Blog

Posted on

Academic Conference Appearances are like Late Night Buses

In that they offer uncomfortable seating and there’s usually some guy ranting incoherently while everyone else avoids eye contact.

Also, you wait ages for one and then a whole bunch arrive at once.

Due to circumstances beyond my control, relating primarily to parenthood, emigration and writing commitments, I’d not actually been to a conference in over a year, until I was invited to take part in this excellent one-day event on Literature, Cultural Studies, and Translation. It was my first conference held in Cyberspace, so I finally got to experience the Zoom fatigue everyone else has been complaining about for 18 months.

Speaking on Nadsat in translation alongside Benet Vincent.

Anyhow, it was an excellent, eclectic and engaging experience, for which I must thank the organisers at Cappadocia University. And it has spurred me into action to do a few more. Often, one thing which precluded attending conferences was the same reason which rendered them appealing – that you had to visit a different location. The upside to Zoom-fatigue conferencing is the same as the downside – it can and will be done from one’s back bedroom. So, newly emboldened, I’ve re-engaged on the conference circuit and have a few abstracts accepted already for the forthcoming year, primarily on religious futurism topics.

Next up is an especially busy conference, as I’ll be presenting not one but two papers in two days. I’d link to SFRA 2021, except you have to be a member and pay to attend. If that is you, then please pop in to listen to my papers. I hope you find them interesting.

I’ve already mentioned the first paper here, which will examine Israel in Alt-History. The other relates to my long-running SF and Buddhism project and takes us up to the Sixties:

There is, of course, four days worth of exceptional SF research, not to mention roundtables, keynotes and discussion. If you’re not an SFRA member, you should definitely consider joining and (virtually) coming along to the conference. There are too many papers I’m looking forward to hearing (childminding permitting) but most of all I’m excited about my fellow panel members. I’m on two amazing panels, one on Israel and Palestine in SF and one on religious futurisms.

We might even have a little announcement to make too. More of that after the event.

Posted on

The Chymical Wedding of Samuel Beckett

There is to be an odd little celebration this month, in Folkestone of all places, to commemorate its visitation by, and subsequent nuptials therein of, Samuel Beckett.

Beckett married his long-term partner, as we now know due to a series of excellent biographies, in curious circumstances. He was embroiled in a serious relationship with a BBC producer at the time.

Samuel Beckett with his wife Suzanne Déchevaux-Dumesnil. | Samuel beckett, Playwright, Samuel
Beckett with Mme Beckett

Ostensibly, marrying Suzanne Déchevaux-Dumesnil in March 1961 was intended to achieve the aim of ensuring her inheritance of his copyrights. As it happened, she ended up dying about six months before him, in 1989.

The curiosity pertains to Beckett’s decision to marry after nearly three decades of relationship, at the very moment when he was most involved in a separate relationship with an entirely different woman.

The organisers of the festival in Folkestone aim to give voice to those surrounding the events of the marriage, including the perspective of a journalist thrown off the scent, and a witness to the wedding itself.

It’s fun, original and embedded theatre, doing what theatre can do best, which is dramatise our stories back to ourselves. Samuel Beckett’s mysterious marriage took place in Folkestone, and it is great that they can now include this odd intrusion from the world of absurdist theatre and continenal intellectuals as one of their own stories, for it is that too.

Posted on

A Fantastikal Voyage

It’s been out a little while already, but I only just got around to checking out the latest edition of Fantastika journal.

Fantastika Issues – FANTASTIKA JOURNAL

It’s especially gratifying to see oneself mentioned, not only in Chiara Crosignani’s conference report about “Fantastic Religions and Where to Find Them”, from Genzano a couple of years ago, but also in Derek Thiess’s imaginative and very current article about preppers and the apocalypse.

As always, there’s a bumper smorgasbord of non-realist writing to be enjoyed, from the Gothic to SF, from Britain’s haunted forests to Stanislaw Lem. Over 280 pages in fact!

I’m personally saving up, like a child hoarding his easter egg, their review of the Korean SF anthology Readymade Bodhisattva for after I finish reading the collection.

Fantastika is always an excellent read, and in these days of outrageous access charges for academic research, it’s delightfully free to read.

So go read it!

Posted on

The Grapes of Wolf

When it comes to lost works of literature, John Steinbeck’s unpublished werewolf mystery amounts to five words I never imagined I’d ever write in that order together.

Werewolves and Wildness: The Open Graves, Open Minds special issue of Gothic Studies - Edinburgh University Press Blog

Okay, it perhaps might not carry the same cultural weight as rediscovering Aristotle’s volume on comedy, or Shakespeare’s Love’s Labours Won, or Gerard Manley Hopkins’ early poetry, or James Joyce’s lost stageplay.

But in terms of sheer unexpectedness, it’s on a par with hearing of the existence of Ernest Hemingway’s secret gay erotica, Franz Kafka’s rediscovered techno thriller, or Sylvia Plath’s long forgotten shopping and fucking chicklit.

