The Mumpsimus

I previously wrote (and wrote and wrote...) about what I was thinking when designing an intro to film class that I'll be teaching next term, and particularly when choosing the fourteen films to show during the 150-minute screening time outside of class.  That post wasn't complete, though, because an important other factor in the shape of the course is the textbook. When I got the assignment to teach intro to film, I'd never looked at a film textbook.  I'd be tempted to say, "When I was in school, we didn't need none of them overpriced, overstuffed, overacademic behemoths!"  And though it is true that the profileration of such textbooks is a relatively recent event, a handful of them are over thirty years old.  I just tended to get teachers who didn't want us to read much in film classes. I'm a fan of reading, though.  And I'm especially a fan of reading in an intro class, where a textbook gives interested students more information than ...

Because a colleague is going on sabbatical next term, I've been recruited to teach an Intro to Film class at Plymouth State . I suppose they thought of me because I spent three years as a playwrighting and screenwriting major at NYU , so my CV has more film-related stuff on it than most other folks' in the English Department, which oversees this particular class (though it's also a class that's a requirement for the Communications department ... I'm staying happily ignorant of the politics and regulations that, in the absence of a specific Film Studies department, make particular film classes part of one department or another...). I've spent time on film sets of various sizes, know a few writers and producers and such, and even have a couple of friends who were real, live film majors in college ... but academic film study is a world I know only at a superficial level, so it's good this is just an intro class. And so I've spent more time preparing fo...

New Hampshire is a small state, so we only have a few daily newspapers. We're most notorious for the Union Leader , but the state paper that's won a Pulitzer (among other awards) is the Concord Monitor . And today the Illustrating VanderMeer exhibit that I helped put together at Plymouth State University got a big feature story in the Monitor , with a particular focus on New Hampshire's own Eric Schaller. The web version has the full text, but I was blown away when I opened up the paper and saw it was almost the entire front page of the arts section: And just a reminder that Jeff and Eric will both be in Plymouth on the evening of November 23 for a reading and discussion. Huge thanks to David Beronä and Jennifer Green at Plymouth State for their work in putting the exhibit together, and special thanks to the Public Relations department at the University as well for helping it continue to get great coverage. And if you haven't yet bought Booklife or Finch , the only ...