#this ones just like. if freud was the editor

[cupiare]

started off really enjoying a fairly honorable defeat but the drama is getting a bit dreadful i won’t lie

[grandhotelabyss]

I know that you're probably not the person to ask, but then I just don't know who would be... Why doesn't Sarah Nicole Prickett have a book of essays by now? Hasn't she written enough essays to even compile them into a book? Are they not notable enough or penetrating or.... I grew up reading her essays and they led me to a lot of solid literature. I mean some of her stuff seems to be fruity fashion articles I don't care for, but I thought she managed to carry an impeccable level of writing paired with a more-so philosophical mode of thinking into everything she did. I think it's a shame for her to fade.

Maybe it's something specific and unknowable from the outside. It doesn't seem like too many writers from that clique in the New Inquiry to Artforum-Bookforum pipeline did write books. Even the swaggeringly judgmental Lorentzen, to say nothing of the lovingly ambivalent Prickett, has no book. The moment for the specific aesthetic/ideology she was loosely associated with was probably circa 2015-2019, with say The Argonauts and Females as bookends and Jia Tolentino as the pop version, so maybe she missed her window. I agree with you that she was among the best in that milieu, not that I'm an expert. I quoted her admiringly here on Hardwick's Melville-as-heroine, a point she made against the worst of that Millennial leftist nihilism in Kate Zambreno. Though I am ambivalent about cliquish Bookforum, here she is this summer on Jacqueline Rose, whom she seems to prefer to Gillian, not a stance I sympathize with (men! always judging and picking and choosing! what would Simone Weil say?), and I'm already a little sick of the new vogue for psychoanalysis on the socialist left, predictable as it is following their political defeat, as one always needs Freud to explain why Marx doesn't work, and I find the whole framework of the piece a bit, well, sentimental (men!), but she writes well all the same—

Gillian’s death inspired Jacqueline’s publishers to suggest that she might write a memoir of her sister’s life. But a memoir, which would not do justice to the life, didn’t materialize. Neither did the project that Jacqueline proposed in its stead, a book about the Jewish-turned-Christian philosopher, mystic, and martyr Edith Stein. (This is all according to the interview of Rose by the editors of The Jacqueline Rose Reader, published in 2011.) Stein is—has to be—the original name of Stone, the dispossessed and disowning father of Gillian and Jacqueline. And now, a further substitution, Weil for Stein. Simone comes from the Hebrew “Shimon,” meaning “one who hears.” “Weil” as a German word means “because,” but as a surname for Germans it’s said to derive from the Latin “villa,” as in a country house, a family estate. Historians believe that “Weil” was adopted by families originally named “Levi,” a Hebrew word for “joining.” So we are fully back in place, if not time. 

—so maybe she's working away on a magnum opus behind the scenes.

[notasdriedapricots]

Tag Game Tuesday Sunday

(I'm so late but so much happened this week, I'm sorry)

Thanks for the tag, @lasswithumor

Name: Sofía

Age: 28

Pronouns: she/her

When is your birthday?: 6th of March

Where do you call home?: Somewhere in the centre of Argentina

Do you have any pets?: Not really. My parents have a cat that I kinda adopt when I visit, but the one I considered my cat (even though he also lives with my parents) died a couple years ago. I do want to get my own cat soon tho

Current favourite musical artist?: Oh, that's hard because lately my discover weekly has been on point so I just get random songs from artists I've never heard about. But I guess I'm currently excited about what Vulfpeck is putting out lately (or Vulfmon might be a different project altogether, I honestly haven't researched it I'm just vibing hard with "I can't party" and the visual album)

What do you do for work?: I'm a psychologist, although currently I'm also working retail a couple days a week for other reasons

If you could have lunch with anyone, dead of alive, who would it be?: Freud, no doubt. I'd love to see him despise current psychoanalysis and turn to neurosciences, because I KNOW he fucking would.

What are you wearing right now?: Black mom jeans, a back sweater, brown boots and belt, and sunglasses. I'm chilling in the sun rn

You're going back to school, what is your major?: Industrial design, I'd like to make useful objects. I've realised my mind works in a way I feel would really work in that field. That or I'd study to be a literary editor. I'm better at that than I am at writing tbh.

Last fanfic or book you read?: That I finished? Piranesi, I think. As for what I'm technically currently reading, I started The Dictionary of Lost Words a while back but I'm not the biggest fan of how the beginning is written (the narration doesn't feel like a small child at all and it's a bit off-putting at times...)

Share a happy memory: My graduation ❤️

Again, thank you for the tag! As usual, I'm late and so have no idea who has been tagged. So here's a free tag for you if you want to do this too!: @🎁

[papertrueworld]

Is Editing Your Thesis Too Expensive?

We see a culture of collaboration in academia. Even if you are a loner and prefer sitting quietly in a corner and working, having someone to work with has its benefits. You can solve problems more quickly, brainstorming sessions are fun and productive, and you are seldom rendered speechless.

A second pair of eyes helps you to get a fresh perspective on your thesis by refining your prose and helping structure it effectively. A good thesis editor will help you answer tricky questions regarding your thesis statement, and the content structure of your dissertation, and help you adhere to formatting guidelines.

Getting your dissertation edited professionally neutralizes bias. When you write your thesis, your brain automatically justifies your writing and tricks you into thinking that it is valid. When you look at it from someone else’s perspective, it is easier to find errors in grammar and punctuation. Professional thesis editing services also help you neutralize bias in terms of subject.

For example, let’s say you are doing a master’s degree in Psychology and are writing a paper on Freud’s methods vs Jean Piaget’s methods. Personally, you may tilt more towards Freud’s ideas, and that might cloud your rational, objective judgment in writing. Your editor will point out such bias and suggest points to develop much more rounded arguments.

Professional editing helps you become a stronger academic writer. When you give your thesis to your professor to edit, they will point out superficial errors and be done with it. An academic edit is a line-by-line review, with the “track changes” function on Microsoft Word. The corrections and edits that a thesis editor makes will be visible along with the original text so that you know how and where your text can be improved.

A good thesis should be like a smooth journey for the reader, with a definite destination in mind. Each paragraph should build on the previous one until the conclusion. A good editor ensures that your thesis builds up to a resounding crescendo and helps you build gradual momentum. The editor reviews each paragraph to ensure that it is necessary and adds value to your thesis.

A thesis editor ensures that your dissertation is free from any grammatical and punctuation errors. But these are just the superficial things that a thesis editor does. They help you perfect your thesis in terms of content and structure. They answer the following questions for you:

Is the thesis well-organized?

Is the thesis statement the right balance between specific and comprehensive?

Do the paragraphs follow the MEAL writing plan?

Is thesis editing expensive?

It is quite difficult to find a good thesis editor whose charges are affordable. While dissertation editing certainly isn’t cheap, it’s also completely worth the money.

A good thesis editor provides professional feedback and suggestions for you to strengthen your thesis and make it more impactful. Thesis editing is a long-term investment: It is an asset that will help you secure your future academically. You can save up through your course for this essential step.

Editing firms offer a variety of discounts to make the editing expense bearable for students. PaperTrue, for example, offers monthly discounts so you can get an impressive thesis at an affordable price!

[letustalkhistory]

On this Day: 1st April 1908, Abraham Maslow Born

On this Day, 1st April, 1908, Abraham Maslow was born.  Maslow is famously accredited for Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

Abraham Harold Maslow was born in Brooklyn, New York, US, the eldest of seven. Maslow’s parents fled Kiev, then part of the Russian Empire as a result of the Czar’s prosecution on the Jewish community (read more on Jewish Persecution in Russia).  In spite of Maslow having six siblings, he described his childhood as being lonely and unhappy, having struggled to overcome acts of racism and anti-Semitism such as events like anti-Semitic gangs chasing and throwing rocks at Maslow. One of his only friends was his cousin, Will and the books he immersed himself from the library. 

Maslow also despised his home life, having a negative relationship with his mother, himself having said, "What I had reacted to was not only her physical appearance, but also her values and world view, her stinginess, her total selfishness, her lack of love for anyone else in the world  – even her own husband and children  – her narcissism, her Negro prejudice, her exploitation of everyone, her assumption that anyone was wrong who disagreed with her, her lack of friends, her sloppiness and dirtiness...".   Maslow had attended one of the top high schools in Brooklyn, Boys High School. Whilst here he served as an officer to many academia clubs and became editor of the Latin Magazine as well as editor of “Principia,” the school’s Physics paper for a year,  After high school, Maslow attended the City College of New York, where he also took night classes on legal studies alongside his undergraduate course. In 1927 he transferred to Cornell after having nearly immediately dropped out of his previous College, although Maslow he dropped out of Cornell after one semester due to low grades and the high cost of tuition. He later went on to finish Law at City College of New York, and after developing an interest in psychology had went to Graduate School at University of Wisconsin. Here he found a mentor in psychologist, Harry Harlow who served as a doctoral advisor. At the University of Wisconsin Maslow earned his bachelors, masters and doctorate degrees in Psychology. Maslow’s masters thesis on  "learning, retention, and reproduction of verbal material" was published in 1934, three years after completion after Professor Cason (the individual who recommended Maslow to research the subject for his thesis) had convinced Maslow that it was nothing to be embarrassed off (Maslow’s belief).  Whilst studying in 1928 Maslow married his first cousin Bertha, who was still in high school at the time, having met years earlier in Brooklyn. 

Maslow progressed to Columbia University on similar themes of his thesis on his research. At Columbia, Maslow found himself mentored by Alfred Adler, an earlier colleague of Sigmund Freud. 

In 1937 Maslow had became a member of faculty at Brooklyn College, where he worked for fourteen years.  After world war two, Maslow has began questioning the way psychologists came to their conclusions on understanding the human mind, and whilst not completely disagreeing did initialize his own ideas, which he called humanistic psychology.  Throughout the second world war, by the time the US entered in 1941 Maslow was already a father of two at thirty three years old so was ineligible for the military. In spite of this, it did not mean that Maslow was not inspired by the horrors of war in a “vision of peace,” which lead to his groundbreaking psychological studies of self-actualizing under the initial supervision of two mentors, a Ruth Benedict and Max Wertheimer. This would become his basis for his focus on mental health and human potential and through borrowing ideas from other psychologists developed theories such as the concepts of hierarchy of needs, metamovitaion, peak experiences, metaneeds et cetra.  In 1951, Maslow was a professor at Brandeis University for eighteen years to 1969. Between this time he also became a fellow resident of the Laughlin Institute in California. In 1963 he rejected a nomination to become the President of the Association for Humanistic Psychology as he felt the organisation should develop as an intellectual movement without need of a leader.  On June 8th1970, just three years after having previously suffered a heart attack, Maslow whilst jogging had a severe heart attack leading to his death. Maslow was aged 62 in Menlo Park, California and is buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery.  Maslow is recognised as being a pioneer in psychology and paved the future of future psychologists, forming the framework in comprehensive studies. His most  Keep an eye out on Lets Talk...Psychology for Maslow’s Theories! (at this time not produced)

[ancientphantom]

Working on brushing up old reviews has inspired me to provide these for everyone playing along at home: Bad Phantom Adaptation Bingo!

Categories are behind the cut. I suggest drinking, especially if played with friends.

Angry Mob: Bonus points if it’s somewhere that it absolutely does not make sense for an angry mob to form.

Anti-Romani Racism: Use of the G-slur and any plot involving Romani people being evil, abusive, magical, or otherwise stereotyped all the way to hell.

Carlotta’s Career: Bad Singer: Somehow Carlotta is a highly sought after professional opera singer, yet also simultaneously super bad at singing.

Christine and Raoul Have a Loveless Marriage: Yes, they got married, but it was the wrong choice and they hate it, okay?

