Category Archives: Blog

Utilitarian Review 9/28/13

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News

I think this week I’m going to experiment and have a featured archive post every day rather than one a week. We’ll see how it goes. You have been warned!

On HU

Featured Archive Post:Linsey Bahr on fashion in the Hunger Games and Gattaca.

Walter Benjamin on the internet as socialist utopia.

Our music sharing post: check out what folks have been listening to.

Michael Arthur on racism and funny animals.

Jacob Canfield provides a useful guide so you can figure out if you’re being a censor.

Chris Gavaler explains Joss Whedon’s next project.

I talk to Julia Serano about call out culture and exclusion in feminist and queer communities.

Vom Marlowe on how GoodReads needs to let its readers talk about it when authors are assholes.

People who make art shouldn’t appropriate Hulk!
Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Atlantic I:

—wrote about the documentary The Muslims Are Coming.

—interviewed Julia Serano about the reality of gender and her new book Excluded.

—wrote about segregation and violence in Chicago.

At Splice Today I wrote about:

—Tim Wise, Robert Shaw, white allies and failure.

—how Alexander Hamilton was the Dick Cheney of his day.
 
Other Links

This is a pretty horrible story about the Chicago police.

Helen Rittelmeyer with a lovely piece about Charles Lamb’s Confessions of a Drunkard.

Hating perfect actress hair.

Brian Cremins on Bill Mauldin’s Back Home.
 

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Whose Chicago?

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This first appeared on Splice Today.
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Most of The Interrupters, the new Steve James (Hoop Dreams) documentary about violence in Chicago, is set resolutely at street level, focusing on the efforts of CeaseFire, a group that tries to defuse altercations before they escalate. There are a couple of moments that pull back to give you a national picture, though. One of these is a political press conference following the 2009 beating death of high school student Derrion Albert. Mayor Daley, Attorney General Eric Holder and Education Secretary Arne Duncan all got up dutifully and promised that this would never happen again, no, no, no, not on our watch, not to our children. Which prompted one listener to ask …um, haven’t you said that before?
 

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Of course, Duncan has said that before — and to the same audience, probably. The country is, after all, now run by the same people who have, steadily, determinedly, and for years, largely failed the Chicago communities where kids like Derrion Albert grow up. There’s a huge disconnect between CPS’ national reputation for reform and the local reality. In the same way, there’s a huge disconnect, as one community leader and minister points out in the film, between the success of a black President in Washington D.C. and the fact that in that President’s hometown black children keep being placed in the ground.

As it happens, I live half a block away from Obama’s Hyde Park home — close enough that when he visits town my street gets closed off and I have to show an ID to get in my front door. I live within walking distance of some of the communities, like Englewood, featured in the documentary too. And yet, the bulk of The Interrupters might as well have been filmed on the moon for all the connection it had to my own experience of Chicago. For example, there’s one scene where CeaseFire worker Ameena Matthews addresses a roomful of mourners and declares that she’s the daughter of Jeff Fort. Everybody knows who she means…but I wouldn’t know Jeff Fort from Adam if the filmmakers hadn’t thoughtfully informed my white ass that he was a major gang leader in the city through the 60s and 70s, now serving life in prison. Similarly, I’ve lived in Chicago almost 20 years and never seen a gun, much less seen anyone shot with one.

I’m aware, of course, that the Chicago I know isn’t the only Chicago. For one thing, I’ve got a friend who’s a school teacher on the south side…and, inevitably, he’s had kids in his classes who were victims of gun violence. Just as inevitably, we watch a teacher in The Interrupters when she hears that the neighbor of one of her middle-school students was recently shot. She responds with grating perkiness (“You can talk to me about that you know!”) which I would feel much more comfortable sneering at if I thought for a second that I’d handle such a revelation with any more panache. In any case, the kids very kindly ignored her, and turn to talk to Eddie Bocanegra, a former gangbanger and murderer turned CeaseFire worker, whose credibility is clearly exponentially higher within his Hispanic community than that of some random educator.

That credibility is central to CeaseFire’s mission. “We’ve got more than 500 years of prison time in this room!” one interruptor declares in a meeting. “That’s a lot of wisdom!” It’s also a lot of cultural capital when you live in occupied territory. Cops, various people note, are afraid of the neighborhood and are feared and mistrusted in turn. Outside politicians want to solve the problem through bringing in the National Guard, a tactic which, community members very reasonably point out, is likely to end up with more, rather than less bodies. The community is defined in opposition; it’s those who have fought the power who are trusted. You have to have lived the life in order to have the right to speak.

Many of the most poignant moments in the documentary are about this truth, demonstrating the hard-earned knowledge the CeaseFire workers bring to their jobs. Ameena Matthews, for example, grew up fatherless, and was physically and sexually abused at a young age. She sees herself in a young girl named Caprysia. Caprysia’s mother is an addict; she couldn’t stop her younger sisters from being shipped off to DCFS. Caprysia herself is in and out of jail, radiating rage and despair. Ameena takes Caprysia for manicures, tries to get her to go to school, scolds her, worries about her, and cries over her like a mother. One of the most painful moments in a very painful film comes when Ameena asks Caprysia rhetorically, “Are you worthy of love?” and before Ameena can answer her own question in the affirmative, Caprysia interjects a sullen but heartfelt, “no.”

In a subsequent scene, though, Caprysia leaps up and down with joy when Ameena visits her in juvie, and refers to her as “my mother.” She may not be a blood relative, but by virtue of will and love and community, she’s family. Some CeaseFire muckety-mucks talk at length about how violence is a disease and needs to be treated epidemiologically and blah blah blah. But it’s clear from watching Eddie and Ameena and the third interrupter, Cobe Williams, that CeaseFire is really built on people caring for each other. The movie is about a community sorting out its shit.

