We’re gonna make it after all.
From Making Light, some photos by Scott Wyngarden:
I’ve never blogged under a Democratic administration. I wonder what it’s like.
Pith from the comments:
So I commiserated with Julia over the whole having to read Twilight thing; she said, “oh, you really should. Feel for me, I mean. If Susan Pevensie wrote an Ann Rice novel…” —And would you look at the air now, full of glitter?
But on the back side it didn’t say nothing
That side was made for you and me.
A whole lot of folks were thrilled beyond words when Pete Seeger stood up and sang the whole damn thing. They linked to uploaded videos of the historic public event to share with friends and family and country. HBO, who bought the rights to broadcast the inauguration concert, are busy yanking down every free copy they can find. —While you can apparently watch The Whole Damn Thing on hbo.com, there’s no linkable version of This Moment or That that I can find; what century are we in, again? (But apparently, neglecting to broadcast the invocation given by Bishop Gene Robinson—the sop tossed to Obama’s GLBTQ supporters, furious over the choice of Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at the actual inaugural? That wasn’t HBO. That’s all on Obama’s Presidential Inaugural Committee.)
Okay, so it isn’t as baldly bad as I’d thought. —Anyway, here’s a version from what looks to have been German television:
Appropriative.
This didn’t happen to me. It happened to a friend of mine who used to work at Powell’s. I’ve never worked at Powell’s. She was standing next to a display of Riverdance photobooks or stacking a display of Celtic Christmas photobooks or photobooks titled maybe The Dublin of Joyce, I don’t know, but anyway you get the point: stacks of grass that green and grey stone walls and smiling old folks in tweed and maybe a pint or two of the good dark stuff. Anyway there’s a customer, a black man, and he smiles and says Ireland, huh?
And she says, yeah, it’s always a bestseller, all this Irish stuff. —She usually worked in the red room; the books on Ireland would have been in the purple room. But this might have taken place in the orange room. I don’t know for sure.
Anyway he shrugs and says well Ireland, it’s kind of like an Africa for white people.
And my friend allows as how okay, yeah, she can see that.
And he leans across the stacks of books and says, thing is, most of us actually came from Africa.
I’m not going to link to it, the critical contretemps that’s USsed and THEMmed its merry way across LiveJournal (mostly), in part because I have read maybe a teaspoonful of it, in part because it is far more heat than light (my fingers scorched already by what little I read myself), in part because “linking” to it would require nigh-daily updates longer than this post will ever be, even accounting for all the posts and threads that have since been flocked up tight, in part because people I respect and even count as friends however internetty are saying inflammatory things on either side of the divide, but mostly because I haven’t even read the book whose discussion started? sparked? is the focal point? of the current fine mess, so I wasn’t going to say anything at all.
Still, these ripples still keep lapping even at the shores of my little backwater.
But if I say something like how it’s an incredibly dick move to say you haven’t read the book, it’s such an egregious example of X that you couldn’t finish the book, because I mean come on, how can you say something so surely without reading it for yourself, well, someone might say why should I have to read the book to have an opinion because X and anyway I never used the word egregious, why aren’t you engaging my argument?
And if I say something like how it’s an incredibly dick move to say if someone hasn’t read the book what business do they have stating such a divisive opinion about it, because I mean come on, one of the unstated goals of an undergraduate education is to be able to say things about books one’s never read, well, someone might say yes but their argument is wrong I mean X why I’d never, and anyway that’s ridiculous, and why aren’t you engaging my argument?
Which would leave me protesting that I’m not trying to engage any arguments, I’m just trying to point out that if your goal is to have a conversation then you’ve lost by opening with a dick move and if you’re just preaching to the choir well that’s fine but realize what you’re doing and don’t pretend otherwise, but that leaves me as the guy in the middle with the squashed armadillos saying on the one hand but on the other and anyway a mild and not-at-all-inconveniencing pox on both your houses, and no one likes to hang out with him.
