Busy, Busy, Busy

So I've been super busy lately and neglecting this blog. I'm on a search committee at Renison college, which is great experience, but it eats a lot of time. Earlier this week I gave my first solo lecture to a class of 150. It was on Love and Film and I gave a materialist reading of film. I told the class that they needed to do the "descent" in order to understand the intertextuality of film. I screened Dogville (the night before), used clips from Happy Feet, and worked with a critique of Fox and the Hound as supporting racial segregation. I was arguing that these films work as secular myth.

Last night I went to a lecture by Saba Mahmood on the Islamic emancipation genre in North America - Reading Lolita in Tehran, Irshad Manji's diatribes against Islam. Great talk. Mahmood demonstrated how most of the authors she referenced were in bed with Neo-conservativism, usually through economic links.

Today I attended a lecture by Terry Eagleton on "The Death of Criticism". I couldn't hear very well, and I was dead tired from two days of interviewing and the late night coming back from the Mahmood lecture. Eagleton is still arguing for a dynamic notion of nature - pushing against the thesis that we are culture all the way down.

I've been meaning to mention that I went to a The Shins concert about three weeks ago now in TO. Very good stuff. Though I was remarking that I think they would be as good in a classical concert hall as they are in a rock venue.

I also put the finishing touches on an essay that I'm going to shop around to Journals for the next little bit. "There is no Outsider".