Yes, I’m staging a writing contest. All will be welcome to participate. Unlike many writing contests, the process will be open—you’ll be able to read each of the entries as they come in. How is this possible? The wonders of blogs.
Watch for details at www.americanpoplit.blogspot.com
Sam (right) and Dean (left) have yet another brother-to-brother chat, apparently in front of jarred biological specimens. (From a previous episode)
Last episode ended with a cliffhanger, with Sam’s memories busting out from behind the mental wall that Death put up to keep them hidden. This episode begins about a minute later with Dean slapping Sam awake. He seems groggy and has a headache, but is otherwise little the worse for wear. Kind of an underwhelming resolution to a cliffhanger.
Cut to a janitor cleaning a science lab who, it appears, is murdered by the anatomy mannequin that normally hangs in the lab.
Once Dean lays down the law on no trips down memory lane for Sam, they begin investigating the janitor’s death. Their only lead is some funky electromagnetic readings at the science lab, focused on the anatomy dummy that Dean can’t help but pull bits and pieces off of … but they quickly get a break in the form of another murder, this time at a clothing factory.
Again, Sam’s electromagnetic scanner again goes haywire, giving him an idea. “Wait, that anatomy dummy you were molesting at the lab.”
“Excuse me?” Dean replies.
“What if that’s what this is about?”
Cautiously, Dean asks, “What exactly are you accusing me of?”
So the working theory is some kind of ghost that can possess mannequins somehow, prompting Dean to say, “I don’t like the way Kim Cattrall’s looking at me.” The major flaw in the theory is why these attacks would take place in totally different towns, not even next to each other. Sam’s research leads to discovering that there was a female factory worker, Rose, who disappeared over a year earlier.
Dean has been dodging calls from his ex, Lisa, and Sam finally forces him to answer it. It turns out to be Lisa’s son, Ben, who has been trying to get in touch because something is wrong with his mother. She’s locked in her room, rarely leaves, won’t talk to him. Reluctantly, Dean takes off to deal with the situation, leaving Sam to continue the investigation.
Sam quickly learns that the dead janitor used to work at the factory, too. He questions people at the factory, finally finding a guy, Johnny, who “looks nervous” and clearly knows more about Rose than he’s letting on. He’s on the phone with someone, panicked, when he gets attacked in the factory … but rescued by Sam at the last minute.
It turns out that the victims had all been part of a practical joke gone awry. The victims (along with a fourth guy) had tricked Rose into thinking she had a secret admire, luring her to an apartment where she discovered that her admirer was a mannequin. When she’d tried to run, one of the men had grabbed her by the arm, forcing her to stumble and crack her head on a table. She died and they hid the body … which means that Sam now has a body to destroy. (Although he destroys it with 20 minutes left in the show, so I’m thinking there’s more death on the way.)
Dean arrives at Lisa’s only to discover that she isn’t in trouble. In fact, she has a date … which is why Ben called. “We’ve been Parent Trapped,” Dean declares. Dean and Lisa have a heart-to-heart where she says that every time the phone rings, there’s a small chance it’s him, but a big chance it’s Sam calling to say he’s dead. Every time she thinks she’s over Dean, he shows back up. What does he want? He doesn’t have an answer to that.
He’s even more stumped when trying to explain it to Ben. “My job turns me into someone who can’t sit at your dinner table,” he explains. He wants Ben to have the chance at a normal life.
Ben turns it around on him, hitting one of Dean’s weakest nerves, the family loyalty button: “You say family’s so important, but what do you call people who care for you, who love you even when you’re a dick? You know you’re walking out on your family, right?”
Back on the case, Johnny gets home … and things get even weirder. He comes into his room to find his girlfriend on the bed. They’re packing up and moving on, tonight. He takes her hand as he talks to her. “I love you. You know that.”
Did I mention that his girlfriend, the one to whom he is speaking, is a life-sized sex doll?
It turns its head to look at him, which seems to come as a surprise. (You would think that someone who’s declaring their love to a sex doll wouldn’t be surprised by much.)
Sam figures out that he didn’t destroy all of Rose’s remains … because at 16 she gave her kidney to her sister. He meets up with Dean, who quips, “So, that the girl with the haunted kidney?”
