On HU
Featured Archive Post: Chris Gavaler’s students review Spider-Man 2.
Me on why it’s not morally wrong to send your kid to private school.
Ng Suat Tong on the subversive blandness and bland subversion of Ms. Marvel.
Sean Michael Robinson on Depeche Mode, Doré and the denigration of craft.
Sarah Shoker on the economics of fantasy and why nerds like stuff.
Roy T. Cook asks if Tong of the Fantastic Four is transgendered.
Kailyn Kent on why suggestions of lighting for wine are stupid.
Utilitarians Everywhere
I contributed a piece to the Orange Is the New Black roundtable at Public Books, which really kicks the series satisfyingly. My piece is on the way that the series uses hoary lesbian tropes from the 1950 prison film Caged.
At the Chicago Reader I did a short review of Edie Fake’s wonderful Memory Palaces, which he’ll be reading from at Quimby’s tomorrow.
At the Atlantic I wrote about how Beyoncé critiques bell hooks.
At Salon I wrote about:
— the 12 greatest albumsof the 90s.
—how twitter has enabled sex worker speech.
—Comic Book Resources’ decision to revamp their comments in the light of sexist abuse.
At Splice Today I wrote about
—Liberals for the Republican establishment
— why mainstream sites cover Game of Thrones even though no one watches it.
At the Dissolve I wrote about the mediocre documentary Next Year in Jerusalem, about nursing home patients visiting Israel.
Other Links
Rob Liefeld…what more can you say?
Dani Paradis on a camp for children to express whatever gender they want.
Jonathan Bernstein on why campaign finance reform isn’t worth the candle.
Linda Holmes on romance fiction and women’s health.
I looked at that Rob Liedeld link and decided that maybe we’re all missing the point. After all, the anatomy of the woman in that picture is more distorted than the anatomy of the women in Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, to name just one example that I looked up for comparison.
He can’t be that far off unless it’s on purpose. Maybe he’s secretly a great artist, and we just haven’t realized it yet?
I felt bad about beating on such an easy target and looked up some of his recent work to see if I could say anything nice. His grasp of anatomy has improved, but it’s still a little distracting (spindly ankles, extra-long thighs, etc.). His website has a well-written gush on the Claremont/Byrne run of the X-Men. He makes several excellent points about Byrne’s art at the time. It’s odd to me that we can admire the same work for the same reason, but he still creates in a style I really dislike. To each their own, I guess.
Regarding the coverage of GOT: I’d say certain magazines cover it more than junk like the Big Bang Theory or whatever, because the people writing for those mags think (correctly) it’s a more intelligent show with more interesting stuff going on. But, really, your sample is very limited. People magazine and tons of other mags regularly seen on display while waiting to check out at the local drugstore don’t cover the stars and plots of Mad Men and GOT near as much as the more popular intellectual mags you focus on. The truly popular mags cover the shows and stars that their readership love. It’s funny that your own limited view is what led to you thinking there’s some baffling elitist control of what’s being covered on TV. Fear not, the junk is overwhelmingly promoted almost everywhere if you ever care to look.
Hey Charles. You misunderstand the article. I’m not claiming there’s some elitist conspiracy. I’m saying that coverage decisions are based, not on quality or popularity, but on genre.
You kind of make my point for me here.
“I’d say certain magazines cover it more than junk like the Big Bang Theory or whatever, because the people writing for those mags think (correctly) it’s a more intelligent show with more interesting stuff going on.”
You’re naturalizing your own genre preferences as objective markers of quality. But they aren’t objective markers of quality. I’ve seen Orange Is the New Black and I’ve seen Big Bang Theory, and neither is very good, but the first certainly isn’t hugely or clearly better than the second. Same with Breaking Bad.
But the point again is that referring to quality as the reason something gets covered more is patently ridiculous. You hate Beyonce, right? Those magazines cover her obsessively. Are the folks who write about her and Game of Thrones just suddenly stupid when they write about Beyonce? Or is the issue really not quality, but something else?
And of course people talk about Nora Roberts in some places. She’s incredibly popular. So is Big Bang Theory.
