Response to Kragen Sitaker: yes, it was quite wrong to say ‘comment box’ rather than ‘group blog’, by way of invoking the indefinite possibility I have in mind. The goal of my little events is to garner a collection of thoughtful posts by numerous discussants, rather than a whole trail of off-the-cuff comments. (Comments are welcome and add value, but they certainly aren’t, and can’t be, the focus.)

The problem is indeed that blogs are locked into the news-cycle pace. The datestamp is sort of a curse that way. We need something like the efficient form but without the manic pace.

As to the question of whether academic work is supposed to provoke immediate response: there is certainly work that is meant for the ages – or the decades, at least – and shouldn’t be expected to generate a cloud of instant discussion. One should be able to excuse such work from what I am proposing. But there is also a sense in which the convenient fiction of the long view simply serves as polite concealment for overproduction. (I talk about this more in the original post.)

I watched it for the first time a few weeks ago, and I’m still getting thrills recalling it.

Academic publishing, in books, journals, conferences, or whatever, is not intended to provoke immediate responses. It’s not a bad thing if it does (unless the immediate responses are “this work is nonsense”)—- it just isn’t the point. Academic publishing is intended to provoke further work, either publishable or practical.

Now, it may be that some of that future work can fit well into a blog comment box, but generally blog comments leave something to be desired in findability, citability (in the sense of having a stable URL and correct attribution), and permanence. Who here can find all the blog comments they themselves have left? But the worst indictment of blog comments, as a form for scholarly discussion, is the obsession of the form with recency and rapidity of response. Comment on a post from six months ago, and your comment will never be read, by anyone.

I don’t think that this would necessarily result in good work not getting done, or not getting published. I suspect that many discussions in such a forum would culminate in publishable works.

So I agree that any academic publication should have associated with it some perennial public online symposium, but perhaps we have not yet found the correct format for that symposium. At present, I’m using e-mail mailing lists, and they have their severe deficiencies.

Masters of the Universe raises the usual genre-boundary questions. Seems to me part of sword-and-sorcery, not superheroes, notwithstanding the Shazam! moment. More Conan-for-kids than Superman. (I suppose LXG doesn’t quite count, either—but the source material is an Alan Moore comic, not a toy-marketing cartoon.)

Or perhaps we ought to expand Jacob’s reasonable exclusion of direct-to-video junk to include also any superhero movies whose source material is obviously second-rate (or worse) to begin with. In which case, we’re back to his list of the usual suspects.

I would argue that an important element in evaluation needs to be degree of difficulty. It’s not a surprise, really, that a movie of “The Punisher” was bad. Putting the Batman franchise into an eight year coma, by contrast: very impressive.

Excluding direct-to-video crap like the first Fantastic Four “movie”; but wasn’t there a Dolph Lundgren (or someone similar) Punisher movie that went to theaters?

Haven’t seen Elektra. But I’d be surprised if it were actually worse than all these. I’ll stick with Superman IV.

A short point, one you’ve no doubt made somewhere else, John: it is entirely, and I think persuasively, arguable that much of the very best academic philosophy, political theory, and cultural commentary has arisen in the context of just such reviewing. Many thinkers best express themselves only while engaging with the expressions of another. Certainly that was the case for one of your intellectual heroes, Isaiah Berlin, as well as for one of mine, J.G. Herder.

I never saw Superman IV, but I hear Catwoman, which I also never saw, was really the bottom of the barrell.

Agreed. See The Inter-Galactic Playground for a blog attached to a book project. Although in this case the blog is there as my research diary, it will stay up after the book is published.