We haven’t done this in a while. So here’s Cassie — Addiction ft. French Montana, from her 2013 mixtape RockaByeBaby.
And what the hey, for something completely different here’s Conway Twitty with “Jennifer Johnson and Me”
And Absu with “Four Crossed Wands”
What have you all been listening to?
On HU
Featured Archive Post: Caroline Small on how SPX blows her mind.
Me on why Harry Potter isn’t very good (it’s all about quidditch.)
Isaac Butler on perceiving race.
Alex Buchet continues his series on the prehistory of the superhero, this time focusing on Holmes and Wells.
RM Rhodes argues that SPX has something for everyone, unlike the mainstream.
Osvaldo Oyola on queer silence and a radical ending for the Killing Joke.
Me on the Joker’s wife, and also no how the Killing Joke is sanctimonious pulp crap.
Chris Gavaler on the superheroine dress code and how the mainstream is (slowly) becoming less sexist.
Utilitarians Everywhere
For my first ever piece at Salon, I talk about Ender’s Game and making genocide a sacrament.
At the Atlantic I argue that the NYT Book Review should just embrace its identity as a lit fic fanzine.
At the Atlantic I talk about the documentary the Revolutionaries and why right-wing ideologues in Texas are only part of a broader problem with education.
At Splice Today I talk about how racists who think Indians are Arabs aren’t actually confused (just racist.
Other Links
David Brothers on how racists-react-to-things posts are themselves racist.
Feminists pretend Playboy cares about consent.
on why focusing on confessions of white privilege are counter-productive.
This ran first on Splice Today.
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“For as writing gains in breadth what it loses in depth, the conventional distinctions between author and public…begins…to disappear. For the reader is at all times ready to become a writer, that is, a describer, but also a prescriber. As an expert — even if not on a subject, but only on the post he occupies — he gains access to authorship…. It is in the theater of the unbridled debasement of the word…that its salvation is being prepared.”
Reading that quote above, you could almost think it was yet another over-carbonated paean to the wonders of the internet — some pseudo-academic talking-head ranting on about how blogs are going to bring about the egalitarian millennium. Everyone’s an expert, everyone’s an author, everyone’s got the keys to the kingdom and, hey look, they’re all running through the pearly gates with words dribbling from their gums and bytes blasting from their backsides.
And yep, that’s precisely what the quote is about. It’s just that the vision of a thousand points of blather is a little hoarier than you might expect. Specifically, the above was written by none other than Walter Benjamin all the way back in 1934. The essay was called “The Author as Producer,” and here’s what it looked like originally:
“For as writing gains in breadth what it loses in depth, the conventional distinctions between author and public, which is upheld by the bourgeois press, begins in the Soviet press to disappear. For the reader is at all times ready to become a writer, that is, a describer, but also a prescriber. As an expert — even if not on a subject, but only on the post he occupies — he gains access to authorship…. It is in the theater of the unbridled debasement of the word — the newspaper —that its salvation is being prepared.”
Yes, Virginia, 80 years ago Benjamin was touting the newspaper — or at least the Stalinist newspaper — as a truly democratic voice. Newspapers were the bright new genre that would allow the people to take an active role in their culture and cease to be the stoned recipient drones of capitalist trash. The press (or “at any rate” as Benjamin says “the Soviet Russian press”) is changing everything; it “revises the distinction between author and reader.” The means of production are now in the hands of all, and the revolution is sure to follow.
One wonders what the Frankfurt School would have thought of the new day that has now dawned. If Benjamin’s beloved Brecht encouraged audiences to think critically about the artist’s work, surely blogs, twitter, and comments threads encourage the audience to come up on stage, beat the actors bloody and shit on their remains while screaming racial epithets sprinkled with smiley icons. If Benjamin truly believed, as he claimed, that the best art, the most valuable art, the art with the highest “technical quality” was that art which succeeded in “promoting the socialization of the intellectual means of production” — well, you’d think he must be right now leaping from his grave in joy and wonder, scurrying over to the nearest internet café, and greedily scrolling through the latest 4chan flame war , all the while muttering to himself, “Lolz! Lolz! The revolution will be Rickrolled!”
The idea that the people will save culture has an almost irresistible fascination for leftists. On the one hand, you have Frankfurt school dyspeptics who think corporate crap has blinded us all. On the other, you’ve got cultural studies pollyanna’s claiming that fans of Ameircan Idol creatively repurpose the show as a site of resistance to hegemony. But whether sad or cheery the dream is the same: some day the masses will rise up and write better novels their own damn selves.
