comp lit and mediaphilia
Today I’m happy to be part of the blog tour for Super Pop!: Pop Culture Top Ten Lists to Help You Win at Trivia, Survive in the Wild, and Make It Through the Holidays , out now from Zest Books. I had forgotten how much I liked books like this. Sometimes it’s good to have a book around that isn’t a narrative but instead is fun to pick up and put down and pick up again. And obviously by the title of my blog, pop culture is one of my favorite things, because it’s media. And I just took a pop culture class as my final (eep!) class for my MSLIS. So it’s perfect and fitting and fantastic.
I feel like approaching the reading of this book from a librarian’s perspective is the best thing, since that’s probably how I will look at it. It’s like a reference book that’s not boring and that’s up to date, and it’s like reader’s advisory the Hannah way, since it has themes like “Adopt a more outlandish childhood” and “Stop being such a philistine.” Win! If you’re a librarian and you do reader’s advisory, likely you want to purchase this book. Or if you like pop culture, and you do, because you’re a human living in the developed world reading this blog. No excuses.
Top 10 Things About This Book That Are Relevant to You, I Hope (In No Particular Order) Continue reading →
Posted in books
Tagged blog tour , books , culture , giveaway , librarianship , pop culture
Jun · 23
I consider the fact that, if I’m planning on taking a full load of courses each summer and graduating in August of 2013, my first year of grad school won’t actually be over until July 31st, when I have my last class until after Labor Day. But I’ll write this anyway.
I don’t want to do a sappy post of realizations and accomplishments and failures, so I’ll instead post some lists. I love lists. I have always loved making lists.
The first list: Words I have had to teach my computer this year so as to get rid of the annoying red squiggly underline Continue reading →
Posted in school
Tagged accomplishment , adulthood , grad school , happy , identity , intelligence , pop culture
May · 06
I have said that I don’t like Lady Gaga, and that’s true. “Bad Romance” and “Telephone” are the only songs that I can stomach, and her videos freak me out. I also don’t think she’s all that innovative, and every time people say that she’s doing something no one has ever done before, I ask them if they were asleep when Madonna and David Bowie were big. I also don’t think it’s a really legitimate thing to say that the point of being a crazy performance artist with no rhyme or reason is to trick people into paying attention, or to make some kind of statement that art is arbitrary, because all of that is just silly. To be clear, I’m also not a big fan of most electronica, because I think you can’t define things as “music” unless they have melodies and include at least one instrument or voice that comes from a physical being or object. But I do reserve a few electric-y tracks for when I work out or clean my apartment.
But it just struck me that my argument somewhat falls apart when I consider that I very much like listening to (and watching videos of) Marina and the Diamonds . I’m going to try to explain the difference between her and artists like Gaga, and also explain why I like her. She’s definitely in the “tradition” of current pop, which is like stylized, commercialized performance art. But it’s still way different from shitty installations in contemporary art galleries and pop stars who go for shock-factor-cum-esoteric-ness. I totally admit that it could just be that I have followed Marina & the Diamonds a long time, so I’ve read her blogs and listened to her demos, and also that I just happen to find her music more aesthetically pleasing than Gaga’s, but I think it’s more than that. Continue reading →
Posted in music
Tagged famous people , fashion , music , pop , pop culture , wishful thinking
Apr · 16
Like any girl who grew up in America, and like any girl who has an older sister she worships, my musical taste has changed, refined, and solidified as I’ve grown older. I had my middle school phase where I listened to anything that was on Top 40 radio, and there are still some things from the 1997-2003 time period that I will always love, defend, and unabashedly listen to, even if I know it’s absolutely terrible. And there are other things that are actually kind of underrated, like the fact that those manufactured pop groups like N Sync and Eden’s Crush were actually very well trained singers, just stuck in the bodies of fakely attractive people and forced to sing really terrible songs.
Anyway. My main genres when I was young were Motown, show tunes, jazz-pop standards, and pop-inflecting R&B. I could count on my sister getting me the latest Mariah Carey, Destiny’s Child, or Alicia Keys CD for each birthday and Chrismukkah. I listened to them extensively, and to this day, even in the age of iPods and playlists and listening to single songs and not albums, if I hear a song off of one of these ladies’ albums I know exactly which song should come next in the track listing.
But then I transferred from the very urban middle school I went to to private school, and then I discovered lots of other music, both that satisfied my ear and that spoke to the major angst I had. Also, it helped that liking music that my classmates liked helped me to fit in, since so much of the way I acted seemed not to do that for me. Continue reading →
Tagged angst , famous people , happy , identity , life , love , magic , music , other people , peer pressure , pop , pop culture
Apr · 01
My tastes in entertainment have been changing, but I chalked it up to my general interest in learning as much as possible about everything. At least until school started, I was far more interested in nonfiction than fiction, and I’ve expanded my blog and news reading as well. Fiction was starting to be the same old, same old. Anyway, now I have intensive theory readings that accompany two novels every week for my crit class, plus various other readings, so if I’m going to read something for pleasure, I want a guarantee that it will be pretty good. Somehow lately that means going for kickass memoir or narrative nonfiction about a topic I want to learn more about, like economics or history. But I’ll probably be moving back to fiction soon. Things come in cycles.
Somehow I still have time for tons of Hulu, even though I have insane homework, two nights of a cappella, and an afternoon of volunteering each week. Actually, then, it all makes sense, because when I had three jobs and college, I thought I watched too much television, so of course I’m watching too much now that I have even more unstructured time. But I’m kind of over a lot of the drama I used to watch, and instead I’m increasingly more obsessed with cooking shows of all kinds, and with competition shows. This is weird, because I think reality television à la Jersey Shore and Real Housewives is awful. But a lot of these competitions, when they eliminate the living together and drama, actually make some astute observations about culture, and they almost serve as social equalizers. Unlike scripted shows with ridiculous stereotypes and whitewashing and tokenism, competitions like “Top Chef,” “Chopped,” “The Voice,” and “The Sing-Off,” while still white-heavy, come a lot closer to replicating actual United States demographics than, say, “Gossip Girl,” which I gave up on halfway through last season (not even the fabulous clothing could hold me anymore). Continue reading →
Posted in television
Tagged pop culture , race , reading , sociology , television
Oct · 04
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