Someday, I will post actual content.

Today is not that day.

 • In today’s Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, there’s an article about graphic novels created by Kaplan Inc. to help students with their SAT and ACT exams.

• I would probably be blogging more if my life wasn’t utter chaos and if I hadn’t reconnected with my Playstation 2 and, in particular, Def Jam: Vendetta and Def Jam: Fight for New York.  And I made a new friend:

It’s made out of Nerf.  I can throw it at things.  I think I’m in love.

…

Clearly, I’m not having the productive summer that I thought I would have.  I am hoping to finish this big long classic film post soonish, and to get some post-MoCCA reviews up.

• The new Savage Critic and you should, like, totally check it out and stuff.

• The other night, I got an e-mail saying I got into a class for the fall that was previously closed–lazy as always, I registered late.  It isn’t a particularly exciting class, but it is one that I need to graduate with my MA.  However, as I still work full time, I can really only spare the time to give two courses the attention they deserve, which leaves me with a bit of a quandry.

 So, here are the choices.  Two graduate courses enter.  One leaves.

 Topics in Literature as Genre: Modernism and Gender

This course will focus on modernism and gender in film and literature of the 1910s and ’20s. Secondary sources will include Cinema and Modernism by David Trotter (Blackwell, 2007) and The Spectacular Modern Woman: Feminine Visibility in the 1920s, by Liz Conor (Indiana, 2004). Sections of the course will focus on the films of D.W. Griffith and Charlie Chaplin, the literature of James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf, and women in relation to various aspects of popular and consumer culture during the decade. Besides these sources, we will utilize selected primary writings and additional web sites and resources. The expected visit of London filmmaker Georgina Starr and showing of her film Theda based on the career of screen vamp Theda Bara will fit right into our work. Students will write individual short essays, produce a class presentation, and write a major research paper. There will be a great variety of topics to chose from.

Topics in Postmodern Literature: New Media Literature

Literature has been directly engaged with technological change and its mediation of language for at least the duration of the modernist period-from telegraph, radio, magazine, newspaper and book typesetting, to the fax, T.V., personal computer, desktop publishing, networking, and digital multi-media production. In this course, I will be interested for us to consider the poetics of electronic literature (i.e. the text-oriented subset of new media) from experiential, aesthetic, theoretical, and historical perspectives. Some initial questions that may inform our study are:

• How do art makers integrate technological concepts and their social implications into art? (database, interactivity, algorhythm, open source, modularity)
• How does the saturation of the social world and the terms of specific media devices (cable T.V., video-game, mobile phone) inform literature?
• What are the important concepts, genre conventions, and “APIs” organizing the varied kinds of work within electronic literature: hypertext, net.art, e-poetry, vispo, blogs, wikis, podcasts?
• What reconfigurations to prior genre conventions and understanding of text objects can we observe? How does the “remediation” of classic genres transpire? Do multi-, hybrid- and inter- media overwhelm genre thinking?
• How can the tools of literary study be adapted to their reading? Where do new media leave the material book?
• Does the advent of “new media” constitute a paradigm shift, a fresh chapter, or only the illusion of literary change? To what degree is new technology enabling, determining, or limiting?
• What do we gain by considering new media from the perspective of electronic literature, rather than such disciplinary categories as performance, experimental music, or computer science?
• How is the writer and the activity of writing reconceptualized? (FLARF, singular genius vs. collaborative writing) How is the reader and the activity of reading/consuming reconceptualized? (navigate, launch, operate)

The semester will be choreographed to acquaint you with current digital practices, leading you toward becoming a fluent reader/viewer/user, while buttressing these engagements with research into the development of new media as a textual art, and the history of human/computer interaction. Our study themes will oscillate between close encounters with new media artifacts and more distanced reflections on theoretical and historical issues–supported by assigned critical readings, student-led panel presentations, collaborative online work, and student-curated exhibitions. We will communally work through a number of emerging new media “classics” and “foundational” critical texts with the aim of enabling students to develop a conceptual framework for producing review-quality critical writing about new media and introducing it into their teaching. In addition to electronic exhibits and reserve texts, we will work with such titles as: The New Media Reader (eds. Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort), New Media Poetics (Morris and Swiss), and The Language of New Media (Manovich).

I’m torn.  On the one hand, the first course?  Right up my alley in terms of time period, content, and media.  On the other, the second course is an interesting field, one I think may be highly relevant in the future of humanities academia.

