Caroline Small wrote an interesting commenton Samuel Delany’s view of comics and Scott McCloud; thought I’d reproduce it here.
Jeet and Noah: I guess I am still deeply skeptical about the assertion that Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman represent “Delany’s taste” in comics, rather than a strategic choice of writers to call attention to. I guess I just disagree that “taste” is what’s at stake here at all, or even that “taste” is a particularly useful category for understanding the role that Gaiman and Moore play in what Delany has to say about comics. (I realize I’m making a big deal out of something that I’m sure Jeet said casually, but it seems to me a particularly fecund slip…)
It’s not that I don’t agree to some extent: I find it deeply unpalatable when Delany uses words like “powerful, insightful and brilliant” to describe Scott McCloud. McCloud is the epitome of “middle-of-the-road” as far as I’m concerned. But I tend to read Delany’s praise as strategic rather than sycophantic.
I’m not sure what else from comics Delany could engage OTHER than Gaiman and Moore, given his project of deconstructing the binary between art and genre: despite those writers being palpably middlebrow (and with that I certainly agree), comics just doesn’t have a Marge Piercy or even a Sam Delany of its own that he could grapple with instead. And Gaiman/Moore have the strategic advantage, even over Piercy and Delany himself, of being very familiar to a great many people and therefore valuable as illustration. Jeet, are there comics creators/writers whom you think he should write about instead, that would be less disappointing, but still effectively work for his project?
I think the way I phrased my initial comment led to this notion that Delany exhibits some “highbrow” taste in literature, and that he hasn’t shown as sensitive an “ear” for comics. But — to use Jeet’s examples — Nabokov and Updike are really no less middlebrow than Gaiman and Moore. Delany’s fiction leaves no doubt that he reads and engages writers much much much more ambitious than Nabokov and Updike. But his project (and possibly but not necessarily his taste) dictates that he not privilege the highbrow at the expense of the lowbrow. I prefer to view him as capable of such great appreciation of human creativity that he privileges instead a synthesis of the entire spectrum: low, high, and middlebrow. There’s a “hippie appreciation” to his writing about art that I think has to be recognized and taken in context rather than at face value.
So for me the “disappointing” thing here is not that Delany has less sophisticated taste in comics than he does in literature: I don’t think we have access at all to his taste through his criticism, because he is far too fine a critic to be concerned with matters of taste.
What’s disappointing — although, really, it’s not so much disappointing as fascinating — is that as a writer he wasn’t able to make as much hay out of his perspective in comics as he was in fiction. Sam Delany’s prose SF really does participate in and advance his project of challenging the ways in which we presume genre cannot be art: Dhalgren is an essential, if not the essential, text for re-examining the conventional wisdom about how the strictures of genre characteristics preclude literary experimentation. But you both pointed out that his comics do not challenge the binary between genre and art in the same way. That’s interesting. Saying that he has middlebrow taste in comics is not sufficient to account for the fact that what Sam Delany has to offer can’t complicate and “elevate” graphic genre fiction in in the same way that it did prose genre fiction…
It’s a fun thread in general; Caro has some more thoughts, as do Robert Stanley Martin, Jeet Heer, and others.
Last week [when this first ran], the right’s five-minute hate was directed against pajama boy, a guy in an ad encouraging young people to sign up for Obamacare. I usually don’t pay much attention to the right’s five-minute hates, but I happened to click through on this one, and was somewhat startled to discover that this random guy looks kind of like me. I’ve even got a onesie that looks a big like that (my son calls it a sleep-skirt.) And the curly hair, strong features, prominent nose, sharp eyebrows, glasses…yep. He’s younger and handsomer, but there’s a similarity. Which is to say that he, like me, looks Jewish. And just to drive the point home, some anti-pajama-boy memes apparently post a “How did you know I went to Oberlin?” tag across the picture. I went to Oberlin, which is known both for being a very liberal school, and for having a sizeable number of Jews in its student body.