The question is, how it that community defined, and why? Or, to put it another way, why isn’t this my Chicago? There are various answers, but one of the main ones has to do with a systematic history of segregation — a history that is by no means ended.

In that vein, I understand why the filmmakers wanted to keep themselves out of the picture, but I wish they had put themselves on camera, or at least more explicitly acknowledged their own presence, once or twice in the documentary. Because, after all, they’re not outsiders looking in. The neighborhood they show is their neighborhood too, both because Steve James is a Chicagoan and because — as the film itself demonstrates, albeit indirectly — there they are, in the room and on the streets. If the story is about the community, then they’re part of the story.

As am I. These are my neighbors, after all, even if I don’t know them very well. Communities have to get their own shit together…but part of that is having people recognize they’re in a community. When Chicagoans like me look at the communities in which CeaseFire works and say, “Those are our kids. Those are our schools” maybe fewer children will get shot. That kind of change in attitude isn’t easy, but it’s probably more helpful than calling in the National Guard. The Interrupters, anyway, makes the case that to if you want less killing, you need, not more guns, but more neighbors.

People Who Make Art…Shouldn’t Appropriate Hulk!

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One of the few Hulk comics I own is a 1981 effort by Bill Mantlo and Sal Buscema titled “People in Glass Houses Shouldn’t Hurt Hulk!” I was never that into the big guy honestly — though I got a year or something of Peter David’s run whenever that was. But I’ve been asked to do a talk on Marvel’s greenest property, so I thought I’d revisit this story (one of two in the issue), which I still remember fairly clearly after three decades.

Why I remember it is not especially obvious, I have to say. The title does have a goofy charm, I guess, and the story has a kind of inevitable progression which is compelling, if not exactly competent.

The narrative starts with Bruce Banner passed out on a Malibu beach; a woman all in white with a white dog finds him and brings him to her house. She cares for him and shows him her sculptures; all glass statues of men. She then seduces him and keeps him for a month, promising to do his sculpture too. Finally, she reveals that she is some sort of witch (the plot rather breaks down here) and tries to turn him to glass with her magical glass hands. But he turns into the Hulk and destroys everything and escapes; she accidentally touches herself with her own magic hands and ends up a glass sculpture at the bottom of the sea. Hulk bounds away. The end.

So this is obviously a basic noire set up, with Glazier (that’s the glass lady) as the femme fatale and Banner as the dupe she bamboozles. The noire paranoid misogyny is firmly in place, which is also the noire terror of/fascination with female sexuality.
 

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At the top of the page you’ve got Glazier’s nefarious boasting about how she collects men juxtaposed with the image of the glass guy frozen underneath the pond — entrapment imagery doesn’t get much less subtle. (Mantlo and Buscema subtly have Banner give us a thought bubble telling us that the statue looks horrified in case we couldn’t tell from looking at it.) Then, at the bottom of the page, Glazier comes on to Banner, who — courtesy of Buscema’s shaky drawing and some preposterous eyebrows — looks deeply uncomfortable. The caption is odd too: “He cannot resist. He can think of no reason why he should want to.” He’s presented as being both overpowered and as ambivalently acquiescing. The implication is that he should be able to think of a reason not to (like the guy in the pond, dumbass!) but he’s too busy thinking with his dick, or his eyebrows, or whatever.

Then we skip ahead a month, with Banner in his ridiculous white suit (connoting elegance? his captive status? the tail end of the 70s) whining about how he’s a kept man and he’s bored. So far, still noire, with Buscema trying lamely to create some sort of interesting light effect with the moon and the white and the interior glass, though mostly it ends up looking like they’re inside some sort of jello mold.
 

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And then the noir coup de gras, where the conniving evil bitch destroys the douchey guy, to the horror/delight of all.
 

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Except that, as you can see, the grace doesn’t coup (or something like that.) The vampiric consummation doesn’t drain the victim; instead it causes him to improbably and greenly tumesce. The mark walks out, the man walks in, and puts the uppity woman in her place. The masochistic sex fantasy of noire is violently rent like Banner’s stupid white suit, to be replaced by the sadistic violent empowerment fantasy. It’s sort of like rape/revenge with the male rapist replaced by a female succbus and the female revenger replaced by a big green steroidal phallic lump.

The gendered reading is fairly obvious, and even unavoidable. But I think there’s a genre reading as well. Again, we start with noire; which is linked to sophistication, sex, and adulthood. And then suddenly we switch up and have Hulk babbling in his infantile dialect and brutishly smashing up all the high art he can see.
 

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Glazier even explicitly explains that she was trying to catch Hulk in the moment of transformation for her collection; she wanted to turn the comic-book monster into a gallery piece, as if she’s some sort of acquisitive feminized Lichtenstein. But of course it doesn’t work, and moments after she insults Hulk’s intelligence, his gargantuan bulky authenticity smashes the effete museum to smithereens. Your puny art world institutions cannot contain team comics! “Stupid to build a house out of glass!” as Hulk says.
 

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As I’ve mentioned before, Bart Beaty in Comics vs. Art argues that in discourses around high art and comics, comics are always already feminize; they are the weak thing that high art masters. However (as, again, I’ve noted before) masculine and feminine are a bit more fluid in these discussions than Beaty suggests. Here, in particular, higher art (both as gallery art and as the relatively sophisticated pulp genre of noir) are presented as feminine, and the children’s, and even child-like, art-form of comics is presented as victoriously hyper-masculine. Bruce Banner is trying his darndest to find a different, more highbrow narrative, where he gets to have sex (he doesn’t know why he shouln’t) and has cool lighting and is placed in galleries. But Hulk comes along and stomps all that hoity toity namby pampy crap.
 

