Disce verum

Speaking of Rae Dunn... Rae Dunn somehow led me to this parody on YouTube: Between starting my PhD program, parenting, and, well, the election, 2016 was a lost year. Somehow I missed this little video. Essentially, it was precocious, a precursor. A prescient, pre-TikTok invitation to the sick millennial burns that have become a social media subgenre.  If YouTubers created the millennial-burn genre, TikTokers have finetuned and finessed it, sharpening their nails on the short-form videos that have their own hashtag.  (You guessed it: #millennials) This one is a particularly fierce takedown, and it's gotten traction on Buzzfeed (itself a GenZ target).  Here's the TikToker, glamdemon2004, and her description of said takedown:  Here's the  I would’ve added Harry Potter but I am too hot and popular to own a copy   #fyp  #millenials Follow  TikTok, on their article, "Elements of a TikTok Video," advise us would-be TikTokers to: Think about writing clear...

  I'm not sure when or where I first read about Rae Dunn, and the millennial-driven craziness for Rae Dunn products.  Maybe it was in  this article , which gives a run-down on the crazy market for the products, where they're made, who Rae Dunn is (she actually exists, in the Bay area), where her products are now manufactured (China), where they're primarily found (HomeGoods, Marshalls, et cetera), how they're hunted down (Rae Dunn Facebook groups), and re-sold (Etsy, eBay, Facebook--and sometimes for obscene amounts of $$).  Then I realized that I actually have and own  an actual, bottom-stamped Rae Dunn product--a mug a friend and officemate of mine had found in, well, Marshalls, with my nickname on it. "I had to get it for you," she said at the time, mug in hand. "I thought it was so weird that it had your name on it, so I bought it. Here." It was oversized, wonky and kind of chunky, a bland if glossy ivory, with my three-letter nickname toothpick-...

  Do you know what "cheugy" means? When and how did you find out?  I wonder why every generation seems to have its own word for basically the same idea. Where does this need come from, to create a new word to put a finger on the same feeling?  Kitschy, chintzy, tacky, schmaltzy, cheesy, corny.  Variations on the same general idea?  A velour Juicy tracksuit by any other name would be just as ___________.  You fill in the blank, depending upon your generation. (Said from someone who had more than a few Juicy tracksuits, back in my Y2K day.)  Cheugy. Pronounced chew-GEE. (With a hard G, as in gross--another word we sometimes used for tacky, back in my day.) If you're curious,  this article in the New York Times  breaks down the particular nuances of cheuginess.  You say cheugy, I might say cheesy. But aren't these qualifiers still all in the same extended, hyper-American family? (Like cross-generational, cross-cultural linguistic cousins.) ...

  Using Web 2.0 to keep the study of classical antiquity alive Howard University students are using the power of social media to try to save their Classics program  #saveHUClassics The students' social media campaign has captured the attention and outrage of scholar Cornel West. In an opinion piece for The Washington Post last month, West and Jeremy Tate argued that the university's decision to "abolish" the program signals a "spiritual decay": Academia’s continual campaign to disregard or neglect the classics is a sign of spiritual decay, moral decline and a deep intellectual narrowness running amok in American culture. Those who commit this terrible act treat Western civilization as either irrelevant and not worthy of prioritization or as harmful and worthy only of condemnation. Howard junior Sarena Straughter created a  Change.org  petition, which currently has just under 200 signatures, after gathering 6,000 signatures thanks to a Google docs petition ...

Taking a second look: Aisha Harris annotates  "The Cultural Canon Is Better Than Ever" In 2020, Harris annotated her 2019 piece for The New York Times. Her original story examined Beyoncé's Lemonade , Harold Bloom, and Toni Morrison, and the democratization and organic evolution of the cultural canon.      It’s not so much that canons have been completely obliterated, as [Harold] Bloom and others feared — in any given collection, the old guard and their descendants have remained. But canons have continued to evolve, and new ones have sprung up alongside them. When Mr. Bloom died in October, Joe Karaganis and David McClure of the nonprofit research organization  Open Syllabus  wondered, in an Op-Ed in The Times, whether he or Toni Morrison, a proponent of more inclusive canonization,  won the literary canon wars . Their examination of millions of college syllabuses found that both had won, in a way.  Students are still being taught Shakespeare an...

Revising the Italian canon via social media The @nytimesbookreview is connecting new readers to Italian writer Goliarda Sapienza: Dalia Oggero, who edited Sapienza’s work for Einaudi , said that Italy in the 1970s wasn’t ready for her unconventional writing, baroque and rational at the same time — or her themes. “Her brand of feminism was ahead of times,” Oggero said. “A sentence like ‘Watch out, because at this rate when women realize how you leftist men smile smugly and paternalistically at what they say, their vengeance will be awesome’ seems like it was written today, not in the past.” Sapienza’s writing was prescient in other ways too, as if she foresaw her belated recognition. One dies to leave the best part of yourself to those who can read you.                               - Goliarda Sapienza The new English translation of Sapienza's  Appuntamento a Positano was released on May 11 .( Find it o...

The journey begins.      Hermes , Helen Frankenthaler (1989)