Part of my fieldwork therefore involves hanging out in marketplaces and talking to folk who sell DVDs, CDs, VCDs, etc. I like to see what’s available, usually buy something to make the store-owner comfortable with me, then chat about what people like, whether what I bought is good, and so forth. Indeed, given all my work on parataxts and extratextuals, I’m especially fascinated with how Hollywood and Nollywood are sold in a town in Malawi.

Well, the other day I found a gem. Alongside the usual suspects of CSI, Prison Break, wrestling, and 24 that I got used to seeing two years ago, the latest show to hit the stands is Lost. Yet, I should explain that action does extremely well here — the “video shows” (rooms that fit anywhere from 20 to 50, and that play movies and television on tiny televisions for an admission price of about 3-5 cents) exhibit a lot of Nigerian soaps, but when it’s Hollywood, it’s nearly always Van Damme, Schwarzenegger (and I don’t mean Twins!), Stallone, Cruise, Snipes, Seagal, and friends. With that in mind, it was interesting to see the copy on the back of the DVD package for Season 5 of Lost (spoiler alert):

“Phil and the gunmen showed up, and Jack plotted his course toward the swan. Phil spotted Jack and started shooting at him. Jack shot back and the rest of the group provided cover for Jack by driving him by in the van and shooting. Sawyer snuck up behind Phil and held him at gunpoint, ordering him to tell everyone else to drop their guns. Sawyer told Jack to do his business. The drill wouldn’t shut down. Jack held the bomb over the hole, looked back at Kate and Sawyer looked at Juliet. Jack dropped the bomb and … nothing happened. ‘This don’t look like LAX,’ Sawyer said. Metal objects started being pulled into the hole. Jack was knocked about by a metal box, Chang was trapped for a moment by a piece of scaffolding and Miles helped pull him free. Phil was about to shoot Sawyer, when another piece of scaffolding knocked him over, then a series of metal pipes shot toward him, with one of them hitting Phil in the chest, presumably killing him.”

Just in case you wondered what genre Lost was, we now have an answer, for Malawi at least: it’s full-on action.

Maybe later I’ll type up the waaaaay cooler notes for Season 1.

Apologies, in the meantime, if formatting is messed up here. I can’t access the rich text editor in WordPress here, and my knowledge of html is strictly limited.

I am a child of Sesame Street, and I say this proudly. I watched a lot of Sesame Street as a child. These were the days before the wonderful Jim Henson died, before the freaky and annoying Elmo moved in, long before Cookie Monster went veggie, and before Mr. Snuffleupagus was visible to the adults on the street.

It’s that last part that’s important to this story here. I’m told that the writers eventually made Snuffy visible in part out of fear that kids wouldn’t share important things with their parents if they saw adults continually refuse to believe in Snuffy’s existence. And for sure, I shared Big Bird’s frustration that nobody believed in his imaginary friend … because my mum had a little game whereby she quite artfully turned her back or left the room momentarily whenever Mr. Snuffleupagus was on the screen. She’d then come back and I’d tell her Snuffy was there, hadn’t she seen him? Always the answer came, “No. Who is ‘Mr. Snuffleupagus’?”

Maybe the writers were right to make Snuffy visible to all, but telling my mum important things was never a problem for me. I do love, though, how she gave me this small bond with Big Bird and Mr. Snuffleupagus, realizing how identification with them could be fun and playful, and letting me have a private relationship with them. Perhaps I’m adding this in retrospect, but my memory, moreover, is that I knew she knew Snuffy existed, but that she continued to turn her back or look away as a small joke. It was a trusting joke, no less, one that let me know that it was okay to have my own relationship with TV characters, and a joke that I see as a symbol of how close she’s always been to me, and yet how much she’s always been willing to let me have my own space. It’s also a joke of which she doesn’t even remember being a part when I discuss it with her now, a fact that makes it all the more wonderful a story for me of how superb she is, since it shows how effortless her brilliant parenting can be.

So today, I’m sure Big Bird and Mr. Snuffleupagus (and Grover and Kermit, no doubt!) join me in wishing my mum a Happy Mother’s Day.

I’ve heard the title of this post way too many times in the last few weeks. They bug me. But they also say something important about how we watch television, I think.

