Rhonda Does Research: 2010

Saturday, October 30, 2010

The Witches' Tea Party

Image by Manchester Library via Flickr The Fancy Nancy Party Tea Party!

Today I'm taking the option of writing about something other than writing for my course journal. A friend of mine is having a "Witches' Tea Party" tomorrow for her 3- and 5-year old nieces, which should be a lot of fun. She has tea parties for the girls (and they have them on their own, too) from time to time, and they dress up in silly/fancy ways (they read the Fancy Nancy books), wearing hats with feathers, lots of jewelry, and so on. This is the kind of harmless, fun activity kids should be doing, right? The problem comes from stuff the girls have heard when their parents are watching the news. Every time they hear the words "tea party," they think it has something to do with their kind of tea party.

My friend is really pissed off about this, since she absolutely can't stand "those people," and it does seem as if they are both ruining a kids' game and abusing an otherwise inspiring and iconic part of our national mythology.
Incidentally, my description of her as "pissed off" falls pretty far short of the reality. When I expressed the opinion that her nieces probably were too young to understand anything about what "those people" are trying to do, she told me to "look up fascism in the dictionary, and then tell me it's not a big problem." When I did look it up, I found that she did, kinda/sorta, have a point, but you could debate it, AND I found an online dictionary (yourdictionary.com) that seems to have a right-wing agenda. Interesting. The Wikipedia article on the problems with defining fascism was a bit more helpful, even though I don't really trust Wikipedia.

So, in support of my friend, here's a few articles that "those people" won't like, and a couple about better tea parties.

Search Amazon.com for fancy nancy

Tuesday, October 19, 2010

I know, I know . . .

Image by Jenn and Tony Bot via FlickrYep, I'm way behind in my postings. I did all the journal entries direct to our course page, and I forgot to post them here. I'll try to do better from now on.
Today I'm getting ready for a conference tomorrow with Dr. Toffee about our big assignment (25% of the course grade). My draft is a mess. (It's happening again-- Zemanta just put up a bunch of pictures and articles having to do with mental health. I must really sound nuts to them). So anyway, the assignment is to analyze a scene from a film using what she calls a "critical model." I picked the film Bewitched, and I'm using gender studies as my model. I'm pretty excited about it, because I found a bunch of things in my scene that contradict everything that was in the movie reviews I read about it.

But I'm still not happy with my thesis, and I hope she can help me out. The one thing I came up with has more to do with what everybody thinks a female character has to be in order to be true to the women's movement than it does with the film. All the reviewers thought that the witch character was a throwback to the 1950s because she wasn't a "strong" woman, meaning, I guess, that she wasn't forceful and ambitious. What she wanted was the average kind of life you see on TV. A nice home, a nice husband, a nice career, and so on. When things don't work out that way, she takes action, which is exactly what she should do -- why should she throw her weight around when everything is going fine? Anyway, I'll let you know how it turns out.

Saturday, September 4, 2010

Janine is Green!

Image via WikipediaI'm supposed to be looking at possible thesis statements for my two profiles of Janine in this entry (the assignment was to write 2 profiles of the same person, but for different audiences). I've figured out what to do for the one directed at the state department of education: I'm focusing on how community colleges need to offer courses for students like Janine, who are interested in careers that deal with environmental problems and issues. It's perfect for her, and I can work in stuff about her volunteering to inventory trees.
The other audience is potential community college students, who are probably trying to get a feel for the school and the students before they commit to going here. So, I'm going with "You'd never know that Janine is headed for a career in environmentalism by looking at her." Yeah, it seems kind of a cliché, but it's really helped me organize the essay (and it came to me from reading that profile of Johnny Depp). I got some good feedback during the peer review (plus a couple of comments I didn't understand at all).

I think I get it

The Mad Hatter, illustration by John Tenniel

Image via WikipediaMy reading for this week is a profile of Johnny Depp by Sean Smith (originally in Newsweek, in 2006), and I think it's helping me crystalize what I want to do with my profile of Janine. The picture that Smith has with the essay is of Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow, but the image I have in my head of him is from a Disney Channel interview last year. He was being interviewed by a kid about playing the Mad Hatter, but he seemed kind of uncomfortable talking about it. It made me think of a guy I know (who shall remain nameless) who is terminally shy. Johnny Depp looked like he was trying to blend into the background. His voice was very quiet, and it was almost like he was hiding behind his glasses. Rather than being an "unlikely superstar," which is part of Smith's title, it was more like he is an unknowable superstar. The weird thing is that Smith makes him seem knowable, even though seeing him being himself, you don't recognize the guy Smith is talking about. Does that make sense?

Saturday, August 28, 2010

Entry 2- Inventorying Trees for Fun?

