Scott Selisker
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sselisker.bsky.social
Scott Selisker
@sselisker.bsky.social
480 followers 290 following 190 posts
literature prof at U of Arizona. books: HUMAN PROGRAMMING (on metaphors for ideology), NETWORKED CHARACTER (on social networks in recent US fiction and history, forthcoming 2026ish). he, suh-LISK-er, views mine, sporadically present here.
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sselisker.bsky.social
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
November 9, 2025 at 7:20 PM
sselisker.bsky.social
Neighborhood beauties:
Ocotillo in bloom Red barrel cactus in flower Cactus with large, bright red flowers. Species?? Scarlet hedgehog? Royal crown? Cactus with buds, species unknown.
April 9, 2025 at 11:50 PM
sselisker.bsky.social
Home Depot Ninja Turtle car and I wish you the best!
Home Depot ninja turtle car, the new one.
March 28, 2025 at 2:33 AM
sselisker.bsky.social
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.
March 5, 2025 at 2:54 PM
sselisker.bsky.social
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
February 22, 2025 at 12:12 AM
sselisker.bsky.social
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.
February 12, 2025 at 3:57 PM
sselisker.bsky.social
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.
February 12, 2025 at 3:51 PM
sselisker.bsky.social
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
January 2, 2025 at 12:04 AM
sselisker.bsky.social
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
December 15, 2024 at 12:05 AM
sselisker.bsky.social
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)
Blue and violet orange tree branches.
November 22, 2024 at 11:24 PM
sselisker.bsky.social
Just a totally new version of the El Con Home Depot Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles car 👋
July 14, 2024 at 8:29 PM
sselisker.bsky.social
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:
p5
July 3, 2024 at 4:11 PM
sselisker.bsky.social
Impossibly pink on a gray morning…
Cactus with pink flowers
June 30, 2024 at 6:02 PM
sselisker.bsky.social
The schoolyard vermilion flycatcher, highlight of many morning dropoffs this year…
Vermilion flycatcher, gate, branches
June 14, 2024 at 8:26 PM