I can't believe I wrote all that last year.

Because I've been grading all damn day and am as tired as a Swearengen of hearing other about the finished semesters of pretty much every other academic blogger, I thought that it might be best to avoid jealously lashing out and scribble a "Best of Acephalous 2009" post.  However, when I started looking through my archives, it occurred to me that my output this year defines me much more sharply than in years past.  What do I mean? 

The posts I consider foundational to my current professional identity all seem to have been composed in 2009.  Granted, the likelihood that I'm suffering from the identitarian equivalent of presentism is awfully high, but I honestly thought I'd written some of the posts from early 2009 in 2006 or so.  (It may also be that I remember the scene of their writing, which would have been in the old apartment, i.e. the place I barely remember ever having lived in anymore.)  If you have absolutely nothing better to do on a Friday night, feel free to scan through my 2009 archives and tell me what you think should be included in the "Best of" post. 

If you do have something better to do, though, by all means do it. 

Comments

[alkau]

Why is someone so young not having fun with friends on a Friday night. Granted grading papers is important, but no fun makes for a boring life. I should know. /since, when I was your age I had fun playing with my adorable son and caring for another baby. You need to try to have a life outside your computer. Just saying....it seems I have more life now then you have and we know how little I get out!

[magistra]

The one that really stuck in my mind was explaining transitions in the panels of Watchmen. I'd read Watchmen a short while before and appreciated its narrative complexity, but not being used to reading comics, hadn't registered all the technical tricks that the artist was using to achieve this. The post not only taught me something about the grammar of such images, but more importantly led to me realising that there is a grammar to look for in the first place. So thanks a lot for that one.

[Caio]

SEK, I started going through your back posts and noticed a pattern in my selections, so I think it would be easier (for me, because I'm rubbish with html) to just say all the scene analysis posts and the close reading comics posts, like the one Magistra mentioned and many others after that. Plus Justifying Comics as a Legitimate Object of Study Parts I & II. I also liked "Teaching the Overdetermined Image." Your takedown of Cashill and the whole Ayers-wrote-Dreams was excellent, and the Cruel_cruel_death post (you know what I'm talking about, right?).

Also, The Day in Actual Communist and Real Nazi History seems as relevant today as ever.

[Martin Wisse]

Agree with the previous two comments. I don't remember if you've made noises here before about turning these into a book, but if you do you've got at least one reader.

[tomemos]

What happened to your post that appeared in my RSS reader yesterday?

[Adam Roberts]

Would it be possible to arrange your posts into three 'parties', and give your many readers the opportunity to 'vote' for one of them, by 'secret ballot'? I feel your British readers would appreciate that.