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The narrative comes across, then, as an extended effort to excuse, or justify, it’s own helpless comic book crappiness. Sal Buscema’s efforts to convey grace, or even style, are utterly ridiculous, foiled by clumsy drawing, clumsy layout, and banal imagination (is that a gallery or a gym?) But grace and sophistication are, we learn through the story, evil, meretricious and not to be trusted. Thick, awkward, clumsy, stupid — those are big, manly qualities you can count on. Fuck high art…or, you know, don’t fuck it. That’s way too dangerous. Just smash.

The Importance of Behavior: the Goodreads Mess

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Today, I’m going to talk about the current GoodReads fiasco.  For those who don’t know, there has been an ongoing fight between readers and authors.  Readers use the site to review and discuss books. Many authors use the site to promote their books.  Recently, some author behavior has crossed lines–nagging readers to review books, being angry at less than 5 star reviews, getting weird and vindictive about readers’ response to books.  In reaction, some readers have begun making decisions about what books to buy/review based on author behavior to readers.  Some readers have also begun including author behaviors in their reviews or their ‘to-read’ or ‘not-to-read’ type lists.  Authors pushed GoodReads to change their site policy to no longer allow readers to mention author behavior as part of their reviews.

I want to discuss the topic of authorial (and publisher) behavior as it relates to the act of criticism.

I’m a writer, a creator, an artist, a reader, a critic.  But I’m also a librarian.

As some of you know, my day job is as an academic librarian at a major research university.  What some of you may not know is that I work specifically with non-traditional students (mostly grad students), teaching them how to use modern research tools in the new scholarly age.  I spend a lot of my time explaining the difference between peer review and non-peer review, how to tell the difference between a splashy astro-turf site and an actual organization working on the ground to help people, and how to look for conflict of interest red flags (WebMD I’m looking at you).

What does that have to do with GoodReads?

I’ve watched various parts of the web explode over this story.  Plenty of readers are deeply, deeply angry.  Some authors are jubilant, some disappointed with GoodReads.  But I haven’t seen anyone weigh in on this mess from a librarian-ish viewpoint.  At least not in the way I want to talk about it.

I’m going to start by outlining some of the concepts I teach my students.  I’ll take everyone through a few current examples of less-than-ideal information sources.  Then I’ll approach GoodReads’ decision the way I teach my students to approach it.

The two main concepts that I find most useful in digging through modern research sources are external review and conflict-of-interest.

External Review

External review’s gold standard is blind-peer-review.  An article (or book) is sent to several experts in the field, with all the author-information stripped off.  The experts red-pen the hell out of the article, and they send the article back to the editor, who reads all the comments and passes the information on to the author.  Neither side knows who the other is.  This allows all parties to be brutally honest without creating life-long enemies.  Using several readers (rather than one) increases the chances that logical errors, citation problems, poor methodology will be ferreted out and stomped into dust via editing.

Of course, this process also takes a lot of time.  Peer-review can crush delicate writer souls like a bug.  As a process, it isn’t perfect.  However, it does improve the quality of the works published.

Most big-name newspapers employ fact-checkers to do a similar process.  Read through X article and make sure country Y really does have Z occupants.  Academic or specialist presses may employ editors with strong backgrounds in the field, or employ experts.

Not all presses do this.  It’s very expensive, for one thing.  It can also be pointless overkill–does the space opera action-adventure need to get the details of plant photosynthesis correct in the love scene?  Probably not.

But if you’re going to make life or death decisions for patients, it’s best to use information that has been vetted as thoroughly as possible.  Medical journals and medical presses are big users of the external reviewer, be it peer-review or highly trained editor.

(For my main example, I’ll be talking about Elsevier’s sins later on in this essay.)

Conflict of Interest or Cui bono, baby

The next concept we need to talk about is Conflict of Interest.  A couple thousand years ago Cicero popularized the phrase Cui bono, which means Who benefits?  Cicero was a big-shot lawyer, senator, and logician.  He meant, “Follow the money” or “Find who really benefits and you will have discovered your criminal mastermind.”

Cui bono is normally used for semi-sneaky conflict of interest.  The murderer may not be the victim’s wife (who inherits the estate), but the victim’s brother in law, who was doing it to get a hold of the victim’s patents.  Or to gain controlling share of the company.  Or to get the mansion at a cheaper price.  Or whatever.

You figure this out by looking around at the situation and peering at various angles to determine what if any beneficial side effects this particular action will have.

See, occasionally people do obvious mad-cackling of the ‘The whole earth now belongs to me, muahahahahaha!’ variety, but it’s just not that often.  You’re more likely to get people who are just doing their old buddy a favor or insider trading that amounts to cocktail party gossip which  then goes on to ruin average-worker lives by hostile corporate takeover or what-have-you.  There just isn’t that much obvious mad cackling going on.

You have to look for the sneakier stuff, the stuff all of us probably do at some point in some small way.

Let’s Talk Examples

Want a good example of everyday CoI?  WebMD.  Lots of people adore that site, because it states up front and proudly that it is written and vetted by doctors.  As far as I can tell, it absolutely *is* written and vetted by doctors.

It’s also one of the most obvious big-Pharma shills I have ever seen.

