“Alice’s Adventures in Algebra: Wonderland Solved” by Melanie Bayley
New Scientist, December 16, 2009
The author argues that Lewis Carroll’s Alice books can be interpreted as a reaction against new mathematical concepts on the rise in Carroll’s time, an interpretation supported by the fact that Carroll was the penname of mathematician Charles Dodgson. The conservative and strictly Euclidian Dodgson was against the new “symbolic algebra” with its concepts like “imaginary numbers”. Dodgson satirized these concepts by taking Alice out of the rational world and placing her in one where everything and everyone behaves irrationally. The author also asserts that this satirical standpoint elevates the Alice stories above his other works, which tend to be dull and moralistic.
“Words and Pictures: Graphic Novels Come of Age” by Peter Schjeldahl
The New Yorker, October 17, 2005
The author discusses the current state of comics and graphic novels, equating the form’s current popularity among youth to that of poetry in past generations. He points to Chris Ware’s recent “Jimmy Corrigan” as possibly the first masterpiece of the form, and sees Ware’s protagonist as major archetype of comics - that of the tortured and humiliated male - which can be traced back to characters like Superman and Charlie Brown. He proceeds to look at other major influences on modern-day comics such as MAD magazine and the work of R. Crumb and the development of the form through other artist like Harvey Pekar and Art Spiegelman. After looking at the work of current artists like Daniel Clowes and Marjane Satrapi, he comes back to Ware and suggests that while “Jimmy Corrigan” could represent the pinnacle of the form, it will continue to gain new ground for years to come.
Friday, March 26, 2010
Saturday, March 6, 2010
Intellectual Autobiography
If I had to pick one moment in my life that set me down the intellectual path I am on today, it would be one afternoon when I was fourteen years old and home sick from school. I was watching TV and a basic cable station happened to be showing Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. I had heard of the film, but had never seen it and knew little about it, and what I saw pretty much blew me away. The kind of dark humor and satire on display was fairly new to me, and spoke to me in the same way that authors like Kurt Vonnegut and Douglas Adams had also begun to around that time. That evening when I mentioned watching the movie to my father, I was surprised to learn that he considered it one of his favorites, and was a big fan of Kubrick’s films in general. Over the following months we proceeded to rent all of Kubrick’s films and watch them together. In watching these films I began to really think about the methods and possibilities of cinema. While I had seen the films of director’s like Hitchcock and Welles before, I now began to look at them in a whole new way. Going to see Kubrick’s last film, Eyes Wide Shut, with my father in the summer of 1999 was a meaningful moment for me. I had just completed my first year in New York University’s Cinema Studies program, and I had both Kubrick’s films and my father’s nurturing of my love of cinema to thank for leading me there.
While cinema was certainly my driving interest throughout my undergraduate career, it was a course outside of the Cinema Studies program in my junior year that sparked an interest in the wider field of media. The course was “Television and the Information Revolution” taught by Michael Rosenblum. Rosenblum had previously worked for CBS, but now taught this course after leaving in frustration with the industry. This course was my first exposure to media theorists like Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman and, being someone who grew up watching a lot of television, was the first time my perceptions of the medium, and media in general, were truly challenged.
Two moments from this course stick out in my mind as having a reverberating effect on me in the years since. The first came from reading one the assigned texts – Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. In his forward, Postman discusses the disparate futures suggested by George Orwell in 1984 and Aldous Huxley in Brave New World. When Postman’s book was written in 1985 there was an air of self-congratulation within our society over the fact that 1984 had come and gone without the bleak and oppressive world of Orwell’s novel coming to pass. But Postman argued that the future of Brave New World, one of passivity and ignorance, was the one in greater danger of becoming a reality. We were becoming a society not where “Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history”, but one in which “people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think” (xix). I was particularly struck by this because I had recently read both novels and, some fifteen years after the publication of Postman’s book, 1984 was still go-to example of a future to fear. The expression “Big Brother is watching” had pretty much become a cliché, rattled off practically every time someone saw a new security camera in a public place. At this point in my life I found myself becoming increasingly frustrated with what I saw as a rise in mediocrity in our culture. The kind of films, television and books that were the most popular I saw as dull and unoriginal. I was sometimes accused of being cynical by those close to if I expressed my opinions on this subject, but now I was hearing things that gave weight to my fears about the direction in which society was heading.
The second thing I remember most about the course came during one of Rosenblum’s lectures. One of his main ideas that came up regularly throughout the course was that network television was a dying institution. He believed that the rapidly changing face of media, particularly the rise of the internet and digital media, would render it obsolete in the near future. In this particular lecture he predicted a day when instead of watching one’s favorite program on a network station with regular commercial breaks, you would watch in on a website with a single sponsor. This was back in 2000, and I remember at that time having trouble wrapping my head around this concept. I just didn’t see people watching television on the internet. Of course today we have websites like YouTube and Hulu and in many ways his prediction has come to pass.
