iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

came across this late. it's excellent. but if i may, i refer all kleist-commenters to paul de man's (100-page) chapter on this (3-page) text, which argues that the author kleist seeks to present the text's "graceful" romantic resolution as an impossible dodge of the aesthetic dilemma

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Doug Eacho @dougeacho.bsky.social · 15h

what's fun about adapting your dissertation into a book is finding out all the bits of your dissertation in which you wrote false things. you can go read the false thing today. i also have a sentence that says the opposite of that thing and is true. you can read it years from now

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Doug Eacho @dougeacho.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

we got one shot at a family photo during A's birthday party today and I think we nailed it

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Doug Eacho @dougeacho.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

I've now spoken with three bilingual readers who insist this book is much more successful, and feels more "literary," in its English translation than in its original Chinese. Are there canonical examples of this phenomenon? Not novels admiref by foreigners, but prose that *gains* from translation?

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Doug Eacho @dougeacho.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

i gave my NUS job talk - at 4pm, on a 12hr jet lag - gesturing at all my slides and audience with a large iced coffee

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Doug Eacho @dougeacho.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

USA live arts folks, please check out Annie's survey (and advocacy) work here -->

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Doug Eacho @dougeacho.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

it's "accumulated admin tasks" morning, which means i have scanned my face with my university authenticator app eight times in the past two hours.

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Doug Eacho @dougeacho.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

shout out to my former-yugo phd supervisor, who in seminar back in 2016 - commenting on the yugo breakup - said "the left has failed to properly theorize inflation and the subjectivities it produces" and at the time that seemed like a niche digression

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Doug Eacho @dougeacho.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

the fact that people think that "arts and humanities and social sciences" might guide AI development is itself a sign of how little people know about the findings of contemporary arts and humanities and social sciences

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Doug Eacho @dougeacho.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

I tutored an Azeri oligarch's teen son who had just moved to NYC from Baku and lived alone in a Plaza Hotel suite; sessions focused more on general explanations of US life than the SAT

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Doug Eacho @dougeacho.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

after decades of STS criticism a lot of academics got the message that we should ground critiques of new tech's in their economic and ideological functions rather than in categorical claims about The Human. turns out that doesn't matter bc everyone wants to argue against lib humanism regardless

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Reposted by Doug Eacho

Doug Eacho @dougeacho.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

The first modern spoken drama performed in Chinese was a Tokyo radical student adaptation of Uncle Tom's Cabin titled "The Black Slave Who Cried Out to Heaven."

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Doug Eacho @dougeacho.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

The first modern spoken drama performed in Chinese was a Tokyo radical student adaptation of Uncle Tom's Cabin titled "The Black Slave Who Cried Out to Heaven."

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Doug Eacho @dougeacho.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

see I've actually taken some Canada into my speech, but they did not ask about what to call washrooms or toques so I remain a loyal speaker of the True American English -- DMV Supremacy

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Doug Eacho @dougeacho.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

we in theatre & performance studies are lucky to have two intl conferences which have long been held outside of the US, and i frankly think that US scholars with funding have some obligation to direct their work and visibility to them

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Doug Eacho @dougeacho.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

Make your favorite film sound as boring as possible without giving away the title. a sales clerk marries a businessman who helped her with a tax problem. then her ex opens a gas station.

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Reposted by Doug Eacho

Doug Eacho @dougeacho.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

kusama is a difficult figure to place in performance history, but terribly important to it. like ono and kawara she introduced the ideas of the japanese avant-garde(s) to those of nyc; though not of gutai she at times shared that group's interest in doing painting and performance at once. (1/10)

b&w photo of Kusama Yayoi's "Kusama's Self-Obliteration," 1967. two nude men unfurl a banner on the brooklyn bridge walkway with the title of the piece; two nude women touch heads under the banner; kusama, clothed in leggings and a smock, paints splotchy dots on the performers' bodies.

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Doug Eacho @dougeacho.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

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Doug Eacho @dougeacho.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

I have to assume Stanford's IRB will soon be reviewing a dozen proposals from PhD students hoping to do ethnographic study of these parties

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Doug Eacho @dougeacho.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

me: "look, this is a nice calm new toy. there's a train and a station and a man. you can make the man go through the ticket gate and say Boop and make the doors open." 3.5yo: "dad you are the man and I am the train" "ok" "I'M GOING TO EAT YOUUU NOW WE HAVE TO FIGHTT" "um" "FIGHT ME WITH A SWORDDD"

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Reposted by Doug Eacho

Liesbeth Corens @onslies.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

"Every day, scientists are allowed to publish sentences like, “Many assume there is a close connection between human history and culture (Donaldson 2019)," and yet English departments are the problem?' Friction is good. Joined-up thinking is good. Refusing to be ashamed about the humanities is good.

defector.com

Humanists Have Done Nothing Wrong | Defector

For many years, I’ve held a pet theory that cultural consumers can be grouped into two broad categories: Primary Source People and Secondary Source People. The former are the book lovers, cinephiles, ...

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Doug Eacho @dougeacho.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

out of fairness i did it for my own field too

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Doug Eacho @dougeacho.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

Piranesi falls into that curious subset of sorta-literary genre novels which do not really reveal themselves as genre novels until the reader is already hooked, so you can recommend them to normies, so everyone loves it. also in this set: Never Let Me Go Ministry for the Future ... ?

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Doug Eacho @dougeacho.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

i finished this book. fascinating on ming/qing chinese development. i think a little sanguine about the PRC (2007, a different time.) but its deep discusson about the usa's transformation into an indebted racketeer post-hegemony is, twenty years on, chilling.

