The DOJ’s Ferguson report is just as horrible as it could possibly be, and I encourage you to follow Wesley Lowery’s Twitter timeline for the kind of intensive drill-down on individual excerpts you won’t get from news articles about it.
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URSULA K. LE GUIN GOES FOR IT:
Mr Ishiguro said to the interviewer, “Will readers follow me into this? Will they understand what I’m trying to do, or will they be prejudiced against the surface elements? Are they going to say this is fantasy?”
Well, yes, they probably will. Why not?
It appears that the author takes the word for an insult.
To me that is so insulting, it reflects such thoughtless prejudice, that I had to write this piece in response.
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LOL, the Conrad Hilton meltdown piece in GQ is my everything today. The hero, for me, is this sweet British life coach who witnessed the lil turd’s tantrum from economy and really puts the best possible face on it:
If you were on a desert island, Hilton would be the weakest link, wouldn’t he? Let’s face it. He’d be the one about whom everyone would say, “Oh, shit, don’t get him to do anything. He’ll balls it up.” But this could be the making of him. Have you ever seen a movie called Captains Courageous with Spencer Tracy? I can’t watch it without bursting into tears. Tracy is this old Portuguese fisherman, and this rich kid falls off the back of an ocean liner and Tracy picks him up. And the spoiled kid does a Conrad Hilton. He says, like, “Do you know who I am??” And Tracy just takes him on and teaches him to be a good person. It’s so touching. You see the transition. It’s beautiful.
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Julia Carrie Wong on those stupid stunt journalism things meant to induce empathy (I think Black Like Me was sufficiently ground-breaking at the time not to get lumped in here, but the point stands.)
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Emily Books is getting an imprint!
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Decider’s “Was It Good For the Gays?” takes on “But I’m a Cheerleader” (it was):
While But I’m a Cheerleader might not be the kind of movie to change any minds — it is, after all, a movie for queer people, about queer people, and by queer people (which is, in fact, one of its merits) — what it does is important: it undeniably preaches an sermon of self-acceptance while poking fun at those who are threatened by the queer community simply because those within it find the self-assurance to live their lives on their own terms by openly rejecting societal norms when it comes to gender performance and sexual desire. When Megan is eventually kicked out the camp after she’s caught in bed with Graham (who, unlike Megan, remains at the camp because of pressure from her parents), she takes refuge with a pair of local gay men who attempt to save the campers from Mary Brown’s domination. When she laments that she doesn’t know “how” to be a lesbian, they reply, “There’s not just one way to be a lesbian. You have to continue to be who you are.”
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A reader sent this fascinating article about looted WWII art, and also pointed out the weirdness of this quote from the MFA director, bc Rothschilds losing some fancy art and making it safely out of Vienna is prob NOT one of “the saddest stories” of the war:
“It’s a complete transformation” of some of the MFA’s collections, said MFA director Malcolm Rogers, adding that the gift gives the Rothschilds a dramatic new presence in the museum. What makes the gift unique, however, is its back story: “This gift allows us to tell, in a very moving way, one of the saddest stories of the second World War, and then the story of Bettina’s mother and her lifelong pilgrimage to set history right.”
I mean, maybe he meant the Holocaust was one of the saddest stories of WWII? Also a weird thing to say!
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Trading Spaces‘ Hildi Santo-Tomas as unlikely gay icon:
The cast featured several eccentric designers in its rotation, but there was one whose reputation as a provocateur towered above the rest. Her name was Hildi Santo-Tomas. Viewers hated this woman, and I bore witness to it. A teenager at the time, I was obsessed with the show and joined several message boards where I could waste hours doing postmortems of the weekly episodes, discussing with fellow devotees the fine points of slip covers and bolster pillows. On these message boards, people talked a lot of smack about Hildi. And I spent a lot of time passionately defending her.
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Six 20-something San Francisco dykes you meet on OkCupid, with truly excellent illustrations:
Look mami, I’m as pissed as you are about the invisibility of lesbians in this city. Believe me, I am. In an effort to better navigate the OkCupid Industrial Complex here are SOME dykes you may find in OkCupid:
As with everything lesbian related here’s The Disclaimer: before you go all who-does-this-third-world-dyke-think-she-is on me, this is in no way representative of the queer women community. I’m being reductive on purpose, etc.
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Tags: feminism, link roundup, the internet
At least the Rothschild piece taught me a new word today: “Philately- the study and collection of postage stamps.”
Famously rhymed with “Lady Chatterley” in Tom Lehrer’s song “Smut.”
Oh good, I was just about to wonder how to pronounce it, because I’ve never heard it said out loud.
My morning music has been a medley of Tom Lehrer ever since I saw this comment, which I thank you for.
I was just going to mention that I only know that word because of Tom Lehrer! Such a great song.
In my 9th grade English class, our teacher made us bring in songs whose lyrics we admired. I picked “Smut”, which baffled a lot of people at first (although they ended up enjoying it).
My workplace has a club dedicated to this. They also have a subdivision for “télécartophilie” – those prepaid cards you used to (still are, maybe?) be able to use in payphones.
Oh, they used to make some really pretty ones in Japan!
