Any mashup fan would be remiss without mentioning the death of Don LaFontaine. Just that name suggests a kind of smooth talk that goes a long way toward making the movie trailer its own kind of composition. As homage, I embed Five Guys in a Limo and Voice Talkers. Voice Talkers is my favorite:

In announcing their new Chrome Browser, Google has enlisted the help of Scott McCloud. As usual, McCloud employs the comics medium at perfect pitch. The effort mashes conventional notions of purpose. Sure the piece is informative and persuasive, telling us about issues ranging from browser performance to security and convincing us that Chrome is the way to go. But the visuals kick in with additional narrative punch, holding the interest more than a similar white paper might.

I'm sure people will be watching the rising tide of google lifting or (depending on your perspective) smashing and carrying away more boats, but the mode of information delivery is also worth noting for its absence of the long linear block of text.

This NY Times piece on the pre-announcement editing of Sarah Palin's Wikipedia entry sheds light on the way Wikipedia functions in the larger media ecology, in large part based on its open structure and currency. That updates in the wee hours prior to a candidacy announcement might be the efforts of an insider comes as little surprise. But the way that such updates morph the site into a kind of engine for dissemination and creation of news shows that the combination of at-large editing and instant updating amplifies information sharing power enough that people need to adjust their expectations about where to find (and how to make) the news. As the Times reports, the Washington Post called it "another example of Wikipedia’s mysterious ability to predict about-to-break news, if we only knew to look there."

We covered Billy Collins last night in my American literature class. We talked a lot about the false dichotomy between poems that are reasonably direct and easy to take in and notions of intellectual complexity and depth. I love Collins, for thumbing the eye of such pompousness.

One poem that gave us particular insights was "Workshop" which is easy on the brain, but also as rich as any I've found in language about language, poetry about poetry, and similar abstractions that open levels of meaning beyond the surface message of the text. It's also funny. Really funny.

Another great thing about these poems is they still get the idea that poetry can move on an emotional level. Ever since I heard Collins read it a couple of years ago, "The Lanyard" has been one of my favorites. Again, funny, but also touching.

It also turns out that there is a small YouTube cottage industry springing up around composing animations set to Collins's poems. My favorite has to be "The Country." The visuals really do give the work an extra kick. In some ways, I sense a connection here as well with ideas about the future of English Studies. There are, for instance, somewhat similar videos set to Wordsworth's poems, but they lack the freshness, and I would guess relevance in forward time that I feel in these Collins adaptations. "The child [may be] father to the man," but "The Country" is winning the "Favorited" competition big time.

From my son Palmer's first live show. Palmer is on the right--the dark one.

How crazy is it that the new semester is starting and I haven't even posted anything reflecting (on) my summer teaching. Without further ado, I give you YouTube trailer film reviews by Susie Warden and Hannah Choe

and the mashup below by Jivan Achreja

Transforming the Teaching of Literature from Daniel Anderson on Vimeo.

I decided to do my Computers and Writing presentation this year as a Sophie book. Sophie worked well at bringing together a number of videos and images and also at allowing me to weave in snippets of text. Having the ability to use timelines to sequence the pieces was also very helpful. The Sophie book is currently over 100mb, so I'm not linking it here. Instead, I have just done a screen recording of the project. In addition to this one from vimeo, there is a 30.8 megabyte QuickTime file.

Our notions of what counts as literary shift constantly, a theme woven throughout much of the work that has happened in courses I've taught this semester. Sometimes as these shifts play out, it can be difficult to recognize the emerging forms among an evolving landscape formed around stalwarts like Shakespeare, Faulkner, Austin, Morrison. We need podcasts like this to help us make such identifications.

My first thought after landing here was, what a great Web site. Who would put so many resources into making something so kitschy? I still just had a great time poking around, but after eventually jumping to the corporate sponsor, I'm thinking, what a slick example of contemporary advertising--slick in both a good design and a watch your wallet kind of sense.

[via funny pages]