Utilitarian Review 8/1/15

Posted on August 1, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

On HU

Featured Archive Post: I try to turn poetry into comics criticism. (Perhaps the post on the site least likely to ever find an audience.)

Robert Stanley Martin with on sale dates of comics in late 1944. Pretty covers!

Leonard Pierce on Marvel’s hip hop variant covers and their crappy history with black characters and creators.

Kim O’Connor on the problems with Scocca’s On Smarm.

I wrote an open letter to Axel Alonso about Marvel’s hip hop variants and his comments about me.

Chris Gavaler on the convergence of lit fic and pulp.

Jimmy Johnson on SVU and sex work stigma.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At Quartz I wrote about how inequality is behind the deaths of both black people and Cecil the Lion.

At Urban Faith I wrote about Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me and tradition as a gift.

At the Guardian I profiled science-fiction author N.K. Jemisin. We talked about race, change, and the status quo.

At Playboy I interviewed Monica Byrne about diversity in literature and criticism.

At TNR I wrote about Jack and Jack and the disturbingly bland future of independent music.

At Splice Today I wrote about

—Salon and Gawker hitting each other.

—how Harper Lee’s reputation should be tarnished.

A short blurb about SZA in the Chicago Reader’s Lollapalooza coverage.

Other Links

Claire Napier on why Emma Frost’s wardrobe is idiotic.

Kenny Keil parodies Marvel with way better hip hop covers than theirs.

Emily Shire on Lena Dunham and others pushing to criminalize sex work.

Robert Stanley Martin on Birth of a Nation.

The author N.K. Jemisin

Law & Order: SVU – Pornstar’s Requiem (Season 16, Episode 5)

Posted on July 31, 2015 by Jimmy Johnson

This was first published on CiCo3.
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The following post examines gendered violence and sex work in the context of a recent Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episode. I make use of narratives by two adult film performers, Belle Knox and Kayden Kross, who recently published articles that overlap with the SVU episode, one directly engaging the episode. For broader context I cite Incite!: Women, Gender Non-Conforming, and Trans People of Color Against Violence and the Sex Workers Project and, while not quoted directly, analysis developed by Emi Koyama. Knox and Kross’s lived experiences provide fuller context and analysis than I cite below and Incite! and Emi Koyama’s work are central to the struggle against gendered violence against marginalized and criminalized populations and systemic violence more broadly. I strongly recommend reading their narratives and supporting their work and prioritizing it over what follows should you have to choose between them. Thanks to Megan Spencer for insightful feedback and to you for reading.

Like many Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episodes, the theme of the 22 October episode “Pornstar’s Requiem” is rape culture and the entitlement men assume over women’s bodies. This assumption is especially acute against women of color, colonized women, trans women and other communities marginalized by racism, patriarchy, capitalism and other oppressive organizations of power. Though SVU often centers middle class and wealthy white women, “Pornstar’s Reqiuem” centers one such marginalized community, sex workers. While all sex workers are marginalized or dehumanized in one way or another, an individual or group’s status as indigenous, working class, black, transgender or any other Other (including intersections of any or all of the above and more) means not all sex workers have the same experience. That should be read throughout what follows. (For this review I ignore the production value and storytelling quality, saving that for a later engagement. In brief, this episode suffers from the caricatured posturing and hero-villain hyper-polarization prevalent in the last few seasons of SVU though it is not as bad as some.)

“Pornstar’s Requiem” is one of the series’ ‘ripped from the headlines’ productions. It takes an element from popular media discourse and fictionalizes it to fit the half-police procedural/half-courtroom drama that is Law & Order ’s trademark. The episode takes inspiration from the case of Belle Knox, a porn star and Duke University student whose real name was exposed without her consent by a male fellow student leading to extensive harassment on and off campus.

In the SVU version, Hannah Marks plays Evie Barnes, a white, working class student at Hudson University (a frequent Law & Order stand in for NYU) and adult film performer under the name Roxxxane Demay. Two fellow Hudson University students watching porn on-line recognize Barnes and arrange to get her alone in a bathroom at a college party where they, invoking the rough sex of the porn clip they previously saw, proceed to rape her.

As is usually the case, SVU gets some stuff right while embedding the broader story in problematic politics. At its best numerous characters, especially Barnes herself along with Sgt. Olivia Benson (Mariska Hartigay) and Det. Amanda Collins (Kelli Giddish), over and again strongly reject repeated interjections from men trying to justify or rationalize the rape of Barnes due to her work in adult film. In one instance Barnes, her parents just having turned their backs on her because of her work, says, “I did nothing wrong and people need to hear that.” Barnes repeatedly invokes the principle of consent with no qualifications as to the job or social position of the person granting or withholding consent and how any violations of that are sexual assault.

Evie Barnes defends her right to withhold consent and perform in porn saying, “I did nothing wrong and people need to hear that.

In her write-up of the episode, Belle Knox identifies closely with Barnes.

I know well the chilling rape culture entitlement that comes along with men discovering that I’m a porn star. This is the scenario that plays out on the episode. One of the frat boys accused in “Pornstar’s Requiem” even goes so far as to say to the police the following jaw-dropping line: “I didn’t think you could rape a girl like that.”

Have I heard this before?

