scott does scotland: travel adventures

I, like several of my colleagues, was very interested in Ann Gray’s article and the conclusions it draws about gender and television. Firstly, I got to page 507 (where one of the women interviewed said she would knit if her husband’s program didn’t interest her, and the other referred to the TV as ‘the telly’) and suddenly realized that Ann Gray must be British. This may seem insignificant, but as someone who has half a family’s worth of relatives in small-town Scotland, I can tell you that male-female relations within the…read more

This week’s articles were short, and the lazy girl in me was happy about that. But they were also deeply confusing, and my lack of sleep is certainly not helping me understand them more. My colleagues shed some light on these articles today, which was much appreciated. When I read other people’s blogs, I feel like they are nice, concise, essay-like trains of thought. Mine reads more like a rambly stream of consciousness daydream. I hope you will still tolerate me. To close-read a few bits from Raymond Williams: “The magazine, invented…read more

This week’s readings were so interesting I almost wish I was doing a seminar on them! Instead I will word vomit into this text box for (likely) no one but my mom to read. Thought #1: Paul Gilroy’s article felt kind of like a halfway point between last week’s focus (on race) and this week’s (on music) to me. I liked the way it talked about blues and the way that some music puts listeners through a physical experience of interpretation. Gilroy describes the “preference for recorded rather than live music”…read more

Today’s class brought up a lot of really interesting stuff for me. I went into this year thinking that 2 hours would feel like an eternity, but more often than not it feels like a fraction of the time needed to fully unpack the stuff we’re reading! Just to add a few things to what I said already today: bell hooks: “Only a few of the black women I talked with remembered the pleasure of race movies, and even those who did, felt that pleasure interrupted and usurped by Hollywood….read more

Definitely later than I meant to blog – oops. Then again, now I can talk about our class discussion (argument?) on Adorno. Really glad a reading that confused me so much sparked such an interesting discussion! Moments like these remind me why I’m an English major – my peers’ power to help me understand things is a beautiful thing. In fact, it kind of invites a question about media: if I read something and come away with a particular interpretation, but my opinion is changed by my peers, who read the same…read more