Rich Lowry sneers that pajama boy is “so nerdy he could guest-host on an unwatched MSNBC show.” The slur isn’t exactly surprising; Jewishness and nerdiness are often conflated, or equated (see Woody Allen or Howard Wolowitz.) Assimilated or model minorities are generally seen as unmanly or womanish; what happened to Jewish males is now happening more or less to Asian males.
I guess I could go on now to accuse Lowry and the right in general of anti-Semitism here. But the truth is, I don’t think that that’s exactly what’s happening. In the same paragraph where Lowry sneers at pajama boy’s nerdiness, he writes that the guy is “probably reading The Bell Jar and looking forward to a hearty Christmas meal of stuffed tofurkey.” He’s plugging into stereotypes around Jewish appearance (nerdishness, Oberlin), but those stereotypes adamantly don’t for him link to Jewishness. He knows pajama boy is nerdy, he’s catching the cultural signs rooted in ethnic difference, but he doesn’t link those signs to ethnic difference in any way. It’s not even clear he knows where they come from.
Again, you could see this as indicative of the persistence of anti-Jewish sentiment and stereotypes. But to me it seems more like a sign of just how marginalized and defanged anti-Semitism has become in an American context. We’re beyond a dog whistle here; the prejudice and vitriol has been basically completely severed from its original ethnic target. Lowry and the right literally do not see that this man is Jewish. The fact that he may well not be Jewish simply underlines the point. Prejudice creates a stereotyped view of what Jews look like. That’s gone. So when confronted with a guy who looks (like me) Jewish, Lowry doesn’t immediately think he’s Jewish, which he may not be. Stereotypical Jewish features still provoke a shadow of prejudice, but they don’t any longer link to “Jewish”. People who say, “I don’t see race,” are pretty much full of crap — but it’s different when you talk about Jews. People really don’t see them. They don’t have preconceptions about what they look like; they don’t assume that someone who looks like a Jew is a Jew. At worst, they see somebody who is kind of nerdy. But the original ethnic basis for that nerdiness is gone.
On the one hand, it’s not especially pleasant to realize that some not insignificant number of people think that my looks alone make me an object of ridicule. I’d thought I’d stopped having to deal with that when I got out of high school. But, on the other hand, I basically did stop having to deal with it. Even these folks who clearly are trying to be as unpleasant as possible aren’t able to figure out what my looks mean, much less connect them to an actual systematic program aimed at making the lives of people who look like me miserable. As pajama boy, I face no prejudice. I can work where I like, marry whom I like, even make policy at a conservative think tank, if that’s my bliss. Hate lingers, but it loses a lot of its sting when it can’t remember who its hating.
Art exists in culture. By the same token, culture is represented in, and influences, art. That seems like a pretty obvious and irrefutable point. And yet, to talk about the links between art and culture consistently leads to panicked, even apocalyptic denunciations from those who otherwise occupy little intellectual common ground. Rather than being seen as complementary, or continuous, art and society are seen as matter and anti-matter; bringing them together, it is feared, will cause the end of all things.
Freddie deBoer fears, in particular, that the confluence of art and society will cause the end, or at least the decay, of society. In a Beyoncé think-piece calling for the end of Beyoncé thinkpieces, deBoer raises the familiar lefty fear that interest in art is a deadly form of false consciousness, distracting the intellectually flaccid from the real business of ridding the world of hegemons.
As I’ve said for a long time, a lot of progressive educated white types have essentially replaced having a politics with having certain cultural attachments and affectations. Really aggressively praising the Wire becomes a stand-in for “I am not racist.” Complaining that Selma was robbed becomes a stand-in for having done the necessary work to understand the history of race in America. Telling anyone who’ll listen that you think all of the creativity and risk are in hip hop now becomes a stand-in for advancing a meaningful political platform that could actually improve the lives of actually-existing black people. White people are so weird about Beyonce because Beyonce has become an all-purpose floating signifier, a vessel on to which bourgie white folks project all of their desires for how other people should see them. These vague associations with arts and media are intended to send a message that, if voiced explicitly, we all know by now to ridicule: some of my best friends are black.
