Category Archives: Popular Culture

Battlestar Galactica Razor

Posted on November 13, 2007 by Timothy Burke

Saw it last night with some other Swarthmore geeks (you know who you are). It was good stuff. I guess it had better be, given how long it is until the fourth season begins. (The Sci-Fi Channel really doesn’t seem … Continue reading →

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The Unrepresentable

Posted on November 10, 2007 by Timothy Burke

A while back, my colleague Bob Rehak argued that the Harry Potter books appear over time to have been written with an increasing consciousness of their translation to digital special effects. This is one of the big underlying differences between … Continue reading →

Posted in Popular Culture | 24 Comments

In Which I Pick Some Nits

Posted on November 3, 2007 by Timothy Burke

If there’s two things I’ve come to dislike equally, it’s bad fantasies with dragon characters (cough Eragon) and bad speculative fiction that recreates Horatio Hornblower or other Napoleonic-era stories (cough David Weber). So I really thought there was no way … Continue reading →

Posted in Africa, Popular Culture | 13 Comments

There Will Still Be Pizza

Posted on November 2, 2007 by Timothy Burke

Over at the Comics Curmudgeon, they like to hate the comic strip Funky Winkerbean. I share their sentiments, mostly, and for the same reason, namely that the creator seems so unrelievedly grim in his sensibility since he initially aged the … Continue reading →

Posted in Popular Culture | 1 Comment

Chronicle of Cancellations Foretold

Posted on October 4, 2007 by Timothy Burke

Spurred by Jason Mittell (and just about every other television critic in existence) we watched Pushing Daisies last night. We, too, fell in love with it. My daughter was briefly upset at the way death entered the story, but the … Continue reading →

Posted in Popular Culture | 2 Comments

Hiroo Onoda: The Toys and Cartoons Edition

Posted on September 19, 2007 by Timothy Burke

The historian Gary Cross published an editorial on toys, collecting and commercialism in the New York Times this weekend. Cross’ scholarly work is very good. I’ve cited it, read it, and assigned it. But he’s also a dues-paying signatory to … Continue reading →

Posted in Consumerism, Advertising, Commodities, Popular Culture | 28 Comments

Bugs and Puppy Faces

Posted on August 14, 2007 by Timothy Burke

We took off for a late summer trip to a New Jersey amusement park today, which was fun. At one point, my daughter wanted to get her face painted. I was kind of struck at the catalogue of choices. They … Continue reading →

Posted in Games and Gaming, Politics, Popular Culture | 24 Comments

There Must Be a Word

Posted on August 6, 2007 by Timothy Burke

Is there a term for misperceiving a historical relationship between two works, images or tropes so that the earlier of the two is falsely thought to have derived from the later one? I was thinking about this in terms of … Continue reading →

Posted in Popular Culture | 12 Comments

Cooper v. Rowling

Posted on August 6, 2007 by Timothy Burke

One of the reasons I’m keen to promote an “Everything Studies” approach to expressive culture is my dissatisfaction with the way that established models in cultural and media studies often (not invariably) marginalize aesthetic judgements as well as evaluations of … Continue reading →

Posted in Books, Popular Culture | 16 Comments

Department of Everything Studies (Expressive Culture Division)

Posted on August 2, 2007 by Timothy Burke

I meant to comment earlier in July on this excellent discussion at the Valve on Mark Bauerlein’s suggestions for specific “conservative voices” to be included in courses of literary theory. Pretty much all the criticisms I had planned to make … Continue reading →

Posted in Academia, Popular Culture | 12 Comments