In weird language around WWII relevance, yesterday at work (archive footage library), a client emailed me and asked, “smeesmeesmee, do you have any footage of Dr Goebbels in Egypt?” and I was like, huh. I don’t think it’s necessary to afford him the respect of a title?
Well there’s a lot goebbels people might be looking for footage of, you have distinguish somehow
Thanks to your screenname, I imagined that the client looked like Captain Hook.
Now imagining Captain Hook as an old History PhD, terrorizing research staff and talking to himself among the stacks.
I want to lick that emerald and diamond brooch in the Rothschild collection, though. I live in Boston, so it might happen. You’ll know when you never hear from me again because I am in jail.
I read that Conrad Hilton piece yesterday and it just boggled my mind. Honestly though, it sounds like the British staff were the best people to deal with this, because I feel like if he had pulled that shit on an American flight crew, things would probably have been eve more chaotic.
Favorite bit:
When Hilton wakes up about an hour later, he approaches yet another flight attendant and says he’s “going to fucking kill” him three times. He grabs the man’s shirt and name badge saying, “I could get you all fired in five minutes. I know your boss!” He says, “My father will pay this out, he has done it before. Dad paid $300,000 last time.”
P.M.: What a waste of money.
I love all her responses, she seems so much more collected than I would have been in that situation. I wonder how CH feels about this, looking back. The sentence he’s facing seems a lot less serious than I would have expected for someone repeatedly declaring he would literally murder a flight attendant mid-flight.
When she talked about having bumped into him while waiting for the loo, you could practically hear the theme from Jaws start up in the background.
I suspect the repeated declarations that ‘daddy will pay for it’ probably about cover it both then and now. And he’s right!
If he’d been on an American flight, he’d be in federal custody or dead.
For me, I really wished this story would have ended with him getting the shit kicked out of him by air marshals. Peasants indeed.
I don’t know, he’s white + rich. If not for that, yeah, he probably would have fared far worse.
Yeah, the white + rich are two big factors as to why he’s in rehab and not in solitary.
i kept thinking “why hasn’t he been tased yet???” but then i remembered it’s a british airline.
I think my favorite part is the part where they handcuffed him while he was asleep.
Haaahahahahahahahah
Followed by “I’m a model, you’ve ruined my career!”
BLESS.
“Well, we’re certainly doing our best, Mr. Hilton.”
Lynn Nicholas wrote a fantastic, exhaustively researched book about Nazi art theft during WWII called The Rape of Europa, you should definitely check it out if you’re interested in the topic! The mental image of Goering keeping a bowl of loose precious gems on his desk for the pleasure of sinking his hands into it and playing around with them will stay with me for a long time.
Oh, god. Now I feel extra creepy for my comment above.
If it makes you feel better, I burst out laughing when I scrolled back up to read your comment.
It does. Absurdity and the cackles of feminists really all I want out of the internet, ever.
This thread right here is Reason #17,596 why I love The Toast SO MUCH.
The book inspired a documentary of the same name – you can watch it on Netflix, it’s very good!
I get a lump in my throat every time I watch the part about moving Winged Victory in the Louvre, and how the curator thought he would never see her again.
Ugh, yeah, it’s really hard to watch. I always cry when they talk about how the Nazis blew up the bridges in Florence 🙁
I teared up last December when I went to the Louvre and saw her there. SO DAMN MAJESTIC.
I will probably give the Ishiguro a try but I found Never Let Me Go an odd reading experience given how not-new the premise was in science fiction. There was so much praise for the daring and original plot, too–all by people who don’t read any SF.
I was in the library a few days ago, just browsing, sort of in that “I’ll borrow something I’ve heard of and meant to read” mode. I almost chose Never Let Me Go, because I really did enjoy Remains of the Day, but then I thought about how overrated male-authored books tend to be and I chose Ali Smith’s How To Be Both instead.
I’m feeling really, really great about that choice.
but then I thought about how overrated male-authored books tend to be
100% why I keep intending to eventually get around to reading Ishiguro’s books but never quite do, and I can’t feel any remorse about that.
I’ve talked about this below but might you and Keristars not want to think about how white-dominated this industry is? Do you really think it would have been easy to establish the reputation he has now, as an immigrant with a “foreign” name? Being a woman in the industry is difficult. It’s also difficult being part of an ethnic minority.
As someone who is both and in the industry, I meet an awful lot of highly successful women in the literary publishing industry. Kazuo Ishiguro is the only fellow East Asian I remember meeting in the 6 years I’ve been working in it. Like I said below, it’s not a competition of which intersection of society is more oppressed, but it’s good to remember there are more ways than one of being under-represented. As an East Asian woman with literary ambitions herself, I gotta say, the thought of Ishiguro is comforting to me in a way that Ali Smith can never be, since he’s the only really famous British literary writer who shares my ethnic background, while happily there are plenty of other female writers I can look up to.
No indeed, I imagine he’s faced innumerable obstacles on those accounts. And, probably not unrelatedly, his work is much more interesting to me than, say, Ian McEwen’s or Martin Amis’s. But in the interview above, he strikes me as participating in the sort of “high-art-literary-tradition” gate-keeping that has traditionally been used (among other things) to define men’s writing as serious and women’s writing as frivolous. I think Le Guin was right to call him out on it.