Image via WikipediaI interviewed Janine Brady (not her real name!) yesterday, and I discovered once again that other people's hobbies always seem weird to me. Janine is 23, works as a receptionist in a vet's office, and on the weekends, she volunteers with a bunch of different organizations that promote native plants. She does other things, too, but what struck me about her was that she was very excited that our school is having a campus tree inventory in a couple of weeks. You have to go to a 3-hour class the Friday afternoon beforehand, because this apparently is a lot more than just counting the trees. They're going to do something with GPS (since the trees don't move, what's the point of this?) and some other odd (to me, at least) things.
Janine is not sure what career she wants to pursue, but she thought she'd get her gen eds out of the way while she's trying to figure it out. I have no idea what angle I'm going to take on this for the profile assignment.

Sunday, August 22, 2010

The "Drumline" Summer Camp: Journal Entry One!

Image via WikipediaI know the semester doesn't begin until tomorrow, but I checked my Eng 101 website, and our first project is already posted. It's a reading journal, and we're supposed to do 2 entries each week, one on our choice of the essays in our textbook and another on a prompt supplied by the instructor. So, here goes with my first entry, a reaction to an essay in chapter 61 (Profiles) in The Norton Field Guide to Writing.

I read an essay by Samuel G. Freedman, titled "Camp Leads a Drumbeat for a Marching Band's Style," which is a profile of Florida A & M's Marching 100 summer camp for high school kids. But you wouldn't know that from the opening. Freedman focuses on a student named Ben Brock in the introduction before moving on to talk about the camp. However, the thing that really had an impact on me was when he referred to a former camper, Ralph Jean-Paul, as "Mr. Jean-Paul" (Freedman did the same thing with Ben Brock when he quoted him later in the profile, but the textbook typoed it as "Mr. Rock"). I liked that he didn't automatically use their first names, because I think that's treating them as though they are less worthy of respect than the adults in the essay. It also made me think of them reading the profile and seeing themselves called Mr. in the New York Times. That must have been a rush.

Oh, and yes, I do know that the picture above is NOT the Marching 100. I live in Illinois, so I used a picture of the Marching Illini. Ha!

Thursday, July 15, 2010

I wiped out!

Image via Wikipedia

There's only two weeks left in the summer term, and this is only my second entry. I've managed -- just barely -- to keep up with all the classwork, but I haven't been able to make time for this journal. And that's too bad, because it would have helped with the last major project, which is a portfolio. I have to write a self-evaluation essay for that, and if I'd been keeping this up, I would have had a bunch of material already written about each assignment.

So, I guess I've learned something about myself and about college, even though it doesn't necessarily have to do with the course. I need to manage my time better from now on. And, I'll try to get another post in on my portfolio in the next few days.

I've gotten some fairly weird article suggestions today. Take a look.

Saturday, June 19, 2010

Summertime, and the writing is just as hard as ever

Writing Assignment - Drafting and Revising

Image by Enokson via Flickr

My first assignment this term is to write two profiles of the same person, who is one of my classmates. I interviewed Mary during our first class session (incidentally, I have to take a moment to whine. The summer term is only eight weeks, the class meets twice a week, which means that each class is 2 hours and forty-five minutes long -- yeah, it's a week's work every day. Even with a break in the middle, it's too long for me.). Anyway, we went through the questions Dr. Toffee gave us, and I couldn't think of anything else to ask. This is my problem: I had no idea what kind of "angle" to take on either profile, and according to the assignment sheet, I have to have an angle. Things got worse, too, since Mary couldn't handle the long class periods. (this is funny--my Zemanta feed is giving me all kinds of pictures of the Virgin Mary; none of them look much like her, since she's kind of goth.) She dropped after the first class. So now I've written my profiles (I focused on how she wanted to work with children; yeah, I couldn't see it either), and I don't really know if they're anything like she really is. I wanted to email her to ask a few more questions, but she said she doesn't believe in email -- as if it's some kind of supernatural concept or something.
We did a peer review workshop on the profiles, and my reviewer didn't give me much help, but in a way, that made me realize that I wasn't sticking to a point the way I should. I'm afraid my essays came out sort of negative. But, she'll never know, so I guess it's okay.
My point here is that if I'd just been more alert during the first class I would have gotten more out of her, and I'd definitely have better profiles. Why is it that these things never occur to you when they could do you some good?

Well, the article below is an interesting profile, even if mine aren't.

Saturday, June 12, 2010

Summer School- English 101

Rhonda is back! This summer, she is taking the first course in the composition sequence, so you can consider these postings a "prequel." The course is not a research-writing class, but I always include a research component in every major assignment, though the students generally don't realize that. They think that it's only research writing if you are using books or articles. For her first assignment this summer, Rhonda had to interview a classmate and write two different profiles of him: one for the state department of education (for a needs-assessment study), and the other for a recruiting magazine the college wants to distribute. We'll see how she does this term.

