TCJ.com Kerfuffle
This week on the TCJ.com mainpage Caroline Small, Ng Suat Tong and I participated in a roundtable on the Best American Comics Criticism anthology edited by Ben Schwartz. Jeet Heer, Brian Doherty, and Ben Schwartz himself also participated. In comments other critics joined in, including Rob Clough, Ken Parille, Robert Stanley Martin, and Kent Worcester. So check it out if you haven’t already.
Oh, and there’s a comment thread on the roundtable here as well which includes a discussion of French language and Japanese comics criticism.
On HU
Domingos Isabelinho discussed Dominique Goblet’s and Nikita Fossoul’s Chronographie.
Kinukitty talked about European fashion magazines, Dave Mustaine, and Makoto Tateno’s Yokan Premonition.
In a guest post, teacher and artist Sean Michael Robinson explained that it’s a good thing for art teachers when students are into anime and manga.
JR Brown wrote an extensive article about the history of the pretty boy in Japanese art.
I reviewed Issue #22 of the Marston/Peter run on Wonder Woman.
Vom Marlowe talked about gender issues in the young adult prose series Percy Jackson and the Olympians.
And a music download of Beatlesesque pop.
Utilitarians Everywhere
Caroline Small is going to be on the Critic’s Roundtable panel at SPX, along with many other illustrious folks. (Via Robot6.)
Critics’ Panel: How We Judge
3:00 | Brookside Conference Room
The accessibility of online publishing alongside traditional media has enabled a diversity of critical voices who are addressing the broad spectrum of comics being published today. A diverse group of critics will discuss the disparate bases for their own critical opinions, and the extent to which they regard different kinds of work in different ways. Join moderator Bill Kartalopoulos for a discussion with Johanna Draper Carlson (Comics Worth Reading), Gary Groth (The Comics Journal), Tim Hodler (Comics Comics), Chris Mautner (Robot 6), Joe McCulloch (Jog the Blog/Comics Comics), Ken Parille (Blog Flume), and Caroline Small (The Hooded Utilitarian).
At the Chicago Reader I review JimCollins’ Bring on the Books for Everybody.
In The Gift of Death, Derrida concludes that literature is an empty, parasitic untheology, constantly seeking forgiveness for its meaninglessness. Ever the tenured radical, he sees this revelation as an affront to the academic establishment. But cultural studies is a more callow establishment than Derrida anticipated, and members like Collins don’t have a problem with emptiness. On the contrary, Collins is “delighted” just to find that literary fiction “forms part of the cultural mixes” that modern cultural consumers “assemble with such gusto to articulate who they are, and what is crucially important to them.” The content of their identities and concerns is utterly beside the point. Are they Nazis? Misogynists? Drooling idiots? As long as they embrace it with gusto, who cares? The point of literature is to make a statement regardless of what’s said. By the same token, Collins is aware that, say, The Oprah Show is witheringly stupid and the movie version of The English Patient is an apologia for imperialism—but he can’t bring himself to take the next step, which would be admitting that some of the detritus of popular culture deserves to be scorned.
On Splice Today I talk about the new film The Last Exorcism in light of the criticism of James Baldwin.
For Baldwin, the bed floating, the fluid spitting, and special-effects gouting, were all part of a willful disavowal. The little girl with the deep voice uttering curses is an innocent possessed by the devil…but Baldwin argues that the upper-middle-class milieu in which she sits and writhes is anything but innocent, and that the movie is therefore an example of (in various senses) bad faith. Baldwin notes that at the end of the film, the “demon-racked little girl murderess kisses the Holy Father, and she remembers nothing.” This convenient amnesia is, for Baldwin, emblematic of America’s penchant for forgetting what they have done, to whom, and for what ends.
At Madeloud I have some recommendations for sexadelic lounge music. Groovy!
Other Links
R. Fiore was inspired by our Popeye roundtable to write a really entertaining appraisal of the Fleischer Popeye cartoons.
Hi Moah–
I linked to this on my FB page, but I think everyone who stops by HU might find this of interest. It’s the audio of a 1963 panel discussion on film between Dwight Macdonald, Pauline Kael, and John Simon:
http://tsutpen.blogspot.com/2006/05/when-film-critics-gather.html?spref=fb
It’s particularly interesting given the twists, turns, and bumps of the BACC discussion last week.
Whoops. Got some letters interchanged there. That’s Noah, not Moah, obviously.
Thanks a lot Robert! I especially enjoyed John Simon’s subtle attack on Pauline Kael (unfortunately she represents the future of criticism in this particular panel). I was also surprised by how much Macdonald fetishized the “know-how,” as he put it. I really don’t see why I should be surprised though. He belonged to the upper class, after all…
This panel also showed to me, again, that, in time, the work judges the critics more than the other way around.
“wanton wah-wah pedals” is going to be my new favorite phrase. You’ve got an extra tag at the end of the HMTL link there that’s breaking it, by the way.