Watching in fascination how fast the ways in which we experience media have changed in the ten years since that lecture, sometimes faster than we can keep up with, has been a major factor in my decision to take up media as a field of study. In Digital McLuhan, Paul Levinson discusses the fact that the internet is incorporating more than just television: “the truth of the matter, yet to be fully determined, is that the Internet is and will be a combination and transformation of both books and TV, and other media such as the telephone as well, and thus is something much more, much different from any prior media” (16). For the past three years I have made a living working at a large bookstore. While not an obvious source of inspiration toward a career in media studies, it has put me in a position to observe a major change undergoing our lives. When electronic readers first went on the market they were something of a novelty, not seen by many as a threat to the print industry. Over the past two years I have watched them slowly gain momentum and start to do for reading what the iPod has done for listening to music. The main difference, of course, is that while the way we listen to music has been constantly changing, print and bound books have been a constant for centuries. The publishing and bookselling industries currently seem to be in a crisis over where this is all heading and how to adapt to these changes. The bookstore chain I work for sells Sony’s e-reader in its stores, but does not yet distribute e-books themselves. It seems to be making concession to the new technology, but by not fully embracing it could be contributing to its own downfall.
There also seems to be a split among consumers regarding this technology. The growing number of people I see reading from e-readers on the subway suggests that many have embraced it. But in speaking to customers and co-workers there seems to be a great deal of resistance to the devices. Some see the experience of reading from a bound book as a unique one and don’t feel it can be replaced. Some just like the act of collecting books and displaying them on a shelf, which e-reading could render obsolete. I often find myself wondering if these feelings are justified, or if people are just resisting something that could very well take over and become the norm in the coming years. Questions like these regarding not just how we read but take in all media in the digital age are a major preoccupation of mine – one that I hope to explore in my time in the Media Studies program.
My decision to enter the program has not been completely influenced by my interests in the theory side. A little over a year ago, on little more than a whim, I enrolled in an intensive month-long course on digital editing. I had recently found myself talking to several friends who worked in the field, and something about it stirred my interest. I began the course and I found myself taking to it immediately. Not only was I stimulated by learning a totally new technical skill, but I had also found an outlet for my creative side that had all but neglected since my high school art classes. One of the most satisfying moments came when we presented our final projects on the last day of class. The assignment had been to create a trailer for a film of our choice. I had chosen Todd Haynes’s Velvet Goldmine, partially because it was a film I had always enjoyed, and also because on watching the film’s actual trailer I found it to be an inadequate representation. My own trailer received an enthusiastic response from the class. Several students who hadn’t seen the film now felt encouraged to do so. The instructor, who had seen it, felt I captured the films major themes well without giving too much away. It was basically the exact response I was hoping for, and I then knew I had found a new calling. This positive academic experience sparked my decision to go back to school full time, and I was pleased to find in the New School’s Media Studies program one in which I could merge my theory-based and technical interests.
It’s difficult for me to say at this point where I see myself fitting into the Media Studies community in the next two years and beyond. All I can hope to do right now is take these various interests I have laid out here and build on them, while at the same time remaining open to all the new areas that I am exposed to. By remaining open-minded and flexible, I am confident that I will have solid idea of my place in this field sooner than later.
Works Cited
Levinson, Paul. Digital McLuhan. New York: Routledge, 2001.
Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves To Death. New York: Penguin, 2006.
While cinema was certainly my driving interest throughout my undergraduate career, it was a course outside of the Cinema Studies program in my junior year that sparked an interest in the wider field of media. The course was “Television and the Information Revolution” taught by Michael Rosenblum. Rosenblum had previously worked for CBS, but now taught this course after leaving in frustration with the industry. This course was my first exposure to media theorists like Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman and, being someone who grew up watching a lot of television, was the first time my perceptions of the medium, and media in general, were truly challenged.
Two moments from this course stick out in my mind as having a reverberating effect on me in the years since. The first came from reading one the assigned texts – Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. In his forward, Postman discusses the disparate futures suggested by George Orwell in 1984 and Aldous Huxley in Brave New World. When Postman’s book was written in 1985 there was an air of self-congratulation within our society over the fact that 1984 had come and gone without the bleak and oppressive world of Orwell’s novel coming to pass. But Postman argued that the future of Brave New World, one of passivity and ignorance, was the one in greater danger of becoming a reality. We were becoming a society not where “Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history”, but one in which “people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think” (xix). I was particularly struck by this because I had recently read both novels and, some fifteen years after the publication of Postman’s book, 1984 was still go-to example of a future to fear. The expression “Big Brother is watching” had pretty much become a cliché, rattled off practically every time someone saw a new security camera in a public place. At this point in my life I found myself becoming increasingly frustrated with what I saw as a rise in mediocrity in our culture. The kind of films, television and books that were the most popular I saw as dull and unoriginal. I was sometimes accused of being cynical by those close to if I expressed my opinions on this subject, but now I was hearing things that gave weight to my fears about the direction in which society was heading.
