Min Hyoung Song

@minsong

English Professor with focus on ecology, race, and aesthetics. Latest book is Climate Lyricism (Duke UP), which is also open access: Viewpoints my own and not my employer’s.

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Min Hyoung Song@minsong· 27d

Day 2.

Min Hyoung Song@minsong· 27d

The sun is orange and the air hard to breath.

The sun is an orange dot against a grey sky.

Min Hyoung Song@minsong· Jun 23

Dense, deeply researched, this book focuses smartly on the 70s and 80s. The fight against authoritarianism it chronicles often ends badly, but the women at the center of this story never give up trying to bring better worlds into being.

Cover of Durba Mitra’s The Future That Was: A History of Third World Feminism Against Authoritarianism. The cover art shows a colorful sphere ringed by what might be bodies.

Min Hyoung Song@minsong· Jun 21

Happy Father’s Day to me.

Sardine cans laid out so front can be read

Min Hyoung Song@minsong· Jun 8

Sublimation breaks open the immigrant novel with an amazingly original conceit and should probably appear in many syllabi soon, but I’m also having a hard time saying you should read it right away. I’m halfway through and feeling really mixed.

Cover of Isabel Kim’s Sublimation. Image is hard to describe but shows two women walking away from each other.

Min Hyoung Song@minsong· Jun 6

2. They have an equal problem with Sadiya Hartman, whom they mention by name twice and more if we include allusions to her like this (the first reference to Hartman appears in the next paragraph):

There is, however, a long-standing and deeply rooted current in contemporary humanistic scholarship that regards the idea of scholarly objectivity with profound suspicion. One version of this skepticism is purely epistemological. A scholar of literature or history may concede that there are genuine facts about the meanings of texts or about the past which prevail independently of our representations of them, while at the same time holding that scholarship is aimed, not at an accurate reconstruction of those facts, but rather at an edifying narrative.

Min Hyoung Song@minsong· Jun 6

What’s are examples of those who have failed to pay enough lip service to this all important ideal? 1. They really have a problem with transgender studies.

Much work in the philosophy of sex and gender is organized around the political project of securing social justice for trans people and other gender minorities, where this project is taken to presuppose the substantive thesis that trans women are women in every sense.

Min Hyoung Song@minsong· Jun 6

It’s not too extreme to say that they make this point categorically at its conclusion, even though they repeatedly concede that in the past the university claimed to do this even while advancing incredibly noxious ideas.

Part of the raison d’être of a university is that it should engage in disinterested inquiry — inquiry aimed at knowledge and understanding, both for their own sake and for the sake of further goods that require genuine knowledge and understanding, rather than ideologically informed opinion, for their promotion. This, at least in part, is what universities are for. Indeed, it might well be thought that one of the greatest contributions a university can make to society is to provide a model of what disinterested inquiry can be and how it might thereby be of value. If the pursuit of disinterested inquiry is compromised, it strikes at the very foundation on which a university should be based, just as the corrupt administration of justice strikes at the foundation upon which a system of justice should be based.

Min Hyoung Song@minsong· Jun 4

I often think of this final page from Persepolis vol 1: it feels like a widely shared moment for so many immigrants, a scene of subject making when you turn around to say goodbye to what you’re leaving even as you’re in the process of leaving.

Girl at the airport looking back at her parents, to see mother has fainted and is being carried away by her father.

Min Hyoung Song@minsong· May 25

This is a key paragraph that’s already getting a lot of press attention. Worth reproducing all of it.

110. Finally, I would like to employ the expression “to disarm,” which is close to my heart. Disarming AI means freeing it from the mentality of “armed” competition, which today is not limited simply to the military context, but is also an economic and cognitive phenomenon. This entails a race for ever more powerful algorithms and larger datasets, driven by the desire to secure geopolitical or commercial dominance. To disarm means discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern. To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity. It means freeing technology from monopolistic control and opening it to discussion and debate, therefore making it human-friendly and restoring it to the plurality of human cultures and ways of life. Our task today is not only ethical or technical. It is ecological in the deepest sense, for it concerns a new dimension of our common home. AI is already an environment in which we are immersed, as well as a force with which we must engage. For this reason, merely regulating it is insufficient; it must be disarmed, welcoming and accessible.

Min Hyoung Song@minsong· May 13

Can’t say I understood everything in Nan Da’s “Literary Criticism in the Age of AI,” but the last two sentences hit me like a ton of bricks.

We know that people’s literary-critical inferences cannot be identical, for that would be a kind of death, but we also know it cannot be an interpretive free-for-all or just statistically approximated hearsay. ai may not care about any of this, of course, because, like Death, it cannot suffer the downstream consequences of faked comprehension and wrongful
inferences in its body or its life. But that would mean that we have to
care about those consequences—of fakery and wrongful inference—on
other people’s bodies and lives.

Min Hyoung Song@minsong· Apr 14

Settle down beautiful flowering trees, my allergies can’t take it.

Pink flowers in full bloom against a blue sky.

Min Hyoung Song@minsong· Dec 26

We went to a vinyl cafe (you buy an expensive drink and listen to albums on headphones all you want) and I took this photograph as the sunlight came through a record.

A brightly colored album turned neon when held up to the sunlight.

Min Hyoung Song@minsong· Dec 8

Grading season is here.

Min Hyoung Song@minsong· Nov 13

So many applicants now use LLMs like ChatGPT to write cover letters, they no longer communicate much or anything about the qualities of the applicant. www.ft.com/content/e5b7...

They were right to be distrusting: evaluations of the work done by the people hired in the post-LLM period no longer had any correlation to cover letter quality.

Another way of putting all of this is that the use of LLMs in job applications made the market much less meritocratic, with a 19 per cent fall in hiring for the most capable workers and a 14 per cent boost for the least capable. Oh, and the number of applications and length of cover letters roughly doubled, meaning more time needed to sift through less useful and often actively unhelpful submissions. Good job, everyone!

Min Hyoung Song@minsong· Oct 29

Saw this in a toy store window and somehow it seems like an apt response.

Colorful plastic chickens with their beaks wide open in shock.

Min Hyoung Song@minsong· Jun 19

I felt I needed to learn more about AI (even though the subject bores me profoundly), and this was a great place to start. Recommend highly! A few quick thoughts… 1/

Min Hyoung Song@minsong· May 29

I enjoyed reading this a lot—even the sometimes-frustrating refusal to translate anything in a text that’s very polyglot—and think it’s take on AI is especially insightful.

Cover of Ryan Ruby’s Context Collapse: A Poem Containing a History of Poetry

Min Hyoung Song@minsong· May 21

I’ve been reading a lot about 20C Korea for something I’m working on, and I cannot recommend this new book by Kornel Chang enough. It’s about the U.S. occupation of southern Korea right after WW2, but it also feels all too generalizable.

Cover of A Fractured Liberation: Korea under US Occupation by Kornel Chang. Photo of Koreans disembarking from a ship overseen by armed U.S. soldiers.

Min Hyoung Song@minsong· Apr 28

My commute to work the other day... but oh, the allergies.

Steps leading up past a tree in full flower with a bright blue sky above.

Min Hyoung Song@minsong· Mar 19

One of the hardest stories to tell is of poor people living full and meaningful lives. When Life Gives You Tangerines is absolutely rocking this.