dilby

Agreed, that was a wonderful moment. The whole show has become a sort of melancholy exercise since he passed away, but there's a bittersweet beauty to trying to rewatch with gratitude. He was an amazing person (and a real cinephile, which is also nice). I've got some reading and viewing lists, but I've been trying to do the thing that feels the least like homework at any given time. So.....a lot of Subnautica. But reading a few plays here and there. :] Edit: Lol, I forgot I also acted in a friend's feature film. So that took up the entire months of September and October.

I've really been enjoying checking out a dozen art films from the library and then binging Parts Unknown on Netflix instead

I'm leaning yes, if only based on the lack of other posts and Chicago's history of not reaching out until 2-3 weeks later than now. Definitely don't start worrying yet

Ha! I bet you're right. I was the person who accidentally laughed out loud at the passage from Tristram Shandy.

One or two of you have mentioned video games to pass the time. If you have the inclination, What Remains of Edith Finch is a slow, beautiful narrative game currently available for free through the Epic Games Store. I sat down to take a look at it out of curiosity and ended up playing through the whole thing in one sitting. Strong recommend but it's real sad.

Lol, note to self - post memes earlier in the day for maximum reputation

@mandelbulb I'm out of reacts for the day but I'd smash that like if I could

It's because we officially live in THE AFFECTIVE TURN, my friend dread it, run from it, affect theory still arrives

+1 to Touching Feeling, particularly "Cybernetic Fold" and "You're So Paranoid." I had a professor who described the day he walked into seminar in grad school after You're So Paranoid came out and everyone in the room was like "I guess this whole enterprise is different now." Eve Segdwick really was a special lady. Meeting her through and loving her work just a few years after she passed away has been melancholy and a little spooky.

I just went ahead and reported that interview post as spam lmao

I swear I'm not trying to stir the pot, but according to the 2018 Acceptances thread the first person to receive a notification last year was a SUNY-Buffalo admit exactly one year ago today. So.....it begins I suppose

Isn't it amazing??? It's 100% compassionate, all out Joycean cinema. It's, like, woke Terrence Malick (and I love Terry). Austin has a very active film society that brings most major foreign releases (and where I interned for a year ), so I was lucky enough to catch it on the big screen. Don't read anything about Burning before you see it!

@Bopie5 so, I've almost made my way through my watchlist but still need to catch If Beale Street Could Talk, Suspiria, The Favourite, The Miseducation of Cameron Post, Lean On Pete, Vox Lux, and Widows. I'm finally seeing Into The Spider-Verse tonight and am super jazzed. Recent 2018 watches that I think are essential viewing: Shoplifters (!!!), Madeline's Madeline (on Amazon), Minding the Gap (on Hulu) and this Oscar-shortlisted animated film, Weekends. If you haven't seen Lee Chang-Dong's Burning yet, you should not do anything else until you've caught it.

No research projects for me as well, since I'm not at an academic institution right now. So I'm catching up with all of the major 2018 film releases on my watchlist and working on my goal of finishing all of Shakespeare's plays before starting grad school. 14 to go.

"Harvard isn't ready for this jelly"

+1 to the job market warning NOT being a commentary on your strength as an applicant. Both of my main mentors have told me on separate occasions that they feel like part of their job is discouraging students from going into academia, lol

Applying straight out of undergrad because, like, miss me paying for my advanced degree That said, I was also very lucky to end up at an undergrad institution with a highly structured English honors program including a senior thesis and tons of research opportunities. The idea was to produce BAs who would be prepared to enter competitive PhDs without needing a Master's

@sad_diamond welcome, and yes! I did feel some anxiety about splitting the apps across multiple disciplines. but I think in many ways it was an asset because it sort of freed me to start fresh with my profile for each individual program. By necessity, my Duke Literature application has very little crossover with my Chicago Cinema Studies application. Applying to these different kinds of programs forced me to take nothing for granted when asking "What will the adcomm at this department want to see?"

I've got a very good friend from undergrad who just started his PhD in English at Chicago, and FWIW he said he was expecting to be grilled but mostly they just talked to him about his writing sample. The people who he talked to were POIs and they really just wanted to get a sense of his personality and were engaging very deeply with what he had written. It was a big relief to him (and to me).

One recent engagement with Freud that I was really impressed with was Eugenie Brinkema's The Forms of the Affects (which is a wonderful and exciting book for lots of reasons). Her strategy with that book is to examine a handful of key texts that define various affects (grief, disgust, anxiety, joy) to gain insight on their "form"; i.e. "What is this affect shaped like? If I were to make a cinema text out of this feeling, what would it look like?" (This might sound a little out there. The whole book is an effort to flesh out this methodology.) Anyway, she uses Freud and Kierkegaard to suggest that the form of anxiety is "an uninterrupted horizontal line" and uses the image of the horizon in an indie shark-horror film to illustrate that point. It's totally wild and unlike anything I've read before. And it also demonstrates an approach to Freud that uses his writing as essentially a very interesting and problematic and critically useful set of primary texts rather than a uniformly productive body of theory. Sort of like what Eve Sedgwick does with Silvan Tomkins in "Shame and the Cybernetic Fold" (which is equally life-changing if you haven't read it before).

FYI I'm really digging everything that everyone is saying but GradCafe won't let me like any more posts today !! Now that this thread is really bumpin, I just wanted to say that I hope everyone's doing alright. This forum infamously activates people's anxiety/jitters, and I know none of us need that. It would be great to be, like, the most mindful thread in town. :]

@Mumasatus If I'm inferring correctly, I had a media theory seminar with your daughter in Fall 2017. Small world. Thanks for the heads up about Ann's departure! I'll be sure to keep that in mind while chatting with people about UT.

@beardedlady you can dm me if you have any questions about UT Austin English faculty, or about the university in general it sounds like your POIs might include Ann Cvetkovich and Julie Minich, who I don't know personally but have heard wonderful things about

@mandelbulb welcome, it's nice to see another cinema/literature ticket-splitter here. Your research sounds cool and very similar to my own, at least the affect and embodiment angle. I'm sure we have a few overlapping POIs. :] I have a few dream programs for various reasons. It would be miraculous to get into any of these: Stanford is where Scott Bukatman is working, and he is my #1 academic because his research constellates a similar focus on animation, embodiment, and technologically mediated consciousness. Their Modern Thought and Literature department is also built on an interdisciplinary flexbility that will allow me to construct my own curricular center of gravity around the overlap between cinema studies, ecocriticism and neurohumanities. Super neat! Chicago is where many, many theorists whose work I adore are currently working. Sianne Ngai (affect queen!!), Lauren Berlant, David Rodowick, James Lastra, and Tom Gunning are all teaching there. UCLA is where my undergraduate mentor's dissertation advisor from her Ph.D. is currently teaching, as well as a ton of other faculty doing ecocriticism. UCLA also has some cool interdepartmental resources like the Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies. It's a very politically engaged school and that's important to me. If I don't get in this cycle, I'm going to continue working at my comfortable tech industry customer service job and apply again next year. Anyone here can PM me with questions about finding a job—I've only found the one I currently have but I'll be happy to offer my two cents if you're feeling anxious about it. :]