New Blogs

Ladies and gentlemen:

I will no longer be posting on Ladder on Wheels for the time being, saving my posts for the collated blog over at the Christian Humanist Podcast website. So if you like the sort of thing you read here, you'll get three times as much if you add www.christianhumanist.org/chb to your RSS feed reader. I won't be deleting this blog, and if something happens and the podcast folds in wrath and acrimony, I'm sure I'll come back. But for the time being at least, my thoughts will be here, not here.

The other announcement: If you liked my music or just wanted to laugh at it, I will be posting more of it at asymposiumofpopularsong.blogspot.com. There's nothing up there just yet, but add it to your reader and you'll be alerted when something is. I'll start with old songs and then eventually record some new ones. (I have a back catalogue since 2007 that hasn't been recorded.)

Thanks for reading Ladder on Wheels, and we'll see you at The Christian Humanist Blog.

Post of the Year

According to my blog tracker, my most popular post is the two part "Deep in the Big Black Heart of the Sunshine State," about the deep existential darkness in Disney/Pixar's best movies. It wasn't even close, and it's all thanks to John Frost over at The Disney Blog, who promoted the posts. Frost's generous promotion was followed by cross-posts on The Journal of Cartoon Overanalyzations and, improbably, on the message boards at ultimate-guitar.com, both of which boosted those posts skyward.

The message, of course, is that the Internet cares far more about what I have to say about cartoons than what I have to say about literature--which isn't really surprising. Too bad I'm pretty much out of thoughts on cartoons.

If anyone is interested, our most-downloaded podcast is Episode #4: God and Country. It's not one of my favorites, but that's the one people apparently were intrigued by.

Happy New Year, everyone (and new decade, whatever the naysayers say). Here's hoping 2010 is better than 2009--and that the teens are better than the aughts.

Break

I'll be off the grid for about two weeks, as I'm going on my honeymoon and house-hunting in Tallahassee. Enjoy your Ladder on Wheels-less time.

Goodbye, MP3s

I got the dreaded takedown notice from Blogger today, so there'll be no more MP3s on here. I'll continue posting the essays on my top 25 songs of the year, but you'll have to go elsewhere to find MP3s of them. I recommend the Hype Machine.

New Widget

If you'll direct your attention to the right margin, you'll find a program that tells you what my iTunes is playing. I'm not sure anyone cares, but if you're stalking me, it's exactly what you need. (You may have to refresh your screen to make it work.)

Also, if you think my taste in music is as awesome as I do, you can listen to my last.fm radio station here.

Hello

I know I promised another Barth post last week, but it'll have to wait, especially given the cold response my other Barth posts have received--I can only assume it's not something you guys are interested in.

Anyway, I got a new computer, and while I can't get it to connect to the internet at home, I can use it here at the school, and so you can expect the Tuesday Mixes to resume this week.

Someone in Boston Hates T.S. Eliot

I signed up for a blog tracker, which means I'm now obsessed with figuring out who's reading this. (People from England and Turkey, apparently.) But my favorite thing is seeing what people search for on Google and end up here. Someone, for example, got to my post "T.S. Eliot and the Five Types of Criticism" by searching for "hate T.S. Eliot." My guess: an undergraduate who was assigned "The Waste-Land."

Sad Announcement

MP3 posting (including, of course, this week's scheduled Tuesday Mix) will cease for awhile, as my computer is dreadfully ill and I don't want to tax it. Other posts will continue.

Upcoming Series: Summer of Hamlet

So because V. and I are both incredible nerds, we're devoting our summer to reading various versions and adaptations of Hamlet. And because we're both incredible nerds, we're taking you along for the ride, posting every yawn-inspiring moment of it to this blog. Here's our schedule, with dates left off because we're not yet to that level of incredible nerditude:

- William Shakespeare, Hamlet. Naturellement.
- Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. A crazy absurdist comedy based on Hamlet's indistinguishable buddies. We're reading this one early on because the Shakespeare Tavern in Atlanta is putting it on May 9 through June 1, and we want to be able to read the play first.
- John Updike, Gertrude and Claudius. This whole project began as a way of forcing Shakespeare scholar V. to read Updike. I've not read this novel myself, but it's apparently a prequel to the play that leaves Hamlet mostly out of things. It'll be interesting to see how ostensible sexist Updike treats that dirty whore Gertrude.
- Heiner Müller, Hamletmachine. V. suggested this one, which I've never heard of. Müller condenses the play into eight inpenetrable postmodernist pages.
- Film: Hamlet. The classic and influential Olivier performance. I'm not wild about this idea, but we figured we needed to have a straight performance of the play.
- Film: Hamlet 2000. Yes, the Ethan Hawke version. Why Ethan Hawke and not Mel Gibson or Kenneth Branaugh? Because Ethan Hawke doesn't hate Jews, and he never cheated on Emma Thompson.
- Film: The Lion King. I love this movie, and it was my first exposure to the play. I was twelve when I first saw it. V. was eight, and even then, she thought it was a hacky ripoff of Shakespeare.

The semester ends in a few weeks, and I hope we'll get right on this series. In the meantime, if you have any suggestions as to texts or films to add to the mix, we'd love to hear them.

Ladder on Wheels

A few words about the purpose of this blog, and then a few words about its title.

I read a lot. Part of that is because I'm a PhD student in literature, and part of that is that I love to read. A bigger part is that I have an inferiority complex and never feel that I have read or retained enough.

I take notes when I read in a notebook--sometimes these notes are thorough, and sometimes they're pretty terse. I want to use this blog as a public space for those notes, expanded and tied together, until maybe I can say something halfway intelligent about the books I read. Maybe you'll find it interesting. Maybe not. Maybe mostly I miss blogging but don't want to talk in detail about my personal life. I don't know.

Since I was a kid, I've always wanted to devote an entire room of my house to a library and shelve books from floor to ceiling. The ladder on wheels is the way to get around--a romantic notion from my childhood that has little to do with what reading is in reality but everything to do with what it should be.