Patrick Iber

Episode 5 of the culture podcast Experts in a Dying Field (me, @zunguzungu.bsky.social, @lililoofbourow.bsky.social), is available and it is, of course, about You Can See Everything. Is Nathan Fielder the true villain of the movie? Why did Errol Morris do Theranos commercials? Why do horses fart?

Guess what? I wrote a scholarly article, something I also do

The article even has an Allen Ginsberg cameo, who took his invited trip to Concepción (via Fernando Alegría), hung around for a while, and then went to Peru to look for yagé/ayahuasca

Guess what? I wrote a scholarly article, something I also do

The story ended up being, in some ways, much more interesting. There were many connections to the famous "boom" in Latin American letters through the summer school events put on by Concepción.

Guess what? I wrote a scholarly article, something I also do

From Rockefeller itself, I had only a few thin folders: not enough material to write about it. But I kept poking at it over the years, and finally found the documents I needed in the personal papers of the writer Fernando Alegría www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPlc...

Guess what? I wrote a scholarly article, something I also do

...a lot of that didn't work very well, while the writers got a lot of what they wanted: time to write. Or drink, as the case may be.

Guess what? I wrote a scholarly article, something I also do

Namely, Pedro Páramo and El llano en llamas ("The Burning Plain"). The article explores the ironies and rather tangled histories of foreign money and the production of Mexican art; at the end, a CIA-linked foundation buys Rulfo some land in the country so he can write more but he just drinks it away

Guess what? I wrote a scholarly article, something I also do

I expanded on that in an article for the Journal of Latin American Studies www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Guess what? I wrote a scholarly article, something I also do

Back in the mists of time, I wrote a book about the cultural Cold War in Latin America. Soviet front groups. CIA-funded magazines. Cuban revolutionaries. www.hup.harvard.edu/books/978067...

Guess what? I wrote a scholarly article, something I also do

Building on what Eric says here, one sometimes encounters a misunderstanding of the Civil Rights Movements in which the people who participated in them did so for no particular political or strategic reason

Prospective grad students, please take heed: you don't need to have read the scholar's work to write them an email. But if you use AI to write your email and pretend to have read their work, the false notes will almost surely be picked up and you will be setting your chances on fire

I'm not exactly Sherlock Holmes but if you claim to have enjoyed my forthcoming book that is going to reflect badly on you

When George W. Bush's popularity fell to levels similar to Trump's today, it signaled the political possibility of electing Obama --- and for the takeover of the Republican Party by MAGA

The thing is that it wasn't until after the financial crisis that Bush got to these levels, and that was really close to the end of his term. Trump still has more than half his term, so we have no idea what could happen

Congrats to all winners and especially to @renatakeller.bsky.social for her excellent book about the Cuban Missile Crisis as a hemispheric phenomenon!

The Haring winner, Adrián Gorelik’s book (in Spanish) about the idea of the Latin American city as an intellectual construct, is also terrific

Inside Jacobin there are two magazines, and the one that wins is the one you feed

Every time you make a Jacobin article the main character for the day you are obligated by BlueSky Terms & Service to subscribe to Dissent, thanks for your attention to this matter www.ezsubscription.com/dis/subscribe