Results of Ruminations

I just finished Frankenstein for the second time in my life today. It is equal parts frustrating and compelling. It frustrates me because, as a piece of fiction, as writing-art, it is lacking. Verbose and Romantic (not the Drew Barrymore kind; closer to the 'slit-my-wrists-I'm-emo' kind), its eponymous protagonist, Victor Frankenstein, is a whiner, a louse, a self-absorbed sissy. He's really hard to like, so I don't even bother trying. By the end of the novel, I'm so tired of hearing him groan and moan about how miserable he is, about how he's tried so hard to kill what he's created, about how horrible his life is...I just want the creature to show up and take him out. Put me out of his misery. It compels me, however and more importantly, because the questions that it raises are persistent, profound, and perplexing. I had my students (with whom I am reading the novel) write down questions as they read that could lead to a discussion. I knew that there w...

So, I had a goal of getting up to the 68,000 words mark on my novel during Spring Break. As of Thursday, I was 155 words away from that goal. Then, on Friday, I realized that what I had written on Thursday was basically crap, and I didn't want to keep it. So today (Saturday), I went ahead and rewrote the whole chapter (very unusual for me; I usually only press forward, only looking back once I have the whole horrible creation before me) with a little extra put in to hit the goal. End result: I hit my goal, and then exceeded it by a good 2,500 words by writing another chapter. This makes me happy. Very happy. Like, I'd do a jig if I could kind of happy.

An item to interject before I tackle these thoughts again: One of my students posted some interesting thoughts about what inspired the previous post, which he put up in his journal on DeviantArt.com (an interesting website, if you haven't checked it out. I can't vouch for its content, save that it's 'interesting' in all sorts of ways). His thoughts are, as always, lucid and fraught with potential. I'm glad he's in my class. Anyway, he has a very interesting post that touches on some of the video game philosophy (I've gotta come up with a better term than that...it needs something more poststructural) that he and I have worked on. It's too brief for my taste, though his essay on Xenogears is eye-opening, to say the least. He has some less-than-supportive/understanding friends on DeviantArt that commented on his ideas, leading his comments section to be less than worthwhile. I have the Shakespeare quote gadget on this blog, and it, ironically, has a ...

I don't have the time to transcribe what a couple of students and I discussed yesterday after class, but I wanted to put, as it were, a place holder here of the concept. Video Games as the Ideal McKenzie Wark , in his fantastic book Gamer Theory , posits an interesting possibility: video games are the ideal world , the almost-Forms of Plato's Allegory of the Cave. It's a major twist to an ancient allegory, and it fits in very well. The whole book makes a very creative argument for the purpose of gaming. My students and I, while studying video games in our month-long course in January 2009, decided that the game is the ideal way of living, for all of the inconveniences of 'real life' are swept away. Irritations like eating, drinking, sleeping, cleaning oneself, and even dying are reduced to nil or an almost there. Individuals and the Ideal A couple of days ago, I realized (again, thanks to one of my students) that it's even more than that. Games tap into the full...