First, when Eddy Kitses and Adam Horowitz, two Lost writer-producers and University of Wisconsin Communication Arts alumni, visited Madison recently, several of our students shared a version of the lines with them. It’s popped up on numerous websites or Facebook threads I read. And it’s a general mantra as the show approaches its final episode.

But I really hope it is just a mantra, something that gets repeated over and over without a sense of why it’s there and what it means. Because if any fans are honestly pegging all their hopes, investment of time, and their ultimate evaluation of the show on how it ends, I have news for you: the show’s already failed for you.

Granted, a lot’s at stake, and I really hope the writers and actors pull it off. Granted, like most (all?) Lost viewers, there have been times in the last few years when I’ve felt as though they’re just throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks, and making up the plot willy-nilly. And granted, I want a brilliant ending, something that honors the journey (t)here. But it’s been an incredible ride. If you’ve stuck with it all this time, and have immense anticipation and hopes for the cast and crew to pull off a fantastic finale, surely that’s because its level of quality has told you that it’s fair to expect this. If not, why are you still watching? If the value of the narrative and of the experience still hangs in the balance, you have only yourself to blame for lashing yourself on the back by watching something you’re not enjoying. If, by contrast, you’ve been enjoying it, where’s the “waste”?

I ask that question in part rhetorically, since I think what’s really being said by many fans when they suggest that Lost might have wasted all their time is that they want a conclusion that justifies the time they’ve spent watching the show to others. Conclusions to stories matter, of course, but when you’re really enjoying a story, they matter more to those not watching. Indeed, much negative analysis of shows that someone didn’t watch harps on their conclusions, either of the show as a whole (cf. Sex and the City) or of any given episode, as critics can easily lambaste a show for its apparent closing message rather than paying attention to the journey – a strategy common to lazy textual analyses. Censors and would-be censors love conclusions, too, because that’s where they look for the moral.

But if you love a show, the journey is the thing. For Lost, it might be enjoying Nestor Carbonell’s performance earlier this year, or Michael Emerson’s performance throughout the series; it might be getting swept up by Jin and Sun; it might be a fascination with Sayid’s tortured path; it might be the pleasure of the puzzle, and of endless guessing, hypotheses, and counter-hypotheses. Etcetera. But those are the things that non-watchers aren’t watching. Eventually, all they’ll probably know is that Lost began with a bunch of people who crashed on an island and ended with _______. And, yes, what fills that blank is likely going to make many people laugh. It already does. Smoke monsters, time travel, cursed numbers, and resurrection don’t instill confidence in too many non-watchers. So I wonder if fans who worry about “wasting” their time are simply expressing a concern that when it’s all over, others will think they wasted their time [and yes, I do enjoy discussing “the others” in a post on Lost].

This is where I diverge, though … and where surely many Lost fans should too. See, if you told me back in 2004 where the show would be now, let alone three weeks from now, I wouldn’t have signed up for the ride. Time travel is nearly always handled poorly. Smoke monsters? Alternate worlds? Not one, but two guys who can talk to the dead? Not the stuff I signed up for. But I’ve stuck around because somehow they’ve made it work, or between the bits that don’t work for me, I’ve found lovely moments and characters and storylines. The fact that I’m not alone, and that so many people are still here could on one hand suggest the huge market for science fiction, but we already knew that. On the other hand, it suggests how much the journey, not necessarily the conclusion, matters, even though our culture at large is fond of its mantra that the conclusion’s the thing.

Last week was Spring Break, and I actually took a vacation, on a cruise ship of all places (no, I’m not 65, but it was cheap, I needed sun, and I needed something that required no energy from me). Which further meant I got to read a novel for the first time in a time span that I won’t mention in case my BA and MA in Lit are recalled. The lucky book: Julian Barnes’s excellent A History of the World in 10 and a Half Chapters. I grabbed it off my shelf having only looked at the spine, thinking, “it’s about bloody time I read some Barnes.”

Chapter 1 is set on Noah’s Ark. Chapter 2 involves a terrorist incident on a cruise ship. Chapter 4 sees a woman sail away from an abusive boyfriend and the fear of nuclear war. Chapter 5 is about a shipwreck. And Noah’s Ark and the shipwreck feature in other chapters too. In other words, while I was sitting on a ship, I was reading about a lot of events on ships. When I went to the gym on board one day, they were even playing Titanic on the screens.

