SECOND WIND

Going live on FB today at 2 pm Pacific! TODAY!

You are cordially invited to cruise by a “front door” mini-concert by SECOND WIND (Susan C. Jarratt, flute / Jonathan Alexander, piano).

The musicians will be performing, near the door for your outdoor enjoyment, a short musical set of something baroque, something blue, something romantic.

Please wear a mask and distance as needed.

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Second Wind

music for flute and piano

The Wayfinding Project

LOVE working on THE WAYFINDING PROJECT with my UC colleagues. Check it out: https://thewayfindingproject.com.

The Wayfinding Project is led by a core of three University of California researchers: Carl Whithaus (UC, Davis), Karen Lunsford (UC, Santa Barbara), and Jonathan Alexander (UC, Irvine), who, over the past three years, have been engaged in a collaborative and multi-campus research project that examines the “writing lives” of UC students that are 3-10 years post graduation. The group has been particularly interested in the kinds of professional, personal, and civic kinds of writing that our alumni regularly engage in, as well as what kinds of knowledges about writing these alumni are developing after graduating. As they have analyzed their pilot data, the researchers have considered how the concept of “wayfinding” might help us understand how our graduates continue to develop as writers after graduation, building on and augmenting the skills strategies, and habits of mind learned on our campuses. The Wayfinding Project builds on findings from existing large-scale research projects within writing studies, such as Michigan State University’s “Writing, Information, and Digital Experience” (WIDE) study and the multi-campus work documented in The Meaningful Writing Project. Unlike these efforts, the Wayfinding Project is designed to attend to alumni’s experiences after they have left our campuses and are making transitions from collegiate to career and personal lives beyond their time as undergraduates. Currently, WP researchers have surveyed nearly 275 students from UC campuses and conducted in-depth focus group interviews with 22 participants — all of whom reflect the diverse population of a minority-majority state, and who also represent the various socioeconomic classes that attend UC.

WE ARE UCI: New Podcast!

Co-hosting a brand new podcast at UCI!

The Office of the Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning (OVPTL) at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) is launching a new podcast to feature the struggles and triumphs of UCI’s diverse student body to redefine student success. Hosted by Hai Truong, UCI alum and marketing strategist for the Office of the Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning, and Jonathan Alexander, associate dean in the Division of Undergraduate Education and Chancellor's Professor of English and Informatics, the “WE ARE UCI: Student Success Podcast” will be launching later this Fall.

“We will provide a platform where the students can share their stories of strength and resilience,” says Associate Dean Alexander. “By amplifying their voices, we hope to inspire the entire Anteater community and encourage other UCI students to seek out opportunities. We also want to redefine what success as a student means in these changing times.”
Upcoming episodes will feature candid conversations with students about the personal, social and educational experiences that have shaped their pursuit of success at UCI.

“WE ARE UCI: Student Success Podcast” will be available to stream and download at iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, and wherever else you listen to your podcasts. http://weareuci.uci.edu/podcast/

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Nayland Blake Retrospective

The art of Nayland Blake offers one of the most pressing meditations on — and invitations to interrogate — the circulation of pain in contemporary American life. A retrospective of their work at the new Institute of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, one of the largest recent exhibits for the artist on this coast, foregrounds such an invitation by showcasing Blake’s frequent use of bondage equipment, chains, images, and video of discomfort and pain, and periodic gruesome glimpses of self- and other-inflicted suffering.

Check out the full review: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/getting-hard-with-nayland-blake-on-the-artists-recent-retrospective-in-los-angeles/

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Getting Hard with Nayland Blake

Getting Nerdy

A podcast episode of THE IMAGINATION DESK, in which I talk with Joey Eschrich of the ASU Center for Science and the Imagination.  We take a closer look at popular modern Science Fiction TV shows and their cultural and political uses, along with a look at writing stories in the digital age.

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EASTSIDERS and Kit Williamson

My interview with Kit Williamson, creator of the hit series EASTSIDERS, in which Kit talks about representation as politics and the importance of being unapologetically queer …

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/unapologetically-queer-kit-williamson-on-eastsiders-and-revolutionary-representation/

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I also think there’s something to be said for queer stories written from and for a queer point of view. And that’s something I hope to continue doing in my career.

Another article on Nico!

In a new book, published this year by Crown, Space Between: Explorations of Love, Sex, and Fluidity, Tortorella traverses some of the same terrain as The Love Bomb in a largely memoir-ish account of their life that also reads at times like a manifesto — and one that understands their generation, millennials, at the heart of the new gender fluidity. Read more at LARB: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/on-millennial-fluidity-or-a-second-open-love-letter-to-nico-tortorella/

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On Millenniall

Fluidity

or, a Second Open Love Letter to Nico Tortorella