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Category Archives: Popular Culture
Adaptation
I really love the idea of courses which combine trying to apply a body of knowledge to a practical problem with exploring why said practical problem actually poses intellectually challenging questions with no clear answer. I’ve mentioned before at the … Continue reading
Posted in Academia, Intellectual Property, Popular Culture, Sheer Raw Geekery
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I Would Have Had My Great Books, Too, If It Weren’t For Those Meddling Hippies
Mark Edmundson complains, again, that the dirty hippies screwed up the world and killed literature in the process. Rather than a dreary point-by-point response to everything objectionable in the essay, I want to focus on one issue in it that … Continue reading
Fun Home
As long as I’m talking about parenting, two anecdotes: 1) We teach on the MLK holiday, but I had time to take my no-school-that-day daughter out to lunch. We ended up talking about a bunch of things, but at one … Continue reading
Posted in Domestic Life, Popular Culture
3 Comments
Blizzard Is CLU
x-posted to Terra Nova I don’t understand why Tron: Legacy has come in for so much critical abuse. I like it as much as my colleague Bob Rehak does. Just taken as an action film, it’s considerably more entertaining and … Continue reading
Posted in Games and Gaming, Popular Culture
2 Comments
Mimesis and Interactivity
Here comes a bunch of blogging! Fasten your seat belts. ================ So yes, we got a Kinect at our house. I am the very model of the modern gamer tech geek. As an incremental change to the wand-driven interface design … Continue reading
Posted in Games and Gaming, Popular Culture
3 Comments
Restoring Sanity One Civic Ritual At a Time
Couldn’t make it to Washington today, much as I’d like to. As Jon Stewart said when they announced the rally, probably most of us who’d liked to have been there wouldn’t come because we have lives. For us, that was … Continue reading
Posted in Domestic Life, Politics, Popular Culture
5 Comments
Goodnight to Goodnight Moon?
The NY Times says that the picture book for children is disappearing, largely because so many aspirant middle-class parents are pushing their children aggressively towards reading chapter books early in life, and receiving some endorsement in this move from teachers … Continue reading
Posted in Academia, Popular Culture
11 Comments
A Lord Byron in Every Cyberpot
I’m interested in seeing the film Catfish after reading A.O. Scott’s review. Still, Scott’s references to familiar examples of online deception coupled with his welcome awareness that literary and cultural fraud is an old and established part of American life … Continue reading
Island at the Top of King Solomon’s Mines
Re-reading King Solomon’s Mines for today’s class, I was suddenly struck powerfully by a sort of deja vu. Not about the novel itself, since I’ve read it quite a few times, both for courses and otherwise. Nor even about the … Continue reading
Posted in Information Technology and Information Literacy, Popular Culture
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Toilers in the Trope Workshop
One of my hopes for cultural history & media studies courses that I teach is that students will learn not just how to read, analyze and critique expressive culture but also get some sense of how to produce it, use … Continue reading