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Doug Eacho @dougeacho.bsky.social · 25/07/2026

it might be shu qi in millennium mambo

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Doug Eacho @dougeacho.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

current draft of readings for the "Drama in the 20th Century" undergraduate course I'll teach this winter. my attempt at narrating a global (with many caviats) canon. some essays and interviews will be added. i am also not 100% committed to which brecht to teach.

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Doug Eacho @dougeacho.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

checked out the letterboxd of my favorite film today (Hou's THREE TIMES, 2004) and the most liked review quotes Barthes and Badiou and ends with "love is a dialectics" i guess all the romantic theoryheads are suckers for this one together

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Doug Eacho @dougeacho.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

as someone teaching at one of the intl institutions that supposedly benefits from these sorts of stories, let me be clear: this is another major blow to the global production of new knowledge in all fields. there is no peer to what top US PhD programs have been.

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Doug Eacho @dougeacho.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

I terribly regret that I will be visiting in-laws in Florida instead of talking intoxication in Adelaide, but if you are luckier than me perhaps you can go to this:

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Doug Eacho @dougeacho.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

with my melbourne trip behind me i am pleased to announce my updated World Coffee City rankings. many places yet to see etc etc but : 1. Tokyo 2. Melbourne 3. Seattle 4. New York City 5. Vienna ... 96. Montréal 97. Rome 98. Cologne 99. Atlanta 100. Paris

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Doug Eacho @dougeacho.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

I watched this live at cruising altitude along with a solid third of this morning's Singapore to Melbourne Economy class, and people were *captivated* by this team and that incredible game. my god

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Doug Eacho @dougeacho.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

i think it is out of fashion so it may be worth stressing that reading "absalom, absalom!" is one of the most profound artistic experiences you can have, especially if you happen to be an overeducated american with 19C ancestry (IYKYK). its horrifying, doomed despair... well yes that's just it.

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Doug Eacho @dougeacho.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

three novels, 1. Absalom, Absalom! 2. Beloved 3. Mason & Dixon and three plays. 1. The America Play 2. The Iceman Cometh 3. Hip Hop Waltz of Euridice.

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Doug Eacho @dougeacho.bsky.social · 28/06/2026

the point of vineland, quite unlike OBAA, was that the 60s revolutionaries had their faults but those would pale before the media-coddled narcissism of their children

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Doug Eacho @dougeacho.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

showing my receipts -- there is one "Modern and Contemporary Drama" anthology in print, from Routledge (2016), ed. Maggie Gale and John Deeney. It's provocative in some ways I sympathize with, but it is 95% European without being labelled as such. (and the USA choices are, um, eccentric.)

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Doug Eacho @dougeacho.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

facing yet another year of teaching a modern drama class without there being a single anthology of global modern drama in print. publishers are captive to the tastes of US or UK undergrads and sign up scholars willing to distort our collective heritage to pander to two national narratives.

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Doug Eacho @dougeacho.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

getting to the point in my writing where when i pause to get ready for a conference i simply do not know how to say anything in less than 7K words. do folks have advice?

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Doug Eacho @dougeacho.bsky.social · 21/06/2026

happy father's day to any and all playing 007: First Light on our Playstation Fives. a true masterpiece of the Dad Media genre; playing it makes you Honorary Dad

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Doug Eacho @dougeacho.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

IMO the "what happened to RW art" puzzle is anglosphere specific, which supplies the answer: art holds little importance or power in these societies so the right has little need for it.

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Doug Eacho @dougeacho.bsky.social · 31/05/2026

captivating, fetishistic, clever. again and again surprising but at end the oldest and most familiar story there could be. postmodernism isn't dead yet. "Oh dear oh dear oh dear!"

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Doug Eacho @dougeacho.bsky.social · 26/05/2026

family update: 3yo has learned that grown-ups can not just *read* stories, but make them up. and change them via his demands. 3yo has further learned that mommy is much better at this than daddy. years of dad and mom sharing-by/alternating bedtime labor... now worthless

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Doug Eacho @dougeacho.bsky.social · 23/05/2026

look i keep telling people this is my favorite book and i am not kidding!

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Doug Eacho @dougeacho.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

finally writing up my take on Appia's 1913 Orfeo (pictured: the Act II underworld, perhaps the single most influential work of set design ever produced?). if anyone wants to share references to critical interpretations of the orpheus myth - right now i'm working w/ Blanchot's - please do share

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Doug Eacho @dougeacho.bsky.social · 16/05/2026

at the national gallery of singapore today, and as usual in this country, having my mind blown. astonishing heights of postcolonial modernism. posting for now, will add alt text captions later.

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Doug Eacho @dougeacho.bsky.social · 14/05/2026

thoughtful thread, and I like the "rather than insist on our value, we should ask valuable questions" framing. but for decades humanists have explored valuable questions (like those mentioned) and have found institutions increasingly hostile to our answers.

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Doug Eacho @dougeacho.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

it's when bradford cox (as atlas sound) covered My Sharona for an hour out of spite from a shouted request. has it all: the post-08 psych-punk sound, anxiety about performance, gender, fury, irony, and that goddamn chord and octave beat just never ever ever ends

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Doug Eacho @dougeacho.bsky.social · 10/05/2026

kiki imagines she will be a logistics worker of modernity but discovers she is a postmodern service labourer and she doesn't like it

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Doug Eacho @dougeacho.bsky.social · 07/05/2026

four months of singaporean bilingual preschool and our 3yo now sings happy birthday in mandarin when throwing a party for one of his stuffies

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