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danial.atkinson

In the spirit for more Holiday FAILS? Check out Sketchy Santas!

Epic Fail Funny Videos and Funny Pictures

I’ve seen a number of calls for papers recently which, while not directly about the romance genre, may be of interest to readers of this blog.

2nd Global Conference: Revenge – Probing the Boundaries (July, 2011: Oxford, United Kingdom)

Revenge, so we are told, is a dish best served cold: a ‘sweet’ wreaking of vengeance on those who have – either in reality or in our minds – slighted, wronged or in some way ‘injured’ us and who are now ‘enjoying’ their just deserts by an avenging angel (or angels) on the great day of reckoning.

This inter- and multi-disciplinary research and publications project seeks to explore the multi-layered ideas and actions of vengeance or revenge. The project aims to explore the nature of revenge, its relationship with issues of justice, and its manifestation in the actions of individuals, groups, communities and nations. The project will also consider the history of revenge, its ‘legitimacy’, the ‘scale’ of vengeful actions and whether revenge has (or should have) ‘limits’. Representations of revenge in film, literature, tv, theatre and radio will be analysed; cultural ‘traditions’ of retaliation and revenge will be considered. And the role of mercy, forgiveness and pardon will be assessed.

For more information, click here and here.

“Virgin Envy: Contemporary Approaches to Virginity in Literature and Arts”: Canadian Comparative Literature Association Congress 2011 (Fredericton from 28 May to 4 June)

Virginity has long been a trope found in literary and cultural texts, however, how do we understand virginity and why does it matter become two questions worthy of consideration. This joint-panel between the Canadian Comparative Literature Association and the Canadian Association of Hispanists aims to work through the poetics and politics of virginity in narrative, poetry, cinema, graphic novels, and popular culture. In many regards, though virginity has been studied, particularly in Medieval Literature, and aspects of Renaissance and Classical Literature, we have yet to see much consideration of virginity as a theoretical problem in modern texts. As such, we welcome papers that move beyond the Virgin Mary and the Virgin of Guadalupe and aim to consider virginity as an interdisciplinary matter that must be considered from the widest-possible range of perspectives. Papers presented in these panels may be considered for inclusion in an upcoming book of essays on the topic of virginity.

More details here.

Frothy, Frivolous, or Feminist?: Expanding the Critical Discourse on Chick Lit and Women’s Fiction (2011 American Literature Association Conference, May 26-29 in Boston)

In the introduction to their essay collection Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction, Suzanne Ferris and Mallory Young state that, “[o]n one hand chick lit attracts the unquestioning adoration of fans; on the other it attracts the unmitigated disdain of critics” (1). Indeed, chick lit is enormously popular, and its commercial success extends well beyond the literary world—the genre continues to influence the television and film industry. Chick lit is, as Ferris and Young point out, “big business” (2). However, the popularity and commercial success of chick lit all but ensure it is dismissed critically. In fact, respected novelists like Beryl Bainbridge and Doris Lessing have dubbed authors who write chick lit as the “chickerati,” and Bainbridge describes the genre as “froth” and a waste of time (1). The critical discourse on chick lit is largely negative, condemning the genre as “trivial” and dismissing the fans who claim it depicts the realities of contemporary single women’s lives (2). In fact, the critical treatment of chick lit—or, the lack thereof—seemingly dismisses the genre purely because of its popularity, and most critics’ unwillingness to take chick lit seriously is remarkably similar to the critical treatment of women writers of the late-18th and 19th-centuries. Writers such as Susan Warner, Sarah Josepha Hale, and E.D.E.N. Southworth, all of whom were enormously popular when originally published in the 19th century, have been largely ignored by the contemporary academy because their works are seen as didactic, sentimental, and unrealistic—all terms that have been applied to various works of chick lit.

They’ve been applied to the romance genre too, of course. More details here.

