PicoBlog

The smear campaign on pigs has levels to it. With the exception of Babe, pigs are seen as grotesque. Riddled with muck and fatty disease, the pig represents a trio of deadly sins, sloth, greed and gluttony, and is taboo across the Abrahamic religions. Judaism, Christianity and Islam consider pigs to be unclean animals. The Book of Leviticus draws the distinction between the pig and other hoofed mammals: “the pig, because it has a divided hoof but does not chew the cud, is unclean for you.

Vermis is a strategy guide for a video game that doesn’t exist. A Dark Souls game, specifically. There’s the same sense of a doomed world more than half-dead, the same obscure lore gleaned in fragments from item descriptions and enemy placements, and the same sense that Vermis would be punishingly difficult, if it were actually a game. The book starts, naturally, with the character selection screen. You can (pretend to) choose from one of 12 classes, including the Murk Sage (“description”), the Infant Seeker (“description”), and of course Rat Man (“become Rat Man”).

You’ll be forgiven for forgetting the previous screen versions of Jim Davis’ “Garfield” comic strip, though there have been many: three different TV shows plus a baker’s dozen of television specials. And, of course, 2004’s lackluster “Garfield: The Movie” and its even more unmemorable sequel. Bill Murray famously dissed his role voicing the gluttonous tabby cat, even calling it his one regret in life in “Zombieland.” I guess Hollywood figures enough time has passed for those movies to recede into the collective unconscious, so here’s another go with “The Garfield Movie,” a fully CGI animated attempt with Chris Pratt voicing Garfield.

“There was an uproar in the IRS offices here over canceling an upcoming Thanksgiving office party potluck,” the artist Edward Gallagher told a reporter, “when the straights said they wouldn’t share food prepared by gay employees.”  This was in 1984, mid-November. Gallagher had built a piece of street art in the plaza outside the Federal Building in San Francisco: four open coffins, each stuffed with a mannequin—a businessman, a housewife, a little kid, a cliché gay—all linked by transfusion tubes connected to blood bags in hospital IV hangers: a protest of Reagan’s policy of silence and neglect and slashing health agency budgets; that AIDS was righteous retribution from a vengeful God, not a public health crisis.

Libs of TikTok is a humor account on the X (formerly known as Twitter) platform which shares and amplifies content from TikTok and other social media platforms, often focusing on highlighting and criticizing liberal and LGBTQ viewpoints and behaviors. The target of this particular post was post likely a navy AC or Air Traffic Controller who seems to enjoy his job of landing planes. The sexuality of a serviceman does not diminish their contributions or their commitment to protecting the nation.

I’m a literature professor at Pomona College. I have been at this job since 2005. For three miserable semesters in 2018-2019, I chaired the English department. I’m writing a book about my experiences working at Pomona. Drafts from the manuscript will appear in this newsletter approximately once a week. I want to give an accurate depiction of the working environment at my school, and to find the humor in it. People don’t seem to know what it’s like to work in a place like this.

You don’t see a lot of road trip pictures that address themselves to the Eastern Seaboard. The West, that frontier of empty space, majestic beauty, violent lawlessness, and mighty predatory animals, is a more typical setting, as is the South, with its gothic vistas, archaic customs, racists, and bayous. The Northeast, seat of government and finance and old universities we hear too much about, is perhaps impervious to adventures not of the kind of going to the city and either making it big or burning out and winding up in the gutter.

Several of the books I’ve read over the past year have referenced The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination by Sarah Schulman. All of them seemed to be inspired by it in different ways. This got me fired up to read the book and I wasn’t disappointed when I finally picked it up. Gentrification is a subject that I’ve discussed a lot over the course of my career.

Have you felt it recently? That sensation of despair mixed with cynicism and powerlessness coursing through you? That’s Weltschmerz. Literally translated as “world-pain,” Weltschmerz follows in the German language’s long tradition of forming apt and amusing compound words. Schadenfreude (harm-joy) is the famous example. But we also have lesser-known concoctions like Daseinsberechtigung (existence-justification) and Backpfeifengesicht (cheek-whistle-face), which is what you’d call a face you want to slap so hard it produces the shrill sound of moving air.