It’s easy to get distracted here by the sweeping assumptions of bad faith — but that’s just standard deBoer being deBoer. What’s more interesting is the way that the typical Marxist/Frankfurt School mistrust of the popular arts is retooled in terms of racial justice. “Bourgeois” pops up rhetorically as it might have for Khruschev (who rather gloriously characterized an exhibit of experimental art as being equivalent to what you would see if you looked up from inside a toilet bowl at someone’s ass descending.) But the main sneer for deBoer is not directed at the middle-class, but at white people. DeBoer’s argument (with the unfalsifiable ad hominem mind reading taken out) is that white people care about Beyoncé, and that talking about her is (therefore) self-indulgent and decadent. Real revolutionaries should talk (all the time?) about income inequality, not pop music.
The problem for deBoer here is that black people have an incredibly long, rich, and important history of caring about art, and seeing it as central to their struggle for freedom and justice. Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Miles Davis, Sam Cooke, bell hooks, James Baldwin, and many many more, would all be surprised to hear that their focus on cultural expression and representation was misguided and antithetical to the civil rights movement. Even if you’re just talking about Beyoncé, there are no shortage of black folks who have debated her as a political and cultural force (as just a sample, here’s Janell Hobson, Ebony Elizabeth,bell hooks and Janet Mock, Sydette Harry…the list could go on and on.)
DeBoer leaves himself some wiggle-room; you could read him as arguing that it’s only white people whose Beyoncé thinkpieces are awful. Perhaps he thinks, not that Beyoncé thinkpieces are bad in themselves, but that only African-Americans should be able to write about black popular music. But then you end up in a place where Beyoncé is a specialist, marginalized issue. Black people can talk about this thing that doesn’t matter; white people like deBoer will be over here analyzing matters of authentic importance, like the failure of the left, or the failure of the left (deBoer’s repertoire is somewhat limited). The need to separate trivial discussions of art from important discussions of social issues ends up effectively erasing black voices and black expression, either by suggesting those voices don’t exist, or by assuming that what they say is of only marginal importance to a struggle which is (in theory) centered on black people’s lives. (HT: Sarah Shoker for explaining this issue to me.)
Sarah Horrocks comes at the issue of art and culture from a very different place. DeBoer is worried that discussions of art will distract from the important work of social change; Horrocks is concerned that the battle for social change will distract from the particular, transcendent importance of art.
I do not believe that art has societal power. I believe art creates the sacred. What I mean by that is that, for each individual that experience a piece of art, a space exists that only that person experiences, that can be profound and moving, based upon what they have projected out as their perception, and how that filters back to them with this thing called art. But that experience is not something you can translate to another person. Two people can see the same piece of art, but the experience they have is never wholely translatable to the other. You take that shit to your grave. I know this because as a critic, I spend tons and tons of words trying to explain the power of my experience–but in the end, all I can convey is just that…the power of my experience. But even if you think you experience something similar–it is still different.
So what that means is that art can be extremely powerful to the individual, but because it is not translatable to society as a whole, it’s power is isolated to each individual that perceives the work.
It’s popular to say that art is this super powerful thing. This notion that a great work of art can crack the world in half. It is a moronic idea, and I say that as an artist, who absolutely believes in the creation of the sublime experience. But if art was so powerful–then why couldn’t Godard stop Vietnam? Why couldn’t Ralph Ellison end racism? Was their art not powerful enough? And if their art isn’t powerful enough–how can a bullshit issue of batman be that powerful?