Go to any particular illness, and you’re quite likely to receive advice to ask your doctor about an exciting new treatment now available to treat this condition.  What WebMD isn’t gonna tell you is that they’re sometimes recommending these exciting new treatments instead of old boring treatments that have long since hit generic.  You’re also going to get nice little articles like this one.  It looks like WebMD.  It smells like WebMD.  But it ain’t.  “The sponsor has sole editorial control.”

Gee, why would that be?

Because the sponsor is paying for that control.  It’s an ad that doesn’t look like an ad.  WebMD can get away with this by putting the tiny print “The sponsor has sole editorial control” in there and then fleeing the legal scene.

Like some European countries, I happen to believe that advertising medications is too risky, too unethical, and generally results in capitalism (rather than evidence-based science or informed personal choice) making really important life-and-death decisions.

Of course, I should disclose my own conflict of interest here.  I have taken both a Cox-2 Inhibitor and Pregalbin/Lyrica.  Both medications caused me problems that the manufacturer knew about, but concealed from doctors and patients.

What, you may be asking yourself, does any of this have to do with a book review site?

Pretty much everything, actually.

To recap, GoodReads just decided that readers can’t include ‘author behavior’ in their reviews or make lists of books based on author behavior

What Other People Say About the GoodReads Decision

The two main responses that I have seen about the GoodReads fiasco essentially go like this:

1.  In-Favor-of-New-Rule.  Authors have been attacked by readers; there is no (good) reason for readers to vindictively focus on author behavior.  The book’s contents are what matter to a review, or what “should” matter.  Therefore, reviews that discuss author behavior should be verboten.  Lists of authors who behave badly do not focus on the books’ merits, so they should also not be allowed.  (Some go so far as to admit that both sides showed “bad” behavior, and that yes, some readers have been hurt as well.)  Some arguments also say, essentially, that this is an author’s livelihood, that a reputation once stained can’t be redeemed, and that every time a negative review is written, a kitten dies.

2.  Anti-New-Rule.  Readers say that the authors are actually to blame for this mess in the first place, because a lot of authors act like under-socialized preschoolers on the sugar high of a lifetime.  Authors send out spam emails begging for their books to be reviewed.  Authors freak out at any reviewer who does not post unqualified praise.  Authors send out their fans (sometimes called attack poodles) to bug readers about review contents.  Authors have been known to post readers’ personal identifying information in an attempt to bully them.  Readers also really hate censorship.

I’m kidding about the kittens.  I’m also going to skip over some of the other parts of the arguments, because this essay is already way too long.

So what about the External Review and the Conflict of Interest and stuff?

Here’s where I slap my librarian hat on and start getting grumpy.  First of course, as a librarian, I am dead set against censorship, because that’s just how we roll.  But second, there is a reason that many people like GoodReads.  There is a reason that many publishers and authors like GoodReads.  How much does publishing like GoodReads?

Amazon bought it.  That’s how much.

But why would publishing or authors or anyone on the “pro” side of the line like GoodReads?  Is it because these folks are all die-hard readers themselves?  (No.  Also, put down the fluffy unicorn of naievete and back away slowly before anyone steals your wallet.)

A bunch of readers is a mass-collection of external reviewers.  GoodReads is a crowd-sourced version of PW.

Sure, there’s conversations, there’s book groups, there’s library action.  But for the publishers and authors, GoodReads is like influencable-Publishers-Weekly catnip on crack.

The beauty of the site is that readers are not being paid, they’re not industry pros, they’re “just” readers.  Which means that other readers listen to them.  If ten friends of mine all mention how delicious a new brand of ice cream is, I will probably go buy some.  If ten info-mercials tell me, I’ll ignore it.  Same idea.

Except publishers and authors suddenly see an external review source and start bouncing up and down thinking, “How can I influence this otherwise-objective-appearing source?”

The point of GoodReads is for readers to discuss books.  Everyday readers have no cui bono here, no income stream, no direct benefit except their own personal interests and hobbies.  The point of the site is the no cui bono.

Authors (and publishers) have a direct income stream that can be influenced by this site.  They have a huge cui bono here.  Authors and publishers are going to push, and push hard, to improve that income stream.  However, they will be pushing against a group that has no income stream involved.

That, my friends, is a recipe for disaster.

Completely incompatible goals.

Ironically, if authors got their way (and successfully influenced all these readers), the site would cease to be worth influencing.  It would be one big infomercial.

But what is this about Author Behavior again?

I’ve talked a bit about lousy publisher behavior, and I’ve mentioned some authors who behaved badly in the abstract.  What I haven’t mentioned is how this works in real time, with real examples.

Do I think it’s ‘bad’ for authors to have conflict of interest?  Nah.  Anytime money is involved, CoI exists.  If you spend more than five minutes in any industry, you’re going to start having conflict of interest.  You’ll start to know people.  If you like them, if you hate them, if you merely know them, there will be conflicts of interest because those feelings will color your response.  That’s why a lot of industries put checks in place.  In blind-peer-review all author-information has been removed, so you don’t need to worry about your friend’s feelings if you rip the article to shreds.

The problem is not having a conflict of interest.  The problem is what people do about that conflict of interest.   It is absolutely possible to make your money in a given field and still be an ethical person.

I think most people know by now that blurbs are often quid pro quo or friendship based.  (If you didn’t before, now you do!)  There’s plenty of unwritten rules involved, but a lot of authors basically read and then rec books written by their friends.  Some authors review books on their blogs or for review publications.  I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, most of the time.

It’s all in how it’s done.  Years ago, I pissed off an up-and-coming YA author by telling her that I basically ignored all her positive book recommendations on her blog.  Why?  She’d posted about how she personally would not write negative reviews, and how that was fine, etc etc.  It is fine.  But if the only reviews you write are glowing endorsements of authors you went on tour with and the occasional Jane Austen-reread, it’s going to start to look a little whiffy.  Especially if your tour buddies are all endorsing you in turn.