Perhaps he was, it’s entirely possible — though it seems like there’s an awful lot of assumption going on from a couple of sentences, which could easily be merely a reference to his awareness that there is a prejudice among his readers, rather than that he definitely shares in it. But I wasn’t talking about whether he’s prejudiced against fantasy genre fiction, because neither were you. You were suggesting that his books are probably over-rated because male-authored books tend to be. So you chose a white female author instead of a non-white male author. And that seems very like you hadn’t here taken ethnicity into account when weighing how an author’s identity affects how they’re received. You’re also hugely implying that the gate-keeping (which he may or may not have taken part in) is misogynistic in nature, despite the fact that in this instance, you’d be very hard pushed to claim that, considering how the fantasy genre is historically male-dominated too.
I wish I could give you a thousand thumbs up. Any discussion of a male POC author that implicitly lumps him in with all the white guys raises huge red flags.
I’m not a huge sci-fi reader, but I wasn’t blown away by the plot of Never Let Me Go either. What I loved about it was the slow reveal of [the plot] by a narrator who can’t quite trust or make sense of her own memories. Definitely a nice contrast to those novels that start “This all happened when I was 50 years younger….[goes on to tell detailed story with precise dialogue].” Nothing against that setup, but it was cool to see it subverted by a “here’s what someone piecing together childhood/teenage experiences actually sounds like” sort of thing.
So I’m looking forward to his particular angle on a different fantasy world, even if it’s pretty played out in the fantasy genre. (Meanwhile, it would be cool if fantasy genre writers also got lengthy NYTimes interviews about their new work, and “don’t worry it’s not FANTASY!” wasn’t a thing Serious Literary Authors felt like they had to say.)
I had the same experience. It’s not a particularly new or interesting plot, but it IS interesting as a character study. What works in the book is not “clones: crazy, right?” but the sort of relaxed, nonchalant voice of the narrator describing her terrible life with all these digressions about how privileged she is. You keep rooting for her to realize how fucked up her world is, and she just keeps calmly accepting it. Also: the Ruth/Kathy friendship is fantastic. It’s simultaneously loving and supportive and envious and toxic in ways that rang very true to me in terms of the kind of friendships teenage girls develop.
I thought it was a fairly good novel, just was nonplussed by the reverent awe for his having written such a thing, which seemed to owe a lot to his status as a literary novelist. I guess you could say the same thing about Remains of the Day and whether it would have been received as equally serious literary fiction had a woman written it.
yeah, the “protagonist in seriously fucked up world learns what is happening, doesn’t resist it” is an interesting story to tell. Why would she resist? She doesn’t know any other way to be. And she’s had a pretty decent life with people who care about her, as she acknowledges.
Actually, I just finished reading The Girl With All The Gifts, and that teacher + kids who would not normally get to be students storyline is there too, and I liked that piece of it a lot.
I didn’t understand all the fuss about Never Let Me Go either. As you said, that plot is so worn out, and the dialogue sounded completely ridiculous. I would really, sincerely (non-douchily) like for a fan of the book to explain its merits to me because I feel like I missed something.
You rang?
Okay, so, full disclosure: I read primarily Sf/Fantasy with a healthy dosage of literary novels and I loved both The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go. And I’m here to tell you: like in the best SF, the clones are not the point. The point is how people respond to living in a world like this. And I, for one, think Ishiguro does this a LOT better than that movie The Island did (although Ewan McGregor wins a thousand points for being gorgeous, of course).
*vague spoilers* The characters have been raised from children to believe certain things about themselves and their world and as the system is slowly revealed to us, simultaneously with some AMAZING character and relationship development, the tension comes from you, as the reader, rooting for the characters to realize their own worth and DO SOMETHING about the horrible position that they’re in. You can see how they might make changes to their lives and take action but as the story goes on you also come to see that they don’t see the same opportunities that you do because they’ve been so brainwashed. It’s a really amazing look at how victims of abusive systems may not realize what’s happening to them and I think it’s a great contrast to all those stories about That One Guy who sees the Faults in the System and Stands Up to The Man.
So that’s why I loved it and it made me sob. But it is kind of like to most SF novels as Miss Marple is to US detective shows and I can see why people who read a lot of SF might be baffled by its popularity.
oooohhhh
I read the book and did not get that at all
(and yes, I do enjoy SF regularly so your explanation for why it fell flat for me makes a ton of sense)
Yay, I’m glad that made sense! I am such a dork but I have loved Ishiguro ever since I read a short story of his for class and I am always trying to share the koolaid haha.
Totally agree. The part that especially breaks my heart is when you’re set up to think that True Love Will Save the Day, or at least buy a reprieve–because, after all, love is a transcendent magical force that can conquer all–and then it spectacularly fails to do so. Everything keeps going. The fact that two people love each other is not enough to destroy the system, it just makes the system that little bit more tragic.
Yes, exactly. That moment is so heartbreaking — they just accept that this is what’s going to happen to them all. Oh man. It just hurts so much and it hurts more because you know that’s how real life actually is, even though you don’t want to believe it.
