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On pundit’s obsession with protecting on campus speakers and chattering class solidarity.
On using openmindedness as a smokescreen for ugly views.
On pretending racism is cultural borrowing.
For patron’s, a first draft of my piece on the zookeeper’s wife and gentile saviors.
Utilitarians Everywhere
At the Verge I explained toe James Cameron that Wonder woman has always been a feminist icon and a sex symbol both.
At Quartz I reviewed a new book about how we need to let refugees work.
At Playboy I wrote about Jack Kirby’s weaknesses and honoring him by making art he wouldn’t.
At Slate I wrote about Joanna Russ’ We Who Are About To, which is better than William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.
At Patreon I interviewed Botanist about eco apocalypse black metal.
At Splice Today I wrote about
—Stephen King’s It which is both mediocre and memorable.
—Predator and camouflaging America’s Latin American wars.
Noah, that’s a lovely piece about Kirby.
One thing I’d question, though, is whether Kirby’s work does indeed fail to be animated by “deep political, emotional or spiritual concerns”. At least some of Kirby’s great themes — at least in his mature work (after 1961) that has proved so oppressively influential — are force itself, and the cosmic insignificance of humanity. His 70s material seethes with these cataclysmic clashes between humanism and anti-humanism.
In a way, he’s working through some of the same ideas as Lovecraft — specifically the tension between our everyday experience and sense of ourselves, on the one hand, and the ineffable sublime of then-modern cosmology. But, obviously, he’s coming at it from a very different angle. There’s definitely a deep element in his work of…well, you could call it “spirituality”, if you take that to be concerned with something like humanity’s place in the universe
Hey Jones! Glad you liked it; Jeet was mostly nonplussed I think (not clear he read past the title…)
The stuff of Lovecraft’s that I feel has real depth is kind of his racism… The cosmic stuff mostly has impact because of his terror of otherness and his loathing of miscegenation. I don’t really get those things in Kirby (which is absolutely to his credit as a human being) but there’s not a lot for me emotionally there otherwise…idk.