Dr. Dove's Blog

If you’re in my Spring 2018 Looking for Love class, make sure to follow the blog linked here, not the drdovevie blog.

The post I mentioned in class that explains de Saussure's signs and syntagm using hipsters.

If you're in my Identity and Place class, make sure to follow the blog linked here, not the drdovevie blog.

Metamorphosis If Kafka could turn a man into an insect in one sentence perhaps he could transform me into something new, a slow willful river running through a forest, or simply the German word for river, a handful of letters hidden in the dark alphabetical order of a dictionary. Not that I am so miserable, but I could use a change of scenery and substance, plus the weather reminds me of him. I imagine Kafka at his desk: the nib of his pen, like the beak of a bird, disturbs the surface of a pool of ink, and he writes a sentence at the top of a page changing me into a goldfish or a lost mitten or a cord of split wood or the New York Public Library. Ah, to awaken one morning as the New York Public Library. I would pass the days observing old men in raincoats as they mounted the ponderous steps between the lions carrying wild and scribbled notes inside their pockets. I would feel the pages of books turning inside me like butterflies. I would stare over Fifth Avenue with a perfectly straight face. ~Billy Collins (from Questions About Angels, W.W. Norton, 1991)

the calculus of you by aaron abeyta         a balloon is rising at the rate of 5ft/s         a boy is cycling along a straight road at a speed of 15ft/s         when he passes under the balloon it is 45 ft above him         how fast is the distance between the balloon         and the boy increasing 3 seconds later something inside of me says to solve for X where X is the distance between the boy and the balloon and i am the boy and you are the balloon and therefore Y i must set both to 0 because i am looking for something 3 seconds from now  like a moment after you turn away but before the perpetuity of the instant before you leave i wonder stupid things like what color is my bike and of course it matters what season we are in because i somehow love you more in spring yes  the road is straight but is it paved i know it can’t be because our love is old and sometimes i compare it to the moon in short  there are too many variables to the way i love you    so i wonder is this really a love poem you  after all are ascending away from me at a rate which has been determined to be 5 ft/sec and therefore 15 feet further away 3 seconds after i began chasing you me  i’m traveling at 15 ft/sec which means i am moving faster than you  which insures that this is in fact  a love poem because i’ve also read about the horizon and something forgiving inside of me also whispers gravity this is just another way for me to say that i love you and though it is longing now i ride  i ride i ride so that i will hold you somewhere in a spring field whose specks of green are barely visible but this doesn’t answer how fast the distance between the boy and the balloon is increasing so i remind myself of the horizon of gravity  of how much i love you so that my love becomes something like this  where distance is called D though D is temporary and because this is still calculus we divide the temporary by how fast i am pedaling and factor in the rotation of the earth and i love the earth too because it makes what i am about to say possible the distance of the balloon multiplied by spring    divided by the dirt road factored into the earth’s spinning which is 800 mph because i’m not at the equator is just another way of saying that i am riding my bike because i love you and in case you care i’ve made my heart into a metronome to pace my pedaling i know my professor will mark this wrong but by my calculations you  the balloon  and me the boy  are not getting further apart in fact  i’ve determined that you will enter into my arms at pt Z in exactly the time it takes for me to pedal there

My friend Ginny and her production company, Not Literally (they did those Harry Potter music videos), just finished their latest video. And it's about fan fiction--what serendipity!

"I'm not here to make friends!"

The show is just like many other family dramas: a little cheesy, sometimes sweet, trafficking in moments of intense decision making and discussion around "teen issues" (sex, drugs, alcohol, sexual assault, bullying, cheating, sneaking out, etc.).  It's not the best thing I've ever seen by any stretch of the imagination, but it does seem a step in the direction of having central characters who just happen to queer (or of color) rather than that being their only defining characteristic.

Really interesting article in the most recent issue of the academic journal Transformative Works and Cultures, which is a project supported by the Organization for Transformative Works (I mentioned them in class: http://transformativeworks.org/). Parish considers the (in)famous metaphor of the fan fic writer as "textual poacher."

Fair warning: some of the writing (as in any arena) is terrible no matter what fandom you choose. Some of the writing is pretty good. You can sort fandoms based on number of reviews/favorites, which does help a bit but is no guarantee of quality. 

This is what I was trying to say about queerbaiting in terms of its historical context vis-a-vis subtext.  Of course, this also speaks to what we'll be discussing on Monday in terms of fan fiction.

Richard Serra, "Television Delivers People," 1973

Theodor Adorno, "How to Look at Television"

Stories recorded during our 2007 live tour. Sarah Vowell, David Rakoff, Dan Savage, and other favorite contributors went on the road with us to New York, Boston, Minneapolis, Chicago, Seattle, and Los Angeles; and performed brand-new stories in front of sold-out audience.