I completely missed the kerfuffle, which is no surprise, I guess, as I live under my nice comfy rock filled only with YA stories (as in Yohji/Aya as I’m sure you know, and not YA as in young adult) and the dog, but I found the whole thing kind of hilarious in the way that only comic bitch slap fights are hilarious. I mean, the Best didn’t even cover 10 years. Just EIGHT. I really, really wanted that silly book to be what it said on the tin, because I’m really looking for that sort of book. I WANT a collection of comics criticism, (especially if it had articles that focused on the art, as so few seem to do) since I so often feel like I make shit up as I go along. Oh well. And there’s no women writing good criticism? Jeez, thanks a lot, Ben. I’ll just shove this book under a bus and not tell all my excellent FEMALE MANGA CRITIC BUDDIES about it, yo. *snort*
Thanks for the note on the link. If I ever do one of these roundup posts without a broken link I think I’ll retire.
To be fair, Jeet did push back too on the idea that there aren’t good female critics or manga critics, which was nice to see.
I don’t think I’ve read all of Jeet’s parts yet, but that’s good to see.
I had another disheartening experience with a local comic shop (hint to comics geeks running comic stores, women talk from their mouths, not their boobs. shocking, I know…) And I’m sort of running low on patience with the hiding in the basement crowd, I guess.
I decided to release the hounds, I mean my LJ buddies, to help me find a bunch of favorite female-written comics criticism from that era, just because, well. It will be fun, right? Er, unless you’re tired of this discussion, in which case I’ll frame it differently, still collect the links/article cites, and post it another time.
I’ll email you about it….
VM, what about the crew at Sequential Tarts?
I thought Sequential Tart was gone! Don’t know why; they seem to be up and running, with a couple of articles from last week.
Robert, thanks for that link to the movie critic discussion. It’s pretty fascinating. My favorite moment is probably Dwight McDonald’s characterization of Pauline Kael’s “I watch the movie from the perspective of the audience” stance as watching Alfred Hitchock’s The Birds from the avian perspective. (I can’t believe they all hated the Birds!) Kael’s skewering of the harem scene in 8 1/2 was pretty great too though; I liked her in this discussion context much more than in the essays of hers I’ve read, I have to say. I hadn’t quite gotten (or had forgotten) how important boredom is to her as a critical concept. That was nice to see too.
The one thing I thought was interesting where I disagreed with all of them was where they were discussing fannishness and expertise. Kael (with characteristic inconsistency) suddenly moves from identifying with a typical moviegoer to insisting that one needs an immersive knowledge to be a critic (I guess it’s possible that she thinks that typical moviegoers are fannish experts — that’s exactly the sort of thing she’d be confused about, actually.) McDonald responds by making vague gestures at objectivity, which everybody laughs at — but they all do seem to more or less agree that a critic should be very knowledgeable. Which makes sense as the thing critics would say…but I’m not necessarily convinced. It seems like, yes, expert knowledge of film can be interesting and worthwhile — but at the same time it can also be interesting to hear from somebody who’s not immersed in that context, but is coming from somewhere fairly different. That’s actually an argument the internet has made much more pressing than it probably was at the time; the idea that anyone could be a critic (including all those people who Kael thought with irritating naivete that she was speaking for) would probably have horrified them.
Oh, and Domingos, I’m pretty sure that was Simon fetishizing the know-how, right? Simon says Ray is horrible because he’s technically lousy (among other things), Kael defends him; McDonald backs Kael up.
I could be confused too; it’s a little hard to tell always who’s who in the audio….
I’m quite sure that me being hard of hearing doesn’t help much…
I’ve listened to it all again and you’re right, but it’s also Simon who says that thing about the point of view of a bird.
I’ve a problem with what I call the politics of fun. For two reasons: (1) it is something like the dictatorship of the proletariat masquerading as democracy (it creates an elitists vs. us common people kind of situation); (2) what it usually means is: fun = fast paced & stupid & American & blockbuster; boring = slow paced & intellectual & European & box office poison. Re. (2): I, for one, would be incredibly bored if tied to a chair, with some device on the eyes to keep them open, to be forced to watch _Rambo_ 17 or something… I know what happens in action movies almost to the minute. I can’t even imagine why people aren’t incredibly bored by something as hollow as _Avatar_, for instance. Even if the graphics are interesting, they’re interesting in a pompier kind of way…
it’s a little hard to tell always who’s who in the audio
Really? Between Simon’s Serbian accent, Macdonald’s New York one, and Kael’s finishing-school cadence, that’s about as distinctive a mix of voices as I’ve ever come across.
As for the put-down of The Birds, the initial crack came from Simon, but Macdonald took it and ran with it. I was reminded of his review, where he said that the birds were the only characters who weren’t acting like birdbrains.
