RIP Studs Terkel

I am very sad to hear that Studs Terkel has passed away. I have only had the chance to read two of his books: Will the Circle be Unbroken? and Hard Times. Both were extremely good, and highly recommend them to anyone. Earlier this year I had meant to visit him in Chicago. Now it is starting to look look a lost opportunity. He was a fiery man, and always reliably interesting. A website devoted to him can be found here, and his wiki page is here.

Media--New and Old

I read an article by Benedict Anderson today relating the uses of print to the formation of nation-states, and the rise of capitalism. Very interesting. One of the points Anderson makes in the essay, which is extracted from His book Imagined Communittes, is that languages from the 8th to the 12th century are vastly different. It's an obvious point that the Anglo-Saxon of Beowulf is vastly different from the Anglo-Norman of Chaucer. However, after the invention of the printing press, language started to change less frequently. The English of Donne is not so removed from the English that I use today. So, the way in which this connects with the rise of capitalism and nation-state, is that the printing media needed to find an audience, so it therefore expanded into the vernacular market, and needing to connect the vernacular with a lger audience fueled the need to have a unified language. Therefore the English of one part of England needed to be understood in another part. Therefore, as the markets for print expnaded, so did a uniformity of the country, and therefore created a representation tthrough language of the nation-state.
However, I was thinking about newspapers, and how they reflected the movement towards the nation, and the rise of a mass auience to print to. And thought of how that market has been collapsing for the past fifty years, and found this interesting article about newspapers's future.

The Noble Prize in Literature

I haven't been able to read anything by the recent Noble laureate, but I was a little peeved by the Noble committee's remarks concerning American literature. I also haven't read all of this article, but it has been interesting so far. I will read it later and post some thoughts, and relate a story about tiny people in tiny books.

Great Library Alert!

I was sent a link to this article about this man's library. He has a lot of really neat artifacts, and this is the kind of library I dream of owning someday.

Revamping the Old Blog

Hello All,

I am redoing the old blog, once dedicated to graphic novels via ENG 300. Instead, as inspired by my ENG 301 class, Approaches to Literary Theory. Mostly I will be writing about things that interest me, literary theory, narrative structure, criticism, graphic novels and so forth. I will try to post original creative writings as well. Due to my time constraints it may not be produced as often as I would like, but I will try to make it daily, and to make the postings interactive, photos, videos, etc.... Anyways, I'm hoping this jump starts a creativity that has been lacking for the past two years, and provides a vehicle for thought. Also, please excuse the grammar and spelling.

Hello Out There?

Is anybody still reading this? Spencer? I meant to write on this throughout the summer, but work too damn much, and am really to tired to do anything. I think I read three books all summer. One being Eight Men Out, which was a nice read. Mostly I watched baseball (I'm a Cubs fan), and got angry at the tv (old man yells at cloud type stuff). Oh, well. I think I'm gonna start posting again anyways.

Final Paper- or what I've been up to.

So the thing I've been researching lately is the way panaling works in the graphic narrative. When I was working on my mini-comic I had to use the program comic life one of the interesting things I found on it was the grid layouts that were exempiary of the different stages of the comic book. For instance, the forties and fifties predominantly had a style close to this one:
(I can't post it right now, but I'll try to later)


A style that is highly formatted. The panels are boxes which roughly all the same size, and spaced evenly. The most interesting thing about these comics, although they did have their stories, is that these are the comics that influenced the generations of writers and illustrators to come. The sales of the comics ranged between 80-100 million books a week in 1952, and passed along to something in the range of six other kids a week (according to statistics in David Hajdu's book The Ten-Cent Plague). How this had an effect on the culture, and how it has moved the graphic novel seems to be what is at stake here. On April 21, 1954, a senate subcommittee found it neccessary enough to hold hearings on comic books.