Steve Ersinghaus

For those interested, my lull follows to two plans, really three.
1. Preping for the Spring semester is involving the intro of a new conferencing system for online Intro to Lit so I’m taking time to familiarize myself with this program.
2. The break gives me quality time with my two kids and my wife, so [...]

Spinning writes about the importance of sharing ideas in a group. The richness of the experience of story is indeed made that much more powerful by sharing ideas and testing them. This is foundational to college which, in my mind, is an action. My friend Lawrence Johnson always argued that college was a place where [...]

Spinning discusses te myth of the west, which takes a lot of forms. One of the ideas that gets me in Blood Meridian is a seeming contradiction between space and border. The novel explores what is far and what is close, but in a way the landscape doesn’t suggest a peaceful openness, an openness that [...]

Chapter 7. Watchmen. The scene begins with an odd reflection and a slash across the left lens of a pair of goggles. The view backs out to reveal a hand, Lauries hand, her finger raised where it had smeared off accumulated dust on the Night Owls costume. Well learn a little later that the goggles [...]

In both Watchmen and Shakespeare’s King Lear we have to deal with the notion of revealing or uncovering and the idea of the disquise. Edgar in King Lear must keep his identity from his father, Gloster. Rorschach and Dan must keep their identities hidden as well in Watchmen. When R is revealed to us and [...]

Susan wants me to answer her assertions about Dr. Manhattan. Here’s a summary of the disagreement. She asserts that DM reveals human qualities. I argue that while he tries to fit in, he can’t, because the distance from his humanity is too great: here’s Susan’s argument:
I am still convinced that Dr. Manhattan is more human [...]

As we begin our adventure into Watchmen, it strikes me how far we’ve come in Contemporary Fiction. We’ve met numerous approaches to telling stories. The numerous kinds of reading that this implies is interesting. Kinds of reading.
We began the discussion with the idea of reading a comic panel. I threw an abstract series of squares [...]

I think our journey through Adam Cadre’s Photopia is going quite well. As I observe the progress what impresses is the different stories that come from the experience. We talk in groups about IF differently than we do about Cortazar. We talk about what is behind Alley’s story; we talk about the programmer as [...]

Here are a couple of relevant offerings to keep up with: newsgaming.com — newsgames and Poems that go, especially since Contemporary Fiction is heading into the adventure of IF. Nick Montfort writes of Poems that go’s current theme, Literary Games:
The games in this issue, drawing on the tradition of computer and video games in various [...]

I believe that writers should always attempt to understand expressive styles as a matter of “feeling out” the history of craft, while also understanding that styles are also “natural” to form or native to voice. This is an issue of hearing and voice and what promotes individual flare and gusto. Here Spinning goes after [...]

I think we saw in Thursdays Contemporary Fiction that trying to understanding what Donald Barthelme meant by “Me and Miss Mandible” is pretty tough business. We saw that one reading began to cancel itself out after a time (the protagonist is a man; the protagonist is a fantasizing boy. No yes no yes and so [...]

Adam Szychowski in My Life with the Wave: A masterpiece of Ultrarealism (the joke is that he’s going write against a surreal attribution of Octavio Paz’ story) writes “They fall in love and settle into a routine . . . [and the wave] rebels; this time against the slow rhythm of domestic life, instead of [...]