Actually, it’s even less likely than all of those. But, we are assured, nevertheless, it exists.

Publish it now, dammit!

Posted on

Tiktoking about invented languages

Our invented languages blog/project got a shout out today from Grammar Girl on Tiktok, which I have to say is new for us.

@therealgrammargirl

Clockwork Orange. #edutok #literature #language #fyp #foryou #learnontiktok #wotd #learntoday #wordoftheday #nadsat #ela

♬ original sound – Grammar Girl: English Is Fun

Such is the proliferation of social media platforms nowadays that I kind of gave up some time ago trying to keep up. I don’t do Twitter, or Insta or Tiktok. I’m on Facebook largely out of habit and because it’s where I can find a lot of the people I often need to find relatively quickly.

I’d love to say I got burnt by Bebo or something, but really it’s just a combination of laziness, and a desire for order. It’s also one of the reasons why I’ve finally (after a decade of owning the domain) launched this site.

I can tell by the stats that having one’s own webpage, especially as an academic, is probably not the most effective outreach methodology. But it suits me, as it gives me a degree of control, and allows me to archive things.

Am I a luddite? Perhaps (definitely in many ways, only perhaps in this though.)

Therefore I have great respect for those, like Grammar Girl, who have embraced the changes and the platforms and found successful ways to communicate with new audiences.

And I have great gratitude when such people share the love with those of us who don’t have their magical powers.

Posted on

Sokal Squared come out fighting

The so-called ‘Sokal Squared’ collective who effectively trolled a series of journals a few years back with spoof articles intended to satirise the methodologies, findings and content of social science journals, have been defending their work.

By way of aide-memoire for anyone who doesn’t recall the ‘Grievance Studies’ debacle, in 2017 and 2018, three academics submitted a range of papers for submission to academic journals primarily dedicated to topics such as cultural, queer, race, sexuality and fat studies. The academics – Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose – contended that the level of scholarly standards in these journals, and indeed in those fields, was low and eroding the reputation of academia generally.

Thumbnail of video Academics expose corruption in Grievance Studies.jpg
Lindsay and Pluckrose, chuckling over the content of one of their bogus articles

When some of their articles were published, they went public to condemn what they saw as poor academic standards in these fields, and critique what they termed the prioritisation of ‘social grievances’ over rigorous academic scholarship. Their contention was that certain fields were underpinned by the assumption of certain grievances, and the scholarship which took place within those fields amended and adapted theories and findings to reinforce those grievances.

The reaction was varied; they received praise from some quarters, including some of the journal editors themselves, but they were also on the receiving end of serious criticism for what many perceived as unethical behaviour. After the debacle reached the pages of the New York Times, Boghossian was even investigated by his own employer in relation to academic ethics.

This current paper, some years on, in the journal Sociological Methods and Research, suggests that the Sokal Squared authors are still not happy about how their experiment was received. In response to a journal article supporting them last year, they have come out with this latest attempt to explain their methods and motives. I expect likewise that there are many people working in those particular academic disciplines who remain unhappy with the ‘Grievance Studies’ papers experiment in the first place.

Mostly, I’m noting this because I cited most of these papers in one of my own, an article which also aimed to highlight what I perceived as a shoddy corner of academia engaged in dubious practices, which could best be highlighted by actually engaging with the process of submitting a paper.

My target was, I think, much less ambiguous than that of Boghossian et. al. I took aim at the predatory open access journals which have sprung up in recent years, looking to prey on primarily emerging academics and academics from developing nations by charging sky-high article processing fees. In order to highlight that my article was a hoax, I cited not only the Grievance Studies articles which had made it into print, but also Sokal himself, the granddaddy of the practice, whose 1996 spoof of postmodern cultural studies led ultimately to a book, and an argument with Jacques Derrida.

I think I was able to categorically demonstrate the shoddy and debased academic practices, if you can even call them that, of these journals. I’m not entirely convinced that the Sokal Squared team made their case as definitively, but in this latest article, they do manage to convince that theirs was a serious attempt to expose what they felt was of serious concern.

In short, it wasn’t a hoax, folks.

Posted on

Another Israel is Possible

Once again serious trouble and violence has erupted between Israel and Palestinians. Elswhere there is no end of discussion and commentariat media and social media prepared to offer their speculations and insights into why this is currently occurring.

Also prevalent are the ideas many people have about how to resolve this seemingly intractable problem. Two-state solutions, Eretz Israel solutions, walls… all these and more are being argued across the web.

I’m not intending to replicate any of that. Instead I will simply offer a solution that would work and yet at the same time will never take place, except of course, in another timeline, where it already has.

Next month at the SFRA 2021 conference, I’ll be talking about the Jewish states that Zionism pursued and failed to implement, for one reason or another, and how that has manifested in alt-history literature.

For now, though, all I can do is offer you the frontispiece from my talk:

Posted on

The Zen of Sci-fi

Karma, they say, is a bitch. But karma is also a balancing act, a mode of returning one’s energy back to you.