Now the people are here, though, and…well, it’s a mixed bag. Certainly, lots and lots of folks who could never have gotten their voices out before are able to do so now. The result could not exactly be characterized as an increase in art’s “technical quality,” though, nor as a socialist utopia. Capitalist desires have not been shucked; instead, they’ve metastasized. Given the means of production, as it turns out, people mostly want to scream fire in a crowded messageboard, talk about their furry fetishes, or check the weather.
The point isn’t that the people are innately frivolous or deluded — in fact, there’s tons of political discussion online, and the Iranian uprising showed quite clearly that access to communications technology can have potentially liberating effects. But hedge as you will, the democratization of the literati cannot be said to have created a world in which socialism is ascendant, or in which there is an overwhelming majority of speech exhibiting what Benjamin refers to as the “correct political tendency.” It’s almost as if the rallying cry “every man a genius!” is as much a call to debased polymorphous revels as to fraternal salvation. Benjamin himself, from that perspective, starts to look decidedly libidinal, sensuously spitting his half-baked theories through his mustache and out into the ether, a troll in love with trolling long before his time.
Prompted by Osvaldo Oyola’s essay earlier this week, I moved about six boxes of clothes and a paper cutter out of the closet in order to get at my comics collection and reread Alan Moore and Brian Bolland’s The Killing Joke.
And no, it wasn’t really worth it. The comic was a disappointment when I first read it upon its release in 1988, and 25 years later it continues to underwhelm. The Joker’s sad sack origin hasn’t gotten any less pro forma melodrama with the passage of time, while the visual rhymes and formal density that served Moore so well in Watchmen here simply inflate a standard genre exercise in good guy/bad guy pulp doppelganger Manicheanism with gratuitous pomposity, robbing it of charm without adding any weight. The sexualized crippling/rape of Barbara Gordon is, as Osvaldo says, a low point, but it’s also of a piece. Extra violence, extra sex, extra unpleasantness, extra formal trickery and the odd leaden bit of wordplay; it’s all there to desperately claim significance via special pleading, rather than by actually writing a thoughtful story. Bang, Pow, Batgirl shot through the spine, comics not just, etc.
There was one pleasant surprise, though; Brian Bolland’s art. I’d always thought of him and Watchmen artist Dave Gibbons as more or less interchangeable, but in fact Bolland’s work is a lot more fun to look at. His faces have a nice plasticity and solidity; a realism shading into cartoonish grotesque which fits the Joker nicely — and suggests the throwaway EC comics horror dreck hiding beneath Moore’s high-falutin’ script. In some sense, it makes you wonder whether the problem with The Killing Joke is that Bolland is too good, his enthusiastic mastery pulling Moore by the collar into a farrago of pulp, just like those grossly offensive dwarves pull Gordon onto the train to view a cornucopia of sadistic incest torture porn. Much of Moore’s career has been a sometimes winning, sometimes losing struggle with genre, and in this case genre appears to have teamed up with Bolland to strip him naked and kick his sorry ass. Then he rose up with his hands on his head, giggling maniacally and burbling about how cool it would be to have Boland draw circus freaks and sexual assault — all for profound philosophical reasons, of course.
Be that as it may, Boland adds significantly to the weirdest, most disturbing moment of the comic.
That’s the Joker in his sad sack pre-Joker days, talking to his pregnant wife about how he’s once again failed to get a gig as a comedian. He makes some bitter, crude remark about how girls on the street can make more money than him — and his loving, long-suffering, nurturing wife cracks up. She finds bitter allusions to prostitutes funny, and tells him he’s good in the sack as she reaches for him with a bizarrely exaggerated clown grin.
On the one hand, the grin is there to supply the transition to the laughing clown in the next panel. But it also makes the wife the ur-Joker — the one who finds (her husband’s) suffering and (female) degradation funny, and the one with the demon’s grin. Boland really sells that too; I didn’t remember the dialogue here at all, but that feral, toothy, malevolent smile stayed with me across the decades. Pre-Joker’s hollow, confused look in the mirror is also perfect — he doesn’t look like a man being comforted by his wife. He looks like the terrified victim who suddenly realizes the evil spirit has possessed his love one, and is about to devour him. Osvaldo notes Joker’s queerness — I think that queerness is here presented, specifically, as transvestism. The Joker is taking the place of his wife, or his wife (who we later learn dies in a freak accident) is possessing him.