The second thing I remember most about the course came during one of Rosenblum’s lectures. One of his main ideas that came up regularly throughout the course was that network television was a dying institution. He believed that the rapidly changing face of media, particularly the rise of the internet and digital media, would render it obsolete in the near future. In this particular lecture he predicted a day when instead of watching one’s favorite program on a network station with regular commercial breaks, you would watch in on a website with a single sponsor. This was back in 2000, and I remember at that time having trouble wrapping my head around this concept. I just didn’t see people watching television on the internet. Of course today we have websites like YouTube and Hulu and in many ways his prediction has come to pass.
Watching in fascination how fast the ways in which we experience media have changed in the ten years since that lecture, sometimes faster than we can keep up with, has been a major factor in my decision to take up media as a field of study. In Digital McLuhan, Paul Levinson discusses the fact that the internet is incorporating more than just television: “the truth of the matter, yet to be fully determined, is that the Internet is and will be a combination and transformation of both books and TV, and other media such as the telephone as well, and thus is something much more, much different from any prior media” (16). For the past three years I have made a living working at a large bookstore. While not an obvious source of inspiration toward a career in media studies, it has put me in a position to observe a major change undergoing our lives. When electronic readers first went on the market they were something of a novelty, not seen by many as a threat to the print industry. Over the past two years I have watched them slowly gain momentum and start to do for reading what the iPod has done for listening to music. The main difference, of course, is that while the way we listen to music has been constantly changing, print and bound books have been a constant for centuries. The publishing and bookselling industries currently seem to be in a crisis over where this is all heading and how to adapt to these changes. The bookstore chain I work for sells Sony’s e-reader in its stores, but does not yet distribute e-books themselves. It seems to be making concession to the new technology, but by not fully embracing it could be contributing to its own downfall.
There also seems to be a split among consumers regarding this technology. The growing number of people I see reading from e-readers on the subway suggests that many have embraced it. But in speaking to customers and co-workers there seems to be a great deal of resistance to the devices. Some see the experience of reading from a bound book as a unique one and don’t feel it can be replaced. Some just like the act of collecting books and displaying them on a shelf, which e-reading could render obsolete. I often find myself wondering if these feelings are justified, or if people are just resisting something that could very well take over and become the norm in the coming years. Questions like these regarding not just how we read but take in all media in the digital age are a major preoccupation of mine – one that I hope to explore in my time in the Media Studies program.
My decision to enter the program has not been completely influenced by my interests in the theory side. A little over a year ago, on little more than a whim, I enrolled in an intensive month-long course on digital editing. I had recently found myself talking to several friends who worked in the field, and something about it stirred my interest. I began the course and I found myself taking to it immediately. Not only was I stimulated by learning a totally new technical skill, but I had also found an outlet for my creative side that had all but neglected since my high school art classes. One of the most satisfying moments came when we presented our final projects on the last day of class. The assignment had been to create a trailer for a film of our choice. I had chosen Todd Haynes’s Velvet Goldmine, partially because it was a film I had always enjoyed, and also because on watching the film’s actual trailer I found it to be an inadequate representation. My own trailer received an enthusiastic response from the class. Several students who hadn’t seen the film now felt encouraged to do so. The instructor, who had seen it, felt I captured the films major themes well without giving too much away. It was basically the exact response I was hoping for, and I then knew I had found a new calling. This positive academic experience sparked my decision to go back to school full time, and I was pleased to find in the New School’s Media Studies program one in which I could merge my theory-based and technical interests.
It’s difficult for me to say at this point where I see myself fitting into the Media Studies community in the next two years and beyond. All I can hope to do right now is take these various interests I have laid out here and build on them, while at the same time remaining open to all the new areas that I am exposed to. By remaining open-minded and flexible, I am confident that I will have solid idea of my place in this field sooner than later.
Works Cited
Levinson, Paul. Digital McLuhan. New York: Routledge, 2001.
Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves To Death. New York: Penguin, 2006.
First Post
Thus begins my new blog. I'm creating it to primarly be a place to post my work for my Understanding Media Class, but will hopefully evolve into something more. For the sake of having some content on here, this is the first (and only, so far) thing I've posted to YouTube. It was a moment from a movie that, while not intentionally funny, had me rolling on the floor. Apparently many agreed, and the video currently has over 26,000 views. Enjoy!
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