Sun(Mon)day wrap-up and what's due Wednesday

Most of you guys argued that Watchmen could fit into an underground or indie genre or a mix of both.

Isabel brings up an interesting aspect that we haven't talked about very much in class (but that is important): audience. Different audiences can have different reactions to Watchmen (or "different readings," as we've been saying this semester.) ". For one, I personally don’t think Watchman can be categorized under mainstream but if you ask a person who is a comic book lover, they would probably say that Watchmen is very much categorized as main stream."

Rick disagreed, saying that "Watchmen is as mainstream as fucking Disney Channel." Take a look at the characters that inspired the Watchmen. Do you think these characters are mainstream or make Watchmen mainstream? Keep in mind our discussion today: lines aren't always clear cut.

Liam made an interesting point in response to Yvette's post: I am not sure how popular comics are today; and even though they might have a large audience, it would still pale in comparison to other forms of entertainment. 
In the past ten years or so, there's been a real explosion of Hollywood movies based on comic books (Batman, Superman and Spiderman, of course, as well as their super frequent reboots, but also The Avengers [and all their characters' movies], Daredevil, Hellboy, Constantine, Men In Black, Persepolis and so on [Yes, some of these are old. I am old.]) This seems like comic books are sources for more mainstream media, but does that actually make comic books mainstream?

Yvette and Tiffany tie for best photo this week.

Also, for Wednesday, be sure to bring some notes/outlines/rough sketches of ideas for your paper. We're going to be talking as a class and then splitting up into smaller groups, so make sure you have something to work with.

See ya then!

Watchmen and Underground rhetoric

I apologize for being a little late with this one this week. I hope it didn't screw up anyone's schedule.

We talked on Wendesday about the kind of story (or stories) that Watchmen is telling and perhaps some of the points its creators are trying to make. Last week you also wrote about the style of Watchmen, which may or may not have had explicit connections to Hebdige's ideas of style as a tool of the underground.

What I'd like you to do this week is something that we haven't debated about in a while. I'd like you to write about how Watchmen is or is not a form of underground or indie media. One arena in which we talked about this a lot was Firefly. We had arguments that it both was and wasn't underground. Its representations of characters and genre-bending might have made it seem indie, but its representations of genres and venue of viewing (a major network) made it more mainstream.

I think Watchmen has elements of both. Our theoretical lenses and readings should help you ground your feelings about the text (though it's not required, I'd highly recommend referencing and using a reading or lens from earlier in class. This will help guide your thoughts as a writer and your audience, as well.)

Try to focus only on the text and not that Watchmen's been around for a long time and has been made into a major movie. In other words, try to focus only on what the book is actually saying and how it does that, rather than all the hoopla around the idea of the book.

Finally, homework. I'd like you to come up with three possible artifacts for your upcoming paper (details here). We're going to discuss that in class and it will be your role question, so come prepared! I'd also like you to refresh your memory of your They Say, I Say readings. Look over your notes, skim the book. This will come in handy as you write.

Also, for pre-Monday homework, I'd like you to read these two articles. We'll also be discussing these in class, so print-outs will be handy. You can read them in any order, honestly:
SLATE:
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2012/05/before_watchmen_controversy_alan_moore_is_right_.single.html
FORBES:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/markhughes/2012/02/01/alan-moore-is-wrong-about-before-watchmen/

These articles (and Monday's discussion) is going to be a different approach to the text than tomorrow's blog, so try to do the reading after you reflect on the text without the hoopla.

Contact me if you have questions, have a good weekend and don't be an agent of oppression!

Rainy days and Mondays' assignments

As per blog posts and what we talked about in class, today is cancelled to give you a reading day. Additionally, I have written an assignment sheet for your longer writing assignment. The syllabus describes it as a "final" blog post (you will have more blog posts).

We'll discuss it more on Wednesday, but for now, read this over and be thinking about your ideas for the project:

The Main Event

You will write a “final” blog post worth 10% of your grade. Here is the syllabus description: “an opportunity for you to produce a polished piece of writing, engage in independent inquiry and apply the concepts we’ve discussed in class to an artifact of your choosing.”

Requirements

Length: Two full pages double-spaced, but no more than four pages.