"Dr. Toffee"

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

So far, so good

Image via Wikipedia

I made it through the essay part of the exam (the objective part is tomorrow), and I think that I did okay, but today I want to talk about fairy tales. I can't believe I never heard of The Storyteller before. I rented it, but now it's on my wish list. I watched it with my brother, the Rossmonster. Ross is seven (yeah, and I'm 18. I know! What were they thinking?), and he liked Hans My Hedgehog best. I actually got 10 extra credit points thanks to Ross (I knew he had to be good for something). I read him the Brothers Grimm version of Cinderella and wrote a page about how he reacted. It was pretty funny. He said that he liked it much better than the Disney movie, and he wanted to know why the movie didn't have the stepsisters getting their eyes pecked out. Yeah, that would have worked.
Anyway, I'm taking a psych class in childhood development over the summer, and I think I might use fairy tales for my research paper. We'll see. For now, back to studying.

Saturday, May 1, 2010

What are fairy tales for, anyway?

Image via Wikipedia

The final exam essay question seems harder already: we have to analyze the fairy tale (it's called The Three Ravens, and we won't see the video until Wednesday!) using a critical model (Toffee is absolutely obsessed with critical models) from the handout she gave us last week. The handout is a short reading by Bruno Bettelheim, who apparently was a very controversial guy. I get most of what he's saying, I think, but without knowing The Three Ravens, I'm not sure what I can apply to the story. She showed us Hans My Hedgehog (it's kind of a Beauty-and-the-Beast story) yesterday, which was pretty weird, and I figured out a few things from the handout that could apply to that.
For one thing, Hans's father doesn't love him, which is why Hans leaves home. I can see where a kid whose father is kind of cold might get some help from the story, since we find out that the father realizes he cares about his son after he leaves AND since Hans does live happily ever after in the end. The story also shows that you have to keep trying if you ever want to be happy, which is something that is mentioned in the handout. There is one thing that I wish the model did explain, which is why Hans has a horse-sized rooster that he can saddle up and ride! No help there.
It is interesting, to look at fairy tales this way, I mean, and I can see where they can give kids a way to think about stuff that bothers them. It just never occurred to me that the stories had a purpose.

The article below has a really good discussion of kids and fairy tales (and it talks about Bettelheim, too).

Oh, No! The Final Exam!

Image via Wikipedia

The final exam is coming up in another week, and there is going to be an essay question about fairy tales. Dr. Toffee wants us to write about how we take exams, stuff like how we pick essay questions when we have a choice. Well, obviously, I pick based on whether I can think of something to write about the topic of the question, but sometimes that turns out badly anyway. Usually, I try to figure out what the teacher wants to hear, based on what was said in class about the topic, and I try to get as much in as I can. I don't know if that's going to work this time, because we are going to analyze a fairy tale for the exam.
One good thing-- she's going to give us a study guide, and it will have the essay question on it. That way, I can deal with figuring it out ahead of time. I hate having to ask for an explanation during an exam (even though I'm pretty sure that everybody else needs one and feels the same way).
I never thought much about how teachers make up exam questions, but the article below makes it seem really complicated.

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

My revision (or, Will this Ordeal Never End?)

Image via Wikipedia

I'm probably going to do a lot more revision between now and Friday. I wasn't all that unhappy with my intermediate draft, except for the big disaster with the DVD featurette. I'm thinking now that I should have taken Toffee up on her offer to pretend that didn't happen. On the other hand, I can see that the new thesis really is more scholarly, and it looks like nobody has ever talked about the Sherlock Holmes stories from this angle, so I actually am "creating new knowledge," which is supposedly the point of academic research. So, yay me!
But still, this has been so much more work than I ever would have expected. I have never revised anything as much as I have this paper, and I never completely shifted a paper's main point before. If I've learned anything that's super important about research, it's to really think things through from the very beginning. I should have done more of that thinking on paper, too, so that I could have gone over that stuff again and again. It probably would have saved me a lot of time later on.
Here's something I might have used if it had been published more than 5 days ago:

Unreliable Narrators

Well, I found out a lot about unreliable narrators in a hurry, but I had to go to another school to see the books I needed. I photocopied the parts I needed, and I think I got everything that mattered. The best one, for me at least, was one Dr. Toffee recommended, The Rhetoric of Fiction, by Wayne Booth. This is an old book (1961!), but it had what I needed and I could understand it without having to read it five times, which was what happened with a couple of things I looked at when I first started researching. I also found a couple of books that I might have tried to use if I'd found them sooner, but they were way too intense-- it would have taken too long for me to get anything useful out of them.
It appears that Dr. Watson can be classified as an unreliable narrator, and he's not like others that Booth mentions, because he seems really, really reliable. We don't even suspect him of being unreliable. However, he's unreliable in a weird way: he doesn't seem to be hiding anything to protect our good opinion of him, but simply to be ignoring things that we would find of interest. He wouldn't see himself as unreliable.

