Time to Unclog Again

I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t clog up once in a while, so here’s another probably uninteresting post intended to get this thing going again.

• The other week, I rented a couple of children’s movies for my daughter. One of them was Toy Story 2, and ever since I have kept thinking that it would be very fun to read a semiotic analysis of it. There are so many interesting things about it: loads of references to other popular movies (Mr. Potato Head throwing his hat, Oddjob style, for instance); the toys are more real than the figures they are models of (Buzz Lightyear isn’t “the real Buzz Lightyear,” and therefore can’t fly, or use his anti-gravity belt, etc.); the “fake” Buzz Lightyear, which is as real as the “real” one, is exposed by removing his helmet, which makes him think he is suffocating (a reference to the first movie; the helmet is then used to distinguish the two); and so on.
• I thought about writing a book on some subject, in the mode of “exploratory writing,” where I would write about the subject as well as about learning about the subject, and describe how the structure and organization of the book changed as I learned more about it. I like this, because I feel the meta discussion would amplify the learning experience for the reader. (This has probably been done thousands of times, but I can’t think of a book now which does it; and I guess this was the motivation of the essay form as Montaigne saw it.)
• Some things tend to cause clogging. This time, it’s mainly because we’re selling our apartment and are busy getting it into a more sellable state, but it’s also a combination of me getting distracted by summarizing my weblog history and thinking about a new design for this site, and the fact that reading fiction, which I’m doing now, often means straying from the path.
• I thought again about genres and the effects of their conventions (which I think of as constraints). I must find something to read about this.

I hope this will do.