Scattershots on a Tuesday

[jlh]

David Denby, one of the film critics of the New Yorker, just wrote a book about how snark is a terrible thing. Now, I have my own problems with snark—I don't think it's the best response to everything all the time—but Denby is being rather ridiculous. Then again, he's the guy who wrote a pointless defense of Great Books (maybe not pointless, since it started as a New Yorker article and he got the critic nod shortly thereafter). Anyway, appropriately as Denby was formerly a film critic for New York Magazine, their book critic Adam Sternbergh hands Denby his head for writing such a ridiculous book, and in doing so gives as spirited and appropriate a defense of snark as I've ever seen. (For starters, any book about snark that says that Keith Olbermann isn't snarky is basically useless.)

Further proof that fandom gives you what you didn't know you wanted, and actually probably do not in fact want, but are glad exists: David Archuleta/Joe Jonas fic. The author promises to get smutty in a future installment, even though in this one, promise rings are mentioned, so it feels a little bit like an oxymoron. Cook makes "wiser older man" appearances, so bonus!

I commented on two posts on metafandom today. Now I'm thinking about writing two posts based on those comments, one about how it doesn't matter how much purchasing power you have if you are the less represented demo, and the other about the pleasures of the AU and how no, RPF AUs are not essentially original fic. Should I write these posts? If I do, should I link them to metafandom? Do you think they would be anything like useful for anyone but the converted?

Right, SO MUCH TELEVISION next week! HIMYM and Idol premiere omg, and BSG is back and I've caught up (at least, in short recaps) and Top Chef is back this week. Seriously my head is going to implode after the desert I've been in recently, for reals.

Comments

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

You should totally write those posts.

David Denby really knows how to embarass himself sometimes. *Is off to read articles*

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

Also, having read the article now...I've been realizing in the past few years that little repulses me more than men longing for people to be more like they were back in films of the 30s and 40s. Now, I love movies of those decades, but there's a certain type of guy that wants to be the guy and be with the girl and I can't put my finger on it but it's always a bad sign. Even if the person is 65.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

I love Sternbergh's response about the water fountains. Like, yeah, Denby, everything was not awesome in the 40s just because the movies are fun.

The question is, should I link them to metafandom, oh meta-writer they love?

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

I think the one about purchasing power is an especially good thing for fandom to read. They might not want to hear it, but I think a lot of people would love to have that explained to them from the other side. "Why don't they want our money?" is such an important issue in fandom. And the AU one I think would get great responses on metafandom too. Plus they're kind of new topics!

[evil-erato.livejournal.com]

Ahahah- that fic? Priceless.

[imaginarycircus.livejournal.com]

David Denby gives me a pain. But I lol'd so hard when Adam Sternberg said "(EPIC FAIL)" in response to his book about snark.

Just out of curiosity why do you think his defense of the Great Books as an educational philosophy is pointless? I haven't read his book so his arguement may be pointless--but I'm always interested in anything anyone has to say for or against Great Books curriculum.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

To be fair, I only read the New Yorker article and not the book, but you know how Denby gets all enthusiastic about something way out of scale of the thing itself? He did that with taking the Great Books course up at Columbia. And he really wanted to discount all the arguments against Great Books with just, "but these books are really good! And they say something about our shared culture!" And it's like, first of all, no one said they sucked. And second, we don't have that shared culture—that's the whole point. It reminded me of what happened in the History and Literature dept when I was at H. They used to make all the Americanists take a semester of English lit, on the idea that American lit is based on English lit, and some folks made the argument that American lit is also based on plenty of other literary traditions, especially 20th c American lit, and lobbied to take things closer to their area of specialty. So people who were focusing on Hispanic America took a semester of Spanish literature, or the like.

He seemed to think that expanding the canon would always already mean losing other things, and they were all too precious to lose. It was silly, because of course the Great Books curriculum has to be updated and changed because newer things get added to it. It's not like we've all agreed that the culture became ossified in 1900, or 1850, or whenever.

Mostly, it was a straw man argument that gave me a headache.

[imaginarycircus.livejournal.com]

At least that guy from the Boston Globe actually read Epictetus and Plotinus when he wrote his book. I think the one year course at Columbia is cool. I think U Chicago has a slightly meatier version. But from that New Yorker article alone--yeah--Denby, get off my side. I wanted to read the Great Books partly because it wasn't an education that was open to women for so long and if those ideas ground a lot of Western culture than I wanted to read them. But that doesn't mean there isn't a world of other cultures and that inform ours--absolutely. And sometimes people want to study something completely new to them.

