Stardust movie- nice way to show different "kinds"

Persepolis: the story of a childhood should have two reading and discussion days, depending on how long it is (??)

Yes on selected stories from  thousand and one nights, provides historical context for above

Dreams movie- what relevance does that have?

Reading high castle and dante’s inferno would be fun, excerpts vs. full texts?

No comment on house

Class Notes

Start class off with 2 images. (From fluid to fixed)

Are we finding note taking useful? No one talked about it evaluations.

sweetp: When taking notes for the class I thought it was kind of fun. It was nice to kind of sit back and watch. I got kind of creative, but as a reader I know I never look at them.

Anne: Fun and interesting to do the note taking, but don’t really look at them.

rachelr: I don’t read them on a regular basis, but I found something interesting that Paul said that I used in my paper.

 In terms of the reading for the remainder of the semester I would not like to read a second graphic novel after A Game of You, so I do not want to read Persepolis. I would really like to read parts from Thousand and One Nights however- I feel that would be a good compliment and extension of our current text choices. The movie Stardust would be nice to see as it is based on A Game of You and I feel that another view on the same story line would bring a part of what the class liked about the mystery/Sherlock idea that we had back into the syllabus. The movie Dreams also looks really interesting, so if there is any way that we could watch both movies I think that would be great.

Michiko Kakutani's March 17, 2010 NYTimes essay on "Reading and the Web: Texts Without Context"

 I believe that the constructed syllabus for the next few weeks is intriguing in its form as well as its content. Personally, I am interested in utilizing some of Wai Chee’s suggestions because they were simply SO different! I have never read Dante’s Inferno, yet I have heard a lot about it—and no description I have heard has ever sounded like Wai Chee’s classification of it as an early “science fiction.” I think reading this piece of literature with an eye towards its science fiction characteristics could prove to be extremely interesting and helpful towards our search of what genre exactly is.

 Carroll's Alice in Wonderland is given a brutal, disturbing interpretation by Svankmajer in Neco z Alenky. In this darker portrayal, there is not much that is freeing about Wonderland, after all. Wonderland (or shall we call it Horrorland?) becomes the expression of the deepest, most disturbing, recesses of consciousness, from which Alice cannot escape. The narration in Neco z Alenky in particular draws attention to the fact that all the characters Alice encounters are figments of her own mind, as the camera zooms in on her mouth as she (rather eerily) speaks for each character.

The Emergence of Form, Meaning, and Aesthetics

Evolving Systems:
Open Conversations

Chance: its meaning and significance

31 March 2010 | 7 April | 20 April | 5 May | 19 May | 2 June | 16 June

 Anne began the class with the question of whether assigning people (today, I’m one of them) to take notes on our class discussions has been useful. She raised interesting questions about what happens when different people write accounts of what is seemingly the same experience. The accounts are inevitably different, taken from different points of view, and dependent on what the note-taker selectively perceives and takes an interest in. There is always a gap between what is said and what is heard. In other words, much is lost in translation.