Since they can’t burn the kidney (the sister kind of needs it), they decide to go the hoodoo route, casting some kind of spell that will suppress the ghost. Rose’s ghost doesn’t like this, so she possesses the Impala and tries to run Dean down. Instead, it crashes through a storefront. A piece of glass impales the sister right in the kidney, killing her. As she dies, Rose’s ghost manifests just long enough to apologize before flashing out of existence.
Overall, this case ended bittersweet, not really something that they can clearly chalk up to being in the win column.
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Okay so I went to my first paid concert over Thanksgiving break for this epic symphonic metal band called Epica! The concert was AMAZING, but that’s not my point. I’ve had one of their songs stuck in my head for the past week and I didn’t know the name of it or enough song lyrics to figure out which one it was. Then, last night I went to play my iPod and it was the first song that came up! Is this destiny? Perhaps…especially considering the song is about destiny! Here’s the song if you are interested…
So does destiny exist? I don’t really have an opinion on the matter. I consider myself a very rational person so I will not believe it unless there is some scientific data proving it or whatever. But I will agree that the thought of destiny usually does make people feel better. If something goes wrong in your life you could just say, “Everything happens for a reason” and feel better about your situation! I just think that the thought of destiny and any sense of higher power gives people hope because they don’t want to believe that there is no reason to life and that this is it…you live and then you die and that’s the end. People who think that there’s no point to life are generally depressed people which is why people generally believe in irrational things. I mean…what’s something that people who need help in their lives like something with addiction are told? Believe in a higher power and ask for guidance! The whole basis of AA is accepting help from a force greater than yourself.
Glitter: The Unity College Fantasy Literature & Philosophy Blog
I need people to join this blog for my Writing for Publication Semenar class with Kate Miles. I’ve sorta, um, forgotten to do this earlier. Anyway, if you guys could do me a huge favor and join this, I’d be really greatful and give you telepathic cupcakes.
I’ll be posting art, poetry and stories I happen across, and keep tabs on my own personal projects.
Here’s the link: http://silvereyeforest.blogspot.com/
Glitter: The Unity College Fantasy Literature & Philosophy Blog
I never look forward to getting my crotch examined. I did get some birth control pills, so it wasn’t a total waste of time.
I dressed up and fixed my hair. I normally look like a homeless bum, but my sister has been supplying me with lots of lovely clothes. I also feel like I need to look nice when someone has to stick their fingers in my vag. That’s all that is on my mind for now.
Don’t forget to get your yearly pap, ladies.
My need to delete doesn’t end with the internet. I want a fresh start. Packing up and moving away from this shitty town and leaving all the garbage behind, would be a dream come true. Everything in my life is going really well, better than it ever has, but I want to shed some old layers. I want to complete the new me with a new place and new people.
Maybe it’s just my foul mood getting the best of me……maybe not.
I am not nearly as media-savvy as some of the contributors to this blog (Crystal and Roger and Katherine have reaffirmed for me my old-fogey-dom at the same time that they have taught me a lot!). But I can say with conviction that my undergraduates so far this year have seemed to be at their very best when I ask them to think about Romantic poetry in relation to a Romantic-period history of media, mediation, and re-mediation. Is this the case for other visitors to this blog?
One of the most successful class sessions we had in fall term was on ballad-collecting and on the Tour to Scotland that William and Dorothy Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge took in 1803–a session that resulted in an energetic discussion of the Romantic period’s nostalgia for poetry as sonic experience and the Romantics’ awareness of the gains and the losses involved as sung and chanted ballads were re-mediated as printed artifacts. This past week, as we began the second term of our year-long course with the poetry of John Clare, mediation has once more come to be at issue, and our discussions have once again been wonderfully energetic and thoughtful. I from the get-go have stressed the controversies that attend on the presentation in print of those poems of Clare’s that in manuscript tend to flout the conventions for standard English orthography punctuation. (And I have taken pains in designing the reading assignments for these two weeks to give the class various editors’ versions of the poems–Eric Robinson’s, vs. Jonathan Bate’s, vs J. W. Tibble’s.) The flashpoint for those controversies is, of course, readers’ ambivalence about the role in the production of our reading matter that is played by that mediator and middleman (or middle-woman), the editor.
