I’m on sabbatical, but this post goes out with an affirmation of solidarity with everyone getting down to fall teaching in this low dishonest decade. It’s a bad time for teaching. On top of social and political crisis, there’s AI. Or rather, as part of said crisis, there’s AI. It is exhaustingly present everywhere you turn, even when you have retreated to your sabbatical bunker—perhaps especially there, if you are in your sabbatical bunker, as I am, to study the institutions of genre fiction. I am studying how, for a century, Anglophone culture and society developed a system of (apparently) formula-bound text production which, whatever its limitations, many people have turned to for its seeming copiousness and its openness even to those with few literary and economic resources. Meanwhile, in the past decade, Anglophone culture and society have developed a system of (apparently) formula-bound text production which, whatever its limitations, people are turning to in order to fill the internet with garbage text while filling the atmosphere with carbon dioxide and filling the pockets of some astonishingly awful people with more money than you can imagine. So here’s my idea: like the development of genre fiction, “AI” is the product and beneficiary of a significant transformation of literacy—that is, the production and use of writing—and its role in the distribution of social rewards.

Shamelessly borrowing a webpage from Cosma Shalizi’s books, here is an aggregate of my casual notes on some books casually read over the summer. I have been posting these on the federated book-reading site bookwyrm: you can fedi-follow me there from any-fediwhere as agoldst@bookwyrm.social, if that’s something you like to do (sickos).

Robert P. Goldman, ed., Ramayana of Valmiki: An Epic of Ancient India

Over the last couple of years, I have been irregularly reading my way through the Princeton Library of Asian Translations edition of the Rāmāyaṇa. I just finished this seventh and final volume. I love a good philological extravaganza, and my one year of Sanskrit in college made me particularly enthusiastic about the ins and outs of that beautiful language. So this gigantic mega-edition, with tons and tons of paratext bulking out the 24,000-odd ślokas of the epic, had lots of appeal for me. I didn’t know much at all about the poem when I started. My single college course on Indian culture (beyond the Sanskrit) spent some time on the Mahābhārata but not on the Rāmāyaṇa. I had the vague idea that the latter is, Eurocentrically speaking, the Sanskrit Odyssey, which sounds cool, and I’d read A.K. Ramanujan’s “Three Hundred Rāmāyaṇas” because I admire Ramanujan and because it was, sigh, in the news for a while. Ramanujan also makes it sound cool and supplies a stretch of quite beautiful translation (in collaboration with David Shulman) from Vālmīki’s version (alongside his renderings of other versions).

I noticed that early this month John MacFarlane wrote a retrospective on Twenty Years of Pandoc. I’ve used this incredible tool almost every day at least since 2011, when I set out to write a syllabus and a website for one of my first courses from a common template. It warms the heart of this procrastinator to learn that it began as a “product of procrastination” that just kept snowballing. Now it can bring endless avoidance-through-fiddling to all kinds of writing and document-producing. In fact it seems likely to me that pandoc really gave TeX a new lease of life, spreading it far beyond its well-entrenched home ground of the mathematical sciences to everywhere PDFs are needed—and in my case allowing me to indulge my nostalgia-toned techie/type-y compulsions while writing, teaching, and pursuing all kinds of other distractions. At this point it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of TeX, and that’s largely thanks to the streamlining and flexibility made possible by pandoc’s TeX-generating capacities. So bravo John MacFarlane, and bravo pandoc. May you thrive for many decades more, keeping the flame of useful abstraction and playful rigor alight in dark times.

Two basically unrelated updates. I have been cleaning house. Literally: because I’m going on leave starting July 1. I will be visiting at Clare Hall, Cambridge, and working on my book on genre fiction. I’ll return to my Rutgers teaching in the spring.

Also, metaphorically. I recently read Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s memoir Dreams in a Time of War (reading note on bookwyrm) and decided to update some of my annotations to his novel Petals of Blood with some information from the autobiography. Having done this, I became annoyed that my website’s headline font lacked the two vowels with diacritics in Ngũgĩ’s name. In order to fix this, I could have just changed the font, but instead I made the completely rational decision to update the whole website, switching to a new underlying Hugo theme. It’s not a huge change, but possibly there will be glitches here and there. I regret to say that the change in the picture of me showing evidence of aging is not due to a software defect.

Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare rides upon sleep, so here I am back fiddling with my computer configuration out of pure escapism. When I prepare slides for class or a talk, I write in markdown, using pandoc to generate the slides via Beamer. Beamer, you say, still? In 2026? Well, what do you want? I read somewhere (Finnegans Wake?) that Vico says people only understand what they themselves have made. I made an elaborate Rube-Goldberg pile of Makefiles, pandoc templates, pandoc Lua filters, hacky LaTeX tweaks, and so on and so forth, and it suits my purposes. I’ve been using it ever for a decade and more, and I keep hacking on it to keep up with whatever changes pandoc updates bring. I hadn’t tidied things up for the public repository in a while. Now I have. I give you, once again, Easy Lecture Slides Made Difficult: available for whatever use on github.com/agoldst/elsmd.

This should work with recent pandoc to generate slides and accompanying speaker notes from a single markdown file, by default in my preferred dark-on-light “scuro” theme.

I haven’t yet updated my R package that uses this for R markdown slides in my preferred style, but I will soon. I certainly have plenty I want to escape from.

This coming Thursday, February 12 at 6 p.m., I am discussing some work from my book in progress on genre fiction with the Culture Workshop of the NYU Sociology department. Clayton Childress of UBC and Under the Cover will be the discussant. I have precirculated a manuscript excerpt under the title “Yank Mags, Mushrooms, and Failed Isomorphisms: British Genre Fiction before 1970 and the Transmission of Classifications in Commercial Publishing.”

Perhaps “failed isomorphism” is an inauspicious rubric for an attempt at interdisciplinary scholarship, but there I go anyway. In this part of the book, I describe the surprising divergences between British and American genre-fiction history in the first half of the twentieth century, in order to explain why the UK, the country with the more robust popular fiction industry at the start of the century, lagged behind the US in developing genre fiction as a formal system of categories.

Though course registration at Rutgers is over and done with, I want to put on record that I do know what courses I am teaching next term, even as I am still grading this semester’s finals.

A new semester approaches! Here’s what I’m offering the good people of Rutgers.

“No Kings” was huge in New York, even bigger than “Hands Off” was, and the national turnout was likewise gigantic, not only in the flashpoint cities like LA and NYC but all over the map. In NYC I didn’t hear any speakers. Nationally, there was no single leading organization, though Indivisible is among the prime movers, with the ACLU and labor unions—including mine—getting on the bandwagon and swelling the numbers. What does this rallying crowd want?

Following the example of Chris Newfield, who has returned to the unversity-finances-blogging fray after a hiatus, I went and looked at Rutgers’s potential losses from the initial onslaught from the current federal government.