Category Archives: Article

Dyspeptic Ouroboros: Alyssa Rosenberg on Pop Culture and Criticism

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Alyssa Rosenberg writes on pop culture for the Atlantic and at her own blog. We met a while back when she wrote an article on Twilight, to which I responded snarkily, and she responded to my response with much good grace. After that auspicious start, I asked her if she’d be willing to talk about criticism and art for this blog. In response she wrote the essay below.

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When I was in middle school, a prescient friend bought me Isaac Asimov’s Magic, a collection of the science-fiction author’s fantasy writing and essays. Some of that book’s lessons, have lasted with me for more than a decade: Overindustrialization is Mordor. Writing aliens is pretty hard. And perhaps I should have absorbed a third, delivered in the short story “The Critic on the Hearth”: “I have two of my own comments. The first is that every critic ought to become a garbage collector. He will be doing more useful work and he will have a higher social position. The second is that every critic ought to be thrown into the fireplace.”

But by the time I got to Magic, it was already too late. My first career as a pint-sized critic was already behind me–and unbeknownst to me, one of my future paths had been set.

To fill lingering hours after elementary school during a four-year stopover in Middlebury, Vt., my mother had convinced an editor at our local newspaper to give me space on the children’s page to write about books. The criticism, such as it was, that appeared next to a school picture of me in round glasses and a dress with an equally round lace collar wasn’t exactly sophisticated. At eight years old, I wasn’t up to doing much more than picking books that had something in common and explaining that I liked them. Or not.

The column ended when we moved away, and high school and college brought pleasures other than criticism: insanely competitive debate programs, hard-fought municipal elections, the ability to drink legally, writing classes, boys. Each time I felt as if I’d found the Next Thing. With the perpetual certainty of youth, I was alternately sure I was going to be the best high school debater ever, an activist professor, a local political fixer. There were a lot of possibilities that felt more important than journalism, much less something like writing about YA literature. And yet, by my senior year in college, I found myself sending off dozens of applications for journalism and publishing jobs, ending up at National Journal, a respectable and deadly-serious Washington, DC political weekly.

It wasn’t necessarily the platform from which to get back to criticism. But I arrived in Washington in a season when a thousand blogs weren’t just blooming, they were being transplanted into some of the best journalistic greenhouses in the city. And after several years at National Journal and then at Government Executive, a magazine for civil servants, I looked not to political bloggers, but to my eight-year-old self when I decided to start writing on the side and for fun, and wanted to find a meaningful subject. And after watching policy bloggers slug it out against the backdrop of an oft-deadlocked Congress, pop culture seemed more valuable than it had before, as both an escape, and as a field of play. I’ve become a somewhat more sophisticated consumer and observer of media in the last decade and a half. I can explain why I like or don’t like things now. But I’ve also found myself interested in a larger question: what does what we like say about us?

Noah and I met, in fact, because of a disagreement over what the Twilight phenomenon means for discussions about sexuality and gender. We never reached agreement on the merits, but it was clear we were working under the common assumption that culture, particularly popular culture, is a place where both creators and consumers work out real-life issues ranging from deciding whether to have sex before marriage to what would happen in a world with extremely large, well-equipped private armies.

Doing this kind of criticism doesn’t necessarily mean being deadly serious about things that are, after all, a lot of fun. Sometimes a Robyn song is just a Robyn song. But sometimes it’s also an argument for female artists about going independent rather than relying on and being shaped by a major label, just as the pop-rap fusions in collaborations between artists like Kanye West and Keri Hilson or B.o.B. and Janelle Monae are evidence for rap’s conquest and colonization of popular music. The Iron Man movies are fun because Robert Downey, Jr. is relaxed and having a great time playing a roguish industrialist, but they’re also action movies for people who feel ambivalent about the projection of American military power–even if it means they’re settling for an individual having tremendous power, fire- and otherwise, because he’s charming. Unlike in politics, in pop culture the choices don’t always have to be clear. Artists are blessedly free to explore gray areas without risking the career suicide that so often accompanies the impression that a government leader possesses less than crystalline moral clarity.

All pop culture might have larger implications, but that doesn’t mean that pop culture is weighed down or overwhelmed by its larger significance. That means that lots of Americans can murder prostitutes in video game worlds without feeling bad about it, but also that they can absorb relevant lessons about respecting the elderly along with a bunch of jokes about talking dogs. Critics are the people who can live in those tensions and contradictions, who interpret and clarify the meaning in jewels and in junk. Maybe for happily residing in the midst of those fractures, for seeing the value in a movie that involves a little girl beaten up, or a cowardly loan officer dragged to the netherworld by a demon, for balancing difficult aesthetic and political judgements, we still ought to be roasted. But I think in a world where culture has such freighted implications, there’s room for critics along with the garbage collectors.
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Many thanks to Alyssa for her guest post. Please visit her blog if you get the change; she writes on comics, hip hop, television, movies, and lots more.

