Category Archives for video

Reading Fiction is Back?

Man Carrying Thing on YouTube, in a video entitled “Self-help is dead. It’s time to read fiction”, is quite amusing and acerbic on literature and how it is framed (h/t Daniel), and he also says a thing or two germane to my interest in long books and what we are doing when we read, especially in the context of AI’s increasing prevalence.

See for instance his comments on “reading as a tool” (from 2:11):

“There’s this pervasive idea and I think it starts in primary education that reading is a necessary punishment in order to extract value from a book. That reading is a painful challenge but worth it if you can extract key information that can be useful to you. I think it starts out with reading Great Expectations looking for the answers in your quiz about what Dickens’s moral of the story is.”

He goes on to suggest (though this is news to me!) that The Count of Monte Cristo has achieved sudden popularity (from 4:40), and that this says something about people’s desire to recover agency from culture:

“People today are diving into this like 1200-page book in order to feel something, in order to have an experience, not to learn valuable lessons about life, but just to live in this and to have an experience outside of your own. The same thing I see happening with Lonesome Dove, these huge epic books that people are gravitating towards simply because it’s entertaining. [. . .] People want to have their thoughts returned to them. That fiction is an exercise in your imagination. It’s an exercise in your consciousness. It’s a deeply quiet and active activity. People are tired of being passive, of having being inundated with information, entertainments, with frivolous things. People want to have their thoughts returned to them.”

“Reading fiction is back,” he concludes. I’m not sure I’m convinced, but nice if true.

LAST100

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This Fall, I’m teaching “Introduction to Latin American Studies.” I’ve taught it before, but the twist this time is that I have some money to make videos to illustrate and enhance the course.

There will be three types of videos: 1) “instructor videos,” or mini-lectures that I write and deliver; 2) conversations with colleagues and others on specific topics; 3) student-made videos.

Everything will be made available (via YouTube) with a CC-BY-NC license. This means that anybody can re-use and even remake the material, so long as they attribute the original source, and so long as they don’t use them for commercial purposes.

They are far from perfect (we’re not professionals), but I’m pretty pleased with how they’re turning out so far. Each one gets a little better, at least in technical terms, I think, even though we also find ways to add new glitches we’d barely considered before.

We’ll have to wait, of course, for the student-made videos, but here are the first few instructor videos and conversations:

Instructor videos:

  1. Where is Latin America?
  2. The Meeting of Two Worlds
  3. The Colonial Experience

Interviews:

  1. Hugo Chávez in Context, with Max Cameron
  2. Modernity and Modernization in Mexico, with Alec Dawson
  3. The Mexican Revolution, with Alec Dawson

Posthegemony in Peru

I was fortunate a few weeks ago to be able to present my book at a “Mesa Verde” at the Instituto de Estudios Peruanos in Lima.  Guillermo Rochabrún and Juan Carlos Ubilluz provided stimulating comments, and there was a spirited discussion session at the end.  Herewith, the video of the event.  Many thanks to Patricia Ames for moderating and making it possible.

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Watching this footage (which I’ve just come across) gives me goosebumps.

It comes from a pro-Sandinista solidarity concert held in Nicaragua in 1983, billed as a “concierto por la paz centroamericana.” The soundtrack was released as “April in Managua.” I used to own the cassette version, which I was given in Honduras sometime around 1988. I practically wore it out listening to it.

Wikipedia tells me that Alí Primera, the singer here, died a couple of years later, at the age of 42, which only adds further poignancy to this video.