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(Course-related content will appear here in reverse chronological order: the newest things at the top of the page, and older posts toward the bottom.)
May 6th, and for May 13th/15th
In class on May 6th, we checked out:
- Some clips from the TV program Rome and from Flags of Our Fathers
- the Scottish rock group Belle & Sebastian’s song I Fought in a War, and we’re going to discuss the kinds of ideas we have about soldiers and warfare. I gave you a handout with the lyrics, which are available here. You can hear the song here… but the video doesn’t fit at all. In fact, the reason the video and the song don’t go together actually will help you to understand my lecture better!
- We looked at Kipling as well. The handout is here.
We also shifted gears and start talking about another archetype, opposites of the Soldier/Man of Action — the Outlaw and the Rebel. We’ll see how far we get with that.
I’m going to be asking you to watch one film for next week’s lecture — Pirates of the Caribbean — and to listen to a three-part radio-documentary on pirates from the BBC World Service (part 1 | part 2 | part 3).
And please check out this essay on pirates, American culture, and pirate-fashion: Skulls & Crossbones: America’s Consumptions of Pirate Symbolism.
For May 15th, make sure you have watched two episodes from Season 1 of The Sopranos, plus the film The Silence of the Lambs.
A Modest Proposal & Yujie’s Essay
I spoke last week of how anger and humor can be combined with exaggeration or even sature in good writing, and mentioned the example of Jonathan Swift’s 1729 essay “A Modest Proposal.” Since I was asked to provide a link, here are a few:
- The text of the essay;
- A free audiobook of the essay, courtesy of Librivox;
- Some discussion of the essay at Wikipedia.
And here is Yujie’s essay, for critique on May 7th.
Reading Free Culture
Folks,
I’d love it if we could get through all of Free Culture, and I’m still considering whether that’s possible. Lessig’s style is a lot easier to read than Sterling’s, but there’s still some touch vocabulary there. Still, I think it’s worth looking at, especially since Korean copyright and IP law is about to become a lot more like American law — except more restrictive.
So anyway, for now, I’m going to suggest you work on getting through the first few chapters — we’ll be reading all of Part 1, at the very least, as well as later sections, so you can’t go wrong working on those chapters, as well as the introduction and the Flash lecture I mentioned in class.
We’ll also discuss the exaggerations and fantasy-descriptions of hackers and hacking in the film Hackers, which we watched last week while you were recuperating from exams, and I’ll have a handout or two for you to check out next week, about the status of Korean internet censorship and filtration.