And if I say the reason I’m not engaging any arguments is because I haven’t read the book in question, that might leave you with the impression you’ve sussed out which side I’m really on. But then I’d have to point out that the move in question as described sounds dicey as all get-out and I’d never attempt it myself and the earlier attempt that some have cited, which I have read, I’ve got to tell you didn’t work in my opinion, well, that might leave you with the impression you’ve sussed out which side I’m really on, and if so could you tell me? I mean would you look at the crazy on my face? Is that the time? Whoa.
None of which anyway is what I wanted to say.
What I wanted to point out:
This entire argument, about cultural appropriation and all the isms that implies, is raging around contemporary works set rather firmly in the genre of fantasy.
I can’t think of another contemporary genre whose tropes are so nakedly the fruits of cultural appropriation. Whose toolkit is so openly dependent on the tactics of cultural appropriation. —We go to write about the fantastic, and so we sauce our pastoral dish with a biting dash of Other, because what is more strange or fantastic than the Stuff from Beyond the Fields We Know? —And more: we appropriate our appropriations, cannibalizing the books our books are made of until Fantasyland begins to take on its own dim shape, with folklore and folkways we all agree on that nonetheless have never existed anywhere in the REAL world. Miles and miles of books and not a TRUE or AUTHENTIC moment in any of them, and how proud we are of that!
Because look at the beauty. Look at the power. Look what can be done with these tools. But look at the tools; look where they come from; look at what we’re doing with them, and what we’re doing it to. —That’s where the critical discussion needs to be.
(But it is! cry US and THEM. That’s exactly where we are! Weren’t you paying any attention? And anyway I think I made one too many dick moves myself to be able to take on the mantle of Reasoned Discussion, and also anyway, I haven’t read the goddamn book—)
Recession.
n. That period of time in which it is seen as economically feasible to run infomercials advertising a device that sharpens disposable razor blades. (cf. Depression, n., that period of time in which you can’t sell enough devices that sharpen disposable razor blades for $14.99 after mail-in rebate to cover your marketing costs.)
Jack-in-the-pulpit; onyx; yellow sapphire; Pantone® 14-0848 (mimosas!); Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn.
It says something that it’s only now as this blog-thing celebrates its seventh year that I’ve figured out how convenient it can be to post-date entries—so that I write them whenever it’s convenient (or whenever I actually think of them), but they appear whenever I actually want them to appear.
The requisite link to the first post.
The colors of the seventh anniversary are, apparently, yellow and off-white, which makes for an appealing synchronicity with Pantone’s choice of color of the year: a “warm, engaging yellow” they named Mimosa. “In a time of economic uncertainty and political change,” they say, “optimism is paramount and no other color expresses hope and reassurance more than yellow.” And they are the global authority on color and provider of professional color standards for the design industries! Says so on the label. So fret not about the folk wisdom that says yellow walls make kids twitchy and loud.
Seven’s traditional gifts are copper and wool; the modern gift is a desk set, which it seems can be combined with one of my preferences such as golf or collecting. Hmm. Golf aside, I think I’m going to like this year better than previously reported. —It’s suggested I watch The Desk Set: what night’s good for you, O Spouse?
Other odds and ends.
Since they keep piling up, and for whatever reason I’m in a pithy mood: Dylan Meconis has a new website; Sara Ryan, who has new glasses, points us to Vice’s interview with Ursula LeGuin; the Spouse has had a tasty epiphany; and this, while not strictly speaking safe for mixed company, might nonetheless prompt a small slim smile.
“They’re all going to suck, people! They’re all going to suck!”
Douglas Wolk demonstrates his marvelous politesse:
Still, there’s a cautionary tale within the pages of the graphic novel. In the ’40s, the Betty Grable-ish superheroine Sally Jupiter (played by Carla Gugino in Snyder’s film) agrees to star in a biopic, to be called Silk Spectre: the Sally Jupiter Story. Of course, after the director and the studio have their way with it, its working title becomes Sally Jupiter: Law In Its Lingerie, then She-Devils in Silk, and it eventually appears as a bondage-heavy exploitation flick called Silk Swingers of Suburbia. What goes into the Hollywood machine is never what comes out. Snyder’s Watchmen may be a terrific movie—but if it is, what’s great about it won’t be what’s great about Moore and Gibbons’ book.