Call for Essay Submissions on Love in Film and Television Westerns

Call for submissions for an edited collection requested by Palgrave Macmillan Submissions for a collection of essays tentatively titled Cowboy Love: Lonely Hearts and Happy Trails in Western Film and Television.

Long before the release of Brokeback Mountain (2005), Cowboy Love was a complicated, and often conflicted, subject in Western film. Cowboys who would never run from a fight often run from love, and for good reason. Transgressive and titillating, love is one of the most hazardous of all frontier activities in the West. Its presence and absence establish and destabilize gender norms, raising social, political, moral and ethical questions. Simultaneously affirming archetypes of manliness and womanhood and challenging notions of American machismo, the narrative of frontier romance has contributed to the lasting popularity of the cowboy and the endurance of the Western as a genre.

More details here.

Teach Me Tonight

I have enjoyed reading this collective blog, and I have anticipated with pleasure making my own contributions. And anticipated, and anticipated.

I’ve found myself having trouble rustling up a post on teaching Romanticism, however, because I am not teaching Romanticism.  During the week before Thanksgiving break, a typical one in many ways, I taught King Lear in one class, taught White Teeth in another, and worked as department chair to host external reviewers whose visit was the culmination of a self-study.

That was a pretty good week, all in all, but it didn’t lend itself to posting fresh insights about teaching Wordsworth. Those insights may come: I do teach a Romanticism seminar in the spring, and I’ll go to London next fall to teach a literature-in-place course linked to a colleague’s ecology-in-place course.

Before I teach those courses, however, I want to offer a different kind of post, meant primarily for the graduate students and job seekers in the audience. We often talk about teaching from the perspective of institutions that allow and require teaching specializations that do not characterize many of the jobs Romanticists hold.  As it happens, I love teaching Shakespeare and Zadie Smith as well as Coleridge and Austen, and I find satisfaction–OK, sometimes–in the way that smaller institutions ask faculty to get deeply involved in service and governance. (I am, for example, in my tenth year at Grinnell College and in my second term as department chair.)

In some ways, I do not have the job I imagined when I started my dissertation, but that indicates a failure was of imagination, not of the job.  To spark the imaginations of others, I will use this space in part to describe the working life of a liberal arts college Romanticist.  I welcome questions that will help me understand how to provide useful commentary from that perspective.

Teaching Romanticism: An RC Pedagogies Blog

Official Greg Bear Website
Order Hull Zero Three Here
Trailer and more about Hull Zero Three on FBC HERE

INTRODUCTION: “A starship hurtles through the emptiness of space. Its destination-unknown. Its purpose-a mystery. Its history-lost. Now, one man wakes up. Ripped from a dream of a new home-a new planet and the woman he was meant to love in his arms-he finds himself, wet, naked, and freezing to death. The dark halls are full of monsters but trusting other survivors he meets might be the greater danger. All he has are questions– Who is he? Where are they going? What happened to the dream of a new life? What happened to the woman he loved? What happened to Hull 03? All will be answered, if he can survive. Uncover the mystery. Fix the ship. Find a way home.”

Greg Bear is a famous name in sf and his novels of years ago (Eon is the most notable) were highlights for me at the time; while most are dated today, I still have a fondness for Moving Mars which has remained strongly in my memory and it is the only one of the author’s older work I would recommend for today’s readers; a novel of politics, love and revolution in a sfnal context, Moving Mars is less dependent on any particular sf trope, so it is one that has “time legs” imho.

Slant which takes place in Moving Mars‘ milieu may still be of interest too, though it never connected that well with me even at the time and it’s very “cyberpunky” with the now dead subgenre’s combination of prescience (social computing, Internet’s pervasive reach and transformative power) and hilarious naivete (human nature, politics, history), cyberpunk being the Jetsons of the 90′s and a perfect showcase for why and how sf dates so quickly.

