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I’m really enjoying Better Off Ted. Not too many triggers of my embarrassment squick, and some really funny lines. Ted on his strained relationship with his father: “We’re like oil and—what’s that thing that’s always disappointing oil?” Clever like that. (And, hey, I learned a new word for that: paraprosdokian.)
Miles Fisher: This guy is weird, and I like three of the four songs on his free EP. For one—a cover of the Talking Heads’ This Must Be the Place—he has a music video, also freely downloadable, in which he does a creditable impression of Christian Bale in American Psycho, and the combination of the song with the images of 80s excess and sociopathy produces a deeply disturbing fanwork.
Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms: Parody is repetition with critical distance, and must be distinguished from satire (parody relies on reference to an earlier text or text, and satire relies on reference to reality) and from irony (an attitude), although the three often have a Venn-diagram overlap. (Why it must be distinguished—what the critical payoff is in doing so—was never quite clear to me.) Parody is conservative in its reliance on the past while radical in its revisioning. Context is vital—parody can only be understood as an interaction between the presumed author, the text, and the reader. Calling a work parody requires us to impute intention to the author or author-function, and understanding a work as parody requires knowledge on the reader’s part, so the study of parody forces us to pay attention to all parts of the author-text-reader-intertext relation.
Alternative Alices: Visions and Revisions of Lewis Carroll’s Alice Books, ed. Carolyn Sigler: Excerpts from heirs and parodists of Alice from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; the intro suggests that Alice parodies declined after this in part because Alice was admitted to the canon, which doesn’t ring quite right to me; I suspect it’s more that parodies, in the twentieth century, regularly target more contemporary works. Anyway, Alice’s Adventures drew rewriting both for being insufficiently didactic and for being too restrictive in the imaginative possibilities for girls; the late period also features Alice used in political satires. Victorian women writers “reconstructed an image of Alice more appropriate to their beliefs about women’s cultural power and authority,” and women writers appropriated Alice “to free her from the restrictions of Carroll’s highly conservative narratives.” Moreover, “[t]he invocation of the popular and widely disseminated images of both alice and Lewis Carroll also provided one means for unknown female writers to authorize themselves in the growing literary marketplace of the late nineteenth century. In particular, these Alice revisions illustrate the transition—especially important in the emergence of women writers—from private to public discourse: the transformation of private occasional writing for a particular child to a public text for popular consumption.”
Andrew Goodwin, Dancing in the Distraction Factory: Music Television and Popular Culture: Goodwin argues that most criticism written about music video misses some key things: music has always, and especially in the twentieth century, relied on images to sell music, whether through posters, cover art, or live performance, so music video represents a change and not a sensory addition to the repertoire. Music videos are made as promotional devices, with systematic effects on content. And music videos are only part of what viewers end up associating with the music in terms of images. It’s an interesting read, and helpful in thinking through the relationship between fan videos and non-fan videos.
Miles Fisher: This guy is weird, and I like three of the four songs on his free EP. For one—a cover of the Talking Heads’ This Must Be the Place—he has a music video, also freely downloadable, in which he does a creditable impression of Christian Bale in American Psycho, and the combination of the song with the images of 80s excess and sociopathy produces a deeply disturbing fanwork.
Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms: Parody is repetition with critical distance, and must be distinguished from satire (parody relies on reference to an earlier text or text, and satire relies on reference to reality) and from irony (an attitude), although the three often have a Venn-diagram overlap. (Why it must be distinguished—what the critical payoff is in doing so—was never quite clear to me.) Parody is conservative in its reliance on the past while radical in its revisioning. Context is vital—parody can only be understood as an interaction between the presumed author, the text, and the reader. Calling a work parody requires us to impute intention to the author or author-function, and understanding a work as parody requires knowledge on the reader’s part, so the study of parody forces us to pay attention to all parts of the author-text-reader-intertext relation.
Alternative Alices: Visions and Revisions of Lewis Carroll’s Alice Books, ed. Carolyn Sigler: Excerpts from heirs and parodists of Alice from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; the intro suggests that Alice parodies declined after this in part because Alice was admitted to the canon, which doesn’t ring quite right to me; I suspect it’s more that parodies, in the twentieth century, regularly target more contemporary works. Anyway, Alice’s Adventures drew rewriting both for being insufficiently didactic and for being too restrictive in the imaginative possibilities for girls; the late period also features Alice used in political satires. Victorian women writers “reconstructed an image of Alice more appropriate to their beliefs about women’s cultural power and authority,” and women writers appropriated Alice “to free her from the restrictions of Carroll’s highly conservative narratives.” Moreover, “[t]he invocation of the popular and widely disseminated images of both alice and Lewis Carroll also provided one means for unknown female writers to authorize themselves in the growing literary marketplace of the late nineteenth century. In particular, these Alice revisions illustrate the transition—especially important in the emergence of women writers—from private to public discourse: the transformation of private occasional writing for a particular child to a public text for popular consumption.”
Andrew Goodwin, Dancing in the Distraction Factory: Music Television and Popular Culture: Goodwin argues that most criticism written about music video misses some key things: music has always, and especially in the twentieth century, relied on images to sell music, whether through posters, cover art, or live performance, so music video represents a change and not a sensory addition to the repertoire. Music videos are made as promotional devices, with systematic effects on content. And music videos are only part of what viewers end up associating with the music in terms of images. It’s an interesting read, and helpful in thinking through the relationship between fan videos and non-fan videos.
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