As you demonstrate, though, people can get really defensive when you suggest that their genre preferences have something to do with genre.
I do enjoy that you’re claiming there can’t be an elitist conspiracy because this stuff gets covered in People (which I look at every week just about, fwiw; my wife subscribes.) People being a well known marker of elite status. It’s like polo with staples.
Oh, and just so you know; People and Us really don’t cover Big Bang Theory pretty much at all. The television they focus on most consistently is reality TV, pretty much.
It’s true that I don’t much understand your point: people are being elitist about which TV shows they cover because of some great conspiratorial support for “genre” — which includes GOT and Orange is the New Black, but not sitcoms like BBT or the procedural NCIS. Yeah, that makes no sense to me.
I’m not naturalizing my preferences, but I do think it’s true that GOT is a much more thoughtful, better shot, better acted, better written and more emotionally complex show than something like NCIS or BBT. Yeah, that’s objectively true (both that I’m thinking it and as a proposition). I’m guessing that when you say that neither Orange nor BBT is very good, you really mean that you feel your statement true only within the context of your private thought bubble at the time you’re typing out the evaluation, but you don’t believe anyone else should agree with you, so please just dismiss whatever you’ve just written. I’ll grant you that, if that’s what you really believe, but I kind of doubt it. Just like no solipsist ever exits by a window, no subjectivist ever bothers to argue with anyone else.
As for writing about Beyonce, I’m guessing it’s different people than the GOT fans, but maybe not. Maybe if you gotta cover R&B the same way you gotta cover TV for your pop intellectual mag, you cover what you think is best in the field. Maybe Beyonce is the best in current R&B. I’ve heard that opinion voiced before. That just suggests TV is in better shape than R&B. But I’m not really going to put much effort into figuring out why both Beyonce is covered more than God. I assume it’s because people have really bad taste in music, including pop music critics. Or maybe it’s because Beyonce is “genre” and other musical acts receiving less coverage aren’t. (TV critics have pretty bad taste in TV, too, FWIW.) I like it when something I love is loved by a fairly large group of people, because it’s so fucking rare. Most of the time, it’s stuff like Beyonce that people go on about and I come across as a person who hates “everything.”
I don’t see it being much important what TV shows People magazine covers, just that whatever the truly popular show is, you’re baffled as to why it isn’t covered as throughly by a few writers for pop intellectual mags as a handful of shows on subscription cable channels aimed at a little more a higher calibre of audience. You think it has something to do with a conspiracy about genre, rather than that the limited sample of people doing the writing aren’t probably the people who really get absorbed by the mundane rituals of hillbillies who make duck calls (unless, of course, the hillbilly makes a scary statement about race or gender). (BBT, on the other hand, seems to get quite a bit of geek online coverage, so I’m not sure that’s a good example of a popular show with little coverage.)
I guess I don’t see why you’re not more baffled about coverage of Beyonce than of Mad Men.
I’m not really baffled by either. And I didn’t say BBT had little coverage. And I’m not talking about elitist conspiracies.
So…
I guess I’ll try one more time. Mainstream magazines often present their coverage as if what they’re covering is either more popular than everything else, or else more interesting than everything else. It’s a claim that there’s some sort of objective reason for the coverage. In fact, though, it’s just another fandom. The things get covered because there’s a genre interest in the Golden Age of Television, or pop music, or what have you. They cover what they cover because they cover it, basically. It’s the same reason comics blogs cover comics and superhero films and some sci-fi or whatever. It’s not because GofT is more interesting than every other show on television (which even you can’t say it is, right? You haven’t seen every other show on television, I”m pretty sure.) And if the question was, what is the most interesting thing we could write about, even you wouldn’t pick Game of Thrones, probably; there must be something in all of culture that you’d rather think about.
“I’m guessing that when you say that neither Orange nor BBT is very good, you really mean that you feel your statement true only within the context of your private thought bubble at the time you’re typing out the evaluation, but you don’t believe anyone else should agree with you, so please just dismiss whatever you’ve just written.”