Christine is Evil: And that’s why she hurt Erik’s poor feelings and we hate her.

Eh, Just Kill Raoul Off: He can’t interfere in your ship if he’s dead.

Erik Dates a Blind Woman: I mean, who else?

Erik Finds Religion: Converting (usually to Christianity) will solve his problems!

Erik Has Manly Pets: Thundering stallions, menacing hounds, hordes of rats.

Erik is Rich/Noble/Fancy: He’s a count, or a lord, or a prince, or he has five million dollars, or he’s a literal angel...

Erik Learned Nothing from Last Time: Erik forgot instantly about that whole learning and gaining redemption thing and is plotting to do exactly what he was doing the entire time... all over again.

Erik Loves Animals: Erik cares for or is able to instantly bond with animals so you can tell he’s a Good Person on the inside.

Erik Wrote the ALW Musical: Because who else could have written the most amazing musical ever committed to paper?

Erik the Virgin Sexmaster: Erik has never had sex before, but he’s mind-blowingly good at it and everyone has fifteen orgasms.

Erik’s Genius Musical Spawn: Erik has children and they’re just as Special as he is.

Everyone Lives at the Theater: Instead of, you know, in their homes.

Evil Persian People: Foreign people are antagonistic and dangerous, especially those scary brown ones.

Freud Called, Erik’s Dating His Mom Again: Christine looks uncannily like Erik’s mother, and/or he obviously uses his love interest as a replacement/proxy for his mother.

Have You Heard About Erik’s Tragic Childhood?: Recap the whole thing, as luridly as possible, and explain why it means it’s okay for him to be an asshole.

Hilarious Names: Characters are named variations on Angel, musical terms, or completely made up names that don’t exist in reality.

Hottie Phantom: Erik is just lusciously physically hot and everyone wants him. It’s science.

It’s Not Pedophilia If It’s Romantic: No, no, it’s okay if Christine/some other lady is a child/teenager and Erik is an adult. He loves her and he might wait until the day she’s legal, so that makes it okay!

Mask That Makes You Handsome: Erik creates a mask that makes him an undetectable gorgeous male model when worn.

Meg, For No Reason: Look, she’s in the ALW musical so she’s going to show up at least once if it kills us.

Nurse Poor Wounded Erik: Erik gets hurt or falls ill so a loving woman can lovingly nurse him back to health.

Orphan Alert: Erik and/or other characters adopt orphans to show how good and charitable they are.

Random French Words: It’s important to sometimes say oui, monsieur in your text so people don’t forget this is set in France.

Random Muggers: Sometimes you need random muggers so people can be rescued from them. That’s life.

Random Orientalism: Making things sound exotic and fancy by invoking places in Asia or Africa (usually Persia and India, but somehow everywhere in the world is fair game).

Raoul is Abusive: Just give him a personality transplant and then no one has to worry about whether or not Christine likes him.

Rape Threat: Someone’s Virtue is Threatened, often by random antagonists (or Raoul).

Reincarnation: People come back for another round and usually make exactly the same mistakes.

Romance with Thinly-Disguised Self-Insert: Author writes an obvious personal fantasy of their avatar dating Erik and helping him recover from Christine’s cruel rejection.

Secret Erik/Christine Sex: Either they did it during the original story and you just didn’t notice, or they’re doing it right now and Raoul doesn’t.

Secret Wedding!: Christine and Erik actually got married! Or maybe someone else and Erik. It’s very hush-hush. Priests are rarely even invited.

Sexy Madame Giry: It’s important that those side characters all get sexy romance, too.

Smug Smirks of Smugness: Erik smirks so you know he’s powerful yet playful.

Stalking is Sexy: The ladies LOVE it when Erik creepily lurks just out of sight everywhere they go.

This Book Brought to You By Absolutely No Editors: From the run-on sentences to the rampant commas to the wild homophone abuse, reading this hurts your eyes and your brain.

Those Were Accidents, Not Murders!: Erik didn’t really murder anyone, they just blundered into his traps/accidentally fell into his noose/forced him to fight back in self-defense/didn’t really die.

Time to Punish Christine!: Christine was very bad to break Erik’s heart and that’s why this book is now going to abuse, murder, assault, or in some other way ruin her life.

Time Travel!: How else is your modern-day character going to get to romance the Phantom?

Vampire Phantom: Erik does not drink... wine.

Wait, Christine Changed Her Mind!: Actually, she didn’t mean it when she said she wanted to go home with Raoul so she’s coming right back now.

WHAT Daroga?: When the Persian is forgotten yet again.

WHAT Deformity?: Actually, Erik isn’t ugly at all, or he’s barely ugly and everyone can reassure him that actually they love him.

What Even is French Nobility?: No one knows what Raoul’s title is or how it works.

Whorephobia: Disdain for and mistreatment of sex workers, usually to show how “pure” or “good” the other characters are.

Women: For Healing Erik’s Soul: Female characters are solely here to heal Erik’s suffering and reward his pain. What do you mean, “goals” and “feelings”?

Zero Classical Music Knowledge: Obvious lack of elementary understanding of opera, composition, or like... what words mean.

[k00244461]

Research

Harry Styles

His fashion has been noted as "flamboyant", "fashion-forward" and "fun". Citing his use of the colour pink, Styles quoted English musician and The Clash's bassist Paul Simonon in a Rolling Stone interview: "Pink is the only true rock & roll colour." Ann Powers of NPR wrote that his personal style recalls the Spice Girls' "theatrical parade through pop's sartorial heritage" and that he "comforts with fashion's way of telling stories through artful accessories." Tom Lamont of The Guardian noted that some of Styles' fashion choices have contributed to "an important political discussion about gendered fashion."

Styles won the British Style Award at the 2013 Fashion Awards. In 2018, Styles was voted fourth on British GQ's list of 50 best-dressed men, in which fashion designer Michael Kors deemed him "the modern embodiment of British rocker style: edgy, flamboyant and worn with unapologetic swagger."

Journalist and editor Anna Wintour chose Styles to be a co-chair of the 2019 Met Gala alongside Lady Gaga and Serena Williams, which preceded the art exhibition Camp: Notes on Fashion. In 2020, Styles became the first man to appear solo on the cover of Vogue, for its December issue. Following criticism from conservative commentators and activists for wearing a Gucci gown on the cover, Styles defended his decision by saying, "To not wear something because it's females' clothing, you shut out a whole world of great clothes." He went on to say that "what's exciting about right now is you can wear what you like" and that the lines "are becoming more and more blurred. "He was voted GQ's Most Stylish Man of the Year in 2020.

Grayson Perry

Grayson Perry (born 24 March 1960) is an English contemporary artist, writer and broadcaster. He is known for his ceramic vases, tapestries and cross-dressing, as well as his observations of the contemporary arts scene, and for dissecting British "prejudices, fashions and foibles".

From an early age he liked to dress in women's clothes and in his teens realised that he was a cross-dresser. At the age of 15 he moved in with his father's family in Chelmsford, where he began to go out dressed as a woman. When he was discovered by his father he said he would stop but his stepmother told everyone about it and a few months later threw him out.

Perry frequently appears in public dressed as a woman, and he has described his female alter-ego, "Claire", variously as "a 19th century reforming matriarch, a middle-England protester for No More Art, an aero-model-maker, or an Eastern European Freedom Fighter", and "a fortysomething woman living in a Barratt home, the kind of woman who eats ready meals and can just about sew on a button". In his work Perry includes pictures of himself in women's clothes: for example Mother of All Battles (1996) is a photograph of Claire holding a gun and wearing a dress, in ethnic eastern European style, embroidered with images of war, exhibited at his 2002 Guerrilla Tactics show.

Perry has designed many of Claire's outfits himself. Also, fashion students at Central Saint Martins art college in London take part in an annual competition to design new dresses for Claire. An exhibition, Making Himself Claire: Grayson Perry's Dresses, was held at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, from November 2017 to February 2018.

As of 2010 he lives in north London with his wife, the author and psychotherapist Philippa Perry. They have one daughter, Florence, born in 1992.

Leigh Bowery

Leigh Bowery (26 March 1961 – 31 December 1994) was an Australian performance artist, club promoter, and fashion designer. Bowery was known for his flamboyant costumes and makeup as well as his performances. Bowery was born and raised in Sunshine, a suburb of Melbourne, Australia. From an early age, he studied music, played piano, and went on to study fashion and design at RMIT for a year. He moved to London in 1980: 'I was so itchy to see new things and to see the world, that I just left', he said in 1987. There he found himself part of the New Romantic club scene. He worked in a clothing shop and appeared in commercials for Pepe jeans. He soon became an influential and lively figure in the underground clubs of London and New York, as well as in art and fashion circles. He attracted attention by wearing wildly outlandish and creative outfits that he made himself. As a fashion designer he had several collections and shows in London, New York and Tokyo. He has influenced designers and artists. He was known for wildly creative costumes, makeup, wigs and headgear, all of which combined to be striking and inventive and often kitschy or beautiful.

Bowery influenced other artists and designers including Alexander McQueen, Lucian Freud, Vivienne Westwood, plus numerous Nu-Rave bands and nightclubs in London and New York City.

Jaden Smith

Jaden Smith (born July 8, 1998) sometimes known by just the mononym Jaden is an American actor, rapper, singer, and songwriter. GQ described Smith as "in a league of his own" in terms of fashion and a "superstar who has taken fashion to an entirely different level". Smith has called Tyler the Creator, Batman and Poseidon his icons when it comes to fashion. Smith said that Tyler the Creator introduced him to the brand Supreme. Batman's dark, gothic scenery has influenced the clothing he has created through his brand MSFTSrep and his personal clothing style, wearing Batman protective armor to Kanye West's and Kim Kardashian's wedding and his prom. MSFTSrep's range includes hoodies, T-shirt, trousers and vests. In May 2013 Smith collaborated with a Korean designer, Choi Bum Suk, to create a pop-up store in which customers can buy clothes with their collaborated logos.

Smith raised controversy in 2016 after modelling in a womenswear campaign for Louis Vuitton wearing a skirt. Explaining his choice to wear a skirt, Smith said he was attempting to combat bullying, saying "In five years, when a kid goes to school wearing a skirt, he won't get beat up and kids won't get mad at him." Smith continued to wear womenswear throughout the rest of 2016. Smith was the first male model to model women's wear for Louis Vuitton. Smith created a denim-line with fashion brand G-Star in 2018.

[professorchaos]

a few people have expressed interest in this, so under the cut is a list of academic resources focused on critical analysis of south park and/or relating it to a wider context in either animation, television, philosophy or social studies.

books

The Deep End of South Park: Critical Essays on Television’s Shocking Cartoon Series, edited by Leslie Stratyner and James R. Keller, 2009

this title is available on a 14-day loan from archive.org’s online library, found here. i would recommend downloading it as a PDF for easy reading. my personal favourite essay from this book- that i have read so far- is the very last one: “Among School Children: Lacan and the South Park Felt Board Lesson Set” by james r. keller, though i think there’s something in here for everyone depending on personal areas of interest. i’d recommend reading the introduction to get an idea of which essays you’re interested in. one warning is that this book is much heavier than most of the sources recommended here, both in use of language and in content (at least, the way the content is dealt with and examined in depth). a lot of it is pure critical & literary analysis, so if you didn’t enjoy english class in school, you might want to give this one a miss. (if you did, however, absolutely go for it. it’s a great book).

South Park and Philosophy: You Know, I Learned Something Today, edited by Robert Arp, 2006

this one is... weird. you can read some of it on google books here, but the rest will have to be purchased- if it captures your interest then i’d recommend just buying a secondhand paperback copy, since they go on amazon for as low as like, 20 cents. the weird thing about this book is mostly the attitude of the editor; the book’s tone is very laid-back, not professional or academic outside of the essays themselves (and even then, not always). there’s even a totally made up ‘interview’ with matt and trey at the end of the book.

that said, it’s a good read, and there’s a lot of content. if you’re interested in religion, politics and ethics you’ll most likely enjoy this quite a bit. i think that “Is It Okay to Laugh at South Park?” by catherine yu might be particularly relevant to fandom, and it’s one of the chapters that can be read online for free!