It doesn’t surprise me that none of them liked it. Simon can be relied on to sneer at anything that comes out of Hollywood. (I think he’s a terrible critic, by the way–an uninsightful snob poseur whose main talent is for vitriolic insults.) As for Macdonald and Kael, they both saw Hitchcock as an entertainer, rather than an artist. When the wittiness of his films gave way to a rather self-important nastiness in the mid-’50s, they lost all interest in them.
That’s what I meant when I said that, in time, works of art judge the critics rather than the other way around. Same thing for Satyajit Ray.
Oh and, even if I consider myself to be hard of hearing I think that you’re right: I just got distracted somehow… Macdonald sounds a bit like Bugs Bunny: “I knew I shoulda taken dat left toin at Albe-koi-kee.”
Macdonald thrashes the comics specificity, actually, when he says: “How did vitality get in there? I mean, crudeness I give you, but vitality? It’s possible to be crude and not vital, you know?”
This never crossed my mind. I always linked the two in my mind too: North American (but not Canadian) newspaper comics published during the first two decades of the 20th century always seemed crude and vital to me. But Macdonald is right: there’s not much that’s vital in there: slapstick has nothing to do with life… “Zaniness” is a far better word to describe what’s happening in the comics specificity of the beginning of the century. As for Kirby, for instance, I would use “dynamism.”
I could always tell Kael! And mostly Simon and MacDonald were clear; every so often I was unsure about a phrase (but I did get that it was MacDonald running with the Birds.) I have a lousy ear for accents, though.
You’re way more familiar with their positions initially than I am, Robert, thus less likely to be surprised!
Domingos, it makes sense that you wouldn’t be a big fan of Kael’s…though it’s she who defended Ray, and Simon (who aligns himself more with elitism, as Robert says) who is down on the director (I haven’t seen Ray’s films…but they don’t make them sound pulpy.) And it’s MacDonald who argues for universal standards (a la Suat) while Simon sort of seems to be saying at the beginning that you should judge Hollywood films by other Hollywood films.
The idea that crudeness doesn’t have to go with vitality is nicely done! I thought Kael’s point about the value of collaboration was also fairly directly applicable to comics though. She likes collaboration both because she’s interested in artistic incoherence (very pomo!) and because she wants the work to be open and engaged with the outside world, rather than insular and inward turning, and she sees the presence of different artistic viewpoints as a move away from autobiography. That has a pretty direct application to the mainstream/indie comics divide, right?
Has Gary ever gone after Kael for that sort of thing? It seems like her (somewhat confused) lauding of mass culture would irritate him…? Or perhaps he sees it as validating something like Kirby — but doesn’t Gary usually see Kirby et. al’s participation in the mainstream system as a blot, or as preventing them from doing their best work? Whereas Kael is kind of saying that individual vision can be a barrier to interesting work (though again, she’s not murderously consistent about it or anything.)
I do know that Gary was a big fan of Simon’s, and in fact reprinted an article by him in an early TCJ.
Conversely, in ‘Paradigms Lost’ (one of his books on English usage) Simon actually quotes from a letter Gary sent him!
I agree and disagree with the three of them. What bothers me a bit is that they have to go against each other on principle. It seems like both men are there to get her, so, whatever they say she’s against it. I wonder what would have happen if Simon said something actually nice about Ray (whose films have a neorealist feel)… But mostly I disagree with Pauline Kael… Macdonald is one of my heroes, if I have any, so, I pretty much agree with whatever he says (I’m not sure about Sarris because I never read anything by him)… Simon seems reasonable in his ideas, but he also seems like a poor critic…
I thought the alliances shifted around fairly regularly. MacDonald and Simon definitely think Kael’s aligning with the audience is silliness; Simon and Kael thought MacDonald’s objectivity was silliness; MacDonald and Simon lined up against Hollywood film; MacDonald and Kael lined up for Ray….
I’d say Simon and Kael were definitely mostly opposed with MacDonald taking one side or the other…but it didn’t feel especially doctrinaire to me
Maybe you’re right… I privileged the first part of the panel in my mind, I guess… I don’t see why you need to contradict yourself above though…
Um…because I contain multitudes?
Sorry…I have trouble resisting stupid Whitman jokes….
I haven’t watched the discussion yet, but jeez, I thought the harem sequence in 8 1/2 was kind of funny. I mean, he was making fun of male sex fantasies, right? You know, the Crumb comic If I Was King follows the same plot, right down to the harem girls rebelling but the guy ultimately triumphing over them.
I want to listen to and read the stuff on Kael/Simon/the clip but I can’t wait until I’ve done that to say how much I dig the sexadelic loung music thing: before you posted this I had selected Piero Umiliani’s To-Day’s Sound as one of my 15 albums on that Facebook meme. I love that stuff. :D
Now back to your regularly scheduled cerebrality.
Hah! I’m getting more into it; Riz Ortolani is great too!
Our television is sitting on a 6′ long shelf that was built especially to hold my rapidly increasing collection of 50s and 60s lounge music on vinyl.
The cover art on Today’s Sound is especially worthwhile.