Karl Steel

@karlsteel

Brooklyn College / Grad Center Medievalist. Posthumanism. How to Make a Human (Ohio State UP 2011); How Not to Make a Human (Minnesota UP 2019). Currently working on The Irrational Animal. website is medievalkarl.com

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Karl Steel@karlsteel· 28d

Mary Turfah's fantastic review of Jean Said Makdisi (yes, *that* Said family) memoir, Beirut Fragments in Bookforum

Karl Steel@karlsteel· Jul 17

Saw it in Berlin in 2016 www.blackinternationalcinema.de/BIC16/html/b...

In “No Child”, Will Windsor (Will Williams), a recent college graduate, waits on returns from interviews for a "real" corporate job. He bides his time self-medicating with alcohol and supporting the habit with his earnings as a tutor.
After a typical night of binge drinking, Will receives his newest assignment and soon finds himself the half-hearted tutor of an African American boy, Thomas Daniels (Timmy Richardson plays “Justice” in Tyler Perry's, “If Loving You Is Wrong”). The subject is Reading and Comprehension. The author: Hemingway. And Thomas needs to "get it" to pass the 3rd grade No-Child-Left-Behind standardized test.
As Will rekindles his love of literature, and as he sees Thomas making the connections that make reading and understanding magical, he discovers an opportunity for redemption. Will he open his heart and let inspiration pull him up? Or cut and run at first opportunity to descend further into a life of despondency?

Karl Steel@karlsteel· Jul 15

This is all absolutely in line with the longer tendency of discourse around reason to praise theoretical or abstract reason as true or higher reason. The monument analogy, though: that's new to me. archive.org/details/DeIn...

Quod scilicet in aedificiorum bellorumque opere videmus, in contraria scilicet nuncupatione vocabuli. Eorum namque nominibus vel aedificia inscribuntur vel ducuntur triumphi, quorum imperio ac ratione instituta sunt, non quorum opere

Karl Steel@karlsteel· Jul 15

reading 1.34 of Boethius's Music treatise for what he says about reason. The practitioner is inferior to the theorist, he says, just as the mistress is superior to her slave, or reason to the irrational. Look at monuments! The names they bear are the leaders, not the workers who erected them

We see this, of course, in the building of monuments and the waging of wars -- that is, in the contrary ascription of titles; for monuments are inscribed and triumphs are celebrated with the names of those by whose authority and reason they were ordained, not with the names of those by whose labor and slavery they were completed. [1.34, Calvin Bower trans for Yale UP, 1989]

Karl Steel@karlsteel· Jul 3

Ok I think I found out why they're so radically left (sorry sorry)

Karl Steel@karlsteel· Jul 3

En route to Pavia, where I can finally realize a lifelong dream (wandering under a roof)

Tourist site, Pavia's famous bridge, proposing that "it is possible to wander under a roof"

Karl Steel@karlsteel· Jun 30

Here

Karl Steel@karlsteel· Jun 28

Karl Steel@karlsteel· Jun 22

One of the best things I've read this year. Like James Thurber's Night the Bed Broke run through absolute American pentecostal dirtbaggery, a tender memoir of Waldrop's to my mind horrific family. Not the memoir of escape I'd have written, but it is one anyway.

Light while there is light NYRB paperback

Karl Steel@karlsteel· Jun 18

Good enough for today! Notes in place / half done / finishing tomorrow.

a work space, book on a stand, a bunch of peanuts and almost to get me through, look it's a mess

Karl Steel@karlsteel· Jun 18

if you need more data

Karl Steel@karlsteel· Jun 17

A great gag from Roberto Rossilini's THE MACHINE TO KILL BAD PEOPLE (1952)

Caption "that idiot died doing the Fascist salute"
4 pallbearers mourning garb with a cobbin, a extension on the lid to accommodate his still-saluting arm

Karl Steel@karlsteel· Jun 16

On a lighter note (!), last night I encountered, for the first time, William McGonagall's "The Sunderland Calamity," on the 143rd anniversary of same, and I'm sorry to do this to you but: allpoetry.com/The-Sunderla...

Her Majesty's grief for the bereaved parents has been profound,
And I'm glad to see that she has sent them £50

Karl Steel@karlsteel· Jun 16

reading the Andrew Tate piece in the NYer www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...: the bit where he wants to spread his 'genes', and w/ that and Elon Musk's brood and the Guojun Xuan and Silvia Zhang case, wondering grimly how many 100s of children of this sort these freaks have inflicted existence on

In the compound, the influence of the Tates’ father lingered. Andrew’s former “harem” member said, “His dad told him that he needed to procreate as much as possible and spread their genes.” Women became pregnant, and Andrew has said that both he and Tristan have “double-digit” children. “I’m the big gorilla,” he said. “I take the fertile females and I impregnate them.” Mothers were moved to their own apartments, where they kept working on camera. The brothers sometimes visited, and Andrew has described meting out harsh discipline. “My kids obey me like fucking soldiers,” he said. On his orders, his five-year-old son would sit for hours in silence: “Doesn’t fucking move, doesn’t say a fucking word, because he’s scared for his fucking life.”

