Best Music of the Year…So Far

SZA_08-15-2013

I asked what folks were listening to way back towards the beginning of the year. We’re 6 or 7 months further on…so what do you all think are the best albums of the year?

Here’s a couple of my picks:

I’m really into this awesome twisted space death metal by Artificial Brains.

 
SZA’s alt R&B floaty psych soul is great:

 
I’m just now falling in love with this Open Mike Eagle track:

 
Jason Eady is the best country album I’ve heard this year:

 
And I really do love the new Sunny Day in Glasgow album, Sea When Absent

So what about you all? What’s your best album of the year so far?

10 Books That Really Stuck With Me

men_women_and_chainsaws

Peter Sattler tagged me in this facebook meme asking me to list 10 books that really stuck with me, from all times of my life. I usually avoid these social media gauntlets, but I did this one, because I don’t know why. I tried not to think about it too hard and probably failed. I’ve linked to essays I’ve written about the writers/books (unless I haven’t written about them.)

1. Carol Clover, “Men, Women, and Chainsaws”
2. James Baldwin, “The Price of the Ticket”
3. Richard Wright, “Black Boy”
4. Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons, “Watchmen”
5. Jack L. Chalker, Soul Rider series
6. Marston/Peter, Wonder Woman
7. Sharon Marcus, “Between Women”
8. Jane Austen, “Pride and Prejudice”
9. H.P. Lovecraft, “Shadow Over Innsmouth”
10. Ariel Schrag, “Likewise”
11. Wallace Stevens, “Palm At the End of the Mind”
12. Ian McEwan, “Atonement”
13. George Eliot, “Middlemarch
14. C.S. Lewis, “Til We Have Faces”
15. Stephenie Meyer, Twilight Series
16. Foucault, “History of Sexuality”
17. Philip K. Dick, “The Man in the High Castle”
18. Ursula K. Le Guin, Earthsea Series
19. Cecilia Grant, “A Gentleman Undone”
20. Julia Serano, “Whipping Girl”
21. Gerard Manley Hopkins, collected poems
22. Octavia Butler, “Xenogenesis”
23. Julia Cameron, “The Artist’s Way”
24. Ai Yazawa, “Nana”
25. James Loewen, “Lies Across America”
26. Samuel Delany, “Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand”
27. Grace Llewellyn, “The Teenage Liberation Handbook”
28. George Bernard Shaw, “A Book of Prefaces”
29. Eve Sedgwick, “Between Men”
30. Tabico, “Adaptation”

Obviously, not thinking about it too hard meant in part not being able to count. I think the earliest one of these I read was probably Black Boy, which I believe is from fifth grade or thereabouts. The Earthsea books might be from around then too, and the Jack L. Chalker was early on — probably middle school. Oh, and the H.P. Lovecraft would have been from around then too. I don’t think there’s anything on here that I was actually assigned in college, which is a little weird, but I read “The Man in the High Castle” at that time. (I thought about including Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, but I can’t say it’s the book that’s stuck with me as much as a couple of the ideas; thought about Elshtain’s Women and War, too.) The most recent things here are the Cecelia Grant and the Ian McEwan. Most are books I love…and probably not coincidentally many are books that made me cry (Yazawa, Grant, Loewen, McEwan, Lewis). There are a couple that I don’t think are very good though; that would be Chalker, Meyer…and Cameron’s on the list because that’s the worst book I’ve ever read. The Delany was on my headboard in high school for years and years without me reading it; I dragged it all the way out to Chicago with me, I think, and finally got through it…and didn’t exactly like it. I still think about it, though, in a way I don’t with lots of books I’ve enjoyed more. I should reread it someday. (I haven’t managed to find any other Delany I like at all. I thought the essays might work, but I started a volume of those recently and was bored and irritated.)

Though I’ve only read Delany once, I’ve read many of these numerous times; probably read Baldwin and Austen most, and maybe Loewen and Shaw and Cameron (the last of whom I read multiple times for work reasons.)

The list definitely tilts towards the cis het white guys, but it could be worse in that regard, I guess. 17 guys, 13 women; only 5 non-white folks. 9 LGBT writers (Baldwin, Marcus, Schrag, Hopkins, Foucault, Delany, Serano, Tabico and Butler…who I hadn’t been sure was lesbian, but the web seems to agree she was. Sedgwick might fit too…her identification was complicated.) So that’d be 10 cis het white guys altogether (if you count Moore/Gibbons and Marston/Peter as one each). Only about a third, but the single most represented group, it looks like. I’m all about my demographic. (Though I think Schrag is the only Jew on there? Oh, and Eve Sedgwick. Might be another one or two; we assimilate and are hard to find.)