Actually, what I mean is that it’s possible for folks to have different opinions about what’s best. In my case, I don’t see much difference in quality between OITNB and BBT. Since I’m actually one of the people who writes about pop culture for mainstream magazines, that at least should call into question your claim that people write about what they’re interested in when they write for these places. That’s maybe true to some extent, but I can tell you from experience that I am not allowed to write about even fairly popular things that I am interested in because they don’t fit the genre requirements. It happens all the time. It’s frustrating, but it is what it is. If I was interested in Game of Thrones and Mad Men, I’d be in much better shape to make pitches. Both of them sound really dreadful, though, and I haven’t been able to make myself watch them just for work. (They do both look better than House of Cards, I’ll admit.)
RE: Beyonce vs. Mad Men. Beyonce is really, really popular. She’s about the most popular performer in American music right now, I think. So if you’re going to cover pop, there’s some reason to think she’d be covered. But nobody watched Mad Men, so popularity doesn’t seem like it works as a reason to cover it. That’s all.
I don’t really think Beyonce is exactly covered just because she’s popular. She’s covered for the same reason Mad Men is covered; because she’s in the genre of things that mainstream pop culture mags believe is important. (She gets a lot more coverage than Rihanna, I think, who is also hugely popular.)
As an example of what I’m talking about…I have some luck pitching superhero comics, even though their audience is vanishingly small. Pitching romance novel coverage is a lot trickier, even though the audience for romance novels is way bigger than the audience for superhero comics. And no, it’s not because superhero comics are more interesting or better than romance novels. They really are not.
“Actually, what I mean is that it’s possible for folks to have different opinions about what’s best.”
Sure, some 2nd grader says Jane Austen is really stupid. You say that she’s one of the great novelists. This disagreement is possible. And it’s possible even if it’s true that Jane Austen is, in fact, either stupid or not stupid. But is it your view that there’s no objective reason for believing Austen is either stupid or not stupid, that it’s just the editors of culture determining this for no apparent reason other than they happen to like or not like Jane Austen? I don’t believe anyone ultimately disavows the substance of their own views on art like that. It’s a bullshit position that’s offered usually in the defense of some supposedly ignored art (in whatever medium). Maybe the intent is good, but it leads to really dumb and even corrupt places.
I would guess the reason for what’s chosen for print is based on what the editors like and think will get attention. I would guess that’s why the online Atlantic doesn’t tend to discuss current issues in metaphysics that I’m interested in (couldn’t find any mention of “correlationism” that they’ve made in a brief Google search, for example), but it does cover every gender and race squabble on Tumblr and Twitter in tedious detail (easy enough to find a connection between ‘misogyny’ and the Atlantic).
My dearly departed grandmother read romance novels out the ass, but I’m pretty sure she never picked up an issue of the Atlantic and the like. Maybe the readership of such mags overlap significantly with the viewers of the Golden Age, but not so much with the Harlequin readers. I don’t know, since I don’t have any data handy. Seems like a good guess to me, though. I probably won’t read an article on romance books, but I might read some article defending the Big Bang Theory, despite not thinking either is definitively superior to the other. But, then again, I’m probably not the best example of the relevant target demographic. So I’d say look at the hits and sales of the mags. It’s not just about the size of the audience for a particular topic, but it has a lot to do with the perceived target readership and predicting their habits.
If it were just about the size of audiences for a topic, then why not have more conservative Christians writing about contemporary Christian fiction etc.? Hollywood learned this economic lesson from Mel Gibson. There’s your likely answer more or less. Such Christians do go to the movies, but would they switch to reading the Atlantic if it had fewer feminists or whoever writing for them? Maybe the editors shouldn’t be so “genre”-biased.
And there’s also the factor that if a mag has success covering certain things, then they’re going to keep going to that well. They’re likely reticent to change things too much as long as people keep clicking on Beyonce and Mad Men.
Charles, if I wasn’t willing to consider the possibility that I was wrong about aesthetic matters, why would I ask you to write here? We disagree about near everything.
And lots of smart people have said interesting things about Jane Austen being no good (the Bronte’s most notably.) I don’t agree with them…but I don’t exactly think they’re wrong, the way you can be wrong about a math problem.
