So, it’s been an eventful month for me, to say the least, and I’ve been slacking off in my blogging promises (yet still meeting the once a month quota, hah!). I headed up to Sydney late last month for the Australian Romance Readers Convention, a week later I graduated once more with Honours, and the following Saturday I made my annual pilgrimage to Supanova Expo. I’ll be blogging about all those, and I still need to get round to my thoughts on My Princess (so abominably late, I am), but firstly – graduation!

In the lead-up towards graduation I was feeling pretty off about the whole ordeal; I mean, graduation doesn’t equate to getting a job or a good one at that; it just officially closes that chapter of tertiary study. And now I’m really in a limbo. So there certainly was a sense of finality this time, whereas last year I was joking alongside the other graduates, thinking “oh, I still have all the time in the world!” I’d been through the graduation drill before, yet this year I felt as flustered as ever. Perhaps when I finally get that PhD in the distant future, I will tick …

So, it’s the end of June, and I’m halfway into my Honours project—SCARY THOUGHT. If you don’t know what my project is about, you might want to read this post though my objectives have altered slightly as time’s passed. Now is the perfect time to critically reflect on my progress throughout the first semester. We were given the opportunity to present our process and findings in a quasi-formal verbal and visual (poster) presentation on the 10th and 16th of June. (Well, actually, it made up 75% of our total grade, so it’s a bigger deal than I’m making it out to be.)

Luckily for me I was assigned to the latter date, so that gave me a while to collate my ideas together, following my marathon completion of my artist book for my elective unit. In a nutshell, I formulated a new question/thesis, emphasising the merits of ornament over modernism, excess over restraint, maximalism over minimalism. The difference being a lot of me mixed into the concoction. I turned to critical theory and other texts to validate my arguments, and I believe I was able to confidently and convincingly articulate my ideas on, and more importantly my passion for, this subject.

I’m …

Last December I got accepted into Honours this year for Visual Communication, and I’ve decided to base my “thesis” per se on kitsch and collecting the mundane, which is the original title of my proposal. No doubt this will change with time. (I wanted to do a project purely on Batman, but that’s not exactly substantial in this context. At least this way I can chuck him in there somewhere, because he is a part of me. :P)

I am making a master list of kitsch films, books, magazines and every other periodical, TV and music, and whatever else pops up in my mind through out the year that I am investigating this topic. Feel free to leave a comment or better yet make a suggestion! I’m starting to notice that a lot of my lists are material mostly harks back between the 40s and 70s, the HEIGHT of kitsch appeal. Then again, I think, arguably, pretty much everything from any era can be considered kitsch—it’s a product of whatever era from which it derives. And it seems mostly exploitative, horror, sci-fi and smut reigns supreme in this category.

I will document my findings here and on my Flickr account, …