I was going to post about dealing with my mum’s old photos and health issues, but I think it’ll take more time to draft than I have, so …
MISTAKES WERE MADE (But Not By Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions and Hurtful Acts, by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, argues that much of our irrational behavior is an effort to remove cognitive dissonance and avoid feeling bad about ourselves: If we lied to put the perp in jail, he was definitely guilty so there’s no harm done; if we cheated on our spouse, it didn’t really count; if we commit war crimes they really had it coming, and so on. Unfortunately, most of this I’ve heard before—I’d like it better if the authors devoted more time to explaining why some people can beat dissonance, either my accepting they screwed up and atoning or simply ignoring the guilt and forging ahead. At one point, for example, they admit it’s remarkable, given the ease of developing bigotry against a Not Us group, that so many people aren’t prejudiced against blacks (or Jews, or gays, etc.), but they don’t look into the question any deeper than that.
DONALD DUCK: Lost in the Andes collects some of Carl Barks’ Disney comic-strips, as Donald hunts the Andes for a source of square eggs, battles a witch trying to extinguish the Christmas spirit and tries to rescue his uncle from captivity in the South Seas, with Huey, Dewey and Louie in tow, of course. While I know Barks is highly regarded, he’s something of a dog-whistle for me—it’s not that I think he’s bad, but his work is pitched at a frequency I just don’t seem to pick up. So this didn’t really work for me.
WITCHFINDER: Lost and Gone Forever by John Arcudi, Mike Mignola and John Severin has Sir Edward Grey (a 19th century witch-hunter in the Hellboy universe) travel to the Wild West to hunt down a missing man, only to find himself dealing with a sorceress raising an Indian army (not to mention raising zombies and stone dogs). This is one of the weaker Hellboy-related entries—not bad, but fairly generic—as a frontier scout gets most of the action, this might as well have been an issue of DC’s Weird Western (in the endnotes, Arcudi admits the genesis was the desire to do a Western in the Hellboy series, so I’m not far off)
THE KRYPTON COMPANION by Michael Eure is an excellent look at the Man of Steel under editors Mort Weisinger and Julius Schwartz up through the present. This is very heavy on discussions of the art, particularly Curt Swan (who’s almost universally revered) and Neal Adams (who counts Superman vs. Muhammed Ali as a personal favorite, partly because of his respect for Ali sticking it to the man) and more mixed reviews of Kirby’s work on Jimmy Olsen. There’s also discussions with most of the key writers, lengthy discussions of the various changes and reboots through the years and more discussion of what makes Superman work, or not work. A good read.
Monthly Archives: April 2012
A couple more books
Just books
Due to our activities last weekend and my current travels, no movies to review …
EXPEDITION TO THE MOUNTAINS OF THE MOON by Mark Hodder has Richard Burton and Algernon Swinburne (whose last steampunk adventure I reviewed here) rushing across Africa to beat a Prussian-backed Richard Speke to an Ultimate McGuffin, despite Burton’s fear the British government won’t use it any better than the enemy. In alternating chapters, Burton finds himself half-amnesiac in Hodder’s alt.version of the Great War, knowing there’s a reason he’s living outside his normal timeline but unsure what … This is very good until the cliche ending and I’m not sure where it goes from there, but I’m still ready to pick up the next volume.
PARADISE LOST is, of course, John Milton’s epic poem about the fall of man in which a defiant Satan vows to bring down God’s latest creation as payback for getting thrown out of Heaven, Eve eats an Apple and Adam gets a look at his descendants’ future (culminating in learning that God will redeem us for Adam’s sins). While Satan is indeed the closest thing to an epic hero here, I can’t see the claims that Milton makes him look to good—the poet is constantly reminding us that Satan’s bold talk is either to buck up the troops or hide his own worries.
SURPRISED BY SIN: The Reader in Paradise Lost by Stanley Fish argues that Milton’s reminders are meant not only to subvert Satan’s grandeur but to make us see we’ve been gulled by his heroic rhetoric (Puritans, Fish says, hated rhetoric as a tool for influencing us without appealing to reason). Fish argues that Milton pulls similar tricks to invite his original readers to judge prelapsarian Adam and Eve by our own standards, then remind us that before the Fall, they were truly innocent. The biggest section of the book analyzes the Fall, arguing that in Milton’s eyes, there was no “explanation” for eating the Apple other than free will (and that not eating, far from a life of submissive passivity, was a constant, active embrace of God’s will). Very interesting.