Most of the rest of your discussion is all things I agree with. You’re explaining the intersections of genre and economics, which is fine, but doesn’t really contradict anything I’ve said. Genres and fandoms are certainly economic strategies. I wouldn’t dispute that.
Saying that you might be wrong about something is entirely different from saying that we can’t determine whether you might be wrong about something. If you’re disagreeing with someone else’s evaluation, then you either believe you have a good reason for doing so, or you don’t really believe that there’s any legitimacy to your disagreeing with them. It’s not about the intelligence of the person you’re disagreeing with, but about whether you believe there’s any substance to your own POV. Similarly, this doesn’t require that you believe you ever have the final answer to any question, only that you have to believe that there’s a possibility of justifying a position on something other than arbitrariness. Without that, you can’t ever justify having an argument with anyone else about any topic whatsoever.
You appear to think that the only reason to talk to people is to convince them that you’re right. That seems like a silly reason to talk about art, to me. Nobody convinces anyone of anything for the most part. The reason to talk about these matters is because one is interested in them and because you can learn things from others even without necessarily agreeing.
I’d agree that aesthetic opinions aren’t arbitrary. But that’s a long way from saying that Game of Thrones is so clearly more intelligent than everything else that everybody will of course want to cover it. (Which is a position you’ve sort of backed away from, if I’m reading correctly.)
No, I thought we were only talking about disagreeing on the relevance etc. of certain popular art and how it’s covered, not the subject of conversation itself. Thus, I was limiting my comments to disagreement.
And I never said GOT is covered because it’s intelligent, but that the people writing for the relevant mags here “think” it’s more intelligent (which I concurred with). They get more out of it, can say more about it, than duck calls. It’s easy enough to talk about race and gender in relation to the show. These are part of the show, after all. So, no I haven’t backed away from that.
You like to talk about gender a whole bunch, which seems to fit into the Atlantic fairly well. If you only wanted to talk about gender and GOT, you’d be set.
Well, I agree that some of the folks who write for the Atlantic probably feel like there’s more to say about GoT than about some other things. I just don’t think that means there actually is more to say. I could say tons of stuff about Big Bang Theory and gender, for example. Probably about reality television, if I was interested in watching that. Criticism really isn’t limited by subject matter. I think folks get confused about that.
I would be set if I wanted to talk about GoT more…which as I’ve pointed out, somewhat refutes your claim that the issue is that folks who write for the Atlantic want to write about this thing x. I don’t want to write about that, I write for them. So the explanation is not just writer’s preferences. There’s more at work.
You could simply be the odd man out…? Surely it’s your editor who matters the most and who can choose to shape the Atlantic blog as she/he sees fit.
On a side note, there’s little doubt that Noah should have chosen to watch GoT instead of OITNB. More long term potential for articles, more popular in general and among Atlantic readers (I assume), covers more ground which he’s actually interested in (race, gender-sexism, the fantasy tradition, politics etc.), and is generally more palatable as popcorn. I think he would have “enjoyed” it more despite the huge investment in time. OITNB is just boring/irritating.
Well, there’s a difference between analyzing a show from it’s socio-political complications and what the show is trying to say. Everything is about as complicated as you want to make it, but not everything is equally complicated.
Regarding disagreement and believing in justification, I should’ve added that it’s also irrelevant whether you ever change another’s mind, only that you need to believe that others would be correct in changing their minds in accordance with your opinion. Otherwise, you’re admitting to arguing gobbledygook. (And this isn’t so different from normal conversation: you need to expect others are understanding what you’re saying, are responding in a relevant manner to what you’ve just said. Otherwise, why even bother communicating? Just punch people.)
You’d be refuting my claim that people write about GOT because they want to write about it if you’d cite examples of people who have no interest in it writing about it. I never said what’s published is based on “just writer’s preferences.” I was disagreeing with you notion that it’s some sort of conspiratorial problem that the most numerically popular arts aren’t necessarily what’s considered the most popular at certain mags with certain readerships.