That sequence seems like a tell; a quick conflation of sex, femininity and terror which suggests that the assault on Barbara Gordon isn’t an accidental, unnecessary indiscretion, but rather a condensation of the book’s central obsessions. In the panel before she’s shot, Barbara too wears that weird Joker grin, her hand extended as Joker’s wife’s hand was extended, the coffee-cup echoing the pencil cup in the other image. Thus Joker is both his wife and the murderer of his wife; the sexualized, uncanny woman brings upon herself vengeance for her wrongness. As in Junji Ito’s Tomie stories, the female ensorcels men, and what she ensorcels them to do is murder her.
Ito’s stories present his horror and lust — or his horror of lust, or his lust for horror — without apology. Not so Moore, who wants us to believe that he didn’t really want to show us those pictures of Barbara Gordon, or that he doesn’t really enjoy all those gruesome rictus grins on the corpses, or that he didn’t really want to off the Joker’s wife. Moore’s rooting for sanity and Gordon and Batman and reconciliation and rehabilitation along with the rest of us, right? The real killing joke, maybe, is that it doesn’t matter whether Batman kills the Joker, or Batman kisses the Joker. The structure and the end aren’t important. Instead, what matters here are those women grinning and asking for sex and death, the genre pleasures that make us smile.
Isaac Butler from a recent comments thread drops some science on perceptions of race:
Basically, our brains have evolved to do an enormous amount of automatic processing of and reacting to simuli and life experience. They do this through a few different processes, but they mainly involve creating cateogories, associations between these categories and what get are called “schema,” which are essentially stories our brain tells itself without our conscious knowledge.
The associations and stories we have often involve categories of people, which we call stereotyping (it doesn’t have a negative connotation in psych circles). A lot of stereotyping is harmless. How do you know without having to think about it that a large, bald, fat human that’s crying probably doesn’t need a diaper change but a tiny, bald, fat human does? How do you know that a black rectangle that rings is a phone and not a wallet? it’s all these kinds of processes.
Anyway, not all of our associations are harmless or value neutral, often they involve preferences (when they’re positive) or biases (when they’re negative) about people in certain groups. Simply put, we have a story about them in our heads that we do not realize we have.
This whole phenomenon, one where our decision making and POV is affected by prejudices ovcuring at the unconscious level, is called Implicit BIas. It’s not limited to race and it’s not limited to the United States. It is, in fact, part of the human condition. It also isn’t a moral failing. The majority of white people in this country consciously hold egalitarian values. This is why explicit measures of bias and prejudice basically have no predicative value as to what people will actually do.
Implicit measures, on the other hand, do tend to predict behavior in experimental settings. The most famous of these is the IAT, which you can actually take yourself at projectimplicit.net. The IAT tests categorical associations through reaction times.
Anyway, this is long-winded, but there’s decades now of scientific evidence as to the validity of implicit bias, its predicative power, etc. and so forth. There is also considerable evidence that believing oneself to be objective actually causes people to act with more rather than less bias. There is some evidence that being aware of implicit bias, coupled with context-specific interventions, can help safeguard our decision making processes from implicit bias’s effects.
This is why color-blindness is such a pernitious idea. It’s actually the opposite of what we need. It’s the delusion that we’re objective. And what the Right does is talk about color-blindness through one side of its mouth while stoking White racial anxiety with the other. So they take race off the table as a valid topic for discussion (“playing the race card”) while also talking about it in ways guaranteed to panic Whites. For an example of this, look at Fox’s coverage of the Zimmerman verdict.
Gallhammer
On HU
Featured Archive Post: Jones, One of the Jones Boys on visual aliens; characters drawn in a different style than everything around them.
Jack B. on Johnny Ryan and the appeal of bullying.
We’re going to have an indie comics vs. context death match roundtable.
RM Rhodes says stop complaining about Marvel and DC and vote with your feet.
Kailyn Kent on how the romance narrative eats Lucy in A Room With a View.
Richard Cook and I live-blogged the Presidential address on Syria.
Richard Cook with ads of food from comic books.
Me on seeing and not seeing race in the Pixies, Danity Kane, Johnny Ryan and Bloom County.
Chris Gavaler on superhero anatomy then and now.
Utilitarians Everywhere
At the Atlantic I wish people would talk about poems rather than poetry.