KISS THE BOYS AND MAKE THEM DIE by James Yardley introduces supergenius investigator Kiss Darling, (“the supergirl with a wow IQ and a dynamite body” according to the cover copy) who gets caught up in an Egyptian revolutionary’s scheme to take over the middle east. This 1970s book was meant to kick off a series, but I can see why it didn’t (only one more book followed): For all her genius, Kiss spends all her time getting ogled, getting kidnapped or falling in love with the villain, while her lecherous drunk of a boss gets the action (and the action’s kind of mundane, lacking any real style or pulp thrills). Unimpressive (and the lecherous Arab stereotypes don’t help either).
Jesus wasn’t big on stoning people
Wasn’t going to post again tonight (loooong day sorting mother’s possessions, boxing them, then lifting boxes) but via Slacktivist I came across this discussion of how the Gospel story of the woman taken in adultery proves homosexuality is a sin.
At issue: Hilary Clinton’s assertion that gays deserve the same protection against violence and discrimination as minority religions, races and ethnicities, not just here in the US but everywhere.
Dan Scalf of Truth in Action Ministries explains this is the woman taken in adultery all over again. Oh, not the part where Jesus told them not to stone her (or even that after showing mercy he told her to sin no more). No, because it was a trap for Jesus set by the Pharisees to see how he’d deal with her! And in the same way, by saying homosexuality is acceptable, Hilary Clinton is setting a trap for Christians!
What’s the trap?
Beats the hell out of me. But apparently the way out of it is not to show mercy to sexual sinners the way Jesus did (presumably because he didn’t mean Those People). As slactivist put it, “A story about Jesus’ refusal to allow the persecution of someone whom religious leaders regarded as a sexual sinner is not the best choice for supporting your agenda of persecuting people that your religious leaders regard as sexual sinners.”
Scalf adds that the Obama administration’s real goal is not equal rights but “complete cultural acceptance for a practice that God’s holy and infallible Word calls sinful.” Umm, no. They’ll let you continue to preach against gays because that’s your right. They’re just saying you don’t have the legal right to bully them, and that laws like Uganda’s that condemn gays to death are a hideous travesty of justice.
The fact you do not get to turn your religious views into public policy is not oppression. Nor, as I noted recently, is it comparable to Nazi tactics or Bull Connor.
Price inflexibility
One of the cliches of libertarianism (or at least that branch of it represented by Freedom News, my former employer) is that there is absolutely no give in product pricing.
If government regulates industries so that they can’t pollute, or have to give workers a living wage, prices will have to go up because otherwise the company will lose money money. If costs go down because of outsourcing jobs overseas to where people work for slave-labor wages, Americans see the benefits because prices go down too!
An extreme form of this argument cropped up some years back when a CNN commentator argued that if we force China to make toys that aren’t hazardous to kids and don’t contain toxic chemicals, prices will rise (apparently poisoned kids is a fair deal in this context). More recently, the New York Times argued that Apple can’t possibly pay its workers a decent wage because that would cost the company profits.
The flaw in this argument is that prices aren’t inflexible. If Apple thought that hiking its costs would hurt sales, it’s perfectly capable of eating the loss to sustain market share. And I’m pretty sure that sneaker companies paying overseas workers one tenth or less of what Americans make aren’t slashing the price accordingly.
Then there’s the unethical overtones: Is having lower prices more important than treating workers fairly or protecting the environment (even if the workers and the environment aren’t American)?
And it’s debatable whether it’s even a good deal for Americans. The standard Freedom editorial was that everyone benefits form free trade and deregulation because it keeps prices low. Business Week, however, reported a few years back that even economists who were bullish on outsourcing conceded that if all the financial gains flowed to corporations and stockholders, it’s a net loss for Americans.
A more recent online article (I can’t find my link to it) argued persuasively that having money flow to the 1 percent at the cost of American jobs is a loser: The 1 percent can only buy so much, so without lots of gainfully employed people making decent wages, we’re going nowhere.
So here’s a thought for Newt Gingrich: Instead of a campaign to allow everyone on Earth the right to own guns, how about a campaign to allow everyone the right to unionize and giving everyone decent working conditions?
Given the Repub attack on unions even in this country, I’m not holding my breath.
Capturing an Era
A while back, I came across this post on Love Your Movies, arguing that Saturday Night Fever was a “time capsule” for the 1970s: “a movie that captures perfectly the feeling and times of that era. the music, the clothes, the voice.”