On the other hand, I also know some authors who write lots of reviews, including negative reviews (often to the horror of other industry pros).  These authors are willing to be honest about their reactions to a book.  Sometimes they give a positive review to a friend’s book.  That’s never bothered me.  Sure, friendship is probably part of the positive review.  I kind of don’t care much, because they’re still willing to be honest, and I think most of us have warmer feelings towards work that was done by a friend.  Like I said, if you work in any industry for a while, you’ll start to know people.  Recommending friends’ work is normal author behavior.  Writers who write about dragons may become friends because they all like dragons, and they may start shilling for their buddies’ dragon books, because hey, dragons!  It’s natural.  I think readers/consumers are pretty savvy about that kind of recommendation, and I think it hurts no one.

However.

My nose starts to twitch when money is the primary motivator for a critic’s body of work.  I don’t mean straightforward, “Thanks for reviewing Book X for Library Journal, here is your twenty dollars Mr Reviewer.”  I mean “I will endorse product X if in turn I get an endorsement or kickback via this other route.”  If most of a critic’s output is primarily intended to shore up a separate revenue stream, then Houston we have a problem.

Sneaky revenue streams create unpleasant cui bono situations.

After some thought, I decided to not include specific examples of non-GoodReads authors doing this shit.  (I figured this essay is already long enough, for one thing, and for another, I don’t want a digression of my main thesis.)  I think most people are now aware that some authors have, in the past, paid people to write Amazon reviews.

Here’s what a professional reviewer-for-hire said about fake reviews:

He says he regrets his venture into what he called “artificially embellished reviews” but argues that the market will take care of the problem of insincere overenthusiasm. “Objective consumers who purchase a book based on positive reviews will end up posting negative reviews if the work is not good,” he said.

Objective Consumers: Vanishing Like a Unicorn

One of the big sources of “objective consumers” is GoodReads.  It’s a place where readers are supposed to connect to other readers, no money involved.

The problem is that many authors don’t want objective consumers.  They want praise and positive marketing.  At the same time, if readers at GoodReads (or reviewers at Amazon, for that matter) become overburdened with fluff-pieces, the reviews become useless because no consumer believes them.

What kinds of things are authors doing?

They’re commenting on reviews directly to complain.  They’re flagging reviews.  They’re sending emails/messages asking reviewers to change their scores.  They’re sending their personal fans to do similar things.  (There are also some additional creepy things, like using free book giveaways that solicit reviewer home addresses, but that stuff is fortunately an outlier.)  Some of them just send endless needy requests for people to read their book, please please pretty please.

It’s these authors who have been labelled as BBAs, badly-behaved authors.

I’ve lived through my share of flame wars.  I can don inflammable pants, but there are days when I’d really rather not.  Some years ago, I read a book that I despised.  It was a fairly popular book, and the author was infamous for starting a web-wide flamewar that lasted three months. (The flamewar was about a different book.) I thought about reviewing the crappy book, and then I thought, you know, I could just go hit my head against the wall until the urge to review passes.

That is a dampening effect.

Should I, someday, review that piece of garbage masquerading as a novel?  Yeah, maybe, but I kinda don’t wanna.

I sure as hell can’t blame a bunch of normal everyday people for not wanting to get slammed by endless author-tantrums.

The reality is that no one can keep track of that many badly behaved authors, so readers have, understandably, crowd-sourced lists of them.  Authors who spam like hormel.  Authors who freak out about four-star reviews.  Authors who argue.  Author who will flag your perfectly reasonable review.  Etc.

Readers don’t have any financial power beyond ‘not buying the book’ or ‘not reviewing the book’.  Readers as individuals have a tiny amount of fiscal power (buy/don’t buy) to exert capitalism’s power towards changing authorial behavior.  Authors are the means of production, which Marx tells us means they’ve got some juice.  A middle-man like Amazon will be paying attention to the means of production, UNLESS buyers/consumers act in very specific ways (such as boycotting) OR exert influence outside that direct influence stream.

The lists of authors behaving badly, the reviews that include information about authorial behavior, these are crowd-sourced methods of, well, collective bargaining in the book buying stream.  Readers collectively refuse to review badly-behaved author X’s books, then author X is not rewarded for that behavior because author X’s book does NOT have the objective outsider positive review of approval that creates buyer confidence.

No, Really, Cui Bono?

So who benefits from the powers-that-be removing author behavior from the GoodReads site?

Is it readers?  Nope.  If you read the announcement of the policy change, readers are overwhelming pissed.  They report feeling un-appreciated, deceived, attacked, and betrayed.  They also report feeling uneasy about writing long reviews that might suddenly be deleted with no notice.

So, is it authors who benefit?  Well, in the short term some authors will benefit from this change.  Readers unaware of the ‘bad’ authors will probably buy their books again.  Once.  Then, if the author freaks out over a 4-star review or harasses that reader with spam, that will be the end of those sales.

So, is it ‘good’ authors who will benefit?  Nope.  A whole bunch of them are posting on GoodReads to say how pissed they are, too.  They hate censorship, they don’t want their own reviews yanked, etc, etc, and some of them have packed up their bags and left the site.  That will mean these ‘good’ authors will lose the chance to positively benefit from whatever marketing opportunities do exist there.

Will authors benefit longterm?  No.  Eventually one of two things will happen.

