I’m digging out from beneath a pile of student papers at the moment — as well as the consequences of holding the majority of my office hours at the end of the quarter, when the students are revising and can benefit the most — so it took someone else sending me an email to learn this disturbing fact:
Every time the Donalde thinks about sex, his next thought is about me.
By request, below are the links to all of the visual rhetoric exegeses (a.k.a. McCloud or Bordwell-inspired “lecture notes”) I’ve produced in the past few years. I would say I’m surprised there aren’t more of them, but then I remember 1) how labor-intensive they are to compose and 2) the number of drafts I’ve deemed insufficient for public consumption that linger unfinished in assorted folders. So here goes:
Films:
Television Shows:
Comics:
I admit that there may be some meat in the interview “David Koch” scored with Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, but the most significant element of the Buffalo Beast‘s prank is its very existence. It demonstrates, concretely, how beholden conservatives feel to the Koch brothers. Unlike the Rachel-Maddow-takes-marching-orders-from-George-Soros-type conspiracies that pass for common wisdom in conservative circles, here we have a sitting governor, at the height of a political crisis, confiding in billionaire from Manhattan about, among other things, the influence of out-of-state figures on the protests in Madison.
After re-watching the infamous silent episode from the fourth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “Hush,” I am compelled to conclude that Joss Whedon loves him some tracking shots. Unless the camera is tightly framed on someone’s face, it’s either panning or tilting or both. If this were my only encounter with his work, I’d probably draw the conclusion that because the majority of the episode contains no spoken dialogue, Whedon felt the camera work had to be dynamic enough to sustain audience interest. But that’s not the case: Whedon’s camera is consistently active, only a bit hyper in “Hush.” For example, when Buffy finishes her ablutions and enters the hallway, the camera pans with her:
Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home fits neatly into the last third of my “Confessional Narratives” course for all the obvious reasons: it’s intensely autobiographical; it’s told from an emotional and temporal remove from the events narrated; those events are of indisputable significance to the life of the confessor; etc. In particular, it resembles Craig Thomspon’s Blankets and Art Spiegelman’s Maus in that its focus is on the narrator’s relationship with someone particular; however, unlike Thompson’s relationship with God or Spiegelman’s with his father, Vladek, Bechdel’s interested in a fundamental reconcilation with her closeted father.
I’m not claiming that Spiegelman was uninterested in understanding his father better, only that his attempt was doomed to failure because the unknowable horror of the Holocaust made it impossible for him to either share that experience or even understand the gravity of its effects on his father, e.g. these non-consecutive panels from “And Here My Troubles Began”:
It seems impossible for a conservative to write anything about Wisconsin without noting, for their records, that elections have consequences. The original context of Obama’s statement, you’ll remember, is a conversation he had with Eric Cantor on his third day office. Having been handed a helpful list of deficit-reductions suggestions by the Representative, the newly minted President responded “Elections have consequences, and at the end of the day, I won.” At which point, as you well know, the Republican faithful graciously bowed out of public life and allowed the President to impose his will on the nation, which is why Guantanamo is now closed; the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are now over; single-payer healthcare is the law of the land; and the Caliphate is nearly installed.
Because that’s how conservatives are using this phrase: “Union members of Wisconsin,” they say, “Scott Walker was elected, and elections have consequences, so quit bitching and go home. We won, and now we’re going to do whatever we want. You lost the right to complain when you lost.” The problem with their rhetoric is plain to anyone who noticed—which includes all those linked above—that the Tea Party held a counter-protest yesterday, i.e. the Tea Party exists precisely because they didn’t accept the very same logic they’re launching at the protesters. ”Elections have consequences” doesn’t mean, as they’re currently construing it, “Roll over and die.” It means what they thought it meant two years ago, which is that they’re in for a political fight.
There is, of course, one more crucial difference: conservatives protested over fictional abuses of authority—czars, death panels, long-form birth certificates, etc.—whereas the protesters in Wisconsin are fighting against the bill as stated both by the person who drafted it and every conservative cheering on the union busting.
I know I shouldn’t grasp at fruit hung so low, but the offers of the folk over at a place I’ll link to shortly are mighty tempting fare. Just the other day, their Commander in Grief decided that his ethos would be enhanced if he penned a manifesto in the style of an online crank,* e.g.:
WE REFUSE TO BE SHUTTLED OFF TO GOVERNMENT RUN URBAN “PLANTATIONS,” WHERE WE’LL BE ASKED TO WORK AND YET STILL BE FULLY DEPENDENT FOR OUR WELFARE ON THE MAN IN THE BIG WHITE HOUSE.
I’m not even quoting the bits that are in ALL CAPS and italicized, because on a fundamental level I’m not even sure what that sort of emphasized emphasis signifies. That said, the fact that a white man whose Wikipedia page absolutely wasn’t written by him or maintained by his acolytes is claiming slave kinship isn’t the issue here. The issue, as evidenced in this post, is that as Paul noted, the deficit in Wisconsin is an accounting stunt of the sort that “classical liberals” should abhor, and yet the “classical liberals” over there never mention the stunt, only its inevitable effect.
It’s almost as if they’re blind to the fact that politics are being played when they’re on serve, but their eyes and whines come to fore when their opponent plays a strong baseline game.
*The whole screed is worth a read, instructive as it is about the rhetoric-to-rails relation in contemporary American society.
