Three Things Thursday: NDQ, The Digital Press, and Writing the Lede

This week involved lots of little things which is both fun and frustrating for any efforts at productivity, but useful for a Three Things Thursday.

Thing the First

On Monday, issue 92.1/2 went to press featuring a great little editors’ note from our student editorial assistant. For the last two months, students in my Practicum in Writing, Editing, and Publishing read the accepted contributions from NDQ and selected from 57 authors from these that fit together into something coherent. For students, this is fun and little bit frustrating, but it gives them hands-on experience with putting together an issue of a literary magazine.

Thing the Second

I’m also very excited about a project from The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota: Michael Michlovic’s An Archaeology of the Red River Valley of the North. It should come out next week, ideally on Tuesday. I’ve posted about in the last week or so.

This will be the third book to appear in 2025! Check out, Jack Russell Weinstein’s Israel, Palestine, and the Trolley Problem: On the Futility of the Search for the Moral High Ground and Eric Burin, ed. Picking the President: Understanding the Electoral College. Revised and Expanded Edition.

Thing the Third

For lots of reasons, I started thinking about the lede to my talk at Franklin and Marshall at the end of the month. My paper is going to focus on Sun Ra and pseudoarchaeology. Readers of this blog likely know what I going to say and argue.

I have the core of the paper sort of sketched out, but I wanted to get the lede right. I’ve been itching to give a highly polemical paper where I attack the anti-pseudoarchaeology in a playful, yet sincere way. As our world has devolved into a routine of polemic-per-day, I have begun to feel a bit uncomfortable even playfully contributing to this.

The second option is something more hopeful. One of the big pivots that I’m trying to make in this project is away from the rather simplistic position that many of the arguments made by the anti-pseudoarchaeology crowd are facile and even counter productive, toward a more positive argument based on the idea that pseudoarchaeology has particular and valuable insights into offer to the 21st century world. As I’ve said variously on this blog, I can see how pseudoarchaeology can contribute to more thoughtful understandings of expulsions and displacements, catastrophes, and even the development of disciplinary knowledge.

A final option for a lede is to talk about my particular areas of specialty. As a student of Late Antiquity and contemporary America, I am used to studying periods of time where the end of the world is imminent. These periods produced creative critiques not only of their own time, but also of their past. While embracing the creative potential of chaos may seem a bit tone deaf when people are suffering (and no less tone deaf than playful polemic in a world burdened by almost overwhelming sincerity), it could help frame the work that I’m doing within particular intellectual traditions that have continued relevance for today.