As I was writing the above bit it really got me thinking about how masterfully Ishiguro handles having three main characters who don’t make strong choices, something that I think is usually super important to having a good book. On the one hand he’s simple a fabulous writer, but I think he substitutes action for strong non-action? If that’s a thing? Like the narrative structure keeps suggesting these moments of potential action that we as the reader expect and then he makes the strong choice of not going through with them which satisfies the same need, maybe?
Mm, yes, I think you’re definitely right about him letting the reader’s knowledge of certain tropes set us up for certain expectations and then having the characters fail to act on them as we have been taught to think they should (Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans definitely do the same thing). Which I think is interesting in light of LeGuin’s critique? Her major issue is that Ishiguro doesn’t understand or respect the tropes and tools of fantasy and so isn’t doing anything particularly interesting or useful with them, but Never Let Me Go at least (I haven’t read his latest yet) demonstrates a pretty sophisticated understanding on his part of certain genre tropes and how they inform reader expectations.
Maybe Ishiguro falls into the Margaret Atwood school? She’s always super defensive about not calling her stuff science fiction because she doesn’t want to get trapped in the genre ghetto, but she works with sci fi tropes all the time and totally understands how they work. I don’t think she’s said anything about sci fi as tone deaf as what Ishiguro has been saying about fantasy, though.
I can totally see that. And we’re also talking about an older generation of writers where labeling books genre was more of A Thing. I mean it still is but I think we can safely say that there’s less of a stigma.
The funny thing is that after all this I’m really nervous to read his latest. I was really excited for it when it was announced both because I love him and that time period and I was really curious to see what he would do with a stronger move into the fantasy genre, but I skimmed the NYTimes review and it was pretty brutal. :/
Strong non-action is a fabulous way to describe the way Ishiguro’s characters tend to move through their worlds, and I agree that the tension between what the reader wants and what the characters do is a key and effective element of much of what he writes.
I haven’t read the new book yet (but we’ve got it & it’s really prettily made!) but I’m excited to, because I am fully on board the Ishiguro Train.
Yeah but neither have anything on Parts: The Clonus Horror
I liked The Buried Giant for a lot of the same reasons you (and I) liked NLMG (and yes, I’m a big SF geek, too)—it had a kind of almost-allegorical thing going on that didn’t become clear for quite a while but retroactively illuminated a lot of odd, bothersome things about the world. I’m sorry Le Guin hated it (Neil Gaiman was extremely polite about it in the NYT book review, too), since she’s one of my very favorite authors, but as far as “literary” writers slumming it in genre fiction goes, I found it so much more interesting than, say, Station Eleven. It’s also a really interesting companion piece to The Once and Future King, a book I’ve always loved.
I liked NLMG, but the fact that everyone just accepts the system is also a huge flaw in the book. Yes, I can see the point of subverting the cliche of the lone hero who understands that what his society is doing is Wrong. It’s certainly not that I can’t believe that victims of abusive systems could be so brainwashed that they’d never be able to find the wherewithal to rebel — I can easily believe that. I believe, oh, I believe and it breaks my heart that the (SPOILER ALERT) clones have these teachers who, infuriatingly, respond to their former students’ pleas for aid by saying there’s nothing they can do to save their lives, all while obviously expecting them to be GRATEFUL just because they (the teachers) treated the clones like human beings instead of like vermin when they were children! That scene is too, too true to human nature, brilliantly done.
BUT — we are also supposed to believe that there is no one in ALL OF HUMAN SOCIETY who has enough of a problem with this murderous, evil system to begin a resistance movement? Literally no one, anywhere? That I can’t believe. People are products of their societies, yes, and yet for all of the history of slavery we have also had abolitionist movements — even if they were small and radical and deeply popular because the majority of people preferred to be self-serving. But there *is* always someone, somewhere, standing up to oppression, even when they don’t have the power to enact change.
There is no indication that anything like that exists in Ishiguro’s world. That might be okay if I thought it were a deliberate choice, to portray humanity as even worse than it probably is. But I don’t think that’s the case. I think it never crossed his mind, honestly, which in my mind makes it a pretty telling flaw in the novel.
All this stuff in this thread about male authors being overrated and if Ishiguro’s novels were written by a woman, would they have garnered the same level of admiration? etc… Aren’t we slightly forgetting that though he may have male privilege, he is also an immigrant with a non-white name in a hugely white-dominated industry? I go to a lot of literary events in London, being part of that industry myself and yes, sexism is a problem but do you have any idea how white these events are, especially considering how multicultural London is? Nowadays I’d estimate that the publishing industry is about 50/50 male/female (though figures are much more male-dominated at the top) but I’ve been to events where I’m the only non-white person there. I’m not saying that racism is more a problem than sexism — I don’t think these things are easily quantified and besides, it’s not a competition — but I think it’s good to remind oneself of intersectionality.
Thank you, I am surprised how few people are considering this
Everything Ursula K. LeGuin writes about how fantasy works makes me want to stand and applaud.
I’m here to talk about the Trading Spaces where Hildi put hay on the walls. http://www.tlc.com/tv-shows/trading-spaces/videos…
Okay, but why is Kelly Bensimon in that video? Did I just completely forget that she was involved with that show pre-Housewives?
Hildi wasn’t responsible for Crying Pam, one of the most awkward and riveting moments in Trading Spaces history. (That was Doug.)
