Commencement
This graduation season, you’ve almost certainly sat through one of the worst literary genres, the commencement speech.[i] Yes, David Foster Wallace achieved greatness with his: And there is...
View ArticleThe Three Movies that Traumatized Me
For some people, it’s Bambi. For my brother Al, it was ET and Pee Wee’s Playhouse—he must have had a psychic intuition about that Pee Wee Herman guy. But everyone can look back on childhood and...
View ArticleMan of Steal
The S stands for Hope. Shope. S’hope. Man of Steel, the movie that dares not speak its name, uttering the S word only once[1], opens in a CGI sci-fi universe reminiscent of Avatar. No giant Smurfs,...
View ArticleBreaking Bad; or, the Superhero Uncertainty Principle
I am several years late to the Breaking Bad party. I tried watching it two years ago but lacked the fortitude to see how Walt and Jesse were going to dispose of the dead body and get themselves out...
View ArticleEveryone who believes in books, or has (or has been) a child, should read...
A quarter of Americans read zero books per year. The Onion, as usual, put it best: “Print is Dead at 1803.” I know this is a blog. You’re reading it on a screen. And I like blogs, and websties, and...
View ArticleI Bet You Think This Blog is About You: Blurred Lines and the Problem with...
Who are you? Or, I guess, who are “you”? More accurately, if less grammatically, who is “you”? “You” has been very busy, at least going by song lyrics. Other genres—including a lot of poetry, even...
View ArticleFall: Verb, Noun, Season, Metaphor
Although I’m facing a late summer heat wave, and it’s still about three weeks away, the beginning of school makes me think it’s fall. It’s a strange word, “fall”: really a verb—action...
View ArticleThe Ethicist Who Wears the Black Hat
There is no way that I won’t read a book by Chuck Klosterman. Still, that sentence’s double negative reveals my ambivalence. In some ways, CK and I doppelgängers: we’re the same age, moved...
View ArticleThis: The Popular Culture Studies Journal!
OK, Hourman needs to go on hiatus for a little while. But in the meantime, I’d like to share something that I–in my secret identity as Jesse Kavadlo–wrote that took significantly longer than an hour....
View ArticleHow I Spent My Summer Vacation (which lasted two years, apparently)
Hello! It’s been a very long time since my last post, which was October 2013. That’s at least 14 years in blog years. While I’m not coming back to regular blogging–not yet, anyway–if there’s anyone...
View Article
More Pages to Explore .....