The result was a wonderful layering of both experiences, textual and RL. Barnes makes a lot out of the separation of the clean and the unclean for the Ark, and playfully applies it to the cruise patrons in Chapter Two, though not before I’d already amusingly made the connection myself, staring out at the different passengers. As I read that Chapter Two, in which terrorists hijack a cruise ship, I heard a crew member warn a passenger not to venture too far from the pier alone in Guatemala due to local unrest. Titanic played as the ship listed in somewhat rocky seas. The final chapter situates the narrator in a personal heaven that includes the perfect breakfast for every meal, while I enjoyed a buffet breakfast everyday and sat around looking up at the sun and clouds for the rest of the days. And there were countless other small confluences of the world around me and the world(s) in the book, each close enough to one another to make me think more deeply about the unfolding texts, characters, themes, and plots around me.

I love these moments – when real life conspires with fiction to make you think, to add shades of meaning to something that is already demanding reflection. One could see a grander author at work, I suppose, narcissistically (or religiously?) seeing this as some sort of Truman Show scenario in which everything is there for a reason. Instead, I see it as yet more evidence of how much richer any text becomes on the back of other texts and experiences.

We often manage and control such processes, watching specific genres of film or television to match moods or seasons of the year, listening to sad songs after a break-up, etc., using life to fill a text even moreso, or vice versa. But when the moments occur at random, it’s a nice little sign that the chaos that is intertextuality sometimes produces beautiful structures, paths, and meanings.

DVR Season Recording
Monday – How I Met Your Mother
Tuesday – nothing
Wednesday – Modern Family, Glee, South Park
Thursday – Flash Forward, Survivor, The Office, 30 Rock (when it starts)
Friday – nothing
Sunday – Mad Men, Amazing Race, The Simpsons

Will Watch If It’s On, But Not Being Recorded
Monday – House, CSI: Miami
Tuesday – Biggest Loser, The Good Wife
Wednesday – New Adventures of Old Christine, America’s Next Top Model
Thursday – Fringe, Bones
Friday – nothing
Sunday – Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, Family Guy
Any Night – Food Network

n.b: ABC’s Full Episode Player was giving me way too much grief for me to bother watching Hank or The Middle after my DVR and I’d missed them. So, no review and no inclusion on my list

• Ken Levine’s wonderful account of the Emmys, including his nice snark about Jeff Probst winning: “Hugh Laurie can’t win an Emmy but this guy now has two for saying “Wanna know what you’re playing for?” every friggin’ episode.” (for the record, though, I think he’s the deserving winner – jg)
• Cable U’s Reess Kennedy on why he doesn’t think he should like Mad Men for the show, yet loves it for its branding
• With all the other things going on here, I don’t have time to write about them, but the Where the Wild Things Are posters have intrigued me. Go here for a collection of them
• Issue 3 of Transformative Works and Cultures is out, with, as before, a sizeable and wonderful collection of stuff
• Fox has picked up Glee
• The Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) has come up with its Statement on best practices regarding Fair Use for academic teaching and publishing. Read, circulate, and make sure your press sees it too
• In an article called “Nadir Of Western Civilization To Be Reached This Friday At 3:32 P.M,” The Onion attacks one of ABC’s new sitcom (though, personally, I think Cougar Town seems like the sign of the beast itself), writing “At 9 p.m. Wednesday the ABC sitcom Modern Family will premiere, marking the least-inspired creative endeavor ever attempted by modern man.”
• Finally, though I’ve been happy to see the Jay Leno Show draw some meh ratings, TV By the Numbers notes that the numbers could look good for NBC, even at this low level

I recently had the (ahem) extreme joy of going through my manuscript for Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts to make the index (that’s not it above — that’s a screenshot from Google Books’ copy of Watching with The Simpsons). It’s a bittersweet moment in book publishing, since it’s the last thing you need to do before you then see it as a tangible object a few months later … yet it’s not a fun task (though one can introduce very small elements of fun: check out the Dharma Initiative entry in my index to Television Entertainment for an example, or the Bill O’Reilly one in Satire TV). You could pay someone else to do it, but then you won’t see a dime of proceeds from the book, and while I’m not foolish enough to think I’ll make much money off my books, it’s nice to get at least something out of it, even if that something equates simply to a load of groceries or a nice dinner.