Also at the Atlantic I talk about the uncomfortable racist roots of anti-interventionism.
At the Chicago Reader I’ve got some previews of upcoming pomo museum shows.
At Splice I explain to the mainstream that black metal does not equal fascism necessarily (just genocide.)
I also argue that morally shaming people for not putting their kids in public school is not a good idea.
Other Links
An excerpt about being an ally to trans women from Julia Serano’s wonderful book Excluded.
Jeet Heer interviewed about his new book about Francoise Mouly.
Interesting piece at Slate refuting the case for charter schools and vouchers.
And Richard Dawkins once again brings shame to atheists everywhere. Thanks, Richard.
This first appeared on Splice Today.
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I was supposed to go see the last Harry Potter movie with my utterly obsessed seven-year-old son. We got into the car to drive to the theater with our son gibbering on about Quidditch and Hogwarts and Voldemart, and then I pressed the power button on the Prius… and pfft. Nothing. The battery was dead.
Which is fairly typical of my entire experience with the Harry Potter franchise. Lots and lots of build-up followed by a big fat zilch. I don’t hate the Harry Potter books. I read the first four of them, and watched the first movie. My son’s obsession with them has moved rapidly from amusing to annoying to thoroughly oppressive, but still, it’s better than Thomas the Tank Engine or superheroes. The Potter books are at least marginally readable… especially since my son has learned to read himself and is going through them on his own.
Nevertheless, what bugs me about the series is that it should be better than just tolerable, and not just because the whole world is apeshit over it. The first book opens with a horrid family right out of Roald Dahl, and I quite like that lovely scene with the owls dropping drifts of letters addressed to our hero. The idea of a wizarding school seems pretty solid. And there are lots of excellent British children’s books series. If the How To Train Your Dragon books can be consistently top-notch, why not Harry Potter?
And the answer is: Quidditch. The notion of wizard-soccer on broomsticks is pretty clever, and I can certainly see the appeal for kids—who doesn’t want to fly? But the actual game is incredibly stupid. Most of Quidditch is devoted to goal scoring, but a huge bushel of points are awarded not for scoring goals, but for catching a special ball called the Snitch. Whoever catches the Snitch also ends the game—all of which means that, for most intents and purposes, the vast majority of the action taking place on (or above) the Quidditch field is pointless.
You can see why J.K. Rowling designed Quidditch as she did; the rules make the Seeker, who goes after the Snitch, by far the most important player on the field. Since Harry turns out to be a supremely gifted Seeker, all the matches end up being about Harry’s wonderfulness. This, observation of my son has informed me, has a huge appeal to the core under-nine audience. But for anyone else, Quidditch as repetitive occasion for transparent hagiography gets very old very quickly.
This is nit-picking to some extent. But it’s also emblematic. There are a lot of things like Quidditch in Harry Potter; places where Rowling failed to fit the pieces together right and the result is the irritating sound of audible grinding. A friend of mine pointed out that the thing that gets him is that Harry, when we first meet him, should be a volatile, unstable wreck. He was systematically emotionally abused by his foster parents, the Dursleys, throughout his childhood, and while nurture isn’t everything, it’s something. Kids treated that way have real problems; they don’t just shake it off in a few pages and become do-gooding everyboys with loads of inner resources.
The problem isn’t the scenario per se. As mentioned above, if the same story was told by Roald Dahl, you wouldn’t think about it for a second, any more than you ask questions about the actual logistics of building Mr. Wonka’s chocolate emporium. Instead, the difficulty is Rowling’s tonal control—or the lack thereof. Harry Potter comes out of the Lewis Carroll/E. Nesbit/Dahlian tradition of British nonsense, with its fantastical illogical goofiness. But Rowling also wants to create an epic battle between good and evil indebted to Lord of the Rings.
The result is a lurching hodgepodge; a magical world that isn’t internally or externally consistent, but is too concerned with it’s own inner-workings to ever really take flight into whimsy. The first book gets at some of the rush of wonder in classic fantasy… but as the kids learn more, magic is rapidly domesticated, turned into a series of recipes. You’re left with endless piles of prose explicating labyrinthine rules, most of which don’t even have the geeky satisfaction of making sense.
I know lots of folks say that the last movie is pretty good, and that the series in general becomes darker and more effective as it goes on. Maybe so, and maybe my car will work well enough to go see it. I’ve had enough exposure to the series, though, to feel fairly confident that wherever Harry Potter goes, he will go there with a pfft.