I think people who do love the GB's sometimes feel defensive because of the Dead White Males label. But it's true. I just don't think there is anything wrong with reading Dead White Men so long as it isn't all you ever read.

[lillijulianne.livejournal.com]

ah, david denby. i will always sort of love him because in 1983 or thereabouts he made a reference to taps that mixed up penn's and cruise's characters. i wrote to him, impassioned adolescent snail mail, and a few weeks later he printed a correction. the funny part is that i was sort of on the money and i doubt he had a clue at the time that the two of them would loom quite so large as actor and movie star respectively, especially tom, but at the time it was rather decent of him to bother...

re the GBs, i am sympathetic to the idea in that they represent something i feel was withheld from me for reasons primarily of class. but it's complicated.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

It isn't the concept that was lame, but his defense, which similarly to the snark thing, is very kids get off my lawn. He just seems pretty resistant to the opening up of the culture. (My favorite remark in that NYMag piece was that we weren't only not all in the same vote in the 30s, we weren't drinking out of the same water fountains.) He was just like, these books are great! We should go back to our unified culture! And it's like, dumbass, we never had one.

That said, classy that he printed the correction! Was he at NYMag at the time?

[lillijulianne.livejournal.com]

yep. i saved the issue for years- it had a sarcophagus on the cover, iirc- but god knows where it is now. i suppose it could have been something other than my letter that impelled the correction but the timing and his phrasing have always made me believe so. very classy indeed.

the water fountain line was fantastic. i think the problem with such arguments is that people try to paint them far too broadly. you're the historian so i'm at a disadvantage here but i do think the new deal and the wartime and postwar domestic policies of fdr and truman DID move the country toward a culture that was more unified than before, in many good ways that are indeed typified, if simplified, in corny movies- the way a platoon of soldiers in wwii movies always came from five or six different ethnic/regional groups, for example- and that the civil rights movement was in part a logical and beautiful evolution of that leveling, begun in the 30s. but this is narrower and more specific than what denby seems to mean according to that review, and also raises the question of how this commonality fragmented or backfired in later years...

[jlh.livejournal.com]

You're totally right—the New Deal was really the time when the new immigrant classes, the southern and eastern europeans, "became" white, for two reasons. One, the Great Migration of blacks from the south brought the contrast between the not-quite-white and the really-not-white. Two, the only way FDR could get the southern Dems to vote for the New Deal programs was to agree that they would be both segregated and locally administered. It wasn't until the war started that federal contracts demanded no segregation, thanks to the pressure of the black community, who finally had clout because they had moved north and could finally vote.

So while the New Deal allowed for many others to become white, it also deepened racism against blacks in many ways. So that corny platoon that you mentioned could have included Hispanics from Texas or California, or a Native American, and maybe even a Chinese, depending. But it wouldn't have any blacks because the armed forces was still segregated.

And yes, it was after blacks fought in the war and then came back to continued segregation and lack of opportunities that the civil rights movement gained traction—that, and that the US didn't want to look bad in front of the Russians.

But the common culture that Denby talks about is a media fiction. There were always subcultures, many of which had almost no real connection to the dominant culture, or thought of it as a thing that went on that they weren't paying much attention to. And certainly, as you say below, that coming together wasn't under the aegis of some sort of everyone has a BA and has read their Homer.

What irritates me is this sort of unthinking cultural imperialism, this "we were a better country when we were all the same" except that that was never true, we were never all the same, but the dominant culture was powerful enough to pretend that all these other groups either didn't exist, or really wanted to be them. Now the subcultures are very open about how they don't want to be a part of the larger culture. The diversity is our strength as a nation. Denby is idiotic to think that the short term unity of the war was anything other than a reaction to an attack, not unlike our supposed unity after 9-11.

[lillijulianne.livejournal.com]

oh, and i forgot to say that there remains the question of whether there's any real connection between the great books and whatever flowering of commonality might have taken place. the gi bill and its ramifications are fascinating. i have my father's notebooks from his time as a business major at "fairly ridiculous" (will always adore eddie and the cruisers for putting that out into the wide world that even if cafferty's bruce imitations left me cold)...it was an astonishing period of movement from the working classes to middle income range but the sort of liberal education denby thinks about is not what most people got. or, perhaps, wanted or needed.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

See, and I think Denby would say that they should have been forced to do so, that everyone should be pushed into that dominant culture. But that culture only works as long as it decides that the only people who "count" are the ones that that had the appropriate education, etc. Denby would be confused that peopel who had been given the opportunity to join that culture, decided not to do so.