Not in those exact words, but in actions and in snide remarks, in the assumptions people make with my body and my livelihood because they have watched me in porn or heard that this is my profession. One time a hotel provided a key card to a friend of another man I knew, and at 2 in the morning, this large and loud, older and incredibly drunk stranger wandered into my hotel room — with his own key. I was terrified. Did he think that because I was a porn star he could just come in? Did he think he could do something with me?

She continues, “There is this sense of ownership of porn stars from strangers, which is, quite frankly, chilling.” In a recent article for Salon, fellow porn star Kayden Kross describes her own nonconsensual outing as a college student and how, due to sex workers’ societal position, people outside the industry can’t even imagine how it is that she hasn’t been raped.

I have not been molested by an uncle. Not by a single one of them, if you can believe it. Yet strangers every day tag me with this scarlet letter because they can imagine no other circumstance under which I might choose the life I have chosen. Not only is this an insult to me, but it is an insult to all women who have made unconventional personal choices, because the go-to assumption is that a woman who doesn’t fit the mold has very likely been sexually damaged by a man. It is a comfortable way to explain away a disobedient woman.

There are few keener descriptions of rape culture then how Kross describes the public as demanding her past rape in order to comprehend her. Rape is necessary for their engagement of Kross’s narrative, part of the “sense of ownership of porn stars” that Knox writes about. Kross describes the expected consequences in case of actual assault.

I sometimes wonder how deeply the assumption that the adult performer is somehow a lesser person really runs. Will our aggressor be given a lighter sentence in the event of a murder trial? Will the case be taken less seriously in the event that one of us disappears?

This is the result portrayed in “Pornstar’s Requiem”. After achieving the uncommon in real life result of a guilty verdict – according to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, only nine out of every one-hundred sexual assaults are ever prosecuted in the first place – the judge sets aside the verdict and admonishes Barnes in the most condescending manner saying, “I hope going forward you find a way to respect your body and yourself.” Knox writes that the judge’s phrasing is “something I have heard so many times from my friends, family and peers it practically feels like my first name.”

The Patriarchal State and Accountability

SVU, like all cop shows, even more critical ones like The Wire, defines accountability as state intervention followed by incarceration. In the case of sex workers, people of color, colonized (including intersections thereof) and other Othered populations, interventions by institutions of state violence (the police, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the military, F.B.I., etc.) frequently exacerbate rather than mitigate violence, including sexual violence.

The Sex Workers Project (SWP) at the New York City-based Urban Justice Center conducted a small survey of folks in the trade. Among their findings:

Thirty percent of sex workers interviewed told researchers that they had been threatened with violence by police officers, while 27% actually experienced violence at the hands of police. Reported incidents included officers physically grabbing and kicking prostitutes, as well as beating them; one incident of rape; one woman was stalked by a police officer; and throwing food at one subject. Sexual harassment included fondling of body parts; giving women cigarettes in exchange for sex; and police offering not to arrest a prostitute in exchange for sexual services.

Perhaps most obviously, that most sex work is criminalized means that agents of state violence generally seek to incarcerate sex workers, not offer any kind of protection or support. As Incite! Women, Gender Non-Conforming, and Trans People of Color Against Violence notes, “Existing laws that criminalize sex work often prevent workers from reporting violence, enable law enforcement agents to not take violence against sex workers seriously when it is reported, and facilitate police violence against sex workers.”

The vigorous defense offered by the (initially reluctant) District Attorney and police in “Pornstar’s Requiem” is anomalous in the real world though the lack of rapist accountability of any kind in the end, the paternalistic dismissal of Barnes by the judge, the exploitation of class differences between the rapists to turn the working class rapist snitch and the perpetual saving mission of the police all ring true.

Condemned to Porn

The end of “Pornstar’s Requiem” is filmed as tragedy. Kross writes about experiences outside of the porn industry bubble where porn stars are dehumanized and made punchlines. In a comedy class she is taking the instructor says, “Don’t worry, if you fail at this, there’s always porn.” It’s a common punchline. In their opening monologue for the 2013 Golden Globes, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler make a similar joke.

Tina Fey: I don’t think she has plans to do porn Amy.

Amy Poehler: None of us have plans do to porn.

Examples abound. Porn is not a career one chooses in such comments but a life one is condemned or resorts to.

The porn industry has no doubt been tragic for some of its workers. But so has the restaurant industry. So has accounting. So has professional American football. The “porn as last resort” narrative is another way of dehumanizing sex workers. Since, in patriarchy’s narrative, no one would choose it, those engaged in it must not be anybody nor any body. This is how “Pornstar’s Requiem” ends.

Evie Barnes broadcasts her social death.

After the judge sets aside the verdict and frees Barnes’s rapist, Barnes commits what the show portrays as a kind of suicide, complete with suicide note, where she leaves university for porn. “Pornstar’s Requiem” narrates this as the failure of the agents of state violence to complete a saving mission. Barnes no longer exists, they lost her. Only Roxxxane Demay remains. Demay partially affirms her position telling Collins, “At least here when I say stop, they stop.” But she does so on the verge of tears over a funereal soundtrack making that affirmation instead part of the “resort to porn” narrative. No matter that earlier in the episode Barnes expresses a certain fulfillment with her work in porn, “I signed contracts. I got paid. It felt good. I mean these guys [Barnes looks to each side at the men on campus] look right through me. They have no idea what I’m doing on set with hot porn actors.”

Evie Barnes self-medicates before her funeral.