FORMAT/INFO: Hull Zero Three stands at about 330 pages divided into three parts and quite a few short chapters, all with descriptive names. For most part the narration is first person stream-of-consciousness with the – “recently born” though as a a full grown man – narrator slowly discovering or “recalling” pertinent facts about the situation at hand while he essentially tries to survive moment to moment. The blurb above describes well enough the general set-up and part of the novel’s enjoyment is discovering what’s what, so I will not add more. Hull Zero Three is literary hard sf with a good dose of social commentary.

OVERVIEW/ANALYSIS: “I don’t know which is more unsettling—meeting myself dead or meeting myself alive”

Hull Zero Three stands on its style first and foremost; if the stream of consciousness narrative that you can get a taste HERE entrances you as it has happened to me, than you will love it since if you keep reading, you will slowly understand what’s what as well as you will get to know a fascinating set of characters.

It is true that the book is confusing for a good while and I found myself retracing the narrative several times when some new detail appeared that seemed implied earlier and I could not recall it, but that is natural since the narrator is confused himself and the book conveys this perfectly.

The hard sf stuff (ship capabilities, layout, conditions, artifacts) is also done superbly and we slowly fit the puzzle together with the narrator. From time to time, new words and later concepts and ideas pop-up – one of the novel’s main conceits is that the narrator is imprinted before “birth” but recalls stuff if/when situations warrant – and the author handles this aspect very well, never slipping by using words that the narrator could not have known and were not mentioned before.

For its first two parts which cover most of the book, Hull Zero Three was a superb read that showed how you can combine a literary style with hard-sf and keep the reader turning the pages, but I was mixed about the last part that explains things. On its own it is well done and quite emotional, but I thought that it broke the novel’s unity and its narrative balance, moving from immediacy and continual discovery, to a view from above and omniscience. This change stamped Hull Zero Three as a genre novel that conforms to the requirement of explaining (almost) all. And that did not work well for me since I would rather have had an ambiguous ending with the characters still facing the unknown, ending which if handled well would have been more in the spirit of what came before.

All in all, Hull Zero Three (A+) is very good and I highly recommend it, but I still have this little regret that with an open ending it could have been one of the year’s top novels for me; the explanatory last part brought it firmly into the genre camp and its expectations, rather than holding to the “convictions” of the first two parts that transcend sf.

Fantasy Book Critic

For the third straight year, I am aggregating every online “best of 2010″ book list I find.

Please feel free to leave a comment or e-mail me with a blog, magazine, newspaper, or other online media list I have missed.

other daily updates to the list
main list of “best of 2010″ book lists

Revisit the 2009, 2008, and 2000-2009 (best of the decade) online book lists.

Today’s updates to the Online “Best Books of 2010″ Lists

Book Group Buzz (books)
Candy-Coated Scorn (best books)
Chicago Magazine (favorite cookbooks)
The Enlightened Economist (economics books)
The Ginn’s (favorite books)
Minneapolis Star Tribune (best nonfiction books)
Minneapolis Star Tribune (best travel books)
Minneapolis Star Tribune (fiction)
Murder, Mystery, and Mayhem (best mystery books)
Muse at Highway Speeds (best books)
No Tells – Grace Cavalieri (best poetry books)
Observer (best illustrated children’s books)
StoveTop Readings (best cookbooks)
Telegraph (art books)
Telegraph (books)
Telegraph (cookbooks)
Telegraph (humour books)
Telegraph (music books)

also at Largehearted Boy:

daily updates to the list

Online “Best Books of 2010″ Lists
Best of the Decade (2000-2009) Online Book Lists
Online “Best Books of 2009″ Lists
Online “Best Books of 2008″ Lists

2010 Online Year-end Music Lists
Online Best of the Decade (2000-2009) music lists
2009 Online Year-end Music Lists
2008 Online Year-end Music Lists
2007 Online Year-end Music Lists
2006 Online Year-end Music Lists
other lists at Largehearted Boy

52 Books, 52 Weeks
Atomic Books Comics Preview (weekly comics and graphic novel picks)
Anitiheroines (interviews with up and coming female comics artists)
Book Notes (authors create playlists for their book)
guest book reviews
Largehearted WORD (weekly new book picks)
musician/author interviews
Note Books (musicians discuss literature)

Largehearted Boy

This week I finally finished reading Keith Richards’ biography, Life. Interestingly, the audiobook version is narrated by Johnny Depp, and I was actually tempted to pick that up instead (though I never listen to audiobooks).