Love and Monkeys

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1. Love

I remember, if somewhat hazily, the day my mother bought me my first art book. It was late morning after Sunday School in the early 80s and the location was the large basement outlet of a local book retailer which specialized in Chinese language books. The book cost her 50 Singapore dollars which would have been the equivalent of just over USD$30 at the time. I have no idea what prompted this indulgence since, till this day, she has little interest in art of that nature.

The tome in question was Pierre Gassier and Juliet Wilson’s The Life and Complete Works of Francisco Goya, and I was about 12. This was the first catalogue raisonné I ever owned and one of the few that I have read from cover to cover.

The ridiculously romantic ideas it conjured up in my mind proved quite deadly. I emerged from my first artist monograph with the wholly innocent and idealistic expectation that the artist was ever changing and ever learning; at one with the material, social and spiritual aspects of painting; and able to shift effortlessly between the needs of commerce and art. While I recognize these notions as so much foolishness today, I haven’t completely discarded all this childish baggage which still hangs about my neck like a millstone or some unkillable gene.

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Old Wine in New Wineskins: An Analysis of Streak of Chalk

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The following article on Miguelanxo Prado’s Streak of Chalk was written about 15 years ago soon after the release of  its English translation. It has never been published and I assumed the manuscript had been lost up till a few months back when I discovered it in a stack of old ring folders.

While Prado is probably best known in the U.S. for his work on Sandman: Endless Nights, this was the book which brought him to the attention of Europe and to a lesser extent the American comics cognoscenti. The mid-90s was a relatively fallow period for European comics in translation. They were certainly being released, but in such numbers that Prado’s book seemed like an oasis (this being no testament as to the actual quality of the water). This situation hasn’t changed significantly in the intervening years with a mere trickle of translated works emerging from that side of the Atlantic. A large number of important comics of European origin have never been translated or are long out of print. There simply isn’t a market for them much less any related critical writing.

In the article that follows, I’ve focused largely on the symbols and allegories found in Streak of Chalk but there are a few other elements that bear looking into: the dualism and unity of the two female protagonists; the recursive imagery; and the metatextual elements.

Streak of Chalk won the prize for Best Foreign Comic at Angoulême in 1994.

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Dyspeptic Ouroboros: Daphne Carr on Music And Criticism

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Dyspeptic Ouroboros is a new occasional series here on HU in which artists, critics, and other folks talk about the relationship between art and criticism.

To kick things off, I’m publishing an interview I conducted with Daphne Carr. Carr is the series editor for the Best Music Writing series. She blogs at funboring.com, and her book in the 33 1/3 series on Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine will be out in September. We talked by email in February. A shortened version of this interview appeared on Madeloud.com.

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Noah Berlatsky: The Best Music Writing series is somewhat unique in the sense that there hasn’t been a successful “Best Book Review” or “Best Film Writing” series (I guess there was a “Best Film Writing” book or two, but it seems to have gone belly up after a year or so.) Do you think writing about music occupies a different cultural place than writing about other kinds of pop culture? And if you do, do you think that’s because of an intrinsic difference in the way people respond to music versus other art forms, or is it because of the historical development of music criticism, or some other factor?

Daphne Carr: Music occupies a different cultural space than do other forms of fine art (for sure) and mass-distributed art because it is ubiquitous in contemporary life, it permeates nearly every moment of our public lives (with or without permission) and is part of much of our private lives. Along with that music is also a form of communication that privileges the poetics and emotional content as much or more than denotative meaning, which makes it a rich “text.” Of course there is also music as a culture, music as a social context or as an element that heightens the meaning of social gatherings for many people, which makes it important when writing about how we live our lives and make sense of the world. So there are a lot of ways that music is different than any form of art fixed in material or any work that exists in restricted spaces. I could go on and on…

One of the things I love most about BMW [the Best Music Writing anthology] is that many of my favorite pieces come from writers who do not consider music to be their primary object. There is a sense that anyone who has cultivated a writing style and who has passion and time can write a great piece about music, whereas I think some of the other fields of art like literature, film, and fine art have more canonical theoretical approaches one is supposed to have mastered before beginning to criticize. While some lament the lack of a body of theory for the analysis of popular music, I think the sort of wild mixture of approaches—from lyrical analysis to memoir—is its strength. It also makes my job really hard because people are writing from all over the place.

Just a note of clarification by the way, I track down and read work about any kind of music, not just “popular” music. I don’t have a bias against art music in any way.

