You spend endless hours engaged in really detailed research or thought, in sometimes really small and obscure things, so you have to be invested in it. Assailed by so many naysayers—businesslike administrators, right-wing pundits, smarmy journalists, armchair critics of the academy—the MLA has circled its wagons and jacked up the entry fee. I still think their tortured, overwrought sentences are for the most part patently absurd, and when Mark Hansen refers to the film Memento as an example of "retentional finitude in a particularly acute form"—which is immediately before he talks about "the breakdown of cinema as a temporal object"—I recoil. Finally, Charlie's face flushes and he turns to me. Longtermism also led to some bizarre conclusions.
nest...