Saturday, April 10, 2010

More research! Will it ever end?

Herbert Block, who signed his work "Herbl...

Image via Wikipedia

Yes, I'm doing two posts in one day again, mostly because I don't want to work on my paper right now, but if I don't do any school-related work, I'll feel guilty. So, I'm supposed to talk about the new research I have to do for my revision.
First, I need to find stuff about unreliable narrators. During my conference, Dr. Toffee said something like "discussing that would build my ethos as a serious scholar." Really, I don't know how serious a scholar I am, but I'm sure working like I am.
Next, I need to go through the stuff I already have about Watson, and maybe get some more. Okay, I'm going to have to get some more. I don't think it'll take too much time, but if it does, I guess that's the way it goes.
Finally, I need to take a day off and think about something else, research-wise, because I've got a political science paper due in a couple of weeks. That one is about McCarthyism (I'm going to argue that those Tea Party people are just McCarthyists -- or is it McCarthyites?-- with new outfits, and they are going to bring the Republican party down), and my instructor looked worried when I told him my topic. After he suggested a couple of authors, he said, "I look forward to reading your paper," but he looked just as worried. I don't care. My aunt doesn't have health insurance, and those guys pissed me off.

Here's an article that brought home to me just how much of a slacker I am.

Stasis Theory and Me

Front page of The New York Times on Armistice ...

Image via Wikipedia

I mentioned a while back that I blew the first assignment for this course (like almost everyone else! Only Lisa and some guy who dropped a couple weeks ago got it right). We were supposed to analyze a newspaper editorial using "stasis theory," which none of us had ever heard of before, and Toffee told us to go to the (very helpful, if only I'd thought it through) Purdue OWL website to learn about the theory (she talked about it a lot in class, too). I guess I thought that I just had to say something about the theory, but it turned out that what she wanted was for us to write about what kind of argument the editorial was making. In class, she said the topic of the editorial was irrelevant, which I took to mean that the theory would work on anything (which it does), but what she really meant was that we had no reason to spend any time talking about the editorial's topic in our essays. So, of course, we all talked about the editorials' topics and barely said anything about the theory.

Well, that's what happened, and later on we discovered how serious she was about the theory, since she's been applying it right and left to everything. This week, I'm supposed to journal about what kind of argument I'm making in my research paper. My thesis is "A filmed version of a Sherlock Holmes story has to be an action film unless it is told from Dr. Watson's point of view" (yeah, I'm not happy about the wording yet). Anyway, I think it's an argument of definition, since it depends on how you define an action film.

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Forgot to mention-- Big drama during conferences

I can't believe I forgot. Lisa did my peer review last Friday. She's already heard all about my project (she went to see Sherlock Holmes with me a couple weeks ago-- my notes were in too big of a mess, and the DVD wasn't coming out soon enough). She thought that I did a pretty good job, but she wanted to know more about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and she suggested a few places where I could add that. I may add some, because his non-SH stories do connect with my thesis in a way.
Anyway, Lisa's draft (probably the fifth or sixth one) didn't work right. I could tell it when I was doing the review. I think she tried too hard. She had her conference yesterday, too, and she burst into tears when she sat down at the desk. What do you do when somebody does that in front of you? Dr. Toffee gave her a pack of Kleenex (she had it ready like she was expecting someone to cry), and then she just told her how to fix it. It sounded like Lisa tried out a bunch of different theses (is that the right word?), and the one in the draft she submitted was the one she should have gotten rid of. She was arguing that parents choose names for their babies in an effort to try to control them before they are born, and she got kind of emotional (in the essay, I mean). Issues, right?

A Research Disaster!

Well, I can hardly believe it, but my project has blown up in my face, thanks to the filmmakers, of all people. The DVD has a short piece on how they were faithful to the Conan Doyle stories when they made Sherlock Holmes into a modern action hero. I was crushed. I didn't know how to deal with this kind of problem, so I e-mailed Dr. Toffee. She said we would talk about it at my conference (where we were supposed to be talking about my draft). I met with her yesterday, and it's not as bad as I thought it was. She offered a couple of solutions. First (and I thought this one was pretty generous of her), she said we could just pretend this never happened, since I already did most of the work and had the draft finished. I got the feeling that she thought this would be the wrong choice, but that could have been my imagination. Second, I could change the thesis (I went with the original one, which is exactly what that stupid featurette was arguing. Doh!). I decided on the spot to shift the thesis to that Watson-point-of-view idea I had. We looked at the draft for the rest of the meeting, and she showed me how a lot of the stuff I had would still work.
I knew before this that she was going to insist on some kind of major revision (that was part of the assignment), so I'm not upset over that. I'm just so pissed off at them! And yeah, I know it's stupid to take it personally, but still . . .