Evie Barnes’s social death is finalized on a porn set. Collins tells her, “You don’t have to be here,” and tries to offer her other options. Demay tell Collins, “Once you’re Roxxxane Demay, you can’t be Evie Barnes again,” takes some kind of pill, disrobes and walks to her burial, a gangbang scene with fifteen men as stand-ins for pallbearers.¹ This, as with all saving missions, ends with the ‘saved’ being dehumanized by the saviors. The dehumanization that Barnes fights against earlier in the episode is finalized with the heavy, tragic soundtrack, Barnes/Demay’s tears and Collin’s desperate, sorrowful pleading. She is literally dehumanized in this narrative. The human Evie Barnes is dead and Roxxxane Demay, a fictional character invented by Barnes for stage purposes, now exists in a non-life as the title “Pornstar’s Requiem” suggests. Here Collins and Barnes’s rapists are no longer opposing parties, they find shared ground with Barnes’s dehumanization.

Roxxxane Demay approaches her funeral.

The episode’s end message affirms both agents of patriarchal state violence as sole recourse of accountability (though failed in this instance) to victims of gendered violence and the dehumanization of sex workers. NBC broadcast this message to over two million initial viewers. As with all popular culture, the episode did not invent this message. Instead it (re)produces it in conversation with broader media and popular discourse. “Pornstar’s Requiem” is another exchange in the conversation and in spite of its attempt at critical engagement, it ends up projecting and producing the real-life alienation described by Kross and Knox.
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^{1.The episode strongly suggests a social death and portrays Roxxxane Demay’s evolution as solely horror. There is another interpretation though the show does not point to it in any way at all, what Emi Koyama calls “Negative Survivorship“. Interpreting the scene this way is far better and appropriately positions the agents of state violence with the rapists while supporting Demay/Barnes. Based upon all previous episodes of SVU, this is not the intention of the writers.}

The Physics of Fiction

Posted on July 30, 2015 by Chris Gavaler

I grew up in a universe in which electrons were like planets orbiting double nuclei “suns” in tiny solar systems. It was a metaphor, a useful one at the time. Then new data required a figurative upheaval. Now the electrons of my children’s universe mingle in clouds. Electrons always have—chemistry teachers of my youth just didn’t know better. Any change in metaphor is also a change in reality. That’s why the in-between state, when the old system is collapsing but no new figurative principle has risen to organize the chaos, is so scary. Metaphors are how we think.

During the second half of the 20th century, the literary universe was a simple binary: good/bad, highbrow/lowbrow, serious/escapist, literature/pulp. Like Bohr’s atomic solar system, that model has lost its descriptive accuracy. We’ve hit a critical mass of literary data that don’t fit the old dichotomies. Margaret Atwood, Michael Chabon, and Jonathan Lethem are among the most obvious paradigm disruptors, but the list of literary/genre writers keeps expanding. A New Yorker editor, Joshua Rothman, recently added Emily St. John Mandel to the list: Her postapocalyptic novel Station Eleven is a National Book Award finalist—further evidence, Rothman writes, of the “genre apocalypse.”

Rothman resurrects Northrop Frye to fill the vacuum left by the collapsing genre system, but the Frye model’s four-part structure (novel, romance, anatomy, confession) is more likely to spread chaos (“novel” is a kind of novel?). Another suggestion comes from a holdout of the 20th-century model: The critic Arthur Krystal believes an indisputable boundary separates “guilty pleasures” from serious writing. Perhaps more disorienting, Chabon would strip bookstores of all signage and shelve all fiction together. Ursula Le Guin, probably the most celebrated speculative-fiction author alive, agrees: “Literature is the extant body of written art. All novels belong to it.”

I applaud the egalitarian spirit, but the Chabon-Le Guin nonmodel, while accurate, offers no conceptual comforts. The Bohr model survived even after physicists knew it was wrong because it was so eloquent. Even this former high-school-chemistry student could steer his B-average brain through it. A vast expanse of free-floating books is unnavigable. A good metaphor needs gravity.

To explain the lowly lowbrow world of comic books, Peter Coogan, director of the Institute for Comics Studies, spins superheroes around a “genre sun”—the closer a text orbits the sun, the more rigid the text’s generic conventions. It’s a good metaphor, which is why most models use some version of it, including all those old binaries: The further a text travels from the bad-lowbrow-genre-escapist sun, the more good-highbrow-literary-serious it is. But because metaphors control how we think, solar models are preventing us from understanding changes in our literary/genre universe. It looks like an apocalypse only because we don’t know how to measure it yet.

Chabon is often credited for starting the genre debate with “Thrilling Tales,” the first genre-themed issue of McSweeney’s, published in 2003—though the Peter Straub-edited “New Wave Fabulists” issue of Conjunctions beat it to press by months, and surely Francis Ford Coppola deserves credit for rebooting the classic pulp magazine All-Story in 1997. Coppola has since published luminaries like Rushdie and Murakami, even if, according to the old model, those literary gas giants should exude far too much gravitas to be attracted to a lowly pulp star. And what becomes of second-class planets when their own creators declare them subliterary? According to S.S. Van Dine’s 1928 writing rules, detective fiction shouldn’t include any “long descriptive passages” or “literary dallying with side-issues,” not even “subtly worked-out character analyses.” For Krystal, if a “bad” novel becomes “good,” it exits its neighborhood and ascends into Literature. The Krystal universe of fiction resolves around the collapsed sun of a black genre hole, and his literary event horizon separates which novels are sucked in and which escape into the expansive beauty of literary fiction.

