The Physics of Fiction

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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”.
 

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Mr. Monk and the Toxic Masculinity

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This essay is dedicated to the wonderful Alla Palagina who generously shared countless episodes of Monk with me and with whom I initially discussed this episode after we watched it in early 2011. May she rest in power.

Originally posted on CiCO3
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Adrian Monk could represent a potential alternative masculinity. His clumsy, fumbling, mumbling, constantly terrified competence as police detective stands in stark contrast to the chest-puffing, misogynist, homophobic normative masculinity that pervades popular culture. Instead of embracing his competence though Monk is constantly aspiring towards normative masculinity. A telling episode is 2006’s “Mr. Monk and the Astronaut”.
 

Wagner prepares to murder Raphelson

Wagner prepares to murder Raphelson

 

“Mr. Monk and the Astronaut” begins with famous astronaut and test pilot Steve Wagner (Jeffrey Donovan) drugging Joanne Raphelson (Brianna Brown), a former Vegas showgirl he once dated and whom he severely beat and hospitalized several years before. Raphelson planned to reveal the beating in a tell all biography.

Wagner is a confident, charismatic white alpha male predator. And he has an airtight alibi for Joanne’s murder having been in planetary orbit at the time of Joanne’s death. He charms the police, Monk’s personal assistant Natalie and the children in Natalie’s daughter’s class when both he and Monk go to present on career day. Monk is the only one who believes he killed Joanne.

Children mock Monk at the career day then proceed to terrorize him with laser pointers. Hijinks ensue and afterwards he confronts Wagner in the hallway. Wagner uses aggressive physicality to cower Monk then tells him, “You’re a flincher, you’ll never stop me. Because when the chips are down when it really counts, you are always going to flinch.” This, combined with Monk’s panic about the laser pointers sets up the episode’s final confrontation.
 

Wagner makes Monk flinch

Wagner makes Monk flinch


 
Wagner ridicules, questions and challenges Monk’s masculinity throughout the episode. Monk confesses to his psychologist, “When I look at a manly man like Steve Wagner, I just feel weak. I just feel so inadequate. I know he’s guilty, but I’ll never be able to prove it.” Here Monk affirms Wagner’s perceptions as well as Wagner’s masculinity. This violent misogynist represents the manhood to which Monk aspires.
 

Monk is steadfast in the face of laser scopes

Monk is steadfast in the face of laser scopes

 
The show concludes with Monk confronting his fear and placing his body in front of a jet Wagner is piloting to prevent its takeoff. Monk remains steadfast in front of the plane even when soldiers arrive with (for some reason) laser scope rifles which cover him much like the earlier laser pointers. Wagner is taken into custody from the plane. As he is being handcuffed Wagner makes eye contact with Monk and gives him an acknowledging nod, validating his manhood. Alternately put, the episode resolves with Monk receives validation of his own manhood through the toxic masculinity of the “manly man” he succeeded in incarcerating.
 

Murderer of women gives Monk a nod of approval

Murderer of women gives Monk a nod of approval

 
Monk is not exceptional in embracing toxic masculinity to validate the manhood of its male characters. The episode in question does not invent it but is does represent yet another exchange in and (re)production of normative patriarchal discourse.

“Mr. Monk and the Astronaut” (season 4, episode 14) originally aired on 3 March 2006 to around 5.65 million households in its initial airing.

Under the Gun

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After a year in New York City, where the claustrophobia was so oppressive that I sometimes snuck out into the hallway to beat on the plywood screwed onto the roof hatch, my husband and I moved to a small village in Ohio. Yellow Springs is a town you may have heard of, in spite of its population of only a few thousand; the hometown of Dave Chappelle, a liberal enclave filled with older radicals and young free-spirit entrepreneurs, it is bounded by farms and parks. The Tecumseh Land Trust, a sort of demilitarized zone whose maintenance keeps strip malls and chain stores at bay, insures a level of charm annihilated by an influx of big box stores in neighboring towns. It is bounded on another side by Glen Helen, a small nature preserve with winding trails leading over a waterfall and a modest center for the rehabilitation of injured birds of prey. Our downtown consists of a few restaurants, a few coffee joints, a number of shops devoted to the functional and ornamental artwork of locals, a movie theater, and a local grocery. On Saturdays, much of the town turns out for the farmer’s market, populated by piles of organic peppers and tomatoes, small-batch fermented vegetables, and cheese from the cows I walk past on foggy mornings.

A year after our move, the pavement was still hot against the soles of our feet as my husband and I stood, arms around one another’s shoulders, looking far down the street. This was an awkward posture for us—neither a cold nor an overly affectionate couple—and after a while, we ended up standing apart but close, as the rattle of gun shots down the block shuddered through the air.