The intensity of the students’ engagement with these topics makes sense, I think, because (as the students in ENG308Y were themselves quick to recognize) they themselves have a stake in the controversies over the editing of Clare as well as in the controversies over copyright in the manuscript material that have become entangled with those debates about editorial practice. Clare’s corpus is a work in progress, and they sense that they can shape that progress. I have the advantage, too, that as some one who is preparing a new selection of Clare poems for the 9th edition of the Norton Anthology I can talk about the choices I’ve had to make as I’ve punctuated, or not puncutated, and the sleepless nights I’ve experienced after making my decisions. This generation of students seem interested by just the issues of textual criticism that to previous generations might have felt like a distraction. I half suspect that this is because they are so aware that their schooling is happening at a moment of media shift, when the relations among print artifacts, digital text, digital sound files are being unsettled and rearranged.
Let me give an example of some of the moments in discussion when students made connections that indicated that awareness. In the class session last term in which we treated ballad-collecting and Wordsworth’s “The Solitary Reaper” we got a lot of mileage from the passage in James Hogg’s Familiar Anecdotes of Sir Walter Scott when he listens in on his mother’s response to Scott’s ballad-collecting:
there war never ane o’ my sangs prentit till ye prentit them yoursel’, an’ ye hae spoilt them awthegither. They were made for singing an’ no for reading; but ye hae broken the charm now, an’ they’ll never sung mair. An’ the worst thing of a’, they’re nouther right spell’d nor right setten down.
When we talked about this moment my students came up with some terrific analogies for the problem: recording artists who thwart their audiences’ desires for lyric sheets, for instance. The recent project of a colleague here at Toronto, Andrew Dubois, coeditor of the recent The Anthology of Rap for Yale U.P., has been much in my mind as I’ve thought about why it feels so right for us right now to zero in on this aspect of Romantic culture– odd as it is to think of Margaret Laidlaw as a forerunner of Chuck D!
P.S. Re. my December post: I still haven’t prepared those slides of my own note on poems–embarrassment about handwriting , not to mention about my proclivity for statements of the obvious, has been holding me back!
Like Kate Singer, I too have been thinking about the rise of the Digital Humanities at MLA 2011. I agree, largely, that making should be a hallmark of identifying as a digital humanist but – like Kate – I wonder if making is limited to coding. Building or making may refer to the construction of scholarly and student communities. Matt Kirschenbaum in “What is Digital Humanities and What’s it Doing in English Departments?” makes the following claim:
Whatever else it might be then, the digital humanities today is about a scholarship (and a pedagogy) that is publicly visible in ways to which we are generally unaccustomed, a scholarship and pedagogy that are bound up with infrastructure in ways that are deeper and more explicit than we are generally accustomed to, a scholarship and pedagogy that are collaborative and depend upon networks of people and that live an active 24/7 life online. Isn’t that something you want in your English Department?
One way I try to engage in the collaborative infrastructure that Kirschenbaum imagines here is by publishing my syllabi on Scribd. Scribd is a website that allows you to upload, share, and embed .pdf files. Here is a copy of my syllabus:
Scribd reformats your documents to allow them to be read on smartphones and tablets like the iPad, and any document type may be uploaded (.doc, .docx, .pdf, .ppx (for PowerPoint), xml, OpenOffice). Readers can, furthermore, share whatever documents they find on Scribd by “readcasting” them. Readcasting generates Facebook updates and Tweets with links to the document being read. Readcasting can, for example, be a useful way to have students engage in peer review and collaborative research.
Of course, copyright does become a problem with Scribd. Users have in the past violated copyright by placing protected documents on the server. However, I do feel that Scribd opens up some really interesting possibilities – especially for classrooms that wish to do away with paper.
I say this in response to a recent post on the NASSR listserv by Adam Komisaruk:
I’m slated to teach a graduate “readings” course in Blake this summer, and book orders are due soon. As I contemplate and reject several alternatives (the Dover facsimiles are too sporadic, the Princeton facsimiles are too expensive, the Erdman/Bloom lacks illustrations, etc.), I’m wondering about the viability of “going paperless.” I’ve already requested a fully wired classroom–i.e., with individual iMac terminals, overhead projection, and a high-speed Internet connection–so, assuming my students have similar equipment at home, I could conceivably use the Blake Archive and eE as my texts.
The majority of respondents mentioned using the Johnson/Grant Norton edition in conjunction with The Blake Archive. While I largely agree that this is a great way to go (I’m currently using the Johnson/Grant edition in my Blake class), I feel that the current generation of students is too savvy with the internet and social media to passively accept the edition we order in the bookstore. For example, I ordered the Johnson/Grant edition, but I know that many of my students use the free Erdman edition of Blake on the Blake Digital Text Project, supplementing it with the Archive and tagging websites and .pdfs using Diigo or A.nnotate. I initially resisted this development in my class but inspired by Komisaruk’s comment, an article by Leeann Hunter, and a revealing expose on the textbook industry by Anya Kamentz, I’ve decided to encourage the digital revolution percolating in my students.