This and that: quick notes at the end of a long week.

MoCCA was a blast.  There’s just no describing a weekend of awesome nerds, awesome comics, awesome food, awesome liquor, and awesome karaoke.

 So, in other words, I’m not even going to try.

 I didn’t buy half of the things I had planned on buying, as is the case–after I made my purchases at First Second’s table, I realised that many of the books on my list could be purchased at local comics shops or bookstores, so I changed my buying plans and stuck mainly to purchasing minicomics and the like.  Here’s my haul, minus a couple of superhero comics purchased at Rocketship the night before (The P.L.A.I.N. Janes and The Re-Gifters were purchased at Rocketship, however):

I am now seriously considering a trip to TCAF in August and SPX in October to hold me over until the next MoCCA.  As of yet, I haven’t read anything–this has been kind of a hellish post-MoCCA hangover week–but I’m dying to dive into those piles and swim around.  I know I’ll be reviewing at least one thing in that stack, so maybe I’m not as far out of comics-blogging mind as I had thought I was.

• Via the lovely John Jakala, I found the P.O.W.E.R. in Comics organization.  Readers of my old blog may remember my inherent distaste for comics activist organizations–by which, I mean people hell-bent on making a significant impact in the industry via the least amount of effort–but I think this group may be a little different.  Unlike other groups–the kinds that generally draw my ire–this one doesn’t appear to have “let’s get more people to buy comics so we can make more money and be really successful yay!” as a goal.  Further, this group doesn’t appear to be the type to seek out the easy, half-cocked solutions that come from the same part of the lizard brain that daydreams Powerball lottery fantasies (“If I had millions of dollars, I could totally MAKE PEOPLE LOVE COMICS LIKE I LOVE COMICS! It would be AWESOME!”).  And that’s a great thing–people motivated by passion rather than fame or their own egos tend to be the type to stick with their plans over the long haul, rather than giving up when they’re not making in-roads fast enough (you’ll notice that the group that prompted the discussion on my old blog hasn’t updated since April of 2006–hell, even I update more often than that).

 So far, P.O.W.E.R. in Comics seems like a diverse group of comics fans, bloggers, creators, and retailers commited to increase the role of women and minorities in comics any way they can.  It’s a big goal, but P.O.W.E.R. in Comics creator Lisa Lopacinski appears to have the right idea about doing things:

This community is a positive one, where people can share ideas on how to increase the activity of women and minorities in the comic book industry rather than just complain about how it hasn’t happened yet.

This community is one of sharing, where creators can help those looking to become creators attain their goals and where artists and writers can find each other and team up; also where creators can come to promote their works. Here blogers can post links to their blogs dealing with issues important to POWER members. Here artists and writers can post samples and get opinions. Here podcasters and video makers can post segments to get reviews, opinions, and support.

This is a community of networking, where creators can find publishers, where publishers can find retailers, where readers can find stores and items they might enjoy.

This is a grass-roots community, where people can share their ideas and experiences about getting comics into new communities and share letters, press releases, and blogs about not just what’s wrong with the comic book community, but how to fix it.

In the P.O.W.E.R. in Comics community we don’t just complain, we try to find solutions by Promoting Ownership, Writing & drawing, Editing and Reading by more women and minorities in the comic book industry.

I think the community basis could work well, and using a social networking type of format facilitates that.  Good luck, Lisa and crew–I’ve joined up, for whatever that’s worth.  Anyone that knows me knows that white heteronormativity is one of my pet issues, both academically and personally, so I think this group will be a good fit for me.

 • I didn’t have the time or energy to do a TCM preview for this week.  Sorry.  You probably missed a bunch of good shit because I was lazy.  I’ll bring it back next week.

• For all it’s faults, Green Lantern: Sinestro Corps managed to make ADD sing Gwen Stefani tunes.  Indeed, dear friends–the shit is bananas.

Like Alan, though, I did kind of enjoy World War: Hulk. Alex at Rocketship made me buy it and, for a superhero comic I had no interest in buying until his enthusiasm for it broke my spirit, I enjoyed it thoroughly.  Remember that the next time someone whines about “those fucking elitist douchebags in Brooklyn,” or whatever people say.  I’ll even give the book a photographic endorsement:

• Also, I may bring back that annoying “Ask me things and I answer them” game, because I’m that egotistical and, er, bored with my life.