And this artsy Vine of Manu’s clutch 3 that ABC made to advertise them is fucking gorgeous.
For my part, I’ll be flying back to San Antonio to attend Game 2.
Author: Eugene Fischer
This is Herky, the mascot for the University of Iowa sports teams, the Hawkeyes. When you live in Iowa City you see Herky every day, everywhere. Herky exudes defiant pride from license plates, store windows, chalk drawings on the sidewalk, and the back of innumerable loose-fitting sweatshirts. This year, Herky is even more prevalent, due to the Herky On Parade program, which has placed 83 individually decorated Herky statues all around town. One of these, down on the highly-trafficked ped mall, is named Checkmate Herky, presumably because once it sees you there is no escape.
Checkmate Herky is the most terrifying thing I’ve ever seen. Checkmate Herky will find you. Checkmate Herky will trap you. Checkmate Herky will chase you through the light and through the darkness. Life and death are trivial pastimes to Checkmate Herky, and struggle as we may, he will be there, waiting for us, in the endgame.
Some followup from my earlier discussion of this topic. My friend Keffy Kehrli, on twitter and in private conversation, emphasized the difference he sees between trigger warnings and content warnings. It’s a distinction I hadn’t thought about, but I think it’s a valuable one. A trigger warning implies an assumption of responsibility on the part of the teacher for particular traumas the students might have, and also reinforces the false idea that triggering is a predictable phenomenon. A content warning, on the other hand, is a way of being sensitive to the potential for troubled responses to difficult material, but still leaves the responsibility for self care with the student. Now that this distinction has been pointed out to me, I agree with Keffy that content warnings seem more appropriate than trigger warnings, and all of my thoughts in support of trigger warnings apply as well or better to content warnings.
Brittney Cooper published an essay in Salon titled, “No Trigger Warnings in My Class: why you won’t find them on my syllabi.” Cooper worries that trigger warnings will stifle education. She writes, “this call from students to censor their own education before they even receive it is designed to keep them from being challenged,” and makes several meaningful points about the importance of a classroom being a place where preconceived notions are questioned. I have two responses to Cooper’s article. First, that I also don’t think trigger or content warnings belong on a syllabus, for the same reasons she mentions. I think they should be part of classroom discussion. Second, a warning isn’t an invitation for students to excuse themselves from crucial material. In the anecdote I shared before, the triggering concepts were entirely unrelated to those that were pedagogically relevant to my class. If I, like Ms. Cooper, were a professor of gender studies classes, then content warnings for things like rape or racism wouldn’t be offered so students could ask for alternate assignments, but so students could determine if the class itself was right for them. Those who took the class would still be required to engage on difficult issues. And I’m personally not comfortable asserting that those who chose not to would be “censoring their own education before they receive it” as opposed to engaging in reasonable self-protective measures. Young though they may be, college students are adults, and deserve the benefit of the doubt that they are competent to design their plans of study.
Tim Duncan says they’re going to get it done this time. I believe him.
Not going to do a full con report this year, but I attended WisCon38 and had a generally lovely time. I got to see Karen, Pär, and Jeremiah, all of whom I’m going to miss terribly when I move away from Iowa City and can no longer easily visit. I roomed with Keffy Kehrli and Sunny Moraine, and also spent time with Ted Chiang, Marica Glover, Jen Volant, Meghan McCarron, David Schwartz, David Moles, Ben Rosenbaum, Will Alexander, Genevieve Valentine, Valya Lupescu, Nancy Hightower, Alice Kim, Liz Gorinsky, Richard Butner, Barb Gilly, Marco Palmieri, Greg Bechtel, and a bunch of my friends from the Clarion 2012 class.
The most notable thing for me this year was that I had my first reading at the con. Gwenda Bond and Christopher Rowe had to cancel their attendance at the last minute, and I got to take one of their places in at the Death-defying Feats of Moxie reading. I read the first three sections of my novella “The New Mother,” and got an enthusiastic reception. Hopefully by next WisCon it will be published.
I was at WisCon this weekend, so didn’t do my normal roundup of favorited tweets last friday. Here’s two weeks worth instead.
Baby changing station. pic.twitter.com/9K4yGiHNXV
— Renzo Soprano (@Renzo_Soprano) May 15, 2014
The Associated Student Senate of UCSB passed a proposal to require professors to issue trigger warnings on classroom materials. Today, twitter has been fairly active with discussion both for and against such a practice. I’d like to share an anecdote that informs my feelings on the subject.
In 2013 I taught a course for the University of Iowa on writing fantasy short stories. One of the stories I assigned was Karen Joy Fowler’s award-winning story “The Pelican Bar,” which is about a teenage girl forcibly sent to an abusive boarding school in the Caribbean. I assigned the story to spark discussion of the boundaries of the fantasy genre, as the story is structured like a portal fantasy, but contains no definitively speculative element. It’s a fascinating story that reads differently depending on the reader’s own familiarity with fantasy fiction. But, as it happens, boarding schools like the one in the story actually exist. I knew that when I assigned it, but as that wasn’t relevant to my pedagogical purpose it never occurred to me to mention that information to my class. So I was shocked when I received an email from a student which read, “I am incapable of writing any sort of response, or participating in any discussion, concerning Fowler’s ‘The Pelican Bar.’ May I please have a replacement assignment?”
When I read the email I felt sick to my stomach with guilt. I immediately gave the student an alternate assignment, permission to leave the room during discussion, and offered to meet if desired. In our discussion the student let me know that that their past experiences were too close to those depicted in the story to be able to engage with it critically. The student didn’t use the words “trigger” or “PTSD,” but described feelings of panic while reading, the sensation of a “mind racing,” having a “hyper-emotional, fight or flight” response. It was obvious to me that triggering was exactly what had occurred.