Anyway, there's some news about SH (the character). The BBC has a new series coming (hope we can see it here) of Sherlock Holmes in a modern setting (see below), and the article says that "a comedy [version of Sherlock Holmes] tipped to star Sacha Baron Cohen and Will Ferrell – has also been announced, which will be produced by Judd Apatow, famed for Anchorman and Knocked Up." How about that? I'm guessing that Ferrell will be Watson and Cohen will be Holmes, but it could work the other way, too, I think.

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Tuesday, March 30, 2010

"Dr. Toffee" breaks in to say a few words about actors and directors who can't keep their bloody mouths shut!

Just got back from a high-speed trip to Walmart to get the DVD. I raced back home, made a cup of tea, and popped the disc in the machine, starting the making-of featurette, “Reinventing Sherlock Holmes.” It has to be said: Guy Ritchie, Robert Downey Jr., and Jude Law are a bunch of WRETCHED GITS!!! Here I’ve been going along nicely, having my fictional student work on an argument of their film’s validity as an adaptation, AND THEY DECIDE THAT THEY HAVE TO MOUNT A DEFENSE THEMSELVES! Just who the hell do they think they are?

I’m sorry to tell you this, gentlemen, but when you create a work of art and send it out into the world, it IS your statement of its validity. Moreover, it’s a big hit, so why do you care that it’s being criticized for the very thing that’s making it fresh and exciting? You have probably sent a number of filmgoers running off to bookstores and libraries to read the original stories, for which I applaud you (not to mention your READ poster for the American Library Association), and they will all discover, as Rhonda has, that you are not “reinventing” the characters so much as you are giving them their full context to a depth that has not previously been imagined. And having done that so successfully, why did you feel the need to make trouble for Rhonda (and me)? Now I have to advise her on her revision, and I’m especially glad that she is not a real student, because I’ve had any number of them who, when advised that they needed to do a global revision thanks to a piece of material that was unavailable to them during their research, had hysterics and/or dropped the class only a few weeks before the end of term. You wretched, wretched men.

Back to Rhonda.

Sunday, March 28, 2010

Why I'm Losing My Mind

Well, it's not because I don't have enough material to draft my paper, or because I waited too long to start, or because I haven't given it enough thought. I'm pretty sure that I feel like I'm going crazy because I've never written a paper like this one before. The peer review is Friday (today's Sunday), and this entry is supposed to be about problems I'm having. The way it's going so far is that I keep thinking of stuff I needed to put in my outline but didn't, so every time I finish one task (for lack of a better word), I have to go back and put something else ahead of what I just wrote. In other words, this thing is growing in every possible direction, and it may be totally out of control.

The one "task" that's given me the most trouble is defining a term: action hero. I guess that if I knew more about action/adventure stories in the 1800s, I'd be able to come up with a more scholarly definition that would take that into account. As it is, I'm basing the definition on a couple of sources (the Tasker article and the one about Gladiator), and I think/hope I've finally got it to work.

The argument itself is shaping up okay, thanks to that Slate.com article. I'm refuting it point by point. My conclusion sucks. That's the next big problem.

Speaking of peer reviews, my feed just popped up a batch of articles about a group of academics "corrupting" the process of academic publishing. Take a look:

Saturday, March 20, 2010

A Plan of Action

Sherlock Holmes in "The Adventure of the ...

Image via Wikipedia

I'm getting a jump on next week; I just checked the course site, and Toffee has posted the journal prompt for week 9 of the semester. She wants us to talk about how we "want to compose" our essays. This is kind of an interesting idea. I've never written about what I plan to write, unless you count outlining, which she says not to do for this entry.