Lev Grossman, author of The Magicians, calls that argument “bollocks, of the most bollocky kind.”

“As soon as a novel becomes moving or important or great,” he retorted in Time, “critics try to surgically extract it from its genre, lest our carefully constructed hierarchies collapse in the presence of such a taxonomical anomaly.” The problem is nomenclature. Grossman defines genre by tropes: A story about a detective is a detective story—it may or may not also be a formulaic detective story. Krystal defines genre exclusively by formula. Substitute out the ambiguous term, and his logic is self-evident: When a formula novel ceases to be primarily about its formula it is no longer a formula novel. Well, duh.

Grossman’s trope approach makes more sense, but Krystal is nostalgic for more than generic categorization. The old dichotomy was seductive because it was (as Grossman points out) hierarchical, performing the double organizing duty of describing and evaluating. By opposing “literary” to “genre” and then conflating “literary” with “quality,” Krystal is forced to make some ineloquent claims: “All the Pretty Horses is no more a western than 1984 is science fiction.” While technically true (Cormac McCarthy’s and Orwell’s novels are genre to the same degree), such assertions are forgivable as long as they are exceptions. But when those free-floating planets represent the expanding norm (in what possible sense are Atwood’s, McCarthy’s, and Colson Whitehead’s most recent novels not apocalyptic?), Krystal’s model collapses.

At least the good/bad dichotomy has collapsed. It never made categorical sense, since a “bad good book”—a poorly written work of literary fiction—had no category. Literary fiction is another problematic term. It traditionally denotes narrative realism, fiction that appears to take place here on Earth, but it’s also been used as shorthand for works of artistic worth. With the second half of the definition provisionally struck, we’re left with realism. Its solar center is mimesis, the mirror that works of literature are held against to test their ability to reflect our world. Northrop Frye declared mimesis one of the two defining poles of literature, though he had trouble naming its opposite. Frye located romance—a category that includes romance as well as all other popular genres (and so another conceptual strike against the Frye model)—in the idealized world, so Harlequin romances are part fantasy too (real guys just aren’t that gorgeous and wonderful).

But any overt authorial agenda can rile mimesis fans. Agni editor Sven Birkerts panned Margaret Atwood’s first MaddAddam novel because “its characters all lack the chromosome that confers deeper human credibility,” and so, he concluded of the larger premise-driven genre, “science fiction will never be Literature with a capital ‘L.’” Atwood was writing in a subliterary mode because she had an overt social and political intention. So her greatest literary sins, for Birkerts, aren’t her genetically engineered humans, but her Godlike and so nonmimetic use of them.

Others have tried to balance the seesaw with poetic style or formula or sincerity, suggesting that literature is a wheel of spectra with mimesis at its revolving center. In the old model, mimesis was also the definition of “literary quality”: The closer a work of fiction orbited its mimetic sun, the brighter and better it was. Like the Bohr model, that’s comprehensively simple, and so little wonder Krystal is still grasping it: Literature is the lone throbbing speck of Universal Goodness surrounded by an abyss of quality-sucking black genre space. Remove “quality” from the equation and posit a spectrum of mimetic to nonmimetic categorizations bearing no innate relationship to artistic worth, and the system still collapses.

Quality could rest in that fuzzy middle zone, a literary sweet spot combining the event horizons of two stars: mimesis and genre. That middle way is tempting—and perhaps even accurate when studying “21st Century North American Literary Genre Fiction,” the clumsily titled course I taught last semester. I am requiring my current advanced fiction workshop students to write in that two-star mode, applying psychological realism to a genre of their choice. But it’s a lie. If quality is mobile, and it is, then no position on the spectrum—any spectrum—is inherently “good.”

Perhaps novels, like the electrons of my youth, orbit double-star nuclei, zigzagging around convention neutrons and invention protons in states of qualitative flux. It’s not just the text—it’s the reader. That’s a central paradox of physics too. “We are faced with a new kind of difficulty,” wrote Albert Einstein. “We have two contradictory pictures of reality; separately neither of them fully explains the phenomena of light, but together they do.” Light, depending on how you measure it, is made either of particles or of waves—and so somehow is both. That seemingly impossible wave-particle duality applies to all quantic elements, including works of fiction.

The cognitive psychologists David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano, in their 2013 study, “Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind,”dragged the genre debate onto the pages of Science. Literary fiction, they reason, makes readers infer the thoughts and feelings of characters with complex inner lives. Psychologists call that Theory of Mind. I call it psychological realism, another form of mimesis. The researchers place popular fiction at the other, nonmimetic pole, because popular fiction, they argue, is populated by simple and predictable characters, and so reading about them doesn’t involve “ToM.”

Kidd and Castano are recycling Krystal’s “genre” definition, only using “popular” for “formulaic.” Their results support their hypothesis—volunteers who read literary fiction scored better on ToM tests afterward—because their literary reading included “Corrie,” a recent O. Henry Prize-winning story by Alice Munro, and the genre reading included Robert Heinlein’s “Space Jockey,” a detailed speculation on the nuts and bolts of space travel populated by appallingly two-dimensional characters. The science is as circular as Krystal’s: Stories that don’t use readers’ ToM skills don’t improve readers’ ToM skills.

