On HU
Featured Archive Post: Ng Suat Tong looks at Gary Groth’s interview with Gil Kane.
I review an album of post-war hillbilly music.
Matthias Wivel weighs in on the debate over literariness in comics.Eddie Campbell clarifies his position in the (lengthy) comments thread.
Alex Buchet on Peanuts, as you’ve never seen it before.
Chris Gavaler looks at eugenics and the House of Slytherin.
I compared the poetry of Zen poets Basho and Ryokan.
Robert Stanley Martin provides an audio download of Pauline Kael lecturing on the auteur theory.
Utilitarians Everywhere
I was on the Charles Adler Show talking about Persepolis and censorship in schools (in reference to my Atlantic article below.)
At the Atlantic, I talk about:
—The Client List, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and cultural images of sexy, deviant single moms.
— Persepolis and school censorship.
—Steubenville, I Spit on Your Grave, and failures of imagination about rape.
— what Andrea Dworkin would,and would not, have liked about the new film Ginger & Rosa
— Olympus Has Fallen, which is one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen, and makes me despair for my country.
— what Rush Limbaugh got right about Beyoncé.
At Splice Today, I talk about
— how the internet ate my dream job. Whine, freelancer, whine….
—the left wing pro-war pundits and how they sucked.
Other Links
Jessice Luther on feminism and romance novels.
C.T. May on CPAC.
Mallory Ortberg on CNN”s coverage of Steubenville.
And then there’s the Onion on a courageous athlete who overcame raping someone.
Philip Cohen on gender segregation in the workplace.
Alex Pareene on awful local news reporting.
Ronald Reagan was a traitorous thug.
This Week’s Reading
I reread Persepolis, and started David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years. Also still working on LOTR with my son; we’re in the middle of the Two Towers now.
I can’t believe you wrote a whole piece about how Beyoncé might be a genius, and then when she stepped up to claim her place as Better Than All of You, All Hail the Queen, you turned on her. Are you behind Beyoncé-the-Genius-Artiste, or not?
Also: David Graeber! :D
I can’t be trusted.
To be fair, I think it’s fair to call John Lennon a genius too, but I dinged him for misogyny in the same article.
Just finished the David Graeber. The call to honor the non-industrious poor is pretty awesome.
Right? He’s like the anti-Beyoncé, sympathetic even to people who haven’t worked as hard as he has.
Yep; sympathetic to them because they *haven’t* worked as hard as he has.
Not really a shock that Beyonce is not especially interested in distancing herself from the logic of capitalism….
“and the most important part of the job, it often seems like, is not imparting information, but rather figuring out how to make sure that the students don’t receive any. ”
This article lays the blame more on the system than the textbooks. But it probably depends on the particular subject in question.
Beyoncé has been a commodity for most of her life, it’s probably the way she understands human relationships. She’s actually not too far off from the Kpop idols. Certainly closer to them to than to most of humanity.
Yep. Perhaps a connection between that and the fact that the emotions she seems able to access most easily are empowerment and self-pity.
Heh…just realized that the one good comment on the Atlantic article was by you, subdee…
I just get tired of the whole, “I doubt she even thinks about what she’s saying, she’s just a puppet for the massive media machine” thing people like to write about female pop stars. And in this case it’s especially offensive because Bow Down sounds like it was specifically made to be “difficult” and “conceptual” – to show that Beyonce, too, can take part in the critical conversation about Beyonce.
At TSJ I said (in comments, because I’m lame) that it sounds like Beyonce has remixed her own song. Why should the remixers and the cultural critics get all the credit for smart thinking about Beyonce, why can’t Beyonce get some of that credit too?
She’s the voice, and the guy at the computer pitch-shifting and chopping-up and manipulating the voice – or the person who hired the guy with the computer and told him to pitch-shift, etc. And then people say “I doubt she thinks that much about what she’s saying” and you are just like, >____>.
