…for me! I created my first legit iMovie project: a video review of Black Panther! Too few blackademics celebrate our own achievements, so let me be the first to say I’m proud of myself. I admire everyone who learns to play with the tools they have available to achieve new things. While many blackademics and our detractors have spoken about this film’s spectacular nature, my review has got references to scholarly texts, SON.
Watch here (also added to the video page):
In other news, I’m also totally stoked that I got approved to use the Huntington Library! Octavia Butler collection, here I come!
This is a major milestone. After embarking on my first actual readings/auditing of some 1960s radio plays, this really ensures that my research for Audiofuturism takes up Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler. That means something so different now from what it meant when I wrote Speculative Blackness, and I am so, so thankful to be joining the ranks of legit Butler scholars like adrienne maree brown and Gerry Canavan. You’re damn right I’m about to start during my very next trip to L.A….
Meanwhile, I learned something about teaching from the grading I’ve just finished: I can format assignments in a more constructive way, to yield better, more refined writing, in my Science Fiction course (the broad survey of the genre that I keep under my belt based on Science Fiction: Stories & Contexts along with a mutating cast of films). While I’m now teaching on quarters, and there is hardly enough time to keep up let alone draft, workshop, and revise paper assignments, I can almost certainly fix that over the course of a semester. Here’s to hoping that transition is in the cards in the not-too-distant future…
I can’t share any other news, but know that the dog is well, dear reader. That’s what’s important. Winter quarter has just ended, so Spring quarter is coming up sooner than anyone can see coming. Something tells me it’s going to be a blaze and a blast-off. 
Next stop: UCLA (again!), for the American Comparative Literature Association conference! This is my first time participating but my second time joining forces with a couple of smart young scholars from George Washington University. I’m presenting the refined first foray into Audiofuturism, my treatment of The Star-Pit by Samuel Delany, as part of the seminar “‘New Ways of Doing Things’: Speculative Fiction, Identity, and Worldmaking.”