No, I’m not going to post a You-Tube video of myself getting doused in ice water, and, indeed, by the time this posts, the ice bucket challenge will have probably morphed into something else anyway—most likely a series of parodies.  Rather, I wish to submit this latest of virally-initiated fads to a semiotic analysis, seeking what it says about the culture that has so enthusiastically embraced it. As always in a semiotic analysis, we begin with a system of associations and differences, and with some history.  The actual act—dousing someone with a large bucket of ice water—of course, refers back to a once spontaneous, and then institutionalized, end-of-Super Bowl ritual by which the winning coach is sloshed with the melted remains of the Gatorade barrel.  That is part of the system in which we can locate the current fad, but already we find a significant difference.  That difference lies in the fact that the Super Bowl related ice bucket prank is not only an act of celebration but one celebrated by a highly elite masculine club (in fact there is a faint aura of hazing about it), while the ice bucket challenge is an act of pure populism.  Not only can anyone participate, but it is, by definition, a mass activity through which individuals are “called out” to participate (indeed, there is a certain whiff of coercion about the matter, a trick-or-treat vibe that caused even Barack Obama to say “no thank you, I’ll just make a monetary contribution”).  Thus, the ice bucket challenge can be associated with such medical research fund raising activities as wearing yellow Live Strong bracelets or participating in walkathons, but it is also a reflection of a hetero-directed society whereby (in this case benignly and for a good cause) individual behavior is dictated by group pressure. America, which prides itself on its tradition of individualism (this is one of our chief mythologies), has a hetero-directed tradition as well that goes all the way back to the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.  For the people that we know as the “Puritans” (their own name for themselves was the Congregationalists) had a very group-oriented worldview, one that compelled every individual member in the Congregation to demonstrate to his or her co-religionists the signs of salvation, or face expulsion. The tug-of-war between staunch individualism and hetero-directedness is one of the most enduring contradictions in American history and culture.  In some decades (the fifties are notorious for this), hetero-directedness weighs more heavily (it isn’t called “hetero-directedness”, of course: we know it as “conformity”); in other decades, anti-conformist individualism is dominant (the sixties generation at least viewed itself as anti-conformist). The tug-of-war at present is especially complex.  On the one hand, digital communications technology has been a tremendous nurturer of hetero-directedness.  From the sudden viral explosions that produce flash mobs, zombie walks, and, yes, the ice bucket challenge, to the constant sharing of individual experience on the world wide web, digitality has created a global hive that is always abuzz with Netizens caught up in a network of constant group behavior.  But on the other hand, we are also living in an era of intense libertarianism, a hyper-individualism often expressed, paradoxically enough, by way of the same social media behind the global hive. It is this sort of non-dialectical mixture of individualism and hetero-directedness that makes America such a culturally complicated, and, well, paradoxical place.  While revealing such paradoxes does not resolve them, it at least helps us to understand ourselves as a society a bit better. ... View more

Manuel Muñoz’s “Leave Your Name at the Border” is a short but potent piece that I love to teach.  Given the current tensions around our borders, it’s especially timely.  But I also love the ways in which it asks students to think about the risks and rewards of assimilation and acculturation.  It’s like Richard Rodriguez for a new millennium. I recently ran across a video that I think would be great to use while teaching Muñoz.  It’s about José Zamora, who had trouble finding a job until he changed the name on his resume to “Joe.”  Zamora dropped one letter and got a job.  His experience directly speaks to Muñoz’s discussion of the anglicization of Mexican names while underscoring the deep economic stakes in making those decisions. It’s a short video—perfect for class—and somehow hearing Zamora discuss his experiences makes it all more real.  It’s a great combo with Muñoz.  Give it a try. [embed width="450" height="360"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=PR7SG2C7IVU[/embed] ... View more