That made me think, if I wrote a memoir, who would I want to narrate the audiobook version? My choice would be Gilbert Gottfried, who would add some much needed volume to my otherwise quiet life.

To enter this week’s contest, leave a comment with the name of the person you would pick to narrate the audiobook story of your life.

One winner, chosen randomly from the commenters, will receive the following prize (or a Amazon gift certificate if you would prefer):

Keith Richards’ memoirLife (your choice of book, audiobook)

The winner will be chosen randomly at midnight CT Friday evening (December 3rd).

also at Largehearted Boy:

previous and ongoing contests at Largehearted Boy

52 Books, 52 Weeks (my yearly reading series)
Atomic Books Comics Preview (highlights of the week’s new comics)
Book Notes (authors create playlists for their book)
guest book reviews
Largehearted Word (highlights of the week’s book releases)
musician/author interviews
Note Books (musicians discuss literature)
Shorties (daily links from the worlds of music, literature, and pop culture)

Largehearted Boy

Epic Fail Funny Videos and Funny Pictures

The literary story today is a model of conformity. After decades of writing workshops, system writers have synthesized all the many instructions and subliminal cues to give the academic system of writing perfect examples of consistency, as seen in poem after poem, story after story—by the thousands. They’re all adeptly crafted, as from a factory.

This is the nature of bureaucracy—and the question is whether art can and should be the product of bureaucracy. In place is an unstated “book” of how to write, so that writers who want to get ahead create by the book, and only by the book. Which also means that those writers approved and promoted are those best able to conform to the system way of writing. They’re the students raising their hands at the front of the class, giving, quickly and efficiently, the teacher exactly what she wants.

It’s a machine way of writing art and results in machine art, with no room for difference, much less the creativity of new ideas. Is this process good for American literature? Writers are giving the system and its priests and acolytes—the nomenklatura– what it wants but they’re not producing what the public wants. The public lives outside the literary machine, and doesn’t know the values and codes of the particular bureaucracy that’s been put in place.

More thoughts on this upcoming: “Dropping Chandeliers.”

AttackingtheDemi-Puppets

The answers to most questions lie in history. Winston Churchill once said he could look farther into the future because he looked farther into the past.

An example of the sad condition of today’s literary world can be found in this post by Blake Butler at
www.htmlgiant.com/feature/the-myth-of-the-human-wrt-david-foster-wallaces-mister-squishy/

The essay speaks for itself. I posted a pair of quick responses to bring a contrary viewpoint to the gushathon over Blake’s post. I shouldn’t have had to say anything. The essay speaks for itself. It’s not even an essay– it’s a dissertation. A miscarriage. Dead-on-arrival. Butler writes as if he’s pursuing a Phd. A hurricane of words, a mass of poorly written sentences, and at the center of them: nothing.

We’ve come along way from classic American essayists like Vidal, Baldwin, Mailer, and company, haven’t we?

I love it. If the entire intellectual literary community is stopped at an orange-sign roadblock with emergency lights flashing, without the sense to turn around, it leaves open roads which will take the writer to actual destinations.

Who has winning ideas? Which ideas, which writings, will prevail?

There was a flurry of interest last century when a jar was found in the desert in Egypt containing the so-called gnostic gospels– counter narratives to the four accepted versions of the story of Jesus. Had they been suppressed? If so, why? Politics, surely! I believed this myself. That is, until I started reading the counternarratives. What I found were insular, nonsensical, clearly inferior writings.