I think I actually started doing this in the last couple of entries. I selected Nathan Heller's review/article about the film because it's representative of all the reviews that complained about Sherlock Holmes being too action-oriented to be faithful to the Conan Doyle stories. I'm thinking now that the point I brought up last time about Watson might just explain the difference; I talked to my father about it, and he agrees (gave me a few good ideas, too). In all but a couple of the stories, Watson is the narrator, and we see everything from his point of view. For a former army officer, Watson is also pretty stuffy and judgmental -- a real Victorian, according to my dad -- and it's clear in the stories I've read so far that he doesn't tell us everything he knows that we would like to know, too. That bit I quoted from "The Musgrave Ritual" is a good example, and I think I'll use that story as my main comparison with the film. He also brushes over a lot of action, especially travel. SH really gets around, according to Watson, but the doctor just says that they went from point A to point B (and sometimes the whole rest of the alphabet) without giving any of the details of the trips or describing the places they travel through. The film, however, does NOT use Watson's point of view, and now that I think of it, I guess I've never seen a SH film that does (and thanks to my dad, I've seen plenty). I read something in one of my sources, which I guess I'll have to find now, about Watson being an "unreliable narrator." That seems to sum up the problem I see. He has his own personality quirks that lead him to criticize Holmes for various things and to praise Holmes for things that he (Watson, that is) approves of. Watson isn't ever going to talk about things he thinks should not be talked about in public, and he's not going to tell us stuff that he thinks we should already know, like what Mayfair looks like as opposed to Stepney (which he does describe, in "The Six Napoleons").

So, it appears that my thesis is being revised already! I'm not sure how to word it, but it's something like how everything Heller is noting as a deviation from the stories is only a deviation if you believe that Watson's point of view is the only point of view that matters. Well, this is going to take more thought than I thought it would.

Thursday, March 18, 2010

The Big Deal: Creating New Knowledge

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Yeah, I know I already posted one today, but spring break is almost over (no, I didn't go anywhere. I'm broke!) and I've got the day off, so I'm catching up with the prompt I skipped last week, which was to analyze the assignment for the research paper. I keep thinking about what we were told on the first day of class: the purpose of academic research writing is to create new knowledge. I'm not really sure how my project is going to do that, although Dr. Toffee says that it is.

On the assignment sheet, the project is actually called "The Documented Argument Essay," a pretty intimidating name, I think. Anyway, here's the way I see it. This is a fairly long essay (minimum 2500 words) for most people, but I'm really gonna have to edit this time; you may have noticed that I tend to write a lot once I get going.  The essay has to have a few things, I guess to show that we know how to do them, like a bunch of sources and a "survey" of the articles and books on the "issue."  Maybe it's me, but that last word seems kind of important. The issue isn't the topic, really.  The topic is only part of the deal. There's also the academic approach. So, I have to think about my issue, which I think is whether Sherlock Holmes -- which is pretty clearly an action flick -- is a distortion of the character Conan Doyle wrote about. I've got sources on Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and action films, and it looks to me like I have to go over all of that. The stuff on action films goes to my academic approach, which is "genre criticism," according to Toffee, who says that it's a kind of approach that scholars in film studies use all the time. My thesis is sort of geared toward talking as much about what makes an action film an action film as it does about Sherlock Holmes. In fact, I think I'm going to have to open the paper with a definition of action films; some of my film sources should fit in there.
And what about the argument? The sheet says the paper has to have "a well-developed argument that appeals to logic rather than emotion (or anything else!), considers counterarguments, and contains no serious logical fallacies." I feel some pretty serious confidence about this requirement, mainly because I have a target to argue against in that Slate.com review I talked about in my last post. Once I've got my definition of an action film set down I need to do some brainstorming about the points I need to make about the stories and about the film. I think I mentioned before that some of the stuff in the film comes right out of the stories (for one example, there's a scene early in the film where SH is shooting at the wall in his room, and it's drawn from one of the stories, "The Musgrave Ritual." Watson is complaining about what a slob SH is, and he says,
        " . . . pistol practice should distinctly be an open-air pastime; and when Holmes in one of his queer humours would sit in an armchair, with his hair-trigger and a hundred Boxer cartridges, and proceed to adorn the opposite wall with a patriotic V.R. [for Victoria Regina] done in bulletpocks, I felt strongly that neither the atmosphere nor the appearance of our room was improved by it.").

The main difference I see between the stories and the movie is that Watson, as written by Conan Doyle, tends to describe things rather than action, as above. He doesn't tell us what he does while Holmes is "adorning" the wall, but based on his earlier complaints, it seems that we are supposed to know that Watson was probably trying to get Holmes to stop. And, it looks like I've stopped analyzing the assignment, doesn't it? Now that I think about it, I guess I'm trying to think of counterarguments.

The one logical fallacy that I'm worried about is overgeneralizing. It can be hard to tell when you are doing it; at least it is for me, but since I know I do this sometimes, I'll be extra careful. What burns me right now is that I'm pretty sure Lisa already has her draft done.

One item checked off the to-do list!

Cover of Beeton's Christmas Annual for 1887, f...