Oh, the name Crying Pam takes me back! I watched a ton of Trading Spaces in college, and I remember fangirling about Doug. Something about the insouciance and piercing blue eyes and weird designs. I give myself a pass because I was like 20 or something.
I googled to find a picture of the bathroom where Queen Hildi nailed records and silk flowers to the walls. Instead, I found buzzfeed http://www.buzzfeed.com/briangalindo/the-5-most-w…
“Hildi took interior design and turned it into installation and performance art…”
Yeah but like the author even acknowledged, she RUINED these people’s HOMES. They could very possibly be looking at some serious, serious financial consequences from her “art.” I’m sorry but I am sick of “great artists” or “geniuses” getting passes for being huge assholes and causing harm to people because they are so geniusy or whatever. Argh.
ETA: And that hay room was DANGEROUS to the children living there. I still remember the title of the TWoP recap of that ep — A Hideous Train Wreck, By Hildi. On Crack.
I legit just had a dream that my sister and Hildi were redoing my bedroom. All I asked was that they didn’t paint the hardwood floors (I don’t have hardwood floors?) or my ancient antique bedroom set. Hildi was furious that I put restrictions on her and immediately painted both. I have no idea how that woman has stuck in my subconscious for so long.
I remember reading that a few homeowners had to pay anywhere from $3k to $5k to have Hildi’s egregious designs fixed. One involved cardboard and Liquid Nails. And yeah, there was the flowers in the bathroom (very unsanitary and unhygienic).
The best part is her incredulousness that children would ruin the wall and put it in their mouth, even if they were told not to.
The one episode which stands out in my mind is where she covered the walls of a kitchen with wine labels. The family who owned the home were very anti alcohol (possibly Mormon? I don’t recall.) No one was very happy about that.
Am I the only one who watched the upside-down-room clip on the Trading Spaces story (which was WONDERFUL btw) and then ran to IMDB to make sure the twins are the same ones who played conjoined twins on Grey’s Anatomy a zillion years ago
please tell me I’m not the only one
wow, i love GA and i didn’t make that connection
you win, you’re great
Nothing makes me more irritable than people who put on the guise of a non-privileged person and then “learn a lesson.” It is, as the article said, the most childish form of learning. A kid maybe won’t understand or believe that the stove is hot until they touch it for themselves, but gradually the idea is that you grow up and grow in understanding so you don’t have to have everything proven to your face. This is not news. I don’t have to see the pyramids in Egypt to know that they’re there and understand their historical significance. So why is it that an otherwise intelligent adult needs to prove to themselves by putting on a disguise that bad things happen to other people who don’t look like straight white middle class men? Why can you believe that the Roman Empire existed, but you can’t believe a woman who wears a headscarf gets harassed until a white woman tries it for herself? Why do you believe in the Higgs Boson particle, but you don’t believe black men get a raw deal by the police until a white guy play-acts it for you? What is the child-level reasoning there?
THIS THIS THIS thank you.
They don’t believe it because they don’t WANT to believe it. It is much more comfortable to go around believing that your experiences are the norm and that the stories of less privileged folk are exaggerations or aberrations. Once you become aware of the systemic injustices and microagressions that exist, you might actually have to DO something about it.
It’s also easier to believe that all the good things you have are due to your own merits, talents, and hard work. No one really *wants* to believe that not all of their achievements are deserved, because that also makes us uncomfortable.
When they say the news is written for a sixth grade reading level they’re not just talking about the vocabulary.
The other side to this that really upsets me: pretending to be non-privileged to teach other people a lesson, do an “experiment”.
People at work were talking and being all Tsk Tsk Shame On Them earlier this week because some rich kid up in NYC pretended to be homeless and sick and the only person who stopped to help was another homeless dude. His brothers gave the homeless dude several thousand dollars as a reward for his compassion, or something? and my coworkers were like “how could everyone just pass by like that!”
Yes, it’s a shame that hundreds of people just walked past. But, c’mon, you guys clucking and shaking your heads would have done the same thing! “Tests” like that are absurd – everyone knows that if you live in a city, you get inured to other people begging, and if you don’t live in the city, you’re probably wary/scared of folks who look homeless. Be angry that it’s possible for a kid to pretend to be homeless, because there aren’t enough resources to help everyone.
Or maybe it’s just my guilt that I have to be choosy about who I give money to or help because I can’t trust that offering help won’t get me screwed over, or put into danger (yes, this has happened to me – a guy I was nice to and helped out started talking about raping and asking me extremely inappropriate questions about my sex life, so I got him trespassed from the building – two months later, he gets out of jail and the very first thing he does is hunt me down to show me his Out of Jail letter and bus money, and give me a very creepy drawing he’d done of a flower that looked like a vulva with my name on it and what was supposed to be milk to make it glossy.) Or even if I’m not worried about danger, I just don’t have the mental fortitude to help directly. (and I definitely don’t have the cash to hand out)
sorry this got long. that hobo guy was 2 years ago and still makes me so angry that i helped him out only to be repayed with threats and creepiness. (also the guy who started cursing me and hitting my car because I was stopped at a light with my windows down and had no cash or food to give him) I try to help people when I can, but it gets exhausting even when the interactions aren’t negative.
