Category: Experiments

live-tweeting Brady Bunch, part 2

STA and I continue our quest to live-tweet the entire Brady Bunch series (here’s part one). Tonight we watched 2 more episodes. Here are the storify archives:

Episode 4: Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore
Episode 5: Katchoo

Here are two particularly memorable tweets from episodes 4 and 5:

I wrote about “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” a couple of years ago in The Trouble with Alice.

I refer to the Brady kids as the Brady mafia in Mike and Carol are the worst parents in the history of the world, part 2.

Live-tweeting Brady Bunch, part one

When I first started writing on this blog, way back in 2009, I posted a lot about The Brady Bunch. Since then, I haven’t had as much time to watch or reflect on them. But, a couple of months ago, I had an idea: I should live-tweet the entire series. Is it crazy? Perhaps. But, it might just be fun and instructive. Tonight STA joined me for the first installment: Episodes 1, 2 and 3 of Season 1. Check out the archives of our tweets over at storify:

Episode One: The Honeymoon
Episode Two: Dear Libby
Episode Three: Eenie, Meenie, Mommy, Daddy

questions about group think

It seems like lots of people that I read on a regular basis are talking about the problems with groupthink these days. The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Brain Pickings have all had posts about it in the last couple of weeks. I want to write a lengthier post about it soon. For now, here are some questions that this focus on groupthink raises for me:

Why is everyone talking about “group think” lately? Are there underlying motivations for discussing it? What do they mean by groupthink? How do you write it, groupthink or group think? What are the differences between group think and “crowd sourcing”–a la Cathy Davidson’s valuing of it in Now you see it? What is the role of the individual in the creative process? How does/should that individual relate to a group? What are all of these criticisms of groupthink saying about the individual and/vs. the group? What is my creative process? How does groupthink cause problems for group projects? What are some alternatives to group projects? (How) does my dialog assignment speak to and/or reinforce the problems of groupthink?

Okay, enough questions for now. I’m thinking of using the new “aside” format for wordpress to do some “asking question” exercises. This post was my first experiment with it.

The trouble with footnotes

When I was in graduate school, I loved footnotes. Yes, I’m a big nerd. I loved reading author’s asides and contextualizations of their arguments. I also loved following the trail of their sources to new sources and new possibilities. I remember first reading bell hooks’ Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center and being disappointed (even as I loved her ideas and writing style and recognized the politics behind her decision) that she didn’t have footnotes. How could I see where her work comes from? What shapes her understanding of her claims? Now, having spent so much time blog writing, my love of footnotes has been replaced (has it? well, maybe not replaced but joined?) by an equal or greater love of links and parenthetical and italicized asides. (okay, maybe I have too much love for parenthetical asides. Ha!)

Do footnotes belong in blog writing? I’m in the process of posting parts of a “academicky” article on this blog and I keep asking myself this question. Nerd that I am, I feel compelled to do some research on the (I’m sure) numerous ways that others have weighed in on the point of footnotes (in all writings, offline and online). I think I’ll start with bell hooks and page 81 of Talking Back.

A new look!

Notice something different? I’m in the process of re-designing my blog (just a little), thanks to STA and some awesome fonts from Chank. I’m using Dry Cowboy for headlines and Adrianna for text. Pretty sweet. I’m also hoping to revamp my about pages and add in some more teaching materials (finally) soon. So far, the new look is inspiring to make more trouble and have (even) more fun on this blog.