After Wednesday's Class: Energy Humanities, Oil, and The Beast

As I noted today, I'll also use this blog space to site references relevant to our class. I'll post these references following class on Wednesdays.

Here's the Tar Sands Songbook video by Tanya Kalmanovitch that we looked at today. The images, music, and comments in this video provide some additional context forThe Beast. Kalmanovitch's comment that, at first, she didn't think music was in any way linked to oil also links to our discussion of the energy humanities and the ways in which our lives are so thoroughly enmeshed with oil even, or especially, when we don't notice it. I also liked her discussion of how music was a way "to enter into issues [like oil] imaginatively."

Here's the link to the brief news clip on the Fort McMurray fire in early May 2016.

Here's the a link to Louis Helbig's Beautiful Destruction; the catalogue includes the photograph "Sulpher and Snow" that we looked at today as well as commentary from writers spanning the political spectrum. We discussed the tension between beauty and destruction or violence and we also discussed briefly the ways in which Goldrin et al. sought to generate a dialogue between polarized positions in The Beast in much the same way that Helbig seeks to activate a dialogue between opposed ideas in his work.

Here's a link to the Thinking Allowed podcast, "The Power of Oil," that offers a more global angle on oil and also provides a bit of history (we didn't discuss this today).

Here's a link to the list of petroleum-based products.

Finally, I didn't get a chance to draw your attention to this website, the Petrofictionary. It looks at oil keywords and resonates with our approach to words and names in this class. (With thanks to Brenda Carr-Vellino for pointing this site out to me.)

That's it for now. Please feel free to add other references as you come across them.