Having lived through the 1970s, I disagreed. The 1970s, for all the crap they get, were a lot of things: Disco dancing, Star Wars, Watergate, the Vietnam War, terrorism (well over a thousand bombings in the first couple of years), The Godfather, The Exorcist, the oil crisis, cable TV stations (stuff like HBO and The Movie Channel were very novel back then), the Kent State killings in 1970, Roe vs. Wade, All in the Family …
That being said, I agree with the author in comments that SNF does do a good job capturing a particular segment of that decade’s culture. And that’s the most any film or book can do without a panoramic approach.
To really get a time capsule of an entire decade take scope, because there’s no decade where everything can be summed up easily. There were probably more Young Republicans in the 1960s than hippies grooving at Woodstock. The 1950s had their conformist men in grey flannel suits, but it also had Beatniks, the Korean War, the start of comic books’ Silver Age, a gay rights’ movement.
Scope is the big blockbuster novel that ranges all over, runs throughout the decade and includes a big cast: Conservative politician father, rebel son, black activists, one of Jimi Hendrix’s groupies, a New Wave SF writer, a typical sitcom writer, a military officer—or any mix that gets the whole range of the era. And it would need to run through the whole era. You see some of this in Harry Turtledove’s World at War books, which criss-cross the entire WW II world to show how it copes with an alien invasion.
Alternatively, you take a slightly narrower scope: Not an entire world but maybe the military, or advertising (I’d make a reference to Mad Men but I just can’t get into the show) or theater or movies (the book Pictures at a Revolution shows how much those changed in the 1960s).
Or you focus on a particular strand, as Saturday Night Fever does, and you do it well enough to capture and define it.
Or (for historical writing), you work with the image and stereotypes of the era. My short story And He Bought a Crooked Cat (still out and making the rounds) plays a lot with the image of 1950s conformity, though I’ve tried not to impose too much of a modern perception on it. As historical novelist Gary Jennings once observed, nobody thinks of themselves as quaint, or old-fashioned and my protagonist’s rather stuffy fashion sense wouldn’t have been that remarkable at the time.
Alternatively, you simply use the era as a backdrop. The Glory That Was (also in circulation) doesn’t really say anything about the 1970s, but it does make use of it as a setting: Watergate, terrorist bombings, the fact 18 year olds could drink. For me it’s important that backdrop stories use enough that nobody reading it thinks “Well, he could have put that in the present and it wouldn’t have made a difference”—I hate it when I watch a movie set in the recent past and don’t see a point to it.
A decade is a lot to capture but that doesn’t mean we can’t give it a shot.
Ann Romney and other links
As you may have heard, Repubs are once again in high dudgeon (they’re good at that) because a TV commentator said Ann Romney hasn’t worked a day in her life. My god, don’t liberals realize how hard a mother works? They’re the ones making a war on women!
This reminds me a lot of the Barbara Bush flap from 20 years ago. As Feministe points out, we routinely refer to “work” in a variety of contexts to mean “work outside the home” so it’s hard to see any slur on motherhood here (and as Feministe and I have pointed out, it’s not like right-wingers support motherhood with more than words).
And as Slacktivist notes, a major part of the 1990s Republican-supported welfare reform was that mothers should not stay home—they should be out there working. Romney himself wants to up the work requirement.
Of course, those were poor women and a lot of them are nonwhite, so it’s not as if they’re going to get the same treatment as Ann Romney.
Ann Romney says that she’s had to struggle. But as Digby says, scrimping in college while living on your stock dividends (provided by the parents) is not in the same as scrimping while working two jobs (or even one).
In other news:
•Newt Gingrich calls for an international campaign to make all nations grant their citiznes the right to own guns! I’ve often wondered what the NRA was going to keep doing to get people’s contributions (after all, it’s not like anyone’s going to pass serious anti-gun legislation)—I guess this is it.
Oh, and the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre (who once claimed Martin Luther King was shot as part of a government plan to smear gun owners) thinks the media are distorting the case to make stand-your-ground laws look bad.
•A Catholic priest refuses to fight against gay marriage in Washington state.
•Tennessee worries kids holding hands is too sexy.
•A simple way to fix income inequality: $10 million for each person.
Filed under economics, Politics, Undead sexist cliches
Write like a rock star?
I posted a link to this post a while back, but I think it’s worth more detailed discussion.
