On HU
Featured Archive Post: Alex Buchet on EC comics, accuracy and morality.
Reading Anna Akhmatova’s poetry as comics.
Reading Paul Celan’s poetry as not comic.
Sudee on Kieron Gillen’s phonogram and the power of britpop.
Sean Michael Robinson on why Downton Abbey isn’t very good.
Robert Jones, Jr. explains why he is no longer reading mainstream comics.
I talk about Ursula K. Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness and a world without imperialism.
Chris Gavaler on Robin Hood and the history of sex abuse in the Catholic Church.
Our weekly music sharing post featuring Horowitz playing Scarlatti.
Utilitarians Everywhere
At Slate I reviewed David Wojnarowicz, James Romberger, and Marguerite Van Cook’s amazing graphic novel 7 Miles a Second.
At the Atlantic:
—I talk about She Devil! Forgotten super femme fatale!
—I reviewed Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowel’s new album and talked about Emmylou’s career as a collaborator.
—I argue that rom coms are crap because Hollywood sucks, not because love has won out over all in our culture.
—I picked Funeral Mist’s White Stone as a track of the day.
At Splice I talked about Destiny’s Child’s awesome Christmas album.
At Splice I talked about Chinese electronica hipsters White+
Last Saturday I got to talk a bit about Wonder Woman at a screening of a documentary about her at Chicago Filmmakers.
Other Links
Sharon Marcus defends cats.
Michael Nugent analyzes sexist facebook photos.
TNC on my racist city.
Sarah Carr on the hurdles poor kids face on getting into colleges.
Ashle Fetters on nicknaming your romantic prospects.
Robert Stanley Martin reviews Game Change, which he argues is unfair to Palin.
This Week’s Reading
Finished Ursula K. Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness and started Anne Bronte’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Oh…I think I failed to mention that last week I read Anna Akhmatova’s poems, translated by D.M. Thomas. Also I watched the Wigs channel’s web series Blue for a review. Oh, right, and still reading the Fellowship of the Ring to my son…though almost done.
Loved the new Emmylou…
Thank you Noah, for one of the most unique and insightful reviews ever done of 7 Miles a Second.
I just finished Yann Martel’s Life of Pi. I’ll be starting Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth and Moto Hagio’s A, A’ [A, A-prime].
That’s always been my view Emmylou, too, she’s my favorite backup vocalist, but I’ve never much cared for her solo albums. She tends to make whatever she’s on as a backup the best, though: Dylan’s Desire, Parson’s Grievous Angel and Crowell’s Ain’t Living Long Like This. My ideal 70s right there.
That’s not my view of Emmylou! I love her solo albums (at least most of them.) It’s just that many of them are very much collaborations (either because she is covering other’s songs, or working with other performers, or actually singing duets (as on Trio, or the current album.))
I’ve actually been listening to Bluebird from 1989, which is fantastic.Great song selection, nice assists from the McGarrigles and Bonnie Raitt. Brand New Dance from the next year (1990) is awesome too….
Ah, well, I agree she’s a great backup vocalist, then.
The Sarah Carr article made my stomach hurt and gave me flashbacks.
I was the first kid in my family to go to college, and looking back, there were a million times I nearly didn’t make it (and none of my poor friends did). I still remember trying to figure out how to afford the college applications and several colleges saying, Look if you can’t afford to apply, you can’t afford to come. I had no idea what I was doing and unlike the kids in the article, a lot of the admin staff didn’t want to help, so asking the counselors was useless or harmful (mine flat out told me college was too expensive for me).
Some of my teachers cared, though–my English teacher told me to go to the college fair, and that’s where a kind lady at some college booth explained about application fee waivers. Ever since, I’ve told all my little cousins that I’ll explain how things work. Most of them don’t take me up on it, but a few have.
It’s rare (ime), even as a higher ed person now, even in non-traditional arenas (as I am now), to run across people who really understand all the hidden roadblocks of invisible knowledge that’s required to make it to college as a first gen poor student…
Yeah. I think people tell themselves that the aid and so forth means that anyone can go to school, etc….but the real way to make college affordable to people who have less money isn’t to give them aid. It’s to lower the cost. If you make college incredibly expensive, only rich people will be able to afford it. It’s pretty straightforward.