Prime Time Animation: Television animation and American culture, edited by Carol A. Stabile and Mark Harrison, 2003

only two chapters of this book put focus on south park (7 and 12) but it’s still worth worth giving a read if you’re interested in television and/or animation. i found “Back to the drawing board: The family in animated television comedy” by michael v. tueth especially interesting, as it provides a wider context to the ways in which family is presented on the show, from early sitcom television to the rising popularity of the simpsons through the late 90s. on the other hand, “’Oh my god, they digitized Kenny!’: Travels in the South Park Cybercommunity V4.0″ by brian l. ott will be of interest to anyone fascinated by the old web, focusing on examining and analysing online south park communities from 1998 to 2002. though hugely outdated, it’s a very endearing piece and a relic to a time gone by.

journals

“Won't somebody please think of the children? Or, South Park fanfic and the political realm” by Judith Fathallah in Journal of Youth Studies, 2015

“Something in My Pocket: Bakhtin, Freud, and South Park” by Ian Ganassi in The Critical Flame, 2016

“Motherhood, Stereotypes and South Park” by Victoria Nagy in Women’s Studies, 2010. As far as I can find, this is not accessible without a university library, but contacting Nagy directly to ask for a copy might work. (I also might be able to provide a PDF over email, but only for personal reading).

note that these are just a few that i’ve read- there’s definitely more out there, and if i find anything else which i enjoy, i’ll add it to the list! feel free to send in any resources you would like to recommend as well. happy reading!

[michael-weinstein]

Reacting to David Hurwitz

Some weeks ago I came across the recently opened Youtube channel of David Hurwitz, a music critic who wrote reviews for High Fidelity and Amazon, and the founder and executive editor of the website Classics Today. I agree with some of his opinions, though I do disagree with him a good deal. But the straw that broke the camel's back was one of his early videos, which is titled: Classical Music's 10 Dirtiest Secrets. I was so alarmed by it, that I decided at once to stop watching his videos and to omit him from my YouTube recommendations. Today I've decided to finally face Mr. Hurwitz and express my reactions to his "secrets". Now, more than my opinions being lauded, I actually want people to congratulate me for copying the entire script, unabridged, because it was painful for me to do so, since I disagree with practically every "secret". And in response to some of the comments, Mr. Hurwitz said something to the effect of "some people here don't have a sense of humor!" Well, I do have a sense of humor (you can blame my parents for that), but if you, dear Herr Prof. Hurwitz, say you're joking, you've got to make that more clear in your arguments. Well, here is, without further ado, Classical Music's 10 Dirtiest Secrets by Mr. David Hurwitz.

[This is] the antidote to all of that PR we hear these days, that tells us that just because something is "classical", it must all be equally fabulous and we just can't get enough. Well, here's a news flash: it's not. Witness the following:

1. Mozart really does all sound the same. Yes, he was a genius. Yes, he wrote 620-some-odd pieces in 35 years, but let's face it. How different can they be? Even Toscanini thought they all sounded the same.

2. Beethoven's Grosse Fuge is just plain ugly. I mean, if you ever listen to that thing recently, it sounds like four dying cattle. I know we're supposed to be amazed at its contrapuntal mastery, and it's transcendental what-not whatever. It's ugly, let's not kid ourselves.

3. Wagner's operas are much better with cuts. I mean nothing, nothing has the right to be 4 or 5 hours long at a stretch. I mean, you go to the Met at 6 in the evening, and you don't leave till after midnight? You got to be crazy. The shorter it is, the better it is.

4. No one cares about the first 3 movements of Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique. I mean, nobody. We all want to hear The March to the Scaffold and then The Dream of the Witches' Sabbath. That's the hot stuff, that's were the music gets really juicy and exciting. The first 3 movements are more than a half hour [long], they're just preludial. I mean you sit through them politely, but then you wait to get your pulse racing, right? When the guy's head gets chopped off and the witches start hopping around. I mean, you know, he really should have just written the last 2 [movements] and left off the first 3, I think.

5. Schoenberg's music never sounds more attractive, no matter how many times you listen to it. Of course we're told that, you know, it's only a question of getting accustomed to its particular unique sound world and all that, and the more attention you give to it, the more rewarding it will be. Wrong, it's never more rewarding, it never sounds better. He was just a difficult truculant kind of guy, and he wrote difficult truculant music. Even his tonal music is hard to listen to. It's just difficult, period. Accept it, live with it, and love it, or don't.

6. Schumann's orchestration is really bad, and needs improvement. Once in a while a conductor will show up who says: "Well, you know I'm playing the original orchestration, it's better than everybody thought". No, it's not. It's thick, it's muddy, it doesn't do the music justice, and everybody tinkers with it. Even people who don't physically rescore it mess with the balances or whatever, just to make it listenable. Otherwise it's simply impossible.

7. Bruckner couldn't write a symphonic allegro to save his life. I mean, he calls some movements allegro, but who is he kidding. Even his early school symphony (you know, the one we call [Symphony No.] 00) has a first movement that's Allegro molto vivace. I mean, who is he kidding? It's not allegro, it's not molto, it's not vivace, it's all just slow. It's the way the man was, and we have to accept it as it is.

8. Liszt is trash. Enough said.

9. The so-called "happy ending" of Shostakovich's Fifth is actually perfectly sincere. Now, recent scholarship has revealed that this happy ending with the trumpets going nuts, and cymbals and timpani pounding away, crashing and bashing, is supposed to be a hidden signal for the misery and suffering of the Russian people. So while the music itself is going nuts with joy, we're supposed to be secretly sympathizing with their unhappiness and with the composer's personal misery. Well, I don't know. Freud said sometimes a happy ending is just a happy ending. And you know, it's okay to be happy. Finally:

10. It's a good thing that only about 200 Bach cantatas survive. I mean really, folks, have you listened to all 200 of them? Do you just like come home from work and say, "Heck! I really need to hear a 25-minute Lutheran penitential cantata about suffering and misery"? I mean, how many of them can we stand? Supposedly about a third of them are missing, I mean more than a hundred of them. And if you're really really that concerned about it, if you really think it's a loss to humanity, I have a suggestion of where you might want to look for them. You see, when Bach died his estate got divided up between his wife and kids, and the oldest one Wilhelm Friedemann (who was supposedly a drunk organist or something like that) had a daughter. And his daughter got married to a business man, and sometime around the 1760s or so (or '70s, I don't know somewhere around then) they moved to Oklahoma. So, if you happen to have nothing to do, and you're really desperate for a new Bach cantata, start looking in barns at Oklahoma, because they started a farm there, and so somewhere, maybe, you know, near Oklahoma City or somewhere out there in the Texas Panhandle, you may find a hundred or so Bach cantatas!

And with that, let me just suggest that you should use your own judgement, listen fearlessly, judge mercilessly, enjoy what you want, love what you love and don't worry about the rest.

Well, now it's my time to respond (wow, it was difficult copying all of that).

1. I have to admit that I'm not so hot on Mozart. I get the feeling that I must worship him because he was a colossal genius, in a sense he's an encylopedia figure (and it's weird that I don't feel the same way about Bach, Beethoven or Haydn who are usually considered as encylopedic figures, and Mr. Hurwitz has himself admitted that although he respects Bach, he doesn't like a lot of his music specifically for this reason). However, I do think that there's a very noticeable difference between Mozart's 1st symphony and his 40th (I haven't heard the Jupiter, so the analogy is not perfect, but at least I'm honest about it). Besides, I personally do not really like Toscanini, but even without that, just because Toscanini said something doesn't mean it needs to apply to everything and everyone.

2. Well, Beethoven's Grosse Fuge is an acquired taste. I mean yes, it's difficult, it's hard to get through, it's angry, and it might even be "ugly", but that's because Beethoven wanted to be ugly. If you don't like it, just go and leave.

3. This one touches a sick nerve because I am a Wagnerian. Yes, some people are crazy in order to go and be in the theater for 6 hours for a Wagner opera. I do get that sometimes it's difficult to be attentive throughout such a long performance (especially if it's a bad one), but Wagner knew what he was doing when he was composing such long operas (and mind you, I don't always agree with his megalomaniac ideas). It is Wagner's right to have Meistersinger run for 5 hours, just as it is Puccini's right to have La Bohème run for 2 hours. Once again, if you don't want to be in an opera house for 6 hours, don't go. But don't tell me that everything is better when it's short.

4. Once again, this one also touches a sick nerve as I'm a deep fan Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique. I should remark that aside from its programmatic function, I don't get the fourth movement, but I would be the first to admit that the finale is the X-Factor of the symphony. That said however, there is a place for the first 3 movements. If they're preludial, they're supposed to be so! And they're much more than a prelude! The first movement has lots of moments of teenage anxiety, depression and hallucination and one of the criteria for a good performance would be for me how much it gets the madness and extremness in this movement. In short, how "teenagery" it is. The second movement also seems to be just nice, and not having any service apart from its programmatic function, but it's sometimes good not to be going full tilt in the epicness department. Likewise, the third movement is also there for the need of what William Berger called (in a different context) "the lowering of the collective blood-pressure". And yet despite what might seem from a movement titled Scene in the Countryside, this movement actually has some manic terrifying moments. Once again, if you don't like the first 3 movements, just listen to the last 2, but again, Berlioz knew what he was doing in adding these first 3 movements.

5. Like the Grosse Fuge, Schoenberg's music is also an acquired taste. I disagree with Mr. Hurwitz's opinion that "it never gets more attractive", but I also disagree with those who say that "the more attention you give to it, the more it will reward you". Circumstances vary with every single person from one millisecond to the next. I am a Schoenberg fan, but I don't persuade people to join the Schoenberg fan club (but that's because I'm not a kind of a persudaing guy). And I'm not alone in that. Alexander Goehr, who is likewise a deep Schoenberg fan, seems to agree with me on this point (that is, I agree with him):

I don't think it is likely that it is possible to convince people who find the music [of Schoenberg] extremely difficult, that hidden beneath the surface is a heart of gold, and it's really all like Puccini if you only knew how to listen to it. It isn't like that. This was a fractious and difficult personality, with a striking and fast mind, and a feeling of responsibility towards music, musicians, students, all through his life.

Once again, if you don't like it, don't listen to it, just go and leave.

6. I haven't listened to Schumann's music so I can't say whether his orchestration is bad or not. However, I can say that people don't tinker only with Schumann's dynamics, and for some reason they get criticized for that in a way which would not happen if they would do the same to Schumann. So in a sense, having a conductor tinkering with Schumann's dynamics should not be something all that special, so stop making so much of a deal out of it.

7. Likewise, I haven't listened to much Bruckner, but I would agree that if it is indeed slow, that is the way Bruckner was and we can't do anything about it. Maybe what for him was fast, is slow for Mr. Hurwitz. And not only is the perception of tempo different from one person to another, it's different within the same person from one millisecond to the next.

8. Ok, I'm barely handling myself together when I'm writing this, and things are especially confusing when Mr. Hurwitz doesn't dare detail. If you think that Liszt is only virtuoso opera transcriptions, the Transcendental Etudes and the Hungarian Rhapsodies, you are damn wrong! Just look at his symphonic poems, and the Faust and Dante Symphonies and you'll see he was much more than just a flashy romantic pyrotechnic of the piano. You still think this is kitschy and wearing on the sleeve? Ok, fine. How about the late piano pieces?! I just keep going mad when I see how many people don't know, let alone appreciate Liszt's late works (which I'm not even going to write a blog post on, because it speaks by itself. Here's a playlist.) These pieces tell you, more even than Tristan, the Ring and Parsifal, how Debussy and early Schoenberg came into being. If you're not convinced by that, I really have no other idea to dissuade you from believing that "Liszt is trash".

