TAKING STOCK OF 2021

Once again I take keys in hands (in place of Charlie Brown's "pencil in hand" whenever he would write his "pencil-pal") and look back at the things I wrote on this blog and its companions.

Some of the essays I liked best included:

MYTH AND SEXPLOITATION, in which I examined some of the works I already analyzed for their mythic content and showed how the myth-concerns of those works also played seamlessly into their passion for sexploitative content.

DEATHBLOW AND DEATHMATCH-- Though I formulated my concept of the combative mode near the start of this blog, guided largely by some salient if brief remarks by both Kant and Frye, this essay is the first time I attempted to codify how the combative mode is expressed through popular story-tropes. The essay immediately afterward, QUANTUMS OF SOLIPSISM PT. 2, further elaborates the tropes in terms of the "vector terminology" I borrowed from Alfred North Whitehead.

LIKE A TROPE, ON THE WIRE was a new attempt to summarize my NUM theory and to relate it to the history of literature as articulated by Aristotle and misinterpreted by people who misread Aristotle.

PROBLEMS VS CONUNDRUMS represents my effort to find a more elegant way to restate some of my earlier formulations regarding what I called "lateral meaning" and "vertical meaning."

KNOWING THE IDEA FROM THE CONCEPT focuses upon finding new terminology with which to analyze the *quanta* through which the two vertical potentialities are expressed in fiction, with the "idea" being the quanta through which mythopoeic thought is expressed, while the "concept" is the quanta through which didactic thought is expressed.

And in December, starting with STALKING THE PERFECT TERM: ENTER PRIMES, EXIT COES, I devoted numerous posts that month to "an anatomy of the crossover," a subject that's interested me for years, though only in the previous year of 2020 did I conceive of terms, "stature" and "charisma", for the different operations of Prime and Sub characters/presences. I anticipate writing more on this topic in 2022, though I confess I may be reaching a point where my system is about as all-embracing as it can get.

Most of the mythcomics I analyzed were works I'd read at least once before, though a few items, like Ernie Colon's THE MEDUSA CHAIN, proved more rigorous than I'd perceived in the initial reading. I don't think I encountered any new-to-me works in 2021 that I liked as much as my 2020 discovery of NISEKOI, although ELFEN LIED and THE SONS OF EL TOPO probably rate as my foremost discoveries for last year.

My favorite movie/TV reviews of 2021 included:

NAKED KILLER (1992)

The BEAUTY AND THE BEAST episode "To Reign in Hell," which may inspire me to make a full examination of all three seasons of the teleseries within year 2022.

Perennial old favorite FIEND WITHOUT A FACE.

The two-season NISEKOI teleseries.

GODZILLA VS. KONG, because I'd been waiting for fifty-something years to see the titans of Japan and the U.S. to square off in a city-smashing donnybrook.

The first two Tobey Maguire Spideys, here and here, which certainly helped me out when it came to consider NO WAY HOME.

The two Keaton Bat-flicks, here and here.

"WAXWORKS," which at present reigns as the first true "monster mashup."

THE TRIUMPH OF HERCULES, my favorite Italian peplum.

The fourth episode of BEWITCHED, which finally put into perspective for me why this often mediocre show had such strong resonance for many though not all TV viewers.

And one of the best adventure-serials of that form's glory days, THE SPIDER'S WEB.

Naturally, a lot of my movie/TV viewing for the year was driven by cogitating about what movies I wanted to cross-reference on THE GRAND SUPERHERO OPERA, which has been going since June. I have not yet made more than a couple of attempts to cross-promote the blog, so not surprisingly OPERA doesn't get much attention, though still a little more than my other two "junk-drawer" blogs. For the time being I'm still committed to OPERA, though. In my mind at least, OPERA builds on Northrop Frye's comment that the critic, like the natural scientist, tries to examine all phenomena, going on the theory that a "total coherence" exists between all of the relevant subject matter. In the hands of ideological critics, this was often a means of deriding, say, even the best BATMAN productions by having a big laugh at how stupid the TV show was (or seemed to be). I'm aware that even old-time fans aren't ever going to be deeply invested in the analysis of a creaky old serial like JUNGLE DRUMS OF AFRICA. But there's a sense in which understanding anything-- be it a genre or a physical phenomenon-- requires that the analyst must see everything, good, bad and mediocre, as comprising facets of Shelley's "dome of many colored glass," doing everything possible to stain that monotonous white radiance of Eternity.