EastWesterly Review
since 1999

You cannot say we didn’t try. Budget cuts are real, of course, and Purewater University’s rebrand under new president Ridge “Rotgut” Jahline to make PU “The Job-Creation Station” made a conference featuring literary and cultural theory a difficult line item to justify. “You can do it as long as it doesn’t cost anything, doesn’t take place on campus, and has no association with the university,” was essentially what the email from the Office of Academic Affairs read. Yes, sir! Message received, sir!

From there, things just got substantially less substantial, ever more clearly much less clear.

Emails flew between would-be participants. Slack channels blew up. Eventually, a Signal group chat was started.

What didn’t happen, in any discernible way, was a conference—at least, not one that involved people in rooms reading papers at one another and then awkwardly schmoozing between sessions.

What did happen was papers shared, potential presentations described, envisioned, alluded to. What did happen was real work, real communication, parasocial relationships online, at least one probable throuple, and and an ice cream social in a neighborhood park, all aglow with a well-intentioned vibe.

Consequently, we present to you The Lost Conference . . .

The Wreck of the Alien and the Fundamental Underwear of War

–Olga Victoria Warner

Part film critique, part nautical chart, and part runway show, Warner’s paper derives from a thick description of an early scene in Ridley Scott’s Alien featuring Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) attired in the titular undergarments and the subsequent carnage and mayhem as an extended metaphor for how the patriarchy pits women against one another. The idea is astute, and the cat is cute.

Musk in the Dust: Rapid, Unplanned Disassembly as Western Trope, a Showdown

–Biff Jezos

Things fall apart; mere capitalism is spread across east Texas, Louisiana, and parts of the Gulf of Mexico. As fly SpaceX rockets, so goes the vibe of these, assuredly end, times.

Dictator Projection: Greenland, Bigliness, and the Misprision of Egomania, a Battle Plan

–Boer Tyredall

Much has been written about how the Mercator Projection makes Greenland look much “biglier” than it really is, attracting the wandering eye of a particular president and whetting his massive and increasingly imperial appetite. Here, Tyredall brings it all together in a tour de force of bad perception and the faults of looking at the world from the perspective of a flattened screen.

Dog Moms, Cat Ladies, and Window Squirrels: the Furred Fun of Influence

–Kiki Pudelkrush

Doomscrolling, Pudelkrush argues, isn’t the only thing to do online, and while the video vacuity of most critter-oriented content on YouTube can easily be critiqued, there’s a real reason it strikes a chord: we need to know we’re not alone.

Sir GaulaHead: Arthurian Anglophilia, and the Normcore Conquest, a Paradoxysm

–Richard Lionphardt

Literary types like us get the round-table references, but the “normcore” stuff just seems like GenZ not understanding the anchoring influence that was the Land’s End catalog. Man cannot dress in corduroys alone, but he sure can use it cover most of the work week.

Biz and Teen: TikTok, Insta, and the Science of Complexity, a Doomscroll

–Mia T. Orakle

Orakle’s basic premise is isn’t just that endlessly scrolling social media created a nation of strung-out dopamine junkies but that the outputs of the algorithms are basically unknowable. Chaos theory applies, lives coming to resemble the slop they constantly ingest.

Gobblin’ Mode: Family Relations, Thanksgiving, and the Politics of the Sloppy Bitch, a Let’s Do It! Checklist

–Kendra Mukbang

One way of thinking about the question “Am I the asshole?” is that if you have to ask, you probably are. But admitting you’re the problem isn’t the same as admitting blame: dysfunction in any family is as varied as the dishes in a potluck and, Mukbang suggests, equally revealing of the foibles of the people who brung ’em. When all else fails, you can always eat your feelings.

Maxx-Maxxing: how Maxxing has Maxxed Gen. Z to the Ultimate Maxx

–Funicular Joiryde

Joiryde’s paper, even though it wasn’t delivered F2F, still managed to be in-your-face and nutrageous. It would have gone viral had he bothered to knock his jaw to pieces, we’re relatively sure.

Lochdown: Scotland, School Shootings, and Nessie as Genderqueer Icon

–Paul Roux

Shrouded in mystery and darkness, obscured by myth and images of unknown provenance, the Loch Ness “monster” easily takes on all our cultural fears—and aspirations. Nessie is both exploder of our expectations and her-o, but Roux rows around the subject, never touching bottom.

Make Amerika Hoppy Again: Collectivization, Convention, and the Decline of Craft Brewing, a Cortisol Hit

–O’Dell Newbelle Gyum

While lefty X-ers, Boomers, and Millennials are still stinging from GenZ’s massive MAGA defection in 2024, we have one more complaint to make: the kids are just not drinking enough. This reviewer, for one, had to drown her sorrows in some Dark Truth as she read—the stout, that is.

