final girl + corpse supercut from rhiannon on Vimeo.

In honor of Halloween, I compiled a supercut of a trope within a trope: the moment in which the final girl* discovers a corpse. Enjoy!

*In her excellent 1987 essay “Her Body Himself” Carol J. Clover coined the term “final girl.” According to Clover:  Read more about Final Girl + Corpse Supercut

from buzzfeed.com

In his 2010 text, Developing Animals: Wildlife and Early American Photography, Matthew Brower considers the constructed nature of wildlife photography and what it tells us about historical understandings of human-animal relations. Brower is the curator of the University of Toronto Art Centre and a lecturer in museum studies in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. Beginning with an analysis of early American photographs of taxidermy, his text examines the practice of “camera hunting” in the nineteenth century, the invention of the photographic blind and Abbott Thayer’s use of photographs to make arguments about animal coloration and camouflage. Brower argues that examining these photographic practices illustrates how they construct a particular narrative of the relationship between animals and humans. Brower suggests that photos of perceived “wild animals” are staged to tell a particular story about the historical constitution of the animal and human-animal interaction.

Image Source: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/bro

Brainstorming with my fellow viz. writers on matters related to book covers and the rhetoric thereof, I mentioned my interest in the Chick Lit phenomenon.  After politely listening to the sound of a dead horse being dug up from its grave and beat relentlessly, there was a collective eye roll and sigh.  For more reasons than I have time to list at the moment, I realized very quickly that the nonplussed reception was more than justified.  We kept bouncing around ideas, and touched upon the question of whether there was a male equivalent of Chick Lit.  Or, to use the term that our editor Rhiannon invented, is there such a thing as “Bro Books?”

It was an awesome idea, and what follows is my attempt to run with it.

This post started with a t-shirt. It draped across the shoulders of a college student—female, attractive—and sported the slogan “Strong is the New Sexy.” The shirt caught my attention because it was neon orange, but the slogan stuck. It seemed both snappy and dense, culturally relevant and straightforward.

Image Credit: Jenniver Cohen and Stacey Colino, Amazon.com

Image Credit: Syed Hunbbel Meer Read more about Words, Words, Words: Judging Hamlet by its Cover

By accident, books on my nightstand fall into two piles: those which I should read and those which I want to read. In my current situation, coursework determines my should pile. The want pile consists of, well, books I read even though no one is making me. My haphazard nightstand organization is not meant to defend the divisions between high art and low culture—what gets counted as Literature with a capital L and what’s categorized as trash reflects hierarchies of race, class, gender, and nationality. My piles of books merely echo a more general conversation about the canon, one that is particularly active in English courses. 

Image Credit: killingtime.com

These days, the best cocktail bars are taking their ice very seriously. The cut, size, and clarity of the ice are considered key factors in the content of a drink. Cocktail bars like Austin’s (and New York’s) Weather Up organize their drink menu by the shape of the ice. This post examines the increasing focus on the appearance of cocktail ice.

Image credit: thefrisky.com

I would wager that any statement I might make maligning the seemingly-growing group of people known as Hipsters would be met with nearly unanimous approbation.  Which works out well for my present purposes, as I’d like to state from the outset that I cannot stand Hipsters.  I’ve spent lots of time trying to figure out what it is about this group of people that could evoke such an impassioned response in an otherwise even-keeled individual.

Image Credit: Roots Run Deep Winery

I don't know anything about wine. I know there are reds and whites, and I know that, thankfully, they don't give me migraines.

And I'm not picky. Give me something that isn’t too acidic, nothing too sweet, and I'm happy enough to grade some student papers. But I'll admit that—when I’m choosing wine myself—I choose it entirely on one qualification, and one only: the label.

Image Credit: girly-drinks.com

Why do we think of certain drinks as “girly?” It's common to use this category when we talk about alcohol. Popular TV shows like Scrubs and How I Met Your Mother portray male characters being mocked for ordering girly drinks, or using their female partners as camouflage in order to obtain them.  Social media users label pictures of pink, umbrella-d beverages with the hashtag “#girlydrink.” Magazines publish articles giving their spin on girly drinks, like Cosmopolitan Magazine’s “Girly Drinks We’re Not Ashamed to Love.”