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I can't believe it myself, but my annotated bibliography is finished. Fifteen entries, and as far as I can tell, all correctly MLA in format. I'm not really happy with my working thesis, but hey, it's just a working thesis, right? It's not supposed to be perfect yet. I went with "Although much has been made of the action in Sherlock Holmes, the film actually adheres to the characterization of Holmes and the level of action found in the original stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle." Kinda wordy, isn't it? It's not a breathtakingly argumentative thesis either. Maybe Dr. Toffee will have some idea how I can spice it up.

My plan for the next stage -- the draft of the "documented argument essay" (i.e., the research paper) -- is to argue against the article below, from Slate.com. We'll see how that goes over.

Thursday, March 11, 2010

The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes

Portrait of Arthur conan doyle by Sidney Paget.c.

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Believe it or not, I just read an enormous biography of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and I really didn't have to! I was just looking it over -- checking out the introduction, the table of contents, and the index, just like Dr. Toffee said to do -- and I thought I would read a few pages, and then suddenly it was an hour later and I'd gone through a few chapters. I was hooked.

The book is The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes: The Life and Times of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, by Andrew Lycett, who has also written biographies of Rudyard Kipling, Ian Fleming, and Dylan Thomas. Dr. Toffee pointed out to me that Lycett is an historian, which she seems to think is unfortunate, although she liked the book, too (turns out she's into 19th century Brit-Lit). The problem, as she explained it to me, is that when a non-lit person writes a biography of an author, there is less about the individual works of the author, and I'd have to say that's true about this book. He mentions most of them, but he doesn't do any literary criticism, beyond a kind of review. I mean, he says whether a story or novel is good work or not, but he doesn't do any real analysis. On the other hand, I learned a lot about life in Conan Doyle's era, especially about "spiritualism," which was an obsession with him from early adulthood (this fascinated my dad, who has borrowed the book to read himself. He thought that the spiritualism was something Conan Doyle got into in his old age).

I discovered something that disappointed me, though. You remember that I'm a big movie buff? Well, when I was a kid, my dad rented a movie and made me watch it with him. It was Fairy Tale: A True Story, about the incident of the Cottingley fairies (two girls who lived in the country took photographs of "fairies," or so it seemed); in the movie, ACD (played by Peter O'Toole. A great actor -- he should have played Dumbledore) and Harry Houdini (played by Harvey Keitel!) meet them and try to get at the truth, which in the film is that there really are fairies. Thanks to Lycett, I now know the "true story," which is that neither man met the girls (one of whom was 16-- in the movie, they're both around age 10 or so), and they faked the pictures with cutouts from a book. When you see the pictures, you can't believe anybody bought them as being real.

See what I mean? Anyway, I loved that movie (hey, I wasn't even 10 years old myself, I don't think). The sad reality is that ACD believed the photos were real BEFORE HE EVER SAW THEM!
Another sad reality is that most of what I just spent a couple of days reading is not going to find its way into my research paper, but I'm not sorry I read it.

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Body Talk

I've been working my way through the Tasker book (Tasker, Yvonne, Ed. Action and Adventure Cinema. London: Routledge, 2004.), and it's really interesting. I can already see that there are ideas I can apply to my project, even though -- of course -- they are writing about different movies. One of those ideas has to do with bodies. Apparently Tasker previously wrote a book about what she calls "muscular cinema" (she's a Brit), talking about the action films of the 1980s, when Stallone and Schwarzenegger were the big stars. It's easy to see where she's coming from; just think of Rambo, and you can see a picture of Stallone where he's all sweaty and bulging with muscles. Things changed when Die Hard was released, since Bruce Willis is obviously not of the same physical type.
About half the authors of the articles in this book refer to the body issue. One of the articles I like so far is by Steve Neale, titled "Maximus Melodramaticus: Masculinity, Masochism and White Male Paranoia in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema."
Unfortunately, Neale writes in a pretty dense style, from my point of view, at least. Here's an example:
"This distinctly fetishistic adulation surrounding Maximus/Crowe's quasi-bestial masculine persona belies a return of the repressed: a nostalgic longing for a mythic masculine essence, a phallic presence rather than a bricolage of 'decorative' and commodified signifiers. Of course, this is exacerbated by the generic throwback to the 1950s epic and the national masculine certitude it worked to represent" (Neale 244).
See what I mean? Quasi-bestial? Bricolage?
Anyway, I'm trying to figure out where Robert Downey Jr. fits in the grand scheme of things in the action hero timeline. My problem has to do with a movie of his that I saw a long time ago, Restoration. There's a scene in that film where RD is naked -- with feathers -- and at one point he is walking away from the camera. Far from being a hard body (even as hard as Willis), he's pretty flabby. Not fat, but completely untoned, if you know what I mean. And every time I see him in a film nowadays, I have that mental picture. I wish I'd never seen it.