I really enjoyed OITHNB. That Pensatucky episode in the Church was comedy gold!
Oh, Christ; Pensatucky — barf, barf, barf. Hey, liberals, it’s okay to hate Appalachians! They’re white! Hah hah!
I might well have liked GofT more. I’m kind of sick of swords and sorcery for the rest of my life after my misspent adolescence, but on the other hand OITNB is really crap.
You keep talking about conspiracies, man. Genres aren’t conspiracies. They’re communities and fandoms; they’re a way to organize aesthetic experience. I feel like you didn’t even read the article; there’s a conspiracy to ignore laundry lists? Come on.
I don’t really see complexity in art as something that’s especially meaningful as a measure either… I don’t know. I think Big Bang Theory is pretty clever about what it’s doing, even if that is often kind of noxious. OITNB is too. And when things aren’t clever, that’s often interesting too….
Re discussion, you seem to be operating under the assumption that folks can’t hold multiple contradictory ideas in their head at once, Charles. I do believe in what I’m saying…but I can also see that my belief isn’t necessarily always in every way true, and is dependent on where I’m coming from. I think most people operate more or less in that way when having aesthetic arguments.
Guys. Time out.
The reason ‘NCIS’ receives no coverage while ‘Game of Thrones’ drowns in it has nothing to do with quality or even subjectivity.
NCIS is broadcast and visible to homeless folk in overnight shelters. To everyone, dorky midwestern schlubs and Joe and Jane Sixpacks included.
You have to pay good money to see ‘Game of Thrones’, ‘Orange is the New Black’, ‘Mad Men’ or ‘House of Cards’.
Snobbery is the key.
Also, in the view of this cynic, greed: those Slate and Salon and
Atlantic lazy commenters on the latest latest TV darling have found the perfect way to deduct their premium cable bills from their taxes…
Hey Noah, take note!
That may be part of the reason shows like GofT doesn’t have broader reach, certainly.
I don’t have cable, actually. I’ve thought about getting it and deducting it…but it seems like kind of a huge pain….
Don’t bother, dude! Simplify.
I don’t have either radio or TV, and I’m happy as a clam in mud.
Plus you’re probably racking up beaucoup bonus IQ points on your son’s smarts score just by eshewing trash videoluxe.
I think the biggest reason that certain shows get covered and others don’t has to do with the fact that while not as many people watch Mad Men as Big Bang Theory, the people who do watch Mad Men get super invested in it, which inclines them to read and share articles about it. Popularity is sort of a red herring here, as in this age of narrowcasting and time shifting it’s not about the number of viewers so much as getting the viewers an advertiser wants. This applies to writing about TV, too.
Possibly…I bet there are avid Big Bang Theory fans out there though. My own post on Big Bang Theory is one of the two or three most popular things ever on this blog, fwiw.
I’m not suggesting there aren’t Big Bang fans. I’d bet money that there are some super-intense Big Bang fan sites. It’s just that I suspect the kind of magazines that commission television think pieces don’t see Big Bang fans as their demographic. That having been said, Emily Nussbaum has written about Big Bang Theory in the New Yorker…
That sounds right, Nate.
Noah,
I don’t hate the Appalachians and I have a long line of white trash in my family tree, so I don’t hate poor white people. I can laugh at something like Coe’s song “If That Ain’t Country,” which I believe was his intent: a comical appreciation that satirizes white trash. I also think Jim Goad makes many good points in his Red Neck Manifesto. Yet, despite all of this, I remain unoffended by the intentional uses of stereotypes regarding Pennsatucky (I found out it’s 2 n’s). Stereotypes can be funny and they can express some truth. I can laugh at ethnic/class humor without feeling encouraged to hate the target. Would women from an urban setting serving time in prison probably have certain white trash stereotypes in mind when dealing with someone like Pennsatucky? Seems entirely likely. Try holding multiple contradictory ideas in your head when dealing with the character, I guess.