As someone who wrote a dissertation entitled “Maximal Diversity: Non-Darwinian Evolutionary Theory in American Fiction, 1895-1910,” I can’t help but lend my full support to this bill:
Oklahoma state Rep. Sally Kern wants to make it clear that her new legislation protecting the rights of science teachers to “teach all science instead of just the Darwin model” is in no way an attempt to introduce creationism or Intelligent Design into the classroom. It is, in fact, just an attempt to let teachers teach “pure science” about “all of evolution”
No student in Oklahoma can possibly understand the modern world without a firm grasp of heterogenesis, Lamarkian inheritance, kinetogenesis, orthogenesis, metakinesis, geographic isolation, biologic isolation, the Baldwin effect, organic selection, and orthoplasty, to name but a few. To stick to those strains of evolutionary theory that Morse Peckham called “Darwinisticistic” is a travesty against science and democracy that can only be rectified by the State of Oklahoma commissioning to write a textbook for many moneys.
I know, I know: more Mad Men. This will have to tide you over. Now, something lumbering as quickly as a zombie wouldn’t seem to pose much of a threat, so it goes without saying that turning them into something threatening would entail speeding them up or increasing their numbers unto ubiquity. In the former case, their uniqueness is reduced and they become just another movie monster; in the latter, they’re horrifying because our inability to grasp the greatness of their numbers approaches the sublime. But how would they pose a threat if they were unable to move at all? I’m teaching the episode of Doctor Who entitled “Time of Angels” because the answer to that question is that they move via film cliché. More on that in a moment. First, let me introduce you to the Doctor:
He is a funny old man with a magic blue blox whose Wikipedia entry is longer than New Hampshire’s, so I’m not sure I’ll be able to briefly sum up who and what he is. Suffice it to say he’s the English equivalent of Superman, only intellectualized instead of strong. You don’t really need to understand the Doctor to understand this episode or my post, though; more important for the present are the Weeping Angels, a malevolent race of statues created by the current show-runner, Steven Moffatt. Let me say it again: they are a malevolent race of statues. How do they demonstrate their malevolence? When you’re not looking.
There’s a purity to the concept of creating a monster whose movements perfectly (and can only, because they must) match the cinematographic vocabulary of horror. Every time the camera is on them, they must be statues, meaning the audience must actively infer their off-screen movement. The audience must be attentive because they won’t be able to sit back and observe the proceedings (and because if they do there won’t be any proceedings to sit back and observe). The challenge for Moffat and director Adam Smith is to take this ingenious metaphor for horror films and turn it into something genuinely horrifying. What follows is how they do it in the beginning of the episode.
…and I assume, given the human condition, that my co-bloggers/cob-loggers agree. So please, given what you know about what I/we like, please recommend some blogs you think I/we’d like that you’ve never seen mentioned here. (And given that I’m the one posting this, feel free to geek out. I’m not about to mind.) (Just make sure they’re quality, because I/we are never not judging you.)
At some point in their quest to defend Sarah Palin from the likes of Jon Stewart, Big Hollywood‘s John Nolte and Big Peace‘s Peter Schweizer either lost the ability to understand the English language or acquired Palin’s ability to misunderstand it. Their new side-quest involves Stewart’s mocking of Palin for fundamentally misconstruing what Obama meant by “Sputnik moment.” Here is what the President said:
Half a century ago, when the Soviets beat us into space with the launch of a satellite called Sputnik, we had no idea how we would beat them to the moon. The science wasn’t even there yet. NASA didn’t exist. But after investing in better research and education, we didn’t just surpass the Soviets; we unleashed a wave of innovation that created new industries and millions of new jobs. This is our generation’s Sputnik moment.
The President is clearly saying that Sputnik spurred the United States into action so that it could defeat the Soviet Union. Now, here is how Palin responded:
That was another one of those WTF moments, when he so often repeated this Sputnik moment that he would aspire Americans to celebrate. And he needs to remember that what happened back then with the former communist USSR and their victory in that race to space, yes, they won, but they also incurred so much debt at the time that it resulted in the inevitable collapse of the Soviet Union.
Palin is arguing, based on her fundamental misunderstanding of what the President said, that because Sputnik led to the collapse of the Soviet Union some 30 years later, the United States should not try to become the Soviet Union. Nolte is arguing, via a long quotation from Schweizer, that
Palin’s other point is that Sputnik was the sort of government bureaucratic program that got the Soviet Union in trouble; it’s an example of what eventually did them in … From the late 1950s, CIA had clearly described the chronic weaknesses as well as the formidable military power of the Soviet Union.” Hmmm. Do you think this “chronic weaknesses might have had something to do with excessive bureaucracies and the size of government?
Anybody else notice the problem with Schweizer and Nolte’s defense? Of course you do. But in case either of them read this, I’ll spell it out: Palin woefully misunderstands the President’s argument, as is evident by the fact that in the terms of the analogy, she mistakes the United States for the Soviet Union. The President said that the United States now should be like the United States in 1959, not that it should be like the Soviet Union in 1959. To claim that the President wants the United States now to be like the Soviet Union in 1959 is to make an error worthy of the mockery it has received. Instead of recognizing Palin’s inability to comprehend a simple analogy, Nolte and Schweizer claim that the mockery is unfounded because bureaucratic excess eventually brought down the Soviet Union.
Nolte and Schweizer have two problems: the first is that they’re defending a minor point and ignoring the major one; the second is that, by the terms of the analogy when properly distributed, the fact that the United States responded to its Sputnik moment in 1959 without collapsing undermines the legitimacy of their minor point. If the United States could do it before, surely it could do it again, no?
Two very long and image-laden posts that may be of interest to you: the first discusses how Frank Darabont establishes tone for the series in the opening scene of AMC’s The Walking Dead, while the second approaches the classroom difficulties created by racial stereotypes in Maus and American Born Chinese. I apologize for not posting them here, but I can’t bear the thought of reformatting all those images again. However, feel free to discuss either or both posts in the comments below.
Paul Campos, Above the Law 2011 Lawyer of the Year
Erik Loomis, HNN Cliopatria 2011 Best Series of Posts
