Shucks

Perhaps you thought you'd seen the last of me. Alas, I have returned. Big issue of the Dr. Banana Digest coming at you.

It's been more than a year since my last dispatch from Charm City. I feel unsatisfied with the progress I've made since moving here, but sometimes I'm able to accept that healing takes longer than we think. The rain has slowed and the heat has returned and every day I feel more and more like I'm emerging. Not furious and fine-boned like a baby bird bursting through its shell. More like some kind of invertebrate, a snail perhaps, finally drifting free of the little blob of slime in which I was hatched. Time to stretch my eyestalks and get moving.

Sprouts

Things are coming up

Women, Gender, and Science in Victorian Culture

Leila and I are editing a collection of primary sources for Routledge. This will be four volumes on women in science in 19th century Britain. Divided into Natural Sciences, Medicine and the Body, Women and Empire, and Feminist Ecologies, the set is meant to be a comprehensive introduction to primary material on anything and everything relating to women in science in this time and place. I'm especially excited about the Women and Empire volume, which was a wild ride to research, and hopefully makes the point quite clearly that women were doing science and one of the ways we know this is that they were up to all the same naughty science things men were. No release date right now, we're still working on the interpretive material that will accompany the sources. It's going to be stupendously expensive and not really meant for general consumption outside the library (and is in fact ultimately going to be part of a digital database product for libraries) but I'll keep you posted anyway.

Cosmic Fragments: Dislocation and Discontent in the Global Space Age

This book comes out next year, edited by the incomparable Asif Siddiqi, who got a few of us space people together at SHOT in 2018 to hash out some ideas. Contributors wrote on themes of displacement, dislocation, and disruption in spaceflight history. It's a really necessary new collection of essays not least because of its transnational perspective. It also takes on one of my favorite things to harass people with at parties, which is the instances in which spaceflight is a bad thing that sucks shit and hurts people, and how the romance of spaceflight and solar system colonization is in the same aesthetic and affective register as garden variety earth imperialism. I'm super proud of my contribution to this (find me in Chapter 1!) and it's been a long time in the making. Updates when you can get your eyeballs on it.

[TITLE REDACTED]

The last book I have in process is one I'm not really writing. I'm the Program Manager for the Johns Hopkins University Institutional History Project, alongside a Lead Author and a Research Historian. Together we're researching and writing a comprehensive history of JHU from 1876 to 2026 that will be published by the press in time for the 150th anniversary of the university's founding in fall 2026. My role is essentially to coordinate all the resources needed to research, write, publish, and promote a 600 page scholarly institutional history in three years, while pinch hitting as a researcher. I wish I knew exactly how everything was going to go, but as far as we know we're the first to ever do it quite like this. Public-facing components will start next year, including some fun events in Baltimore and DC.

Rhizomes

Things are taking root

The stuff I'm looking at in the archives right now is all about how a certain group of scientists and administrators navigated the uncertainty of the moments right after WW2. They stood amidst a vast wartime research and development infrastructure that had been built seemingly overnight and just a quickly changed everything about how science was done in the US and at universities. The decisions that lay before them were immense and consequential; should we go back to the way things were? Should universities continue in peacetime to do research and development, especially of weapons, for the military? What becomes of all the work, the equipment, the newly experienced young scientists, the new lines of inquiry created and fostered by conflict? Many of these postwar planners write with genuine anxiety about how precarious a career in military research was, their belief that the money would never last, that the collapse of defense work for science was imminent, inevitable. Some were steadfast pacifists who were disgusted at even the suggestion that war work continue after the end of hostilities. Others– perhaps most–were canny opportunists who sniffed at the winds of change and eagerly sought federal patronage. It's a reminder of the thing I find most interesting–most addictive–about history; the past is a strange place and I can never visit. These steely-eyed missile men couldn't know exactly what the post war world would look like. It hadn't happened yet. Despite my misgivings about how it all turned out, I feel strangely tender toward them facing an immensely changed world and trying in earnest to reckon with what is the best way to live and work within its unfamiliar new shape.