Format: .doc or docx

Turned in: via email ekatsea@nmsu.edu

When: Before noon on Friday, Nov. 8

Other things: A works cited page (including at least one of the class readings and at least one blog post of your own or a classmates, for a total of two or more)

A title (with an action verb)

Proper citation (MLA)

What it will be

You will choose one of the below prompts:

GROUP: You will identify a group, activity or action. You will then describe how this is set apart from other groups, activities or actions. You will then make an argument for how this is related to a certain genre or how it is related to the mainstream

OBJECT: You will identify a pop culture item. You will then describe what genre this does fit into it. Next, you will describe how this object does not fit into the genre you describes. Finally, you will argue what you think this object’s relationship to the mainstream or genre is.

GENRE: You will identify a genre. You will then define its expectations, definitions and limits. Finally, you will argue what you think this genre’s relationship to the mainstream is.

Schedule of Events

Fri Oct. 25: Blogs will discuss ideas for getting started and structuring your work

Wed Oct 28: First draft due in class for peer editing large concerns

Wed Nov. 6: Second draft due in class for peer editing small concerns

Fri Nov. 8: Final due, emailed to me by noon in a .doc, .docx format.

PS Today's blog post title comes from this song. 

Sunday wrap-up: We watch the watchmen

How's the comic book reading going? Alan Moore's other big comic book V for Vendetta was one of the first comics I ever read, so I am remembering my own experience of that as I think about your work this week.

As with the academic reading, it's not so much about having brilliant insights like lightbulbs going off, but about continuing to work at a text, interrogate it and look for those knots of contradictions that we've talked about. From reading your blog posts, I can tell you guys are doing that.

-Rick's description of the art made me laugh: "The shades and hues represent a bad night of acid and vomit."I think we could call this meta-commentary, as it's not just commenting on the text, but commenting on the text in a way that Alan Moore would like. Another good example of this is The Onion's (a joke newspaper, along the lines of the Daily Show or the Colbert Report) obituary of author JD Salinger. I hope you read The Catcher in the Rye or some of his short stories in high school (A Perfect Day for Bananafish?), but this obituary is written to sound like the narrator in The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger's most famous piece.
-Though it's not directly related to style, Kiveth had an interesting description of the characters

the heroes kind of have a mind of their own they do as they please, yes they help society, but still they do as they please. Is kind of like they take advantage of being the heroes. 

How does this seem different from what we normally expect from the superhero/masked adventurer genre?
-Desirey had a a similar reading of the characters, but also asked questions through a feminist lens, particularly focusing on who has control. This is an interesting way to think about power.
-Madison also has a great reading of power and politics. Watchmen definitely seems to be saying something about politics, but what? This is what Madison wrote:  I also think that they might have been added to joke somewhat about politics and how outrageous and stupid they can be.

You guys are also including some great visuals! (If you hover your mouse over the photo, you'll see the file name, which will give you the name of the classmate whose blog I grabbed these from.)

IMPORTANT REMINDERS!
-No class Monday. Focus on finishing Watchmen for our regular meeting of class on Wednesday.
-Part of your participation this week was commenting on my last post. Click here to check out what you need to respond to.

Who watches the Watchmen?

Hi guys! So far, with Watchmen, you've:

1) Read (at least) the first chapter (hopefully more!)
2) Made a map of the characters and their relations in class
3) Discussed some of the ways the visuals/information work together
4) If you haven't seen it, you're at least aware that there is a movie adaption of the comic

For this blog post, I'm interested in returning to an idea we discussed briefly on Wednesday and working to connect it to some of our earlier reading.

First off, I'd also like you to read this interview with Alan Moore, the creator/writer of Watchmen, with the UK Guardian. (I also feel I must be explicit in telling you that the other comic this article discusses, Lost Girls, is very, very, very sexually graphic. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but don't go Googling it around children.)

Q: Comic book writer or singer for a local metal band? (A: This is Alan Moore)

What I'd then like to you to think about and discuss in your blog post, by using the Alan Moore interview, the Dick Hebdige piece about style, our class discussions, Watchmen itself and perhaps any other readings that seem applicable is: Why and how is the style of Watchmen important?

