About this whole Theme Month thing

A week of the new year has already flown by, but I am still planning on devoting some serious real estate around here to monthly themes, if for no other reason than because it amuses me to do so. If there are other reasons, they may have something to do with the fact that coalescing my pop culture consumption (and the ensuing reactive blogging) around identifiable foci allows me to delude myself into feeling like I’m accomplishing something, which is always nice.

So without further ado, allow me to preview what’s to come for the next four or five months:

JANUARY = GREEN LANTERN!

I went back and forth on whether or not to call this “Green Lanuary” but ultimately decided that was a little too awkward (even for me). Regardless! I make no secret of my fandom for all things power-ringed, but I usually try not to make everything all about Green Lantern all the time. But due to a confluence of factors (a GL animated anthology I received on Blu-ray as a gift a while ago but still haven’t managed to watch; a series of prose GL novels I ordered with some Amazon rewards points recently; various Christmas presents) I have tons of material and I’m (only somewhat abashedly!) looking forward to plowing through it all at once. If, after all this time, you tend to zone out when I get going about my favorite four-color atomic age sci-fi artifact, then consider it a blessing that I’m aggregating so much of it over the next few weeks. I’ll probably leave it for a while after that, and you can rejoin me for …

FEBRUARY = THE 20’S!

It seems apt to look back on the 1920’s during the one month of the year which has only twenty-something days. I believe I’ve mentioned before my general fascination with the Prohibition Era, but what’s really driving this theme month is the 1001 Movies Blog Club. As I looked over my progress on the task of watching, if not every movie on the master list, at least a broad and diverse sampling of it, I realized that the 20’s are without question my weakest decade in personal cinematic experience. Of all 40 films released between 1920 and 1929 which made the Must-See cut, I have seen … 0. Not a one! I’ve at least seen one from the previous decade, a half-dozen from the 30’s, and the numbers get steadily more robust from there (except for a weird dip in the 50’s), but the 20’s remain untouched. So I picked a few films to Netflix from the decade and plan to move them to the top of the queue for February. Once I fill in that gap a bit, it’s on to …

MARCH = PATERNITY LEAVE!

OK, this is not really a theme so much as a fact: our baby is due right around the Ides, but may very well come any time after March 1st. And rather than becoming a recurring topic for posts around that time, I expect the birth of our third child will be an occasion for the blog to go into a period of low-to-no content hibernation. It’s going to be a brave new world dealing with a pre-schooler, a toddler and a newborn all at once, and only my indefatigable optimism leads me to believe that the blog will update at all thereafter! But assuming it does, then I will pick up again with …

APRIL = BASEBALL!

Again, not exactly revelatory to confess my undying love for our national pastime. But, also again, I seem to have a backlog of old birthday presents (one collection of essays on the New York Yankees; one much-lauded novel about college baseball) that I might as well dig into all at once. And here is a legitimate confession: I have never seen Field of Dreams. I may very well have to correct that come April, as well. And once baseball season has been well and truly rung in (and assuming I haven’t gotten of tired of so much concentration of subject matter by then) then I can whipswitch gears again into …

MAY = ANIME AND MANGA!

Quite some time ago (like 2010), I made a resolution to investigate more deeply the artistic offerings of Japan in the formats of anime films and manga comics. Since then I’ve made some progress on that front, but neither as much as I expected nor as much as I’d like. May seems so far away right now that I’m really not sure exactly what the highlights of this theme month might be; presumably I might try to knock off the remaining volumes of Akira that I haven’t gotten around to yet, but there’s also a fair amount of anime on the 1001 Movies master list, so that’s another potential source of material as well.

And then it will be June and very nearly time for Beach Books on a Bus and/or Summer Movies on a Train, with Spooktoberfest ’13 not far behind. But at the (oft-ignored) risk of repeating myself, that’s both a long ways off and clear on the other side of the impending expansion of the brood. Still, it’s fun to make plans; what else would we laugh at in hindsight as we careen and carom wildly through the crazy days and nights ahead?