What kind of fucked-up college experience did Cary Tennis have?

I think he's usually a terrible to simply bad advice columnist. But this `advice' to a socially awkward college freshman looking for some help on meeting people goes beyond the realms of the terrible and into the terrifying:

Take a good, long look around you. You've all been sent here for different reasons, but one thing is clear: Some of these people will stop at nothing to get what they want. Consider the desperate ploys and devious schemes they hatched to get here.[...]

As to the friendship angle, you may find that one or two of you enjoy socializing together. Fine. But don't overdo it. Don't start thinking you are friends. Remember, these are desperate people. The things they've done to end up there, you don't even want to think about. Don't believe for an instant that they won't sell you out. It's every student for himself. They don't call it an elite four-year university for nothing. Everything you've heard about life there is true. Don't forget it.

KV 1922-2007

Kurt Vonnegut, who was born in Indianapolis and called himself a `Hoosier', fell down several weeks ago. He died last night. So it goes.

In which I pick up, and drop, a bad habit

`Just in case' does not mean `if and only if'. You bring along an umbrella just in case it rains; two sets are of the same cardinality just in the case that there is a bijection between them. What a difference a definite article makes!

Where did I pick up the habit of using `just in case' when I really meant `just in the case that'? Possibly from one Andrew M. Bailey. Except that I was doing it two years ago, quite a while before I met AB. More likely this nasty little meme has been circulating throughout the Anglophone philosophical community for quite some time, and both AB and I contracted it that way.

On Terminology

In the last post I mentioned picking up a trade paperback, which reminded me that I've been meaning to post something about comic book terminology for a while now. For the last several years "serious" comics have started to penetrate into a more mainstream audience and with that has a very slight annoyance on my part over the term "graphic novel". First, some straight up definitions. Traditionally comics are published in three primary forms, the strip, a short form booklet, and a longer form. Comic strips are referred to as such. The short form, usually taking the shape of an 8" by 11", 22 page booklet are usually called "comic books" and even though movies based on such books have made several billions of dollars are still considered the domain of children and to consist exclusively of men wearing their underwear on the outside of their pants and punching things a lot. This is, of course, not terribly accurate, but that's not really my concern.

The long form comic is where we run into a bit of confusion and my slight annoyance. Technically, a graphic novel is a comic story written and published in a long form. Companies also, however, bind together several issues of the shorter form "comic books" into a long form book and publish that as what is known as a trade paperback.

My annoyance is simply this, I feel like the term "graphic novel" has been appropriated by mainstream folks to represent "serious" comics which are suitable for adults to read. It's used as a term to justify participation in an activity and a medium which those people still deride as beneath them by removing any mention of "comics" from the name. This becomes all the more apparent when you consider that all of Alan Moore's major works, including the much vaunted V For Vendetta and Watchmen, were originally published as individual comic book issues. Preacher, soon to be made into an HBO Original Series, was published as comic books. I don't call Faulkner's stuff literature in fear that people will think I read Danielle Steel if I call them books.

Now, I said this was a minor annoyance and that's true. A world where people are discovering that comics are more than men-in-tights is better than a world where that 's not happening, even if they're being coy about it through the clever use of labels. There is a useful place in our terminology for graphic novel, but let's agree not to use it as a code word for "cool" or "serious".


Update: Here's an excerpt from Roeper's review of 300 that's exactly what I'm talking about.

"If you thought "Gladiator" was a bit too stingy with the bloodshed, if you
felt "Sin City" could have been more stylized, if you hate it when the masses
refer to graphic novels as "comic books," this is your day.

For today brings about the release of "300," and it is the "Citizen Kane"
of cinematic graphic novels."