If psychological realism is taxonomically useful for defining “literary” (and I believe it is), then here’s a better question: What results would a ToM-focused genre story yield? My colleague in Washington and Lee University’s psychology department, Dan Johnson, and I are exploring that right now. For a pilot study, we created two versions of the same ToM-focused scene. One takes place in a diner, the other on a spaceship. Aside from word substitutions (“door” and “airlock,” “waitress” and “android”), it’s the same story, the same inference-rich exploration of characters’ inner experiences. When asked how much effort was needed to understand the characters, the readers of the narrative-realist scene reported expending 45 percent more effort than the sci-fi readers. The narrative realists also scored 22 percent higher on a comprehension quiz. When asked to rate the scene’s quality on a five-point scale, the diner landed 45 percent higher than the spaceship. The inclusion of sci-fi tropes flipped a switch in our readers’ heads, reducing the amount of effort they exerted and so also their understanding and appreciation. Genre made them stupid. “Literariness” is at least partially a product of a reader’s expectations, whether you lean in or kick back. Fiction, like light, can be two things at once.

This wave-particle model may or may not emerge as the organizing metaphor of contemporary literature, but follow-up experiments are under way. We will survive the genre apocalypse. In fact, I predict we’ll find ourselves still orbiting the mimetic sun of psychological realism. The good/bad, literary/genre binary has collapsed, but the center still holds.

[This article originally appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education in January 2015.]

An Open Letter to Axel Alonso

Posted on July 29, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

Mr. Alonso,

Hi. I’m Noah Berlatsky. I’m the critic who you mocked (without mentioning my name) in your interview with Albert Ching at Comic Book Resources last week.

That interview, as you know, focused on criticism of Marvel’s hip hop variant covers. Many writers have argued that Marvel has a poor history of employing creators of color, and that, therefore, its variant cover project seems to celebrate the work of black art at a company that has largely ignored black people. I made that argument myself at the Guardian. In doing so, I failed to acknowledge that Marvel had hired many people of color to do the cover variants. I apologized for that on twitter. And, as I said, you took that as an opportunity to throw some elbows my way.

I have no objection to the elbows. I screwed up. I erased people of color when I was trying to highlight the ways in which they are erased, and for that I deserve ridicule. As one injured party, whose good efforts I should have acknowledged, you’re well within your rights to pile on.

However, I was distressed to see that you used my error as a way to dismiss, not just me, but everyone who had expressed concern about this marketing initiative. You wrote,

A small but very loud contingent are high-fiving each other while making huge assumptions about our intentions, spreading misinformation about the diversity of the artists involved in this project and across our entire line, and handing out snap judgments like they just learned the term “cultural appropriation” and are dying to put it in an essay.

That may well be an apt description of me. But you have to be aware that many other writers, who did not make the same errors I did, have raised objections, both to Marvel’s failure to employ black creators and to its generally dismissive tone when confronted. Why, in short, are you responding to one white writer who screwed up, rather than engaging with the many black writers and POC writers who have discussed this issue? I’m sure all of these folks have already been drawn to your attention, but in case you missed them, people who have tried to talk to you about this problem include David Brothers, J.A. Micheline, Shawn Pryor, and Osvaldo Oyola.

Many more people have weighed in on social media. Perhaps this is just a “small” contingent compared to Marvel’s whole audience. But it is part of the “dialogue” with hip hop you claim to want Marvel to engage in. People want to know why Marvel claims to love hip hop, but won’t hire black creators to write and draw its ongoing comics. And your response is to, very deliberately, engage with a white critic who made a mistake, while ignoring all the black people and people of color who have voiced serious concerns. That doesn’t seem like you want a dialogue with hip hop, or with anyone. It seems, instead, like you want the credibility of hip hop without engaging with the community and without doing the work.

Along the same lines, it’s great that artists like de la Soul and Nas like their covers; you gave them props, and they responded enthusiastically. However, I wish you would take a moment to go back to them and explain that you are using their endorsement as a way to avoid discussing the lack of black artists on Marvel’s regular comics line. Perhaps they would be fine with that. But it seems like you should give them the opportunity to say so, rather than making assumptions.

I suspect you will never see this letter. I had hoped CBR would give me the chance to post this on their site, especially since, in my view, their interview was sycophantic and broadly unworthy of them. Unfortunately, for me, and I feel for their integrity, they decided not to give space to a reply.

But since you made your response to criticism all about me, I felt like I should try to tell you, even if only in a small voice, that it isn’t about me. Because, as I hope you’re aware, hip hop is way bigger than me. It’s bigger than you, too. And yes, it’s even bigger than Marvel. The folks criticizing you are asking you to live up to this music and art and movement that you’re claiming that you love. As it is, the only bit of hip hop you are demonstrating real affection for is industry rule #4080. If you’d like to change that, you need to maybe stop talking and start listening — though not, in the first place, to me.

Thank you for your time,

Noah Berlatsky

On Scocca

Posted on July 28, 2015 by Kim O'Connor

Long ago, in the distant days of 2013, I had an unfashionable opinion: I really disliked “On Smarm,” an essay by Tom Scocca. It was a wide-ranging cultural critique hung on the author’s dislike of Dave Eggers (and, to a lesser extent, Eggers’ literary progeny, Isaac Fitzgerald). It was at its core a weak argument—by 2013, Eggers (as a writer, at least) no longer exerted the cultural influence he had around the time of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000), or even Zeitoun (2009). And Scocca’s fixation on Fitzgerald, who is about as well (or little) known as Scocca himself, seemed odd. Unwarranted. Mean.

