You
walk into the room, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and are
immediately assaulted with a barrage of new scary words: NAKED MIRROR DAMAGE PSYCHE. What follows? An introduction to the class; review of our
rules of engagement, and a glance at your English 220 Naked Mirrors Passport. It also
includes:an intro to the nakedMIRROR
toolkit, andJon Klassen & Dan Rodrigues' eye/allegory cinematic art! If we have time, also, a taste of classic literature, Ozymandias, by Percy Bysshe Shelley. And, I promise, NO MILEY CYRUS!
(nakedMIRROR toolkit word for the day? ANALYSIS)!
Thursday, August 29, 2013
GMCS
333, aka the SCIMAGINARIUM, welcomes you back--you enter the door with
two well-crafted, typed discussion questions you have authored based on
your careful, critical
reading of the first 100 pages or so of Zarate and Appignanesi's
FREUD FOR BEGINNERS. What kinds of questions? Imagine that
you are a graduate student and that your evil professor (lazy,
distracted, and
cruel) makes you come up with
questions for the students that will not put the class to sleep.
They must be clever, even salacious, but not so bad that they get
the prof in trouble--he's tenured, the doofus, but still circumspect.
Type these two questions and bring them to class for today.
ALSO! Bring in an AD from ANY magazine /newspaper pasted onto a sheet of
paper. On that same paper, do a close reading of the AD/IMAGE using
concepts you have taken and adapted from FREUD FOR BEGINNERS. Be as rigorous or as creative as you wish to be.
All three assignments should have your name clearly written or typed on the top of the page.
Tuesday, September 3, 2013
You
will walk into the classroom, GMCS 333 having finished FREUD FOR
BEGINNERS. In class, we will begin to screen LARS AND THE REAL GIRL.
The trick this week is to adapt your careful reading of the dense
material from Appignanesi & Zarate's Freud treatment and to adapt
it, on the fly. Ultimately though, both Craig Gillespie, director, and
Nancy Oliver, screenwriter, along with their key actor, Ryan Gosling,
are keenly focused on the same problem that drove Siggy Freud to probe
the tortured dimensions of his patients' psyches: our relationship with
enabling/disabling fictions. Our discussion today should be
particularly interesting, compelling, and useful.
Thursday, September 5, 2013
In class, we will complete our screening of LARS. As you watch
the film today, don't hesitate to begin constructing connections
between this film and other works we have read this semester. For
example, Lars may seem to be suffering from a kind of madness--but what
distinguishes him from Jon Klassen and Dan Rodrigues's Annai for
that matter?
Tuesday, September 10, 2013
click to enlarge
Over the weekend, a miracle has happened! You have carefully,
dutifully, and thoughtfully read the first 127 pages of John Berger et
al's WAYS OF SEEING. Wow. It's a book (really a book
mirroring a TV show) that changed the world of visual cultural studies
(and literature, for that matter).
It is also synthesis
time--that magic moment (that only happens in literature classes, ok, I
am exagerrating, but it's probably true) when you are able to put
things together in new, dynamic, and surprising ways.
The classic Hegelian dialectic posits 3 steps: thesis, an anti-thesis, and a synthesis
(the latter being something like a
vortex of imagination and knowledge wherein you forge new
understanding, a new thesis, as it were). Today, Freud (Appignanesi,
Zarate), Lars (via Craig
Gillespie, director, & Nancy Oliver, screenwriter), and John Berger
(with his co-writers and graphics team)
come together in a fugue. More on this lecture to come.
Thursday, September 12, 2013
Surprise lecture on John Berger's WAYS OF SEEING and the DIGITAL
HUMANITIES! You have entered the room today and you have finished
reading WAYS OF SEEING by John Berger and his crew of semiotic pirates!
Your cruise-director for today's class is a big surprise, Dr. Jessica Pressman--she's a top notch academic genius totally into visual and
digital culture who left a school called Yale (a small community
college on the East Coast, ;-0) to hang with her fellow pointyheaded
intellectuals here at SDSU, "The Harvard of the West Coast"™...
Hang on to your hats, you are in for a treat as Berger's findings are
revised and updated for the 21st century in ways both perplexing and
exhilirating.
Tuesday, September 17, 2013
PERPETUALLY TWELVE #6, featuring a young lil' McHank on the cover!!!
agic
Days afoot as you plunge into the back story of zines in America!