In recent years I've significantly downsized my social media (you may remember the origin of this newsletter as the momentous deletion of my Twitter account). But I've been on Tumblr this whole time and I won't leave until that platform (inevitably) blows itself up. Apart from all the things I like about it–the very specific pre-web3 vibe and humor, the ease of sideblogs and concomitant anonymity, the legendary long posts, Goncharov...), there's stuff on Tumblr I never see anywhere else. Things, in fact, that can't exist without the larger context that the platform provides, things that compel me. Take this post:

This is a classic Tumblr #aesthetic post. It's meant to reblogged and collected by aesthetic blogs–places you can go to immerse yourself in a specific visual language to evoke a specific feeling. But this post features, quite conspicuously to my eye, a photo of the space shuttle Columbia breaking up in the upper atmosphere in 2003.

I reblogged this post with tags saying I wanted to write a paper about it. But what would that paper...be? What can I say about this that isn't hack generational generalizing (you're too young to even remember this!)? Perhaps a brief but measured observation about the flattening effect that the internet has on images. You might refer to Leo Steinberg's Other Criteria for more, as I have. The gist is that technology allows us to place any and all images on the same plane in new ways that confuse and contest their meaning. As a Steinberg (rather than a Greenberg) girlie myself, I think we never fully dealt with this new possibility as it became real, we simply live now in the world it predicted. Is there something strange and sad here? Or something merely naive?

Cultivars

Do what I tell you

If you've never watched the 2004 Battlestar Galactica series, this is your official sign to do so. It's on Amazon Prime right now. There's not enough time for me to describe to you how influential this series has been on basically every creative aspect of my life. My favorite episode is Season 3 Episode 9 "Unfinished Business" and I implore you to email me your thoughts once you've watched it. It's truly a writer's episode–a bottle into which you put all your characters and shake them as hard as possible to see what happens. Start with S1E1 "33" and deal with the miniseries later.

I have very specific criteria for YouTube video essay content that I enjoy and would pay money for and curiously the only two creators that meet it are both trans women with humanities degrees. Definitely check out PhilosophyTube, which I actually use in teaching (the Transhumanism video is an excellent intro/lit review for to hist/Phil tech). But my main recommend is Contrapoints, and specifically her Patreon ($2/month), which includes her "Tangent" videos. Less elaborately staged but almost as in-depth as her main channel videos, Natalie's tangents are what I wish I could make if I could figure out how to write about the Columbia #aesthetic post. Recent favorites of mine include the GamerGate and the New Atheism tangents–two super important moments in internet culture that we don't seem to talk about much anymore but from which we are and will be reaping the whirlwind for the foreseeable future.

Speaking of internet aesthetics. Please avail yourself of the Cari Institute's collection, "an online community dedicated to developing a visual lexicon of consumer ephemera from the 1970s until now." This is a superb resource for creative work and also an impressive archival project preserving the look and feel of ever more fleeting cultural moments. This lives in my mind in the same room as the Center for Land Use Interpretation and its publishing projects.

Some life stuff:

Drove up to Pennsylvania for Dungeons & Daddies live. This actual play podcast is extremely funny and weird, but I think the thing that really hooked me was learning more about the group and how they make the show and the unhinged creative energy that ricochets around the whole production. It makes me miss making things.

If you're ever thirsty in Glenside PA, check out The Cork. Transportive dive bar magic, a longstanding passion of mine.

Later that same week I went down to DC to see a friend. Le Diplomate for dinner! If you're ever in DC please hit me up, it's so simple and quick for me to get down there to see you!

Or, if you prefer, take the train up to me in Baltimore! You can come over and see my pond! All I care about is Pond. All I think about is Pond. You should build a pond if you're feeling sad or bored. Pond pond pond.

That's all for now. Love you, miss you, let's make something together.