We recently snagged a large grant from our school’s technology fee to outfit AMP, our Advanced Media Production lab.  It’s filled with geeky love including 15 high-end fully-kitted iMacs, a clutch of HD video cameras, a Livescribe pen, Final Cut Pro, Adobe Creative Cloud, and a 3D scanner and printer. Initially we’ll be using the lab for our graduate courses but the idea is that what students learn in their grad classes will trickle down into their own teaching.  That’s my explicit goal for the fall.  I’m slotted to teach ENC 6700: Introduction to Composition Theory and Methodology, our pedagogy course for new Graduate Teaching Assistants.  I’m planning multiple sessions in the AMP lab: one for our discussion of readings about teaching and technology, one for us to learn how to use some of the tech in a very hands-on way, and one for production where students will design a lesson plan or tool to use in their own classrooms. I’m not sure what we will end up producing.  I’ve always thought it would be interesting to visually represent an essay or a paper’s argument in three dimensions but I think it would also be interesting to create tutorial videos on common issues from a classroom. I hope to return to this at the end of the semester, so that I can share with all of you what happens on the near-bleeding edge of technology.  In the meantime, if you had your ultimate playground computer lab, what would you include? ... View more

One wouldn't ordinarily consider an opinion piece by Robert J. Samuelson—The Washington Post's top economics columnist—as a candidate for semiotic analysis.  But a recent column of Samuelson's reveals so much about the current state of American consciousness that it is quite useful for illuminating an important part of the background needed for the construction of any system being constructed for the purpose of cultural analysis.  So I will be looking at it here. Samuelson's brief essay is entitled "The (millennial) parent trap," and in it he bemoans (this is not too strong a term for it) the precarious economic prospects not only for his own three "20-something" children, but also for all of the parents like him. The opening sentences of his op-ed piece pretty much sums it all up: "You could hear the tension in his voice. His 20-something daughter was living at home. She had a graduate degree from a good university that, in times past, would have led to a solid job. But she had no job and no prospect of one. He worried and wondered how long this would last.  He has plenty of company." What is most striking about Samuelson's piece is not the raft of economic statistics that he brings to bear upon the well-known economic woes of millenials in the wake of the Great Recession, but the emotion that he displays over the matter.  Samuelson is usually a pretty low-key writer, an economist more at home with the logic of numerical analysis than with emotive expression.  But when such a man writes words like "The unwritten social contract of .  .  .  [our] .  .  .  era presumed that the economy would be strong enough so that when children reached a certain age, they could be 'launched' into the adult world and would not crash. It’s this contract that has now broken down," you know that something is really happening.  A famous economist and journalist who presumably belongs to the upper-middle class, Samuelson would seem to be immune from such worries about his children.  The fact that he is demonstrably not immune shows just how deep the problem is. And here is my semiotic point.  The impact of the Great Recession just may be the great game changer in American history, disrupting America's fondest mythology, the one we call "the American dream."  Signals of this disruption appear throughout popular culture (especially in the hit HBO series Girls), but as Samuelson's lament indicates, it is not simply a matter for story lines.  The story line of America itself is being rewritten, and if we want to understand much of what is going on in the country today (especially its intractable divisiveness and ideological polarization), we need to take into consideration the fact that more and more Americans are seeing their country as a land of "betrayal," not "opportunity." A final disclaimer: having no children of my own, and having survived the economic turmoil in perfectly good shape, my analysis is not a reflection of my own worries or emotions.  But when an unemotional fellow like Robert J. Samuelson lets his hair down in The Washington Post in this way, you can be pretty confident that the times they are a' changin'. ... View more

I love Arwa Aburawa’s contribution to Emerging, “Veiled Threat: The Guerrilla Graffiti of Princess Hijab” (p. 27).  It’s wonderfully complex for an essay that’s relatively brief, touching on questions of religion, politics, commercialism, and art.  What I love most about it is the way the reader has to suss out whether or not Princess Hijab’s art is radical or conservative, as it has been read both ways.  One useful text to place next to Princess Hijab is the street art of a fellow Parisian, Suriani.  Suriani’s most recent work features drag star and Eurovision winner Conchita Wurst, who recently modeled for couture design John Paul Gaultier and whose gender-bending appearance and winning performances in the Eurovision contest have garnered both praise and criticism.  In an interview with Buzzfeed, Suriani foregrounds the political functions of this art: “As the political debate about equal rights has been quite active in France recently, I decided to get inspiration from it for my recent work. I have chosen the figures of drag queens because they match the positive vibe I have been trying to transmit with my work.” Suriani can help to tease out the political implications and complications of Princess Hajib’s work, inviting students to see it in all its complexity rather than reducing into either conservative or radical.  Taken together, these artists also underscore the social functions and political potentials for art, offering new insights and conversations about the relationship between the aesthetic and the political. ... View more