What do you think the role of writing about music is? Is music writing to help people make consumer choices? To help them understand music better? Is it entertainment? Is it art in its own right?

Of course music writing can also be entertainment, and can also be art. It’s a huge field with so many different kinds of writers in it, from poets to content writers.

As far as music criticism goes, one of the primary skills of a critic is to be a filter. It’s the “we suffer so you don’t have to” model, a division of labor where critics give attention to things that the less active, less obsessive listeners would or could not. The filtering result of a review used to be that readers wouldn’t have to suffer by wasting money on wretched LPs or CDs, and now maybe it’s just that listeners won’t waste as much time. Or, if the reviewer favored something that was unusual, it might get bumped up in sales and appreciation. That said, the circulation model of music and music criticism has changed so dramatically with online distribution/publishing that I think it is not easy to compare it with the print-media and physical copy era.

I know you read a ton of music criticsm for the Best of series every year — and that the final books reflect the individual editors, rather than your personal taste necessarily. So I’m curious if there’s a type or kind of criticism that you especially despise, or that you feel is not doing what criticism should do. (I noticed on your blog you were dreading the onslaught of Michael Jackson tributes this year — is that, for example, a dislike for that kind of article in general, or just a weariness that there’s going to be so many of them?) Is there an example you could give maybe of a critic or a piece you especially dislike?

A note about the question – I consider music criticism just one small sub-field of “music writing.”

Well, there is one thing I won’t tolerate when I read music writing for the book, and that is work that is obviously, unquestionably racist, sexist, or homophobic. Of course there is a big difference between reporting on artists or scenes in which these attitudes exist, which I consider to be an important and underdeveloped part of music writing, and the writer him or herself advocating hate.

The only other thing in criticism I despise is writing that recreates either press releases or preexisting reviews. If I see the same sets of adjectives used in multiple reviews, I start searching to see what the first source was and how much more of the content and style is similar. Its astounding how often writers do this. It’s lazy, immoral, and embarrassing to and for the whole writers’ community.

Also I was not dreading the onslaught of MJ pieces, only the fact that we can’t publish all the good ones. If a publisher wants to do it, contact me and I will either give you all the pieces or I can help you put the book together myself. Seriously, that book should happen.

In contrast, is there a kind of criticism you’re especially interested in, or feel are particularly what criticism should be doing?

The thing about BMW is that it is not a collection of original essays. I literally take what comes. The pieces that always thrill me are the ones that present artists, musical works, scenes, or philosophical questions about music in fresh ways, often with novel structures, solid craft (however manic in style), firm opinions backed up by clear arguments, works written with passion and that have been clearly edited, fact-checked, and spell checked (although there are exceptions, usually blogs that read like some post-midnight inspiration). I like to read work that seems engaged with other parts of the world beyond music, be it other forms of culture, history, politics, or literature (that said, I like a well-written bit of inside baseball too). Given that music writing is often a commercial art, I like writing that fills up the space given to it in the most original way, and work that, like popular music itself, calls attention to and critiques its commercial origins and constrained formats. That’s why I loved Mike McGuirk’s Rhapsody capsule reviews and Paul Ford’s Six Word Reviews although the latter was more of a critique of concept of critical listening in the digital age or at the mega-festival. Greil [Marcus, editor of Best Music Writing 2009] called it “dada provocaton art.” We should have ran the whole damn thing.

Criticism, as a sub-field of music writing, should be engaging in the sound and culture of the musical object in question, and should engage and provoke the reader to listen and/or think more, more clearly, or differently about music, language, or the world. The best pieces create discussion for a long time afterward, change a reader’s mind, and even change their lives. I was definitely changed by reading Katy St. Clair’s piece A Very Special Concert. It gave me a new contextfor understand both the mentally retarded people and the people who work in supporting them (not to mention, it made me respect Huey Lewis). A similar thing happened with the John Jeremiah Sullivan piece “Unknown Bards” from last year’s book. In the piece Sullivan recounts a fact-checking call with John Fahey that is equal parts funny, sad, and startling. The whole piece is an argument for stubborn devotion to listening, to questioning and re-questioning one’s ears, and to cultivating an exhausive and critical mental archive. John Fahey was one of the people who did this, and his death is a great loss to scholars as well as the listening world. This piece got me set to march out the door once again. I don’t want to be all “salvage” about it, but there is a lot of work music writers can do just by knocking on a door, being kind enough to get invited in, and sitting down to listen. With a recording device on, of course.

