This is me claiming to have discovered something that no one has ever discovered before, which is simply a remarkable echo between Rebecca Harding Davis' pioneering realist novella Life in the Iron Mills (1) and Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (2).

(1) "I tell you, there's something wrong that no talk of 'Liberte' or ' ( Read more... )

At first glance, Crichton's science fiction might seem more alarmist than Verne's, but we should remember that science in Verne is often a neutral force used for not-the-best purposes. (Remember what Malcom says in Jurassic Park: genetically recreated condors > recreated dinosaurs. So it's not that science is awful, it's that people don't always ( Read more... )

Okay, maybe he doesn't exactly approve of waterboarding per se; but there's a scene in Out of the Silent Planet where the all-knowing and god-fearing Oyarsa of Malacandra (read: archangel of Mars) orders the satanic Prof. Weston repeatedly dunked in cold water (off-scene), which is close enough for jazz ( Read more... )

FAIL? I think this list of the 25 Best Conservative Movies might even achieve EPIC FAIL levels. If you can't bear to click on the link, here's a quick rundown of what 25 people think the top 25 conservative movies are (in my rundown, I don't bother to mark the names of most of these ersatz critics, thinking it charitable to let them distance ( Read more... )

Have done more thinking, reading, cutting, planning of my syllabus (now with small presentations planned for the students to do):
( syllabus omnibus after the jump )

If money, time, and space were not obstacles (how redundant: time & space are one thing, and time=money), what would be your current dream roleplaying game ( Read more... )

In "Reading Like an Alien," Kelly Hurley notes that the armpit is "a hugely undertheorized zone," a throw-away comment that surely raises the question: what would an adequate theorization of the armpit look like ( Read more... )

Disenfranchisement is a serious matter, not to mention a serious word, but I was thinking about it this morning in the shower--well, that's actually where I do most of my serious thinking. I thought, if we set a minimum age for voting, how difficult would it be to set a maximum age, and would it be beneficial to do so ( Read more... )

I ended the last post with the idea that Zack and Miri's romantic relationship gets created by porn: Zack first realizes that he and Miri really do love each other when he watches himself and her on film ( Read more... )

Seriously, is it so hard to imagine men being friends with women without sex being a problem? I guess I shouldn't expect much more from Kevin Smith, considering how large bromances loom in his movies--Dante and Randal in Clerks, T.S. and Brodie in Mallrats, Bartleby and Loki in Dogma, Jay and Silent Bob in all of those movies and Jay and Silent Bob ( Read more... )