I need the whip of the thunder, and the wind’s dark moan.
The Rev. Al Sharpton steps into the rain:
I am tired of seeing ministers who will preach homophobia by day, and then after they’re preaching, when the lights are off they go cruising for trade… We know you’re not preaching the Bible, because if you were preaching the Bible we would have heard from you. We would have heard from you when people were starving in California—when they deregulated the economy and crashed Wall Street you had nothing to say. When Madoff made off with the money, you had nothing to say. When Bush took us to war chasing weapons of mass destruction that weren’t there you had nothing to say.
But all of a sudden, when Proposition 8 came out, you had so much to say, but since you stepped in the rain, we gonna step in the rain with you.
[…]
There is something immoral and sick about using all of that power to not end brutality and poverty, but to break into people’s bedrooms and claim that God sent you. It amazes me when I looked at California and saw churches that had nothing to say about police brutality, nothing to say when a young black boy was shot while he was wearing police handcuffs, nothing to say when they overturned affirmative action, nothing to say when people were being relegated into poverty, yet they were organizing and mobilizing to stop consenting adults from choosing their life partners.
Who are you going to believe, me or your own lying language?
I know I shouldn’t be surprised by the truth-eaters, but damn:
Like Lincoln’s plain manner of speaking, Joe [the Plumber]’s commentary is still unvarnished; it still “has the bark on” as the phrase was applied to Lincoln. And if anyone reading this immediately jumps to the conclusion that I am comparing Joe Wurzelbacher to Abraham Lincoln, you have a perfect example of the dynamic I am talking about.
What was Whittle thinking? —I suppose maybe if somebody called him on it, he could always point to this and this and say Obama says he doesn’t “compare” himself to Lincoln, but we know better, so QED?
Hyperbole,
or, Yup, it’s a silverfish.
Yeah, I know, you’re all, dude, Achewood is brilliant? I was never made aware of this fact until now! —But you know how they say every age gets the Achewood it deserves? This is that Achewood.
Insecurites.
It’s a sad state of affairs when, in today’s pluralistic, post-racial society, a rich white man still feels the need to play let’s you and him fight.
Newgle.
Lifehacker tells you how to replace the old Google G in your Firefox search box with the new Google G. —Good God, why?
It’s a chick thing; thank you so much!
Sometimes it’s nice to take a couple of disparate things from your daily media rounds and just sit ’em down next to each other. You know?
No wonder so many men are becoming gay, I mean really. You listen to women today. They’re afraid of ’em! It’s not that— A lot of guys become gay out of default. —There’s another epidemic that we’re not talking about: the lack of grandchildren epidemic. I’m gonna do a whole show on that, which is separate from the gay thing. But why so many white families don’t have grandchildren.
—Michael Savage, noted swimming partner
of Alan Ginsberg
—Jim Balent, noted writer and artist of Tarot,
Witch of the Black Rose
It took its toll on all of us.
Is it just me, or is the Beast’s 50 Most Loathsome of 2008 a little more… tired, than usual?
What Mads Gilbert said.
In case you’ve got less than half an ear on what THEY’re saying about the Gaza and you’re wondering Mads who?—
I am appalled by the terrorists attacks, but I am just as appalled by the suffering the USA has inflicted on others. It is in this context the deaths of 5,000 people must be viewed. If the US government has the legitimate right to bomb and kill civilians in Iraq, those who are oppressed also have a moral right to attack the USA with whatever weapons they can create. Dead civilians are the same, whether they are Americans, Palestinians or Iraqis.
Which is from the bad mad days of November 2001, which is when Solveig Torvik of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer said this about what Dr. Gilbert said:
Yes, dead civilians are the same. But are the reasons they are dead always the same? I think not. That’s where critical distinctions must be made. When civilians die, it matters whether they die as intended or unintended targets. To me, it matters whether you die in the service of liberty or tyranny.
Hear, hear! More light less heat, we always say. But how does one ensure the world shall know one’s aim is ever toward liberty? Perhaps a leafletting campaign?