12 nonfiction, 2 books of poetry, 16 fiction, 3 comics. Sci-fi is I think the most represented genre with 4 titles (Delany, Butler, Chalker, Tabico — Dick might count too as alternate history, depending on how you look at it, and I guess Lovecraft might too depending on if you think evil creatures from outside of time are sf or fantasy). Romance is in there and personal essay and academic books and horror and superheroes and lit fic and some classics and YA and porn and autobio and even self-help (Cameron and Llewellyn), but no mysteries (unless you count Watchmen, I suppose). That’s about right; mystery isn’t a genre that I’ve ever had much of a relationship with. I thought about including Agatha Christie’s “Murder of Roger Ackroyd”, which I read when I was a kid; not sure I can honestly say I care about it too much any more, though. Also no plays; I thought about Pygmalion but picked Shaw’s essays instead. I’m sure I could pick some Shakespeare too…

All right, that’s enough babbling. If you want to put a list in comments, please do (you can copy and paste if you already did it on facebook). I’m curious to see what other folks would pick (whether 10 or more.)

Can Video Games Be Art?

PaPo-Yo-5

 
The internet’s been aflame and atwitter and afacebook with Anita Sarkeesian’s latest video about sexism in video games. She’s depressingly but inevitably gotten death threats and heaps of abuse, and that’s what most of the discussion has focused on.

One of the things she’s saying that has somewhat gotten lost, though, seems to be that video games can be art, or should be thought of as art. She talks about a game called “Papo and Yo” in particular as an example of a game with more aesthetic ambitions than the general shoot em up. I’m not very versed in video games, alas, but I’d be curious to hear people talk about what games they see as (good) art, if any.

We’re had a couple posts on this topic; Isaac Butler wrote about the virtues of the Walking Dead and Emily Thomas wrote about new text adventure games. So…what do folks think? Any other contenders for video games as art?

Is There Any Good Literary Fiction?

atonement

 
I’m defining literary fiction here as the genre of self-consciously serious fiction that’s coalesced relatively recently — so more or less in the last 30-40-50 years I guess, maybe a little earlier. John Barth and John Updike would count, Hemingway or Mark Twain not so much.

Anyway, it’s a genre I tend to be very skeptical about; most of the fiction I admire post-1950 is sci-fi or comics or something that isn’t literary fiction. But there are a couple exceptions. Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy was great, and I enjoyed Confederacy of Dunces. And I really loved Ian McEwan’s Atonement, which I read recently (when I worked on the Shmoop study guide).

So…what lit fic do you like? Or/and, what lit fic would you recommend to a lit fic skeptic?

Photography, Overrated/Underrated

We haven’t done one of these in a bit, but I’ve had so many people tell me that they’re wrong and/or evil that I felt we should revive them. So…since Michael A. Johnson posted about war photography this week, I thought we could bounce off of that. What photographers do you think are overrated, or underrated if such a thing is possible?

I guess I’d go for Walker Evans as someone who is understandably but still inexcusably lionized for his poverty porn. Underrated…I don’t know if Andres Serrano quite fits since he’s obviously very successful, but as I said yesterday I feel like he’s broadly loathed by both right-wingers and high-art skeptics (including comics folks) who don’t seem to have actually looked at or thought about his work much.

Bert Stabler’s written about why all art photography is overrated, and Thomas O’Shea responded here with a defense of the genre, if you’re looking for more photography discussion.
 

Walker+Evans+-+Frank+Tengle+family,+Hale+County,+Alabama.+Sharecroppers,+1936

Overrated Man and The Sea

Underrated/overrated 20th century lit? Hemingway gets my vote for overrated; he’s treated like a god and I find most of his work fairly puerile. “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” with its boys’ adventure misogyny is a particular low point, but the manly men doing manly things with fish narrative also seems like Jack London without the hyperbolic preposterousness which makes London fun.

Underrated I’d say James Baldwin. His essays are maybe the best essays in the English language, but he’s mostly seen as a specialist interest, as far as I can tell. I wish folks would read him in high school rather than the Great Gatsby.

So what do you folks think? What 20th century writers are underrated or overrated?

41aAU9FYX3L

Most Overrated Television Show…And Most Underrated, If Any Exist

I’m watching Orange Is the New Black for an assignment, and being impressed again by how the new era of television drama seems to rely on basically overrating every single thing on the tube. With the exception of the Wire and the first season of Twin Peaks, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a television drama that managed to get past sporadically entertaining and onto “good”.

Anyway, the most overrated thing I’ve seen is probably “Breaking Bad,” which is supposed to be one of the great artistic triumphs of our time but to me (in the first season at least) seemed mired in all too familiar television cliches and lazy dramatic devices. Outside of drama, there are shows I love — the Batman TV show for example, or Warner Bros cartoons, and so forth. But I don’t know that any of them are underrated exactly.
 
breaking-bad-all-characters