I stand by “The Pelican Bar” as an excellent story, and the pedagogical purpose to which I put it as a justifiable one. But if I were to teach it again, I would absolutely offer a trigger warning first. The purpose of my classes isn’t to shock my students or force them to confront/get over their own pasts, it’s to create an environment where the students can engage with the ideas I believe are necessary to learn the subject. If my curriculum has built-in barriers to such engagement, then I’m not doing my job.
The only concern I might have with a proposal like the one at UCSB is the possibility for abuse by the students. But it seems to me that this would be easily preventable. If I, as a professor, offer trigger information, it is then the students’ responsibility to communicate with me in a timely fashion about about their mental health needs so we can work together to accommodate them while still pursuing the goals of the course. Professors already do this in universities all over the country for things like giving extra time on exams to students with ADD diagnoses, or making participation accommodations for students with social anxiety disorders. Sometimes it’s just between the professor and the student, and sometimes it’s in conjunction with the university counseling office. But in either case, this is already part of the professor’s job description. I don’t see why trigger warnings are any different. It’s just an expansion of the number of mental health considerations we’re accommodating. That’s a good thing.
This video captures many of the things I adore about the San Antonio Spurs. [EDIT: The original video was taken down. I’ve switched it out with a mirror.]
What you wouldn’t learn from watching this wonderful video, though, is that for the first half of their era of dominance, the Spurs were thought of as offensively mediocre, but a defensive powerhouse. The reversal of perception over the last decade, despite having the same player core, is stunning. And it’s a credit to Gregg Popovich, who, as Nate Silver notes, has been “uniquely able to stave off regression to the mean.” Ian Levy picked up on that and observed that as his teams’ defensive effictiveness waned, it was nearly perfectly compensated for by increasing offensive prowess. (The trend lines in season ORTG+ and DRTG+ by season are perfectly parallel.) So it’s not just, as the video suggests, that the Spurs play perfectly executed team basketball. That’s what they do now, yes. But in the broader sense, what the Spurs under Gregg Popovich do, year after year, is play perfectly to their strengths while minimizing their weaknesses.
Children are the future… UNLESS WE STOP THEM
— rstevens ☕️☕️ (@rstevens) May 9, 2014
The Sparrow won a ton of awards, got rave reviews, and is loved or admired by many people whose opinions I respect. And yet, for years, whenever one of them recommended it to me, it came with the caveat, “It’s a pretty religious book. I’m not sure how you’ll like it.”
My friends know I am not a religious person. Works of fiction where the point is to explore the grandeur of religious feeling are very likely to leave me cold. I am not, though, insensitive to books about the human experience of religion. These I can find as moving as any other exploration of profound human experience. So when I read The Sparrow, it was with the hope it would be that kind of book. And, for about the first nine-tenths, it was. That last tenth, though…. Stop reading here if you are spoiler averse.
Up until the end I thought that the book was engrossing, the characters rendered with deft nuance, the dialog compelling, and the building sense of menace genuinely chilling. Up through, oh, around the time that Anne dies, the book was completely working for me. After that, though, it breaks down. The climax of the book is the moment when Emilio Sandoz is “raped by God,” and everything in the last few sections happens in service of constructing this moment. Characters who have been built with tenderness are dispensed with casually, often off the page1, in a perfunctory deepening of Sandoz’s abjectness leading up to his ultimate violation. All the issues of faith that characters struggle with up to that point are communicated with clarity and naturalness, and I was sympathetic to them even if I didn’t share them. But the perfect, efficient thoroughness of Sandoz’s downfall seemed authorially artificial, and thus an unfair structural thumb on the scale for a teleological worldview. This deviation from the book’s prior subtlety is relevant, because Sandoz’s final conflict is whether to view his experiences as farcically meaningless, or the design of a God (read: author) he must despise.
I said on Twitter that I was trying to decide if Russell failed me as an author, or if I failed her as a reader. And I think it might be a little of both. She failed me with the manipulative heavy-handedness of the climax. I failed her because Sandoz’s ultimate struggle, to answer does it mean something or does it mean nothing, speaks to something I lack. Whatever it is in some people that makes the answer it means something so tragically tempting is not in me. To my mind, Sandoz wasn’t raped by God, he was raped by a bunch of aliens. I understand Sandoz struggling to reach that conclusion, but I am fully resistant to the narrative suggesting that I should struggle as well. When the Father General says, “He is still held fast in the formless stone, but he’s closer to God right now than I have ever been in my life. And I don’t even have the courage to envy him,” it reminds me of nothing so much as Flannery O’Connor’s Misfit, announcing, “She would have been a good woman if there had been someone to shoot her every day of her life.” That is to say, the philosophy of a psychopath, or at least someone prone to the fetishistic glamorization of suffering.
I have been brought down by circumstance. I have had my heart wounded by the cruel and belated recognition of my own hand in the authorship of my trials. But at my lowest my mind has always alighted on ontology. These things just happened, as things do, and it is terrible, as things often are. Irony can be punishing, and and challenges to sense-of-self wrenching. But whatever human wiring it is that demands they be signifiers of purpose, that grasps for and resonates with teleology–that is simply absent in me. Or if it is present, it has been roused by neither my own past experience, nor the climax of The Sparrow. That doesn’t mean it isn’t real, or a worthy keystone around which to arch a story, but it does mean that I as a reader can’t go along for the ride.
Wikipedia informs me that some of this is to hide the fact that the characters don’t actually die, and are around for the next novel. I don’t consider this to greatly ameliorate my critiques. ↩