A brief history of title design.

By Ian Albinson. Film listing here. And these may be of interest.

When it comes to the less reputable quarters of academia, you’re a cold-hearted, cynical bunch. Oh, don’t deny it. Some of you chuckled wickedly at that mistress of limpid prose Dr Caroline Guertin and her Quantum Feminist Mnemotechnics. Some of you managed to turn the infinite nuance of artistic theory into bawdy comedy. Others somehow found amusement in Professor Sharra Vostral’s musings on the politics of menstruation and her discovery that the humble tampon is “an artefact of control.” 

I mean, really. You people are such heathens.

It’s with some trepidation, then, that I share the latest find by TDK and Mr William Briggs – Stuff Academics Like, a compendium of curios from our Towers Of Learning. One of its regular features is the Guessing Game series, where readers are invited to ponder a list of imposing conference papers and lecture titles in order to fathom which of them is the imposter. Below are a few contenders from a recent list, only one of which is officially hokum. Feel free to take a shot. 

Binary Poetics and Ecology in Battlestar Galactica. 

The Support Belt Fetish: An Example of Psychoanalysis.

Antagonistic Corpo-Real-ities.

Turtle Times: The Cross-Generational Cult Text of Turtles Forever and Gendered Readings. 

Not sure? How about,

The True History of His Beard: Joaquin Phoenix and the Boundaries of Cinéma Vérité.

Or,

Exemplarity – The Real: Some Problems of a Realist Exemplarity Exposed through the Channel of an Aesthetic Autopoeisis.

Or could it be,

Alan Ball’s True Blood Antics: Queering the Southern Vampire…?

Nope. They’re all actual contributions to the broadening of our minds and the swelling of the culture.

The imposter, of course, is,

Guattari and the Onomatopoeic Imperative: Decentering the Archaeologies of the Speech-Act.

Which is obvious now that I’ve pointed it out. Oh, there’s more.

Mary Grabar on Wisconsin and the activist curriculum.

Despite all the accoutrements of 1960s protests – the drumming, chanting, human chains, sit-ins, sleep-ins, teach-ins, and teach-outs inside the Wisconsin capitol – the issue is the retention of political power through Big Education. Unions are necessary to maintain this power. The professors are using their classroom bully pulpits to shape “change agents” who will protect their jobs by picking up bullhorns and sleeping on the floors.

More on those “change agents” and their big, warm hearts here. For an overview of eroded academic probity, see Horowitz and Laksin’s One-Party Classroom.

Jeff Goldstein on incestuous funding circles.

The ‘collective bargaining’ being ‘busted’ here is a money-laundering scheme that has union leaders taking money from the taxpayers that the taxpayers can ill afford (and can’t themselves ‘bargain’ on), giving it to teachers in raises and benefits, collecting it back in forced union dues, and then funnelling that money back to the Democrat party at a rate of 96%.

And Stephen Hayes and John McCormack note the Wisconsin saga’s strange inversions.

The absurdity of the Democrats’ outrage was too much. They weren’t merely wrong on a procedural point. They were accusing Republicans of “making a mockery of democracy,” operating like a “banana republic,” and, in former labour secretary Robert Reich’s words, conducting a “coup d’état.” All the while, Democrats were hiding in another state trying to prevent a newly inaugurated senate from holding a vote on vital state business. But in the end, senate Republicans had found a way to vote. The Assembly passed the bill on Thursday. Scott Walker signed it into law on Friday. And that is what democracy actually looks like.

From here, inversion seems to have been a recurrent theme of events in Wisconsin. As when activist doctors invoked the virtue of “public service” while handing out fake sick notes to absentee teachers, thereby leaving the taxpayer with a multimillion-dollar bill for work not done. Maybe that’s the “social justice” we hear so much about.

One charming detail of the protest was this comment,

Walker doesn’t HAVE a college degree. ‘Nuff said. 

A theme eagerly seized upon by other brave defenders of The Working Joe. Strange how readily supposed egalitarians resort to class condescension.

 As usual, feel free to add your own.

Made of oak, walnut and aluminium, a box that turns itself off.

Big Man Japan. // Space Hoppers in Venice. // You Are Listening to Los Angeles. // Time lapse antennas. // Cassini meets Saturn. // Esoteric sausage. // Know your spiders. // Cells. // Water. // The world of pizza boxes. // Marmite products rated. Marmite cashews? Why was I not told? // Bridges seen from Google Earth. // Little street dramas. // Dogbrella. // 1920s Egypt, in colour. (h/t, Coudal) // National Public Radio, for people who are “more educated, fair and balanced than conservatives.” // All the cool kids will want one of these. // Big caves in Vietnam. (h/t, Dr Westerhaus) // Bill Bailey’s rather nifty guide to the orchestra.