I am witnessing this first hand because a dear friend of mine, Keith Jones, is putting together a . documentary on the punk scenes of Africa. He is focused primarily on South Africa, and in his work he has been doing exactly that—knocking on doors of total strangers—and finding that many of these brave musicians (many of whom played in multi-racial bands under Apartheid) haven’t talked about their experiences since they happened. I’m prodding him to take the huge archive of interviews, photos, and flyers that can’t possibly make it into the film and and to do a book with them, because this is not just important for music history, but the history of South Africa.

There are so many more books like this to be written. When you start doing a book like that, you also realize how desperately important first hand accounts of concerts, band practices, and recording sessions are, as are reviews that give a historian some insight into the way people listened at the time. The best criticism is both completely of its time and evergreen in this way, and it is a joy to find. I suggest Ellen Willis’s report on Woodstock if you need an example. Read it even if you don’t.

I know you are working on a PhD., and that many of your own essays are focused on the intersection between art and broader social and intellectual movements. Is that the sort of thing you generally like to see criticism doing, or are there other models? Is there a book or essay you could give as an example?

Again this question is more about music writing than criticism, I will work from that angle.

My own personal career in writing about music and studying music culture has given me the opportunity to participate in many different writing contexts and to read so many different styles of music writing. Of course it has also shaped my opinions about all three of the words in the book’s title: “Best” (cultivation of skilled value judgments) “Music” (notice no qualifier “popular”) and “Writing” (crafting language).

I started off as a zine writer and moved to criticism in college. My own preference was always more for features, and a big part of going to grad school was my desire to expand my research methods and hone my critical reasoning skills. My reading of feminist theory, anthropology, and philosophy of science has made it basically impossible to accept the premise that there is a universal position from which to make “absolute” value judgments. Still, it’s possible for me to love writers who stick by this approach. It’s like a cookie fortune, but instead of adding “…in bed,” I mentally add, “…or so (s)he thinks.” That is a really long way of saying, yeah I can read, evaluate, and enjoy things that I would never personally write, of course.

I guess I keep ignoring your request to give examples, and maybe that’s because I don’t want to play favorites in a field where writers’ styles can change dramatically from piece to piece, and when even the most average writer can happen upon a story so good they merely have to keep the facts straight. Also, when I was first starting to write about music I would read interviews with music editors and they would talk about who the greatest writers of the next generation were and I would feel really defeated. I never want to make a writer feel that way, because we do this thing out of passion, and we have potential to get better if we keep working, get good feedback, and pay attention to the world, and never stop listening to new music.

There are some 3,500 email addresses in my database for BMW, and I am sure that I am missing a lot of people besides those. There are people doing great work all over the world—folks like Anwyn Crawford in Australia—and every year I have the good luck and pleasure of finding more and more of them. I do my best to find new voices for the book, and welcome anyone to submit their own work or the work of other people to me. Yeah, there are some “usual suspects” in each book, but at least half of the writers are coming from solicited and unsolicited works from the world, from my stacks of magazine subscriptions, my RSS feeds, and my trolling of blogs. Oh yeah, and Twitter.

And, if pinned down I might say “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” by Gay Talese is the piece of music writing I wished I’d written, and that the whole archives of Ann Powers, Simon Reynolds, and Greg Tate are not to be missed by lovers of music and writing. Of course, I am biased towards Ann, who is guest editing this year and is one of my writing heroes. Ellen Willis is another hero and she will finally get the anthology of music criticism she deserves, Out of the Vinyl Deeps, this September. The full disclosure is that I co-wrote the afterward with Evie Nagy. I’m really proud of that book, and happy that Ellen’s daughter Nona put it together while working on her Girl Drive project.

I was listening to a joint discussion you had with Douglas Wolk on Soundcheck a year or so back. You both seemed pretty down on snark. You in particular seemed to be arguing that critics should try to understand and analyze, if not exactly go beyond, their scorn for, say, Vampire Weekend. I guess, as someone who writes and enjoys the odd bit of snark, I wondered if you felt that just dumping on a record was never a valid move? And is that coming from a popism perspective in some ways (I’m thinking of Carl Wilson’s Celine Dion book especially here, I guess.)

I feel like snark is a tool best used to undermine power, not to reassert it. Snark is a portmanteau of snide remark, and as such serves as a kind of sly witticism meant to serve its object of derision. When it’s done well, it’s a swift comeuppance to some over-esteemed icon. But when someone is being snide from a position of power and the object of the remark has done nothing to deserve it—really, just provides the set up for some joke—I feel like that’s a form of malice, a kind of abuse of power.

My metric for evaluating snark doesn’t really come from poptimism, it is my own personal ethics. I do share a lot of the poptimist philosophy towards musical listening and writing style, especially as qualified by Jody Rosen some years back.

