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Scott Selisker

@sselisker.bsky.social

480 followers 280 following 190 posts

literature prof at U of Arizona. books: HUMAN PROGRAMMING (on metaphors for ideology), NETWORKED CHARACTER (on social networks in recent US fiction and history, forthcoming 2026ish). he, suh-LISK-er, views mine, sporadically present here.

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Scott Selisker @sselisker.bsky.social · Jun 12

Mostly recovered from a humbling 2-year-covid-to-post-concussion-syndrome interlude, hoping to get back up to speed with academic pals and lit studies fields. Hi!

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Rose Ruane @regretteruane.bsky.social · 5d

Philip Larkin’s this be the verse mangled into Ozymandias, the text reads

They Oz you up, your mandyias.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They give you vast and trunkless legs
A sunken shattered visage too.
But they were Ozzed up in their turn
By Mandyias upon the sand
Who half the time had wrinkled lips And half in sneering cold command.
Oz hands on mandyias to man.
Like mighty works atop a shelf Look on them early as you can
Ye mighty and despair yourself

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Jordan S. Carroll 🌹 @jordanscarroll.bsky.social · 6d

if you are wondering why the Trump administration is creating racist memes with images from Halo and Lord of the Rings

Speculative Whiteness

Reveals the alt-right’s project to claim science fiction and—by extension—the future Fascists such as Richard Spencer interpret science fiction films a...

www.upress.umn.edu

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Scott Selisker @sselisker.bsky.social · 6d

I reviewed Ben Mangrum’s new book, on the surprising range of American comedies about computers, for ASAP:

ASAP/Journal @asapjournal.bsky.social · 6d

Check out our newest review by sselisker.bsky.social on Ben Mangrum's newest book about comedy, GenAI, phenomenology, slop, and more: "The Comedy of Computation offers a toolkit for understanding a load-bearing portion of the discourse about new technologies."

asapjournal.com/review/revie...

Review of Ben Mangrum’s The Comedy of Computation, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Obsolescence - ASAP/Review

This spring, I tuned in to an episode of the New York Times podcast Hard Fork to hear an interview with Karen Hao, the author of Empire of AI (2025). Hao explains her choice of “Empire”…

asapjournal.com

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Günter Leypoldt @guenterleypoldt.bsky.social · 6d

Thrilled to announce my new book (electronic version out now, print next month) — it proposes a new value theory grounded in the longue durée of literary institutions, 1800–present.

Cover of my book: Literature's Social Lives: A Socio-Institutional History of Literary Value. The Cover depicts a bookseller in 1930s Cambridge, with a book rack on her back, and a customer perusing one of her books

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Scott Selisker @sselisker.bsky.social · 6d

A truly legendary run, transformative contributions to letters & humanities, and a wonderfully supportive and insightful editor on a personal level. Congrats and thanks for everything @noctambulate.bsky.social !

Publishers Weekly @publisherswkly.bsky.social · 7d

Doug Armato, who has helmed the 100-year-old press for 27 years, is retiring at the end of December. His tenure saw the expansion of the press’s list and the development of strong Indigenous studies, trade, and regional publishing programs.

University of Minnesota Press Director Retires

buff.ly

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Scott Selisker @sselisker.bsky.social · 6d

*in middle or upper admin

Scott Selisker @sselisker.bsky.social · 9d

Chili not tomato? Good enchilada sauce is almost 90+% rehydrated chilis … from scratch is delicious (esp for moles etc) but cans/jars are nearly as good. Frontera’s seems to have disappeared here but Siete is also good.

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Scott Selisker @sselisker.bsky.social · 9d

Surf’s up, way up!

Scott Selisker @sselisker.bsky.social · 15d

Agreed. I was expecting worse, so I’ll def take the qualified no as a win.

Scott Selisker @sselisker.bsky.social · 15d

Kitamura report: found *Audition*’s Goffmanian thriller vibe more exciting than its ending, but in *Intimacies,* the end made the novel. Further research (the first one) required…

Scott Selisker @sselisker.bsky.social · 15d

I doubt I’ll beat Silksong (1/3 through Act 2), but awed by Team Cherry’s vision of gracefulness and fluidity, where boss fights and platforming sequences are explicitly *dancing*…

Scott Selisker @sselisker.bsky.social · 15d

U of Arizona says NO to the Compact: president.arizona.edu/sites/defaul...

president.arizona.edu

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Scott Selisker @sselisker.bsky.social · 16d

Lovely! When I was in grad school they had all the Flo Gibson Henry James on cassette tapes. I listened to the one on my exam list—and then PC and many others. Loved Maggie Gram’s piece about Flo G and the format: www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...