The blogger, a musician and writer, points out how the economics of the music-industry have changed. Technology makes it possible to self-produce an album that sounds as good as anything recorded by professional sound people; record labels actually encourage this, as proof you’ve got an album’s worth of talen; and indie musicians are increasingly realizing that if they can put together their own album and build their own fan base, why exactly do they need a label?
In contrast, the writing industry still looks on getting published by an actual publisher as the mark of a pro. Even though the technology is there for self-publication (particularly easy now with e-books) and the Internet opens up options for self-promotion, self-publishing (despite some spectacular success) still screams “wannabe,” partly because publishing doesn’t have the reputation for screwing its authors that the record industry does.
The blogger’s questions: Do publishing houses really add anything you can’t do yourself? Is self-publishing more of a viable option? Will it reach the point where it becomes a necessity?
Rereading the post recently, I don’t think the two fields are as close as she does. I think it’s a lot easier to build a fan base, particularly a paying fan base, for a musician (not easy, just easier) because they’ve got the advantage of public performances. Even if you start out playing in bars and passing the hat, it draws fans without detracting from using the same material in an album later. If writers, on the other hand, release free material for download on our website, I’m not sure anyone will come back and buy it later (but I haven’t tried, so if you have, feel free to correct me). And performing makes a stronger impression than reading a story online—particularly if you’re new and nobody has any particular reason to read your online work. I’ve downloaded Barbara Hambly’s work from her website, but I’d be less likely to do it for someone new.
Then again, there’s options like Kickstarter for generating funds for a publishing venture (as author Natania Barron did for her debut novel, Pilgrim of the Sky).
And as she notes, not everyone wants to become their own publisher, or is suited to it. As the Kung Fu Monkey blog pointed out once, even if streaming video technology makes it possible for TV writer to dispense with the networks and create their own Internet channel, some writers just want to write, not be writer/director/producer/TV executives. The technology involved in self-publishing with ebooks is a lot simpler, of course, but it’s still a factor to consider (KFM has an interesting discussion on digital comics here, by the way).
And while it’s often ignored, 20 percent of Americans still don’t have Internet access, which is not a problem with broadcast TV or hard-copy books, but raises problems for digital content, something that “let’s do everything digitally” enthusiasts tend to ignore (like this report, though it’s otherwise very interesting). For that matter, the indie-musician blog post asserts that ebook readers are now cheap—I don’t find an $80 Kindle cheap at all, and for much of my life I’d have considered it too pricey to be practical.
Of course, my taste inclines to books on paper, so I’m biased. Does that bias make me overly pessimistic or excessively skeptical? What do you think?
David Brooks does not get noir
Echidne of the Snakes discusses David Brooks’ latest column, in which he suggests that young idealists working on economic self-sufficiency or water purification projects overseas are blind to how corrupt governments can impede them (“if there is no rule of law and if the ruling class is predatory then your achievements won’t add up to much.”). The solution? Film noir! “The noir heroes like Sam Spade in “The Maltese Falcon” served as models for a generation of Americans, and they put the focus squarely on venality, corruption and disorder and how you should behave in the face of it. A noir hero is a moral realist. He assumes that everybody is dappled with virtue and vice, especially himself. He makes no social-class distinction and only provisional moral distinctions between the private eyes like himself and the criminals he pursues.”
As a fan of film noir and the novels that gave birth to it, I find Brooks’ analysis incredibly shallow.
It’s true noir pays a lot of attention to social corruption (although a lot of noir novels—Night Has a Thousand Eyes, for example—do not). As Raymond Chandler put it, they take place in a world where a judge with a cellar full of booze has no qualms fining a man caught with a hip flask.
But noir has no illusions about re-establishing the rule of law. Where corruption is the issue, there’s no hope of serious reform, it’s about rescuing one innocent person, punishing one crime, helping one soul breathe free within the corrupt system.
Applying a band-aid, helping a few people do better as the projects Brooks dismisses might, is closer to the noir ideal than sweeping social reform (and safer—if American idealists go and charge into the Third World hoping to remake entire governments, they’d better write their wills first). He’s fallen into the trap David Rieff disccusses in A Bed For the Night, the conviction that nothing but systematic reform is worth doing.
As for noir making no social-class distinctions, bullshit: Noir is much more concerned with the corruption of the rich than Brooks, who worries about the morality of the poor. The Long Goodbye, for example asserts that nobody ever makes a hundred million dollars without some dirty work.