There’s a difference between reading about something and experiencing something. I can read as many books as I want about Australia, but it’s not equivalent to actually travelling there. Being a tourist in Australia is of course not equivalent to living there, and I don’t think anyone gets to pretend that it is, but it still gives you more experience than just reading.
I like reading “travel logs” from cismen who try out being a woman, even though I as a native fulltime resident of Femaleland can see that they’re sometimes really naive and surprised about obvious things. I also like to read accounts from women who experiment with passing as men. Men write about being men all the time, but when a woman does it, she can point out the things a woman would notice that a man wouldn’t, kill misconceptions and make comparisons between passing as a man and passing as a woman. I love it when teachers try out being a student, doctors suddenly become patients, rich people get to see what life is like on the other side (provided they don’t just ignore that they have a safety net, which they often do). I’ve tried some things myself, too, and learned a lot.
Obviously you have to be sensitive and thoughtful about it, not just assume that you now know everything (like tourists do when they come back from a weeklong trip and suddenly see themselves as experts). But trying different identities and writing about it isn’t a bad thing in itself, to me.
Ursula K LeGuin is always right about everything. THE END.
No she isn’t, because she hated Jonathan Strange! I worship her anyway though.
That’s just what I was thinking! I adore her fiction, but I don’t think I share her taste or her idea of what fantasy needs to accomplish. I’ve read reports from others who found the new Ishiguro very affecting, so I’ll likely give it a chance.
I think Ishiguro is a great genius and I love all his books, but I like her sprightly defense of the genre.
The way she frames it – an imagination clashing impossibilities together to create a new world – is really really compelling, and I don’t disagree that the litfic tendency to back slowly away from association with genre is both laughable & distasteful, but she’s also holding tight to a pretty rigid definition of a genre that has unfolded some since she was first its reigning queen.
I’ll just pick a middle ground neither author will choose to meet upon, where fantasy can include more mistily-defined & expected elements, and literary writers can accept that they are using genre to create their stories.
Oh man, I love that book so much. I’m very curious about the TV series they are making.
I made a wish-list for the adaptation, the most important items of which are
1. Stephen Black had better be devastatingly, devastatingly hot
2. The fairy gentleman had better be a magnificent cross of Thranduil and Jareth from Labyrinth, and he’d better demonstrate a huge (metaphorical) boner for Stephen Black
If he is gonna be like Jareth, that boner is gonna be more than metaphorical.
TRUE.
I am so tentative about the tv show. On the one hand I am so ready for a dark, Regency fantasy show to watch a million times and perhaps live alongside my constant rewatching of Pride and Prejudice, but on the other there are just so many ways it could go wrong!
Art museum people are really scarily attuned to the toll war takes on cultural objects–I say this as a museum person–and it’s likely he really was thinking of the most serious upheaval in Western art in history, not only for wealthy collectors but for very modest ones too. It’s why survivors fight so hard to have their art returned to them, and why events like the destruction of Warsaw–85% of its buildings were deliberately demolished by the Nazis–are so gut-wrenching. The Nazis well understood that acts of war were not only genocide, but of wiping out any survivors’ entire cultural heritage, or appropriating it. So yeah, what this guy is saying is weird, but it reflects a very specific professional and historical point of view. It’s weird because of course the human loss was worse. Of course. But what the Nazis did was not only kill people, but kill the memories of those people and the history of those people. It’s really pretty horrifying when you get acquainted with the full scope of the events.
This explains some of the disconnect I’ve been feeling when people tweet or post sadly about the destruction of cultural artifacts by ISIS — like, yes, it is sad, but they’re also mass-killing _people_, and you’re not tweeting sadly about that…Realizing that they’re reflecting a specific point of view, and that the people tweeting are probably reflecting on the loss of cultural heritage, helps me feel less sputtering irritation, even if that perspective is not my go-to.
Well, I admit I was making an effort to be charitable because often I think these kinds of stories are upper-class wanking (you hear an awful lot more about the Rothschilds than about most other Jewish families because of their art collection, but that does not make theirs the saddest story in the war, by a long shot). But working in museums and having gone to museum school, and seeing/reading something like The Rape of Europa really gives you a gut punch about the sheer scope of what was lost. People are people, and most of us will have untold stories, but we will be remembered. And it might help to think of it this way: in this scenario, you’re gone. All pictures of you are gone. Your siblings are gone, your parents, your nieces and nephews, and maybe all but one of your children. They don’t have anything of yours. They might not even remember you well because they were young. They have no home in their homeland, no one there knows them, they had to start over completely from scratch, in a new country, maybe from a very young age having nothing to help them figure out who they were or where they came from. Stuff is for the survivors. And we still have people living for whom this was a very intimate loss. We take for granted knowing to whom we belong and to what place. They couldn’t. That’s why this gets such attention now.
Hmm, I’m going to have to think about this. I’m descended from what were likely lower-to-middle-class Jewish families that, very luckily, had all left the Old Country decades before the Holocaust. So it’s easy for me to write off the loss of stuff/possessions/even records, seeing as my family didn’t have much of that to lose to begin with, and yet were able to survive and thrive in a new place despite not knowing what our last names were prior to Ellis Island. (And to be honest, I know relatively little about the Rothschilds, except for their philanthropy to Jewish orgs/institutions and their political influence: this must be different for someone in the museum world: I honestly wasn’t aware they’d lost much in the Holocaust at all, I’ll have to do reading on that.)