“Weird Al” Yankovic has a new video that swept the internet: “Word Crimes” a parody of Robin Thicke’s controversial hit “Blurred Lines.”  It’s a fun song and video with some interesting potential for the writing classroom.  Consider: Using “Word Crimes” to teach grammar.  Not only does the video have a number of grammar lessons (though perhaps not the most pressing ones) but it also serves as a unique model for thinking about grammar.  Consider having students create their own parody song/videos focused on particularly troublesome language and mechanical errors. Thinking about technology and language.  Work with students to identify social media / technology markers in the video (hashtags, iMessages, emoticons) and then use these elements to open up a conversation about correctness and presentation in an age of texting and Twitter. Thinking about pop (and remix) culture.  Ask students to search the video carefully for other pop culture references (The Simpsons and Seinfeld among others).  Ask them to think about remix culture/ pop culture in terms of writing, composition, and content creation. Writing technologies.  One of the other interesting aspects of the video is the number of writing modes and technologies it represents—everything from the printed word to scribbles on cocktail napkins.  Consider using the video to help students see writing as a technology; prompt them too to consider the video itself as a kind of writing and a result of processes of composition. Diagramming sentences!  The video both mentions and demonstrates sentence diagramming, the classic old school methodology.  It could be quite interesting to introduce students to sentence diagramming and them have them practice the skill by working on other lyrics from the song. There are a couple of puns in Yankovic’s song that are slightly NSFW but Thicke’s video is far more problematic and, in fact, you might also use Yankovic to introduce the concerns and problems around Thicke.  All in all (Al in Al?) it’s nice to see issues of grammar back in mainstream culture, if parodically. [embed width="450" height="360"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Gv0H-vPoDc[/embed] ... View more

One of the most common demands made upon colleges and universities today is that they must teach "critical thinking."  As a great believer in the teaching of critical thinking, I feel that it is incumbent upon all of us who teach it to be very clear about just what we think critical thinking is, however.  I have offered my own semiotics-based take on the matter in this blog before and will not repeat it now.  My focus this time will be on the sorts of standardized multiple-choice tests that have been offered on critical thinking for assessment purposes.  For having looked at some of these tests, I can conclude that while they do contain some of the elements of critical thinking (specifically, the ability to distinguish logical fallacies from sound logic, and pseudo-argument from valid argument), they are still very incomplete in their approach to the subject and need to be supplemented by what I will call the empirical side of critical reasoning. Here's why.  It is perfectly possible to construct a logically valid argument on the basis of false information.  For example, if it were true that there is no global warming going on in the world, no climate change, and no increase in atmospheric greenhouse gases, then it would be logical to argue that nothing needs to be done about the problem because it doesn't exist.  This argument is being made right now and I presume that my readers will see what's wrong with it, but I'll spell it out: the empirical facts as determined by virtually every reputable climate scientist on earth dispute its grounding premise. In other words, to think critically about global climate change, one has to study the science of the matter, and only then can a valid and logical argument be made.  (It is worth pointing out that when one of the last holdouts among prominent climate scientists finally conceded that the scientific evidence indeed pointed to anthropogenetically induced climate change, he was denounced on personal grounds by climate change deniers, not logical or scientific ones.  See how the Christian Science Monitor reported the story in 2012 here. To generalize: critical thinking includes logical and rhetorical skills (they are necessary), but such skills are not sufficient.  Every problem in critical thinking requires knowledge of the relevant facts.  These facts can be scientific, or historical, or mathematical, or based in any number of other knowledge disciplines, but without knowledge of the facts (call it "content"), there cannot be adequate reasoning.  This is why "reasoning skills" cannot be disassociated from content-based education in science, history, and so on and so forth. I am perfectly aware of the postmodern and/or poststructural objection to my position, an objection based in both a deconstruction of reason itself and of the existence of any facts apart from values.  Having written an entire book contesting this point of view (Discourse and Reference in the Nuclear Age, 1988), I am not going to attempt to refute it here.  