Karl Steel@karlsteel· Jun 15

Karl Steel@karlsteel· Jun 12

Rubber Ring Floating in a Swimming Pool, 1971

Karl Steel@karlsteel· Jun 6

Literally just saw this!

Karl Steel@karlsteel· Jun 3

Looks like this! Sucks! Mostly for it having nuked the Instagram account I now feel stupid for having linked to my fb

Karl Steel@karlsteel· Jun 2

Sven Beckert's gigantic history of capitalism sure loves a "dense network"

Karl Steel@karlsteel· Jun 1

Fwiw

Karl Steel@karlsteel· May 31

Went to the graveyard / got a summer message for academics

Karl Steel@karlsteel· May 31

"wolf in sheepskin clothing"

Text on an 'interview' with a graphical ai agent

Karl Steel@karlsteel· May 30

Just read. Argues that capitalism originates not in markets, not with the bourgeois, not with "enlightenment rationality," but in the countryside, specifically, in English agriculture. It's a bracing read.

Ellen Meiksins Wood The Origins of Capitalism: A Longer View

Karl Steel@karlsteel· May 28

only 2 on this so far (Laura Dern in Is this Thing On, and Tony Leung [on a treadmill] in The Silent Friend). Surely there are many more.

Jogging but way too many clothes for the weather

Karl Steel@karlsteel· May 20

Oh crap I have no idea how Instagram links work apparently Anyway it's here

Karl Steel@karlsteel· May 19

if we restart SLOW PROUST CLUB I have some swag ideas

black tee shirt white text except for the author's name in big red: it's a Proust thing (you wouldn't understand)

Karl Steel@karlsteel· May 18

Kinda amazing

Someone doesn't like NYC but maybe it's a them problem

Karl Steel@karlsteel· May 11

sometimes they're just fun. this one needs to be a pamphlet in itself

One early translation, absolutely faithful in its treatment of the oyster
episode, is Sauvage, La Circe. The two dramatic adaptations may be based on Gelli, or more directly on Plutarch, via “Que les bestes brutes,” 1:270–74, which first made the text generally available in Western Europe (note, however, that the final entry in Machiavelli’s eight-part satire of 1517, L’asino [The donkey], is also an adaptation of Gryllus). The two French plays each omit the oyster: The first, from 1661, is Montfleury, Les bestes raisonnables, 1:223–38, which features one scene in which a man, once a lion, shouts in frustration (“Qui diable m’a rendu ma première figure!”) when returned for a while to its human form, and then in effect answers Wittgenstein’s observation (“If a lion could speak &c”) by railing at Ulysses about human cruelty and treachery. The next, from 1718, is
Legrand and Fuzelier, Les animaux raisonnables,” 3:1–35. Though lacking a talking oyster, the play does have a singing dolphin, which claims to be happy to meet Ulysses once more after vainly searching for him among “deux cens Huîtres” (two hundred oysters). The lion of Jean de la Fontaine’s fable “Les compagnons d’Ulysse” is one of several animals, none oysters, that refuse to become human again (here I am a king, it says; were I a human, I would once more be but a simple soldier). For guidance in finding this material, see Boas, Happy Beast, 35–36, which is preceded by a detailed paraphrase of the Gelli; Connon, “Animal Instincts,” 75–90 (which traces the route from Plutarch to the French
adaptations); and Escola and Rabau, “Bibliothèque de Circé, which is particularly good on nineteenth- and twentieth-century reimaginings of Circe.

Karl Steel@karlsteel· May 10

Blah blah blah etc medievalkarl.com/general-cult...

Closer to home: when the thirteenth-century natural scientist Aldobrandino of Siena observed that “among all the things that provide man with his nutrition, meat provides him with the most. It fattens him and gives him strength,”[1] he reaffirmed evidence that he could have drawn from any well sunk in the common field of medieval warrior literature. A vita of Columba of Iona, for instance, tells of the saint’s asking a reaper what he had eaten in his former profession: “When I was a warrior,” he says, “I used to consume a fat ox to my full meal:’” the saint tells him to do just that, and he does, and then Columbia reënfleshes the bones, and then donates the ox to the other reapers, uncertainly for food or for labor.[2] The Carolingians, we’re told, admired voracious meat-eating: Charlemagne praised Adelchis, son of the king of the Lombards, for just that, while the Italian nobleman Wido of Tuscany was disqualified from the Frankish throne for, in part, for providing an excessively frugal feast.3] Einhard reports Charlemagne’s irritation at his doctors when they compelled him to give up roast meat, while, centuries later, the Middle English Alphabet of Tales tells us that the emperor “ate but little bread, but all at once he would eat a quarter of a sheep, or two hens, or a goose, or a pig’s shoulder, a peacock, a crane, or a whole hare.”[4]

Karl Steel@karlsteel· May 6

Last night I told my ma students that the black plague left an undersized cultural mark, like the Spanish flu, like Covid, and goddammit Ben Lerner's new book is so masked up and how in its opening pages.