Horrocks’ piece is much more careful, and much more generous, than deBoer’s. Partially as a result, she says directly what is implicit, or danced around, in his piece. Ralph Ellison (or those Beyoncé thinkpieces) have not ended racism; therefore Ralph Ellison (or Zainab Akhtar criticizing Horrocks) are socially pointless; they don’t matter, and cannot matter. The fact that neither the Civil War nor Martin Luther King ended racism is an conveniently ignored (by deBoer as well). Art can affect people individually Horrocks says, and is valuable for that reason. But it can’t have any social or political effect — a truth witnessed by the fact that great art with social commitments has not created a utopia.
Which leaves you, with deBoer, wondering why all those fools like Ralph Ellison and bell hooks bother to try to deal with political issues in their art or criticism. It seems like you should either be creating individual AbEx yawps, or organizing protests. Mixing the two is dumb — and dangerous. For deBoer, it leads to decadent bourgie white people congratulating themselves rather than overturning capitalism the way they should be. For Horrocks, writing still in the shadow of Frederic Wertham, “A society where art is considered powerful is not a safe one for art to be created in.” If people think art matters, there will be censorship, and even violence, against artists. The problem with censorship is not that voices for freedom are silenced, but that the state and those creating political art both collude in a silly but tragic error. If only Paul Robeson had realized that political expression was irrelevant, he needn’t have bothered with all those songs about racial and class justice, and he never would have been blacklisted.
This isn’t the conclusion that either Horrocks or deBoer wants to arrive at, of course. Rather, Horrocks hopes that separating art and political expression will leave the world free for purer, less constrained artistic expression. DeBoer hopes that separating art and society will lead to purer, more effective politics. But if you stipulate that art can’t change the world, you end up with art made only by people who don’t care about changing the world — which makes much of the art by marginalized people irrelevant or incoherent. And similarly, creating a politics walled off from discussions of culture or aesthetics ends up with a politics of struggle oddly divorced from the emotions, or thoughts, or interests, or feelings of those on behalf of whom you’re supposedly speaking. #BlackLivesMatter is a movement, but it’s also a poem — which is why, with the power of art to mean more than it means, it can, and has to, apply to black women (and men) at the Grammys, as well as to black men (and women) targeted by police.
Horrocks loves art, and wants to see it protected. DeBoer is committed to creating a better world, and doesn’t want that struggle debased. I love art and want a better world too. But I don’t think you can have art without the impetus, or hope, of change, and I don’t think you can get to a better world by denying the power of dreams. Surely if the African-American experience in this country has demonstrated anything, it’s that you can’t take the struggle out of art, nor the art out of the struggle.
Jordannah Elizabeth is one of my favorite contemporary musicians; I picked her “Bring to the Table” as the best album of 2014.Her new album, “A Rush” is going is streaming on Bitch now; Jordannah let me interview her about it.
Noah: Your last album, “Bring to the Table” was mostly in a folk music vein, but there are a couple of tracks here — “A Rush” and “14 Minus 13” — that seem almost like left-field R&B pop, like FKA Twigs perhaps. Why did you decide to move in that direction? Was it listening to different music, working with different collaborators…?
Well, Bring to the Table was a clean folk album because my drummer missed his airplane from Baltimore to the studio in San Francisco. He was the ace up my sleeve that was going to bring a unique spin to the sound of the music. I rejected Bring to the Table for several months because it was a really structured album. I put it out because I had an open night at El Rio in San Francisco, and I thought, “Well, why not throw an album release party?” With that said, for Bring to the Table, I was inspired by a Bob Dylan – Lightenin’ Hopkins and Etta James vibe…so that came across in the sound.
Breck Brunson and Steve Kille [producers on the new album] appeal to different aspects of my musical persona. Breck is an experimentalist. He’s a beat maker and a visual artist. With him, I wanted to do some experimental trip hop stuff. I love Massive Attack, Portishead, Shabazz Palaces and FKA Twigs. In fact, I discovered FKA in Breck’s kitchen…so yes, that stuff was an influence, but I really just sat in Breck’s studio and let his work inspire me. Some of those beats are several years old, so “14 Minus 13” and his remix for “A Rush” are strictly him. You have to ask him who his personal influences are.
