Influences

I don't read very many blogs, but there are two that serve as sources of inspiration for this one. One of these, to which I was introduced only recently, is SemiObama, a blog devoted to the semiotic analysis of Barack Obama. That is, the bloggers analyze how Obama has been portrayed in (predominantly popular) culture, which is not the same thing as analyzing who Obama is, what he might do as president, or whether or not one ought to vote for him. In other words, it tries to understand what Barack Obama (as a signifier, an image) represents in the eyes of others, rather than what he, or the bloggers themselves, might claim he stands for (as a political agent or thinker).

Here is a link to SemiObama, where you'll find (in the quotation from Umberto Eco) an exceptional definition of semiotics:

http://semiobama.blogspot.com/

I think this blog offers an exceptional example of cultural studies analysis. As just one example, they play with the idea that this Time magazine cover image--

--evokes the "notoriously altered" 1994 Time cover with the recently arrested OJ Simpson. What an intriguing insight. Or rather, what an intriguing observation, which seems destined to provoke some good insights. Check out SemiObama for more on this and other images and discourses.

My favorite blog, though, is "The Comics Curmudgeon," appearing at

http://joshreads.com/,

which satirizes the newspaper comics. The wonderful thing about this blog is that its satirical edge is rooted in a particularly sharp form of analysis. The comics are a great example of a discourse that people have to learn how to read: they don't make a lot of sense unless you have internalized the particular logic (or, arguably, illogic) that allow them to function. Because they are confined to a particularly compressed space (a few square inches) and yet are read serially in increments spaced 24 hours apart, the comics rely on your knowing how to read them in order to do their work. For example, we have to know that one type of "balloon" represents speech and another, thought; and we have to know that motion is conveyed with certain types of lines--neither of which corresponds to our extra-textual reality. And we do internalize the logic--apparently fairly quickly, since very small children can usually "get" the comics. (I remember reading Doonesbury, a comic geared toward adults that comments on political issues, from a young age: I didn't usually get the jokes, but I did learn a lot about comic phrasing and the ways in which time can be conveyed visually in two dimensions.)

But I digress.

The Comics Curmudgeon is excellent at seeing the weird little things that comics use as shorthand and saying, in effect, "What the heck?!?" For example, here is an image from a comic strip that I have used in introductory literary theory courses:

They'll Do It Every Time, 9/26/06

And here is part of what The Comics Curmudgeon had to say about the image:

The main gripe in today’s TDIET is ludicrously pointless (contractors sometimes overextend themselves and take longer to finish things than you think they will oh no oh no whatever shall we do) but I’m intrigued by one of the comments from the peanut gallery at the right of the frame: “Those are the same two guys who built the pyramids.” What on earth is this supposed to mean? That they’re immortal and unimaginably old? That they’re sinister Egyptians? That the pyramids, like this Long Island in-law addition, were vast projects that took years to complete and were intended to house mummified corpses? (http://joshreads.com/?cat=58&paged=14)

In other words, the blogger (whose name is Josh Fruhlinger) gets the joke, but also wants to get underneath the joke, point out the weird stuff that we might not notice, that our brains just kind of skip over however ludicrous or odd it might be because we (generalizing freely here) tend to be sympathetic readers, would mostly rather just get the joke than stop and analyze the joke. But Fruhlinger is onto something, because he realizes that, in many cases, analyzing the joke is funnier than the joke itself was.

If that makes sense.