Scott Selisker

@sselisker

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

396 Folgt630 Follower465 Posts

Bluesky

Ist das dein Profil?Übernimm es — dann gehört dir sselisker.dirty.social.Profil übernehmen

Scott Selisker@sselisker· 15d

Loved the Odyssey review!

Bill Murray tied to the mast in What About Bob, possibly also an Odyssey adaptation

Scott Selisker@sselisker· 26d

Especially enjoyed this bit (and the following graf, where Gabe turns this stupid question back on Appiah’s CV)

What we are shown about the "classification" of the MLA and ACLA prize data is almost a parody of motivated reasoning in data analysis: if you ask a chatbot to determine whether "the primary scholarly orientation" of a book is "identity-group" and/or "social-justice oriented" rather than "primarily literary-formal, aesthetic, philological, or period-defined," based solely on the book's title and publisher description, the chatbot will reproduce the implied premise you already hold: identity and political orientation must be separated from formal and aesthetic concerns that are "really" literary. …

Scott Selisker@sselisker· 28d

A pic of my academic-writing-in-Markdown/VS Code setup: file browser on the left, prose in the middle, research notes top right, Doogie-Howser-style writing journal bottom right, terminal panel with pandoc conversion command across bottom:

windowed coding environment described in post

Scott Selisker@sselisker· Jun 18

Reflection pool discourse—if there are now living organisms spanning this thing that is taller than skyscrapers I like imagining it’s a King Kong-scale Swamp Thing type scenario cooking up…

Reflection Pool compared with skyscraper height chart.

Scott Selisker@sselisker· Jun 9

Snagging a last-second seat for this felt like winning a Coffee for Closers

Glengarry Glen Ross with Rosa Salazar and Indira Varma

Scott Selisker@sselisker· Jun 7

Screaming in my heart at the extraordinary civic beauty of the Aarhus Dokk1 library and culture center. The baby gong sounded as I first approached it!

Katie Kitamura (!!) speaking later this month

The Gong and the View of the Harbor reading lounge

Amazing kids area bookshelf and Lego workshop

THE GONG
You have now reached The View. In the middle of the area you find The Gong.
Kristine Roepstorffs The Gong is 7.5 metres long and weighs three tons and it is the world's largest tubular bell. When a child is born in Aarhus University Hospital at Skejby, the parents can press a button at the hospital, which sends a signal that releases the arm that rings The Gong at Dokk1. The Gong is engraved with a sun motif and an infinity symbol illustrating new life.
tion

Scott Selisker@sselisker· Apr 28

Always a pure delight teaching @gerrycanavan.bsky.social's essay on Star Trek/Star Wars reboots/IP: SW's 'depiction of maximally good protagonists versus maximally evil antagonists that is famously concretized in the totemic notion of a mystical "Force" governed by "Light" and "Dark" "sides."'

"The three original films ... wear the trappigns of space-operatic SF, but actually operate narratively within the logic of the fairy tale ... most notably through their depiction of maximally good protagonists versus maximally evil antagonists that is famously concretized in the totemic notion of a mystical "Force" governed by "Light" and "Dark" "sides."

Scott Selisker@sselisker· Apr 27

Cover, official page, Oct 6 2026 hardcover / late-June ebook release dates, ISBN-13 for my book, *Character Networks in Contemporary U.S. Fiction*... global.oup.com/academic/pro...

Oxford Studies in American Literary History: Character Networks in Contemporary U.S. Fiction, by Scott Selisker (background: abstract city window nodes)

Scott Selisker@sselisker· Apr 16

The grad students voted for Lolita as our final American Novel text. A favorite show-and-tell among my used bookstore finds is this real-life John Ray, Jr., Ph.D., one L. T. Woodward, M.D., in this intro to Sade’s “Justine.” [Bonus: a mail-in postcard to acquire about a career in Accounting!]

De Sade’s Justine, 1964 paperback with girl and terrifyingly anatomical candelabra illustration (no info on illustrator, alas).

“There is not a page that does not show Sade’s sickness as clearly as it does his genius,” etc - LT Woodward, MD

As for Woodward’s “Sadism” book, with money Freud quote as implicit endorsement: “The instinct of destruction … is placed directly in the … sexual function. This is true sadism”

“Who else wants a big-pay job as an ACCOUNTANT” while reading about how Justine decides to answer a mysterious summons?

Scott Selisker@sselisker· Apr 4

Double buddies

Scott Selisker@sselisker· Mar 28

Thinking belatedly about DOGE AI use and genAI’s effects on cognition and culture, it seems like there’s an overwhelming tendency toward the Dunning-Kruger Effect’s uninformed overconfidence that I think we’re already seeing at scale…

Dunning-Kruger illustration, x axis Wisdom, y axis Confidence, an early peak in Confidence without Wisdom is “Mount Stupid”

Scott Selisker@sselisker· Mar 19

For fun, a Jurassic technology conundrum: five wires, and the numbers on the buttons are probably old room numbers, hard wired into the wall, building from mid-1960s. Any ideas what it used to do?

Mystery electrically wired box with four buttons, 2 labeled 473 and 475

Scott Selisker@sselisker· Mar 11

Lil backyard friend among the orange blossoms

Hummingbird in nest next to orange blossom bud

Scott Selisker@sselisker· Feb 21

Been meaning to try tostilocos for a full decade. They did not disappoint. @angermonsoon.bsky.social : relevant to your interests? Thx to @faith-harden.bsky.social for *elevating* Saturday.