You and Douglas also seemed to be objecting to, or wanting to see fewer, short reviews and blurbs. Do you think that music criticism has gotten shorter? Or has the internet actually allowed for longer projects than in the past? And do you think the change you see (for shorter or longer) is a good thing or a bad thing?

What I meant in that rant was that as the digital archive of music writing gets deeper, there will certainly be a lot of redundancies if everyone is writing short, mostly factual pieces that have a tiny bit of critical engagement, which is what most blurbs are.

The trend seems to be that print writing is now shorter and that professional online music publishing is finding some consensus or standards on average lengths for writing types. There’s always room for the 10,000 word essay on hauntology, and that I welcome. Long live chaos! I certainly wish that there were new funding models for all of this great chaos.

To get back to the Best Music Writing series for a minute — it seems like some of the most interesting music writing is often being done now in formats that don’t easily lend themselves to anthologizing. How do you deal with that? Are there pieces that you want to include but just can’t because they’re based around youtube clips or visuals or are just too long or fragmented?

I do think that there are an increasing number of pieces that are hybrid to the point of being multimedia in their creator’s conception not just in their subsequent editorial design. I see these things as their own form of new media art. Some of it, like podcasts, are really new media broadcast. There are other media that do music criticism well, for instance, a lot of experimental music is meta-musical critique, and videos like the “literal videos” and “….Shreds” series are forms of music criticism as well. There’s so much great stuff!

At the end of the day, I have to draw a line. For now it is English-language writing about music published in some kind of periodical. I’ve daydreamed about doing a visual and/or online component to the book, but my job is big enough just dealing with periodical texts. In an ideal world, I’d have a whole BMW office that could have a multimedia editor, and we’d keep all the publications, links, and videos as an archive that could serve as research for current and future generations of music scholars.

Finally…I wondered if you could talk a little about your PhD. thesis and your upcoming 33 1/3 book on Nine Inch Nails.

The Nine Inch Nails book, Pretty Hate Machine, will be out on Continuum in September 2010 and I am planning a launch event that will be in the spirit of both the old and new Nine Inch Nails. Stay tuned. I will also be doing readings on the East Coast through the fall, especially in September. If any group of 15 or more NIN or music writing fans gets together in a place where I can travel by public transportation (subway, bus, commuter rail, train) and plans a public event I will come do a reading. Email me musicwriting@gmail.com

As for the dissertation, ask me in May 2012.

Dream of the Red Chamber: An Introduction to the manhua adaptation

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The growing affluence of the mainland Chinese has led to a steady growth in both the quantity and quality of reprints of classic Chinese comics. These comics have been available sporadically over the years but mostly in abridged and unlicensed versions. Even up to 10 years ago, the quality of these reprints were poor with images possibly 2-3 generations removed from the originals.

It is only in recent years that more expensive “collector’s editions” preserving the original format of the comics (i.e. a single image per page in rectangular booklets) have emerged.

The 2005 collector’s edition of Dream of the Red Chamber from the Shanghai Fine Arts Publishing House (SFAPH) is a case in point. The comics  (lianhuanhua) from the SFAPH represent the high point of the adaptors art in China.  Originating from the middle of the twentieth century their influence on all future adaptations of the four great novels of classical Chinese literature is inestimable.

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Gender and Cartooning in Chicago

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Despite Alison Bechdel, despite Marjane Satrapi, despite manga, women are still in many ways marginalized in American comics. And if you are a marginalized group, there are generally two ways to go about advancing your lot. You can work towards integration. Or you can work towards establishing your own institutions. Martin or Malcolm, Betty Friedan or Shulamith Firestone, the questions remain the same. Do you want to be given access to the institutions? Or do you want to change them? These two positions aren’t always or necessarily opposed, of course — some people may have voted for Barack Obama both because it marked an important moment in integration, some may have voted for him because they hoped he would change the country, and a lot of people probably voted for him for both reasons. Still the goals don’t always dovetail so nicely; often you have to pick which to prioritize, and how.

These issues were the subtext of much of the discussion at a panel on “Gender and Cartooning in Chicago,” which I attended in April. The panel was organized by Anne Elizabeth Moore (former editor of The Comics Journal and Punk Planet) and featured cartoonists Nicole Hollander (Sylvia) and Dewayne Slightweight (The Kinship Structure of Ferns, I Want to Know the Habits of Other Girls.) Each of them had thought about the problems of being a women in a male dominated field, and each had come to somewhat different conclusions about how to best advance their careers and their art.