Reading Arthur Chu’s piece about Gawker’s recent missteps, I remembered that I had written this thing. I think I submitted it exactly one place before I gave up on having it published; even three days into the take cycle it seemed past its expiration date. But Chu’s piece helped me see how “On Smarm” epitomizes the Self-Important Truth-Telling version of Gawker that I find most detestable: the same intransigent, didactic 90s-era Adbusters mode that seems to have fueled the resignations of Max Read and Tommy Craggs.

We make fun of The Believer for its relentless positivity, Slate for its contrived contrarian takes, the NYT for being out of touch, and Gawker for being a total nightmare. There’s something in each of those assessments, but they hardly represent the full truth; they just describe those pubs at their worst. With that in mind it’s worth noting that, in the time since I wrote this, Scocca has written at least one remarkable piece of criticism that I know of—a 2014 piece about Bill Cosby that probably inspired Hannibal Buress to make those now-famous jokes about the serial sex offender…a story that Ta-Nehisi Coates (who was recently named by Nick Denton as his dream editor for Gawker) looked away from.

There have been false dichotomies in criticism since forever, I guess. “On Smarm,” like countless other essays that talk about irony or whatever you want to call it (usually with regard to David Foster Wallace or, less often, Wes Anderson or Sufjan Stevens), heaps praise on a so-called virtue—in this case, snark—and trashes its perceived opposite in a way that creates a sort of snapshot of a particular cultural moment. Curiously, for Scocca, that moment seems to have occurred sometime in 2003. Why it spoke to so many people in 2013 is a phenomenon I still don’t understand. –KO

On Scocca

Let’s be honest: the only thing less appealing than the prospect of reading a 9,000-word essay is to then read someone else’s opinion on it. I, for one, would rather watch Vampire Diaries. I don’t believe that snark or smarm or the popularity of any given website is dumbing down the discourse. But as I’ve watched praise for “On Smarm” echo through my Twitter feed, I’ve come to feel there is a credible threat from “critics” so hot to make a point that they’ll forego careful arguments for half-truths, oversimplifications, and petty zings. That is performance, not criticism, and Tom Scocca is playing to the cheap seats.

“It is also no accident that [Dave] Eggers is full of shit,” he writes. This, the essay’s first pull quote, is less a sentence with meaning than a half-baked burn. Engineered to appeal to his (many) readers who already find Eggers detestable, “On Smarm” is rife with an LSAT’s worth of logical fallacies and rhetorical flimflam, relying on pseudo-philosophical trappings, heavy use of hyperbole, self-evident rants, tangential insider anecdotes, and random observations on Edward Snowden in lieu of much actual information. Presumably some other writer is cataloging it all for posterity even as I type.

I prefer to begin by interrogating the stakes of what Scocca clearly sees as his project: speaking truth to power. (Predictably, he sees this as a service only snarkers can provide.) At one point in the piece, Scocca actually invokes the word “evil,” and that judgment knocks around the rest of the essay in his strange constellation of smarmer case studies. (Squint at the first thousand words, and you might come away with the impression Eggers did 9/11.) To better understand Eggers’ tactics, Scocca says, let’s consider the technique of Smarm Lord Ari Fleisher. Is “smarmy” a fair word to use in describing both Eggers and Fleisher? I think so. But considering that one is a writer with cultural cachet and the other was the mouthpiece of an administration that bamboozled our nation into an unjust war, it sort of feels like one of these smarms is not like the other.

The basis of Scocca’s indictment of Eggers as the elitist overlord of Big Smarm—the “defining document of contemporary literary smarm,” or “manifesto,” as he also refers to it—is an email interview Eggers did with some college students in the year 2000. Consider for a moment the emails you were writing at the turn of the century. (Or, if you were never ridiculous, consider the likelihood that, were you an agent of propaganda, you would choose the Harvard Advocate as the platform for your manifesto.) Here is Scocca’s smoking gun, in case you didn’t follow his link. It’s a really entertaining read, but as the hollow heart of “On Smarm,” it’s rather less affecting. However much of a sanctimonious twit Eggers was in that interview—and make no mistake, he was a huge one—how many voices of critical dissent do you imagine his (solicited) opinion actually quelled? Let me go out on a limb and say none.

Thirteen years on from that interview, while the Dave Eggers didactic mode is still set more or less to human-equivalent-of-a-Golden-Retriever, it seems pretty clear he means well. Given his roles as a philanthropist and as a human megaphone, claiming that the Eggers agenda is silencing anyone’s voice is a reach. (In fact, in building a national network of organizations that promote literacy and writing skills, he has demonstrably worked for the opposite.) Say what you will about Eggers’ writing and his anti-snark stance. (I myself approve of both, in moderation.) The world needs a helper dog far more than someone who would kick it.

It’s not just the corrupt ringleader of Big Smarm that Scocca misrepresents. There’s also Isaac Fitzgerald, a longtime fixture on the San Francisco literary scene, whom Scocca chooses to describe only as a publicist who recently took a job as books editor at Buzzfeed. Scocca wastes little time in establishing Fitzgerald as his intellectual inferior. “For a guiding principle of 21st century literary criticism, Buzzfeed’s Fitzgerald turned to the moral and intellectual teachings of Walt Disney in the movie Bambi,” he writes. He fails to mention that as recently as May, Fitzgerald worked as the managing editor of The Rumpus, a prominent literary magazine he now co-owns with the novelist Stephen Elliott. Scocca told the truth, but only partly, and in doing so he made Fitzgerald out to be an ethically dubious rookie dingdong. Far from an oversight, he gave Fitzgerald the exact same treatment back in November.