I’ve been fascinated about religious futurisms for some time now, and already wrote a book about SF’s engagement with Catholicism. Since then, I’ve been working on SF and Buddhism, and anyone who’s heard me talk about it knows that I’m putting a lot of energy out there about it, because it’s something I think is fascinating, culturally complex, and also important for how we develop collectively as a society.

Jedis, Buddhism and the translational power of film – Jagwire

That energy karmically returned to me the day I got an email from Eric Molinsky, who runs one of THE best podcasts anywhere, the Imaginary Worlds podcast. It really is essential listening. Eric’s an old pro from the New York radio scene, and his ability to produce magical radio has reincarnated in his new role as host and producer of Imaginary Worlds.

So now you can join the people who’ve heard my energy about SF and Buddhism, because Eric only went and did an entire episode of Imaginary Worlds about exactly that. Better again, he got some absolutely phenomenal SF writers to talk about it too, including one of my favourite authors, Ramez Naam.

The episode is here, and if you rummage around in Eric’s archive, you’re bound to find a load more interesting episodes to occupy your lockdown time.

I’m billed in the podcast as a professor at Coventry University, which isn’t accurate, as I haven’t risen to such nosebleed heights (yet!) and I’m also no longer in Coventry. That’s my karma, I guess.

Posted on

99 Red Balloons Just Flew By

I have no nostalgia for the 1980s. The music was poor and got worse as the decade went on. The fashion likewise. The politics of the era – yuppies, conspicuous consumption, haves and have nots kicking off towards the huge disparities we still see today – was especially egregious.

I spent almost all of that decade in Belfast, a city at the centre of a slow-burning civil war in those days. Watching TV at night could be interrupted at any time, and often was, with a police warning for shopkeepers to return to their premises and check for bombs. Fun times.

One of the ironies of the era personally was that I was much, much more scared about the possibility of getting nuked than the very tangible daily probability that I might fall foul of Belfast’s sectarian violence and terrorism. For this particular fear, I partly blame Threads, a docu-style drama from the BBC which aired in 1984 and depicted a not so Orwellian but definitely dystopian near future in which the city of Sheffield experiences the aftermath of nuclear war.

We’ve kind of forgotten about nuclear anxiety since then. The fall of the hyperpower duopoly at the end of the Eighties definitely played a role in that. Somehow we overlooked the proliferation of nuclear weapons since, and the fact that there were more complications, more possibility for a war by error.

And other events took centre stage. We got a whole new kind of threat to worry about post-9-11, and especially in the last few years, as black swans mounted up to the extent that it began to seem like we were living in an alternative reality, the prospect of good old-fashioned Cold War-era nuclear destruction seems to have fallen off our collective radars.

It shouldn’t have.

United States Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM, for short) is a somewhat fuzzy entity and likely does not loom large in most people’s psyches. It’s an arm of the US Military, charged with a range of responsibilities, which includes those exquisitely banal euphemisms “strategic deterrence,” and “global strike”. In short, if the US ever comes under nuclear attack, or deems a nuclear attack to be necessary, USSTRATCOM will be centrally involved.

“Peace”, they say, “is our profession”, but one always nervously ponders the Orwellian inversion potential in such mottos. “War is peace”, after all, was the motto of Minipax, Oceania’s War Ministry.

All the more concerning then to notice a tweet from said USSTRATCOM, as they look forward to the year ahead, and find oneself plunged back into the nuclear anxieties of the Eighties:

In an increasingly multipolar world, and one where hostilities are apparently growing daily, there is an ever-multiplying list of potential flashpoints which could lead to nuclear escalation. No longer is it simply a case of America and Russia: rogue nation North Korea and its murky and paranoid leadership has a nuclear capacity; angry neighbours India and Pakistan now possess nuclear arsenals; so does Israel, surrounded as it is by states hostile to its existence; its sworn enemy Iran is desperately trying to become a nuclear power; and the internal politics of Britain and France, the other two overtly nuclear states, have almost never been as fractious as now.

I don’t wish for my son to experience a version of my nuclear anxiety from the Eighties on steroids. Even moreso, I worry that we may be closer now to a nuclear event than we ever were then. We need to take that USSTRATCOM warning very seriously. We need to find a way to rid the planet of nuclear weapons.

The detonation of only 100 missiles would likely lead to the end of life on this planet. Two years ago, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute estimated that there were a staggering 13,865 nuclear weapons stockpiled, of which 3,750 were deployed with operational forces.

We’re only one mistake, one terror act, one escalation of belligerence away, in Kashmir, in Israel, in Korea, in Taiwan, in the Arctic, in the Ukraine, in so many potential flashpoints, from annihilation. The doomsday clock has crept up to 100 seconds to midnight, closer than it ever was during the Cold War.

I feel like I should be styling my hair in a mullet and wearing my ‘Frankie Says… War! Hide Yourself!” t-shirt even saying this, but as I said, I’m not nostalgic for the Eighties.

But we need to ban the bomb for good.