Dewayne Slightweight (who is an acquaintance of mine) is not widely known, but he’s a remarkable young artist. Though he’s female, he identifies as genderqueer, and prefers to be referred to by the male pronoun. As this suggests, Slightweight’s thought a good bit about identity; his work is very consciously focused on exploring and building, as he put it, “feminist or queer or anti-capitalist community.” His comic The Kinship Structure of Ferns attempts “to make an art that communicates a new form of kinship” built around “love, hope, desire, and friendship.” Slightweight argued that “hierarchical capitalist culture privileges sight,” by, for example, saying, “I know what a woman looks like,” or “I know what a terrorist looks like.” So in his work, Slightweight tries to complicate looking by turning his comics into performances; he will project them on a screen and dance and sing in front of them, contrasting his body with drawn bodies and with music. He includes a CD of musical accompaniment with each comic as well, the effect of which is pleasantly disorienting. As you read and listen along, words and phrases pop out and repeat in odd, out of sync ways, breaking linear progress up into effervescent bubbles of sound and meaning.

Slightweight’s focus on separate communities and non-hierarchical experience is mirrored in his career. All of his work is self-published; most of it is not sold, but traded with friends in the underground rock and queer arts communities of which he is a part. When asked about his take on current cartooning or mass culture, Slightweight said that he had not bought a book or comic or record in something like three years. Partially this is because he makes virtually no money; he said he walks during the winter rather than taking the bus in order to save up the funds to put out his comics, and he mentioned that one of his main sources of support is food stamps. In addition, though Slightweight noted that he isn’t part of the comics scene, mainstream or alternative, because he doesn’t want to be. “I don’t need to pay attention to what dude is the up and rising star,” he pointed out. Nor does he need to worry about sexism or discrimination, since the underground community of which he is a part has lots of women, and lots of queers, and lots of feminist men. “A grouping of women and queers is not a ghetto — it’s a wonderful thing,” he said.

Slightweight, then, is committed to a separatist rather than an integrationist model of feminist culture; when asked if he would be more interested in the mainstream if it included more interesting, feminist-friendly work, his answer was essentially, “no.” For Slightweight, the very existence of the mainstream is the problem; he argued that the point of feminism was to decentralize power. “You have as much right to talk back to culture as culture has to talk to you,” he said. The point, then, for Slightweight, is not for marginalized groups to step into positions of power, but for them to speak from where they are, and so break down a hierarchy which insists on privileging certain creators or certain voices.

Nicole Hollander, the creator of the strip Sylvia, began her career as a comics professional when women were even more underrepresented in the industry than they are now. She is also a newspaper political and strip cartoonist, segments of comicdom that are perhaps the least gender-integrated. (Anne Elizabeth Moore pointed out that there had been only one female editorial cartoonist in the United States — before she was fired in the recent economic bloodletting.) It is no surprise, then, that Hollander spent a good part of her discussion talking about the barriers she had faced as a woman to mainstream success.

Hollander began her career illustrating articles for The Spokeswoman, a feminist, political magazine. After receiving some interest from book publishers, and inspired in part by Doonesbury, she tried to syndicate Sylvia — at which point she ran up against something that looked rather like sexism. One syndicate executive told her that her strip was “deep, but narrow” — narrow, presumably, because it didn’t have any men in it.

Faced with mainstream disinterest, Hollander turned to DIY. She worked to syndicate herself, phoning up newspapers on her own behalf. Though she made some sales, being a woman was a disadvantage here too — newspaper editors would often tell her, as she put it, “We have Cathy already. One woman is quite enough, thank you.” Nonetheless, she managed to land the strip at one paper and another, and to cobble together book deals, performance opportunities, and a certain amount of fame, if not exactly a fortune.

Hollander discussed not only the lack of opportunities for, but also the lack of representation of, women on the comics page. “Men want to write about men,” she noted, and pointed out that there would only be more strips for women when there were more women creators with access to the comics page. As it stands now, Hollander said, girls don’t generally think of becoming cartoonists. She herself, she said, had not been interested in comics as a girl; as a child she had liked the Phantom and Broom Hilda, but as an adolescent, comics had offered her nothing.

All of this might suggest that Hollander sounded bitter…but that wasn’t the case at all. On the contrary, she pointed out that in her experience it was her male colleagues who often complained about low pay or that they could not make a living at cartooning. As for herself, she noted, “I wish I had more money…but I feel very happy in my career. I’ve been able to say everything I wanted to say. I was able to say “vibrator” in one strip. I was able to say “orgasm”” At another point she added, “I could be Sylvia. I could be tough.” Thus, though Hollander would have liked more mainstream success, she also has appreciated the freedom which came with being on the margins.