Style, of course, can mean many things, such as:
-genre (what genre(s) does Watchmen belong to? Based on that, what do you expect from/of it?)
-appearance (colors, panels, expressions, actions, etc.,)
-themes (what recurs, is brought up again, reworked, reexamined)
-character/plot patterns (hero, love story...this is also similar to genre)
-tone (dark, humorous, etc.,)

You may also consider how style impacts some of the other lenses we've talked about in connection with Watchmen:
-a feminist lens (How are women portrayed? And men?)
-an underground/indie lens (kind of related to our recent anarchy/hierarchy paradigm we made in class)
-a Marxist lens (where's the money/power?)
-Where are the non-white people lens?

And, perhaps, more recently, via our field trip to the design center, we now have:
-a historical/cultural lens

Now, this is a lot and I neither expect nor do I think it'd be productive if you tried to answer every question (unless you want to write a book). Instead, what I'm interested in is you picking one way to answer how and why the style of Watchmen is important. Of course, there is no right answer (or your online discussions this week would be very boring), so the more important thing is to fully explore how your conception of a way to answer this works.

For example, it might not work if I say that the style of Watchmen matters because comic books are cheap and, hence more available to people, unless I put it in context. The comic book you bought is probably not any cheaper than any other book and is certainly more than if I'd given you something off the internet, but if I think of it as an art book, well, art books are very, very expensive. This brings visual storytelling (not cinematic anyway) to the masses.

That's a really crude and not very good example, but do you see how I focus on one area? (I'm sure you can already see some holes in my example. In fact, another part of your work for this Friday is that you need to comment on this post about some of the ways my "reading"or example response is too limited.)

I'm going to be out of town this weekend, so if you email me, it may take some time to get back to you (which is saying something because I will freely admit that I can be a little flighty when it comes to email.) But please do not hesitate to let me know if anything comes up.

Keep reading, keep thinking, don't be an agent of oppression, have a good weekend and I'll see you Wednesday (no class Monday!)

Sunday night roundup

Yvette has a great photo up this week. Do you ever take notes this way? Have you seen someone do it? I like to use it for signs and book titles, then I look at the pictures later and think "What is this?"

In recounting difficulties with the reading, Tiffany actually laid out a really good process. "I’ve read out loud to myself many, many times, but I just can’t seem to understand what point of view Hebdige is trying to get at...I’m just the type of person that has to push myself into learning about something on my own in my own different kind of way." That's some of the best advice I've heard in a long time: Keep going.

I'm also glad to see discussion has picked up a little. In a response to Tiffany's blog post, Cedric wrote "But really Marxist theory is really hard to understand" And he's right. You guys are reading things that people spend their whole lives studying and struggling with. Don't feel like that struggle means you're failing. That struggle means you're very close to grasping it. Keep struggling!

And finally, Yesenia has some great tips for notetaking, though I might add, don't get too comfortable. I fall asleep sometimes when I'm reading and that doesn't help at all. 

We'll be doing computer stuff tomorrow in class, so get yer typing paws ready.

Writing and thinking about writing

So, at the end of a theory-heavy week, I'd like to talk about something a little more concrete and personal. As I'm sure you've noticed, there's lots of notes in the margins of the PDFs you get. You may have guessed that these notes are mine. About half of the notes in the PDFs are notes I made for myself and about half were notes I made knowing that you guys would read them.

I'm a big believer in annotating or note-taking while you read. I'm sure you've all experienced a class where the lecture or homework, no matter how closely you pay attention, just does not stick in your memory. Or maybe, you understand the reading, but when it comes time to apply it to your own homework, you're lost. Note-taking is a way of helping you retain it and helping you attend to your own thoughts on the material, which is, in the end, the goal of education: that you can take in information and then think your own thoughts about it. For me, I like to note what I'm thinking and, in particularly difficult texts or times when I just can't seem to focus, I like to write main ideas next to paragraphs as a way to keep me on track.

So, you've got a two-part blog this week.
1) Look back over my own marginalia in the PDFs we've been working with (Barry's Feminism, During's cultural studies, Hebdige's punks). Were my notes helpful? Distracting? What would you have liked to see (or not see)? Don't worry--in no way, will you hurt my feelings.
2) I'd like you to attend to your own notetaking. Walk us through how you take notes while reading. What helps? What doesn't? What do you think you should do, but never get around to? Do you have tips for your classmates? What have other teachers said about notetaking?