Shat GPT: Effluent, Affluence, and the AI “Gap,” a Discussion String

–Invidious Wang

Wang wasn’t wrong to show us what AI slop really amounts to: a collective fecal bloom in the mental environment. Where’s Kalle Lasn when the culture most needs him?

Chapel Rune: Pop Music, Ancient Worship, and the Anxieties of Archeology, a Seance

–Anda Blüm

This is one we regret not seeing in the flesh, or at least, we wish we could commune with it in spirit. The rune-scripted sections added authenticity, but where in the world did she get that font? And is it déclassé to ask for a translation?

The ICE Age: Immigration, Internal Combustion, Authoritarianism, and Climate Change

–Kris T. No’m

A dedicated depiction of the depredations of denialism, the destructiveness of dictatorship, and the desertification of driving these days, No’m’s very name describes a collective inability to take it all in.

Make America Groove Again: Funk, Soul, and the Battle for the Beat of the Nation

–Boo C. Caulins

Fortunately, this paper included a QR code allowing conferees to download some sick beats, because all we see when we turn on the news or scroll through our socials are nauseating beat-downs.

Dramaturd: Partisanship, Social Media, and the Theatrix of the Shitpost

–Mary Chino Cherry

A keen analysis of the political scene, if I do say so myself ;)!

Make America Grain Again: Subsidies, Ag Policy, and Ethanol, an Irrigation Pivot

–Joan U.S. Gothick

This might be particular to Purewater U., an ag-college-turned-liberal-arts-university-turned-technical-institute, but when we look out past the old dorms, the new dorms, and the water tower, we still see the rolling fields of corn, and, frankly, we worry.

The Shithole Stomp: Geopolitics as Racist Ur-Text, a Keening

–Uhuru Ubuntu

Beneath a particularly orange-hued politician (and, surprisingly, there is an understory), there lurks an international cabal of far-right influencers, activists, and podcasters, who, rather than conspiring behind the scenes, seem more than comfortable telegraphing their hate worldwide. Ubuntu takes the long view, though, showing that these times are just one more chapter in a long and ugly book.

Hit the Deck: Skating, Cassettes, and the Counterculture of the Mixtape, a Slow Jam

–To’ Nee Hauk

As one who dutifully schlepped a box full of cassingles with her from dwelling to dwelling for the least four decades, this one hit home as well as hitting the greatest hits and gnarliest moves. But have you priced vintage Nakamichi tape players these days?

Stock/Pile: Digital Media, AI, and “Training Data,” an Exercise in Appropriation

–Sambanquemann Fried

Explaining to our students that automating plagiarism using AI doesn’t make it not plagiarism has been the bane of everyone teaching above the elementary level for the last half decade. I’d assign them Fried’s paper, but I know they’d just use Adobe’s AI summary on the .pdf, and then claim they earned their A.

Quoth the Ravin’ Evermore: Tweeting, Bleating, Trolling and Scrolling; the Endless Suffering of the Social Media User, a Rant

–Redd X. Flagg

According to Flagg, this paper began in that long, lost, but bright, hopeful moment when there was talk of making social media companies pay us to use their platforms. But as Flagg notes, even if we could break our addiction, it would be hard to deny our dependence.

Mister Twister: Saving the Stormchasing Livestream from Male Dominance, a Mesoscale Discussion

–Jennifer Brandon-Hall and Paige Timmer-McKinney

As my partner and I have often noted, women are socialized not to drive into the middle of destructive vortices (though I may aver that a few past relationships should still count). But storm-chasing remains a male-dominated pursuit. A handful of women are breaking through, though, and they have the hail-battered windshields to prove it.

MAHA HA HA: Alternative Health, Satire, and the Great American Crackpot, a Death Notice

–KC Redball

Redball is on the ball with their assessment here: a lot of what now passes for government-approved medical advice is really just metastatic contrarianism in the classic American vein. It’s hard, they write, to make fun of a world so far gone, for how much further can one go?

Turing Point: AI, Christian Nationalism, and the Singularity, a Rally

–Carly Churque

As part of her research for this paper, Churque put what she had written through multiple AI detectors. To her relief, it came up Presbyterian.

And so . . .

Even with this year’s chaos, confusion, and lack of a conference proper, we remain ever hopeful. Perhaps we can wait it out; perhaps we can work toward that world where forays into fields Foucuaultian seem like meaningful contributions to academe instead of terrifying acts of insurrection. Maybe, like for a handful of our colleagues, the answer for us awaits overseas. No matter what shakes out, we’ll write it up here, with dedication of not 100% accuracy.

For EWR, Mary Chino Cherry