Indexing’s also a complex act, since you must wrestle with who you’re doing this for – yourself or others – and if you answered “others” to that question, you then need to try and predict what categories will make sense to these hypothetical readers and their interest. I thought I’d reflect a bit on that act here, while discussing other modes of memory/locating devices. More after the fold …
An index is an interesting paratext, since it’s an attempt to provide an analog version of a web browser to your book. Of course, in a Google Books era, one could see that as a redundant act, but I’m sure indexes will still prove important, since they can also be really helpful to a casual book browser deciding whether the book’s worth it. The index can be a place to see what sort of terms and what sort of individuals hold sway over a book (which can prove all the more helpful if, like SSS, the book uses endnotes not a bibliography). Who and what are the book’s “sponsors”?

Along those lines, I wish modern books would include Wordles, as a much more pleasing way to look at word frequency. I’ll publish more when the book’s out, but for example, here’s a Wordle of Chapter 3, made by wordle.net:

Ultimately, though, I also find myself wracked by concern that the words I’m using aren’t the words that others might be searching for, even if they’re close correlates. So, for example, I write a lot about paratexts as frames, yet someone interested in “framing” might be disappointed to find “frames” missing from the index. Similarly, since I mobilize the terms “synergy,” “hype,” “paratexts,” “peripherals,” “extratexts,” “licensed merchandise,” and a variety of others, I had to wrestle with when to index each of these, without making the index a pp. 1 – 250 kind of affair. But what if the term I chose not to index is what someone’s looking for? And, since I invoked Google Books, what if I’m not using the word “synergy,” for instance, yet am discussing exactly that, when someone is Googling that phrase and finding nothing?

Such questions may seem woefully vain, concerned only with how people will find me and my book, but if we move beyond the case of simply my book, they’re cause for concern. After all, I face similar issues when I need to decide how to tag each of these blog entries. As does everyone indexing or tagging. And thus if we add all those gaps and human errors of indexes and tagging together, we have an archive that can be remarkably hard to access. I’m inspired here by a recent (as yet unpublished) piece I read by one of my dept’s fantastic grad students, Megan Sapnar Ankerson (who, by the way, is on the job market, so hire her if you can), about doing Internet historiography and about the Net’s many, many, many missing pages and records. As we all start to use database searches more and more, and as the world – and hence those databases – fills with ever more publications, we can often fool ourselves into thinking that they’re giving us access to everything. But it all rests with the accuracy of the indexing, the tagging, and whatever system a database uses.

So I’m left wondering if there are better systems in place? And if so, what are they?

Finally, I should note that this concern is personal in other ways too. The more that I read and the more that my head fills, the more I’ll need my indexes and other search mechanisms to access all the research I’ve already done. In grad school, I was often driven by a fear, when researching, that I’d forget all that I’d read, or that years from then I’d overlook the perfect quotation or idea, simply because I’d forgotten about it. Especially if that perfect idea was an aside in a book about something else. So I indexed my notes, quite painstakingly. But just as my thoughts on topics change, so do my categories into which I put them, and my vocabulary for them; thus, looking back on my index for everything I read as a PhD student, I’m confused as to why I classified some things in one category, not another, and so I know I’m likely to forget about a great many of these things. What strategies do others have to wrestle their memory into submission?

Meanwhile, and to keep the pretense that I’m actually posting, let me redirect you to the following, really interesting posts:

First up, Kristina Busse offers reflections on being a fan and a mum (sorry, I refuse to use the word “mom.” I’ll call it aluminum, I’ll drop the extra i in “special(i)ty”, and I’ll even kill the u in -our words, but mums will be mums).

Then, Annie Peterson starts a good discussion on how one keeps a blog up and running. I’ve just discovered Annie’s excellent blog, and would love to post a reply there to let her know I’m reading, but I’m a little too embarrassed to join a discussion on keeping a blog running when I’ve done a crap job of it of late. Instead then, go read her.

Finally, Movie Poster Addict is spot on in noting how successful the Where the Wild Things Are posters have been at capturing a dreamlike quality. There’s something very soothing, otherworldly, and kinda spacy about them all

When does something that’s “new” stop being “new”?