You may notice that a lot of these blog posts are me asking you to reflect on something. I swear there's a purpose to this: In reflecting on your own activities, it's a way of figuring out what works and what doesn't. It's also a way of figuring out how you work. Paying attention to how you get something done (or the process) instead of just what gets done (the product) is a great way to become more productive, more efficient and improve in any task you're doing, but especially writing. (If it makes you feel better, I often have to write reflections of my own scholarship and teaching. While I find them very arduous and annoying to work through at the time, they really do help me improve my work.)

Also, a final reminder: part of the requirement for meeting online instead of in-person on Fridays is writing blog posts and commenting on them. You guys have been doing great at the blog posts, but don't forget that you also have to comment on two of your classmates' posts before Sunday. We've let discussion lag a little lately, so let's focus on improving that as a goal for the tail end of the semester.

As always, contact me if you have questions and have a good weekend!

Sunday night wrap-up

How was your weekend? How was your reading? Here's a roundup of our work for Friday:

Yvette had an interesting phrase: We have to live and go by what the government enforces. We affect change by coming together  She's right: the government has a lot of power over our everyday lives, although we like to think (and talk!) like we have a lot of power over government and politicians' lives.
Several of you noted that the way to change government's malfeasances is to work together. A pretty big theorist named Gramsci also thought this (he called it "organic intellectuals" that would help people form a coherent group.) But Jocelyn pointed out one difficulty in banking on a group of people: The hard part is getting many people one specific topic, you will always have a handful that disapproves. Which can explain how we’re in this bind. 
Several of you also noted the effectiveness/ineffectiveness of protesting, as well as the importance of being informed. Isabel had an interesting point that's also very similar to what we've been discussing in class. Part of the problem is that Ultimately the government (congress) has the last say in what goes down and the common people in the end lack representation in a congress filled with predominantly white, rich people.

And, on one final note, I have strong memories of hearing Hank Williams Jr sing "Monday night fooooooootballll," which is also what I hear when I write "Sunday night wrrrraaaaaaaapp-uuupppp."

As always, contact me if anything's going on. See y'all tomorrow

A bit of political science

So, as you may have heard this week, the government had a shutdown due to across-the-aisle bickering over the budget. Mother Jones has an excellent roundup of links detailing what that means. Some really scary stuff is potentially happening (like, for example, military personnel will still have to work but without pay. :{ Yikes.)

There are a couple things about this that are fairly disturbing:

1) Most Americans (according to this and other polls I've seen floating around) are opposed to the shutdown. Their representatives are acting in opposition to the wishes of the people they're elected to represent.

2) This Jimmy Kimmel video (it's funny and sad rolled into one.)

So, for this week's blog, I want you to watch the Jimmy Kimmel video and tackle a big question: What's the solution? I don't mean politically (meaning don't write "Congress should do X.") I mean, what's the solution for people like us? If we're one of the people who disagree with this action, who dislike what the government's doing, how do we affect change?

This is going to function as an interesting transition into what I want to focus on for the rest of the semester. We've been talking a lot about lenses that give us a way to look at things, but what if we don't like what we're looking at? 

Now's a chance to start thinking about that and, if you feel powerless or helpless, maybe the rest of the semester will be an opportunity to change that.

HOMEWORK
For Monday, I'd like you to start on this PDF. It will (probably) be our last, very long scholarly text BUT I think it's more readable than the other two. You do not need to read the first page. The biographical information is optional; I would recommend skimming it. So, really you're starting on page 2448 (or the fifth page) with the header "From Subculture: The Meaning of Style."You will need to read to page 2452 or right before the header "Ideology: A Lived Relation." It's about five pages.

Here are some helpful hints:
-Hebdige does a job of defining his terms, even if it's not marked with "this means"/"as defined as"/etc. So if you run across a weird word or idea, look for his explanation.
-Keep in mind his headers. His titles are very telling about what he's talking about in each section.
-Try to make connections between his arguments and your own life or this class. Hebdige is writing about pop culture not something high falutin' or obscure.

You should be able to view and download it via the link below. Please print out and/or bring your own copy of this to class next week.

LINK

Several people have emailed to let me know the document hosting/linkage plan is not working, so check your email: I've sent out the document via your NMSU email (or whichever email Canvas uses as default.) Still read the appropriate pages and print out a copy for class next week. We'll be talking about this more than once so a hard copy will definitely be worth it.