Despite everything, I enjoyed our discussions today: I love my job and students like y’all are like 98% of the reason why. The work we do together may feel irrelevant or hyper-specialized or not remunerative, etc. at times, but I fervently believe that learning to read rigorously and write searchingly is “equipment for living” (as Kenneth Burke said), and I’m grateful that we can work on it together this term (yes: I’m still learning how!).

Given our discussion of the macro picture today, you might be interested in an interview published in the NYT today between Linda Polgreen and Tressie McMillan Cottom. They’re both great writers, and Cottom is one of my heroes in academia now: her book LOWER ED is an ethnography of students’ lives at the non-selective and often exploitative for-profit colleges that an increasing share of working-class students started to attend in the 2000s and 2010s. She was one of them, and her brilliant analysis exposes the seductions and the cynicism of the model.

She’s smart as a whip about politics, and this piece has Polgreen and McMillan doing a post-mortem of Kamala’s campaign, but also taking a much broader view of where things might go from here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/07/opinion/presidential-election-2024-democrats.html

It’s paywalled, but remember that all CUNY folk get the NYT for free here.

Reading Jenny Offil’s novel, “Weather” was very different from reading Ghosh’s novel “The Hungry Tide”. Both are discussing the Anthropocene, but have very different approaches. Offill’s novel follows the life of an average college librarian navigating everyday life, while also dealing with the struggles of taking care of others in her life, particularly her drug-addicted brother, her husband, and her son. She takes the job responding to podcast listeners about survival and climate dread, this only amplifies her anxiety about the future. Offill allows the reader to relate with the protagonist through her insecurities and anxieties. The novel centers on the looming threat of climate change and the pervasive dread it inspires, capturing the psychological toll of living in an era of ecological crisis.

Offill uses Lizzie as a character grappling with a sense of dread about the future, amplified by her anxieties of others who fear the world’s ecological fate. Her job working with Sylvia requires her to answer emails from people seeking guidance and reassurance amid their climate anxieties. The emails reveal a collective consciousness fixated on survival, from those asking “how to prepare for the apocalypse” to others fearing that it is “already too late” (Offill, Weather, p. 7). Lizzie being at this job causes her to absorb this dread, feeling the weight of the environmental crisis in a new and more immediate way. Lizzie’s reactions to these climate concerns illustrate how easily anxiety can take root, transforming into an omnipresent background hum of fear. Even as she tries to stay grounded, Lizzie admits to struggling with her sleep and inner calm. She confesses, “It’s the end of the world every day, for some people,” (p. 9), acknowledging that, for many, the crisis is not abstract or distant but an immediate threat. Through Lizzie’s observations, Offill shows how climate anxiety permeates modern consciousness, especially for those who can envision the bleak possibilities awaiting future generations.

The Hungry Tide and Weather both tackle the Anthropocene in different ways. Offill focuses more on the psychological toll, often isolating the nature of climate anxiety. Conversely, Ghosh focuses on how environmental policies and global inquiries shape the lives of those most vulnerable to ecological collapse. I feel Offill’s approach to the Anthropocene gives a different point of view that allows the reader to feel the anxiety and helplessness of climate change with limited means of escape. The existential crisis that is the Anthropocene is complex and affects not just the environment but psyches as well.

In Nayar’s article “The Postcolonial Uncanny…”, he looks at how the past of colonialism continues to affect the present, he uses Ghosh’s novel The Hungry Tide to do this, specifically with the lives of two characters, Fokir and Kanai. Nayar uses this idea of the “uncanny” to explore how the colonial past still haunts the characters in Ghosh’s novel. According to Nayar, uncanny is the feeling of something familiar becoming strange or unsettling to someone. Both Fokir, a fisherman, and Kanai, a heavily educated businessman, are shaped by the history of colonialism in the Sundarbans, but in different ways.

Fokir, who lives in the Sundarbans, is connected to the land in a more personal way. However, this land has been affected by centuries of colonial rule, which changed the natural environment and displaced the people who lived there. Nayar speaks on how the British built embankments, drained swamps, and exploited the land’s resources, leaving lasting scars on the place. For Fokir, the land can be seen as both his home and a reminder of how colonialism took away his people’s traditional ways of life. Especially since his way of living and making money won’t be very reliable in the future. The land that is supposed to sustain him will soon feel alien and dangerous, which is a result of the continuing changes brought about by the colonial past. Fokir’s life shows how colonial history continues to disrupt what should feel familiar and safe, making his connection to the land both comforting and unsettling.