Instead of assigning individual papers, I maintain a WordPress site called William Blake and Media as a hub for my collaborative classroom. On the site, you can find my Scribd syllabus, a description of the first and second projects, a group blog maintained by my students, and a Twitter feed. I use these, in conjunction with papers distributed by Scribd, as a way to reduce (if not currently eliminate) paper in my Blake class. Check out the site and give me some suggestions.
The conclusion of “The Big Boy Saga,” aka “Fake Face versus Big Boy,” is up at
www.americanpoplit.blogspot.com
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
In Moneymakers, Ben Tarnoff vividly tells the stories of three early American counterfeiters. With their tales, Tarnoff examines America’s history of paper currency as well as the controversies that have surrounded it.
The New York Times wrote of the book:
“Tarnoff, a first time author, expertly sketches biographical vignettes… what elevates Moneymakers from the novelty shelf is Tarnoff’s skillful interweaving of the counterfeiter’s work and America’s revolving enchantment with and disapproval of paper money.”
In his own words, here is Ben Tarnoff’s Book Notes music playlist for his book, Moneymakers: The Wicked Lives and Surprising Adventures of Three Notorious Counterfeiters:
America was once a haven for counterfeiters. Moneymakers tells the story of three in particular. They lived in three different eras, from the colonial period to the Civil War, during the golden age of American counterfeiting.
John Fahey – “America”
Part of the work of writing history is to de-mummify it, to bring it out of the museum and make it real. For both writer and reader, history requires entering a kind of imaginative headspace where the past becomes present, where facts that would otherwise lie dead on the page get up and walk around. If that sounds too mystical, “America” is a good place to start. It’s eight minutes long, with unpredictable pauses and shifts, and conveys something of the vastness and weirdness of America.
Duke Ellington – “Money Jungle”
In Fahey there’s air, space, scenery. In Ellington the wilderness is the city, where things are faster, more compressed, and everyone has to hustle to survive. He recorded “Money Jungle” in New York in 1962, with Charles Mingus on bass and Max Roach on drums. Mingus opens the track, sounding like an alarm clock you’re trying to sleep through, or a landlord banging on the door for overdue rent. The city eats people alive, like Moloch in the movie Metropolis. The money that makes up the greenery of the urban jungle is just ink and paper. It has no utility other than as a medium of exchange. In the real jungle, it would be useless.
The Beatles – “You Never Give Me Your Money”
“You never give me your money / You only give me your funny paper.” McCartney probably wasn’t thinking about counterfeit currency when he wrote those lines. But I thought about them a lot while writing the book, and even considered using them for the epigraph before I realized I couldn’t afford to pay McCartney for permission. All paper money is “funny” in a sense—not just the counterfeit, or the “queer” as it was once called, but also the genuine. Both the officials who created money in America and the counterfeiters who forged it were sorcerers of a sort, inspiriting otherwise worthless slips of paper with the power to be exchanged for goods and services. These days, when Ben Bernanke presses a button and a billion dollars appears on his balance sheet, he must feel some small shiver of satisfaction in knowing what it feels like to be a sorcerer. “Oh, that magic feeling.”
GZA – “Gold”
Counterfeiters were the outlaw celebrities of their day. Their stories were traded in taverns over tumblers of rum, reprinted in newspapers, immortalized in books and pamphlets. They provided early America with a mythical criminal in the centuries before the modern gangster. “Gold” is about hustler entrepreneurship, about never being satisfied. The trade is drugs, not counterfeiting, but the goal is the same. “I can’t fold / I need gold / I re-up and reload / Product must be sold to you.” Illegal markets are subject to the same rules and pressures as legal ones. “He pushed up on the block / And made the dope sales drop / Like a crash in the Dow Jones stock.” This was especially true for counterfeiters, whose interstate networks funneled fake cash to every corner of the country in the decades before the Civil War. Their ventures formed a kind of underground banking sector, supplying America with a significant portion of its money supply.