I can see what you mean about how finding/recovering items that remind you of your past would be important to survivors. I think that’s a really good point! But, it’s a little bit disheartening to think that the sadness of loss is weighted for others not by the loss of people but on the loss of objects. We frequently have records of objects. We can recreate and replicate, and we’re going to get better at that. But we can’t replace people. Not knowing if my family’s last name was originally Steiner or Schecter seems like a relatively minor point considering the luck my family had.
Leora Auslander’s “Beyond Words” is a good intro piece about the meanings of physical objects that I would recommend for some more perspective on this topic. Here’s a pdf that’s accessible online: https://blogs.stockton.edu/amst5005/files/2013/01…
I’ve done a fair bit of museum work, and I will admit that my stomach heaved when I saw footage of ISIS throwing statues off their pedestals and smashing them with hammers. But I also understand that that’s a complete knee-jerk reaction on my part, and while it’s bad, it’s not as bad as everything else they’re doing.
Is destroying a statue with a sledgehammer just as bad as killing someone? I would argue that it obviously is not. However it’s not really an either/or thing. Both are extremely abusive and terroristic and reflect the same attitude of contempt and hatred. A physically abusive ex-boyfriend once broke into my house and destroyed my most prized possession, which happened to be original artwork. How I WISH he had blackened my eyes and broken my ribs instead. My body can heal but that art is something that I can never, ever replace and although it’s been years I still cry when I think about it. Anyway, destroying that art and physically hurting me were two sides of the same coin. Destroying statues and monuments and cultural heritage is not really separate from “everything else” they’re doing…although, of course, if they kept it to that sort of behavior alone it would be an improvement.
I think sometimes the destruction of artifacts feels like adding insult to injury. It’s not enough that you’re killing people, but you hae to destroy their life’s work, too? Everybody dies, but the stuff we leave behind (art, books, religious artifacts, etc) helps us live on, and the stuff our ancestors left behind helps us connect to our past.
There is also, I think, an enormous psychological impact in seeing your art and artifacts destroyed. Which is, of course, why ISIS and the like do it, but I think also why some people have a visceral reaction to it.
Hmm, yeah, I work with several indigenous groups, and the story is similar. After the initial genocide, the colonial tactic was that if you couldn’t outright kill the people, killing their culture was close enough and the effect has been devastating to communities. Of course the main thing people miss is the people directly or indirectly killed by colonialist people and systems, but the loss of cultural components is also deeply mourned. I have definitely heard people speaking of the stories and knowledge that was destroyed similarly to the loss of a person and talking about “bringing home” the stolen art from distant museums with great longing.
That’s awful; it must be devastating, as you say. And it’s such a horribly common thing. If you have a group you want to attack or eliminate, destroying evidence of their culture is part of the whole approach – not only do you kill the people, if you can, but you also try to wipe out traces of their existenceand show how worthless you consider it. During the Sri Lankan civil war, one of the biggest libraries in Asia was burned and Tamil material destroyed; the Bosnian National Library in Sarajevo was targeted (as Wikipedia notes, “The Serbian nationalist purposefully targeted libraries and places of cultural significance in an effort to destroy the diverse history and Ottoman legacy within Bosnia”). It’s a way of trying to rewrite history, and it’s really scary. I realise that killing people is worse, and so much of what ISIS are doing is horrifying, but I still find the destruction of cultural and historical artifacts terrible.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_cleansing
Do Britishers really use the phrase “balls it up,” or is this fellow just taking the piss?
My boss is British, and has said “balls it up”, “cock up”,and ” gone tits up” . It’s very entertaining on our joint UK US team calls
My friend told me the other day that some British boss guy at his work said in a meeting, “what the titting fuck!” and it was a bit TOO British swear wordy for some.
The British have the best expletives.
For a complete guide to British swearing you should watch The Thick of It (Also cause it is a great and hilarious show).
Yes. Yes, we do.
Hat tip to dancing_robot on Twitter but ROCK BAND IS COMING BACK AND I AM SO STOKED
I was bemoaning THIS WEEK that it was gone, yesssss!
I’m dancing_robot on Twitter and I approve this message (I’m so EXCITED I’m going to check it out at PAX East this weekend). I was never any good at the instruments but I absolutely loved doing the vocals.
oh, man, Trading Spaces. I still remember that room made of straw! Hildi did some crazy thing! (They all did)
I use to watch Trading Spaces and While You Were Out when they aired back-to-back in the afternoons when I was in college.
Ooh, I was a total TS fangirl in college and spent a lot of time on those forums back in the day, but I’d forgotten all about WYWO until now. Thanks for the nostalgia!
Tangent based on ads I’ve seen on The Toast: I keep running across Intel ads, here and elsewhere, about this robotic dress they made. All the ads are gaming dress gaming something, and the dress is close-fitting, fairly short, and backless, with not much solid covering up top. And I’m still a little annoyed at Intel for the whole thing where they pulled ads their ads from Gamasutra because of a GamerGate campaign, so I’m not exactly open to gaming sexy dress gaming ads from them.
