Profs and Pints Meetup-Metro DC

This talk has completely sold out in advance and no door tickets will be available. You must have purchased a ticket to be admitted.

Profs and Pints DC presents: “Tolkien’s Fight Against Futurism,” a look at a beloved fantasy author as fundamentally engaged in a battle to preserve beauty, with Graham McAleer, professor of philosophy at Loyola University Maryland and teacher of a course on the morals and politics of Lord of the Rings.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/dc-tolkien-futurism .]

As a young man in the early 20th century J.R.R. Tolkien watched an avant-garde art form known as Futurism become all the rage. Shaped by industrialization and by admiration for new machinery, Futurism celebrated speed, acceleration, and the whirl of technical innovation, earning it another name, Vorticism, in Tolkien’s England.

Although remembered mainly as a writer, Tolkien also was an accomplished pen-and-ink artist who kept abreast of the art movements of his time. He developed a distaste for Futurism and what it signified that only grew stronger as he experienced the horrors of modern warfare as a soldier at the 1916 Battle of the Somme. He regarded what Futurism celebrated as “the Machine,” representing fascist politics and apocalyptic war, and his opposition to it deeply influenced not just his art but his written works.

Gain insights into how Tolkien’s sensibilities as a visual artist shaped his worldview and writing with Graham McAleer, a scholar of philosophy who has closely studied Tolkien’s work.

Professor McAleer will look at how Tolkien’s lore can be seen as one long meditation on beauty and its problematic twin, vanity, with what separated them most in Tolkien’s mind being their respective approaches to time: Beauty is patient, vanity is not.

We’ll look at Tolkien’s argument that that impatience mars beauty and corrupts our standing in a cosmos, and we’ll consider his characterization of his own work as “cosmogonical drama” dealing with the universe’s origins. You’ll learn how his tales of Dark Lords squaring off against elven queens and genial Hobbits reflect his view that war is always a dispute about beauty.

You’ll come to see Tolkien as having grappled with a profound philosophical question that dates back to Plato, and you’ll emerge from the talk with a much deeper understanding and appreciation of Tolkien’s works. (Door: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: A bust of Tolkien at Oxford. From a photo by Julian Nyča / Wikimedia Commons.

This talk has completely sold out in advance and no additional tickets will be available at the door.

Profs and Pints DC presents: “Japanese Ghost Stories,” with Brittany Warman, former instructor at Ohio State University and co-founder of the Carterhaugh School of Folklore and the Fantastic.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/dc-japanese-ghost-stories .]

Spend a winter night feeling chills down your spine. Join folklorist Brittany Warman, a favorite of Profs and Pints audiences, for a look at the eerie ghost stories of Japan.

You’ll get acquainted with several spirits and creatures that populate traditional Japanese folklore, among them: The Yuki-Onna, the sinister snow woman who dances on a knife-edge between murder and mercy. A fabulously beautiful samurai daughter who demands bravery and intellect from her future husband—but actually just might be a goblin. The spirit that haunts the cherry blossom tree, whose irresistible melancholy is “the phantom light of long-expired suns.”

You’ll also learn about the incredible life of Koizumi Yakumo, the storyteller who first made these traditional tales available to western audiences and helped popularize them around the world. Born in 1850 under the name of Lafcadio Hearn to an Irish officer-surgeon and a Greek woman, he led a wildly unconventional life. He travelled from Greece to the slums of Dublin to the newspaper offices of Cincinnati to the kitchens of New Orleans before settling in Japan, where he adopted Japanese citizenship and changed his name.

His life as a permanent outsider—and the hatred of prejudice instilled in him by it—shaped him as a storyteller. He became both a conduit of Japanese culture and a champion of the chilling and uncanny.

This deep dive in his life and the ghost stories he gathered and retold will be by turns frightening, hilarious, baffling, and poignant, and will make you understand why his tales remain beloved in Japan and the world over. It’s a great opportunity to become familiar with the ghosts of a nation and the man who told them to the world. (Door: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: A Japanese Yuki-Onna, or snow spirit, as depicted in the 1737 Hyakkai-Zukan, or book of demons, by Sawaki Suushi.

Profs and Pints Northern Virginia presents: “Japanese Ghost Stories,” with Brittany Warman, former instructor at Ohio State University and co-founder of the Carterhaugh School of Folklore and the Fantastic.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/nv-japanese-ghost-stories .]

Spend a winter night feeling chills down your spin. Join folklorist Brittany Warman, a favorite of Profs and Pints audiences, for a look at the eerie ghost stories of Japan.

You’ll get acquainted with several spirits and creatures that populate traditional Japanese folklore, among them: The Yuki-Onna, the sinister snow woman who dances on a knife-edge between murder and mercy. A fabulously beautiful samurai daughter who demands bravery and intellect from her future husband—but actually just might be a goblin. The spirit that haunts the cherry blossom tree, whose irresistible melancholy is “the phantom light of long-expired suns.”

You’ll also learn about the incredible life of Koizumi Yakumo, the storyteller who first made these traditional tales available to western audiences and helped popularize them around the world. Born in 1850 under the name of Lafcadio Hearn to an Irish officer-surgeon and a Greek woman, he led a wildly unconventional life. He travelled from Greece to the slums of Dublin to the newspaper offices of Cincinnati to the kitchens of New Orleans before settling in Japan, where he adopted Japanese citizenship and changed his name.

His life as a permanent outsider—and the hatred of prejudice instilled in him by it—shaped him as a storyteller. He became both a conduit of Japanese culture and a champion of the chilling and uncanny.

This deep dive in his life and the ghost stories he gathered and retold will be by turns frightening, hilarious, baffling, and poignant, and will make you understand why his tales remain beloved in Japan and the world over. It’s a great opportunity to become familiar with the ghosts of a nation and the man who told them to the world. (Door: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: A Japanese Yuki-Onna, or snow spirit, as depicted in the 1737 Hyakkai-Zukan, or book of demons, by Sawaki Suushi.

Profs and Pints DC presents: “Queer Country,” on the long, often-hidden presence of LGBTQ+ performers in country music, with Tanya Olson, lecturer in English and scholar of gender and sexuality studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/dc-queer-country .]

Although country music is often thought of as conservative, rural, and straight, queer artists have always been part of its story.

Learn about the important role that queer artists, their ideas, and their experiences have played in country music with Tanya Olson, a cultural critic whose recent work explores the intersection of country music, identity, and tradition.

She’ll talk about queer artists across generations, describing how they are hidden and what it means to stand in the circle of tradition without being seen. She’ll explore how queerness shows up in the songs, stories, and sounds of country music even when it isn’t named, and also what’s at stake when those threads are left out of the history we tell.

You’ll leave with a deeper understanding of country music’s past, as well as a sharper eye for who’s been missing from the picture all along. You’ll gain an appreciation for why inclusion in country radio and the Grand Ole Opry matters, as well as an understanding of how a queer presence might strengthen, rather than threaten, country music's legacy.

Olson’s latest book of poetry, Born Backwards, builds on the language and imagery of country music to ask who gets remembered and why. Learning from her will make for a memorable evening. (Door: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: Country artist k.d. lang performs in 2008 as part of the Cambridge Folk Festival (Photo by Bryan Ledgard / Creative Commons).