What about the issues of emerging artforms. Video games are coming into their own as cinematic/interactive environments that far exceed many motion pictures, yet there are conflicting opinions that want to lump GTAIV in the same category as Dig Dug.

I guess it's just that most of the stuff you said, Hec, has a foot planted in academia. I can like whatever poetry I want--I have no reason to war with anyone else over what they like to read or write. Academia is what ups the stakes, primarily.

Where the hell is Victor when you need him?

yet there are conflicting opinions that want to lump GTAIV in the same category as Dig Dug.

Fair point. Video games are where comics were in the fifties, or rock was in the sixties. A popular media finding new sophistication and complexity, but still way off the radar of what is considered worthwhile by (most) schools or the populace at large.

It's worth remembering that the word "novel" is rooted in "novelty" - and that novels were not considered serious literature, but mere women's entertainment. (Though I'm treading on Burrell's territory here, and I'm pretty sure she's going to correct me.)

Video games are precisely one of the fields that I see academics tussling over in their turf wars, ND. I have one friend who wrote her Comp Lit dissertation on video games, and another who thinks only computer programers and animators should be allowed to teach MML courses.

I have one friend who wrote her Comp Lit dissertation on video games, and another who thinks only computer programers and animators should be allowed to teach MML courses.

I see things like this in the marketplace. Many HR departments for video game companies put up ads for things like Sound Designers but want them to have computer science degrees and be C++ programmers and the like. While those are nice skills, they are pretty ancillary to doing sound design for video games and disqualify a large quantity of brilliant artists who should be working in the market.

Though I'm treading on Burrell's territory here, and I'm pretty sure she's going to correct me.

I'm pretty sure most people in academia would strenuously argue it's not my territory either, given that technically my territory is composition (which is pretty much as low on the totem pole as you can get--most grad students in the humanities would consider me their inferior).

I guess it's just that most of the stuff you said, Hec, has a foot planted in academia.

It wasn't though. It was self-publishing chapbooks, and changing the focus to live readings, instead of publishing in the New Yorker. It was looking for connections with the burgeoning jazz culture - readings with live musicians. So it was very different from the poetry culture within Academe. Kenneth Rexroth and Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer in SF, all ran their own salons. Open, free to anybody, deeply learned (Rexroth was an autodidact) seminars on poetry and poetics.

Certainly they drew something from established literary canon and criticism but I think it's a distortion to emphasize that element over the more radical and innovative ways they forced their poetry into the world.

Many HR departments for video game companies put up ads for things like Sound Designers but want them to have computer science degrees and be C++ programmers and the like. While those are nice skills, they are pretty ancillary to doing sound design for video games and disqualify a large quantity of brilliant artists who should be working in the market.

So they want programers, not sound engineers? That doesn't make sense to me.

most grad students in the humanities would consider me their inferior

Yeah but they're TOTALLY WRONG. C'mon now, you taught Jane Austen to your husband. You're qualified to speak about the early development of the novel.

In completely non-intellectual news my current anti-migraine meds are dysphoric, and I do not have words for how negative a psychological reaction I'm having. I don't know if I can do this either.