High and low culture are equally fascinating, but you can’t just do one or the other. You must do both.
- Mark Gerard Lawson
This may be the single most important advice not just for those producing culture but for those interested in and practicing the discipline of Cultural Studies. (And, of course, we should add that [...]
The Dialectician’s Guide to Cultural Studies and Totalization
Day 435: AY!
Wow, I’ve been really bad at this whole blogging thing as of late. (I mean even worse than usual.) I have been insanely busy and practically spent every day in its entirety at coffee shops writing. I’m just finishing an article (which I will be sending out tonight). Also, I hope there will be some [...]
Day 423: The Last Lecture
Here Randy Pausch’s by now famous “Last Lecture:” “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams.” This may be difficult to critique, but let’s try. I’d be interested in hearing how people actually read this phenomenon–the book just came out a few days ago.
Day 399: I Need To Vent
Not a lot. Just a little bit. About academia. Nothing dramatic happened. I was just a little upset by a number of talks I recently attended (well, upset may even be too strong–disappointed, rather).
I went to see a Franco Moretti lecture (on the history of the novel). Verdict: terrible! Bad, bad old-school literary scholarship and [...]
Day 394: White Folk
People have been talking about this blog quite a lot–even in academia, which is why this entry may be quite fitting:
There are some entries that are rather haphazardly put together, but a number of them are witty and entertaining. Enjoy.
Day 385: Ghosts
The New NIN project (Ghosts) is finally out. As usual, the album is accompanied by a very interesting web presence (I wrote about the online marketing of My Violent Heart before, focusing on the guerilla marketing and pseudo-astroturfing aspect of it–can’t be bothered to look for the link, though–very busy today–I’ll go see a lecture [...]
Day 374: Depeche Mode
Yes, if you like them, you must have liked my blog recently (lame “Enjoy the Silence” reference).
Explanation: stuff is going on and I don’t want to jinx it. Also, chances for that stuff that’s going on to actually happen (i.e. produce results) are really slim, so I have to force myself not to think about it, [...]
Day 359: Mad Crocs and Other Forms of Advertising–Crikey!
If you’re like me and drink a lot of coffee to stay awake, you may also run into the occasional upset/cramping stomach. In order to fight this, I have been increasingly turning toward energy drinks as a substitute for late-night coffee–works just as well for keeping up energy and alertness during all-nighters, yet spares you [...]
Day 347: It’s Bakhtin Time!
Yes, it is true: the dialogic imagination is in the house! (Maybe, if we’re all really lucky and keep our fingers crossed, the dialectic may even stop by–that is, as long as the dialogic does not deteriorate, as is common, into the logic of the carnivalesque).
Ok, enough pseudo-comedic references to weird Russians. The point of [...]
Day 341: Multiethnic Literature
This semester I am experimenting a bit with alternative teaching and writing formats in my course on Multiethnic Literatures of the U.S. I have created a course blog that will be (at some point–hopefully) pretty much completely student-run. Students are signed up as contributors/authors and will post short responses, as well as longer critical essays [...]
