Unfettered Brilliance: We Interrupt This Blog . . .

Thursday, March 19, 2009

We Interrupt This Blog . . .

I'm behind on my Dollhouse viewing. I plan to catch up and blog about both episodes 5 and 6 by the end of the weekend. (Episode 6 is rumored to be a real game-changer! If you don't mind spoilers, see here. And here!) Already a few academics (not just fans, although I'm one of those too, so don't gripe at me) have weighed in on the show - if you want to get a taste of that point of view, try here! (My friend Alyson has a specialty in French feminism and she's one heck of a Whedonian, so here's a long overdue shout-out.)

Until I can get caught up myself, please consider the following:

I'll be speaking at Gardner-Webb University next Wednesday (March 25). My talk is part of the Joyce Compton Brown Lecture Series and I'm very pleased to be associated with this. The presentation (notice how I'm avoiding the word "lecture"?) will begin at 7 pm in the Blanton Auditorium. (That's #56 on this map.) I'll discuss popular culture as a subject for serious study and touch on what the character of Faith (now there's a named drenched in irony for you!) has in common with the Prodigal Son. And Hansel & Gretel.

Should be a blast!

Hope to see you there!

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Unfettered Brilliance by K. Dale Koontz is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Points of Interest

Lurker's Guide - Excellent fan-run resource guide for Babylon 5

Breaking Bad - The official AMC site for news and recaps about the best show on television

Mockingbird's Nest - What I do outside of my day job

Ensley Guffey's Blog - Musings and links worth noticing

Nik At Night's Blog - Most things TV, including the 2011 Rewatch

TV Tropes - What you've seen, over and over and why it matters

Slayage - Whedon given the scholarly treatment

Whedonesque - Clearinghouse of all things Whedon

BuffyWorld - Shooting scripts, screenshots, and more

Who?

K. Dale Koontz may have watched too much television as a child. She learned to count via Sesame Street and first learned that genres could cross-pollinate through M*A*S*H. When she discovered Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the die was cast. In 2008, McFarland published her book Faith and Choice in the Work of Joss Whedon which focused on themes such as redemption, choice, and consequences in Whedon's work up to that point. (She's fairly sure Volume 2 could be written to include Dr. Horrible, Dollhouse, and The Avengers.) She is a founding member of the Whedon Studies Association (a great group of people, but don't mention Twilight. Just sayin'). She has presented original work on the Rossum Corporation in Dollhouse, Kitty Pryde, and Japanese anime. In 2014, she and co-author Ensley F. Guffey worked with ECW Press to publish the critically-acclaimed Wanna Cook? The Complete, Unofficial Companion to Breaking Bad. Her most recent project was to team again with Ensley and ECW to publish A Dream Given Form, which is the only guide to all the canonical works in the Babylon 5 universe. That book is currently available for preorder and will be released in September of 2017. Dale is available for speaking engagements and only occasionally uses puppets in her presentations.

What?

I have long been interested in storytelling - how we do it, why we do it, and what happens when we mix things up. This interest might be the result of being born and raised in the American South, a region that has long celebrated the involved story over the quick answer. Television - the good stuff, anyway - does this brilliantly. Far from being film's red-headed tacky cousin, good TV lets characters and relationships build slowly and often mixes up genres, so horror is next door to humor and fantasy rubs shoulders with procedurals. This blog focuses on both the "good stuff" being broadcast that catches my fancy (with a special emphasis on Babylon 5, since that's the book that's in the process of being written right now) as well as film. The films are usually new releases being watched for TV19's weekly Meet Me at the Movies, although I reserve the right to veer off into classics and under-appreciated gems as well. Older posts cover what my introduction to film class was up to - currently, I'm not teaching that course, but who knows what the future may hold.

Notable Whedon Work