I came from a neighborhood where SWAT raids, random gunfire, and despair were not uncommon. I was in eighth grade when a girl in my class was gunned down in a nearby parking lot—I didn’t know it was her, but I had seen a body lying in a parking lot on a walk. One morning, I woke to the train whistle, more insistent than usual. A block away, a man had simply sat down on the tracks and waited. The rails were awash in blood by the time I was going to school, a fine spray over the rocks in the cess. A stray bullet fired by a neighbor in a fury of celebration one July 4th afternoon lodged itself in the wall above my parents’ bed. If it had been the evening, it would have penetrated my father’s abdomen. He dug it out of the wall and displayed it next to the pennies he and my mother crush on the train tracks.

On this night, however, violence was out of place.

The gun battle was raging at 11pm on a Tuesday. After picking Ian up from work when the sirens began wheeling around our neighborhood, we padded back and forth between the porch and the intersection between our street and a major road. For two blocks beyond the intersection, police cars lined either side of the street, and the main road was rapidly filling with news cameras, giant lights casting a surreal glow on the corner I normally turned to walk past a friend’s wild flower-strewn front garden. She sometimes punctuates the arboreal splendor with artfully curated holiday decorations. The pavement was still hot against the soles of our feet as Ian and I stood, arms around one another’s shoulders, looking far down the street. This was an awkward posture for us—neither a cold nor an overly affectionate couple—and after a while, we stood apart but close, as the rattle of gun shots down the block shuddered through the air.

Facebook had exploded with rumors two hours before, but by 11pm, we know that the shooter was Ian’s friend Paul, that he was barricaded in his house a few blocks north on our street, and that he would not be coming over for dinner on Wednesday.

We had been trying to find time for a cookout for a year, in part because I had never met him in person. Online, Paul’s regular posts on Ian’s Facebook wall, while littered with extraneous ellipses, were well-reasoned, and emotionally raw—a mockery of form that nonetheless commanded respect for their naked subjective engagement. In spite of this, however, he was not known for his delicacy of approach. Debates about guns were particularly vituperative. Paul had, several years before, been the subject of a raid, which turned up hundreds of guns and thousands of rounds of ammunition. All of it was legally purchased, and all of it was returned. Several other friends had already blocked him, and his rambling responses were occasionally aggressive. Unlike those on most internet commenting threads, however, the longer Paul interacted, the sweeter he became—after what began as a particularly vicious battle, the thread would eventually devolve into Paul’s declarations of love and appreciation, grateful for the debate.

Ian had seen him the day before, Monday, at Kroger, and was a bit sad and distant after watching Paul limp to the plastic pharmacy counter to collect his blood pressure medication. He had picked me up from mucking out stalls, I was flush with the new strength in my arms, and reeked of dirt and manure, my spine singing from the muscles knitting and thickening across my shoulders and back, and easily gamboled over Ian’s ache for Paul’s reduction.

Tuesday morning was spent pulling meat out of the freezer to defrost and marinate.

My fingers closed on Ian’s arm as we counted seventeen shots in rapid succession. We walked back to the corner, looked down at the army surrounding Paul’s small house, briefly embraced, walked back.

On Wednesday morning, I started to weep.

A week before, the day after I defended my dissertation, my friend Jeremy was gunned down in a local bar after what can only be described as a psychotic break. During high school, Jeremy’s parents’ porch was a safe space; conveniently placed alongside of a main drag, but tucked just away off on a side street, the wide, concrete steps could accommodate more than a dozen milling youth, while the solid stone paling shielded us from passersby. Teenaged girlfriends and I loitered while he and his friends joked around, but the unusual element in this scene was that Jeremy and his friend Phil policed the discourse; it was a misogyny-free zone, the only anodyne social space in my adolescence.

Jeremy and I had been in irregular but enthusiastic contact since we were in high school, using the innovations of digital correspondence to manufacture political debates every few months. Looking back on a long conversation on hate crimes, I’m struck more by the pleasantness of the exchange than by our stark disagreement. Jeremy thought that the existence of the legal designation of hate crimes amounted to criminalizing thought, while I see them as a classification of a crime committed against an individual but intended to terrorize a larger group. Jeremy thought profiling could be useful, while I think that profiling is an act of racism. These are wide gulfs in thought and approach, but his respect for my views was apparent in his phrasing. He wasn’t seeking to convert me—merely to show me that his point-of-view was reasonable. I often explain to my students that this is the only truly honorable approach in a debate.

