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.

Just Because

Fun Home Continued

I thought this was the best book we've read since V for Vendetta.
I heard a lot of discussion about the mom, and how we get a little closure on her. That is certainly true to a certain extant. Both the mother and father still don't quite resolve the issue that they seem to have with their kids, both still seem distant, and both still don't resolve the fact that their relationship with their children is borderline abusive, neglect, violence etc.
I haven't thought it over enough, but I am still a left a little vague about what the Ulysses connection is in the book. I think it has more to do with the whole not taking any English classes, and then the symbolism between Stephen and Poldy as a spiritual relationship rather than a biological relationship, which seems more like Alison and her father's relationship at the end of the book.
I'll mull it over a little more though.

Fun Home

I think the point I was trying to make in class didn't come out so well, as it usually doesn't. My point was that their personalities are hinged on the fact that they are a hyper-literate family, and the way they approach reading, the way they analyze books, reflects who they are. It seems more like an insulated family, and each member is isolated to a certain extant from the family. After all, all families are weird in their own way. But rather than expressing emotion, or love, of any sort, they instead jot down their feelings in books, sometimes expressed with just an underlined sentence. Repressing their analysis sort of reflects a repressed sexuality. I have to get to another class right now. Oh, well. I'll try to expand later.