Preparing for the con, How to shape it all!

Tuesday 4 Oct – Cognitive Labor as Play
• finish Johnson, all of Part II: ecologies: economic, technological, neurological  

(157ff): A new model for media ecosystem: "That model is a complex, layered one...straddle[s] three different realms of experience: the economic, the technological, and the neurological...changes in the market forces that shape popular entertainment [transmedia storytelling in commercial forms of repetition and multiple commodities], part emanates from long-term technological trends [social media and other technological platforms enabling interactive communities such as fandoms with their meta-commentary]; and part stems from deep-seated appetites in the human brain [such as the embodied multitasking of dopamine implicated in memory, learning, pleasure, attention, addiction, physical movement, trial and error at the edge of competence, adapting to adaptation, and so on]." 
(194): "Out of obsession comes expertise, a confidence in your own powers of analysis--a sense that if you stick with the system long enough, you'll truly figure out how it works."

NOTICE THAT THIS ECOLOGY IS THE TOPIC AND CONTEXT OF FEMCRITICON!!!   
•    FemCriticon: SF Media ecologies, feminisms and cognitions 

You must address the ecology explicitly to properly participate!  you would be smart to know this class website very well and to use it to understand this topic in detail.

"For FemCriticon you will create either a paper (with enough handouts for each member of the class) or poster (which one determined by lot) in order to explore the political, intellectual, creative, and cognitive ecologies that interconnect transmedia storytelling in science fiction feminisms." 

NOTICE THAT BOTH PAPERS AND POSTERS SHARE THE RESULTS OF YOUR RESEARCH AND YOUR THINKING ABOUT CONNECTIONS. POSTERS SHOW THESE VISUALLY: WHAT THE RESULTS ARE AND HOW YOU GOT TO THEM. 

• look through all of Butler and read the preface, using How to Read handout to give ideas for thinking of the book itself as an SF object. Pick one story and one follow up essay to read too.
• What can you find out about Butler on the Web? Bring all that in to class.
How does this book travel through SF feminisms? How can you tell? What connections can you make between what Johnson has to say in Part II and what you have learned about Butler, and what you surmise yourself after reading in the book? 

Octavia Butler on Charlie Rose- Part 1/2 youtube.comNov 12, 2008 - 9 min - Uploaded by sonic1267 Go to OctaviaButler.net for more on Octavia Butler. Award-winning author of Parable of the Sower, Parable of the Talents, and ...

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Thursday 6 Oct – Positive Obsessions
• read two more Butler stories and their followups. If you didn’t read “Bloodchild” before, make that one of the stories now.
You are prepared and preparing for femcriticon. What does Butler have to say to inspire you? 

From http://aalbc.com/authors/octavia.htm: On African-American Literature: 
Octavia E. Butler writes: "I'm a 48-year-old writer who can remember being a 10-year-old writer and who expects someday to be an 80-year-old writer. I'm also comfortably asocial -- a hermit in the middle of Los Angeles -- a pessimist if I'm not careful, a feminist, a Black, a former Baptist, an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty, and drive.

I've had ten novels published so far: Patternmaster, Mind of my Mind, Survivor, Kindred, Wild Seed, Clay's Ark, Dawn, Adulthood Rites, Imago, and Parable of the Sower, as well as a collection of my shorter work, entitled Bloodchild. I've also had short stories published in anthologies and magazines. One, "Speech Sounds," won a Hugo Award as best short story of 1984. Another, "Bloodchild," won both the 1985 Hugo and the 1984 Nebula awards as best novelette."
 

Of Special Note: In 1995 Octavia E. Butler was awarded a MacArthur Grant. In what is popularly called the genius program, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation rewards creative people who push the boundaries of their fields.


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http://aalbc.com/authors/octavia.htm 
Clips of Octavia Butler. For more about her, see http://OctaviaButler.net . This is from a panel discussion at UCLA in 2002, moderated by Arthur Cover. The full panel is on Frank Herbert's Dune DVD.

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“Bloodchild” fulfills my expectations of sf in the following ways….
“Bloodchild” violates my expectations of sf in the following ways….
What I have learned so far about sf ecologies changed how I understood “Bloodchild” in the following ways….

How does the story play with expectation and violate it?
How is the story assembled out of bits and pieces of our own experiences and defamiliarized?
What feelings does the story provoke, alter, rearrange?
How is what the story is about for you different from what it is about for Butler?

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