The conspiratorial tone is something I picked up from what you wrote. It’s there in Freedman, too. Whom, by the way, I didn’t comment on, but since I just brought him up and have the book open due to his essay on Russ’ Two of Them (which I just read): the notion that genre precedes literature can’t be correct. What he means is that categorization precedes literature, so our ancestors didn’t include all writing as “literary” was developing. He conflates “genre-formation” with “categorization” to give weight to this conspiracy to keep SF down. But the question springs to mind: what was SF before literature? Were there SF laundry lists before any SF novel was ever thought about being written? His use of ‘genre’ is pretty slippery to fit his need. Having said that, I like the idea that SF is inherently structured for critical theory. Of course, if it’s inherently structured, then that means there’s something else going on than Power struggles in defining genres. The objects contribute to the way we classify them (I’ll just keep repeating this on this site — maybe the Atlantic should cover correlationism more). What he does is set up the maligning of SF as the result of unreasonable Power, but his argument for the genre as critical theory par excellence as reasonable and true, independently of Power. You take his Power struggle idea and run with it … off a cliff. Now, genre categorization precedes all of art — perhaps it was with us in the primordial soup. If the idea didn’t make sense, even when limited to literature, it certainly isn’t helped by being expanded (well, the rhetoric makes sense, but in terms of really being useful in trying to suss out the truth of genre bias, it doesn’t makes sense). I guess you can call a sonnet and markings on a wall “genres,” just like you can call rocks and trees “genres,” but those are a different types of “genre” than horror vs. SF. Anyway, yeah, you sound conspiratorial: making connections based on term-slippage rather than objects and concepts, confusing the mapped and the map. Confer Foucault’s Pendulum.
I’ll let you have the last word, but thanks for the conversation.
“all writing as “literary” was developing” –> “all writing as “literary” as the concept was developing” (and, yeah, of course it’s still developing, so I should’ve used ‘forming’)
Charles, I kind of don’t know what redeeming there is about Pennsatucky. I didn’t see her as funny; just a vicious stereotype. It doesn’t help that I read the memoir, and so know the character she’s based on. The actual, real-life Pennsatucky was not very educated, but is funny and thoughtful and desperate to get visiting rights to her child. She’s a much less stereotyped, and a much more interesting character. The television show turned her into an Appalachian fever dream because white trash is funny, ha.
I enjoy that you deny that categorization is genre based on unexamined genre categorizations of genre, and then deny that such things can be. Nicely self-parodic.
I don’t agree with Freedman about everything; his enthusiasm for sf is overblown, I agree. And I don’t really think there’s much to his claim that sf is innately critical theory; I find that pretty unconvincing (though I think his individual readings are great.)
But I think his points about the enmeshing of genre and power are correct — though I don’t think that’s necessarily conspiratorial. (A conspiracy implies a single locus of power, imposed top down. Freedman seems to be thinking more along the lines of Foucault; multiple nexuses of powers, interacting in complicated ways.)
Haha, of course. What I love about Freedman is what you hate. But we agree about his individual readings.
And, of course, I’m not quitting: all categorization IS NOT a form of genre formation. That just makes hash of the language. When I’m deciding on whether I can eat a rock, I’m not making a literary genre. When I’m seeing reds and yellows, I’m not making literary classifications. This is just too obvious to argue about. If you disagree, I’ll simply let you from here on.
And, yeah he has Foucault and Nietzsche in mind (that’s why I was capitalizing power). But it’s used in some vague conspiratorial tone that’s monolithic, regardless of how complex it’s supposed to be. It’s all about the powers that be, whoever they are (like your editors, maybe, who hate everything about the “genre” of “stuff you want to write about but they won’t let you”), restricting — before anyone is ever an SF novel or even a novel — certain genres to the “genre” of “stuff not worth considering with a serious literary intent.” Power is usually mentioned like this. It’s supposed to convey the complexity of social construction without really mentioning who’s doing what and how or why. It’s them, whereas the accuser isn’t so afflicted by Power determinations.
The thing is, I don’t really think the Atlantic editors control much beyond what goes into the magazine. I do think that mainstream decisions about what’s important count, I guess, and are related to other kinds of marginalizations. But I don’t think that in itself covering game of thrones is evil. I’d just like more of an acknowledgement that the mainstream is a fandom, rather than a standard.
