Today is Not a Productive Day
I did not get much done today aside from making a few corrections on syllabi and clearing out a bunch of emails. In truth, today has been a pretty piss poor day even for non-work productivity. No additions to the book catalogue. No blog posts (until now). No podcast editing. No editing editing. Really, not a whole lot of anything got done. I imagine we’ll see many of these over the next few weeks, especially now that Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz (who I voted for (thankfully)), has issued a shelter-in-place order. Part of this is actually my own doing: I made a pact with myself that “home” would be a separate zone from “work” solely so I can maintain a bit of critical distance; now those two have to come together, and that’s creating…issues. Part of this is only kinda my doing: working and working and working, even when you’re doing things you actually like, can be enormously draining, and I definitely hit my burnout point several years ago when I was still in grad school.
Considering Exotic Animals and the Tiger King
On a whim, I began watching Netflix’s new documentary series, Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem, and Madness, which apparently set out to be the Blackfish of the private big cat zoo world but quickly became something a bit more eccentric and “true crime’-ish. Just like the characters it follows: Joe Exotic (the Tiger King himself), Doc Antle, and “big cat rescue” lady, Carole Baskin. Part of the shift in tone from animal rights documentary to a true crime dive into the dark hole of the human soul appears to be the fact that Joe Exotic, a longtime enemy of Carole Baskin, was arrested and convicted last year for attempting a murder-by-hire on Baskin. Or maybe that was just the icing on the cake the directors realized they had baked after filming. I don’t know. I’m not really here to talk about that, though. Rather, I want to talk about my own perspective on this cast of characters and the many others like them in the exotic pet world. As many of you know, I am also an exotic pet owner and come from a family of them. By comparison to the cast of characters in Tiger King, however, we’re fairly innocuous varieties. I keep small snakes and lizards (three corn snakes, a bull snake, a spotted python, a Peruvian and a Colombian rainbow boa, and (now) 3 leopard geckos) while my mom and her delightful wife Kathy run a bird rescue — which results in their house being a haven for parrots. Our perspectives are fairly close: we both think that most bird species should not be kept as pets, especially certain breeds of parrots, but we also agree that many exotics can, with proper care, be wonderful additions in a family. In my case, I just really like reptiles, but I draw a pretty firm line over what I consider acceptable as a reptile keeper.
One More Week!
In a lot of ways, I’ve been pretty fortunate to work for Bemidji State University. While losing two weeks of class sucks, BSU didn’t choose to rush into the university-wide shift to remote learning. The result? A lot more breathing room (for me). So in addition to all of the things I’ve been doing to keep my mind off the nightmare sweeping across the United States (today: taking a walk, playing some video games, and petting my cat), I’ve also been working hard on adjusting syllabi…and tempering my expectations. Even two weeks doesn’t feel like it’s enough…
Pondering the Editors Behind Our Fiction
Yesterday, I received an advanced copy of Subterranean Press’ new anthology, Edited By. The book collects notable works of short fiction that have been, well, edited by Ellen Datlow, one of the most notable short fiction editors in the world of SF/F/H. It’s a beefy book full of stories by some incredible writers, including Elizabeth Bear, Ted Chiang, Nalo Hopkinson, Kelly Link, and many others. Part of what interests me about this book is the concept behind it and the way it highlights the weird imbalance of awareness about editors in publishing. It is comparatively easy to collect work edited by one short fiction editor than it is to do the same for novel editors. Short fiction editors also seem, in my opinion, much more visible, perhaps because they work with so many authors at a time (a benefit of the short format) than their novel-editing peers. This makes it rather easy for us to recognize the work editors do even if we don’t actually know what it is that they do.
Academia During a Pandemic: Hunker Down Philosophy 2A
I made it through a week of isolation. Mostly. I still went “out,” but in my car to play Pokemon or to occasionally go to the store to get things I wasn’t able to get earlier. At odd hours. In that time, I’ve apparently decided to blog on a regular basis, catalogue my books (finally), watch an absurd amount of TV, schedule an impromptu podcast recording, and prep my classes for remote learning. It’s been a weird week, y’all. A scary week. The one upside to all of this is that I’m pretty sure most of my classes are going to be OK once we switch over to remote learning. While it won’t be ideal, most of my classes are already fairly embedded in digital tools anyway. For those classes, simply upping the stakes on managing the course wiki and wiki-based assignments is a no-brainer. For the other classes, the big question will be whether we can keep certain things “as is” or whether I need to adjust certain assignments and structures for a different mode.
The Science Fiction Research I Didn’t Present This Weekend
As many of you know, the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (ICFA) has been cancelled. I am a regular attendee and have presented my research there several times. This year, I was set to moderate a panel and present an essay entitled “Postcolonial Thought, Decolonizing the Anthropocene, and Tobias S. Buckell’s Climate Change Novels.” That project is now on hold until I can find the time to put in edits and submit it somewhere. However, I will talk a bit about the research that went into this project. Strap in!