9. I have to say before I begin the discussion of Mr. Hurwitz's argument, that trying to figure out the meaning of Shostakovich's music is just pure mayhem, for reasons I hope I don't need to tell you. That being said, we are really actually told that the conflict between musicologists is whether he composed the Fifth Symphony in order to save his skin, or is the music braced with sarcasm. As I understand, there is no reason why the ending should be understood as "sincerely happy" when one goes deeper. Once again, what Freud says doesn't necessarily apply to every situation. So yes, I wouldn't necessarily go as far as to say that we're supposed to be thinking of misery, but we should think of hypocrisy.

10. Once again, I have barely listened to Bach cantatas, but just from looking at the titles, I'm pretty sure that not all of those cantatas are about "suffering and misery" (small unimportant sidenote: You really needed to use the same two words you just used for Shostakovich?). I don't know how much this is likely, but go figure that the hundred or so lost cantatas happen to be the best cantatas Bach ever wrote, and what we've known till now is, forgive the expression, the rotten bottom of the barrel? But trying to go around Oklahoma farms to find them is almost hopeless, for a number of reasons. Most likely, the manuscripts could have been deemed worthless, so they were used for other purposes. The farm could have been destroyed or dismantled or whatever. So maybe we're lucky that some Bach cantatas are missing, maybe not, I have no idea what to say about this.

I saved the most important issue for the end. I have no problem with all the opinions that Mr. Hurwitz has expressed - as long as he was meaning only to express his own opinion. I obviously disagree with him, but I have no serious problem with Mr. Hurwitz suggesting that Wagner's operas are better when cut, that Mozart sounds all the same, and (though with some difficulty, if only because Liszt is widely misunderstood) that Liszt is trash. The problem I have is with him saying that these are the "official dirtiest-secret facts of the classical music industry". And once again, if he's joking, he should make that clearer.

P.S. As I was writing this, I discovered that it's apparently also available online as an editorial, so if you want to make me suffer twice, you can do that.

(Originally posted: 9 August 2020)

[xanyoules]

"You Should Never Tell a Psychopath They Are a Psychopath. It Upsets Them": Villanelle, Joe Goldberg and Feeling Sorry for Psychopaths

What do you envision when you hear the word? I’d hazard a guess it’s your prototypical psychopath with a dead-eye stare and blood-stained knife in hand. Perhaps it’s your conspiracy theorist neighbour, or that — yes, that one — ex. We’ve seen Villanelle’s theatrical murders on ‘Killing Eve’ and we’ve rooted for Joe in ‘You’ despite his murder habit. We’ve read articles with clickbait titles on how to “spot” a psychopath and immediately diagnosed our sibling, colleague or ex-best friend. It’s a term we throw around carelessly, yet it also inspires fear. A real psychopath isn’t like us and they certainly aren’t worth any kind of sympathy. We’re good people and they’re crazy, violent, controlling, unemotional and self-obsessed. Right?

Sweet but a psycho

Popular culture has given us infamous psychopaths throughout the decades and a couple of our contemporary favourites must be Oskana Astankova — the Russian assassin “Villanelle” -from hit TV show ‘Killing Eve’ and Joe Goldberg from Netflix’s ‘You’. Despite their psychopathic tendencies, fans champion their victories.

Psychologist Robert Hare devised the ‘Psychopath Checklist’ back in 1980 and it is now routinely referred to as the PCL-R. Villanelle and Joe would score highly: both characters believe they are of great importance, routinely lie, act impulsively, struggle with control, take zero to little accountability for their actions, lack empathy, and have a history of criminality and behavioural problems.

Hare’s checklist is still doing the rounds in institutions worldwide, usually prisons, but it has come under plenty of criticism for what Willem Martens (2008) deems as being an unethical psychological practice. It’s difficult to diagnose the term “psychopath” but several diagnoses may suggest a fit, from Antisocial Behaviour Disorder to psychopathy and various other personality disorders.

Already, we see how complex a diagnosis it and encounter very different views from psychologists when it comes to the question of the psychopath. Yet, as we progress as a society, so does science. Science isn’t rigid, stuck in a time of Freud and every other straight, white, wealthy, old, neurotypical male philosopher and psychologist from the 20th century. It moves with society and it adapts as our knowledge deepens. Nowadays, some psychologists and mental health practitioners are rejecting the label “psychopath” completely due to the severely negative connotations and even calling psychopathy a mental health issue or disability.

Psychology says what?

Identity is an important factor when it comes to being human. Our identities are important to us, especially as we engage and present these identities online. Psychopaths are said to be so unlike the majority they are unable to make genuine connections with others but as with anyone deemed ‘different’, it is the group that collectively rejects the ‘different’ individual, perpetuating a cycle of low interpersonal integration and marginalisation.

If given an official diagnosis with a working label of “psychopath”, combined with society’s current view of what it means to be a psychopath, a psychopath is quickly forced to the outskirts of society thus lowering their commitment to fulfilling social roles. A self-fulfilling prophecy becomes imminent: when someone is thought of and treated as if they are somehow broken, they often become it.

Noel Smith is the commissioning editor of magazine InsideTime and a former prisoner who has experienced his fair share of mental health difficulties. Writing for InsideTime, Smith says: “If people think you’re MAD, then everything you do, everything you think, will have MAD stamped across it.”

Psychologists Peterson & Seligman (2004), tired of psychology’s tendency to focus on the deviant side of humanity, proposed we all have the ability to express ‘the six common virtues’: wisdom and knowledge, courage, humanity, justice, temperance and spirituality or transcendence.

Here, Peterson & Seligman neatly demonstrated how language can create a narrative. The psychopath according to Hare’s checklist could be grandiose and controlling, but with a slightly different view, they’re confident and courageous leaders. We associate the term so often with negative traits that we ignore the possibility for positives.

Mental health matters — but not for you

“They [psychopaths] are the social snakes in the grass that slither and smile their way into your life and emotions. They feel no empathy, and only care about themselves” says Dr Xanthe Mallett, a forensic anthropologist and criminologist at Newcastle University.

Dr. Mallett’s words reinforce an age-old belief: the psychopath’s only identity is psychopath and they are incapable of being anything other than one-dimensional.

Author Nathan Filer expressed his initial dismay that once his diagnosis was televised by ‘Meet the Psychopaths’ programme on Channel 5, strangers expressed their fear and revulsion immediately. Filer states he “quickly got over” people’s negative opinions but received abuse on the streets with words such as “psycho” and “nutter” shouted at him on a regular basis, reinforcing the rejection by the collective.

Lucy Nichol, writer and mental health support activist, expressed her fears when joining a discussion panel at the Centre for Life Science’s speakeasy programme for adults in 2019. Nichol, rightfully, is anxious about the welfare of those living with psychosis and how they can be discriminated against due to fear. She worries that psychopaths can be “violent and frightening”, and any potential link between psychopaths and people living with psychosis can lead to danger for people with psychosis. Resistant to the movement of psychopathy being welcomed into the family of mental health, Nichol argues it should not be treated as a mental health concern. Her argument is that a classified psychopath lacks empathy and is unable to judge other people’s emotions and this makes the people around the psychopath vulnerable, not the psychopath.

Yet, other mental health conditions and disorders can lead to an individual not necessarily being able to empathise in the way a neurotypical person may empathise. Similarly, an individual with autism, a panic disorder or psychosis may have limited capacity to judge other people’s emotions on occasion. As a society, we tend to understand this and accommodate it.

In contrast to Nichol’s view, there are more and more calls for understanding psychopathy in broader, more compassionate terms.

Dr Luna Centifanti, Lecturer in Psychological Sciences at University of Liverpool classes psychopathy as a mental illness that means the individual experiences “disordered thinking, emotions and behaviour.” She added that psychopathy can lead to struggles with understanding emotions of others and therefore their responses to distress can be “inappropriate”.

Do better, be better

Joseph Newman is a psychologist at Wisconsin University who classifies psychopathy as a disability. Newman explains it as an ‘informational processing deficit’ where individuals have less ability to process cues immediately such as someone else’s fear or upset, inviting us to see the psychopath through a more sympathetic lens.

Campaigners, researchers, activists and those with lived experiences of mental health conditions and illnesses have made huge strides for inclusivity and understanding. As professionals such as Newman and Dr. Centifanti begin to deconstruct the pathological idea of psychopathy, it is being tentatively considered as a mental health issue.

Let’s go back to Villanelle. Her history is relatively secret, but the viewer knows she’s spent time in Russian prison and has no family, therefore little connection to others. Her violent, ‘psychopathic’ actions are a result of her occupation as an assassin as opposed to something she does simply for the joy of enacting violence.

A recent soundbite suggests the show’s writers are no longer calling Villanelle a “psychopath” after astute fans have criticised the way it reduces her to a label.

Be more psychopath

A merge of popular culture, sociology and psychology has begun to turn the connotations of ‘psychopath’ on its head somewhat. The Wisdom of Psychopaths by Kevin Dutton (2012) looks to diagnosed psychopaths to teach us how to care less about other people’s emotions and our own, be fearless in our jobs and have an unwavering belief in ourselves. Western culture is a key culprit in promoting the idea that an impressive salary equals success or showing emotion at work is unprofessional, so, maybe it’s true — we could learn a lot about success from a psychopath.

On the flip side, while these traits have the potential to lead to fantastical financial and business success in aggressively capitalist societies, that doesn’t make them inherently good. Now more than ever seems to be a time where we need to cultivate harmony, compassion and vulnerability for all people regardless of individual status, label or identity.

“It isn’t hard to convince someone you love them if you know what they want to hear”

An eyebrow raising sentence from everyone’s favourite cute psychopath, You’s Joe Goldberg. It is wonderfully inclusive to change the narrative on psychopathy but surely there’s a reason for its fierce reputation. Maybe Dr. Mallet was right in that the psychopath is always a sneaky snake, ready to pounce and sink their psychopathic poison into our blood.

Manipulation is one of the terms we regularly hear associated with psychopathy. If psychopaths are prone to manipulating others, it can be argued that simple survival instincts mean non psychopathic individuals want to protect themselves and society from such behaviour. However, by perpetuating the hype of how dangerous psychopaths are, we just come back to an earlier point made in this article that the collective ostracises the psychopath and therefore impacts their ability to comply with social norms.

Hug your local psychopath

It seems that one of the prevailing mainstream perspectives on psychopathy is that a psychopath is someone evil: they were born evil; they are evil, and they’ll die evil. Hopefully you’ll now join me in disagreeing with that sentiment and see psychopathy as a complex mental health issue where everyone experiencing it is different and deserves to have the chance to be defined beyond a label.

No one is innately criminal or violent. While yes, there are links between criminality, violence and psychopathy, it’s worth remembering that we live in a time of mass media consumption that loves to sensationalise. The need to sell and to exaggerate often win over the need to be patient, analyse and truly understand complex parts of the human experience.

Psychology’s flirtations with neuroscience have revealed fascinating results: the brain, what a non-scientist would likely assume is a fixed and unchangeable organ, does and can change. Our brains are individual and through theories of neuroplasticity we can understand the vitality of our social environment on our brain and therefore behaviour. Psychopaths cannot be excluded from this.

Psychology and sociology are working to explore links between criminality and disadvantage or oppression. If criminality is linked to psychopathy, we must ask why, and be prepared to look at an individual’s history and their social environment.

