An intelligent view of the Obama adventure.
David Denby
Nobody can stand the guy. And it’s not like he’s mean and slashing; he’s just a drag. You can imagine him in conversation with his pompous beard wagging from side to side and the long uhhhhhh‘s between sentences as he dredges up his points.
When I say “nobody,” I mean this: 20 years ago a coworker read Denby’s review of Gorillas in the Mist and said, “He’s always so overblown,” and she hadn’t even seen the movie — it was just his voice, the way he wrote. Eight years ago, trying to define “douchebag” for another coworker, I said, “Like David Denby” and he said, “Oh God, yeah.” Three days ago my mother said, “That David Denby is such a jerk.” And whenever I look at The New Yorker and see his name I think, “Too bad,” whereas when I see Anthony Lane’s byline I think, “Well, there might be some good jokes.” Of course there might not, but the sight of Lane’s name doesn’t in itself make me turn the page.
Via Andrew Sullivan, Reason Online reviews Denby’s new book, Snark. Apparently Denby is trying to shame “douchebag” out of the national discourse. I would too, if I were him. The review says Denby downgrades Tom Wolfe — disturbing if true — and that he doesn’t have much use for Maureen Dowd. The second point is also disturbing, because it means Denby can’t be entirely bad. Of course, Reason may disagree: “the reader comes close to simply telling him to lighten up, rather than explaining that Dowd is a satirist, not a sexist political scientist.” Hah, no. Maureen Dowd is a twit.
The big problem with snark isn’t that it’s mean or shallow, it’s that the people who want to be snarky are inferior. The word sprang up when trying to be snotty and clever became a national passtime. Everyone swarmed in and only a very few had any sort of gift for the assignment.
Your Questions Answered
I figured out religion a while ago. God is infinite; people are finite. The finite is not equipped to deal with the infinite. That includes determining whether any given infinite being exists. Therefore, I’m agnostic.
That being said, the believers and the atheists often have a lot of pep, which can be entertaining. Matt Taibi blogs the following about Newsweek‘s recent “America: It’s Not Just for Christians Anymore” cover story:
You’re usually more likely to see a Newsweek cover illo of a 1st-century BC man netting lake-fish over the headline:
MEN OF THE BIBLE:
What History Tells Us About What They Wore
John The Baptist’s tips on summer swimming
The post goes on to note Taibi’s extreme and justified skepticism regarding the Adam and Eve story.
Oh! Pipsy the Elf Is Dead
… the novel’s delicate tone, which is poised between whimsy and heartbreak.
A. O. Scott, reviewing The Mysteries of Pittsburgh in the NY Times today. Headline: “A Stockbroker in Training Has Turns in His Journey.” Headlines in the paper’s Arts and Leisure section are often entertainingly gnomic (another: “At the Way Station of Life, Departing to Anywhere”). But they can also be overambitious and top-heavy: “Satyajit Ray’s World of Restless Watchfulness and Nuance.” Expanded into a paragraph, the thoughts in question might make sense. As a headline, they make you imagine a tense scene in the Ray living room: “Will you stop looking at me? And don’t fidget! And what do you mean, what do I mean by ‘fidget’?”
I suppose the problem isn’t the headline writers, it’s the situation. The A&L has to cover a lot of movies and shows. Page after page of straightforward headlines (“Chabon’s Mysteries Poorly Adapted,” “Satyajit Ray Retrospective Displays Director’s Eye for Behavior, Emotion”) would quickly become excruciating. Trying to be jokey and clever in the British style would result in the same puns being recycled over and over (the Ray headline would involve Apu and “Come Again”). The only solution is not to read the NY Times unless you’re at your mother’s place and want to put off writing.
Yeah, Yeah. Butterfly, Emperor, Whatever
Still, this is pretty good.
Feminists in Chains!
