Recently in Life Category
Yes, it's an old blog tradition in which I like to participate. When I remember. Which, admittedly, isn't often.
After a hu-u-u-u-uge push tonight, I've managed to get my NaNoWriMo novel more or less back on track. Still a ways to go yet in too little time, and good Lord why won't the NaNo system update its tracker already, but I'm now at 41,355 words where I was at 36,764 when I woke up this morning. For the mathematically challenged, that's a gain of 4,591 words. As a great cyborg detective once said, wowsers!
Can't quit yet, though - I still have 8,645 words to go, but I'm feeling much more confident now that it might be doable after all. Woo-hoo!
Also, on a side note, old SXSW friends should be sure to wish our not-old friend Molly a very happy birthday today. She's just dinged 37 (insert inappropriate Kevin Smith joke here) and is still showing us how to rock academia in your thirties. This is especially appreciated in my own personal camp, as I also spent a small chunk of time today revisiting the Ph.D. problem. Long story short, when I do get to be Dr. Long, I may very well be about the same age. So you go girl – thanks for being so awesome!
Adding further fuel to the tempestuous insanity that has been this week, I've had two somewhat interconnected papers accepted to two more conferences coming up this spring! First is the 2009 American Comparative Literature Association Conference, which takes place at Harvard March 26-29. This overlaps a bit with the tail end of the 2009 Game Developers Conference, so I'll take off from that a little early to make it back for ACLA.
Second is the Fairy Tale After Angela Carter conference at the University of East Anglia in England, which is going on April 22-25. The eagle-eyed among you will notice that this also has an overlap, with MIT6 (April 24-26), so I'm planning on taking off from the Fairy Tale conference early so I can catch the latter half of MIT6. Good grief – literally!
What's fun about these is that the first paper, for ACLA, is titled "From Horrorism to Terrorism: the New Weird, the New Horror and the War on Terror", and the second one is titled "Fairy Tales in the New Weird, the New Horror and the War on Terror". If anyone out there is concerned about self-plagiarism, don't be – they're two separate papers with a shared core body of reference research, where the first one will describe how the New Weird and the New Horror have emerged out of a post-9/11 cultural mentality, and the second will sketch out the basics from the first paper and then drill down into how new fairy tales like Guillermo Del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth fit specifically into that framework. Now I'm wondering what I could do to shift the titles around a bit before final publication to show that they're linked, but separate. Hmmm...
A bit of a hiccup in my NaNoWriMo scribblings, due to this turning out to be an incredibly tempestuous week (and it's only Tuesday). Big news is breaking here in the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT, which I'll link to as soon as it is officially announced... And now the cat is out of the bag: Henry Jenkins III, my friend and mentor and advisor and academic hero, is leaving MIT for USC. After that announcement, suffice it to say that I didn't feel much like writing yesterday.
Oh, I still banged out about 500 words, but that didn't happen until after midnight, and the scene that resulted is likely to be the first thing that I've ever written that I may wind up self-censoring out of a project. Most of the evening yesterday was devoured by a freelance consulting project I'm working on, for which I've been mucking about in the wonderful and woolly world of online video, so between that and the weird vibes here at the office, yesterday was a wash for NaNo'ing.
Today, however, has been an altogether different kettle of fish. I woke up with a little click in the back of my head, and like the tumblers in a lock, several very important pieces fell into place for the story. I realized that something I'd put in as more or less a throwaway concept was actually the cleverly-disguised key to making the third act work and giving my protagonists a way to defeat the villains, which is awesome, and that I suddenly had a very strong idea about how Children of Winter, Children of Wolves will end, and I even had an idea about what the main plot of the third book, tentatively titled The Wild Hunt, will be and how it will unfold – and until this morning I didn't even know that there was a third book in the wings. That was fantastic all on its own...
And then I checked my e-mail.
This morning a press release went out announcing the Media Lab's new Center for Future Storytelling. Just like that, my various plans and schemes for possible directions for my Ph.D research were completely upended, like that scene in Ghostbusters: "The flowers are still standing!" There's also a write-up in the New York Times under the title "Saving the Story (the Film Version)", but there's very little additional content about the actual 'labette' than in the original press release. Believe me, I'm watching this with both eyes. The best thing about this possibility to my mind so far is that it won't officially launch until 2010, which gives me a year to get certain other massive projects done or well underway, but, as always, we'll see what happens...
Plus, now USC has a very definite allure for obvious reasons! So now I have multiple programs that could provide a great home for my Ph.D research whereas before this last year I was still wandering in the desert. The Media Lab, USC, Ohio State, Georgia Tech, Queensland, Madison... Dang!
So, yes. Wild, crazy times – and the week's just started. Heaven only knows what will come of the Futures of Entertainment 3 Conference coming up this weekend, aside from getting to see some friends absent too long... But I do realize that this means I have to get some serious writing stockpiled before Friday morning!
My campaign to dominate the American media-on-the-media continues in a sound bite I provided for the New York Daily News article called "The Q factor: How the science behind James Bond's gadgets was reinvented". For added awesomeness, I even got the last word on the subject – and the subject is fantastical doohickeys.
As longtime readers of this blog know, I started my Master's degree at MIT in 2005, finished it in 2007 and then immediately went to work at MIT as the Communications Director for both Comparative Media Studies (the program where I'd earned said master's) and for the newly-formed Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab. I was completely flabbergasted by the amount of work that being a grad student in CMS had entailed, but I was utterly floored when the amount of work as an employee was even more than that. Still, the past year-and-a-half have been incredibly rich and rewarding, and has allowed me time to continue my studies, which was my main reason for wanting to stick around. Even though I'm not currently in any kind of degree-granting program (and yes, the desire for that delayed Ph.D does have me occasionally wailing and gnashing my teeth), my time has been far from wasted – especially since becoming a researcher at GAMBIT in addition to its Communications Director.