Kanai, on the other hand, is an outsider from Kolkata who comes to the Sundarbans to review his uncle’s journals. His uncle had studied the indigenous people of the region, but Kanai himself is more distant/disconnected from the land and the people there. At first, Kanai tries to see the region through an intellectual and ’sophisticated’ lens, seeing it as a place for research and discovery. However, as he reads his uncle’s journals, and as the novel goes on, Kanai realizes that, while he may have grown up far from these struggles, he is still connected to the effects of colonialism. The unsettling part for Kanai is that, while he thought he understood the history of the region because of how educated he was, he hadn’t fully grasped how personal and painful that history was for the people who still live there. For him, the past is not just something in books but something that affects his sense of identity and his place in the world.

Together, we see how Fokir and Kanai are both affected by colonialism, just in different ways. Fokir’s life is directly shaped by the land and its colonial past, while Kanai’s understanding of that past is disrupted when he confronts its emotional and personal effects. Both of the characters live with the tension between what they’re most familiar with (their home, their history) and the effects of what unsettles them (the effects of colonialism that still shape their lives). This creates an eerie feeling that the past is never fully gone. Through Fokir and Kanai, The Hungry Tide shows how colonialism continues to affect individuals and communities in more ways than one. No matter what route one decides to take regarding one’s life, colonialism will still impact the land it once affected.

So far, in Weather by Jenny Offill, the small, fragmented observations of everyday life reflect a deeper sense of existential unease and uncertainty. Through Lizzie, a librarian in New York, Offill captures the moments of banality and tension that shape daily existence in a world grappling with looming crises, showing the contrast between the mundane and the apocalyptic—blending everyday life with subtle, pervasive reminders of potential collapse. The chapter opens with Lizzie’s interactions in her job at the library, where she engages with a range of patrons, each carrying their peculiar concerns. An adjunct professor struggles with academic demands; a woman takes toilet paper for unknown reasons, and a man is happy to pay library fines. These small but poignant details describe Lizzie’s work environment— examples of people barely coping with life. While ordinary, this setting is imbued with a hint of absurdity and resilience, making it a subtle reflection of societal fragility. “The man in the shabby suit does not want his fines lowered. He is pleased to contribute to our institution” (Offill 9). Lizzie quite literally watches this man while at work and internally judges his behavior with disbelief and humor, which captures her everyday absurdities, hinting at life’s oddities. 

Lizzie’s family dynamics also shows signs of a subtle apocalypse. Her anxiety about the future affects her relationship with her son Eli, evident in her rushing him to school and wondering if she should have had more children. She also shows love and worry when she is with her brother as he struggles with his emotional issues and drug addiction recovery. Her personal unrest matches with some of the societal anxieties threaded throughout the chapter, where the tension between maintaining everyday life and preparing for an uncertain future shows more constantly. “The window in our bedroom is open. You can see the moon if you lean out and crane your neck… The moon will be fine, I think. No one is worrying about the moon” (Offill 10), Lizzie muses, linking the celestial to the terrestrial uncertainties she feels yet cannot articulate fully. It shows weathering in the literal sense of enduring daily life and the figurative meaning of withstanding growing dread. Lizzie’s life is a constant negotiation between the mundane and the apocalyptic, revealing a core tension that resonates with contemporary anxieties about climate change, social fragmentation, and personal survival. Offill uses these subtle observations to question the resilience of people and society, probing how we might continue to function in a world that grows increasingly uncertain.

