Thanks for the title, Leonard.
Took a road trip up to Ottawa the weekend before last. Visited my brother-in-law and his wife. They’ve managed his Stage 4 past the initial prediction. He is the same man I’ve known now for almost 30 years. He is a very different man from the one I’ve known for almost 30 years.
I experienced an inner tilt during that visit, and that’s how I’ve been walking through the past 14 days — at a tilt. Can’t quite put it into words. Like my brother-in-law, I am becoming a different man. And I’m the same guy I’ve always been.
Behind the blue-and-white velvet rope I’ve been posting pictures of my personal lye-berry. My shelves are a mess — kinda alphabetical in spots, but not really. I’m sure I’ve alienated everyone with OCD. But those are the shelves and bookstores I’ve always loved the most — the ones that almost make sense. They’re the most like life.
Life. God help you if you’ve got OCD.
Stuff I’ve been pondering:
- I’ve been monitoring Alan Jacobs’ most recent project with some interest. I am not a little sympathetic. But, wow — I have been holding my breath. I’m kinda hoping it’ll be akin to Matt Cardin’s A Course In Daimonic Creativity. But I’m worried it’ll be another variation of Calvin Seerveld’s Rainbows For A Fallen World. (Nobody mentioned in this paragraph wants my fan-mail, I know. But I love them just the same.)
- Now that “woke” has become more-or-less universally pejorative, it is easier to spot where comic books have truly exploited their consciousness-altering potential, and where they’ve lazily defaulted into pallid pretension — into rote wokeness. Angel Eduardo asks, Does Superman Have To Be White? And Robin Sloane unpacks Gene Luen Yang’s 2016 series, The New Super-Man. I was unfamiliar with this arc, and haven’t yet given it my attention. But from Sloane’s description of it — “Redemption through ret-con; is there anything more comics than that?” — it appears Yang’s craft emulates and possibly supersedes that of Grant Morrison. Excelsior!
- ALDaily pointed me to The Apocalyptic New Campus Novel by Charlie Tyson. It’s a great piece, but the bit that stuck with me — and it is not at all the thrust of Tyson’s piece (which you really should read) — is: “Historians of the future might be forgiven for thinking that in the early 21st century, our country’s colleges were more powerful, and more nefarious, than its military. Certainly the former gets more scrutiny and attention.” And it got me ruminating. Following WWII the American Military Novel was an esteemed genre that appealed to a remarkably wide range of readers. It has all but vanished — quick: name one other Iraq 2.0 novel besides Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. I have to regard this as a bad omen.
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| Transference: it's strictly a one-way affair. Isn't it? |
11 comments:
Not only doesn’t have to be white, in origin he’s a challenge to whiteness — or can certainly be taken that way. (How I’ve thought of him for a while, as you know.) That ‘white’ in America didn’t yet in fact embrace Jews when Siegel & Shuster were kids — and maybe wouldn’t have for some time but for U.S. neutrality vis-à-vis Hitler being denied by an overreaching Japan — is story that constantly demands re-surfacing these days.
To Angel Eduardo I want to say: that race-obsessed miasma isn’t something people who argue like Coates does have imposed. It is something people like my own family have to take the real credit for, or much of it — from the point where we began aggressively re-fashioning what we identified as our most basic commitments into a fortress of cultural and political defense against Civil Rights.
Bob Jones and Falwell U (FU) -- good luck ret-conning that.
They — we — had a large hand in putting Reagan in the WH, as Balmer describes, and later Bush the younger and of course Trump. We couldn’t have done it without much of the rest of the country’s complicity, though. When we talk about BJU and Liberty from the ’70s to present, it’s helpful to recall that this was Harvard in the ’50s.
Don’t mean above to suggest that Siegel and Shuster had anything like a critical-race-theory sensibility as midwestern Jews in the ’30s, in case that’s what I seem to say. Far likelier that their own view was something on the order of an idea that Jews ‘deserved’ to be regarded as white — for which they should hardly be condemned, in my view, if so (or to whatever extent it’s so). I only mean that they and other kids of the time seeding pop culture with new material weren’t giving us a round of new Flash Gordon and Lord Greystoke knockoffs merely — as becomes a bit more apparent with Kirby’s later work. They were giving us variations of those things in which Jewish readers could see themselves in particular ways. (This is where I wish self-perceived contrarians like Eduardo would get closer-up on the history, rather than gesticulating about how the world’s changed in the last 10 or 15 years.) Superman strikes me as a case of particular significance precisely because it’s the ’30s and young Jerry & Joe aren’t plugged into publishing in a way that would make them especially sensitive to what would sell on a big scale. They were creating stuff that appealed to themselves, reflected themselves.
As someone who has yet glean enjoyment from any of the cinema Supermans (TV, different story) any changes Coates and Company are keen to make are changes I am keen to see. As for Eduardo's argument, it seems to be with critical-race-theory which gets us all into tricky waters, particularly those of us possessed of a pasty patina. Eduardo says he has "been able to see past skin since three" -- I'll just take his word for it. But note, please, that I have juxtaposed his essay with Sloane's, and Gene Luen Yang's artistry.
And I might as well segue into another topic I raise in this post: The American Military Novel. Decades ago I read E.M. Nathanson's The Dirty Dozen (which seems to have been written and published with the expectation it would quickly become a film property -- must be nice). Nathanson larded an already very lardy novel with lengthy epistolary exchanges between his narrator and the narrator's Jewish father, all concerned directly with race relations. Nathanson's earnest approach to the matter was of a piece with the Jewish American vets who came back with the intention to build a better America. The military novel became an increasingly cynical affair as the decades of US military "adventures" accrued. And I think the readership for these novels became increasingly rarefied. Those who served were better served reading American Sniper or just skipping the bookshelf altogether.
"Increasingly cynical" -- like the film based on the book (a favourite of mine, I must admit).
Yeah, apologies — was moved to rant and then felt it necessary to clarify afterward. I didn’t mean to ignore the piece about Yang’s New Superman. It’s something I wasn’t acquainted with either. Still reading and processing the Sloan piece — for which I am grateful to you!
(Ranty partly because I can’t read Eduardo there without thought of a great old friend from Bible-church days in Maryland, mixed-race and an unwavering Republican, who’d undoubtedly be nodding and amen-ing him at every line.)
by portraying American anti-Semitism were making the case that one of the key legacies of the war needed to be the complete eradication of anti-Semitism from American life
Instead what we get, of course, is something nearer to a remarkably thorough erasure of antisemitism from Americans’ idea of their history.
And what a long strange trip that has been. My youngest uncle has stories of some tent preacher setting up in the village as the Six Day War rolled in, 'cos this was surely the End of Days -- just look at all your kids wearing long hair! The town barber was busy that week. Of course once things settled down, the kids regretted their repentance and steeled themselves against further religious hucksterism. One plus from the turmoil: pop (unk's big bro) got hired on as the town's first Youth Pastor.
Still working through MacCulloch’s Reformation history audiobook (lot of interruptions). So many rounds of the-end-draweth-nigh, so much emergency getting-right, down the centuries! And yeah, it’s a cultural habit that goes well with spasms of record-wiping.
For those wondering, hereis a YouTube link to Diarmaid MacCulloch's Silence lectures.
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