This question nagged me recently as I stood in line for an hour at the TKTS booth in Times Square hoping to get discounted tickets for Exit the King. Opposite me, along dozens of other huge billboards and flashing lights, was a billboard advertising Wicked as a “new” musical, even though it’s almost six years old. Now, anyone who knows me well knows that I hate waiting, and I also hate TKTS – I resent that a “cheap” Broadway ticket is $60, when I saw the best theater that the West End had to offer for about $10-20 as a grad student in London. So I was inclined to be angry at something. And I was angry at the idea that Wicked is a “new” musical, and (since clearly my anger needed more targets) at the concept of “newness” more generally.

Sure, it’s newer than Phantom of the Opera, but I’d imagine “new” to mean that it came out this year. Granted, a lot of this is just hoopla, kind of like how every pizza store in the city claims to be The Best Famous Pizza in New York!!! (though even then, I’m not sure who the hoopla’s meant to work on. Best Famous Pizza signs are for tourists, but my experience has been that the Broadway-going tourists want to see what they know – Phantom, Les Mis, or a musical adaptation of Teen Wolf (hey, I’m sure it’s coming) – not something too “new”). But it also raised the question at the top of this post.

I think of this too given my pet peeve regarding the term “new media”: at what point are we finally going to stop calling it “new”? Sometimes, that phrase ages its user something fierce, as when computers are “new media,” even though I’m bald and grew up using them, so they can’t be that new. Calling a whole group of media “new” seems silly, since surely there will come a point when (a) “new media” aren’t new, and when (b) there are “newer” media that we need to talk about as new, without people thinking we’re talking about Commodore 64s.

Of course, there’s the Nieuwe Kerk (New Church) in Amsterdam that was made in the 15th Century as the exaggerated example here. Obviously, there were older churches, but keeping that placeholder of “new” is patently absurd there.

What annoys me about the term, then, is partly that it’s lazy. Rather than actually trying to come up with a term that accurately classifies something or a group of somethings, calling it “new” is a cop out, and it just dooms people in the future to account for our mistakes retroactively. If “new media” right now is a mix of computers, the Internet, iPhones, DVRs, Slingboxes, HDTV, etc., why don’t we just work out terms that describe what these have in common … or give up and realize that there are better ways to classify such media with already-existent media.

The other source of my annoyance with the term, though, is that it subtly convinces us to think that the new is somehow more important. And so a great deal of study of media is by necessity of the “new.” When I was in Malawi, as I’ve posted on, I was really struck by how much music that gets listened to, and how many movies that get watched, are decisively not new. But as Derek Kompare points out in his brilliant book Rerun Nation, much television that Americans watch is now new either. And as my wife joked a couple of weeks back while I was watching a hockey game, most sports stadiums in the country, save for playing Lady Gaga, sound as though they’re stuck in the eighties with all the Queen, Randy Bachman, Billy Joel, and so forth playing all the time. Yet when we come to study media, so many of us run like magnets to the “new.” I’m often one of them, since I find very interesting things in recent developments, so I’m not so much counseling the field to all spend way more time with Stripes, Facts of Life, and REO Speedwagon as I am complaining that we can become obsessed with what seems new at the expense of what’s always been around. I’d like to see Wicked, after all, but it ain’t new, so why do we need to call it new?

You may’ve noticed that there are now Simpsons stamps. Finally, a Simpsons-related item that I didn’t own … which gave rise to an odd situation, as I actually ended up buying something Simpsons related (to date, almost everything has been given to me, often in triplicate, by well-meaning people trying to figure out what would make a suitable gift).

I must say, though, that I’m not impressed. The artwork may well be Groening, but Homer doesn’t look like the Homer I know. Or, rather, he looks like Homer does when I try to draw him, not when one of the show’s excellent animators does it.

All the same, as I stood in the long line at the post office on Lexington Ave. waiting to buy them, my mind wandered to how I would use them, or, rather, to how I would use Homer stamps versus Lisa stamps versus Maggie stamps, etc. Extrapolating, I’d love to know how anyone who owns the stamps uses them — what meanings might they tell us about how people relate to The Simpsons. While this is hypothetical research, and, especially given some (welcome) privacy laws regarding mail, impossible research, but pondering what it could unearth gestures further to the importance of paratexts, and to the riches that lie beneath exerted study of paratexts and their use.