Scholarly Look at Celebrities and YouTube

Taking a quick break to post on the blog. I am not getting nearly as much done with my own work, but the good news is that my emails are all cleaned out and the work blog is updated. I also found out that my class is full and some are even on a wait list. I admit I have not been in teacher head-space for almost a month. But this is good - all part of the two-jobs balancing act. Now I am getting excited for my new class. The location is off the main campus in a very beautiful mini-campus.

So I know that some of my friends and family wonder why I have not read certain books (especially popular books) because clearly I love reading. Setting aside the assumption that everyone has that I should have read every book on the face of the planet by now, there is the big factor that I read all the time. All. The. Time. Yesterday, for example, I read a 200 page PDF called The YouTube Reader. I also read half of the MLA on Celebrity (a very interesting edition for those of you who haven't gotten to it yet). The point being that even I can get tired of reading. That being said, I do have a nice little stack of books waiting to read by my bed - and I am slowly making my way through them (although even these are not keeping me current with Oprah's hot list). Most of us in graduate school are encouraged to be MLA members because MLA offers a lot of professional and academic development opportunities. One of these is the MLA books that come out with new scholarship on different issues. In a typical semester (where I am teaching four classes), these tend to stack up. I then usually go through them all at once to pull out articles I might read. Well lucky me, I have a whole edition that is somewhat relevant to part of my work on Rushdie. It is all about celebrity. I know, some of you must be thinking "jeez, you can study anything in graduate school." Well that is true, but think about how significant celebrities are to so many things - the popularity of certain products, the way we imagine ourselves and our ideal lives, the way they help us navigate our cultural values, etc. They are also just fun to write about. This edition covers a very broad range of topics including celebrity, fame, and notoriety (believe it or not there are very significant differences between these concepts).
The other text I was reading is called The YouTube Reader and you can find it for free here. It was recently suggested to me by a professor who knows of my interest in digital humanities. Since DH is still in a sort of infancy, there are few texts about it - this is one of them. Yes, it is primarily about YouTube, but the information can be extended to other uses of DH. You would be surprised at how these scholars look at what we consider to be the simple website YouTube. I am still making my way through parts of it, but it is quite interesting. Have you ever considered how youtube has altered our society?
Okay, I am going to try and squeeze a couple more hours of productivity out of myself. Anyone reading anything good right now?