In contrast to both Slightweight and Hollander, Anne Elizabeth Moore is somebody who follows the comics industry closely. She is in the process of conducting a series of interviews with female comics professionals, and she seems to know just about everybody there is to know. She said that for her it was very important to try to accrue mainstream power in order to promote people like Slightweight and Hollander, “whose work should be everywhere!” as she said. At the same time, she noted, when you participate in the mainstream, you end up “subverting rather than changing.”

Though Moore seemed to be at least provisionally interested in working with the mainstream, she also argued for a need for more female institutions. In response to a question from the audience about the lack of female representation in Kramer’s Ergot, and Sammy Harkham’s reportedly snotty defense of same, Moore suggested that there was a need for more (or even one) female comics anthology.

The final statement of the evening came from a Korean-born woman in the audience. She noted that growing up in Korea, she had constantly read comics by women, for women. She very rarely read any comics by men, because they were overly violent, because they focused on male characters, and because, with so many comics written by women, she didn’t have to, so why would she? In Korea, in other words, comics for women are their own separate genre and have their own audience — but that separate institutional framework is so large and so strong that it is, in fact, effectively of the mainstream. The women added that when she got to America, it was a shock to realize that women here weren’t drawing, writing, or reading comics in large numbers. “It made me really sad,” she said.

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This essay first appeared in The Comics Journal. Since it appeared, Sylvia has been cancelled in the Chicago Tribune, it’s home paper. The Chicago Reader has the story, as well as info about what you can do if you would like to try to get the decision changed.

Update Jan 2014: Dewayne Slightweight now goes by the name Lee Relvas.

Empire of Bland

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Howard Zinn, Mike Konopacki, Paul Buhle
A People’s History of American Empire: A Graphic Adaptation
Metropolitan Books

I decided to review A People’s History of American Empire to answer one burning question: could Zinn possibly be as boring a writer as I remembered?

With some assurance, I can now say that the answer to this question is, decidedly, yes. Mike Konopacki and Paul Buhle have created a graphic adaptation of Zinn’s People’s History of the United States by shortening the text to cover only the last 150 years or so, and then rendering the whole into the easy-reader medium of comics, Nonetheless, the book is an interminable experience : a brutal slog through waist-high drifts of names, dates, and facts, all leading to the same arid exhortations. This volume is, in fact, a perfect mirror image of those deadly texts you were forced to read in school. Like them, A People’s History treats history not as a discipline or a study, or even as a story, but rather as a didactic, infallible bludgeon. The only difference is that where, say, Thomas Bailey tells you over and over that America was great, Zinn tells you over and over that it isn’t. American Empire even pulls out some of the same gimmicks with which textbooks attempt to disguise their irredeemable blandness — little factoids placed off to the side with a cutesy “Zinnformation” light-bulb logo attached, pseudo-first-person-accounts by random historical figures (Mark Twain, C.I.A. Iraq agent Donald Wilber) etc. etc. Even the cartoon format itself comes across as the grape flavoring on the kaopectate. What precisely, do indifferently drawn images of Zinn in front of a lecture hall add to either our historical knowledge or our enjoyment? Admittedly, American Empire is a good bit shorter than the honking, back-breaking tomes we dole out to high-school kids. Nonetheless, it fulfills the main requirement of the genre — try as I might, and despite being paid to do so, I discovered that, like any good textbook, this one was completely unfinishable.

The problem is not that I disagree with Zinn’s politics. On the contrary, I’m a pretty entrenched member of the blame-America-first crowd. I think, like Zinn, that imperialism is a blight and that, for many decades now, the United States has been its most enthusiastic and poisonous promulgator. But even for those who hate their country, unrelenting tales of U.S. perfidy and viciousness quickly become wearisome. Once you’ve seen one C.I.A.-backed slaughter of innocent civilians, you’ve kind of seen them all. It’s a horrible thing to say, but the atrocities in Zinn’s books, as in those of that other progressive superstar Noam Chomsky, quickly become, not so much numbing, as simply dull. When we’re jetting from Wounded Knee to Vietnam to Selma to Mexico to Iraq to Nicaragua and on and on, it’s hard to keep the names of the victims straight, much less care about their plight.

Crafting snoozeworthy material out of burning monks and butchered children is no easy task. Zinn does it the way textbook writers usually do — by being a lousy writer and a worse historian. The thing is, history isn’t a list of facts and dates. It’s a method for studying the past that relies on careful use of sources, weighing of evidence, and arguments. This last is especially important — there is always more than one way of looking at any particular event, and the push and pull of competing interpretations is what gives the past it’s interest and depth. Zinn has an all-purpose explanation for everything bad that’s ever happened —corporations did it. I don’t deny that there’s truth there, but it’s not the only truth, and reiterating it with such pat conviction goes a long way towards making it false. The boredom this book engenders is a defensive reaction; when one is being lied to so assiduously, one tends to instinctively recoil.