On the day of his death, according to reports, he argued with his mother before departing her home. When confronted by police he removed his gun from its holster and waved it around in a threatening manner, at which point he was repeatedly tased and then shot to death in a bar around the corner from his parents’ house, the only bar in crawling distance from my apartment of half a decade. He had apparently tried to raise his gun as officers struggled him to the ground.

It has been nearly two years since their deaths, and I have fought with myself over how to say something meaningful about them. Mass shootings are in the news more often than not, and each time another young man murders, I think back to Paul and Jeremy. Their stories are not unfamiliar: both had issues with mental illness, both had easy access to firearms, and both had a deep and abiding suspicion that gun regulation was the first step down the road towards fascism. But both were also deeply compassionate, vulnerable, had families they loved and large social circles. They were friendly and warm, and when they talked about the issues they cared about, they spoke clearly and calmly, and they listened respectfully to other views. It won’t do to memorialize them with another call to fund mental health services, to regulate the sale of firearms, or to expand government oversight. They had good access to mental healthcare, they purchased firearms within the bounds of the law, and they would have been appalled if I leveraged their memories for more regulation. It won’t do to call on neighbors and friends, or to point towards a particular viewpoint or conspiracy theory. They had friends and family who cared deeply, and they weren’t rigid ideologues. They were nuanced.

In both cases, the authorities tasked with handling Jeremy and Paul’s respective outbursts were in danger, but also were both heavy-handed, which led to discussions in Cincinnati and Yellow Springs about the increasing militarization of the police force. It’s a discussion that should continue, but it is not the only discussion worth having in relation to outbreaks of gun violence (if their perpetuity can even be captured by the term “outbreak” anymore).

These deaths recall for me a darker aspect of our culture. As I mentioned at the opening of this essay, I’m not a stranger to violence. The neighborhood I grew up in goes through regular cycles, the ebb and flow of blood that is a fact of life in poverty. As a teenager, I had guns trained on me by both criminals and officers, and never in the context of a “drug deal gone wrong” or during an arrest. Instead, it was during activities remarkable in this context only for their dailiness; walking home from getting a cone of shaved ice, walking into my parents’ back yard. When the ATF raided the house two doors down and pulled 147 illegal guns out of one side of the duplex, kids had been playing in the front yard an hour before. The girl in my 8th grade class who was shot to death in a parking lot two blocks away. Shots fired were nothing irregular. These were not the experiences of the vast majority of my white classmates, whose houses were nestled in quiet cul-de-sacs in different neighborhoods that seemed very, very far away.

But now, the boundaries are failing. It isn’t that mass shootings are becoming more frequent. It’s that they’re becoming more frequent in ways middle-class white people can see. At 33, now a middle-class white person myself, it is eerie to watch the type of violence I grew up understanding to be common follow me into areas where the police brutality, the S.W.A.T. raids, the tanks, the guns, and all of the other attendant material hallmarks are clearly perceived as something new.

One of the things that always bothered me in discussions about gun violence and violence in general is that those who have not grown up in the shadow of its threat often assume that we acclimate ourselves to it. Environments of violence don’t breed an adjustment period that is capped with a reconciliation with one’s surroundings. It doesn’t get less traumatic just because it happens every day.

I’m a professor of English now. My work is concerned with the representation of violence in literature and the study of empathy. The longer I consider the questions that have guided my life and career, the less I believe that empathy exists beyond a very narrow engagement with the people around me who are like me. Who are around you, who are like you. I worry sometimes that my academic interests are turning me into a sort of voyeur sociopath, who has feelings but suspects that they are considerably more limited and less useful than most would assume. As I read over the essays written by smart, caring people attempting to grapple with this suddenly more unsafe world, I think back to the neighborhood of my youth, where if you chalked the outline of every body that had lain on those streets, you couldn’t take a step without toeing the outline of another tragedy.

The last discussion I had with Jeremy centered on gun control, gun rights, and intent versus contemporary usage in Constitutional rights. While he advocated for gun rights, he was nonetheless disturbed when I sent him information about the connection between the ratification of the Second Amendment and Virginia’s slave-hunting militias. He had a conceal-and-carry license, and frequently encouraged me to buy a gun and take classes in order to better protect myself. In one of our last exchanges, he told me that he wanted to be “the good guy with a gun,” and that he hoped, in spite of my views, I would thank him. Winky face.

I can’t help but wonder, as I re-read those messages, whether a relentless consciousness of the chaos at the gates was what compelled him to have that gun, and if a more immersive vision of it—as I had in my old neighborhood—would have made him feel any differently. But I don’t get to ask him, which is itself a tragedy, because he would have had some interesting thoughts to share.