Steve did the live studio songs. His goal was to capture me in my true element. He wanted a raw live look at my songwriting skills. I didn’t record the original version of “A Rush” until I sat with Steve because I knew I could just sit down, have some whiskey and let myself just exist and play. I think Steve understands people in a way a lot of people don’t. He’s empathetic and patient. Baltimore came out because I’d been itching to rerecord a demo version I did. We had some time, do he encouraged me to just sit down and freestyle the a folk cover of the track. Breck and Steve lived in DC and I am from Baltimore, so we all had that bond as well.
“A Prayer for Black America” has a lot of gospel touches, it seems like. I was curious if you had sung in church?
Breck made the music for “A Prayer”. But yes, my father has been a preacher for 35 years. I grew up in the Baptist church. I went to church often until I was about 15 years old. I sang in choirs all through grade school and in college. I am classically trained, so I sang classical church cannons for my education along with traditional black gospel music in church. I love gospel music. I love African American spirituals… I also love Ave Maria. It is all a part of me.
I was very broken and saddened by the Travyon Martin and Mike Brown killings. As a journalist, I made the choice not to make a statement through writing. Writing is what I do, but I felt a facebook post, a short message, or a letter was not enough. I am a spiritual person, a sister of three brothers, a daughter and a Black woman before I am a writer.
I wrote this song as an intrinsic message of comfort to my community. I am praying for us all. -When I saing “Hold us down…” in the song, I mean “hold down our fort.” When someone in the Black community says “I’m holdin’ it down” it means “I have things under control.” “Keep us clean, keep us lean” is 70s jive talk (old school Black slang). To be clean and lean, means you look together and healthy. Our language- it bonds us.
There are a number of live solos at the end of the album — you usually perform live is that right? But you collaborate in the studio? Do you have a preference? Or what do you enjoy about performing solo vs. working with other folks, and vice versa?
Well, the live solo songs are live studio recordings. Steve Kille produced them. I think it is important having a good producer whether you are singing over their beats or if you’re in their booth alone, with just you and your guitar.
I play solo shows, yes, but I am never completely alone when I’m making an album. It takes a village to do anything. I’m never alone in the room when I am playing a solo show either. Music is collaborative even if it just means vibrations are hitting ear drums… it takes at least two for it to exist.
I know you’ve said you’re planning on giving up your music career after this album. What’s led you to decide to stop? And are you going to stop all together? Recording, playing live, playing on your own — the whole thing?
I got really sick, and I was scared when I said I was going to stop. I am getting better now. I don’t think I am going to stop. What I meant was that I want these album to really sink into people’s hearts. Bring to the Table started picking up momentum months after I recorded and released it. I’m realizing that I should let these two albums exist. Now, I got through this sophomore indie album (A Rush). I will promote it and play some shows, but yeah, I want to slow down. I want to travel for pleasure. I also have a journalism and writing career that I enjoy and a personal life that needs tending to.
When I put out an album, no matter how many people I have on my team, on my side, in my band, it all ultimately falls on me. I pay everyone and for everything out of my pocket. Indiegogo takes care of maybe 20% of my expenses (thanks to my kind contributors. I love you!) I’d like to put my money into a savings account.
I have had a couple of major illnesses during this process as well. I lost a loved member of my family, lovers left, friends got weird and doing a press tour and working full time is just hard. I am human…
But you know, if a label were to pick me up and help me with the work load, I’d make another record sooner than later. It’s just intense being 100% indie. I’m blessed to be able to do it and do it well, but I think it’s time I have management and a label to support my work load.