A) Readers will cave under pressure/fear and begin self-censoring reviews, the way I did with the flame-thrower-author.  That will sound appealing to some authors, but remember.  Consumer confidence depends on mixed reviews.  Otherwise, consumers will assume the site is one big infomercial and ignore all the positive praise.  If the dampening happens, the objectivity will be lost, and the objectivity (created by removing financial conflict of interest) will vanish.  No objectivity, no marketing value.

B) Readers will crowdsource some other method of recording, tracking, and discussing authors whose behavior upsets them.  People do not cease to react just because you remove the megaphone from their hands.  This may mean that the primary users of GoodReads will go to a competitor who does allow them to make these lists.  Or maybe they’ll use blogs.  Or start a newsletter.  I have no idea what the method is, but I am sure it will happen.

Will Amazon benefit?  No.  Again, objectivity is the site’s main selling point as a marketing vehicle.  It is very likely an expensive site to maintain, as are most social media sites.

Given the strong financial incentive for authors to behave in desperate ways, I think it is unlikely that such ‘bad’ authors, of their own accord, will suddenly stop spamming/nagging/bugging readers.  It is possible that GoodReads could prevent mass reader-exodus by instituting a draconian no-bugging readers regime, but that seems….not too likely.

I find the whole mess incredibly sad.

As ironic as it may seem to some authors (and to those who prefer ‘positivity’, which probably does not include any of the HU crowd, given our penchant for festivals of hate), negative reviews are of positive financial benefit.  That includes lists of people to avoid reviewing, even if those lists are not fair or perfectly accurate.  The pressure of financial gain from authors/publishers must be balanceable by the other side–readers–who cannot act in direct financial ways.  If you remove these lists, something else will take their place–or the house of cards will collapse.  The fiscal pressure is just too great.

Julia Serano on Call Out Culture

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I have an interview with Julia Serano up today at the Atlantic, in which we talk about her wonderful new book Excluded, which you should all go out and buy right now.

The interview got cut a little for space reasons, so with the Atlantic’s kind permission, I decided to post the excised bit over here.

You talk a bit about call out culture and where you see problems with it. So, thinking about the Hugo Schwyzer mess in particular, I wonder if you could talk a little about how you think activist communities can be inclusive and open to difference, while still being able to respond to or deal with folks who actually are undermining their goals or exploiting them.

The chapter in which I talk about call-out culture is the last chapter and it’s called “Balancing Acts.” And I talk about how activism needs to be a balancing act between the fact that we each have our own issues and concerns and agendas, and then there are other activists coming from other perspectives who have their own issues and concerns and agendas. And the best thing for us to do moving forward is to create intentionally intersectional spaces where we both talk and listen to one another, and where we give people the benefit of the doubt.

I think that can happen on a very conscious level, especially in smaller situations.

It becomes a real problem on the Internet. Just because, as you pointed out, there are bad actors, and people who are either going to be selfish and only talk about their own issues, or who are purposefully undermining other people. And you usually can’t police who shows up at your blog post, or who comments or who doesn’t.

As I was writing that chapter, I knew that it was a very complicated issue. But I do think it’s important to try to give people the benefit of the doubt. I know for myself, that I grew up in straight mainstream culture that didn’t really have a feminist analysis and that was very anti-queer. And I learned what I’ve learned as an activist slowly but surely, and I went through various stages of probably being messed up in my perspective, just because I was new. And I think that we need a way to give people who are new to activism a chance to learn, and to be given the benefit of the doubt if they say something that other people think is problematic, as long as they’re willing to listen to others and learn moving forward.

The other reason that I bring it up is that a lot of exclusion that happens within feminist and queer movement comes from having some minority member of the group being called out under the assumption that who they are is inherently oppressive. So there’s a long history of trans women in feminist and queer spaces being accused of having transitioned in order to have heterosexual privilege, or being accused of upholding heteronormative ideas of what women are and so on. So that was another concern of mine.

 

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Joss Whedon’s Next Project

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Dear Joss,

Hey, I’m a big fan, seen all your stuff, love it all (except maybe season one of Dollhouse, though the unaired pilot was brilliant). So I’m embarrassed to confess I only streamed Cabin in the Woods on Amazon recently, and I have to say, yes, totally brilliant too. So much so I was thinking, since you’re Mr. Marvel now, why not a mash-up? I know, you’re way way too busy with Avengers 2 and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D to draft another script. So I’ve gone ahead and done it for you:

Cabin in the Superhero Origin Story

Open with a shot of a corporate building and pan down to an entrance sign, “Zarathustra Technologies,” with a yellow school bus parked in front. A guide leads a high school group through the complex as a nerdy kid peels away to investigate a temptingly open lab door: “Arachnid Gene Modification.” As he studies the array of weird, glowing spiders, one descends on a thread and bites him. He slaps it, but too late, he’s already pale and sweaty. Spider arms rip through his sides as he transforms into an enormous, harry spider. It stands there a moment, screeching in confusion, before rows of hidden machine guns pivot from the walls and blast it into twitching pulp.

Cut to Control Room monitor of same image. Three TECHS frown down at the mess as they argue: “Told you the DNA sequencing was off,” “You always say the DNA sequencing is off,” “So next time maybe listen,” etc.

Roll credits as we travel down the row of screens, each monitoring a different room in the complex with a different nerd suffering a different transformative accident: a shelf of chemicals tipping over, a slippery walkway above a vat of toxic waste, a massive machine whirring out of control, a metal door sealing shut beside a countdown clock, etc. The TECHS press buttons, sip coffee, and record data from the staged mayhem, while continuing to banter.

“Okay,” one asks, “who we got next?”