I went looking in hopes that someone else had written something thoughtful about this that I could link here, and I didn’t find anything, but I did find this video. The good: the dress is designed by a woman, and it has proximity sensors and robotics that are meant to attack people if they get in the wearer’s personal space. The bad: the attack looks to me like it’s more the sort of thing that people would trigger on purpose because it looks cool than the sort of thing that people would avoid, and I don’t see what the heck it has to do with gaming.
Beanie Baby Boom’n’Bust!
There’s also a mini doc about a family who invested in them to, ostensibly, pay for their kids’ college tuitions.
That is an AWESOME article and explains so much! I had those collector’s guides and pored longingly over the super-rare ones – the old face Teddies, the typos that would get big bucks, and of course Royal Blue Peanut. I had no idea how internally driven the prices were as a kid.
I lost most of my collection in Hurricane Irene but still have a few hanging around – one of the only things about middle school I remember fondly.
” The growth of Beanie Babies into a national phenomenon can be traced to those four women.”
That is INSANE. This article is incredible.
Ursula Le Guin is literally the best writer/person ever.
Every time some asshole starts mouthing off about how Philip Roth should win the Nobel I bring her name up because c’mon.
Didn’t Conrad Hilton Sr. (the guy who originally built the hotel chain and made all those piles of money) disinherit his granddaughter awhile back, because she was such a public embarrassment? Maybe he should look into rewriting his will so that any descendant of his who manages to not throw pissbaby tantrums in public will get his money, and the ones who do will be left high and dry. It would be interesting to see whether or not it would work as an incentive to get them all to behave like adults.
All credit to “But I’m a Cheerleader” for helping me realize my own sexuality. Will always be one of my favorite movies (plus, how can anyone go wrong with Natasha Lyonne or Clea DuVall). Love!
This is the first I’ve heard of the movie and that write-up has made me REALLY excited to watch it. One of my favorite things are works making fun of ultra-conservative, fundamentalist prudes (and also explorations of gender roles and all those stupid stereotypes around being a lesbian).
Agreed re: art! Saw this trailer at the movies recently and was like “yes Helen Mirren obviously I love you but something feels very off about the tone of Rich People and Their Art” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geJeX6iIlO0 I am sure it is a very moving story but I’m not sure this movie is doing it justice?
Guys, this article made me angry and uncomfortable and I want other people to also yell about it.
It contains the phrase ‘Orwellian junior sex leagues masquerading as feminists’. Just so you know what you’re getting into.
In Defense of Drunk Sex -http://reason.com/archives/2015/03/01/in-defense-of-drunk-sex
Aaaaah the headline alone. 1. That “In Defense Of…” setup that precedes a Logical Rational Essay 2. That straw man over there who disapproves of drunk sex 3. Were you perhaps looking for the word “rape,” yes you were
I don’t even want to click on it, that was a good five word hate-read
I’m glad you made this response, because I feel like I just completed a full hate-read and satisfying-rebuttal-read in 30 seconds.
Yeah, I feel like reading that article is just going to turn into a giant ball of rage.
But seriously, this is not a position that needs any defending! Actual rapists rarely see the inside of a jail cell, so the chances of a guy who has consensual tipsy sex a) being accused of rape b) going to court for it c) getting convicted of it and d) actually serving time…pretty much nil. Not a thing.
RAAAAAAGE
I feel like apologizing because I tried to read it but just noped out a paragraph in. He wants to go back to the old days where he got what he wanted without asking if it was what other people wanted too. (I was about to say fuck him, but really, no, DO NOT FUCK HIM – he deserveth it not.)
Captains Courageous!
my dad and I are the early risers of the family, so we used to spend weekend mornings from like 6-10 watching old movies on TCM and from our own video collection. This is one of my dad’s favorites, along with How Green Was My Valley. This is how I grew up, my cynical liberal jewish dad and I watching soppy classic hollywood, because he’s secretly softhearted and lovely. ((my dad’s celebrity doppleganger is Jon Stewart. Not in looks, but in conversational style and overall ethos))
I LOVE BUT I’M A CHEERLEADER
thank you that is all
My grandfather owned stolen WW2 art! Well “liberated” from the Soviets is how he put it. He claimed it was very important art, but after he died we tried to send it back and it turned out the artist, while culturally important, was insanely prolific and all of the museums and art galleries told us they were fine, thanks. We finally found an art school who wanted them, so that’s where they are now.
I LOVE YOU URSULAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
OK but seriously though, writing fantasy and scifi is about ten times more work than writing any other kind of fiction. You LITERALLY build whole worlds and cultures and histories inside your own head. I get SO MAD that it gets so disparaged as a genre.Writing a book about being a sad man in contemporary Brooklyn when you are a sad man living in contemporary Brooklyn ain’t that hard, son.
Wow, we got But I’m A Cheerleader and Hildi Santos L. Harper (that’s how I punished her for putting glass tubes at toddler level, then saying, “They ought not do that,” when the neighbors suggested kids might grab them) in one day, to say nothing of everything else in this thread. I just kind of want to wash my hair in it all.
I say 'crikey' all the time, and I'm Australian.
Worse/better/same?
Thank you, I am surprised how few people are considering this