Oct 17 - Grossman Lecture

Let's be honest. Austin Grossman is insane. I don't think he looked up for a cumulative 1 minute during the entire 90 minute class period.

Ok. I'm glad we got that out of the way.

I really did appreciate how he introduced his topic of "are comics literature" with the initial question of "who cares?" Because I certainly couldn't think of a reason to care. I think he mentioned stuff about funding, which was the only real reason i could think of to care... i mean, otherwise it's just a bunch of people having stuff intellectual and academic discussions that are both totally boring (to me) and totally pointless (to the rest of the world). But I suppose if comics were officially delegated as literature than they would be better financially supported and i'm in favor of that. I Think the genre as a whole has a lot to offer. Pictures are pretty sweet. Some say that pictures tell a thousand words. Well i don't know about that, but I know that they can definitely tell a more convincing story... of course books are pretty good too and i have a feeling that nobody will ever read what i'm writing on this blog, especially if i put iti n the middle of a paragraph. And this reminds me of a story in which my brother had two write 3 papers in a class about "pragmatics" in which the lowest grade on one of the paper would be dropped and so he got As on the first two papers so on his third paper he simply writes, "being pragmatic, i'm not going to write this third paper because there's no point." Of course the professor gives him an A and asks him to meet him in his office. "Nobody's ever BEAT me at my own game like this... what's your major son?" and my brother responded "film." and the professor looked a little disappointed. ANd Grossman really knows how to put together a story of superheroes though i think that his idea that most books need to be more "awesome" seems to be a little simoplistic. One man's awesome is another man's total bummer.