Frankly, many of the accusations thrown at psychopaths do not work for neurodiverse people. Whether it’s an anxious person unable to understand why their habits, born from their anxiety, frustrate their travel buddy or a psychopath who — as Dr. Newman believes — can’t recognise their words or behaviour has upset someone until much later, the world can be a confusing puzzle for those of us who do not fit neatly into the expected norm.

In expanding compassion and understanding to others regardless of what condition or disorder they may have, we can be instruments of change. Once we look to others and try to understand them, we deconstruct labels that lead to marginalisation and instead, we can bring people together by saying: you are not alone.

**

[tessatechaitea]

Kid Eternity #2

This cover says, "Don't look at who wrote it! Just look at how interesting these visuals are! Sucker."

In my review of Kid Eternity #1, I threw out a few theories on why Ann Nocenti's writing is so weird. After reading page one of this issue, I've thrown those theories out again but in a different way. That makes complete sense if you understand English idioms and also understand that everything Ann Nocenti writes is basically pre-trash.

This is page one of Kid Eternity #2 and it will probably get this review banned on Tumblr.

I have a new theory: Ann Nocenti asked what a Vertigo comic book should be and editor Tom Peyer probably joked, "They're mostly tits and profound nonsense." So Ann Nocenti's vagina gobbed in her underwear and she squealed with glee. "That's what I do!" she chortled merrily! I probably shouldn't abuse Ann Nocenti for writing things I don't understand. I have plenty of choices of other people to abuse for it: my elementary school teachers for not calling me out on doing just enough to get by; my junior high school teachers who let me get away with not putting any effort into big year-end projects (In science, we were supposed to make a stone age tool. I rubber glued a carved-to-a-shoddy point stick to another stick (which was worse than my friend Robert who put some pine needles into a split stick, calling the weapon "Ow"); in English, we had one project based on Romeo and Juliet (because all we did that quarter was watch and read various versions of the play) and I refused to do it because the teacher was wasting my time; in Computers, I found Dan Felipe's project, a trivia program, and I just copied it and used it for my own project (changing all the questions and line numbers and other things to make it seem like it wasn't plagiarized but, I mean, come on! In fairness to me, I only did it because the stupid fucking school changed computers halfway through the semester, dropping the TRS-80s for Apples and my project was relying on the Poke images of the TRS-80 to create an animated sequence)); my high school English teacher, Mr. Borror, for reading nearly everything I wrote in front of the class so that I began to think I was the wittiest fucker in Santa Clara High; my college teachers for some reason or another that allows me to not blame my own lack of ability; and probably my parents because if they were any good at their parental jobs, I wouldn't be writing a blog about comic books. In other words, I'm sure Ann Nocenti is a philosophical genius while I'm just a guy who blames everybody else for things I don't understand. Even if I truly felt Ann Nocenti was an underrated genius whose writings I'm incapable of parsing, I would never ask her to explain what she meant by this first page of Kid Eternity #2. I just wouldn't feel comfortable putting her on the spot like that. It's not up to the artist to explain their art to the foolish audience! Only the Christian Messiah bears that responsibility (and, let's face it, he wouldn't have had to explain every fucking parable if he'd been able to convince smarter people of his bullshit). So if it's up to me to interpret this first page gibber gabber, I suppose I should get to business. Or kill myself. I mean, killing myself would be easier and less painful. And I totally would kill myself before reading more Ann Nocenti comic books except I have plans to cut my toenails in a few months. Before I begin trying to understand this hogwash, I'd like to point out that if she'd written it as a sonnet, I wouldn't have a problem with it. I'd read it, think, "Yep, that's a sonnet!", nod my head in sage understanding, and then jerk off to the titties. But this is not a sonnet so it is not allowed to be obtuse simply for obtuseness' sake. So this fucking speech. First off, who is speaking? The serpent trying to fuck the naked lady? Is this the speech the serpent used on Eve to get her to eat the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil? Although if that's the case, how would talking about Buddha convince Eve of anything? I'll assume the serpent is omniscient (because he may or may not be Satan, depending on what holy men or con artists you believe but certainly isn't Satan if you're simply going by the Book of Genesis. I bet the serpent was God doing one of those Zeus things minus the rape. Zeus loved to trick people so he could get laid; Yahweh tricks people to test their faith). I guess since she had yet to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil (come on, God! That name is terrible), she wouldn't know what she doesn't know and can't defend against any nonsense the serpent spews at her. Let's assume the art goes with the speech and it's the serpent speaking. So why is "God in repair" and what the fuck does that mean? And why is it followed by the statement, "Why not call the wisest man a freak?" Does the snake only speak in non sequiturs? Was that a stupid question since I already know the snake's dialogue is being written by Ann Nocenti? It is kind of refreshing to see that her dialogue style never changed in thirty years. The shit the serpent says on this page could be nonsense spewed by Coil from Nocenti's New 52 Katana. You know what? I don't have to continue this because, in the end, it's just a carnival barker's pitch to get people to believe in the freaks in his freak show. He's all, "What's the difference between freaks and religion?!" That's not a riddle I have an answer for. The only religious joke I know is "What do Noah's Ark and The Bible have in common?" That might be a joke that was extant before I came up with it but I did come up with it on my own. And I think the answer is so obvious I would be insulting the intelligence of all four people reading this. Oh, and the snake trying to fuck the lady? It's a tattoo on the Tattooed Lady. The reason the comic begins in a circus freak show? Because Kid Eternity is the newest freak on display! The opening sideshow scene is just one of Kid Eternity's dreams. The demon angel babies get into Kid Eternity's dream and when he wakes up, they've tied his hair to the floor which totally has him trapped for like three panels. That was a close one! Kid Eternity decides he can't truly know what he's doing unless he utterly knows himself. So it's time to get his brain probed.

Let me guess: Carl will blather on about synchronicity and dreams while Freud tries to figure out how big Kid Eternity's penis is.

Carl doesn't initially discuss anything. He's just the straight man for Freud saying all the typical things you'd expect Freud to say: penis this, envy that, fuck your mom, kill your dad, more penises, many more penises, everything is penises. But then he comes on fast and furious with his archetypes and collective unconscious and human mythology stuff, all the biggest Carl Jung hits (aside from synchronicity but I'm sure he'll get around to that later. Ann Nocenti isn't going to miss showing the readers all the knowledge nuggets she mined to make her brain big). If only Nocenti would spend as much time writing the story as she spends making sure the readers know she knows a lot of shit then maybe I would have kept reading this comic book. Meanwhile, Zeus wanders around looking for somebody to trick fuck, Madame Blavatsky hunts down the next best burger before she slips back to the past, Beelzebub and Judas wander through Limbo, Jesus gets drunk and falls off a bar stool, and a phone yells at a woman. That all happens on one page to make sure the reader remembers other things are happening. But why does Ann Nocenti spend two panels of that dense page on Madame Blavatsky when she could have updated the reader on the non-X-File FBI agents who will probably hate fuck each other before the story ends? I also wanted an update on the Buddha Christ Trash Child. But no! Instead Nocenti just moves on to more of her proof that she's read all about Freud and Jung and totally understands the shallow top layer of their theories and philosophies. I don't mean to say I know any more than Ann Nocenti! But I understand how little I know of Freud and everything she's had him say are things everybody knows about Freud from all the dirty jokes about him: ids, supermen, parental relations, and phalli!

Oh, that's why we didn't get an update on the dense update page; Nocenti needed a full page to document the hate/fuck.

My new Ann Nocenti writing theory: Ann Nocenti has never had an original thought. She simply reads things, takes copious notes of bits and quotes she likes, and then shoves them sideways into whatever script she's currently writing. No wait. She does have original thoughts but they're almost not worth having. Like "everything in life is a prison" and then proving it by stating a few things about life that can be cell-like. It's profound in that way that things are profound when you're on acid. If you don't think about it, you can find yourself nodding along going, "Yeah! Yeah! Everything is a prison! Life is a fucking prison!" But if you do stop to think about it, it's like coming down off acid. You start to see how that thought you had about how the number three ties everything else in the universe together because of the way the corners meet didn't wasn't as mind blowing as it was six hours ago. Although the rant you went on about how pressing play on the VCR remote play the show and pressing pause pauses it but then to unpause it you have to hit pause again when you should really hit play was pretty fucking good. Speaking of acid, I'm two-thirds of the way through the acid documentary on Netflix and it's fucking fantastic. I wasn't really thinking a lot about it but I was nodding along going, "Yeah! Yeah! Everything they're saying about acid is absolutely spot on!" throughout. I actually had to take a break because it was making me too happy listening to all Sting and Carrie Fisher tell their acid stories. I don't know why I didn't just spend five paragraphs discussing why the FBI agents were playing Scrabble while they fucked. It's probably just one of Sean Phillips' kinks. Oh, maybe they were just playing Scrabble and not hate-fucking. It's hard to tell because on the next page, Jerry asks Val if they can finally fuck and Val is all, "You're a nerd!" Then she slits his throat. But then in the next panel, his throat isn't slit and he's all, "You feeling better?" And she's all, "Yeah!" So I don't know what the fuck is going on and I don't really care. I've still got like eight pages of this mess to get through and I'd rather just nod along than try to understand it. And then just like last issue, Ann Nocenti sputters out a bit of writing that I totally agree with because I've said basically the same thing before. About how every day, I fall in love with some person I see on the street because of the smallest of things. And then I love them forever.

My story isn't as good but I once fell in love walking through the airport in Minneapolis. I was passing by an attractive woman and she was gazing off somewhere as I looked at her face. She was coming up on my right and then I glanced down at her breasts and back up at her face. And that was the moment she noticed me, as I glanced from her breasts to her face. And, catching me, she smiled and laughed and kept on walking. And I still love her to this day.

And for this page alone, I forgive all of Ann Nocenti's past (future?) transgressions and find myself eager to read Kid Eternity #3. Oh wait. I still have a few pages left in this piece of crap. I read a lot of books in college that I sometimes still say are my favorite books but I should probably just say they stuck with me because I know which books are almost always in my top five and a lot of the ones in college aren't those. But Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence always stuck with me. It's possible that I completely missed the message of the novel but to me, the book was about how true love only exists when it's unrequited. Archer Day-Lewis doesn't love Ellen Pfeifer more than May Ryder for any other reason than that she was the one he didn't marry. It seemed to me that Wharton was trying to portray how hard love is and true, phenomenal love only exists in the imagination. Only a love we can imagine can remain magical. Only when we love an object, or the imaginary person we've placed on a pedestal, can we evade disappointment in the reality and flaws of another actual human being. Being in love with Ellen Pfeifer was easy because she wasn't there for all those years. There were no fights or disappointments or multiple times accidentally walking in on her taking a huge shit. She was pure and beautiful and imaginary. But then again, maybe that wasn't the point of the book at all. I was young and romantic at the time and I still absolutely loved the women I'd had unrequited crushes on in junior high and high school while my college relationship was slowly circling the drain due to personality conflicts. But not due to sex. The sex was fucking great! Anyway, Freud and Jung decide Kid Eternity is in denial and they leave. Hemlock and Dog spread some new reality across the world via a computer virus. Madame Blavatsky starts making time go backwards, probably so she can vomit up all the Twinkies she ate and eat them again with their delicious creamy filling. And the devil and Judas wind up in a bar in Limbo with Jesus to make plans for Kid Eternity. There's probably a lot more going on but there'd be too much for me to process even if it wasn't confused by Nocenti's writing style. No wonder I gave up on this book after three issues. There's no way by the third issue I could remember anything that was going on, if I even understood it the month prior. Kid Eternity #2 Rating: C-. A confusing mess that's about 90% Ann Nocenti just vomiting out things she's read. Even the things that, with the benefit of the doubt, I want to believe sprang from her own philosophical musings, I can't bring myself to absolutely believe it. I feel like every thought and piece of dialogue she's placed in this story just came from piles of notebooks filled with notes she's made while reading other people's works. It's practically a collage of philosophical ideas and moral musings pulled from myriad sources and shoved into a Kid Eternity framework "written" by Ann Nocenti. Which could explain Nocenti's penchant for stilted dialogue. If she were making up all the character's thoughts, the dialogue would flow from one character to the next. But when each character can only respond with some profound thought Nocenti read elsewhere, it comes across like a ransom note, each word cut from the mind of somebody else and pasted as a reply to another bit cut from some other thinker, no relation existing between the two thoughts except the proximity relationship Nocenti has given them.