Also, thanks :D
Yeah; that’s what my piece about why folks don’t want to talk about her as a genius was trying to be about. Especially for pop stars; especially for female pop stars; there’s just a huge barrier to treating them as if they are artists. It’s because they’re so up front about being commodities, and folks like to think there’s a line there between being a commodity and being an artist. But, of course, in capitalism, that line is always going to be really blurry.
I probably should have said something in the piece about the musical choices; the whole Houston chopped and screwed thing is pretty clearly an assertion of her individuality…and an assertion that that individuality is masculine/swaggering/tough.
Steven, just read that article. I’d say yeah, it depends…textbooks can be awful. But also…education writing isn’t only about textbooks. it’s also about standardized tests…which is where I really doubt you’d ever find anything about the Iraq war.
Re Beyoncé, so she’s insulting and attacking her competitors; isn’t that de rigueur with rap and hip hop (“Most Moronic Name for a Musical Style Ever”)?
Nice to see further confirmation in that “Ronald Reagan was a traitorous thug” ( http://consortiumnews.com/2013/03/07/october-surprise-and-argo/ ) story of what was already well-known in certain non-mainstream circles for years. Along with Nixon and Kissinger’s sabotaging LBJ’s peace talks with North Vietnam — legally an act of treason — and prolonging the war for more bloody years, the better to get “Tricky Dick” elected Prez.
This story ( http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/03/the-problem-with-mostly-male-and-mostly-female-workplaces/274208/ ), in pumping up the feminist charge that we live in a “rape culture,” conflates all jobs where males predominate with hyper-macho, intellect-despising ones like football and the military.
Would women working in, say, an accounting or computer-technology firm be as at-risk of assault as they would be among idolized, macho jocks or the increasingly uneducated, lowered-standards types the military’s had to accept, in order to keep up their numbers*? Hardly. There would certainly be some harassment (many men being pigs, and a preponderance of male workers thus increasing the amount of piggishness), but a violent physical assault is a pretty big jump from that.
* http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18563_162-3115199.html : “The number of incoming soldiers with prior felony arrests or convictions has more than tripled in the past five years. This year alone, the Army accepted an estimated 8,000 recruits with rap sheets…across the services, commanders are not told when someone has a record. The idea: With no stigma, the recruit has an equal chance to succeed.”
See, also: http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/army-recruiting-standards/2007/10/28/id/322010
Mike, I’ve heard a bunch of unpleasant stories about tech companies. Just because the usual stereotype is that geeks are harmless doesn’t mean they actually are.
Here’s my media consumption log for last week:
Reading: I finished Tina Fey’s Bossypants, and I’m up to volume 26 of One Piece.
Movies: I watched Chicken Run with my daughter, and Beasts of the Southern Wild by myself.
TV: I’m on to the fifth season of Deep Space Nine, which means the episode in which they went back in time to the tribble episode of the original Star Trek series is coming up. I also finished season 2 of Buffy, and the second half of that series really got me on board, especially the stuff with Angel turning evil. I thought the episode “I Only Have Eyes for You” was especially excellent, taking Buffy’s guilt and anger at herself for the horrors she had caused and expressing it through a scene in which she and Angel were possessed by the ghost of a student who was living out a doomed romance with a teacher; it was probably the most moving episode of the series so far, and a great example of why this show still resonates with so many. So yeah, I finally get why it’s a big deal. I’m not sure if I’ll start season 3 right away or give it a break (preferably so I can start on season 4 of Doctor Who), but I’m definitely hooked now.
Just curious, Noah: which of Kirby’s comics that he wrote himself are you familiar with?
Well…isn’t the argument that he wrote the Marvel self himself, basically, and Stan just filled in the bubbles?
I’ve read those Jimmy Olsen comics. I read his X-Men. I read a collection of monster comics. Tried to get through a Marvel Masterworks volume a bit back and couldn’t hack it. Read other bits and pieces over the years.
