Class Cancelled 3/15

Hi Class,

I sent this also as a mass email, just wanted to post elsewhere that class today (3/15) is cancelled. In the email I sent you the peer review workshop. Thank you for your understanding and remember papers are due next Monday, as well as the first Chapter of Freakonomics, which you should blog about (Group Leaders need not blog!)

Take care

Vanity Fair's 2010 Hollywood Issue

I always find it amazing when things in the universe just align together and work in my favor. In this particular instance, we are working on a unit on Race and Ethnicity in the media and Vanity Fair puts out their 2010 Hollywood Issue roughly around the same time. I don't normally read Vanity Fair (too many advertizements and things out of my price range) but I usually enjoy the "Hollywood" issue, put out in February/March right before the Oscars, because it has interesting and provakative pictures, which are normally vintage inspired and "Old" Hollywood esque. Actually one of my favorite pictures of all time is this picture of Kate Winslet:


But of course there is always controversy surrounding Vanity Fair covers, and it looks like this year won't be any different. While reading the Huffington Post this morning, they had an article accusing Vanity Fair of "whitewashing" their Hollywood 2010 cover, because there is no diversity in terms of race on the cover. I uploaded it so that you can see for yourself:

Now I can see why everyone is in an uproar, because certainly the cover is lacking diversity, and this seems to be Vanity Fair's "2nd" strike in terms of unfair representation, as not too long ago they were accused of photoshopping Beyonce's skin to make it "whiter." But is it fair to call Vanity Fair racist? I'm not so sure. So I did a little research on previous Hollywood issue covers:

These covers are from 2008 and 2005, respectively. So now I'll open it up to you, class, as I'm curious to hear your opinion on the whole matter.

"I'll See You In Another Life Brotha'!" Or, How LOST "Found" Me

So I have a confession to make: I am huge Lost geek. Infact, I am a huge science fiction geek in general. Lost is really the first show that I've watched from the beginning (September 22nd, 2004) and of course I will be watching this season, its final hurrah.

Everyone has their favorite television shows, but for me Lost is really special. Not just for the ways that it has changed the way television is viewed and interacted with, but for the intellectual freedom it brought me in graduate school.

You see, I was a little lost (yes, pun intended) in grad school when it came to picking my thesis topic. The sum of your tenure in grad school is writing this big paper, called a thesis (or sometimes a disseration or masters production), which is your first real intellectual mark on the academic world. The thesis is supposed to be something new and exciting, and everything that I kept considering to write about just seemed old and stale.

So I was discussing this conumdrum with my mentor in my Critical Cultural theory class one day, and he says "Well you love Lost--why don't you write about that?" Needless to say, my mouth dropped. Up until this moment, I had never honestly contemplated writing about a television show, let alone the one I was completely obsessed and enamoured with, for my thesis. He said if I really wanted to pursue this topic, I would need an academic lens to look at Lost through.

So I sat over the weekend and thought about it and decided to commit 100% to this newfound idea. I decided to look at Lost through a Feminist/Marxist lens and the way that gender and stereotypes were portrayed and reconciled on the island. Looking back now, this was such a liberating moment for me because it showed me that anything could be possible in research, and that I could produce groundbreaking, though provoking work within my field. Moreover, it opened a whole new avenue of opportunities in terms of my own professional development as I spoke at a national conference about Lost and will be publishing a chapter in a book based on my thesis work. All of this happened because I had a little faith in a quirky television show that seemed to defy all odds when it first came on.

Namaste.

"And in that moment I swear we were infinite"--Stephen Chobosky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower

I first read Stephen Chobosky's The Perks Of Being a Wallflower at a very central time in my life--high school. I can't even remember how I found it--perhaps it was the bright neon yellow/green cover, which said so much and yet so little.

I do remember devouring the book. It was set up as an epistolary (something I found out later as a Lit major in college), which basically meant a novel based on written letters. In this case, this letters were to a "friend." The book centers around a young boy named Charlie who enters high school in the early 90s. There is a certain anonymity as you read the book, because you are never told anything concrete about the characters--where they live, for example. Charlie's letters are filled with so much--humor, anger, uncertainty with life. He also writes about narrating the vortex of suck known as high school, and the world within trying to find yourself.

I feel like I am doing a disservice to simply summarize the book. Like I said, the plot sounds so simple, but the feelings that resonated within me as I read it are still with me to this day. Perhaps it is because I could relate to Charlie in many ways, going to midnight showings of Rocky Horror and trying to make that perfect mixed tape for someone. As I read the book, I wanted to read the books Charlie read and listen to the music he listen too.

But really, for me, The Perks of Being a Wallflower and Chbosky hit on that inner isolation and fear that we all have as high schoolers, as inbetweeners, we were certainly not children, but we were not adults either, and as Angela Chase so famously said once on My So Called Life: "High School is a battlefield for your heart"

One of my favourite passages from the book directly relates to the quote I posted: "And in that moment I swear we were infinite." In this passage from the book Charlie and his friends Sam and Patrick are riding around listening to music and find that one song that just makes it all come together. We've all had that feeling, haven't we? After all, that's the essence of this assignment--to remember memories as we associate them with medias in our life. For me and The Perks, my moment of "infiniteness" came my freshman year of college when I finally heard the Smith's song "Asleep," which has a special significance in the novel. I had been searching for the song for years, and to finally hear it brought tears to my eyes...it still does.

Every once and while, I re-read The Perks of Being a Wallflower. And I can safely say that as book comfort food, I still read and understand something new every time, or gain a different perspective being much older than I was the first time I read it.

Welcome!!

Welcome to English 015 in the blogosphere. My blog will be somewhat of a "home base" for us, so check back frequently to see if I've posted anything. Feel free to communicate with me on my blog, as I will on yours. Happy blogging!