[openlyandfreely]

Who Is a Continental Philosopher? 5 APRIL 2011 / DAVID AUERBACH / 1 COMMENT In the debate over continental philosophy a few posts back, there was some question as to which philosophers fell under the rubric of continental philosophy. In the eyes of many observers, indeed, a certain strain of French thought has come to stand for the entire field. Both positive and negative attention have been focused around Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, etc., to the exclusion of many, many others. So I was glancing through the Blackwell Companion to Continental Philosophy (1998) on Google Books tonight, edited by Levinas evangelist and Leiter nemesis Simon Critchley. Even Critchley and co-editor William Schroeder relegate that French strain to just one corner of a large tradition, and most of the names are far less contentious. Rather than trying to answer what continental philosophy is, I think it’s better just to look at these names to get a sense of what the field encompasses. Part I: The Kantian Legacy:. 1. The Context and Problematic of Post Kantian Philosophy: Frederick C. Beiser (University of Indiana, Bloomington). 2. Kant: Robert B. Pippin (University of Chicago). 3. Fichte: Ludwig Siep (Universitat Munster). 4. Early German Romanticism: Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis: Ernst Behler (University of Washington, Seattle). 5. Schelling: Jean Francois Courtine (Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris). 6. Hegel: Stephen Houlgate (University of Warwick). Part II: Overturning The Tradition: . 7. Feuerbach and the Young Hegelians: Lawrence S. Stepelevich (Villanova University). 8. Marx: Michel Henry (University of Montpellier III). 9. Kierkegaard: Merold Westphal (Fordham University). 10. Schopenhauer: Robert Rethy (Xavier University). 11. Nietzsche: Charles E. Scott (Pennsylvania State University). 12. Freud: John Deigh (Northwestern University). 13. Bergson: Pete A. Y. Gunter (North Texas State University). Part III: The Phenomenological Breakthrough:. 14. Neo Kantianism: Steven Galt Crowell (Rice University). 15. Husserl: Rudolf Bernet (Louvain Catholic University). 16. Scheler: Manfred S. Frings (The Max Scheler Archives, Des Plaimes). 17. Jaspers: Kurt Salamun (University of Graz). 18. Heidegger: John D. Caputo (Villanova University). Part IV: Phenomenology, Hegelianism and Anti Hegelianism in France:. 19. Kojeve: Stanley Rosen (Boston University). 20. Levinas: Hent De Vries (University of Amsterdam). 21. Sartre: Thomas R. Flynn (Emory University). 22. De Beauvoir: Kate Fullbrook (University of the West of England) and Edward Fullbrook (freelance writer). 23. Merleau Ponty: Bernhard Waldenfelds (Ruhr Universitat Bochum). 24. Bataille: Robert Sasso (University of Nice). 25. Blanchot: Paul Davies (University of Sussex). Part V: Religion Without The Limits of Reason:. 26. Franz Rosenzweig: Paul Mendes Flohr (Hebrew University). 27. Martin Buber: Maurice Friedman (San Diego State University). 28. Marcel: Philip Stratton Lake (Keele University). Part VI: Three Generations of Critical Theory:. 29. Benjamin: Rebecca Comay (University of Toronto). 30. Horkheimer: Gunzelin Schmidt Noerr (Frankfurt am Main). 31. Adorno: Hauke Brunkhorst (Frankfurt am Main). 32. Bloch: Hans Dieter Bahr (University of Vienna). 33. Marcuse: Douglas Kellner (University of Texas at Austin). 34. Habermas: Thomas McCarthy (Northwestern University). 35. Third Generation Critical Theory: Max Pensky. (SUNY, Binghampton). Part VII: Hermeneutics:. 36. Schleiermacher: Ben Vedder (University of Tilburg). 37. Dilthey: Rudolf A. Makkreel (Emory University). 38. Gadamer: Dennis J. Schmidt (Villanova University). 39. Ricoeur: Richard Kearney (University College, Dublin). Part VIII: Continental Political Philosophy:. 40. Lukacs: Gyorgy Markus (University of Sydney). 41. Gramsci: Ernesto Laclau (University of Essex). 42. Schmitt: G. L. Ulmen (Telos Press Ltd). 43. Arendt: Robert Bernasconi (Memphis State University). 44. Lefort: Bernard Flynn (Empire State College, SUNY). 45. Castoriadis: Fabio Ciaramelli (University of Naples). Part IX: Structuralism and After: 46. Levi-Strauss: Marcel Henaff (UCSD, California). 47. Lacan: William J. Richardson (Boston College). 48. Althusser: Jacques Ranciere (University of Paris VIII). 49. Foucault: Paul Patton (University of Sydney). 50. Derrida: Geoffrey Bennington (University of Sussex). 51. Deleuze: Brian Massumi (McGill University). 52. Lyotard: Jacob Rogozinski (University of Paris VIII). 53. Baudrillard: Mike Gane (Loughborough University). 54. Irigaray: Tina Chanter (Memphis State University). 55. Kristeva: Kelly Oliver (University of Texas at Austin). 56. Le Doeuff: Moira Gatens (University of Sydney). A reasonable list. It definitely has a French bias, but it’s not too bad. If compiled today, it would probably include Agamben, Badiou, and Negri too. The unforgivable omission is Ernst Cassirer, who is only mentioned twice in the Neo-Kantianism article and once in passing by Beiser (whose work I very much like). Schlegel, Schiller, Saussure, Bourdieu, and Barthes also seem rather important. Given the inclusion of a bunch of cultural and sociological thinkers, sociologists Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, and Georg Simmel should definitely be on this list. Other worthy omissions: Humboldt, Brentano, Croce, Mauss, Lowith, Valery, Fanon, Bachelard, Blumenberg, Apel, Eco, Bouveresse, and Virilio. (Not that I like all of them.)

[chiseler]

All the World’s a Stage

In 1988, a socio-linguist at the university of Pennsylvania posted a note on the departmental bulletin board announcing she had moved her late husband’s personal library into an unused office. Anyone who wanted any of the books should feel free to take them. Her husband had been the chair of Penn’s sociology department. They’d married in 1981, and he died the following year at age sixty. Normally you’d expect the books and papers to be donated to some library to assist future researchers, but she’d recently remarried, so I guess she either wanted to get rid of any reminders of her previous husband, or simply needed the space.

At the time my then-wife was a grad student in Penn’s linguistics department, and told me about the announcement when she got home that afternoon.

Well, had this professor’s dead husband been any plain, boring old sociologist, I wouldn’t have thought much about it, but given her dead husband was Erving Goffman, I immediately began gathering all the boxes and bags I could find. That night around ten, when she was certain the department would be pretty empty, my then-wife and I snuck back to Penn under cover of darkness and I absconded with Erving Goffman’s personal library. Didn’t even look at titles—just grabbed up armloads of books and tossed them into boxes to carry away.

As I began sorting through them in the following days, I of course discovered the expected sociology, anthropology and psychology textbooks, anthologies and journals, as well as first editions of all of Goffman’s own books, each featuring his identifying signature (in pencil) in the upper right hand corner of the title page. But those didn’t make up the bulk of my haul.

There were Catholic marriage manuals from the Fifties, dozens of volumes (both academic and popular) about sexual deviance, a whole bunch of books about juvenile delinquency with titles like Wayward Youth and The Violent Gang, several issues of Corrections (a quarterly journal aimed at prison wardens), a lot of original crime pulps from the Forties and Fifties, avant-garde literary novels, a medical book about skin diseases, some books about religious cults (particularly Jim Jones’ Peoples Temple), a first edition of Michael Lesy’s Wisconsin Death Trip, and So many other unexpected gems. It was, as I’d hoped, an oddball collection that offered a bit of insight into Goffman’s work and thinking.

Erving Goffman was born in Alberta, Canada in 1922. After entering college as a chemistry major, he eventually got his BA in sociology in 1948, and began his graduate studies at The university of Chicago.

In 1952 he married Angelica Choate, a woman with a history of mental illness, and they had a son. The following year he received his PHD from Chicago. His thesis concerned public interactions and rituals among the residents of one of the Shetland Islands off the coast of Scotland. Afterward, he took a job with the National Institute for Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland. His first book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, which evolved out of his thesis, came out in 1956, and his second, Asylums, which resulted from his work at N.I,M.H., was released five years later. In 1958 he took a teaching position at UC-Berkeley, and was soon promoted to full professor. His wife committed suicide in 1964, and in 1968 he joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania as the chair of the sociology department, a post he would hold until his death in 1982.

Citing intellectual influences from anthropology and psychology as well as sociology, Goffman was nevertheless a maverick. Instead of controlled clinical studies and statistical analysis, Goffman based his work on careful close observation of real human interactions in public places,. Instead of focusing on the behaviors of large, faceless groups like sports fans, student movements or factory workers, he concentrated on the tiny details of face-to-face encounters, the gestures, language and behavior of individuals interacting with one another or within a larger institutional framework. Instead of citing previous academic papers to support his claims, he’d more often use quotes from literary sources, letters, or interviews. He created a body of work around those banal, microcosmic day-two-day experiences which had been all but ignored by sociologists up to that point. After his death he was considered one of the most important and influential sociologists of the twentieth century.

Without getting into all the complexities and interpretations of Goffman’s various theories (despite his radical subjective approach, he was still an academic after all), let me lay out simpleminded thumbnails of the two core ideas at the heart of his work.

Taking a cue from both Freud and Shakespeare, he employed theatrical terminology to argue that whenever we step out into public, we are all essentially actors on a stage. We wear masks, we take on certain behaviors and attitudes that differ wildly from the characters we are when we’re at home. All our actions in public, he claimed, are social performances designed (we hope) to present a certain image of ourselves to the world at large. The idea of course has been around in literature for centuries, but Goffman was the first to seriously apply it in broad strokes to sociology.

His other, and related, fundamental idea was termed frame analysis, the idea being that we perceive each social encounter—running into that creepy guy on the train again, say, or arguing with the checkout clerk at the supermarket about the quality of their potatoes—as something isolated and contained, a picture within a frame, or a movie still.

He used those two models to study day-to-day life in mental institutions and prisons, note the emergence of Texas businessmen adopting white cowboy hats as a standard part of their attire, analyze workplace interactions and the complicated rituals we go through when we run into someone we sort-of know on the sidewalk.

I first read Goffman in college when his 1964 book, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, was used in a postmodern political science course I was taking. In the slim volume, Goffman studied the conflicts and prejudices ex-cons, mental patients, cripples, the deformed and other social outcasts encountered when they stepped out into public, as well as the assorted codes and tricks they used to pass for normal. When passing was possible, anyway. At the time I was smitten with the book and these tales of outsiders, being a deliberately constructed outsider myself (though as a nihilistic cigar-smoking petty criminal punk rock kid, I had no interest in passing for normal). I was also struck to read a serious sociological study that cited Nathaniel West’s Miss Lonelyhearts—my favorite novel at the time—as supporting evidence.

Thirty-five years later, and after having read all of Goffman’s other major works, I returned to Stigma again, but with a different perspective. Although my youthful Romantic notions about social outcasts still lingered, by that time I’d become a bona-fide and inescapable social outcast myself, tapping around New York with a red and white cane.