The amount of media I've been consuming has been obscene. Barely a week goes by when I'm not buying another book, movie, or game in an attempt to bring myself up to speed in multiple categories. It's been a ridiculously overwhelming project, learning tons about scholarship, theory and criticism in games, films, comics and literature, but lately I've been noticing that I'm making serious progress. Granted, I'm still only about 75%-80% of the way through the AFI top 122 films and I've barely scratched the surface of a whole ton of material, but it's remarkable how much more grounded I feel now than I did when I was a graduate student – and most of that has come after graduation. I have a greater grasp now on Callois, Huzinga, Ryan, Bolter and other game theorists; I'm familiarizing myself with the work of David Bordwell and other film scholars; I'm reading up on the history of comics in the early 1900s; I'm digging deeper into experimental animation from characters like Svenkmajer and the Brothers Quay... Plus I've been filling in tons of gaps in my experience with the genre canon – for example, this weekend I read H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness for the first time, observing carefully when and where I was caught up in his description of his bizarre world and when I was skimming paragraphs due to his blatant violations of 'show, don't tell'. I'm also hard at work revising my writing, banging out essays for possible publication, gathering my wits about me for possible short stories and researching both how to write book proposals and how to approach literary agents.
Long story short, even though CMS doesn't have a Ph.D, this is what I'd imagine a Ph.D in CMS would be like. Maybe someday we'll actually get one and I can set about turning this wooden puppet of research into a real boy of a degree. Then again, even if not, this is probably how the rest of my life will be when it's not being dedicated to errands, repairing houses and/or cars, raising kids and other life challenges. And actually, that sounds simply awesome. More actual writing and publishing, please, but this is pretty much the groove I've been looking for all along.
Life is good!
This has been an amazing month for attending lectures. First there was Kelly Link at the Harvard Book Store, reading to promote her new book Pretty Monsters; then there was Jonathan Carroll at the Harvard Book Store, reading to promote his new book The Ghost in Love; then this week there was Maria Tatar and Gregory Maguire at the Brattle Theater (organized by the Harvard Book Store) to promote his new book A Lion Among Men; last night there was Art Spiegelman at the Brattle (organized by the Harvard Book Store) to promote his new/old book Breakdowns, and then today there was Jeet Heer, Ho Che Anderson and Diana Tamblyn at MIT courtesy of Sarah Brouillette, CMS, FL&L, Literature and the Kelly-Douglas Fund.
The upshot of all this? Living in Boston is awesome. MIT is awesome. And the Harvard Book Store is amazing.
Courtesy of the lovely Small Beer Press newsblog comes my discovery of a new favorite group. Ever heard of the Winterpills? No? Then get thyself over to their official site or their Virb.com page and give their stuff a listen. Close harmonies, beautifully wistful and poetic lyrics (as SBP notes, yes, "You were born immortal and you'll die immortal" is a bloody amazing line, and I wish I'd thought of it, as is "We met first in cafés / and later in ruins" – I mean, day-um) and a myriad of both acoustic guitars and slightly distorted tweets, chirps and burbles make this group easily one of my favorite new discoveries of 2008. And yes, they're on iTunes. There went thirty bucks...
And now I must away, as Laura and I have tickets to tonight's Gregory Maguire / Maria Tatar event at the Brattle and I am sufficiently stoked for both of us and all of you out there in Internetville.
If you had told me when I was sixteen that later in my life I would, in the course of approximately one year, spend some genuine facetime with Neil Gaiman, James Morrow, Mike Mignola, Kelly Link and Jonathan Carroll I would have said that you were nuts. (Well, I would have also said "Who's Kelly Link?" back then, but that's beside the point.)
If you'd told me that I would have gotten the chance to meet Rand Miller (the co-creator of Myst), Bill Willingham (who writes Fables), befriend Raph Koster and listen to a lecture by Guillermo del Toro in that same year, I'd've told you that you were also insane.
If you'd told me that if you extended that window out to eighteen months it would also include getting to meet Jeff Smith and graduating from MIT, I'd've told you were completely barking mad.
Yet, that's the eighteen months it's been for me. When I look back on 2007-2008 and think about all this economic disaster and political hoo-rah and all the rest of the bizarreness afoot in the world, that's what I should remember – that this year-and-some-change has been amazing, wonderful and incredibly stimulating.
All of this is brought up by my attending back-to-back lectures by both Stephen Greenblatt (the noted New Historicist from Harvard) here at MIT and Jonathan Carroll (one of my favorite novelists) at the Harvard Bookstore last night. Consider my mind officially blown.
It saddens me to announce that this morning I was forced to part company with something dear to me, something that had been with me a long time. We had literally seen the world together, but in the end, it wasn't enough.
When you come home from a trip and one of your cats pees on your black duffel bag, you can scrub it with the natural cleaning supplies and try your best to get the smell out. You can even largely succeed, but when you do you find yourself putting the bag in the basement and opting for a different bag the next time you go on a business trip, for fear that said bag will cause great hordes of drug-sniffing dogs to go crazy at the airport, or, worse, your good clothes will emerge from the bag smelling like cat pee, which is, of course, awesome when presenting at conferences or meeting Big Important People™. So, into the basement it goes.
When a great whopping hurricane comes barreling its way into your town and brings water into your basement, and when it comes into only that part of the basement where the black duffel that may or may not smell like cat pee currently happens to be residing, well, that's a goddamn sign.
Farewell, black duffel bag. We had some great times. You're gonna be hard to replace. (But the next time I'm at the outlet mall, I'm sure gonna try. And then I'm keeping it away from the cats. And the basement. Yeah, that's the plan.)
