getting set to go back to the grind

Monday, August 23, 2004, at 07:13AM

By Eric Richardson

Classes start today at USC. I'm on campus to take care of a variety of little things, even though my first class isn't until 9am tomorrow. I'm actually looking forward to what I'm taking this semester, which is a good change. I've got two cinema classes, and two COMM classes, with an extra 2-unit improv theatre class thrown in for good measure.

First thing tomorrow is Censorship in Cinema, with Casper. I mentioned a few months ago that this was the class endowed by Hugh Hefner. Books for the class include Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

My second cinema class is the generically titled Film and/or Television Genres. This is a class that each year or so switches professors and genres, going from westerns to musicals to who knows what. This semester it'll be on speculative cinema, basically films that paint a picture of the future. Books include Ender's Game and The Man Who Folded Himself.

My two COMM classes are Sports, Communication, and Culture and Massive Multiplayer Online Games. Oddly enough, I'm not a gamer. I play NCAA Football on the XBox, and that's about it. Though the class sounds a little dorky, I'm interested in seeing how it addresses community building in online worlds and seeing how transferable the concepts are to other online venues. And it fit my schedule and seemed sort of easy.

So there you have my semester, minus the random improv class.