A new bus pulls up and exiting jocks and cheerleader types jostle aside the newest NERD. One of the techs is reading his file in a voice over, revealing their improbable depth of knowledge and so long-term monitoring and manipulation. He’s not a great candidate though, just barely made the cut, but what the hell. He enters the building last.

A female tour GUIDE in Clark Kentish glasses (she’s cute but bumbling) is describing an antique gamma cannon, now a harmless lobby display. Only wait, why did that light start glowing when she bumped against that button? It charges up as she strolls unknowingly in front of the massive barrel. The NERD, the only one aware of the impending disaster, shoves through the jocks and cheerleaders to push the GUIDE to safety as he’s soaked in a roar of distorted green light.

He stands there, shocked, but when nothing else happens, the crowd of teens cracks up. The TECHS, however, applaud (“Nobody ever saves the girl anymore!”) before readouts indicate no change in NERD’s gamma levels. Damn it! They must have fired a dud. GUIDE thanks him as she climbs to her feet and adjusts her glasses. They shake hands in an awkward moment of mutual romantic dizziness—interrupted by one of the TECHS talking through the bluetooth in her ear to keep the tour moving before they get bottlenecked.

The Arachnid room is ready for a reboot. GUIDE fumbles through her lines, distracted when she sees NERD lured by the open door. She’s torn between protecting him and doing her job. “Don’t!” she calls. “Don’t, um, stay behind too long. We’re stopping in the cafeteria next.” Jocks and cheerleaders cheer as the tour moves on and NERD enters the lab.

This time we see the TECHS orchestrating everything and the difficulty of lowering a spider on a puppet string. They miss twice before the spider grabs his arm. They applaud when he slaps it away, then freeze, waiting for the reaction. Except nothing happens. Readout scans show zero change. He must have slapped it away before it bit him. Man, this kid is lucky! When NERD catches up to the tour, GUIDE squeaks with surprise and pleasure, nearly hugging him then awkwardly stopping herself.

Meanwhile, someone very important in a black suit arrives in the Control Room. The TECHS snap to and give a progress report on the Zarathustra Project, which we glean is a secret, internationally funded R&D program designed to produce a Homo Superior, a literal Superman.  BLACKSUIT is highly agitated at the lack of progress, watching as the TECHS narrate two, simultaneous events on the monitors.

A nerd is lead into the basement where a walkway “breaks” by remote control, dropping him into toxic sludge. Another nerd is lured into a lab where a shelving unit tips onto him as he stands on an exposed wire. The BLACKSUIT is thrilled, until TECHS report that the kid is dead. “Dead? What happened?” “We dropped a shelf of chemicals on him.” “While electrocuting him.” “It tends to kill people.” “98%.” “You have survivors then?” “Well, ‘survivor’ is a strong word.” “And not so much with the present tense really.” Discussion escalates until a TECH notices the other kid climbing out of the sludge—which, hey this looks promising. His vitals are stable, and, wow, the toxins are bonding to his cells. The kid slumps onto the walkway as his arm turns into a new swamp-like substance. The TECHS are cheering! Except, uh oh, the readouts. His arm is dripping away. They watch as he melts into a brackish puddle.

BLACKSUIT is hysterical with disappointment. TECHS try to calm him down, explaining this is how it works everyday here. “But today,” BLACKSUIT blurts, “is not every day! Today is surprise inspection day!” This hardly seems like news to the TECHS, since BLACKSUIT is there already. “No,” he continues, “not me. The Watcher is coming down.” This cracks up the TECHS. “The Watcher? Coming down from, what, his Fortress of Solitude on the moon? He’s going to visit us puny humans?” Actually. Yes. BLACKSUIT received a moon transmission this morning. TECHS are stunned. “The Watcher hasn’t come down to earth in decades, not since , since—” “1938. When we agreed to begin the Zarathustra Project or face his wrath. And today he wants results.” All look at the monitors. They’re blank except for GUIDE and her one remaining tour group.

GUIDE is explaining something, when she steps away to respond to her bluetooth. “The Venom Room? That’s crazy—we haven’t even finished preliminary—” She flinches from the shout in her ear, then tells the group they’ll need to take a little unscheduled break, please make your way back down to the cafeteria again. Everybody but NERD, who she leads down a restricted corridor. He looks nervous, especially when they end up alone in a dim lab—is she making a pass at him? She pockets her glasses and walks toward him sexily, but then stumbles on something. She puts the glasses back on, but tries to keep up the sexy thing—while behind his back a strange oily substance crawls from a centrifuge the TECHS have just switched off and unlocked. GUIDE continues to distract NERD as she watches it over his shoulder. Her lips approach his as the black goo nears his back.

But as it is about to engulf him, she can’t do it, and shoves him to safety. The substance strikes her hand, congealing around it. TECHS are cursing, “What the hell is she doing?” But then NERD dives full force at the black goo, until it releases her hand and swirls around him instead, coating him and slithering into his mouth and nostrils. BLACKSUIT nods. “Wow. She’s good. We could use her in ops.” “Nah,” says a TECH, “total klutz.” NERD is now lost in a black blob as TECHS study readouts. The symbiont is acclimating to the host. GUIDE stares, horrified at what she has done. Excitement builds in the Control Room—until the black goo pours from his body, inert. GUIDE rushes to his side, but can’t embrace him because he’s vomiting out the black remains. TECHS argue about what went wrong (“Told you it wasn’t stable!” “You always say it isn’t stable!”), until BLACKSUIT cuts them off. It doesn’t matter. He’s just received official word on his cell: The Watcher is on his way.

