getting my feet wet

I'm going to be chatting about movies, TV shows, radio, books, magazine articles. Basically, anything textual. My hope is that I can persuade my friend Margaret (and anyone else who happens on this blog) to join in the dialogue. Just to warn you, I'm textually promiscuous by training and by personal taste. An ad during American Idol can be as appealing to me as a poem by Rilke.

But back to my erstwhile partner in crime, Margaret. At grad school, we found that we shared similar taste for violent films that I guess are considered the opposite of chickflicks. My dissertation was on meaningful violence in crime thrillers and westerns of the 40s, the type of violence that was meant to make you cringe while thinking about some larger moral or political issue. Margaret's dissertation focused on aestheticized violence, the kind of violence that wows rather than disturbs. But I'll stop talking about her work because as I mentioned above, I want her to join in.