The four accepted gospels became popular. They lasted because they contained compelling writing about a real, unique personality moving and speaking in a recognizable landscape. When all is said and done, they’re great, moving stories, written simply and with clarity, with simple but effective dialogue. Two thousand years later, the narratives still live and breathe.

The gnostic gospels, on the other hand, are dead artifacts, and were always dead to the world in that they were written for small and narrowly focused communities withdrawing from the world, while their more orthodox brethren were confronting it. Elaine Pagels’ book on the gnostic gospels explains this well. Some early Christians were populists who believed their message was for the world; for everybody. Others constructed barriers of nonsense, the Eleusinan Mysteries, making it difficult if not impossible for readers to comprehend what they were saying– which was the whole idea. Strip away the verbiage and you see they weren’t saying anything. They were less– not more–rooted in humanity and reality.

The followers of David Foster Wallace are contemporary gnostics who write for a tiny minority of readers able to “get it”; those watching the nakedly parading Emperor who convince themselves they see something. DFW is their dead god. His kind of work represents, as I said, a dead end. The task of the new writer is to tear down the System’s plaster gods, to offer living alternatives that can reach the general population, and revive the corpse of American literature in so doing.

AttackingtheDemi-Puppets

The other day I took students to see prized items at the E.J. Pratt Library.  As others have noted on this blog, students really seem to love Blake.  Luckily at Toronto we have an impressive Blake collection.  Because the students were so excited about Blake in class and seemed eager to write about him in their papers, I had expected that they would be most excited about seeing items such as electrotype plates of Songs of Innocence and Experience and copy M of “A Song of Liberty.”  The seminar took a pleasant but unexpected turn when one student, admiring the third edition of Darwin’s The Botanic Garden containing Blake’s engraving “The Fertilization of Egypt,” said that the paper seemed “cool.”  This prompted a series of questions about papermaking and printing in general.  The students did not know much about book production beyond Blake’s unique illuminated printing process.  This is perhaps not surprising, since Blake’s methods are so integral to understanding his texts.  Plus, sources such as The William Blake Archive give students easy access to Blake’s works, revealing them to be much more than printed words in the pages of their modern editions.  Though Blake is exceptional and deserves our and students’ attention, I do wonder if it might be worth spending some time in our classes discussing how, as one student put it, “normal books were made.”

While there is a danger, as Crystal Lake voiced in an earlier post, of overwhelming students with information that takes valuable time away from primary texts themselves, I still think students of Romanticism would benefit from knowing more about how those primary texts were made.  I’m admittedly biased when it comes to such issues.  In addition to being a Teaching Assistant for the English Department, I am a Teaching Assistant for the undergraduate Book and Media Studies Program where I lecture about the hand-press period.  While I wasn’t surprised to find that the students in my Material Bibliography and Print Culture course are fascinated by the history of printing, I was impressed to find how much interest in book production my literature students expressed.  Once we covered the production of paper, they wanted to know how Blake’s illuminated printing differed from the examples of his commercial work I showed them (including his engravings of gallstones in James Earle’s Practical Observations on the Operation of the Stone).  They also wanted to know about the differences between copperplate engraving and the steel-plate engravings found in literary annuals.  In the context of these other “normal” books, Blake’s methods became even more exciting.  Moreover, providing students with an overview of Romantic-era book production brought home some of the ideas discussed in class, such as the fact that most books were expensive and that different social and economic classes bought and read different literature.

I am interested to know if others teach undergraduates about the material production of texts in addition to their socio-political contexts.  And, if so, how is this information introduced in the classroom?  I have come across an impressive number of YouTube videos about printing.  Many are poorly made, yet there are a few interesting ones that have helped book history undergraduates I’ve taught see printing in action.  (One decent short video I’ve come across includes superfluous puppets.)  I’d be interested if anyone else has similar videos or other tools that they either use in lectures or post on course websites for students to view on their own time.

Teaching Romanticism: An RC Pedagogies Blog