Kool G Rap ft. Nas – “Fast Life”
Once the money’s been made, it’s time to spend it. “Rocking lizard Bally’s / While we do our drug deal in a dark alley.” Conspicuous consumption got counterfeiters in trouble. If a silversmith down the street started living lavishly, people would notice. “My bank rolls got the cops coming in plain clothes / Trying to arraign again cause of our fame that’s how the game goes.” Counterfeiters often saw their careers cut short by prison or death, so they had to enjoy their wealth while they could. “Green papers with eagles from a trade that’s illegal.” They burned brightly for a brief period, which made them heroic in the classical sense. “Graveyards is buried with kings.”
Raekwon – “Incarcerated Scarfaces”
Counterfeiters manufactured money backed by nothing but belief, using craftsmanship and charisma to earn their victims’ trust. They deceived people for a living, so it made sense that they often had trouble trusting others. Everything about this track is tightly wound: the rhymes, the metaphors, the beat. It’s a vision of Ellington’s money jungle squeezed into the space of a project stairway. “We could trade places / Get lifted in the staircases.” With illicit wealth comes fear, paranoia. “Time is running out.”
Jawbreaker – “Boxcar”
Strictly speaking, spending forged notes wasn’t illegal; what criminalized the act was the knowledge that the bills were bad. Prosecutors had to prove that the defendant knowingly passed fake money with the intent to deceive. For that reason, the best way to convict a counterfeiter was to induce one of his associates to betray him. In the absence of incriminating evidence, testimony from a former partner in crime could establish criminal intent. “My enemies are all too familiar / They’re the ones that used to call me friend.” Backstabbing hurt just as bitterly when it happened to early American counterfeiters as it did in the Bay Area punk scene circa 1994, when those lines were written.
Quasimoto – “Come on Feet”
After the betrayal, the escape. “Come on feet / Cruise for me / Trouble ain’t no place to be.” Incompetent law enforcement in early America gave counterfeiters endless advantages. Enforcement was local and amateurish. No professional police force existed. Chasing a counterfeiter into remote patches of wilderness, and across several jurisdictions, exceeded the capabilities of most sheriffs or constables of the period. This meant that if the counterfeiter fled fast enough, and his legs didn’t give out, he could usually escape. “Don’t cop out on me / Don’t give in on me.”
The Smiths – “Sweet and Tender Hooligan”
If the counterfeiter was caught, and wasn’t killed in the process, he stood trial. “He swore that he’ll never, never do it again / And of course he won’t / Oh, not until the next time.”
The jurors might be inclined to clemency, since it’s likely that someone they knew had used fake cash. In early America, counterfeiters owed their success in large part to the patronage of their fellow citizens. Demand for currency and credit was so acute that many people were willing to take money they knew was fake. Counterfeiters provided an indispensable service to many cash-strapped communities. “In the midst of life we are in debt.”
Tim Hecker – “Spectral”
Thomas Paine called paper money an “apparition” put “in the place of a man; it vanishes with looking at it, and nothing remains but the air.” Paper’s opponents, from the colonial era through the Revolution and even into the Civil War, tended to denounce it in unusual terms: not just as financially unsound but as supernatural—a “ghost,” an intrinsically deceitful medium that bred bad behavior as it spread like a virus through the body politic. Today’s money is more spectral than it’s ever been, unhinged not only from precious metals but also from any material presence. Most of it exists in computers or fiber-optic cables, not things we can touch. I listened to Tim Hecker a lot while writing the book. It helped me concentrate.
Ben Tarnoff and Moneymakers: The Wicked Lives and Surprising Adventures of Three Notorious Counterfeiters links:
the author’s website
excerpt from the book
The Daily Beast review
New York Times review
New York Times review
NPR review
Wall Street Journal review
Washington Post review
Marketplace interview with the author
Yr Doing a Great Job interview with the author
also at Largehearted Boy:
other Book Notes playlists (authors create music playlists for their book)
Online “Best Books of 2010″ lists
Online “Best Music of 2010″ lists
52 Books, 52 Weeks (weekly book reviews)
Antiheroines (interviews with up and coming female comics artists)
Atomic Books Comics Preview (weekly comics highlights)
Daily Downloads (free and legal daily mp3 downloads)
guest book reviews
Largehearted Word (weekly new book highlights)
musician/author interviews
Note Books (musicians discuss literature)
Shorties (daily music, literature, and pop culture links)
Soundtracked (composers and directors discuss their film’s soundtracks)
Try It Before You Buy It (mp3s and full album streams from the week’s CD releases)
weekly music & DVD release lists