The Compost #1
The Compost #1
A hot, stinky mix of links and recommendations intended to inspire and distract
The title for this weekly or bi-weekly compendium of links and recommendations comes from this quote from "Conscious Uncoupling”:
We strive to take all that is ugly and rotting, and turn it into compost to grow beautiful lives. —Katherine Woodward Thomas
Resources
If you are in just at the stage where you want to take back some agency around where your time goes, both the NCFDD and Scholar’s Voice run coaching programs that help you see where your effort is going and attempt to realign it with your goals and values. I’ve done both programs and recommend them both, though I will point out that neither is geared towards the life sciences, where the success of work by trainees is so critical to faculty advancement.
Reading
I’m reading The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson, a unique kind of “non-fiction science fiction novel” about climate change, but finding it hard to wade through. It’s just so depressing. How High We Go in the Dark was an imaginative and beautiful take on another dystopian future. A third book in the same vein that I absolutely loved was Celeste Ng’s latest.
Vox has a new series on water rights in the Colorado that I’m looking forward to reading. We rafted the first half of the Grand Canyon this past summer, and I got the sense from our guides that things are teetering on the edge of total disaster. There are so many stakeholders (I know, I also hate that word) involved and I hope this series of articles will address them all.
The Cascadia Field Guide is a thoughtful, lyrical, respectful poetry/art/history/science book about the plants and animals and people of the Pacific Northwest Cascade range. It’s going in the car with us (and in my backpack) all summer!
Watching
This unbelievable closing statement by Tennessee Representative Justin Jones before the House voted for his expulsion. Even the reddest of states are no monolith, nor are Democrats, nor are Christians. Rep Jones and Rep Pearson are more than up to the demands of the national spotlight and I can’t wait to see what they do next. Thanks to J. N. for the share.
Lucky Hank, a loose retelling of Richard Russo’s beloved academic novel “Straight Man“. We are only a few episodes in and it’s pretty good—Bob Odenkirk as Hank is truly inspired casting. I kept wondering who has to pick up this guy’s slack while he has a mid-career crisis. I liked The Chair more . . . maybe because it shows Sandra Oh’s character working so hard to keep all the balls in the air.
Beef, on Netflix. This show is not specifically related to academia or science, but I deeply relate to its full-on representation of the destructive, but also weirdly unifying, nature of righteous anger—especially as Twitter continues its death spiral.
LOLs
Pedro Pascal as spring flowers, herbicides, mass spectrometers 😂
Drop any suggestions for resources, reading, watching, or LOLzing in the comments. I’m all ears! Have a great weekend and I’ll be back here with a new essay next week.
I interviewed a college president recently who liked "Lucky Hank" better than "The Chair." There were so many ridiculous aspects of "The Chair" (Bill Dobson is a completely preposterous character) but it did strike pretty close to the mark occasionally. I've not seen "Lucky Hank," though I did read Russo's book years ago, so I'll have to give it a look :). One pet peeve about film versions of academe...they never seem to be able to capture what teaching is really like. Classroom scenes are always just before the bell or little fragments of things--there's never a way of capturing the feeling of a really great lecture or discussion. I listened to David Blight's Yale class on the Civil War a few summers ago while cycling on Iowa backroads, and there are really electric moments in it. Film can capture that magic in music, in art...do you think it's ever represented the magic of the lab well?