I simply love MTV’s series Catfish (Tuesdays 22:00). This is a series inspired by the eponymous 2010 documentary directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman. The film focused on the romantic disappointment of Ariel’s brother, Yaniv (Niv), when he finds out that the pretty twenty-something woman he’s fallen in love with on the internet does […]
I love documentaries. Not nature documentaries, whether they are of the cute, cheesy variety or of the ultra realistic kind –which, for some reason or other, always include grisly scenes of bigger animals killing smaller animals. I mean culture documentary films. My second dream job after university teacher, is ‘documentary film maker’. (Actually this is […]
MASCULINITY EMBODIED (AND THOSE MANLY VOICES!) Today I need to say something about men’s voices. A few years ago I got contacted by an American man with a warm, husky voice, Dave Muldoon, who asked me to help him develop a PhD dissertation on men’s voices –he is himself the voice of Tom Waits in […]
My colleagues in ‘20th century English Literature’ (first-year) and myself have decided to use one spare week that we programmed after the unit on British Poetry for songs. I opened a Forum for students to contribute songs that they found interesting because of the lyrics but since the messages are trickling rather than pouring down […]
My colleague David Owen emails us, UAB’s English Literature Teachers, a juicy article from a Guardian blog: “Library lending figures: which books are most popular?” (http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2013/feb/08/library-lending-figures-books-most-popular). The subheading cheerfully announces that “James Patterson leads the list of the UK’s most borrowed authors in 2011/12” –I had to think twice and end up using Wikipedia to […]
I’m a big Kathryn Bigelow fan, which means that my personal impression about the very high quality of her newest film, Zero Dark Thirty, is totally unreliable. I don’t wish to review it formally here but I’ll say that it’s 160 minutes are thrilling, even though every one knows how they end. Bigelow’s film is […]
The Christmas break seems a particularly good time to enjoy those very long texts one has never time for. In this occasion we have chosen to see the complete Harry Potter film series, the whole eight movies in a row and in just five days. My partner had previously stopped at number four (Harry Potter […]
I haven’t been able to find a better title for this post possibly because this is it: I want to write about the work I have taught most often throughout my 21 years as a university teacher. It used to be Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights until I took a break from it to teach Anne […]
Instead of the expected weekly dose of Ridiculousness, MTV broadcast last Thursday a special programme on Jersey Shore’s Snooki. Yes, I confess: I’m addicted to Ridiculousness, as I should be, being a specialist in Gender Studies. Its viral videos offer, after all, the most complete corpus one could wish for on the absurdity of human […]
These days the Armenian genocide is back on the news thanks to the law passed by the French Senate criminalising its denial (see, for instance, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-16677986). This law, proposed by Sarkozy’s party and sanctioned by him as President, is quite similar to the corresponding German law that makes it a criminal offence to deny the […]