I'll only say this (echoing something Bruno Latour has written):  if you don't accept scientific (or other forms of) factuality, then you have no basis on which to challenge climate change denial.  And, more to the point: while you may have a basis for "critique," you do not have a firm basis for critical thinking. This is why the critical thinking apparatus of Signs of Life in the U.S.A. is grounded in Peircean rather than structuralist or poststructuralist semiotics.  Charles Peirce was a philosophical and scientific realist.  He acknowledged the mediational role of signs, but wrote that semiotic systems are grounded in reality.  I will concede that no one can finally prove the truth of this perspective, but from a Pragmatistic point of view it offers a far more effective basis for the teaching of critical thinking than one that offers no answer to those whose arguments are founded in made-up "facts," or in no facts at all. ... View more

I’m headed to Boston this weekend and that has me pumped, for two reasons.  First it means time with my partner (woo hoo). Second it means that we’re starting work on Emerging 3e (super woo hoo). I’ll be meeting with my Bedford editor (Beditor?) to go over reviews for the next edition, and I have already dashed off my own cockamamie ideas.  Both of these are really limited pools; there are only so many reviewers and there’s only one me.  But hey!  Look!  There are a potentially vast number of you!  So, anonymous reader from the Interwebs, what suggestions do you have for Emerging? Never heard of the text?  No worries.  Tell me what you want in your dream textbook of contemporary readings and I will take it from there. So what should we be teaching?  How?  What apparatus do you want?  What matters more—price or content?  What have publishers totally been missing when it comes to readers? ... View more

Whisper, not unlike Snapchat, is another increasingly popular app.  Whisper allows people to share secrets anonymously, accompanying each secret with a photo.  I’ve been exploring the app, enjoying its voyeuristic pleasures and discovering that many use it (not unlike Snapchat) for sexual ends. It strikes me that Whisper is an immediate, uncurated, digital version of PostSecret.  I think it would be interesting to teach them together, asking students either to use Whisper to create their own PostSecret-like visual arguments or asking them to consider how the two differ—particularly what happens when secrets are freely posted without anyone looking over them.  What’s particularly interesting about Whisper is that it allows replies.  Others in the class could offer feedback on a visual argument through visual arguments of their own. I remain a bit concerned about how open this sand box is and just who might be wandering into it from outside of class but I think it’s a tool worth examining if not indeed worth using. ... View more

With the World Cup standing as the globe's most prominent popular cultural event of the moment, I think it is appropriate for me to take a cultural semiotic look at it, especially in the wake of all the commentary that has followed Brazil's rather epic loss to Germany in the semi-finals.  As I write this blog, Holland is playing Argentina in the second semi-final, but since neither the outcome of that game nor the final to follow is of any significance from a semiotic point of view, I will not concern myself here with the ultimate outcome of the games but will focus instead on the non-player reactions to the entire phenomenon. Let me first observe that while I am myself not a fan of the game that the rest of the world calls football (I'm not a fan of the game that Americans call football either), I am fully aware that to much of that world the prestige of the World Cup is roughly equaled by the value to us Americans of the World Series, the Super Bowl, the NCAA Final Four, the NBA finals, and the BCS championship combined. I have also been surprised to learn that the Olympic gold medal for football has hardly a fraction of the significance of the World Cup for the rest of the world, as signified by Argentina's attitude towards Lionel Messi (currently the world's greatest scorer, but perhaps the greatest of all time), who brought home Olympic gold in 2008 but is still regarded as a lesser man than Diego Maradona, who, in spite of a controversial career that boasts no Olympic gold medals, did bring home the Cup in 1986.  (Perhaps lesser "man" is the wrong term:  Argentines simply regard Maradona as "God"). So I get the point that football is a very big deal in the rest of the world, so big that it may not be possible for most Americans to grasp just how big a deal it is. Which takes me to the semiotic question: why is football such a big deal?  What is going on when a reporter from Brazilian newspaper O Tempo can remark, in the wake of the 1-7 defeat at the hands (or feet) of Germany:  "It is the worst fail in Brazil's history. No-one thought this possible. Not here. Not in Brazil.  People are already angry and embarrassed. In a moment like this, when so desperate, people can do anything because football means so much to people in Brazil"? To answer this question I should perhaps begin by clearing the decks in noting that I don't think that Ann Coulter has the answer.  