. “This is Hamlet. They’re all dead on the floor.”

Jones then opened a file on his computer and cobbled together an ending where not everyone died, just to prove to Monti how ridiculous the idea was. The result knocked him for six.

“I was completely floored,” he says, “because it absolutely worked.”

And thus, a trilogy was born.

But that didn’t mean Jones knew exactly how the next two books would unravel. The ending of Don’t Fear the Reaper surprised him as much as it would his readers. And although he had a vague idea of where The Angel of Indian Lake would go, it was only a vague one, like driving to Chicago without knowing the cardinal directions.

“I just put my tires on the road and thought, ‘Well, I’ll go really fast, and eventually Chicago will appear on the horizon.’”

Reflections and ripples

Jones has said that horror “functions as a funhouse mirror that distorts the anxieties of the time back at us, partially so we can process them. … We're screaming, we're laughing, we're having fun, and our defenses are down, and that’s when we can accidentally think of something that we need to be talking about with the world.”

I had to answer all the questions I’d been intentionally not answering in book one and book two, and I had to do it in a way that didn’t feel mechanical. Man, it was tricky.”

One talking point dredged up in Indian Lake is gentrification, which Jones calls colonization at the neighborhood or city scale.

The depiction of Terra Nova, for example—a shiny new development of ticky-tacky houses carved out of the National Forest of Indian Lake by Proofrock’s uber-rich—calls to mind the exploits of a certain Italian explorer.

“That feels very much like Christopher Columbus seeing this pretty place across the water and saying, ‘Hey, that’s mine,’” Jones says.

Another issue all three novels raise is trauma—something the slasher rarely addresses but that Jones takes seriously. No one, not even Jade Daniels, can live through a slasher and then carry on as if nothing’s happened. The experience, says Jones, will have lasting emotional and psychological effects, and those effects will ripple outward, from the individual to the community to the whole world.

A final girl like no other

For Jones, one positive ripple effect of writing the trilogy has been a deeper, fuller understanding of the final girl, a trope common to the slasher genre.

The final girl, Jones explains, is the survivor girl. “She’s the one who makes it through the night of violence and comes face to face with the slasher and puts him down. She’s the antidote to the cycle of violence, and she can teach us how to push back against our bullies.”

Most final girl arcs, Jones adds, follow a pattern of retreat and renewal. “Through all the terror and violence, the final girl withdraws into a cocoon or chrysalis from which she’s reborn into a warrior princess, scholar, athlete, supermodel—everything good.”

Yet this goodness can present a problem, particularly for the reader, Jones believes: The more perfect the final girl becomes, the more difficult she is to emulate.

That’s why Jones wanted Jade Daniels—“the town reject,” as she calls herself—to be different. “I wanted to make someone who was decidedly imperfect and resistant to her own good attributes,” he says. “Jade thinks she doesn’t have what it takes to be a final girl, because she doesn’t resemble the final girls she sees on screen.”

But what Jade slowly learns over the course of the trilogy is that, although she may not resemble the final girls from her favorite movies on the outside, she’s without a doubt a final girl on the inside.

Sure, she may be abrasive at times, says Jones. She may back you into a corner and give you a six-minute lecture on Jamie Lee Curtis. You may not always like her or find her easy to be around. “But when the chips are down and there’s someone in the room with a blade, that’s when you want Jade Daniels.”

The Angel of Indian Lake will be available in print, e-book and audiobook (a selection of which is narrated by Stephen King) on Tuesday.

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The Angel of Indian Lake, book three of CU Boulder Professor Stephen Graham Jones’ Indian Lake Trilogy, comes out Tuesday.

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CU Boulder alum is challenging sacred economic shibboleths

Anonymous — Thu, 14 Mar 2024 14:59:55 +0000

CU Boulder alum is challenging sacred economic shibboleths Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 03/14/2024 - 08:59

Clay Bonnyman Evans

Nick Romeo’s ‘The Alternative’ uses real-world examples to push back on ‘unempirical dogmas’ of modern economics

Following World War II, economists in the West began to compare their field to natural sciences, physics and chemistry, perpetuating a set of enduring ideas that slowly ossified into the rigid, pessimistic dogma of neoliberal capitalism.

Ideas such as the need for extremely high executive compensation; the inevitability of unemployment and insecure housing; and beliefs that people are inherently selfish, profit should always be maximized, private markets are superior to public ones, harmful externalities are a necessary byproduct of economic growth, and others flourished.

