Category Archives: Media

My “Serial” Binge

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Last weekend, I binged on the wildly popular podcast series, “Serial”, in which Sarah Koenig and other producers and staff of “This American Life” investigate the case of Adnan Syed, who was convicted of the murder of Hae Min Lee in Baltimore in 1999 and who continues to claim his innocence.

I say “wildly popular” as if I’d been in the loop about the series while it unfolded last year, like some five million others anxiously waiting for the next installment (there are 12), but that’s not true. I’m aware of its reach after the fact. But even this much later, I’ll admit I feel a strange satisfaction in having participated in this phenomenal thing, to be in the know about it. Aren’t we just funny that way? There’s so much that I’m completely clued out about, which is inevitable and quite fine actually, and a great deal else on the “cultural” front that I access only tangentially. I’ve watched only half an episode of “Mad Men,” for example, one episode of “Downton Abbey,” none of “Orange is the New Black” or “Transparent” and on and on, which is not to discredit the accomplishments of these programs, nor to discredit people who are faithful fans of these series, but just to say that it’s possible to be aware of things, even know quite a bit about them, without actually listening to or watching or reading them.

But I digress. Continue reading →

Quick tour to the land of digital literature

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At the Symposium on Manitoba Writing held in Winnipeg last week, I signed up for a 3-hour “Reading digital literature” workshop, which wasn’t strictly Manitoban but a bonus opportunity because of the presence of Manuel Portela of Portugal, a scholar of the field. (He did a paper at the conference on “typographic notation” in the poetry of Dennis Cooley.) Having signed up, I almost regretted it, because the abstract was full of words like modularity, permutational, kenetic, audiotextuality, materiality, hyperlinks, nodes, and more. But once in the room, I found Mr. Portela not nearly as imposing as his words and his presentation accessible and informative. Continue reading →

Coupland on McLuhan

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In my previous post, I talked about hearing Douglas Coupland last Friday evening at a University of Winnipeg conference on Marshall McLuhan. I gave most of my attention to his physical presence and manner, because that’s what we so often want to know about celebrities we might try to see in person, but also because it seems the kind of investigation of “medium” that fascinated McLuhan, and in his wake, Coupland.

McLuhan (1911-1980) was a communications theorist who became something of a media guru in the 1960s — during my teens — drawing attention to media in a way we hadn’t encountered before, both dazzling and mystifying us with his critique. He came up with “the global village,”  “the medium is the message,” and notions of “hot” and “cool” media. He was provocative and controversial then, and remains so.

Several years ago I read Philip Marchand’s biography of Marshall McLuhan and enjoyed it. I haven’t read Coupland’s treatment of the man (one of the biographies in the Extraordinary Canadians series) but there’s lots of Google discussion and reviews of the book. (Since Coupland claimed to get a lot of his material for the biography from Google, why not access his book the same way?)

Here, for the record, a few scraps from his talk, things that interested me, more or less as he said them:

— We’re back in the 50s again…. [Then] everyone was going through this collective convulsion….  [Now] we’re back in this point. Time is beginning to feel funny…. We want it now… [Can’t do without] emails 48 hours without having a meltdown.

— Marshall thought the inner voice [we all have] came with reading.

— He was kind of kooky.

— He was a God-seeker. [It had to do with] the limbic system at the back of his brain.

— He’s good at helping you trigger your own ideas… He never preached…. He was a leaf-blower but he didn’t preach.