Scott Selisker@sselisker· Nov 9

Got some good writing done a long while back in the Biblioteca Nacional de España reading room in Madrid while tagging along F, lovely spot!

Photo of neoclassical large reading room with wooden desks, lamps, bookshelves

Scott Selisker@sselisker· Apr 9

Neighborhood beauties:

Cactus with large, bright red flowers. Species?? Scarlet hedgehog? Royal crown?

Scott Selisker@sselisker· Mar 28

Home Depot Ninja Turtle car and I wish you the best!

Home Depot ninja turtle car, the new one.

Scott Selisker@sselisker· Mar 5

New giant mural in progress in downtown Tucson, I’d heard it’d be a saguaro, but the flowers are a welcome surprise

Downtown buildings, 100+ foot tall saguaro mural by Joe Pajac and team.

Scott Selisker@sselisker· Feb 22

Ending the week by finding the opening of an essay I already admired (by @thisblue.bsky.social ) in a book on writing I’m finding very useful, William Germano’s *On Revision*.

"The Rise of Behavioral Economic Mascu-linity," an essay by Michelle Chihara, investigates the form in which economic behavior is explained to the lay reader or listener. Its abstract begins with four key sentences:
This essay begins a cultural history of the behavioral economic narrative mode in American popular media, in relation to the academic discipline but not coincident with it. From podcasts to Michael Lewis's books and films, the behavioral economic mode of narration changes the character or figure of economic knowledge. Instead of the distant financial expert, this mode insists on the authority of the friendly explainer. In the years around the 2008 crisis, at a moment when financial scandals seemed to be losing their power to scandalize, this mode asserted behavioral economic knowledge as the new standard of realism.4
By laying out her intention to "begin a cultural history," the author indicates that her problem falls into Problem Category 3: we didn't know there was an it (and now we will learn

Scott Selisker@sselisker· Feb 12

And:

I should say, though, that this bill is not without advantages, even if they’re unintended. As
someone who frequently teaches George Orwell’s 1984, I should thank the authors of this bill
for so clearly illustrating the forms of state power and linguistic deception that Orwell warned
against last century. I tend to caution my students from making too easy connections between
Orwell’s fictional world and our real one. But this bill will aid us all in understanding how fiction
from the past might clarify the unfolding realities of the present, enabling us to see clearly how
state power and ideological programming shape what we know and think and the conditions
under which that education occurs.

Scott Selisker@sselisker· Feb 12

Outstanding public service here in opposition to Ohio SB1, one of a long line of right-wing extremist bills on education. The second paragraph's dismantling of the "intellectual diversity" canard will be worth repeating at every opportunity:

One could be forgiven for not fully understanding what the authors of this bill mean by
“intellectual diversity” or what it proposes to remedy; it is never quite clear in the bill, but
“intellectual diversity” has long been the language right wing extremists have used to push their
agenda, which includes shrinking dissent, mandating thought, and intimidating professors and
students who do not conform to their ideological program. The phrase itself became popular with
far-right culture warriors like David Horowitz who advised his fellow travelers to use this very
language to turn our universities into tools of political indoctrination. Here is Horowitze in 2003:
“I encourage you to use the language that the left deployed so effectively on behalf of its own
agendas…Say there is a lack of “intellectual diversity” on college faculties and in academic
classrooms. Say the conservative viewpoint is “under-represented” in the curriculum and on its
reading lists” (“The Campus Blacklist”). In SB1, as in our neighbor Indiana’s near identical SB
202, “intellectual diversity” emerges as a vague term because it is now and has always been a
rhetorical smokescreen. It is a calculated attempt to obscure the actual rigorous debate and
learning that unfolds in college classrooms. The public should understand “intellectual diversity”
as the phrase’s originators and popularizers understand it: as a Trojan horse that arrives
promising to enrich intellectual life with diverse viewpoints, but in fact aims to narrow thought,
silence dissent, and enforce its own strict ideological preferences.

Scott Selisker@sselisker· Jan 2

New Year’s greetings from Tumamoc Hill

Cacti, trail, town, from the historic site originally stewarded by Hohokam, Tohono O’odham, and other Indigenous groups.

Sunset over the same smaller hill at Tumamoc

Scott Selisker@sselisker· Dec 15

Bookshelf happened just now to contain multitudes, two kinds of books, two wolves, etc cc @andyhines.bsky.social (really admired it btw)

Inside you there are two wolves,
Literary Studies and Outside Literary Studies

Scott Selisker@sselisker· Nov 22

The world according to my latest vision therapy lenses (10 minutes a day, a very Dustin Hoffman at the bottom of the pool in The Graduate experience, the sky is the water, man)

Scott Selisker@sselisker· Jul 14

Just a totally new version of the El Con Home Depot Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles car 👋

Scott Selisker@sselisker· Jul 3

This diagram of time in terms of its sonic qualities, from Curtis Roads’s *Microsound* (2001), has it all, including a handy conversion from Hz to years:

Scott Selisker@sselisker· Jun 30

Impossibly pink on a gray morning…

Scott Selisker@sselisker· Jun 14

The schoolyard vermilion flycatcher, highlight of many morning dropoffs this year…