Here’s one example. In Zinn’s discussion of Hiroshima, he insists that the U.S. dropped the bomb as “a warning to the Soviet Union to stay out of Japan.” Hiroshima was, in other words, an imperial act — the first move in the American Cold War push for global domination. This is a fairly typical leftist theory, but I’ve never really bought it. Looking back from the post-Cold War world, it’s easy to believe that Russia was the focus of U.S. policy. At the time, however, Truman was probably thinking a whole lot more about Japan — the nation against which we were, after all, at war. That war had been incredibly costly; victory had by no means been assured, and there was every reason to believe that a land battle for the Japanese home islands would be horrific. Virtually every combatant nation in the war — including, most certainly, the Japanese — had already shown itself willing to kill civilians with impunity. The atomic bomb wasn’t really all that much of an escalation from, say, the firebombing of Dresden. Based on my own reading, Truman seems to have used the atom bomb because it was there, because we were at war, and because, when you’re at war, you use the weapons you’ve got. This tells you something about the logical outcome of warfare and about the consequences of power. But it tells you little about imperialism or capitalism per se. It’s a parable about Moloch, not Mammon.

Zinn’s account is flat not because he doesn’t agree with me, but because he doesn’t confront any opposition at all. Other than sneering at Truman’s palpably absurd contention that he tried to avoid killing civilians, Zinn never engages with the many, many scholars who have argued over the years about the rights and wrongs of the Hiroshima decision. Without these other voices, it’s difficult to see what’s at stake. The result is blinkered history, which wanders around bumping into trees while nattering on about the forest. In discussing the Cuban revolution, the decidedly un-militaristic Zinn is thus able to denigrate the idea of civilian control of the armed forces without appearing to even realize what he’s doing. In discussing U.S. China policy, he blithely identifies Mao as “a wartime ally against fascism” without ever raising the thorny question of whether it would really have been a great idea for the U.S. to back the man who became one of the most successful mass murderers in history. Part of the trouble here is that Zinn is trying to cover so much material so quickly that he can’t really stop to think about anything. But this is just another way of saying that his whole textbook-project is intellectually, and, as a consequence, morally, bankrupt. History without thought is an abomination. It should be driven from the earth, the classrooms where it is perpetrated should be razed to dust, and the ground where they stood salted.

The central evil of Zinn’s book stems, it seems to me, precisely from his inability to listen to what the other side has to say. Zinn tells us over and over that imperialism is driven by capital’s search for new markets, and by it’s desire to deflect unrest at home. But his commitment to this canard, and his general breakneck pace, prevents him from taking seriously what imperialists themselves actually contend they are about. From Rudyard Kipling to Christopher Hitchens, the rationale for empire has remained remarkably similar. We’re over there, not to exploit the little brown people, but to help them, for they are degraded and suffering. The argument for imperialism is, in other words, a progressive argument, built on exactly the kind of empathy for innocent pain, and on the same sort of outrage against oppression, in which Zinn himself traffics. This is why, when the father of investigative journalism, Bartoleme de las Casas protested Spanish atrocities in the new world, he helped his career a great deal, and the Indians precious little. The conscience of imperialism is still part of imperialism, and the ostentatious wringing of the left hand is a fine way to distract attention from the atrocities committed with the right. The opposite of empire, rhetorically, is not one-world socialism, but the brand of isolationism in vogue among über-nationalist nutcases like the John Birch Society. It’s not an accident that the most effective anti-imperialist ideology currently going is militant Islam.

The point here is adamantly not that Zinn is a hypocrite. On the contrary, American Empire includes several snippets from its author’s biography, and he seems like an interesting, dedicated, and even noble fellow — one of the few tenured radicals who has actually put his life and career on the line for the cause. He lost his job at Spelman because of his involvement in the anti-segregation movement; he risked indictment by helping Daniel Ellsberg hide the Pentagon Papers. But being a great activist isn’t the same as being a great thinker, and while Zinn may be the first, he is not the second. His exhortation at the end is fairly standard non-denominational humanist jeremiad — “to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of the worst of everything around us, is a marvelous victory.” Maybe. But George W. Bush probably thought something much like that when he bravely defied the opinion of the world and toppled that horrible dictator, Saddam Hussein. Good intentions aren’t going to overthrow imperialism; good intentions are what imperialism thrives on. If you want to end empire, you tend to need nationalism and religion and — unless you’re lucky enough to find a Gandhi — really remarkable quantities of blood. Zinn has no interest in struggling with the unpleasant ramifications of this. As a result, for all its facts and all its good-heartedness, A People’s History is about neither the United States, nor about Empire, but about, precisely, nothing.