I mean, American football, basketball, and baseball (our most passionately followed sports) are team sports too (Coulter appears to think that soccer-football is morally inferior because it is too team oriented and insufficiently individualistic, which is odd when one considers that names like Maradona, Pele, Bobby Charlton—and let's throw in Georgie Best for good measure—are names in Argentina, Brazil, and Great Britain that are at least as magical as Babe Ruth, Joe Montana, and LeBron James are in America, and probably a lot more so). So how can it be explained?  As always there is no single explanation: this question is highly overdetermined.  But let's start with the sheer variety of sporting choices in America.  The list of easily available spectator and participant sports here is so long there really isn't much point in trying to list them.  America has them all, and so the appeal of any given sport must always be taken in the context of a lot of other sports competing for attention (which is why Los Angeles, the second largest metropolitan market in America, can get along perfectly well year after year without an NFL franchise).  On the other hand, in much of the rest of the world while football isn't precisely the only game in town, it is often practically so (let me except those African nations wherein long distance running is practically the only game in town: which is why Africans—in men's competitions, not women's—win most of the important marathons).  A game that doesn't require much in the way of expensive equipment, football can be played by all classes, and of course offers a fantasy pathway to fame, glory, and riches for impoverished football dreamers.  In other words, for the rest of the world, football is the big basket into which nations put most of their sports eggs. But who cares anyway?  Whether someone is carrying a ball over a line, kicking a ball into a net, throwing a ball into a basket, or hitting a ball onto the grass or into the bleachers (and so on and so forth), what difference does it make?  Why is Brazil in despair?  Why do people die at soccer-football games?  What gives with British soccer hooligans? Here things get complicated.  Perhaps the most important point to raise is that sporting events have served as sublimated alternatives to war since ancient times.  The original Olympics, for example, featured events that were explicitly battle oriented—today's javelin event at the modern Olympics recalls the days of spear throwing and a foot race run while carrying a shield—and the role of international sport in modern times continues to be that of a symbolic substitute for more lethal conflict (consider the passionate competitions between the USA and the USSR during the Cold War, with the 1972 Olympic basketball final and the 1980 hockey "miracle on ice" looming especially large in memory).  While I could go on much further here, suffice it to say that the significance of the World Cup is intimately tied up with nationalism and international conflict.  So when the Brazilian "side" fails to kick as many balls into a net as the German side, the emotional feel is akin to having lost a war.  This is not rational, but human beings are not invariably rational animals.  Signs and symbols can be quite as important as substantial things. Americans right now are trying to get into the game when it comes to the passions of global football, but in spite of decades of youth football competition and legions of soccer moms, it really hasn't happened yet.  All in all, American sport is still rather isolationist (I do not say this as a criticism): though we call the World Series, well, the World Series, only American teams play in that game, and the Super Bowl is only super on our shores.  But while there may be something parochial about our sporting attitude, at least it isn't a matter for a national crisis if "our" team loses.  That's not a bad thing. Personally (and not semiotically), I believe that people should only get passionate about their own exercise programs (I feel awful if I miss a day of running), but, consistent with the mores of a consumer society, sport in America is increasingly a spectator affair, something to watch others do for us as a form of entertainment.  It isn't good for the national waistline, but at least we aren't in a state of existential angst because a handful of guys with tricky feet just lost in the semi-finals. By the way: Argentina just went into the final.  Maybe Messi will be God. (Alas.) ... View more

In the aftermath of our SACSCOC accreditation, our school is sending around a terminal degree list, the idea being that departments should specify what degrees get to teach which classes.  Currently, the rules allow any terminal degree in English to teach any course in English—I could teach the Victorian Novel or creative writing, even though I know almost nothing about either.  In some ways, then, specifying which degrees go with which courses sounds like a great idea, though of course it’s more complicated than that—particularly when it comes to composition. Are all English PhDs and MFAs qualified to teach composition?  What level?  FYC?  Upper division?  Graduate?  Those answers may seem obvious, though I am not sure they are.  We’ll see, once the department opens that discussion. What interests me most, I think, isn’t so much the answers we find but instead the institutionalization of authority.  I’m curious to see how that one plays out… ... View more