Noir also frequently emphasizes (as I noted previously) that people get into trouble because of blind chance, not because successful people have better morals. In DOA, a man is poisoned for fear he’s read a document he never even saw. In the novel The Big Sleep, everything starts with one man brushing off an unstable girl who retaliates withmurder.
Brooks’ pose also fits poorly with his past writing. Where was his concern for a stable political system when he urged us to invade Iraq and insisted it would go smoothly? Or when he protested Obama administration proposals to restrict the influence of lobbyists in Washington?
Or maybe it fits his work. The emphasis on morality (as Charles Pierce notes). The willingness to send people off to “fix” third world governments. The touch of condescension toward the activists for not having Brooks’ understanding of the system. And the insistence that everyone, even the noir heroes, are tainted and morally flawed (whereas Chandler argues in “The Simple Art of Murder” that the hero has to be, while not Sir Galahad, a man above the corruption he swims in). As witness Brooks’ argument that those of us who criticized Penn State for covering up alleged child-rape in the sports department are only criticizing the college to feed our moral superiority.
I suspect if Brooks ever appeared in a noir film, Bogart would have gut-shot him.
Movies and Books
Although I came prepared to sneer at INTERIORS (1978) as Woody Allen’s first shot at Ingmar Bergman-style drama (also his first film not to star himself) I found myself caught up in the story of the dysfunctional family of mentally troubled Geraldine Page, straying father E.G. Marshall and artistic but frustrated daughters Mary Beth Hurt and Diane Keaton. The biggest problem is that it has the stiffness of a Filmed Stage Play but it worked for me nonetheless; Maureen Stapleton plays Marshall’s second wife and a young Sam Waterston is Hurt’s husband. Hannah and her Sisters would be an obvious double bill for the family emphasis. “She has all the anxiety and agony of the artistic temperament but none of the talent.”
THE HUNGER GAMES (2012) adapts the bestselling Y/A dystopia in which 24 teenagers are recruited for a battle to the death as part of the central government’s policy of crushing resistance (“We could just kill 24 children, but having a victor gives them hope.”) with Woody Harrelson as a trainer, Stanley Tucci as an oily MC, Lenny Kravitz as a consultant (the realization that black characters were actually being played by black people created a firestorm among some outraged fans of the books) and Donald Sutherland as the reigning tyrant. Very good, even given the Game Show of Death is hardly a new concept (even a non-genre fan like TYG is familiar with it), though I notice here it reflects current American Idol trends (the public gets to vote by providing medicine or other goodies to its favorites). “May the odds ever be in your favor.”
THE FILMS OF FRITZ LANG by Frederick W. Ott is a competent but unremarkable look at Lang’s career, relying on then-current reviews of the various movies rather than in-depth analysis. As someone who only knows the highlights of Lang’s career, however, I must say it was a useful overview, showing that like so many directors, his work ranged from SF to crime drama to noir to historical epic.
FIFTH BUSINESS by Robertson Davies has a retired history teacher entering his flashback booth to show that he wasn’t the amiable fuddy-duddy Mr. Chips clone that some of his acquaintances have assumed. We then follow him from growing up in a provincial Canadian town through the hell of WW I, into teaching history, becoming a hagiologer and his life-long uneasy relationship with a hot-shot businessman of similar roots. The kind of thing I don’t normally like, so it says a lot that I quite liked this one.
THE CREAM OF THE JEST: A Comedy of Evasion by James Branch Cabell starts off well as a minor functionary in Poictesme reveals that his elaborate schemes are due to his being an avatar of the author plotting the books and finding no other way to make them come out right. Unfortunately we then switch from Horvendile to the life of the author which becomes a whiny tale of how such sensitive spirits can never truly be at home outside their dreams, and how horrible it is that his beautiful art became a success purely because of rumors that there’s S-E-X in them (after which we get Cabell’s equally uninteresting Philosophy of Life, The Universe and Everything). Perhaps it’s a good thing I’ve concentrated my Cabell reading on his best stuff and not his entire works.
AVENGERS: The Children’s Crusade has the teen super-heroes Wiccan and Speed attempt to find their suspected mother the Scarlet Witch with the help of their teammates in the Young Avengers, only to have both the Avengers and the X-Men try to stop them for fear of what Wanda’s powers did (death, destruction and warping reality for the worse) when she went mad in her last appearance. A fun read, though as the Young Avengers point out, the X-Men’s own history hardly qualifies them to pronounce judgment on anyone—and the time-travel ending left me a little unclear if this story got wiped out of continuity or not.