Before there were blogs, instagram, twitter, facebook, and the like,
zines were the medium where innovative, revolutionary, beautiful (and
ugly) acts of self-expression went down. DIY for disaffected youth,
pining emos, would-be Hemingways, anarchist sk8terboys, and more, zines
remapped the world of publishing as artists turned to xerox machines
and raided Kinkos to leave their mark on the world. Part of this
tradition is the unique talent that is McHank. By day McHank travails
minding the tiller of the MALAS
program, but the rest of the time he is out working with his roving
bands of pirate artists and musician friends changing the landscape of
pop culture in California and beyond. Once again, here's McHank's bio
and your homework for this coming Tuesday, September 17, 2013:
"McHank has been creating zines since 1992, most notably "Perpetually Twelve"
but also Punt!, Buck Buck, and others. He'll briefly give a brief
briefing about WHAT a zine is, was, or can be. Bring your thinking
caps, and whatever you need to fill one piece of paper. Want to draw?
Write? Collage? You're in business. Complain about things? Praise
something? You're in the right place. Creation will be very free-
you're free to collaborate or work solo."
So bring pens, paper, glue, rubber stamps, whatever you need as you enter a world of DIY literature! Here is just one of the sites that feature his work.
Thursday, September 19, 2013
Literature
proper smacks us in the face as we enter the room having read the first
135 pages of THE FAULT IN OUR STARS by John Green. Like LARS AND THE
REAL GIRL and AN EYE FOR AN ANNAI, Green's novel introduces us to a
cast of characters with various degrees of specialness, various
'flavors' of damage. The magic comes from the arrangement of words on
the page--the way these strange ciphers become people in our
imagination and (sometimes) our hearts and soul.
Tuesday, September 24, 2013
You have spent the weekend wisely, immersing yourself in the universe
created by John Green with folks like Augustus, Isaac, and Hazel who,
utterly fictional, leave a mark on us who call ourselves "real." You
enter the dazzling confines of GMCS 333 having finished THE FAULT IN
OUR STARS, quite a feat. After you are finished, take the time to let
the book sift in and through your consciousness. Then start flipping
through Green's opus
and find the cluster of sentences or paragraph (in the lit game, we
call this a "passage") that YOU think is the centerpiece of the book,
the passage that is most important, most evocative, most outrageous, or
even, most puzzling. Take a clean sheet of paper and carefully inscribe
these words using pen onto the paper. If you are artistically
inclined, draw figures and symbols on the page that help illustrate or
illuminate the passage (in other words, put yourself in the shoes of
Oscar Zarate when Richard Appignanesi sent him his manuscript for FREUD
FOR BEGINNERS). Even if you feel you have the drawing skills of a 2
year old, I want you to adorn your selected passage with something that
illustrates what you perceive to be its inner meaning. Be sure to
bring this piece of paper to class for today as you will need it for an in-class exercise! For those of you that go
to town with your decorations, try not to add anything that gets in the
way of your being able to FOLD this piece of paper. When you are
finished, fold the page in half like this example here. Writing as clearly and big as you can put your name, group, and GTA name on the right hand side of your folded paper.
One of the things that John Green does best is to both illustrate the
conventions of literature and play with them in novel ways--that's
probably why the genre of the novel is called novel!
A memorable figure from the world of art who did similar things with
painting is Rene Magritte. After you finish the assignment, read as far
into the Magritte collection as you wish--you will find these images and words in the required book
written by Paquet on your reading list.
Thursday, September 26, 2013
A surrealist visionary, Rene Magritte helped redefine the contours of
painting in the 20th century. Now as we move from Green's words to
Magritte's lines and colors we seem to be jumping into an alternative
universe--but we are not! Both Green and Magritte teach us to look at
covers as well as books, frames as well as paintings. Here, too,
your work with John Berger's WAYS OF SEEING has prepared you well as
you walk into the room having consumed all or at least MOST of Paquet's book-length
study of Magritte's work. Be sure to have 2 or 3 specific
paintings (yes you can memorize their titles) that you want to talk
about in class. You may want to "read" the Magritte collection
twice: once, forward, to get through the book, but then a second time,
backward, carefully 'reading' the pictures using the tools that the
class has given you to see deeper into their perplexing bizarre-ness!