I have to admit.  I am totally crushing on Arnaud Boursain. Boursain is part of a trio of dancers led by choreographer Yanis Marshall.  They’ve gone viral several times with their videos, which feature the French trio dancing complex routines to pop hits.  After their appearance on Britain’s Got Talent, their latest video has become so popular that you need only go to YouTube’s site and type “guys”--“Guys Dancing in Heels to Beyoncé,” their video, immediately pops up. At the time of this writing, the video has surpassed 10.5 million views. It strikes me that the video is a wonderfully complex artifact for teaching, too.  Put simply,What does it mean when guys dance in heels to Beyoncé?[embed width="450" height="360"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kc17H68IKMs[/embed] I think the answer is rather complex, or hopefully would be.  To help students see that complexity, I might frame the video with Arwa Aburawa’s “Veiled Threat: The Guerilla Graffiti of Princess Hajib” (page 27 in Emerging).   Like the art of Princess Hajib (a fellow French citizen), Yanis Marshall’s choreography and the trio’s performance could be seen as either extremely radical or extremely conservative.  Men dancing in heels might strikingly reveal the socialized, acculturated, performative aspects of gender; men dancing in heels might reinstate men as the central, default option since some might say these men are equal to (if not better than) some women (at least when it comes to dancing in stillettos).  Combining Aburawa with “Missing: 163 Million Women” (p. 249), Mara Hvistendahl’s examination of the devastating consequences of gender selection in birth, would underscore what’s at stake in these discussions—the real lives of women across the world. Julia Alvarez’s selections from Once Upon a Quinceañera (p. 45) offer a different context for looking at the relationship between cultures and gender assumptions while Ariel Levy’s “Female Chauvinist Pigs” (p. 265) brings complex issues of feminism directly to the foreground. Of course, that the dancers are gay complicates all of these discussions.  Note, for example, the many homophobic comments on the YouTube page.  I might use Kenji Yoshino’s “Preface” and “The New Civil Rights” (p. 551) to offer students a set of tools to discuss these implications or David Savage and Urvashi Vaid’s contributions to the It Gets Better Project (p. 425) to directly consider the consequences of homophobia. Then there’s the racial component as well.  Leslie Savan’s “What's Black, Then White, and Said All Over?” (p. 434) examines the tendency of pop culture to co-opt black language.  What then do we make of three white guys dancing to Beyoncé? One might also approach this from the media aspect, perhaps using Bill Wasik’s “My Crowd Experiment: The Mob Project” (p. 513) to look at how viral videos relate to flash mobs. “Guys Dancing in Heels to Beyoncé” is a rich text that offers a lot of opportunities for teaching.  But, really, for me, it’s all about Arnaud Boursain.  He’s so cute! ... View more

I confess to a certain fascination for the Beat generation.  Not because I belonged to it, mind you (I'm getting old but I'm not that old: the Beats belonged to my parents’ generation), but because of their profound influence on America's cultural revolution, a revolution that continues to roil, and divide, Americans to this day.  In other words, if you want to understand what is happening in our society now, knowing something about the history of the Beats is a good place to start. Please understand that when I say this, my purpose is semiotic, not celebratory.  In fact, as far as I am concerned, the Beats, and their Boomer descendants, all too often equated personal freedom with hedonistic pleasure, leading America not away from materialism (as the counterculture originally claimed to do) but to today's brand-obsessed hyper-capitalistic consumerism.  What the Frankfurt School called "commodity fetishism" has morphed into what Thomas Frank has called the "commodification of dissent" (you can find his essay on the phenomenon in Chapter 1 of Signs of Life in the USA), wherein even anti-consumerist gestures are sold as fashionable commodities, while money and what it can buy dominate our social agenda and consciousness. But what interests me for the purposes of this blog is the fate of three recent movies that brought the Beats to the big screen.  The first is Walter Salles' production of Jack Kerouac's signature Beat novel, On the Road (2012), a story that had been awaiting a cinematic treatment ever since Marlon Brando expressed an interest in it in 1957.  Another is John Krokides' Kill Your Darlings (2013), a treatment of the real-life killing of David Kammerer by Lucien Carr—a seminal figure in the early days of the Beats and close friend of Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and Jack Kerouac.  And the third is Big Sur (2013), a dramatization of Kerouac's novel of the same title. What is most interesting about these movies is their box office: though On the Road enjoyed a great deal of pre-release publicity and starred such high profile talent as Kristen Stewart, Viggo Mortensen, Kirsten Dunst, and Garrett Hedlund, its U.S. gross was $717,753, on an estimated budget of $25,000,000 (according to IMDb).  International proceeds were somewhat better (about eight and a half million dollars), but all in all, this was a major flop. Kill Your Darlings did even worse.  