Goffman spent a good deal of the book focused on the daily issues faced by the blind, but in 1985 those weren’t the outsiders who interested me. Now that I was one of them myself, I must say I was amazed and impressed by the accuracy of Goffman’s observations. He pointed out any number of things that have always been ignored by others who’ve written about the blind. Like those others, he notes that Normals, accepting the myth that our other senses become heightened after the loss of our sight, believe us to have superpowers of some kind. (For the record, I never dissuade people of this silly notion.) But Goffman took it one step further, noting that to Normals, a blindo accomplishing something, well, normal—like lighting a cigarette—is taken to be some kind of superhuman achievement, and evidence of powers they can barely begin to fathom.

(Ironically, he writes in Asylums that the process of socializing mental patients is a matter of turning them into dull, unobtrusive and nearly invisible individuals. Those are good citizens.)

Elsewhere in Stigma Goffman also points out—and you cannot believe how commonplace this is—that Normals, believing us to have some deep insights into life and the world, feel compelled, uninvited and without warning, to stop the blind on the street or at the supermarket to share with them their darkest secrets, medical concerns and personal problems as if we’d known them all our lives. He also observed the tendency for Normals to treat us not only like we’re blind, but deaf and lame as well, yelling in our ears and insisting on helping us out of chairs.

Ah, but one thing he brought up, which I’ve never seen anyone else mention before, is the fate awaiting those blindos (or cripples of any kind) who actually accomplish something like writing a book. It doesn’t matter if the book had absolutely nothing to do with being a cripple. I’ve published eleven books to date, and only two of them even mention blindness. It doesn’t matter. If a cripple makes something of him or herself, that cripple then becomes a lifelong representative of that entire class of stigmatized individuals, at least in mainstream eyes. From that point onward he or she will always be not only “that Blind Writer” or “that Legless Architect,” but a spokesperson on any issues pertaining to their particular disability. I was published long before I developed that creepy blind stare, but if I approach a mainstream publication nowadays, the only things they’ll let me write about are cripple issues. Every now and again if I need the check, I’ll, yes, put on the mask and play the role. But I’m bored to death with cripple issues, which is why whenever possible I neglect to mention to would-be editors that I’m blind. And I guess that only supports Goffman’s overall thesis, right?

Well, anyway, a series of four floods in my last apartment completely wiped out my prized Goffman library (as well as my prized novelization collection), so in retrospect I guess that professor at Penn probably would have been better off donating them to the special collections department of some library.

by Jim Knipfel

[tyrannosaurus-trainwreck]

uuuuuuuuuugh

At what point can you pry an interesting setting and a reasonable plot out of hackey, thudding prose?  I keep running into this problem with science fiction, even stuff that's fairly modern and highly recommended, where it's like a goddamned laundry list of activity with no connective tissue or life to it.   Like you’re reading along and it might as well be

Brian McAstronaut awoke in his space-bedroom to find that the ship's solar sails had become tangled in some space-debris while he slept.  He would have thought 'overnight' instead of 'while he slept,' but of course he was in space and so there was no such thing as 'day' or 'night.' There was only sleeping in his space-bedroom and being awake in his spaceship.  The year was 3030, and not being in space was something that people did in the Before Times, back when they lived on Earth and drank earth-liquor and believed in climate change.   Brian McAstronaut lived now, and in space, and he only believed in himself and his solar sails, because his exceptionally clear idea of what life was like in 2020 in spite of that having been a really long time ago gave him some really cool and cynical ideas about the nature of men.  That was dangerously close to introspection, though, and he decided to stop doing it, because introspection was for people in other genres.  Brian McAstronaut scrambled the semi-sentient space robots to go out into space and straighten the solar sails, which his spaceship needed to travel through space. As he watched them work, he drank some space-liquor and listened to a piece of wildly anachronistic music that, presumably, the author likes very much or thinks will make the character sound cool or cultured to the readers, like if this was all happening here on Earth and now in the year of our lord 2019 and the character was listening to a troubadour's banging lute solo on his airpods.  Which would be pretty great, wouldn't it, if we found some weird old-ass science fiction where the protagonist is listening to a rhapsody on their electric pianoforte and never mind, that's Jules Verne. Anyway, as Brian McAstronaut drank his space-liquor and listened to that Rolling Stones album you had to be a really hardcore Rolling Stones fan to like, he looked out at the stars and waited while the author absolutely ransacked a fucking thesaurus to describe the panorama.  It did not affect him emotionally in any way, because having emotions is for girls, or maybe for people who aren't in science fiction novels, which is basically the same thing.  Brian McAstronaut had always lived in space.  Living in space was what Brian McAstronaut did.  Being impressed with space instead of alternating fighting for survival in space with treating space like it was his sofa in a twenty-first century living room was for people who weren't Brian McAstronaut. And it's not that the writers are necessarily incapable of making it better.  The book I'm reading now is fairly interesting when it dives into its self-contained stories and leaves the main narrative in the dust, but the second it crawls back out into the bitter blast of the main narrative, it's "Brian McAstronaut did this" and "Brian McAstronaut did that" and Brian McAstronaut better wind up being a badly-programmed android or some shit, because there's really no excuse for this.   Your protagonist is not a wooden puppet to carry your plot around--even the pulp detective guys churning out murder mysteries for a penny a page knew that.  It's also like... I mean, not to tell science fiction authors how to do their jobs, but ideally your prose should do something other than give space fetishists something to jerk off to.  There's the old razzle-dazzle, and then there's just whaling on the genre descriptor buttons like a drunk dude playing whack-a-mole. Like don't go out and start writing something like Brian McAstronaut ran his callused, manly hands over the glossy black hull of his new ship.  It jutted proudly from the platform, its two heavy rockets hanging below it in an extra virile way.  The extremely phallic, powerful spaceship excited him, but not in an overtly gay way, because the primary market for these books is straight men who are weirdly insecure in their own masculinity, and if they wind up conflicted about how a scene makes them feel in the pants department, they'll leave a bunch of one-star reviews on Amazon and spend all their free time calling the author a cuck on reddit.   Brian McAstronaut was super-secure in his own masculinity, because he had a spaceship kitted out with all the bells and whistles, which are of course named after twentieth- and twenty-first-century physicists--male physicists--because physics stopped being done after that and also because we're all running around right now hitting our Lanchester brakes in cars powered by Benz engines while our phones use a Haartsen connection to blast music over our de Forest speakers.  Brian McAstronaut was glad he'd shelled out the extra credits for the optional ramjets, which made him feel a very straightforward and normal way in the pants department. The entrance to his new spaceship was a vertical slit located between the two rockets--full to bursting with rocketfuel, just ready to spray it all over the stars--and Brian headed for it like a man on a mission, like a man's man who knew what he was doing and had never disappointed anyone with a rocket in his life.  He grabbed the hefty entrance handle firmly and confidently, by the base, and pushed his way into the dark warmth of the vertical slit.  It was keyed to his unique genetic imprint, and it telescoped open, welcoming him home. Inside, the spaceship was spartan but inviting, needing no furniture or decoration or anything other than the quiet of the red womb-chamber.  He could spend years here, suspended in cryogenic sleep, one with the ship while they sped across the stars.  It would just be the two of them, Brian McAstronaut and his ship--the ship which was all his, and which he would never have to share with another person.  He was pretty sure the ship loved him, and that this was a perfectly ordinary conviction to have.  It was certainly very normal to not have to care about the rest of society, or how much time was passing, or whether or not his friends missed him, so long as he was one with the ship.  He was like twentieth-century actor John Wayne, when twentieth-century actor John Wayne was astride a horse. Everything that wasn't the womb-chamber was full of computerbanks and monitors and blinking lights that he could control with his strong man hands.  Nothing would happen without him inputting commands, which was just how it should be.  He was the man who hit the space-buttons and charted the space-course and decided when to pull over for more rocketfuel. Brian McAstronaut climbed into the womb-chamber and pushed the red button next to the emergency brake for the onboard Nixon recorded.  A Schimmelbusch mask was extruded from the placental lining, and Brian McAstronaut took it gratefully, wrapping himself in the thin, flexible umbilicus that trailed from it to the ship's life support system. "Mother," Brian McAstronaut said, breathing in the cryosleep space-gas.  This was a normal thing to say, and he didn't feel at all weird about it.  A nineteenth-century psychologist called Sigmund Freud had discovered that this was a perfectly healthy response that perfectly healthy men had to womb-chambers, and Brian McAstronaut didn't need space-therapy to deal with his space-issues. On the launchpad, a space-dockhand pounded on the hull yelling about the ship being parked outside the lines and tying up the pad, but he couldn't get in because it wasn't his ship, and Brian McAstronaut's ship only loved Brian McAstronaut and, maybe, a special resupply ship or two that also loved Brian McAstronaut and so the ship would be willing to share him every so often.

Also, if you slam on the brakes every few pages for five paragraphs of salivating descriptors that are just a SkyMall catalog of shit coke-addled futurists and thought-leaders were giving tedtalks about the month you wrote it, it's pointless and annoying and dumb and also it dates the shit out of your story.   Like, most science fiction is going to feel dated after a bit no matter what.  It's the nature of the beast.  Ideally, you want to avoid everyone in your target audience picking up the book a mere three years down the road and a) feeling like they opened a time capsule and b) being able to tell precisely when you wrote a scene just by searching Cory Doctorow or Warren Ellis's twitter feeds for the relevant buzzwords.   In conclusion, I know we're not all out here writing fucking Shakespeare, but these really aren't that hard to avoid!  At all!  Just... hire an editor who's not high on their own supply or something.

(crossposted to dreamwidth)

[pass-the-bechdel]

Buffy S2E11 Ted

Does it pass the Bechdel Test?  

Yes, three times

How many female characters (with names and lines) are there?          

6 (50%)

How many male characters (with names and lines) are there?

6

Positive Content Rating:

Two

General Episode Quality:

Storytelling was good. Content was rough. 

MORE INFO (and potential spoilers) UNDER THE CUT:

Passing the Bechdel:

Willow and Buffy pass in a group. Buffy and Joyce pass. They pass at the end discussing movies. 

Female Characters:

Buffy Summers

Willow 

Joyce Summers

Jenny Calendar

Cordelia

Male Characters:

Xander

Ted

Angel

Giles

Neal

Detective Stein

Other Notes:

I get everyone’s human (minus the vamps, hardy har har) and all that, but Joyce is in charge of the well being of a child and should really put her daughter first. That doesn’t mean not dating at all, but it does mean doing it responsibly. Especially since this is the first guy (we assume) that Joyce has dated since Buffy’s dad she shouldn’t have brought him home until she was ready for them to meet and then had a sit down conversation with Buffy preparing for that meeting. That’s some irresponsible parenting to just expect Buffy to roll with there, Joyce. Editor’s Note: gonna have to disagree here; Buffy is not a small child, she shouldn’t need a Special Talk in order to prepare for the fact that her mother is dating someone. Sure, it’d be nice to have a heads-up before finding a strange man in your home (because it is also BUFFY’S home, her safe space - this aspect of her discomfort does make sense to me), but the whole idea that kids cannot handle their parents moving on into new relationships and must be gently coddled instead of just dealing with the fact that the parent is a whole person with a life beyond parenting them is an infantilising cliche which I particularly hate. Joyce shouldn’t expect Buffy to just instantly click with Ted (especially since Ted comes on creepy-strong), but Buffy should also have the basic human decency to just be civil to new acquaintances until she has a genuine reason not to be. We need to kill the idea that ‘children will always be jealous and hostile toward new parental partners, they’re just Like That’.

Freud was bullshit. Stop referencing Freud. 

Xander, stop being a shit friend. Realize Buffy needs some time without Ted and say so when confronted with the outing. 

