Today we were talking about how to live with the fact that we may be turning into Zombies. In his speech “This Is Water”, David Foster Wallace might be hinting at an answer. Enjoy! This Is Water And remember: this is water.
Read More →Archive for May, 2014
Where they belong
Colson Whitehead, in the clip above, namechecks a useful list of zombie flicks and post-apocalyptic scenarios set in New York that hover in the margins of his novel Zone One. But his zombies have more mundane counterparts in the contemporary city. “It’s not hard for New Yorkers to picture zombies,” Whitehead is quoted in the […]
Read More →Contracted
The topic of young teenagers who contract abnormal diseases through unprotected sexual interaction became more and more popular in the modern cinematography. The movie Contracted (2013) is one of them; it tells about the terrible viral disease that plagues a young woman Samantha after she spends a night with a random stranger after a wild party. […]
Read More →In the news
I’m thinking that next time around I may add a course role or assign one person a week to do a little news roundup on contagion topics. I keep seeing things I mean to post here. This, for example, from the Times on the WHO recent designation of Polio as a global health crisis. Or […]
Read More →David Bowie’s Young Americans
From the Kools to the Jimmy Hendrix poster, I was amazed by how many references I understood in Black Hole. But I have no idea who David Bowie is. So, upon some research of his songs, I found one that might have some shared ideas with the relationship between Chris and Rob.To quote David Bowie […]
Read More →A short live adaptation of Black Hole
*Warning explicit content: http://www.rupertsanders.com/blackhole.html I find the short film’s presentation of Keith, Chris, and Eliza very interesting. By making Keith the narrator of the film, the audience get the glimpse of the mind of the troubled teen. While the different reaction of Chris and Eliza on their mutation, demonstrates the how the disease affects different […]
Read More →“AAAAHH!” (Black Hole)
Black Hole is a graphic novel by Charles Burns, which explores contagious disease in a radically different way, using uncomfortable and disturbing imagery to emphasize relationships between disease, alcohol & drugs, and teen culture. All characters in the graphic novel are teenagers and even the parental figures are marginalized. It is reminiscent of the 1960s subcultures […]
Read More →Captain America’s Nemesis
I stumbled upon a review of Nemesis that makes a brief connection to Captain America, as we had done in class last week. Bucky’s nickname, intentionally or not, alludes to the costumed sidekick of Captain America who appeared in the super-patriot’s 1941 debut as a teenage boy wonder fighting Nazis. Like his adventurer namesake, whose parents […]
Read More →Old Familiar Places
In the scene where Bucky and Marcia make their way back the cabin “hugging and kissing like lovesick teenagers” (200), I couldn’t help but think about how much the song Marcia sings, “I’ll Be Seeing You”, foreshadows Bucky’s terrible fate at the end of the novel. The song itself was published in 1938 by Sammy Fain and Irving […]
Read More →Be a MAN
During my reading of the Nemesis I found myself mostly interested by the relationship between Bucky and his Grandfather and how it transformed Bucky into the character that he is. I wonder how much of Bucky’s character is actually his, considering he is living during the war times. Thinking on these I remembered the war […]
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