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Jesse Raber

@jraber.bsky.social

630 followers 840 following 1.1K posts

Working on a literary history of Chicago - Author of Progressivism's Aesthetic Education: bit.ly/2AhdjaH - Co-creator of the Chicago Writing Gallery at the American Writers Museum - let's talk about cooking, ceramics, ebikes

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Jesse Raber @jraber.bsky.social · 1h

Plus Goethe started working on Faust in the 1770s and it arguably belongs to "the long 18th century"

Jesse Raber @jraber.bsky.social · 1h

True, but Goethe's Faust is a reflection of emerging modern science in a way that Marlowe's is still too early to be (1592, while Bacon's Novum Organum isn't til 1620)

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Jesse Raber @jraber.bsky.social · 5h

wonder if that's why Flannery O'Connor always refused the "gothic" label in favor of "grotesque"

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Reposted by Jesse Raber

The People's Fabric @peoplesfabric.com · 8h

It’s a complicated dynamic. Without police at Broadview, the feds escalated at-will, deploying chemical munitions & physical force without provocation. The police presence has provided an argument against deploying the National Guard & ppl haven’t gotten gassed. But it frees ICE agents to grab ppl.

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Jesse Raber @jraber.bsky.social · 5h

whatcha gotta understand see is that catholicism represents the pre-rational past sitting like an incubus on a post-enlightenment world that should be free of the horrors of arbitrary power but somehow still isn't

Reposted by Jesse Raber

Senate Judiciary Democrats 🇺🇸 @judiciarydems.senate.gov · 7h

BREAKING: Sens. DURBIN, DUCKWORTH were just denied entrance to the Broadview ICE Facility in Illinois, unable to conduct constitutional role of oversight.

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Jesse Raber @jraber.bsky.social · 7h

capitalist toadies

Jesse Raber @jraber.bsky.social · 12h

he's groping around for a figure that's basically Goethe's Faust but is too illiterate to find it

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Jesse Raber @jraber.bsky.social · 1d

I guess I'm annoyed at the U of C as landlord for not getting something better, but I'm intrigued by the chain bookstore comeback and at this point all bookstores are good bookstores. They're not competing with each other, they're working together to make a bookish neighborhood.

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Jesse Raber @jraber.bsky.social · 1d

Weird, but I'm not mad about it: Hyde Park getting a ... Barnes & Noble?

www.hpherald.com/evening_dige...

Barnes & Noble to open new Hyde Park store in February

A Barnes & Noble bookstore is set to open in the Hyde Park Shopping Center in late February, adding a national chain to a neighborhood well known around the city

www.hpherald.com

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Jesse Raber @jraber.bsky.social · 1d

it really was the mother of all games

Jesse Raber @jraber.bsky.social · 1d

Yeah when I saw the nonspeaking people expressing themselves with assistive tech in "The Reason I Jump" I was horrified to realize how wrong my assumptions about them were. Like, a guy who couldn't speak or handwrite was using assistive tech to write cogent newspaper articles.

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Julian Sanchez @normative.bsky.social · 1d

Brett Kavanaugh assures me this is the sort of minor inconvenience that shouldn't disturb anyone.

CollinCountyDems @collincountydems.bsky.social · 1d

This is terrifying!

ICE breaks into this woman’s car in the pick-up line at West Loop Elementary school in Chicago and detains her before she can pick her kids up from school. (They were eventually let go after showing their documents)

This is Trump’s America.

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Jesse Raber @jraber.bsky.social · 1d

This is one reason that I've come to love teaching poetry despite training as a fiction person in grad school. Students see poetic form as a legitimate body of knowledge and even enjoy memorizing terms like "trochaic tetrameter," whereas prose form is less "technical" and thus harder to teach.

Jesse Raber @jraber.bsky.social · 1d

must have gone down in the Garfield Park Conservatory

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Jesse Raber @jraber.bsky.social · 1d

yeah she only did the magazine, but her memoir does get into the dollars and cents of it

Jesse Raber @jraber.bsky.social · 1d

Does Harriet Monroe count?

Reposted by Jesse Raber

Amanda Katz @katzish.bsky.social · 2d

I’m sorry, I love this

Lux "Nightmare" Alptraum @luxalptraum.com · 2d

TFW you paid $1400 to see Beckett’s most famous work without knowing anything about it

One Star Review of Waiting for Godot on Broadway
I recently attended Waiting for Godot on Broadway and spent over $1,400 for two Row C seats (103 and 104). I'm a longtime admirer of Broadway productions and even hold a season pass for Shea's Performing Arts Theatre, so I came in with genuine enthusiasm and high expectations. Unfortunately, this show was unlike anything ! have ever experienced —and not in a good way.
What I encountered was not the artistry, music, or emotional storytelling I usually associate with Broadway, but instead what felt like an endless cycle of nonsensical conversation between characters who seemed trapped in their own madness. I tried-truly tried-to find meaning, symbolism, or even a thread of emotional resonance. I stayed through the first half hoping the second would offer clarity. But by intermission, it was clear: this was a waste of both time and money.
Keanu Reeves is an actor I respect greatly, but I cannot fathom why he would agree to participate in such a disjointed, inaccessible production. His talent was lost in a performance that defied reason rather than provoked insight.
To anyone considering attending: unless you are drawn to highly abstract, nearly incomprehensible theater, I strongly caution you against this show. For the average, educated, thoughtful theatergoer, it is far more frustrating than fulfilling. In my opinion, this was the single most disappointing Broadway experience I've ever had - an unfortunate waste of money and, more importantly, of time.

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Jesse Raber @jraber.bsky.social · 2d

I believe they're pretty active on Instagram. Kinda interesting that they're cultivating the more "pop" platform and ignoring the more "learned" one. One more twist in their long and mostly fruitful negotiation of that divide.

Reposted by Jesse Raber

Josh Marshall @joshtpm.bsky.social · 2d

news.bloomberglaw.com/litigation/g...

Grand Jury Declines to Indict Two Chicago-Area ICE Protesters (1)

A federal grand jury declined to indict two people charged with assaulting law enforcement agents outside a suburban Chicago ICE facility, an attorney for one of the defendants said.

news.bloomberglaw.com

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Jesse Raber @jraber.bsky.social · 2d

Small groups of hunter-gatherers tend to produce language isolates, not language families. Every language family reflects some form of social domination/absorption, and the larger the family, the more dramatic those processes were.

Jesse Raber @jraber.bsky.social · 2d

*The Horse, the Wheel, and Language* is a great book about how technological and social forces power the spread of a language family (Indo-European). I wish someone would make an anthology of similar narratives for all language families. What "killer apps" powered Afroasiatic, Bantu, Tungusic?

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Jesse Raber @jraber.bsky.social · 3d

The other side of this coin is when enough time passes that everybody imagines these people living "around the same time"

Futurama: Einstein and Hammurabi are in a hot air balloon. Einstein says "Let's Disco Dance, Hammurabi!" (He replies, "Dy-no-mite!")

Jesse Raber @jraber.bsky.social · 3d

My Pennsylvania friends when I eat scrapple while visiting them: "what are you doing? you don't live here! you don't have to eat it!"

Jesse Raber @jraber.bsky.social · 3d

I read it once in a class and once in a reading group. For class we used *Ulysses Annotated* and tackled all the allusions, historical context, etc. For the reading group we outlawed annotations and ate/drank what Bloom eats/drinks. Took both together to feel like I "got" the book!