NERD and GUIDE have found a table in the cafeteria. He’s picking off the last of the black goop as she sits down with a tray, nearly dropping everything. She laughs. “I don’t know what it is about you, but I swear I go weak in the knees when I’m near you.”

Romantic interlude continues while behind them a new high school group arrives in the lobby. Another guide runs through the gamma cannon routine, only this time no one notices the warning light, so she just stands there waiting to be rescued. TECHS wait too, someone’s finger on the fire button. The guide gives up and moves on as a couple of goof-offs play with the cannon. When one sticks his face into the barrel, TECHS fire it. He staggers back as the group laughs. They stop laughing when his skin turns green and his muscles rip through his clothes.  He’s turning into an incredible . . . BOOM! He explodes across the lobby.

More cursing in the Control Room. “Well, at least we know the cannon is working.” A TECH blinks, realizing something: “But that means—” She’s cut off by shouts that the Watcher is in radar range, he’s descending!

Outside a spaceship drops through the clouds to hover above the Zarathustra building.

GUIDE and NERD are talking at their table when she looks up, alarmed.

The ceiling of the Control Room peels back in the glow of a tractor beam as the WATCHER levitates through the opening. He’s pretty much Marlon Brando in his white Jor-El costume from the 1978 Superman.

GUIDE jumps up from the cafeteria table, leaving NERD as she shouts: “Sorry, gotta go!”

The WATCHER addresses the Control Room in pompous, alien-Brando speak. He is done waiting. The time for Earth to produce a specimen worthy of propagation is upon them. Report your results! TECHS and BLACKSUIT whisper-argue among themselves, until BLACKSUIT steps forward. “Although we have made tremendous progress, I am afraid that we have not yet achieved—”

WATCHER cuts him off. He’s not talking to the humans. He’s talking to the figure stepping into the Control Room behind them. It’s GUIDE. There’s no longer any klutziness to her. She discards her glasses and emits a cocoon of light. When the light recedes, she’s a Superwoman, complete with regal red cape. She reports: “Father, the humans have failed to evolve. I regret to report that I have encountered no genetically adequate mates on this planet.” WATCHER: “Then they have given us no choice.”

WATCHER looks up, and his ship begins to emit a column of light that penetrates the building. BLACKSUIT rushes forward, begging for more time, pleading to spare humanity—they can still produce a Superman! WATCHER smiles. He agrees. The cosmic rays bombarding the building will do exactly that. Sure enough, BLACKSUIT and TECHS are transforming: one’s skin begins to blister; another’s bones bend under his weight; a third shimmers in an invisible force field; the fourth grows orange and craggy. The transformations continue until a TECH self-immolates in a ball of flame; another oozes across the floor in an elastic puddle; the third claws at her face, unable to breathe through the invisible field; and BLACKSUIT expands into a giant orange rock.

BLACKSUIT’s body grows so big it crashes through the floor, smashing down level by level until landing on a cafeteria table as NERD jumps out of the way. WATCHER floats down afterwards, not bothering to pause over the transformations taking place. Each floor has its own flavor: X-men mutations, 50s scifi monsters, horror classics, etc. GUIDE follows him, but she looks upset at all the suffering.

When they arrive at the bottom, NERD is staring up at them, confused and horrified but not . . . transforming. WATCHER cocks his head. He asks his daughter why this one is immune to the rays, but she can only grin with relief that NERD is okay. Red rays shoots from the WATCHER’s eyes, allowing us to see NERD’s internal organs, his skeleton, even close-ups of his DNA. WATCHER raises a hand and the ship rays stop. The writhing bodies on each floor relax and begin to return to their human states. WATCHER is smiling now too. He has found a worthy mate for his daughter. The NERD is a spontaneous mutation, a being higher on the evolution scale than the mere humans that produced him.

NERD is trying to take this all in—the cute GUIDE is really a Superwoman from another planet whose father wants them to have babies together—when WATCHER gives the planetary extermination order.

Wait, what?

GUIDE explains: “Your planet has produced its superman, you. The rest are superfluous.”

“But you can’t!” NERD grabs her arm, and her knees go weak. Literally. She can’t stand. She’s collapsing. WATCHER looks alarmed for the first time. The NERD’s mutation doesn’t just make him immune; he’s kryptonite to them. And so he must be destroyed!

GUIDE shouts no! as her father turns his eye rays into lasers, blasting through tables and rubble as NERD leaps out of the way. Eventually NERD is downed and cornered and WATCHER steps up for the kill. GUIDE tries to stop him, but she’s too weak. He squints and his laser beams strike NERD in the chest. Nothing happens. He’s impervious to this too. WATCHER blinks, intensifying the rays, as NERD stands and walks toward him through the beams. They grapple, excess laser radiation flashing, until NERD grabs WATCHER’s head and forces him to shoot his eye rays straight up through the openings in the floors, straight up to the ship, which explodes. WATCHER collapses.

NERD pulls GUIDE out of the rubble, but can she really be redeemed after okaying the extermination of the human race? Maybe he finds her dying, her body no longer super after being exposed to him, and they kiss during her final breath. WATCHER should stagger to his feet behind them, bloodied and clearly no longer so super either, and just as he’s about to crack NERD’s head open with a piece of debris, BLACKSUIT clobbers him. Remember BLACKSUIT was the big orange rock that fell through the floors, and so he’s normal again, though almost naked in rags.

Should GUIDE and NERD have a happy ending? That’s your call. Seriously. Call me. I can dash out the rest of the dialogue and have this ready for production by, when are you free, 2019? You think J. J. Abrams is too busy to direct? We should talk about that too. I’m sitting by my phone right now.

Sincerely,

Chris

The Avengers (2012) Director Joss Whedon on set