Yes, absolutely. Even with aid to cover tuition itself, there were schools I couldn’t attend because none of the aid covered books and dorm fees and tech fees and so on. And those fees were much higher than I could possibly have earned at a part time job. The whole enterprise is just shockingly expensive.
I must say that the school I did get into (Reed) was actually really good at helping me (and my mother) figure out how to make it all work. Not sure this is still true, but at the time, first year students couldn’t get the money from their loans until they’d attended classes for two months. The money existed, but they wouldn’t disperse it. (To prevent kids applying, getting the money in order to use it for stereos/cars/weed, and then dropping out, presumably.) But if you actually need that money to pay for your books (or rent or food), then how can you study? My school made a special temporary loan for me, but I doubt most schools did.
I think a lot of writing about it (if you get good enough grades, you can get aid) is more aspirational than realistic. Most people can’t get perfect grades, most people can’t get the perfect high paying job to pay off high loans. Realistically, it all needs to be cheaper…..
Thank you Noah for your insightful review of 7 Miles A Second.
Currently reading Jared Diamond’s book about premodern societies. I tried out Nassim Taleb’s new book Antifragile but is deep into I-am-God territory.
Thanks for titling your rebuttal “If Romantic Comedies are Getting Worse”. Chris Orr takes a quote about the business of getting people into the theaters to watch mainstream romantic comedies and spins it out into an argument about quality. The quote is not about quality, it’s about business!
Talking about bad rom coms though, Warm Bodies is not bad because the premise is too fantastical. It’s bad because the premise is too ridiculous to take serious, and the director is too serious about the zombies-as-depressed-persons metaphor to go for big laughs. Also, it’s just not a good movie.
I did like Silver Linings playbook though.
I don’t write the headlines!
Orr explains that he thinks the pertinent issue is quality rather than financial success in his piece — that is, he gives the quote, then says, I want to talk about aesthetics instead.
I think there’s something to the argument that romantic comedies have gotten worse…maybe? It seems like back in the 40s they were better at least. I don’t know that they’ve gotten worse in the last 10 years though. Orr seems to be suggesting that Pretty Woman and When Harry Met Sally were classics and we’ve fallen off from there…but to me both of those movies are utterly irredeemable crap. I just don’t believe that rom coms now are any worse than that…
Ha! I don’t mind When Harry Met Sally. So what was so crappy about it? Too much like Woody Allen (who you also despise)? I already know your objections to Pretty Woman I think.
Woody Allen can be okay. I like Annie Hall. Liked Crimes and Misdemeanors too, I think (it was a long time ago.)
When Harry Met Sally is just smug and precious, I guess. I don’t find either of the two main characters even remotely likable. Just a joyless exercise in middle-drawer sitcom humor. The fact that it’s so beloved is a mystery to me.
Methinks you watch too little middle-drawer sitcom humor – things like Modern Family for example. By comparison, When Harry Met Sally is a work of genius (which it isn’t of course). Sally is obviously meant to be a descendant of Annie Hall.
Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal both give me stomach pains. So that’s probably part of it as well.
I suppose it comes down to one’s definitions, but if we’re talking about Up in the Air and Damsels in Distress, romcoms are far superior to the days of When Harry Met Sally (although Say Anything holds up pretty well from that period). I guess give me Diablo Cody over Nora Ephron. Hell, give me Judd Apatow over her, too. And I much prefer Jason Reitman to Rob Reiner.
Give me norepinephrine over Nora Ephron.
I’ve been wanting to go see Silver Linings Playbook, because I thought Huckabees was really funny (that scene where Naomi Watts has a breakdown during the photo shoot! or the bit where Schwarzman and Huppert are wrestling in the mud), but…that title. I just can’t buy a ticket to a movie with that title; it sounds like it should star Katherine Heigl and Matthew McConaughy. Maybe if I put on some groucho-marx glasses and a big trench coat, maybe…ugh, seriously, that title.
This week I finished The Book of Revelation by Rupert Thomson, which was meh. Can’t decide whether Thomson is really good or really bad at endings. And I started The Bridge by Iain Banks, which is brilliant so far.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
…It seems like back in the 40s [romantic comedies] were better at least.