Starring the likes of Daniel Radcliffe (as Allen Ginsberg?!) and Michael C. Hall, it grossed just $1,029,949, total (IMBd). Big Sur, for its part, grossed .  .  .  wait for it .  .  . $33,621 (IMDb).  Even Kate Bosworth couldn't save this one. Can you spell "epic fail"? As I ponder these high profile commercial failures, I am reminded of another recent literary-historical movie set in a similar era, which, in spite of an even higher level of star appeal, flopped at the box office: Steven Zaillian's 2006 version of Robert Penn Warren's classic novel All the King's Men.  Resituating the action from the 1930s to the 1950s, and boasting an all-star cast including such luminaries as Sean Penn, Jude Law, Anthony Hopkins, Kate Winslet, Mark Ruffalo, and the late James Gandolfini, the movie grossed $7,221,458 on an estimated $55,000,000 budget (IMBd). Now, it is always possible to explain commercial failures like these on aesthetics: that is, they simply could be badly executed movies.  And it is true that All the King's Men got bad reviews, while On the Road's reception was somewhat mixed (Wikipedia).  Kill Your Darlings, on the other hand, actually did pretty well with the reviewers and won a few awards (again according to Wikipedia).  But the key statistic for me is the fact that Jackass Number Two was released in the same weekend as All the King's Men and grossed $28.1 million dollars (Wikipedia), four times as much King's, twenty-eight times as much as Darlings, and about forty times (US box office) as much as Road.  I don't even want to calculate its relation to Big Sur.  So I don't think that aesthetics explains these failures entirely. Especially when one considers how just about any movie featuring superheroes, princesses, pirates, pandorans, malificents, and minions (not to mention zombies and vampires), draws in the real crowds.  Such movies have an appeal that goes well beyond the parents-with-children market and include a large number of the sort of viewers that one would expect to be interested in films starring Kristen Stewart, Daniel Radcliffe, and Jude Law.  But unlike the literary-historical dramas that failed, these successful films share not only a lot of special effects and spectacle but fantasy as well; and this, I think is the key to the picture. Indeed, you have to go back to the 1970s to find an era when fantasy was not the dominant film genre at the American box office, and since the turn of the millennium fantasy has ruled virtually supreme.  While it is not impossible to attain commercial success with a serious drama (literary-historical or otherwise), it is very difficult. The success of movies like Glory, The Butler, and The Help demonstrates that movies that tackle racial-historical themes resonate with American audiences, so I do not think that the failure of these Beat films can be attributed simply to America's notorious disinterest in history.  And, after all, The Great Gatsby (2013 version) did well enough.  Perhaps it is nothing more than a disinterest in movies that are made by directors who are so personally enamored with their material that they forget that they have to work hard to make it just as attractive to audiences (I get this impression from some Amazon reviews of the DVD of Kill Your Darlings).  Artistic types tend to identify with the Beats (the original hipsters), but apparently today's hipsters aren't interested in hipster history.  Given the failure of On the Road, Kill Your Darlings and Big Sur (not to mention All the King's Men), I would be surprised to see any future efforts in this direction, however.  If nothing else, today's youth generation appears to be uninterested in the youthful experiences of their grandparents—spiritual and actual.  In all fairness, I suppose that one cannot blame them. ... 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Snapchat: sadly, it has arrived. When I say that it “has arrived,” I mean that it has reached a kind of tipping point in popular consciousness.  And that’s sad because it means Snapchat is no longer “cool.”  I knew this to be true when I was sitting in a meeting last week with representatives from our school’s version of a marketing department and they joked about having a Florida Atlantic University Snapchat account.  When institutions start talking (even jokingly) about using the service, its coolness is definitely doomed—so, too, when academics blog about it. In case you don’t know, Snapchat is a wildly popular app-based photo and text messaging service whose primary “hook” is the fact that anything sent disappears after a few seconds without (theoretically) leaving a trace, as symbolized by Snapchat’s iconic ghost. I think the app raises a host of interesting questions; given how many young people are using it, I thought it would be an interesting artifact to teach in the classroom. Peter Singer’s “Visible Man: Ethics in a World Without Secrets” (page 461 in Emerging) is a good starting point.  Singer’s concern about the relation between privacy and technology offers a particularly apt set of tools for examining Snapchat, which would seem to restore privacy through ephemera.  However, Snapchats are anything but transitory, as people need only take a screen shot to preserve what’s sent; Snapchat will notify you that it happened, though there’s not much to do about it.  