News
So I’m thinking it may be time for another roundtable? Anyone have any topics they’d like to have us talk about?
On HU
Featured Archive Post: Michael Kupperman on his miserable experience at the New York times.
The 25 best albums of the year.
Me on not being able to sew in Project Runway.
Chris Gavaler on the different kinds of panel-to-panel transitions in comics.
Robert Stanley Martin with on sale dates for comics from July and August 1951.
Utilitarians Everywhere
At Quartz I wrote about Rahm Emanuel’s big fat Taser lie.
At the Guardian I wrote about why academics studying romance is worthwhile.
At Random Nerds I wrote about Star Trek and how legacy series stifle diversity (or sometimes don’t.)
At the Establishment I wrote about:
—misogyny (or the lack thereof) in Hateful Eight.
—using genre to exclude women at Angouleme.
At Splice Today I wrote about:
—George Lucas’ brave battle against capitalism.
—the digital hippie music of Elfmilk and Eartheater.
Other Links
Comics and Cola did a roundup of important comics moments from the last year, chosen by David Brothers, Kim O’Connor, and a bunch of other folks.
The Intercept on Saudi Arabia’s media stooges.
Paola and B.J. May with some suggestions for reforming twitter.
Noah,
Have you read Janice Radway’s “Reading the Romance Novel?” It’s a great example of how reader response criticism complicates efforts to dismiss a genre or a readership. It’s older (1984), but rock solid.
I have! It’s very controversial in romance scholarship. Wrote about it here:
https://www.hoodedutilitarian.com/2014/04/romance-as-criticism-criticism-as-romance/
I am immensely pleased to hear you also read the Intercept. Libertarian fathead or no, Greenwald runs a truly excellent paper.
Roundtable: Best/Worst of 2015. Or you suggested a female film director one, a while ago.
bizarrely, I’ve been asked to participate in a different female director roundtable…which doesn’t mean we couldn’t do one here, I suppose.
Best/Worst of 2015, huh? Not even sure what I would pick…anyone else interested in doing that?
It would also be fun to do something on an individual comic I guess; what from last year would warrant that do you think?
I totally missed that article on romance novels. It’s a great primer. When I read the Radway book it was for a class on methods, so the conclusions were ultimately less important to me than how she arrived at them. What’s more, based on your discussion it seems as if the real contention is with her theoretical inventions, which is pretty much par for the course anytime someone becomes synonymous with a topic. To my mind, it’s an unfortunate side-effect of training in the humanities, where it’s rarely enough to build, (or claim to build), on existing work, and where journal editors too often encourage a “tear it down and rebuild” approach to lit reviews.
I really like Radway; I understand the distrust folks have though. She is still kind of working from a false consciousness model to some degree; it’s understandable that romance readers would bristle at that.
I get it… The false consciousness model was, for a long time, the weak link in the theoretical chain, and probably for good reason (see every critique of the hermeneutics of suspicion, ever). That having been said, I tend to view most consciousness as false, along with most conclusions (and theories) about it (including my own), so it’s always been hard for me to get worked up over that line of conversation. What can I say, I do rhetoric for a living.
These are very half-formed and possibly half baked (particularly the last).
-Nimona or Lumberjanes (both the work themselves and how they reflect changes in the industry/culture).
-The twilight of newspaper strips: contributors buy a print copy of a local paper that still runs comics and pick one of the strips it runs as a starting point. Find something clever which has not already be done by the Comics Curmudgeon.
-The merits of Nerd/Fandom as a identity. There have been multiple essays questioning the marginalization part of nerd mythos, particularly as nerd increasingly is defined to consumption of particular products (as opposed to intellectual and social norm overtones) which belies how white male nerds use this myth to rationalize their reaction to other marginalized groups (I’ve read multiple essays touching on this, including the only DeBoer post I think is fully worthwhile), I can see approaching both the idea of nerd/fan itself and the agendas/attitudes reflected in the discussion around it. I’d also like to address fandom – though it has been deployed as a way to address politics in terms of who is allowed to participate, is something so reliant on intense devotion to luxury entertainment product largely produced by large corporations a good thing for anyone? For example: the pleasure to be found in how nearly anything is a worthwhile subject for stimulating critical dissection all that different from uncritical fannish embrace (as both involve equal intense focus on something that might be kinda crap). You could call it “Wither Nerds and Fans?” or something.