Tuesday, October 1, 2013
We move back from literature and art to the world of cinema this week
with a remarkable and intimate (and outrageous) buddy road film from
Alfonso Cuarón, director of GRAVITY, just out in massive
release. The film is Y TU MAMÁ TAMBIEN
starring Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna along with Maribel
Verdú--it was written by director Cuarón along with his
brother Carlos. This outstanding directror's film drops into the Naked
Mirrors/Damaged Psyche lineup owing to the fact it is one of the more
powerful studies of male friendship ever captured on film. The dark,
unpredictable contours of male psychology (usually cloaked or ciphered)
appears here in all its beauty, all its ugliness as we travel through
the gorgeous and grotesque landscape of Mexico. As you screen the movie
in class, be sure to take careful notes regarding the dynamics of male
friendship/sexuality in the movie. For your reading this week, start dipping into
the pages of TEX[T]-MEX (written by your nefarious professor)--in
particular, the introduction. If your cup of tea leans more to
politics/history, and you don't feel like focusing on male/female
relationships/sexuality, you might also then want to take notes
highlighting how Cuarón's film attempts to "refigure" Mexico as
you may think you know it. Does Cuarón re-vision Mexico, or does
Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN merely recapitulate graphic schemas (stereotypes)
near and dear to your hearts (and your eyes).
Thursday, October 3, 2013
In class we will be screening the final parts of Y TU MAMÁ
TAMBIEN. If you want to get ahead on next week's reading, go ahead
start paging through Dan Clowes' GHOST WORLD though we won't get to it
today. Most of class will be given over to the screening and the
discussion of this thoughtful, evocative, and erotic piece of cinema.
However, those of you who have begun to dip into Clowes' graphic
narrative, may want to begin to contrast the relationship
between Enid Coleslaw and Rebecca Doppelmeyer with that of Julio
Zapata (Gael García Bernal) and Tenoch Iturbide (Diego Luna).
Do note that watching the movie GHOST WORLD won't really help you in
this class as Terry Zwigoff's film does not really mirror the original
graphic narrative. Clowes emphasis is on relationships between female
friends (among other things) and this mirroring of Y TU MAMÁ
TAMBIEN (with the genders reversed) is one of our main concerns this
semester. Short of lovers, friends represent the most important core
circle/backdrop that we use to understand ourselves. Think about the
differences between Cuarón's and Clowes's vision of youth,
sexuality, intimacy, and friendship.
Tuesday, October 8, 2013
Enter the room having finished GHOST WORLD. Dan Clowes's fabulous
comic is visionary--we are ready for its contours thanks to everything we have already read this term,
but it is uncanny and disturbing all the same. If you are new to
comic books and comic book analysis, don't be shy about cracking open Tex[t]-Mex
and reading the Frida Kahlo/Gilbert Hernandez chapter; in it, I spend a
lot of time doing close readings of comic book panels, a skill you will
need to probe the inner madness of Dan Clowes's imagination.
DO BEWARE! YOUR IMAGINATION CHALLENGE NUMERO UNO IS DUE THURSDAY, YOUR NEXT CLASS! LOOKING FOR THE PROMPTS? HERE YOU GO!
Thursday, October 10, 2013
We will continue our discussion of Clowes' GHOST WORLD--be ready to do a
close reading of what you view to be THE KEY panel of
the entire work in class! Read this comic here AFTER you finish
Clowes's opus.
Tuesday, October 15, 2013
Having survived the trials of Imagination Challenge Numero Uno last
week, you have, over the weekend, thrown yourself into the ironic pool
of Kurt Vonnegut's wicked imagination. You enter our Scimaginarium,
GMCS 333 having read the first 17 chapters of BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS,
to page 189 (don't freak! Vonnegut laces his novel with pages upon
pages of outrageous doodles so it will be easy to keep up!).
Naked mirrors and damage psyches are everywhere in Vonnegut's black
comic masterwork--a novel with enough snark to curdle milk and enough
wisdom to change the way you see "America" forever. As you read, be
sure to underscore or post-it note passages that resonate with the main
themes of the class; alternatively, if you run across
ideas/visions/nightmares that are NEW to your experience in the class,
feel free to highlight these as well to share in class discussion with
your colleagues. Oh and do yourself a favor and read a little at a time
so that you don't end up resenting this great novel Monday night--read
to page 69, Friday; to 103, Saturday; to 134 Sunday; to 173 Monday; and
then 175-189 just before class Tuesday... Easy!