But perhaps life has gone downhill, and that sense of dread mixed with dark humor is a coping mechanism. Offill humorously captures Lizzie’s skepticism toward religious explanations for natural phenomena through a mock catechism-style: Q: “How is the goodness of God manifested even in the clothing of birds and beasts? A: Small birds, which are the most delicate, have more feathers than those that are hardier. Beasts that live in the icy regions have thicker, coarser coats than those that dwell in the tropical heat” (Offill 22). The humor arises from Lizzie’s ironic use of a traditional religious format to explain scientifically straightforward animal adaptations. By framing these evolutionary traits as evidence of “the goodness of God,” she subtly mocks the tendency to assign divine intent to aspects of nature that biology easily explains. She compares science with a theological question, which adds wit and irony and shows Lizzie’s critical perspective and her tendency to find absurdity in the clash between spiritual beliefs and empirical understanding. Humor does not negate the existential themes but amplifies them, which shows how it can be a coping mechanism in a world where reality feels increasingly surreal at the same time.

 Offill subtly critiques how people try to rationalize or distract themselves from potential collapse, whether by obsessing over minor details or leaning into dark humor. Weather mediates human fragility in the face of more extensive, unmanageable forces. By interweaving Lizzie’s everyday encounters with existential concerns, Offill talks about the often-overlooked emotional labor of living in an era where the ordinary and the catastrophic coexist, where we are all, in some way, learning to live focusing one eye on our daily routines and the other on the unpredictable future.

(Note: I am referencing pages from the epub version of the text, so they might be different from the physical copy of the book) 

The novel Weather by Jenny Offill, explores the very complicated idea of modern anxieties, climate change, and political uncertainty. primarily establishing  a tone that weaves humor with dread, this lays a foundation setting up a world where personal and global/environmental anxieties and uncertainties join together in a reflection of our lives in a time that feels like there’s an inconspicuous countdown. Lizzie, a librarian, is a rather keen observer of the world around her. Her life is filled with small yet significant details of the people she encounters and her daily routines. Offill uses sectional, flow of thought paragraphs that give a glimpse in to her mind, as it jumps from her brother’s struggles with addiction to her responsibility to care for Eli, and her marriage to Ben. This fragmented structure arguably reflects Lizzie’s fractured focus and the sense of unease that remains present in the novel.  Lizzie’s former mentor, Sylvia, runs a podcast focused on “doom” and the end of civilization, and Lizzie helps answer listeners’ emails, exposing her to people’s questions, fears, and anxieties. This work serves as nothing short of a factor of unease that channels very real fears about climate change and societal deconstruction directly into Lizzie’s mind, which furthers her sense of dread.These emails, filled with apocalyptic almost unhinged Rhetoric, are unsettling for Lizzie, who struggles with her own anxieties about the future. As the chapter progresses, Lizzie’s role in the podcast and the exposure to these questions make her come face to face with her own sense of responsibility toward a world that seems to just be becoming more and more unstable and unreliable. She wants to be able to have that care for whats arounds her but is overwhelmed by the magnitude of the issues she has become increasingly over aware of.

The choice in balancing heavy hitting themes with a sense of humor is an interesting one. Lizzie’s voice is drenched with irony, specifically when she’s faced with situations that highlight the craziness of modern anxieties. This, to me, is a take on how humor in the midst of chaos, is a common human experience and that people can laugh at their own fears and problems  even as they feel the weight of them despite how serious. For instance, when Lizzie mentions the strange emails she receives for Sylvia’s podcast, she notes how people tend to fixate on the bizarre aspects of impending collapse, what to stockpile, how to get ready for survival,  as if these actions might cushion  them from the atrocity of what they fear. This ‘dark’ humor is almost  a coping mechanism for Lizzie and a perspective on the ways people attempt to rationalize the irrational or deal with situations that feel fully beyond their control.  Lizzie humorous approach from the start paints her as an  extremely relatable character, she embodies an  everyday person of sorts caught between their personal issues and a world seemingly on the verge of disaster. Which is much like our world today, with the uncertainty of the future, questions on democracy and other related things.  Her inner monologue reveals a struggle that many people can recognize, the desire to care deeply for a world in crisis while managing the challenges of day to day life. The pressures Lizzie faces from her relationships to her brother’s struggles and her unpaid work for the doom-filled podcast, all make her a character who just feels as though she is obligated to carry the weight of the world and its issues even though her own life is under the threat of unraveling. Lizzie resonates because she doesn’t have the answers. She isnt an activist, she isn’t a genius, she isn’t a hero, instead, she is just a person. A person doing her best to cope with the very complex realities of life.