Listening to Books

My first audiobook was Flo Gibson’s recording of The Mill on the Floss, which, by the way, is one of the very great audiobooks: the sound is scratchy, but Gibson’s voice is confident and almost conspi...

www.nplusonemag.com

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Scott Selisker @sselisker.bsky.social · 18d

!! And got the moves!!

Scott Selisker @sselisker.bsky.social · 20d

I enjoyed learning Ric Ocasek of the Cars produced that first album, to a click track, and said of it, sometimes perfect time is a hook by itself…

Reposted by Scott Selisker

Anna Kornbluh @annakornbluh.bsky.social · 21d

AAUP holds a day of action this Friday Oct 17

nationwide teach in against the loyalty oaths us06web.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

the original 9 persecuted campuses have in-person events

find your chapter www.aaup.org/chapters/fin...

Find a Chapter

A list of AAUP chapters, both unionized and nonunionized. (You can also see a list of just union chapters.)

www.aaup.org

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Reposted by Scott Selisker

Stephen West @stephenwest.bsky.social · 22d

How W. E. B. Du Bois responded to government policing of "anti-American" sentiment during the 1910s:

"I took great satisfaction in being able to sit back in my chair and answer blandly, 'We are seeking to have the Constitution of the United States thoroughly and completely enforced.' ”

Federal agents invaded even the offices of The Crisis and the National Association for the advancement of colored people and asked searching questions: " just what, after all, were our objects and activities?” I took great satisfaction in being able to sit back in my chair and answer blandly, “We are seeking to have the constitution of the United states thoroughly and completely enforced.” It took some ingenuity, even for Southerners, to make treason out of that.

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Scott Selisker @sselisker.bsky.social · 26d

Looks like nobody's said On Beauty or White Noise yet?

Scott Selisker @sselisker.bsky.social · 26d

Disagree! Looking forward to rereading upon imminent audiobook release! I will, alas, probably never teach it or Lightning Rods, but I think about both all the time. (Along with Some Trick's "On the Town.")

Reposted by Scott Selisker

Faith S. Harden @faith-harden.bsky.social · 26d

crafting an administrative turducken: reporting on the reports to be reported inside a larger, meatier report

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Scott Selisker @sselisker.bsky.social · 29d

Larsen’s Passing and Evan’s Black Box might be good complements?

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Joseph Rezek @rezekjoe.bsky.social · 29d

ACLS statement against White House “compact”: THIS IS SOVIET SHIT

Screenshot from statement “Universities and colleges have one mission: to advance knowledge. Faculty carry out the mission by conducting research and teaching students. The knowledge they produce and circulate is independently assessed by professional peers. Interfering with that process by forcing knowledge to pass through a political filter is a tactic adopted by the Soviet Union and other authoritarian states. The White House is dressing up its compact as a reasonable corrective to what it views as problems in campus culture. Let no one be deceived. This proposal imposes government censorship on academia. It is anti-American, and it weakens our democracy by devaluing academic expertise.”

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Scott Selisker @sselisker.bsky.social · Oct 5

For sale: Skeleton with disfigured toe

Scott Selisker @sselisker.bsky.social · Oct 5

Excellent analyses that go beyond a lot of the media coverage of the Compact I’ve seen. Esp good on the glaring absence of a carrot here, and on the significance of the range of medium-to-soft targets…

jamelle @jamellebouie.net · Oct 5

for any UVA folks that follow me you should circulate this among your networks balkin.blogspot.com/2025/10/the-...

Balkinization: The Art of Replacing the Law with the Deal

A group blog on constitutional law, theory, and politics

balkin.blogspot.com

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Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · Oct 3

this great point about the social character of knowledge —how knowing real things relies on others signaling when you’re wrong—is another way of highlighting the political importance of social shame. It also clarifies the fundamental nihilism of the AI-industrial complex

Gillian Branstetter @gbbranstetter.bsky.social · Oct 2

Memorizing this

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