Thursday, October 17, 2013
You cannot believe it! You have read a novel in a week--they said it
could not be done! But you have done it with time to spare as Kurt
Vonnegut's rare, outrageous, and utterly vulgar musings have catapulted
you page by page through BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS--
having entered the room with your book completed today, you brace for
incoming, an in-class writing assignment that requires you to have your
book with you.
Tuesday, October 22, 2013
Stunned, disturbed, moved, affected by the first 159 pages of Haruki
Murakami's AFTER DARK, you enter the Scimaginarium in search of relief,
discovery, something... something to order your experiences of this
singularly compelling and curious piece of fiction. Before you
start reading, do yourself a favor and watch this trailer for a film by French cinema guru Jean Luc Godard called ALPHAVILLE--you may even want to read this review of the film and watch the movie
if you dare (not REQUIRED!). Be sure to take notes as you read, marking
key passages for you to share in class. Enter the room able to
complete the following sentence: "With After Dark, we find a novel
composed by an author interested in__________________ his reader."
Thursday, October 24, 2013
You are in our seminar room and you have finished the novel--you know
you have finished reading all 244 pages as the in-class writing
assignment we were going to have today but has been postponed needs you to have done so! As you read, think about
they way Murakami's narrator weaves elements of this story. Is
Murakami's narrator LIKE Cuarón's in Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN? Or are there
key differences. Authors use narrators to shape your reaction to a
story. How is this novel like THE FAULT IN OUR STARS? Unlike
BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS? Be prepared to respond to questions like these
in class discussion and bring questions of your own as we play another game of YOU'RE THE PROFESSOR...
Tuesday, October 29, 2013
Over the past few days you have been re-reading the introduction to Tex[t]-Mex, pages 15 to 30, written by someone near and dear to your heart (or the bane of your existence).
You have also read the two Seductive Hallucination Galleries, pages 31
to 38, and pages 39 to 57, the first few sections of my essay on Orson
Welles and Touch of Evil. Remember
that Tex[t]-Mex was written for film studies professors, graduate
students, and for advanced undergraduates, so if you have problems
understanding what I am ranting about, take notes and bring these
questions to class.In class,
we will screen the first third of Welles's film noir classic and begin
our discussion of naked mirrors and damaged psyches hanging out on and
along the U.S./Mexico border. Whilst we spent time in the interior of
Mexico with Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN, TOUCH OF EVIL has us spend time in our
own territory as it were, la frontera.
Here's the period trailer of the film which, out of context, makes the
film look cheezy! Believe me, it is anything but and arguably the most
important piece of American film noir from the 20th Century:
Thursday, October 31, 2013
You walk into class having finished reading the chapter on TOUCH OF EVIL in Tex[t]-Mex
(and you make a note to yourself to bring the book to class in the
event there is an in-class writing exercise). The bulk of class time
will be given over to our screening and discussion of the next third of
Welles's wild cinematic opus.
As with last time, be sure to write down questions you have about the
reading--some of the sections (especially where I do battle with
Stephen Heath) are gnarly, complex, and not at all pleasurable, so
bring your queries with you without fear!!!
Tuesday, November 5, 2013
You are thrilled today as you walk into class and the prompts for your
Imagination Challenge #2 have just gone live. In class, we will
continue our discussion on TOUCH OF EVIL, TEXTMEX, and the
Border--especially with regard to the plethora of borders nested within
Welles's film: the border between Mexico and the United States; the
border betwixt good and evil; between sanity and insanity; men and
women; truth and lie; police and criminal; and more more more....
Thursday, November 7, 2013
Surprise Guest Lecture on TOUCH OF EVIL--probably the worst day of the
semester to miss class (you have been warned)!!! Click to enlarge and
learn about our eclectic East Coast speaker/practitioner who will give
us a way to see Welles classic with new eyes!
Tuesday, November 12, 2013
Chuck Palahniuk's INVISIBLE MONSTERS REMIX is on the agenda for
today--before you enter the room, you are to read 190 pages of the
book. HOWEVER! I am not asking you to read TO page 190! I am asking you
to follow devilish Chuck Palahniuk's instructions and to read these
pages following his peculiar directions. Follow them to the T! Do not
deviate! Do what he says! or, don't. It's up to
you!!!! This is a challenging novel--some may find it disturbing.
Others may find it hilarious. However you find it, do read it.
And take notes--you are in for a heck of a ride!