Unless it turns out there was a Nixon’s Oval Office-style taping system for Lee and Kirby’s rap sessions, we’ll never really know. Kirby had a long solo career: The New Gods, Mister Miracle, Forever People, The Demon, Kamandi, OMAC, The Losers, The Eternals, runs on Captain America and Black Panther, 2001, Machine Man, Devil Dinosaur, Captain Victory, Silver Star, some one-shots………. and Jimmy Olsen. I haven’t read every one of those myself, but they have a personal vision, a weird kind of poetry. How many issues of X-Men did he even draw, ten?
There was some of this solo stuff in the Marvel Masterworks thing I tried to read…I’m not against reading more or anything.
To my knowledge the Marvel Masterworks books never got as far as Kirby’s solo comics for Marvel in the seventies.
Maybe Noah was thinking of the hardcover reprints of Devil Dinosaur and The Eternals which look like Marvel Masterworks reprints for all intents and purposes.
I think Noah should try The Demon – that kind of material suits Kirby’s bombastic style.
I have some affection for the Demon because of that Matt Wagner mini-series, which I quite liked….maybe I’ll try that….
It was Jack Kirby Marvel Visionaries that Noah read at my house…I have both volumes, so not sure which one he’s actually referring to.
I don’t know either! Like I said, I tried to read it and was repulsed, so it didn’t exactly stay with me….
“I think Noah should try The Demon – that kind of material suits Kirby’s bombastic style.”
Perhaps. But you’re still dealing with hamfisted dialogue and plotting. I think it’s only better by degrees. You still have to work hard to separate the graphical virtues that might be present from the idiot facets as always present in his work.
I said:
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Would women working in, say, an accounting or computer-technology firm be as at-risk of assault as they would be among idolized, macho jocks or the increasingly uneducated, lowered-standards types the military’s had to accept, in order to keep up their numbers*? Hardly. There would certainly be some harassment (many men being pigs, and a preponderance of male workers thus increasing the amount of piggishness), but a violent physical assault is a pretty big jump from that.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
Mike, I’ve heard a bunch of unpleasant stories about tech companies. Just because the usual stereotype is that geeks are harmless doesn’t mean they actually are.
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Isn’t there a big difference between just being “unpleasant” and “not harmless,” and being a rapist?
And note I didn’t exactly claim all geeks were “harmless.” (BTW, aside from massive body odor, is there anything a woman finds less appealing than a guy who is “harmless”?)
Rather that as a group, they’d be proportionately less likely to perpetrate violent sexual assaults than jocks or military men. (No info to support this belief at http://www.nmcsap.org/statistics.html#cd , where rapists are simply classified by race, age, or being “under the influence,” rather than cultural/subcultural background.)
http://sapac.umich.edu/article/196 reports that “Sex offenders are overwhelmingly male, typically have access to consensual sex…” Ah! That last sure leaves most geeks out of it…
And, there surely are plenty of sexist, socially-retarded attitudes amongst guys of the geek persuasion:
http://www.gamingaswomen.com/posts/2012/05/geek-media-whats-with-all-the-rape/
…which is hardly rare amongst other males, needless to say. Yet note how the link above notes how in “geek media,” rape is uniformly seen as villainous; with heroines who are raped, it’s treated in a “what does not destroy you, makes you stronger” fashion. Not exactly psychologically realistic, but hardly sexist, either.
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steven samuels says:
“I think Noah should try The Demon – that kind of material suits Kirby’s bombastic style.”
Perhaps. But you’re still dealing with hamfisted dialogue and plotting….
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Yeah, it’s not Henry James. So? Does all creativity have to be subtle, nuanced in order to be worthy?
As for my own reading, just finished “Fortress Without a Roof,” about the Allied bombing campaign against the Third Reich ( http://www.amazon.com/Fortress-Without-Roof-Wilbur-Morrison/dp/0312901798 ). Pretty fine, with some mind-bogglingly harrowing accounts of the heroism of bomber pilots, the horrific firebombing of Hamburg: “All too often, the raging winds would tear a child from its mother’s grasp and hurl it into the fire.”
…and just began Robert Schrum’s engaging and lively “No Excuses: Concessions of a Serial Campaigner.” ( http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/29/books/review/Noah-t.html?_r=0 )