It’s in these lies of omission that we begin to see the extent of Scocca’s intellectual dishonesty, the most noxious and damaging characteristic a critic can possess. Here’s Stephen Elliott reflecting on the piece in the daily newsletter he writes for The Rumpus:

There’s this “gotcha” moment where, because Dave didn’t visit a tech campus [to] write The Circle, it somehow contradicts something he said thirteen years earlier. It doesn’t, and even if it did, it’s not a crime for a person to contradict him/herself thirteen years down the line.

I’ve always hated that. The false integrity we try to hold each other to and judge one-another against. It doesn’t mean anything to catch someone being inconsistent. Inconsistency is human.

Elliott is Eggers’ friend and colleague—a fact that will, for some, cast doubts on the motives behind his statement. Gut check: do you think Elliott sounds defensive? Smarmy? Or do his words ring true? What sort of absurd inquisition is based on an email from 13 years ago? I love a good takedown piece of a bully or a blowhard as much as anyone, but Scocca’s smug run through the evidence feels like a surrealist monomaniac hosting Meet the Press. The Eggers “manifesto” aside, Scocca never bothers to explain why he thinks the anti-snark charters of The Believer and the Buzzfeed books section are such a threat to the critical enterprise. The piece is pegged to Fitzgerald, imbuing his hire at Buzzfeed with near mystical import. Why exactly is Scocca so worried? Because Jebediah Purdy, circa 1999? Joe Lieberman?? What? Who?

One of the strengths of experimental longform writing is the way in which whatever ideas and events are being explored start to resonate—and clash—in unexpected ways. The effects can be visceral. Scocca’s essay is of course choppy by design. It functions much like a montage in a zombie movie where we see small slices of nightmare situations unfolding in New York, in London, in Mumbai. We are to understand that smarm is happening everywhere. We are under siege. Threatened by extinction. And we must fight back.

But, as the writer Jim Behrle has observed, “There is neither a War on Christmas nor a War on Snark.” Fitzgerald’s decision to focus on positive reviews is one editor’s choice, not a blanket ban. But people get real nervous when they perceive any threat to their sacred duty to be a jerk. I could write a whole other essay on how sad and chilling I found Jacob Silverman’s “epidemic of niceness” piece for Slate Book Review or Scocca’s casually tossed off observation that “a community, even one dedicated to positivity, needs an enemy to define itself against.” But that’s another lament.

Promoting one approach to criticism is like saying there’s only one good way to write fiction—a preposterous stance. But all good-faith critiques come from a place of openness. Open, first of all, in the sense that you should be honest, but open also to the possibility that you’re wrong. Open, above all, to argument. If you’ve never changed your mind about something, chances are you’re not thinking hard enough.

Maria Bustillos, a writer who admires Scocca’s work, has described him as a blunt-force critic, which is apt. The thing about hitting someone over the head with your point is there is no pretense of having a dialogue. Instead, there is the desire to dominate. To conquer. And for all Scocca’s critical attention to the language of bullies, his own work is imbued with the same gross alpha male tone he purports to speak out against.

Last year I entered the arena of literary criticism with my own 9,000-word essay. Like “On Smarm,” it was a piece of cultural criticism that used literature to talk about politics and sincerity. (From Eggers to the George W. Bush administration, we discussed many of the same people.) Scocca, who writes every day for the same website where my piece ran, was one of the first readers to leave a comment: “Seriously…put a sock in it.” That, in my experience, is the Scocca brand of snark: telling those he disagrees with to shut up. That is not being a critic. That is being a dick.

Which is, in a nutshell, the Scocca’s brand of criticism. I wonder how many words he could write if he had something to say.

Soon As I Said It, Seems I Got Sweated

Posted on July 27, 2015 by Leonard Pierce

In Paul Fussell’s brutally perceptive BAD: The Dumbing of America, the late author cites the tastefully small print on a wedding invitation he had received:

We are aware of the plight of the less fortunate and homeless. Please bring a spare article of winter clothing.

The second part of this, Fussell allowed, was perfectly acceptable, even admirable. The first, with its self-congratulatory, attention-seeking, and naggingly proper tone, was bad. Fussell didn’t live long enough to see comics reach a high enough degree of corporate respectability that they have adopted the same mealy-mouthed back-patting that he found to be the common denominator in every big company’s marketing strategy, but he would have found the events of the last few weeks dismayingly familiar.

There’s certainly nothing wrong with Marvel’s hip-hop variant cover experiment. As blatant attempts at money-soaking go, it’s perfectly pleasant, and the material itself ranges from decent to wonderful. There’s not even anything intrinsically wrong with their attempt to capitalize on a cultural phenomenon with which their own engagement has been, to put it as mildly as possible, standoffish. And its admirable that they made an effort to include work by many artists of color in this project, even if they’ve failed to do so in their regular series. Where it all goes wrong is in how, like the well-meaning couple that just wants to translate their friends’ largesse into an attempt to keep a homeless person warm, Marvel can’t help but inserting themselves into the picture and turning what could have otherwise been a harmless exercise in mash-up culture into a gross display of self-adulation. Like so many corporate executives who can’t manage to do a bit of good without turning it into something bad, Marvel executives just couldn’t shut up.