Thus, like so much of digital communication, the ephemeral becomes lasting. I would probably then turn to Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s “Kiki Kannibal: The Girl Who Played with Fire” (in the Emerging e-pages) to help frame a discussion of the consequences of digital communication and its lingering, devastating effects.  Richard Restak (p. 410) would then offer an interesting counterpoint by introducing an examination of the consequences resulting from the increasing demands made on our attention through digital and social media.  Erdely suggests that unwanted attention (like Snapchat’s ghost) haunts us; Restak suggests we can barely pay attention to any one thing for any length of time.  Who’s right?  And how does Snapchat suggest both, in some sort of synthesis, are true and possible? I’ll add this to my discussion of Snapchat.  It’s the first technology that made me feel old.  My assistant Scott had to guide me through the interface, one that’s based on swipes and presses and gestures that are perhaps more fluid and intuitive for younger, more plastic minds.  Yes, I may be killing Snapchat’s coolness with this post.  But at nearly 44, I am beyond regret. ... View more

Having just read two large classes worth of student papers whose purpose is to semiotically analyze the HBO hit series Girls, I am learning a great deal about this popular program.  There are many striking things about the show that I could write about, but for the purposes of this brief blog I will choose only one:  the notoriously high level of nudity in Girls.  Indeed, as my students tell me, it appears that Hannah "gets naked" about twice per episode, and that this phenomenon is a much discussed feature of the show.  So, if you will, I will join the discussion here. The debate over Hannah's nudity seems to hinge on the physical appearance of the actress/writer who both portrays her and created her in the first place.  Similarly to the Dove "Real Beauty" campaign, defenders of Lena Dunham's nakedness celebrate this display of an ordinary female body, countering complaints about it with the retort that no one seems to be complaining about all of the nudity in Game of Thrones—another highly popular show among Millenials featuring more conventionally beautiful actresses.  And so, from this perspective, Hannah's nudity strikes a blow for women's liberation. I don't think that this is all there is to the matter, however; for when we situate Girls in the system of contemporary television, we can see that there is a whole lot of such nudity and sexuality to be found—in Mad Men, for instance, wherein sexual threesomes (two women to a man, not the other way around)—as well as a lot of rape in shows like Sons of Anarchy, and, notoriously, Game of Thrones.  Indeed, reading my student papers is a bit of a jolting experience as I see the way they seem to take it for granted that of course television is going to be filled with rape scenes and not-so-soft porn. The explanation (or excuse) for all this nudity, sexuality, and rape is often that it makes contemporary television more "realistic," and, in an era where campus sexual assault has become a matter of national concern all the way up to the White House, this explanation is certainly true enough.  But there is a difference between a story that tells of such things and one that graphically shows it, and there, for me, lies the crux of the matter. Let's get back to Hannah's nudity.  It generally occurs during decidedly unpleasant sex scenes, scenes in which Hannah is not only not experiencing much pleasure but is being humiliated in one way or another.  Marnie (another Girls regular) is also willing to humiliate herself sexually to hold on to her "boyfriend" Charlie.  Indeed, sex in Girls seems to bring almost nothing but humiliation, or worse. This is quite different from shows like Friends, which bears a number of similarities to Girls.  In Friends, too, young people struggled to make it in New York during a down economy, and there was plenty of sexuality in that show too.  But the sex in Friends (while often rather puerile) was neither so explicit nor so painful as it so often is in Girls.  No, something has changed.  The sky has darkened. Thus, I am unable to accept the Third Wave feminist argument that the sex and nudity in Girls (and contemporary television in general) is an expression of female empowerment, and that what counts is that women can choose what to do with their bodies.  There is simply too much of an appearance that such "choices" are really responses to what is expected of them.  Instead, I see something of a vicious circle: television shows that depict young women being sexually humiliated in order to satisfy their viewers' demands for "realism," while young women, seeing such humiliation on so many of their favorite programs, come to expect that in their lives and behave accordingly.  Art here doesn't only reflect reality; it helps shape it. Perhaps that is the most striking sign of all here: that it is a dismal time to be young in America, and the young know it.  Whether economically or romantically, the world, shows like Girls are saying, is off kilter.  Whether or not things are really that bad, the responses to Girls indicate that people think that they are, and enjoy the dark humor that the program delivers.  There are worse things than laughing at the darkness, however, and Girls, after all, is a comedy, sort of. ... View more