(no subject)

[minervasolo]

What does your t-shirt say? by rejektedrockstar
Name
Age
Fav. Color
Gender	FemaleMaleI dunno...
Ta-Da
Quiz created with MemeGen!

Watched another of BBC's mockmentaries (mock documentary, see?) last night. Stock market crash. I love those things (mockumenatries, not stock market crashes). Smallpox, traffic snarl, stock market... Mosst are set a few months ahead of the program and show how it all very realistically could happen, usually based on previous near-misses. And plus, I know a lot more about the way the stock market works now.

Actually got to read an interesting essay today, about dysabilities. Might actually read the book it's from at some point. Though I am kind of getting tired of most everything being sociology, rather than English, which would be the degree I signed up for. Literary Criticism seems to be composed of different critics sniping at each other and discussing the grand over-generalised flaws of the human race in general, occasionally, if we're lucky, using literature as a jumping off point. It's all very well knowing what Lacan and Mulvay thought of gender and how we develop it, with occasional references to oppressive masculine literature and castration in feminine writings, but I want to know what they thought of genre-x literature, with pparticular attention to whatever I happen to be covering in my essay. Every subject I think might make a good assessed essay very quickly turns into a sociology essay with examples taken from literature, which I feel is probably the approach I quite want to take. Still, we start actually studying literature next term, so here's hoping. Though I do wish someone would send me an email about seminar groups and tutors and rading lists at some point, because everyone else seems to already know what they're doing.

I keep having new people appear on my FList. It's all very exciting. It grows, it groooows!

::waves::

I feel, since apiphile is bored, I ought to post something of substance. By which I mean links to something vaguely entertaining, except seeing as I'm kinda bored myself, it's a bit difficult. We have mini animations on channel 4, though they're probably not exactly easy to watch at work. There's the evil overlord list, the book of ratings and the major reasons people become homosexual for listy type things, and easter egg archive and Rathergood.com for generally 'other links in my misc section' things.

Comments

[kayim.livejournal.com]

I watched the smallpox one when that was on. Scared the crap out of me, but it was a damn good programme.

[minervasolo.livejournal.com]

It's the fact they're so realistic. Apart from the dates you'd have no idea they weren't real documentaries, for the most part. I guess that's why they can't repeat them - after the event is supposed to have past you'd get people actually believing it. One thing that bugs me is when they try to hide things because it wouold give away the end. In the smallpox one it was the mother of the boy who died, who had to seem absolutely fine until it was revealed he died. In this one it was the constant closeups on characters during interviews until the end, where you could see where the interview was taking place and you realised one guy was in prison. It just spoils the documentary feel, because a documentary about an event of national importance would assume you knew the ending anyway.

[apiphile.livejournal.com]

I am going to print out the evil overlord list and pin it to my OWN CHEST.

[minervasolo.livejournal.com]

We had a look around the subtext area too (basically, the first term's been a crash course in criticism), and the whole 'Death of the Author' idea. Can't say I'm quite one for the 'even if they didn't intend it like that it's still deeply significant' approach, since I swear the only conclusions you can make there are about the author, but if you're using that approach referring to the author leads to 'contextual fallacy'.

I think next term we focus much more on specific texts, so hopefully there'll be less of the strange. I was absolutely baffled to find Freud all over our course, and then to go on talking about theories that the psychological community, for the most part, dismiss, and other people who've drawn theories from that, and feminists who use it to talk about whow writing is masculine and evil while at the same time ripping the theory itself to shreds... Life is easier without Freud. And seeing as he wasn't born for the era we cover next term hopefully there'll be marginally less of him.