From the Editor’s Desk
Welcome to Volume 23, #1 of PCR.
We kick off with Matthew Turner’s “Performing Piracy and the Origin of
National Talk Like a Pirate Day” which day is celebrated on September 19 . He
builds his paper around what he calls The Ten Ps: popularity, provenance,
promulgation, performance, pretending, play, paradox, plunder and pillage, and
phonetics. It is a lively look at our continuing fascination with pirates of old, one
that doesn’t seem to carry over to romanticizing today’s Somali’s. This is
complemented by Kathy Merlock Jackson’s “Childhood Rejects: One-Eye Willie,
Pint-sized Pirates, and the Generational Appeal of The Goonies.
Our fascination with bad guys certainly doesn’t stop with pirates and Sarah
Pawlak explores “The Many Faces of Moriarty” who, like Holmes, seems to have
survived plummeting down the Falls to populate film and fiction, often without
Holmes, his character transcending his origins. While male vampires seem to be
transmuting into glamorous even heroic characters, Lauren Rocha in “Mirror,
Mirror: Gender and Beauty in the Twilight series” shows how the series creates a
backlash against feminism, the female resembling the Victorian ideal, regressive and
without agency. Pulp fiction, however, provides us with plenty of people who do
have agency and in “Race, Gender, and Genre: The Baroness Series as Social and
Literary Progression,” Jennifer Woolson writes of how that 1970 series reflects the
social and literary progression of 1974 and 1975.
Moving away from pulp, Philip Kolin addresses “Popular Dance Music in
Tennessee William’s The Glass Menagerie” explaining how crucial William’s use
of dance music is to the structure of the play. Further, we see that alcoholism is
crucial to Boardwalk Empire's structure in Lindsey Barlow’s “Driven by the Spirit.”
Material culture rears its head, in Ellis Godard’s “ Professor Dress: The
Consequences of Cultural Distance in the Classroom” which looks at its effects, both
good and ill.
Finally in “To My Sons” award winning author Ross Talarico discusses what it
is like to be an author in the
century, while Jon Griffin Donlon examines leisure
studies both East and West, in “ The Happiness Movement, and Japanese Zen” .
Good reading!
peLtcto/
P.S. In our last issue, three paragraphs of Christine Photinos’ article on Leigh
Brackett disappeared, we know not where. They are reprinted with our apologies in
the errata section of this issue.
F.
Felicia F. Campbell
Professor of English
Editor, Popular Culture Review
[email protected]
http://www.farwestpca.blogspot.com