celebrity gossip, academic style

Some things that have been delighting/compelling me the past few weeks:

• Michael Newman’s annual ‘Faves’ list.

• Christine Becker’s ridiculously thorough News for TV Majors site (a terrific place to guide students interested in television) has searched far and wide for Top Ten/End of Decade/Best Ofs lists across the televisual spectrum.

• A profile of the “two sides of Grace Kelly” in vintage Anthony Lane style.

• New (or at least new to me) blogs from Kristen Warner (Dear Black Woman,); Austin Cinephile; Kristen Lambert (Act Your Age); Kelli Marshall (Unmuzzled Thoughts); Liz Ellcessor (Dis/Embody); prolific Myles McNutt (Cultural Learnings); and, still in Beta, but already one of my go-to spots for debates in the field, UW-Madison’s Antenna.

• Over at FlowTV, a worthwhile piece on the portrayal of fangirls, and Twilight fans in particular, by Melissa Click.

• A much-appreciated break-down by Anne Thompson of how the Oscar voting process (for 10 instead of 5) will actually work, including how the ‘weighting’ of top films will affect the likes of Star Trek and Up.

• I was following MLA via Twitter — mostly Digital Humanities folks — and Brian Croxall’s paper, “The Absent Presence: Today’s Faculty,” read, appropriately, in abstenia, was all the buzz. As a poorly paid graduate student about to go on the market, I, along with so many others, understand why.

• Speaking of Twitter, this list of the Top Ten Important Tweets of 2009 is rather spot on. Especially appreciate the inclusion of Oprah’s inaugural tweet, along with Harvey Levin (of TMZ) breaking the Michael Jackson story.

• Finally, I forgot to publicize a recently published piece of my (half) own. One of my fellow Ph.D. students (and a member of my cohort), Nick Muntean, co-wrote a piece with me for the Australian journal M/C on celebrity Twittering. M/C employs a novel means of issue organization: each issue is given a key term; submissions are solicited that engage that term in any number of ways. The theme for our issue was “Disclose,” and our essay, “Celebrity Twitter: Strategies of Intrusion and Disclosure in the Age of Technoculture,” is joined by a handful of others approaching the term in strikingly alternate ways. I’ll have to blog at some point about the pleasures and pains of co-writing an article, but I’m ultimately quite pleased with it.

Coming Soon: Syllabi Previews!