Still a fan of them showing Jenny having to deal with the body possession and danger and it affecting her relationship with Giles. I’m glad it didn’t go away after the end of the The Dark Ages either. 

When Ted starts to overriding Joyce’s parenting decisions (even when it’s just a minigolf score) she should stand in and tell him to back off. And, later, when Buffy says that he threatened her physically, it’s unacceptable for her to not have her back. 

Buffy needs to get a lawyer. 

So I do appreciate everyone having Buffy’s back now, but it’s a little late for that. 

Funny side note, Anthony Head was in a play called ‘The Death of a Salesman’ and that’s just hysterical to me. 

You know how I was praising Jenny making Giles give her space and not forgiving him right away? I take it back. It’s not that I’m unhappy that they reconciled at the end of the episode, but they should have done it by acknowledging what had happened and talking through it, and Jenny working on her healing. Not them getting back together because of an accidental bow misfire. Editor’s Note: Seconded. Jenny talking about still needing time and to not feel like she has to spontaneously ‘be better’ just so that Giles can stop feeling guilty was a GREAT piece of emotionally-real storytelling, but her just ditching that by episode’s end really ruins the power of it. Y’had a good thing for a second there, show, and then you went ‘never mind, Man’s Feelings are more important after all’. 

I feel like the drugged food was thrown in to give everyone (and especially Joyce) a pass on treating Buffy so bad throughout this episode. It’s a cop out. Buffy came forward to Joyce and told her that Ted threatened to hit her, and her mom didn’t believe her. While I know that there are situations where battered women don’t protect their children from abusers, Ted didn’t try to physically hurt her until later. Neither Joyce nor her friends protected her and at some point they should have been made to answer for that. That being said, this episode did have sharp storytelling in that I was actually afraid for a bit there. So kudos for that. 

Editor’s Note: this is an episode that I have a lot of trouble with, for the probably-obvious reason of it being a very familiar scenario that plays out in far too many people’s real lives (though usually without drugged food (which I agree is a cop-out), and of course, without evil robots). On the one hand, the various true-to-life elements are sharply confronting, and in that way they do the job of shining a light on real experiences in a way that could feel validating and helpful to viewers. On the other hand, this content has extreme potential to be triggering, and that makes the flubbed elements of its handling really irresponsible (especially when your story is aimed at young people who might be in the midst of such a situation, rather than adults who have hopefully been able to move past it, emotionally and/or physically). This is one of the reasons I am particularly displeased with the Hate The New Boyfriend Because He’s Not My REAL Dad! routine at the beginning of the episode, because it sets Buffy up as being legitimately unreasonable in a story where her being the only reasonable person becomes immediately relevant as the narrative unfolds; it legitimises the idea of her concerns being dismissed by people who already saw her being immature and rude. I hate the drugged food cop-out, because it seems to be used as a flimsy method to excuse Joyce’s behaviour in particular, instead of exploring the way that a parent can be manipulated/coerced/gaslighted by an abusive partner, and how they can either be genuinely fooled or drawn into complicity in the abuse of their child(ren). The idea of children in these situations saying that it was like their mother was drugged, the way she would defend the boyfriend’s actions, disbelieve the children when they tried to tell her what was really happening, etc, that’s a concept that people could really cite, but playing it straight, making it actual drugs? Just lets Joyce off the hook (and she is very, very on the hook for so much bad parenting, in this episode and others - plenty of what happens with Ted is not her fault, but the story still makes no effort to have her acknowledge where she did go wrong and be a supportive parent to Buffy; Buffy ends up very much the responsible adult in the relationship by episode’s end, but not in a narratively self-aware manner). To top it off, I feel that the whole ‘Buffy thinks she killed a man’ portion of the episode is a HUUUGE misplay, as it muddies the abuse element of the story and suddenly makes it into a moral dilemma for Buffy, and the air of judgment about Buffy defending herself from an abuser is incredibly unsavoury in the context of the rest of the episode. Basically, I appreciate pieces of how this episode gets to the core of realistic experiences, but I take major issue with the way it jumbles its ideas together and never fully explores such a serious subject, and I feel that it’s more likely to leave survivors of such abusive situations feeling confused and uncomfortable (at best), rather than validated and understood. Obviously, some people will feel differently, but I do say all this as someone to whom the episode content (sans drugs and robots) is personally familiar; I’m not basing my opinion on pure conjecture. 

[mybukz]

Poetry Review: May All Beings Rock by Lawrence Pettener

Title: May All Beings Rock Author : Lawrence Pettener Publisher : Lulu Genre: Poetry Format: Paperback, 76 pages Price: USD 9.19 Released:November 2017 Reviewer: Leon Wing

“Poetry never has reason to rhyme though not many things are true all the time.”

The poet of this resounding collection of poems is such a tease, with those first lines of “A Couplet or Two on Duality”. As a reader who has grown past reading rhyming poems, I find poetry only has reason to rhyme when it wants to make connections. Which is what that second line is all about.

Yet another tease comes in the way of the poetic lamentation to Ted Hughes, “The Suppression of Poetry”, in which Lawrence howls his sorrow over the death of the man who IS poetry personified.

The despair is such that he writes:

“Poetry is dead – long live poetry! As drama and fiction move in on its territory, poets lay down pens and start barking —far too few poets to pacify me. Poetry is dead – long live poetry!”

But fear not, reader of this review, as far as this reviewer is concerned, poetry is alive and kicking in the form of this exceptional collection of poems.

In “The Heart of Sadness and the Start of Hardness”, even though “we tear up and trample the invitation”, don’t trample Lawrence’s invitation to read this rollicking verse, which repeats lines to create parallelisms of sounds and rhythms, because in each stanza, “each moment a tremendous celebration”.

You might have heard or read about out of body experiences. Lawrence’s take on this is so visually, rhythmically and graphically accessible in “Losing a body”.

“Once, in Katmandu, your mouth flew open and a spirit entered. You woke with a gash above your eye, recalling nothing.”

The narrator only got back into corporeality, when “.. he flattened you with one good punch to give you back your body, and that kind cut.”

Lawrence has not only this knack of placing lines into formations of sounds, he sometimes manipulates the grammar of a line, by eliding an anticipated word, as in “Brightloaded”:

“You walk out alone, listening the park; lines of trees run right through you.”

The omission of the expected preposition after ‘listening’ is justified when you read the next stanza and experience the sensation of trees rushing right at you with the ‘r’ alliteration in three words, and into you, with the near rhymes of the ending two words.

In another instance of skewed grammar, he is not forging a deliberate error. In “So Much for Common Sense”, he overhears a young man on a phone say “There’s so much people.” But he is aware that “that young man on his mobile/had been completely correct”.

In “This Tap Behaviour”, even though the ‘psychotic neighbour’ is always banging at his taps, when that one time he isn’t, it is practically music to Lawrence’s poetic ear:

“…there was no noise coming through, just this plangent song of water, a plumbed release of pressure. A long, pining whine keened high through our shared pipes like sacred music.”

From his travels around the world, Lawrence writes not only about 'pipe’ music, but also exotic Mongolian punk bands, like “Yat Kha”, who covers rock classics using goat-hair violins. And, he hobnobs with some of the best poets, like John Burnside, in “Drinking John Burnside’s Beer”. And, he praises the ubiquitous British fast food, the chips, in “In Praise of Chips”.

I love the joke in “Subterfuge”, where dinner guests thought they’d witnessed evidence of a murder when a knuckle pokes out from a dish Lawrence copied from a TV chef. He writes again about food, in “News from Europe”, about untypical and unusual concoctions of European chocolates. Still more on chocolates in “Seventy Percent”, about “chocolate anthology” from a supermarket that are “bittersweet as good poetry. The taste/for bitterness comes later on in life.”

There are a couple of poems about music. His take on it can be irreverent but funny. In “We All Need Support”, Lawrence sort of pokes fun at the 'gravel drawl’ of a famous singer 'Bob’. Years later after coming out from his concert, he and his friends “.. found a busker sitting on the ground as in a festival field, playing clear, authentic versions of Bob’s songs. Not only that, he knew how to talk. We adored him. He spoiled it for one of my friends though, a lifelong Dylan fan, by looking up and smiling.”

The last lines make me laugh out loud.

In “Classic in Three Movements”, the poem is not so much about the music but about the movements, but not as what a musician would assume. The movements are physical ones seen or spied upon, not heard, at windows. In another piece, he writes about Deep Purple, but not as how a fan would have liked. He also writes about Bjork, in “Bjorkquake”, imagining how the Icelandic musician would have reacted if she “…had found the perfect bass-note, the earth-deep sound that Odin wrote”

Other subjects Lawrence touches on include crafty magpies with their eyes on his bike, meditation and cats, more poems about cats, their squealing love-making, cat flaps, a few poems about cycling, about locking heads with a driver, gate crashing wedding parties, about first love and the first kiss, about a specific part of a woman’s body, sensitive noses, about past loves, and about working in a mental ward,

In poems about his travels he shows us the vista of the world from his poetic point of view: a funny poem about wandering into a club thinking it was a cafe, an interaction in a launderette with a cleaner from Sarajevo; observing the Basilica of St Maria ad Martyres; eating in Rome, where an Italian word he overheard makes him think of Freud; about flamenco; tasting yoghurt at the Damascus Gate; and stomach pains while traveling in India.

His foray into haiku elicits some astounding revelations about how we communicate today, and about reincarnation.

In his pieces about meditation and other related matters, he ponders about “who you weren’t in all your past lives”. In one amusing piece, thieves broke into a Zen centre and got away with nothing. In “Sutra Neti”, he shows us a sort of yoga one would not imagine could be done: “through the closed left nostril,/pushing softly to penetrate/the swollen lip at the nasal root”.

He has a wry sense of humour. In “Wild Life, April, England” he tells a beggar, “Change? Yes please, love,/I’ll change into a butterfly.” Meeting friends in “Hope & Anchor”, he says, “I hate endings,/putting off the moment when one will kill/the others off with glib goodbyes”.

When he gets serious, he writes with a poignancy which makes you gulp at the sensitivity of the lines. Like in “Doing Tai Chi with My Father”: “My father is horizontal, his cheeks/massive and sagging. The coffin lid stands up/against the wall. It is a small jolt/to see my own name, something we shared”. Especially when that first stanza runs on down to the the next, with its line, “on the coffin lid..” In “Kreuzberger”, we see Lawrence and his brother Ged outside a fast food place, looking at a drunken old man. You’d think the pathos is all about people like the drunk. No, it is not; not until you read up to the very last two lines in the poem. The last line has only two words, but the pathos hits you full on as the wide-sounding vowels in the first syllables of the two words thin to shorter 'e’ sounds, and the “f” sound thickens with the 'v’.

His departing poem is the longest piece. In “Nine Cemetery Contemplations”, he mulls over the death of a kitten, the death of birds in the hands, or rather, paws, of a cat, teenage fascination with a French teacher, having an accident, someone dying in the tsunami, more reflections about his brother’s passing, visiting his father for the last time, buying a Buddhist book for his dying father, and finally the last and the ninth piece, which is so worth quoting in full, here:

“When you were birthed you cried, and your whole world was overjoyed. When you die, we mourn while you may find the great liberation – or just be glad to be reborn.”

*

Lawrence Pettener works full-time as copy-editor, proofreader and writer, with recent and forthcoming book reviews and artist interviews in The Star (Malaysia) and Juliet.com. As Kwailo Lumpur, he writes comic material about Malaysian life, food especially. Three original poetry books are due out in 2019.

Link to the book’s website: www.lawrencepettener.com/mayallbeingsrock Link to stores: http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/lawrencepettener https://www.booktopia.com.au/search.ep?keywords=may+all+beings+rock&productType=917504