CU Boulder alum Nick Romeo argued that modern economics is “misunderstood as analogous to physics or chemistry, when it’s more properly located within political philosophy.”

“These are unempirical dogmas that are treated as laws of the universe,” says journalist, author and University of Colorado Boulder graduate Nick Romeo (MAClassics’14, MFAEngl’12), who teaches journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. Modern economics is “misunderstood as analogous to physics or chemistry, when it’s more properly located within political philosophy.”

That technocratic approach to economics washes out critical ethical and political questions that are—or should be—at the center of the discipline, Romeo says. He notes that for most of history, economics was the province of political philosophy, examined and argued by such historical giants as Aristotle, John Stuart Mill, Adam Smith and John Maynard Keynes.

“That is a much healthier and accurate way to understand the discipline. … Economists don’t have a monopoly on insight, and political philosophy is potentially in a better position to be more insightful,” he says.

Diverse solutions

Romeo has been honing his own intellectual chops for years, first as an undergraduate at Northwestern University and later as a graduate student at CU Boulder. He’s also spent years living in Greece with his wife, Grace Erny, MA Classics, 2014, an archaeologist he met in Boulder. He’s also become a nationally respected writer, publishing in such publications at The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone and The New York Times.

In his new book, “The Alternative: How to Build a Just Economy” (PublicAffairs), he explores real-world examples from around the globe that challenge “some of the sacred shibboleths and economic dogmas of neoliberal capitalism.”

“The eight cases studies in ‘The Alternative’ present diverse solutions to the problems of paltry wages, rampant unemployment, unstable housing and exploitative labor practices,” according to a review in The Washington Post, calling it “a brisk and sensible book that details bold and ingenious proposals in measured tones.”

The first chapter zeroes in on the problem of economics education, which was almost exclusively taught through unchallenged dogma until recent decades.

“The American economist Paul Samuelson once said, ‘I don’t care who writes a nation’s laws, as long as I get to write the economic textbooks,’” Romeo says. “We need to change economics education and what counts as cultural ‘common sense.’”

Nick Romeo's The Alternative explores real-world examples from around the globe that challenge “some of the sacred shibboleths and economic dogmas of neoliberal capitalism.”

He goes on to examine a job-guarantee program in Austria; climate-focused budgeting in Norway; the Well-Paid Maids cleaning service in Washington, D.C., which pays its employees $22 an hour and provides generous paid time off and benefits; a cooperative in Spain that restricts executive compensation to no more than six times that of workers and gives every worker a vote; and other examples of innovative, progressive capitalism.

“Everything I am describing already exists. Many times, these problems are presented as an inevitable feature of the universe, or certainly the American economy, that we can’t get rid of without entirely dismantling capitalism and adopting communism,” Romeo says.

Trying new ideas

While he recognizes traditional critiques of such efforts—they can’t scale, for instance—he suggests that that hasn’t been tried, and stranger things have happened.

“Many things we take for granted today once seemed really farfetched and controversial—the 40-hour work week, eliminating child labor, occupational and environmental legislation, worker safety rules,” he says.

When hard-core libertarians argue against such widely accepted adaptations, and even pass laws to undermine them, such as the recent loosening of child-labor laws in some states, they’re not making a good-faith argument, Romeo says.

“I think if you asked a lot of those folks if they would like to have their kids work in dangerous factories or live in a town where the water is unsafe, it would be hard to find someone truly committed to those views when they are directly impacted,” he says.

Romeo continues to write for The New Yorker and other publications on a wide variety of subjects and teach at Berkeley. He says he’s “developing a few ideas” for his next book.

During his time at CU Boulder, Romeo was particularly impressed with the Herbst Program for Engineering, Ethics and Society, which “engages students with the essential questions of human existence, and links those issues with the ethical practices of science and engineering,” noting the work of Hardy Fredricksmeyer and Wayne Ambler.

“It’s a hidden gem, almost like a shadow department, and the teachers are excellent,” he says. “They have to interact with engineers, always bringing their best. They can’t assume everybody is interested, so they have to know a good way to reach them.”

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntamj5A46jU]

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Nick Romeo’s ‘The Alternative’ uses real-world examples to push back on ‘unempirical dogmas’ of modern economics.

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