So I have finally put my obsession with Wonder Woman and my obsession with women-in-prison films together. You can see the results over at Comixology. Here’s a quote:
Indeed, male creators (and a few female ones) have been exploiting feminism for a good long while, now. Rape-revenge fantasies like the much lambasted I Spit on Your Grave (1978) or Ms. 45 (1981) get their horror, their energy, and their catharsis from a feminist view of patriarchy. In “I Spit on Your Grave,” for example, four men egg each other on in a brutally extended gang rape of Jennifer (Camille Keaton). She then seduces and murders them one by one, repeatedly playing on their inability to believe that she (a) didn’t want to be raped and (b) could possibly harm them in any way.
As you see, I get to talk about rape-revenge films too.
If you want more, more, more discussion of women in prison, you can go here. More discussion of Wonder Woman here and here.
Nominations for the Award of Most Clueless
Over at Icarus comics, Simon notes that manga didn’t get too many Eisner nominations. He argues, though, that manga fans shouldn’t be bitter; they should just create their own awards. Precocious Curmudgeon agrees. (Thanks to Brigid for the links.)
Simon’s point is that awards are more about industry promotion and celebrating creativity than they are about objective quality…and that manga is big enough and independent enough to promote itself.
This is certainly correct…for manga. Manga doesn’t need the Eisners. I do wonder, though, whether it’s true that the Eisners don’t need manga. Or, to put it another way — manga has opened comics up to some vastly underserved demographics. It’s inaugurated entirely new genres. It’s helped to change distribution models. It’s vastly changed what comics in America are, and who reads them.
So you would think, maybe, that the industry might want to celebrate that. Maybe comics might want to use their awards show as a chance to point out to the world how things have changed, to embrace new readers, to paint itself as dynamic and exciting and forward looking and inclusive.
But of course the Eisners aren’t all that interested in doing that. And the reason is that the old institutions of American comics still haven’t come to terms with the changes in manga. They’ve watched the demographics expand without being able to figure out how to take advantage of it; they’ve adapted to some of the distribution changes but haven’t been able to embrace even those whole-heartedly.
So while the lack of manga at the Eisners isn’t a big deal for manga, I think it is maybe a big deal for the Eisners, and for the industry they represent. In short, it’s a sign of a a big, fat failure on the part of American comics. As is so often the case, a snub says more about the quality of the perpetrator than it does about the object of scorn.
Update: Brigid offers a polite dissent, pointing out that many of the Eisner judges are quite aware of manga, and suggesting again that manga needs its own awards. She also suggests that the Eisner’s should maybe expand to include more manga categories in the meantime…which they should, and which, if they did it whole hog enough, would preclude the need for a separate set of manga. If you’re the Eisners, why not create a whole parallel set of manga categories? You’ve got a leg up to begin with, so why not become the prestigious award for manga as well as for comics? Again, that seems like a great way to seem, and for that matter, to actually be, relevant to a whole new group of comics consumers.
Brigid also offers a mini-apology of sorts for the fact that manga fans (and she herself) aren’t necessarily all that into Western comics. I don’t think any apology is ever necessary for matters of taste like that; there isn’t any moral duty to read one comic or the other. With an institution like the Eisners, it would make sense for marketing and industry reasons for the awards as a whole to be more open to manga, but that’s really a different issue than saying, “this judge should like manga more” (especially since, as Brigid notes, many of the judges like manga fine.)
Update 2: And as long as this seems to be generating some interest, I thought I’d point out a couple of other recent manga posts which might be of interest: Kinukitty kicks off her column “Gluey Tart: Adventures in Manporn” with a review of prettyboy assassin manga Blank Slate; I talk about the Japanese Superman; and, from a bit longer ago, Bill Randall talks about perfect girlfriend’s and Sungiku Uchida’s bizarre manga Minami’s Sweetheart.
Throw another update on the fire: Lots of interesting responses from Precocious Curmudgeon, Heidi and Simon.
By the by, everybody who has posted on this knows more about the Eisners and more about manga than I do. Just in case that wasn’t already clear….