In his study of the Batman TV show from last year, Matt Yockey argues that season three’s introduction of Batgirl (Yvonne Craig) carefully maintains patriarchal norms. Batgirl is always subordinate to Batman, Yockey says, and/or to her dad, Commisioner Gordon — or even to Alfred. “The implicit threat of the female crime fighter is contained by Alfred’s knowledge of her dual identities.” Batgirl gets to be somewhat heroic, but ultimately some guy in Gotham is always the boss.
This analysis fails to take into account one small fact. Namely, Season Three (or at least the first few episodes I’ve seen) is not an ordered hierarchy. Instead, it is a huge, staggering, lurching mess. The second episode in particular, with Frank Gorshin returning as the Riddler after a season long absence, teeters on the verge of utter incoherence, before plunging gleefully over the edge.
Seasons 1 and 2 followed a regular two-episode formula arc, from the introduction of the villain to the meeting with the commissioner through the cliffhanger to the escape and on to the defeat of the bad guy. But season three exchanges the two-parters for single episodes, and throws in the addition of Batgirl as an extra bonus crimefighter. The result is a plot that see-saws widely every which way. The Riddler pretends to be the prizefighter Mushi Nebuchudnezzer, drugs various prizefighters, wheels Joan Collins out as a super-villainness who sings a high-pitched note to mind-control other prizefighters, calls Batman a coward to lure him into a fight, uses magnets, tries to mind control Batgirl, fails, and connives with a sports reporter as the narrative veers back and forth between Batgirl running around and Batman and Robin running around, with a brief interlude for Dick Grayson’s aunt Harriet Cooper to explain that she’s been traveling abroad. The winking, knowing humor of the first two seasons dissolves into manic idiocy, summed up by Frank Gorshin bouncing and bobbing around the prize-fighting ring, looking punch-drunk one moment, walking into Batman’s fist the next, gleefully punching the magnetized Caped Crusader from behind in the third.
I guess it’s possible that the show’s creators were nervous about the threat of a female crime fighter and were trying to carefully maintain patriarchal order. But that’s not what happens. Instead, the introduction of Batgirl coincides with a show going utterly off the rails. Batman, who in earlier seasons has every answer at his bat-gloves’ finger-tips, now seems to be almost drowning in the whirlwind of plot. He doesn’t know who Batgirl is, and barely seems to know what he’s doing as he thrashes around in the ring with the Riddler until Batgirl demagnetizes him. In the next episode, (featuring Joan Collins again in a skirt so short it’s amazing it got past the censors) Batman, who has been resistant to the blandishments of all other villainnesses, has his Batbrain scrambled, and has to be rescued by Batgirl and Robin.
I wouldn’t say this is some sort of programmatic feminist message. But the first two seasons of Batman always carefully balanced celebrating the superhero as all powerful fuddy-duddy force of order and mocking him for being an all powerful fuddy-duddy force for order. In season three, the female crimefighter arrives, and the fuddy-duddy force for order experiences some sort of apocalyptic bat seizure. System disintegrates; super-villains profligately flock together, Bruce Wayne’s will, heretofore inviolable, is mushed by the exigencies of plot and the power of Joan Collins.
Most of the mix up is no doubt a simple the failure of capital, as cratering popularity and slashed budgets undermined the Wayne fortune and the shows’ shooting budget. But part of it is, too, the addition of that Domino Daredoll. Spending narrative time with the Batgirl-cycle may not topple the patriarchy, but it at least leaves it in massive disarray.
Me on Andrew Sullivan and the Iraq war as blogging psychodrama.
Julian Chambliss on Flash, Arrow, and the history of the world’s greatest crossovers.
Chris Gavaler on Justified and how if a series goes on too long you end up with nihilism.
Me on Kathleen Gilles Seidel’s “More Than You Dreamed” and the how romance novels can be ambiguous.
Roy T. Cook with a transitional post for PencilPanelPage — they’re going to be posting irregularly rather than weekly. Check the post out for their votes for the best posts they’ve done so far.
Jog on Aamir Khan’s PK and gentle religious satire, Bollywood style.