Thursday, November 14, 2013
Chuck Palahniuk's INVISIBLE MONSTERS REMIX is in your rear view mirror,
as you enter the room having finished your novelistic odyssey. It is
literally an odyssey as Palahniuk has guided you through his pages like
a mad version of Dante's Virgil, leading us to places that beauty and
the fashion industry never meant to take us!
Tuesday, November 19, 2013
FRIDA
KAHLO is on the agenda for today--you enter the scIMAGINARIUM having
read to page 76 in Andrea Kettenmann's KAHLO. Because we have been
dealing with damaged mirrors and naked psyches this semester (or is it
naked mirrors and damaged psyches? trick question, you know it is
both!), you are ready for the incessant, compulsive, and relentless
self-figurations that set the pulse for Frida's evocative body of work.
Try to trace the evolution(s) of her painting style even as you mark
the metamorphosis of her (self) representations--how does her work
connect with other writers and artists we have encountered this
semester? Try to make time to read the piece on Frida Kahlo and
Gilbert Hernandez in Tex[t]-Mex. I am including Hernandez's version of Frida's life here as a resource (and for pleasure--there is really nothing like it!).
Your imagination challenge numero dos is due today at the beginning of class!
Finish
the KAHLO book by Kettenmann--try to find readings/interpretations by
the author that you find yourself in conflict with in the book.
Try to come up with better interpretations as you make your way through
the volume!
Tuesday
November 26, 2013
THANKSGIVING WEEK
Catch up on your reading!
Thursday
November 28, 2013
THANKSGIVING WEEK
Have a great holiday!
Tuesday, December 3, 2013
LIDIA YUKNAVITCH's DORA: A HEADCASE is in front of you and you are
wondering how to read it--here is a suggestion: read a little bit each
day over the holidays. For today, nicely rested from your Turkey and
familia overdoses, you enter the SCImaginarium having read up to page
147, the end of chapter 19. With DORA, know that you are reading an
homage fiction--that is, this novel is to be read as a riff (like in
jazz music) off of the case history of one of Freud's patients, Ida Bauer.
Freud from his intro to his Dora case history.
Now for the purposes of this class, you do NOT have to read the Dora case history (though it is one his best works).
Yuknavitch's novel provides us with a summary review of all the
major themes and ideas that have compelled our attention this term.
Thursday, December 5, 2013
For the last time this term you enter the room having finished LIDIA
YUKNAVITCH's DORA and wondering if there is going to be a quiz.
Cover of the French edition of Yuknavitch's novel.
As you prepare for today's class, try to make connections between
Yuknavitch's wild creative project and other works we have surveyed
this term. This would also be a good day to bring in the list of
literary toolkit terms you have amassed this semester--both to apply
them constructively and creatively to the novel and to review for the
final.
We will have time to review the final for a little bit of time today--here are a couple of finals from past years so you will not be caught off guard.
Jump to the latest assignment!
You
walk into the room, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and are
immediately assaulted with a barrage of new scary words: 
You
will walk into the classroom, GMCS 333 having finished FREUD FOR
BEGINNERS. In class, we will begin to screen LARS AND THE REAL GIRL.
The trick this week is to adapt your careful reading of the dense
material from Appignanesi & Zarate's Freud treatment and to adapt
it, on the fly. Ultimately though, both Craig Gillespie, director, and
Nancy Oliver, screenwriter, along with their key actor, Ryan Gosling,
are keenly focused on the same problem that drove Siggy Freud to probe
the tortured dimensions of his patients' psyches: our relationship with
enabling/disabling fictions. Our discussion today should be
particularly interesting, compelling, and useful.
agic
Days afoot as you plunge into the back story of zines in America!
Before there were blogs, instagram, twitter, facebook, and the like,
zines were the medium where innovative, revolutionary, beautiful (and
ugly) acts of self-expression went down. DIY for disaffected youth,
pining emos, would-be Hemingways, anarchist sk8terboys, and more, zines
remapped the world of publishing as artists turned to xerox machines
and raided Kinkos to leave their mark on the world. Part of this
tradition is the unique talent that is McHank. By day McHank travails
minding the tiller of the 
Literature
proper smacks us in the face as we enter the room having read the first
135 pages of THE FAULT IN OUR STARS by John Green. Like LARS AND THE
REAL GIRL and AN EYE FOR AN ANNAI, Green's novel introduces us to a
cast of characters with various degrees of specialness, various
'flavors' of damage. The magic comes from the arrangement of words on
the page--the way these strange ciphers become people in our
imagination and (sometimes) our hearts and soul. 