“Marvel Comics and hip-hop culture have been engaged in an ongoing dialogue,” gassed editor-in-chief Axel Alonso when announcing the project. All he had to do was keep his mouth shut, you know? All he had to do was pull the covers off the easel and show off what his people had done, and we might have been impressed enough to actually enjoy it. But with this fat-headed, entirely self-serving comment, he forced our hand. By making the patently absurd claim that Marvel Comics – a company that almost single-handedly invented the trope of giving black characters a name starting with ‘Black’, just in case we didn’t get the picture; a company whose record of hiring black creators is nothing short of dismal; a company whose biggest contribution to hip-hop, as far as I can tell, was creating a mutant character named Bling!, the daughter of two rappers named “Daddy Libido” and “Sexy Mutha” – has been engaged in an ongoing dialogue with hip-hop culture, the company forced us to examine that claim at face value, and it’s as worth as much as a pair of knockoff Air Jordans.

It’s not as if there’s no connection whatsoever between comics and hip-hop. Street culture has always been attracted to four-color crimefighters; I made that point the subject of my first presentation at the EMP Pop Conference almost a decade ago. It’s been reinforced articulately by this site’s founder here. The problem is one that David Brothers, a man who’s far more qualified than Noah or I to perceive, is that what’s happening between Marvel and hip-hop isn’t a dialogue; it’s a monologue. Worse still, it’s a monologue that began with a series of insults – what else are we make of a company that created black characters like the Hypno-Hustler, Charcoal, Night Thrasher, and Dreadlox? What are we to think of a company who reached out to black youth, in conjunction with Kyle Baker, so long ago that the comic came with a cassette tape? What are we to assume from the fact that Marvel’s biggest gesture towards the rap game this century was teaming up with a white rapper eight years past his prime? – and ended with a demand to be thanked?

Brothers’ response only showed how compounded Marvel’s folly had become. Alonso, at least, seems to have a genuine appreciation of hip-hop, but executive editor Tom Breevort, who is widely known as a short-tempered crank, fielded a question about the disparity between a company that employs almost no African-American writers, artists, or editors and a company that expects everyone to give them an atta-boy for cashing in on a cultural phenomenon that they previously ignored. Breevort’s response was so clueless, so tone-deaf and consequence blind, so borderline contemptuous, that it made it seem like no one behind the scenes at Marvel bothered to think the whole thing through before releasing the variant covers into the world accompanied by a press release making it clear that they expected to be praised for it.

Marvel’s management doesn’t quite have the perception gap that DC’s does, if for no other reason that they haven’t employed someone as horrible as Dan DiDio since they got rid of Bill Jemas. (Jemas did his own outreach to the hip-hop community, which went about as well as you might expect.) But they can’t coast on the goodwill generated by their successful film empire forever, and sooner or later, they’re going to have to answer – with a response a lot more thoughtful than “what does one have to do with the other?” – questions about their lack of diversity, their co-option of cultural trends, their treatment of their creators, and their ham-handed barreling through whatever social development they perceive as the trend of the moment. (Someday, our gay-married overlords will hold us all accountable for this.) When that day comes, they better have something to show other than a bunch more variant covers that are worth less than the lies they were printed on. Until then, they need to shut up and stop congratulating themselves. So far, the monologue has consisted of rappers talking to Marvel; if they don’t learn to respect their audience the way that audience has respected them, it’ll soon consist of Marvel talking to itself.

Utilitarian Review 7/25/15

Posted on July 25, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

On HU

Featured Archive Post: Bert Stabler on Bloom County as the last realist comic strip.

Robert Stanley Martin with on sale dates for comics from mid 1944, including lots of Walt Kelly.

Chris Gavaler on Zorro, secret identities, and homosexuality.

Phillip Smith tries to figure out what cartoonist Brandon Graham is doing with the sex and 9/11 references. There’s a longish, interesting thread about porn and criticism and other issues, where Sarah Horrocks, Darryl Ayo, and other folks show up to chat.

Me on freelance pitching and how to get rejected while trying pretty hard.

Kate Polak on gun violence and the limits of empathy.

Jimmy Johnson on Mr. Monk and toxic masculinity.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At Qz.com I wrote about

—why ending the drug war won’t address our incarceration problem.

—Southpaw and the dangers of masculine vulnerability.

At Vice I explained why Ant Man is white.

At the Guardian I wrote about the problems with the new Marvel hip hop variant covers.

At Playboy I wrote about

—Stephen Crane’s story The Monster, and white people writing about race.

—how nostalgia means the new Bloom County isn’t as good as the old Bloom County.

At Ravishly I wrote about Ant Man and shrinking men and women into their respective gender roles.

At Splice Today I wrote about

—why I’m glad blacklivesmatter protestors interrupted Bernie Sanders.

—my favorite albums at midyear.

The Shmoop study guide I worked on for Albee’s Zoo Story.

The Shmoop Study guide I worked on for Melville’s Piazza Tales.

Other Links

Shawn Pryor on Marvel’s hip hop variants.

James Kilgore on why anti-poverty and decarceration have to go together.

Hillary Rodham Clinton is good at politics.

Kathleen Gilles Seidel has put several books online for digital sales, including one of my favorites, “Again”.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

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