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Even back in the 30s! Snappy, wisecracking women; a nicely feisty interaction between the genders was routine.
http://www.moviefanfare.com/screwball-comedies-of-the-1930s-40s-when-romance-met-mayhem/
http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/08/07/romantic-comedies-golden-age-when-wit-was-front-row-center/
http://www.amazon.com/Runaway-Bride-Hollywood-Romantic-Comedy/dp/0815411995
The cause for this post-40s decline is hinted at in your critique of this ’57 film:
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She Devil…was made during the anti-feminist post-war backlash when even Wonder Woman herself was reduced to insipid romance plots and mooning after Steve Trevor…
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http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/02/the-woman-they-couldnt-kill-meet-she-devil-forgotten-female-superhero/273475/
Indeed, when WW II was over, and GIs returned home to resume the jobs that had been taken over by women in their absence, there was a huge, concerted campaign to turn Rosie the Riveter back into the Happy Homemaker.
Dior’s long-skirted “new look” pushed a return to “femininity” ( http://universityhonors.umd.edu/HONR269J/projects/petzko/newlook.htm ); the 50s creation of Suburbia meant that women were isolated at home in Levittown-type ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levittown ) developments instead of lively urban settings, where greater social interaction was inescapable. No wonder that use of booze and tranquilizers among these newly housebound (gotta care for the results of the “baby boom,” too!) women soared…
Re that “back-to-the-kitchen’ movement,” Nancy Walker’s “Humor and Gender Roles: The ‘Funny’ Feminism of the Post-World War II Suburbs” is juicily thought-provoking:
http://tinyurl.com/b5v9r5f
And, isn’t the audience that modern films are aimed at substantially different? From adults, the core demographic has become youths with disposable incomes and unsophisticated tastes to match their spoiled upbringings, lack of life-experience.
Re recent personal reading, just finished “To Begin the World Anew: The Genius and Ambiguities of the American Founders” ( http://www.amazon.com/To-Begin-World-Anew-Ambiguities/dp/0375713085 ); then moved on to another of Bartholomew Gill’s Ireland-set murder mysteries, “The Death of an Irish Politician” (AKA “McGarr and the Politician’s Wife”).
I’m still devouring One Piece and loving it; I’m up to volume 10 so far.
TV: I finished the third season of Doctor Who (that is, the second season with David Tennant; in actuality, it’s something like the 38th season…). That is one very good show; I especially like the Human Nature/The Family of Blood two-parter, in which the Doctor turned himself into a human and hid in the past from some alien hunters, and when it became time to regain his memories and become a Time Lord again, he goes through a real crisis that is acted so well and treated so seriously. I like that a show full of crazy sci-fi concepts takes the time to explore the ramifications of its main character callously creating and destroying a person’s life. And I really dig Tennant, who can go from cheekily witty to frantically heroic to agonizingly human to coldly alien on a dime. I’ve barely scratched the surface of this show, but I can definitely see why so many people are so fanatical about it.
Movies: I watched Midnight In Paris; my wife, who usually has no interest in Woody Allen, was excited to see it, and I’ll watch pretty much any of his movies, even though he’s fallen off from his heights by a large margin. I liked the premise; the idea of a nostalgic character getting a chance to visit the past and interact with his heroes is a compelling one. And the acting by the various people playing the likes of Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddleston, a.k.a. Loki!), Hemingway (Pete from House of Cards!), and Dali (Adrian Brody, putting on a silly accent!) was pretty fun. But the angsting over whether one should always romanticize the past or live in the present got pretty damn tiresome, and I hated most of the relationship nonsense in the present, especially Rachel McAdams as Owen Wilson’s wife, who played such an unpleasant, ballbusting shrew (typical of women in late-period Woody Allen movies, unfortunately) that one would wonder why even a doofus like Owen Wilson would marry her (or why McAdams would take the role, for that matter; surely the pleasure of working with Woody Allen isn’t worth portraying such an ugly caricature of a nagging wife who doesn’t respect her husband in the slightest). I can’t believe, of all Woody Allen’s movies, this is the one he wins an Oscar for writing (it’s nowhere near the level of his other wins, Annie Hall and Hannah and Her Sisters). Ugh.
Aw man, Noah, I didn’t know about that Wonder Women panel, or I would have tried to make it. Bummer. You should post something on the site next time. Or maybe I should get on Facebook/Twitter more often and keep up with what’s going on around me…
I didn’t mention it anywhere…sorry about that! It sort of came up quick, and I just spaced notifying folks. My bad.