Sunday, February 28, 2010

A book in the hand is worth two via interlibrary loan

I picked up two books on Friday, and I've already read one of them, but it wasn't an academic book, so I'm counting the time I spent reading it (only a few hours, which tells you how easy the material was) as entertainment/background reading rather than as serious work. (An aside: Zemanta is feeding me a bunch of pictures of Reading, England! Not too relevant, guys.) The book is The Action Hero's Handbook, by David and Joe Borgenicht, the team responsible for those Worst Case Scenario books. The book's subtitle is How to Catch a Great White Shark, Perform the Vulcan Nerve Pinch, Track a Fugitive, and Dozens of Other TV and Movie Skills. Surprisingly, after only a few pages I realized that it was doing something that Dr. Toffee is always going on about: it sets up a model that I can use in discussing Sherlock Holmes as an action hero. I know I need to get that stuff from academic sources, but I think I may quote a few lines from this book, just because it's funny. As far as the RD/GR Holmes goes, the character is definitely an action hero under the terms the Borgenichts lay out in the book. He has many of the basic "Good Guy Skills" they mention, and if the film were to be set in our era, he'd probably have a good idea how to safely land the space shuttle, too.

Maybe the most interesting thing about this book is that it was written based on information garnered from experts in each area, including all of the skills listed in the subtitle (the info on the Vulcan Neck Pinch comes from a martial artist, for example), and the Borgenichts give a brief bio and credentials statement for each expert.
I'll get to the other book next time. It's a much tougher read.

Here's a funny article about movies:

Saturday, February 27, 2010

Woe is me!

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Yes, I'm way behind. Worse yet, Lisa is ahead -- I don't know how she does it, but I do know one thing that helped her. Unlike most of us in the class, she didn't screw up on the first essay. I have to have a fresh revision for Monday. It's almost done. I still haven't finished my library research strategy exercise (that was supposed to be posted to the course discussion on Wednesday (2/24), but I did go over to the library and pick up my two interlibrary loans, before they got sent back and I got a $5 fine (I'll talk about those books next time, when I've looked them over).

I can't get over how much time this takes-- it's way more work than the first first-year comp class, even though there isn't as much actual writing. I got a few good comments from the peer review on my research proposal, but I think I'm going to try to make it to Dr. Toffee's office hours before Thursday (it's due on Friday).

I've checked, and all of my journal entries so far are a lot more than the minimum 100-word requirement. That should count for something, shouldn't it? Not according to the assignment sheet.

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Let the good times roll!

Happy Mardi Gras! Today is the day that I prove my dedication and discipline by actually working on my project. Yesterday Dr. Toffee talked about how there seem to be organizations for everything and all of them have websites with bibliographies of some kind. She showed us the sites for NAAFA (the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance), which is a civil-rights organization that works to fight discrimination against fat people, and Forces.org, an organization that supports smokers. So, I went looking for Sherlock Holmes (I've been so into searching the academic databases that I haven't done a web search. I can't believe it). I found a ton of stuff, and here's the best of it:

The Official Website of the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Literary Estate. There's a Doyle bib here. I didn't know that he wrote anything other than SH, but he did.
The Sherlock Holmes Society of London. This group is a "literary and social society," and they have all kinds of meetings and events. They seem to be a fun organization; according to the site, "The game that we play is that Mr Holmes and Dr Watson were real people and that the sixty stories are true narratives of their cases."
The Universal Sherlock Holmes. "The web version of The Universal Sherlock Holmes is intended as a reference tool for those interested in the Sherlock Holmes Collections at the University of Minnesota." They also sell print versions, and those are pretty pricey. I wish I had time for a road trip to Minnesota. Maybe during spring break. Hmm . . . And, the collection was just covered by the Associated Press in an article titled "Fans Can Investigate Sherlock Holmes in Minnesota."
Discovering Sherlock Holmes: A Community Reading Project from Stanford University. This link is directly to the bibliography. I tried cutting off the url to get to the home page of the project, but it wouldn't let me in. The bib is really long, which is great for me.
Sherlock Holmes Bibliography. This is from the University of Tulsa's McFarlin Library, and it's unlike the others in that it has entries not for literary criticism but rather for novels and stories published at the same time as SH.
Sherlock Holmes on the Web: The Sherlockian.net Holmepage. This is a web portal run by Chris Redmond, author of Sherlock Holmes Handbook. He pays for the site out of his own pocket (no ads!), so I'm doing him a favor here by putting a purchase link to the book, in case anybody comes here who might want to buy a copy.

I feel very virtuous for having done this entry so early in the week, and I think I deserve a little celebration.
Laissez les Bon Temps Roulez!