I’d agree that literary categorization is genre. Genre is itself a literary categorization. Therefore categorizing genre as genre is a genre decision. Distinguishing between red and yellow or eating rocks — introducing those into the discussion is hand-waving and irrelevant.
Or to put it another way; genre doesn’t have to collapse into categorization to say that the difference between a laundry list and a poem is a genre distinction. That seems like a distinction worth making (to me.)
Genres: laundry lists, poetry, stuff that the Atlantic allows their writers to write about, SF and rocks. This is becoming some sort of Borgesian joke, right?
Genre-making is a type of categorization, not the other way around. You can call laundry list vs. poetry a genre distinction all you want, but it does no work for you in an argument like yours or Freedman’s. It’s empty word-slinging to disguise that you’ve not really made an argument. You’re still left with the problem of what’s the difference between SF and other genres which generally are considered “genre fiction” vs. the genres that aren’t so maligned. To redefine all of categorization as genre-making is a ridiculously convoluted way to go about defending your beloved genre of choice. All that does is muddy the waters, making conversation even more difficult, and leave us with the same problem as to why are certain genres considered more legitimate than others. I suspect it’s not because SF is considered more like laundry lists.
Also, if this really isn’t all that clear to you: try to think of why it’s easy to imagine SF vs. Western poetry, but not so much SF vs. Western laundry lists. (And I mean not poetry or laundry lists contained with an SF or Western story, but poetry or laundry lists in the realworld.) Making everything a genre doesn’t answer any problems we have with the narrative (film or literary) genres. Conversely, because there are irrational and biased dismissals of certain narrative genres doesn’t add any weight to why it’s unfair that some favored topic of yours isn’t more covered in some online magazine. You can call it a genre distinction, but so what? It’s not the same kind of genre distinction as the one Freedman was arguing about. Other than the accusation of bias, there’s really no connection.
“Other than the accusation of bias and abusing the term ‘genre’, there’s really no connection.”
I’m not sure why where I’m coming from seems so difficult for you to grasp…it doesn’t seem like it’s that complicated.
I’m not making a point about how sci-fi is maligned. I’m not saying there’s a conspiracy. I’m not really even accusing anyone of bias.
Genre is often seen as lesser in comparison to literature, or the mainstream, or really any number of things. But if you are able to see that genre precedes literature — that the category of “literature” is itself a kind of genre — it calls into question the idea that genre is marginal in comparison to some standard. It isn’t; all aesthetic experience is organized around genre. There is no mainstream; there is no standard; there is no non-genre thing compared to which genre is marginal.
The point of that isn’t that there’s some conspiracy to keep Big Bang Theory out of the Atlantic. The point is that the Atlantic’s coverage is actuated not by popularity or intellectual heft, but by genre interests. And there’s nothing particularly wrong with that — indeed, as I say in my piece, it’s inevitable. But the danger of genre is always insularity, and failing to acknowledge the arbitrariness of one’s genre interests can lead you to think that those interests are more widespread than they really are, and can also lead you to be blind to the ways that those interests (potentially) dovetail with other (more important) forms of marginalization.
Seriously, I have no interest in defending sci-fi, or comics, or big bang theory. I have some in defending romance, but that’s because it’s so ridiculously maligned it’s laughable. I certainly think genre insularity affects sci-fi (it certainly affects Freedman.)
So the point to seeing genre as preceding literature, the work that does, is to show that there is not some standard against which genre is measured. It’s all genre; there is no fixed, central point from which to view sci-fi. Everyone has genre commitments.
That seems like a good stopping point. We’ve stated our cases. Thanks for the conversation, once again.
Fair enough!
Did you read the Freedman on my recommendation, or had you already picked it up? It was a really fun book I thought.
I’d already read a good deal of it a couple years back. Came across it when I was looking for theoretical approaches to SF. Darko Suvin’s classic is OOP and too expensive, so Freedman seemed a good substitute. There’s also a good collection of Marxian essays on SF coedited by China Mieville that’s called Red Planets if you haven’t come across it.