This is pretty much the best blog post ever written, courtesy of David Rees.
Rees is the guy who did Get Your War On, the comic strip that shed a tiny light in the darkness for dazed New Yorkers in the weeks following 9/11.
If you want more background, here’s the NY Times Mag essay by Michael Ignatieff that David Rees is skewering. This link is to a site that lets you see the essay without paying for it.
Have at it!!
When I was a kid and teenager I watched Dick Cavett, David Susskind and and Wm F Buckley’s Firing Line. I loved how guests like Norman Mailer and Germaine Greer and Gore Vidal would get into big literary and political fights about things like Tolstoy, Vietnam, and sex. It was fun, and the guests could speak without censorship, it seemed.
Now Charlie Rose asks his fawning, interminable non-questions and I nod off. And who else is there? Oprah?
This Slate piece reminded me of the good old days.
The NYTimes Caryn James celebrates the Jane Austen
Chic-lit Industrial Complex:
A few quotes:
"How did this early-19th-century novelist become the chick-lit,
chick-flick queen for today?"
(snip)
"Her ironic take on society is delivered in a reassuring, sisterly voice,
as if she were part Jon Stewart, part Oprah Winfrey. " (???)
(snip)
"And while Austen’s era, with its rigid code of social
rules, must have been repressive if you lived in it, when prettily depicted
on screen it can seem positively peaceful and stable, a respite from
today’s fraught, slippery world of quick hook-ups, divorce and family
counseling."
Um. Yeah. Repression sucks. Good thing it goes away "when prettily
depicted". And how did "family counseling" make its way here??
And the piece de repulsion:
"Marsha Huff, the president of the Jane Austen Society
of North America (like so many Janeites, she’s not an
academic; she’s a tax lawyer) points to the scene in
“Pride and Prejudice” in which Lady Catherine (Judi
Dench in the ’05 film), tries to bully Elizabeth into
giving Darcy up because she is his social inferior.
“Elizabeth reacts exactly the way we would react: she
is insulted, she’s indignant at the way this dinosaur
from another era would try to tell this intelligent,
beautiful young woman what to do,” Ms. Huff said in an
interview.
And however much society has changed, Austen’s heroines —
unlike the Brontës’ — deal with the believable, timeless
obstacles of class, money and
misunderstanding, which make her works
adaptable to any era. As Ms. Huff said:
“Everyone thinks she’s Elizabeth Bennet;
not everyone thinks she’s Jane Eyre.
Everyone knows a young woman trying to
decide if the guy she’s attracted to is
Mr. Right. Not everyonemeets a Mr. Right
who has a mad wife in the attic.”
*******************************************
..."dinasaur from another era"??? The tax lawyer must be drunk. And the
Brontes characters are just so...irrelevant, so not "believable." whatever
that means.
such a load of crap! As if Austen's novels are a girl's "how to" on
dealing with man-trouble. An Austen scholar of my acquaintance
(Hi A.B. M., PhD!) notes that as a woman author,
Austen’s place as a member of English
Literature’s canon is precarious, easily ghettoized and
trivialized. Chick-lit might taste nice, but it's not art. .
It's pathetic to see a female journo like
C James so gleefully piling onto the ignorance bandwagon.
Next thing ya know they'll be selling a Jane Austen Action Figure…
Filed under: culture
If you are like me, your email InBox is a kudzoo-clogged tangle, a swamp, a tsunami of clutter dating back 2 years. Spam, unfiled document attachments I sent to myself, phone numbers, “interesting” online articles, handy notes-to-self (“don’t forget to blog about email!!”), inscrutable subject headings I would have to click on to figure out, so I don’t click on them, moveon.org action alerts, and jpg photos of cute dogs.
A guy named Merlin Mann takes a whip and chair to un-tamed email InBoxes at his website, 43folders.com
Mine is still a disaster but at least I read something helpful…here.
The ‘Big Three’ monotheisms of Christianity, Judaism and Islam are the subject of “Among the Disbelievers,” Daniel Lazare’s fascinating piece in this weeks’ Nation. Lazare provides a terrific overview of four recent atheist manifestos: The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins; God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens; Atheist Manifesto: The Case Against Christianity, Judaism; Islam by Michel Onfray and The Meaning of Life by Terry Eagleton.
Lazare takes a probing look at what he calls “the problem, more or less, confronting today’s reinvigorated atheist movement.”
As someone who is alarmed and angered at the rise of religious fundamentalism in the US and around the globe, I was nonetheless impressed with Lazare’s critique.
Is it me or is Leo DiCaprio looking more and more like Clark Gable these days?
DiCaprio has the outsized swagger and glamour of Old Hollywood. Maybe it’s unfortunate that he’s so “big.” He’s ambitious as an actor, but looking at The Departed or Blood Diamond, his aura overwhelms the character he’s playing. Plus the movies themselves are terrible, but that’s a different story.
Filed under: culture
Growing up in New England, Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben were characters from a place and time I didn’t think or know much about – namely, the “Old (pre-war) South.”
Racist character stereotypes in advertising were not limited to Southern imagery however; I’m old enough to remember packets of “Injun Orange” juice drink mix, and The Frito Bandito was familiar too.
Don’t miss this incredible slide-show by David Segal at Slate
It traces the history and context of various, and often virulent, racist language and imagery in American advertizing.
Here is Segal on the origins of Aunt Jemima:
| Looking for a way to sell a self-rising pancake mix, Chris L. Rutt conceived a jolly ex-slave who lived on a Louisiana plantation and made legendary flapjacks in the days “befo’ de wah. Eventually, she’d be boycotted by the NAACP, attacked by Langston Hughes, and belittled by Public Enemy. But this quintessential “mammy”—a black woman who lives to nurture, clean, and cook for whites—was a marketing phenomenon from the start, mythologized in ads painted by N.C. Wyeth and impersonated by actors who toured around the country. One had a permanent residency at “Aunt Jemima’s Pancake House” in Disneyland. |  |
Fire up the Tivo, or just be home on Wednesday, April 25th at 9:00pm to catch a devastating expose by Bill Moyers of the US media during the run-up to the Iraq war.
The program is called Buying The War. Here’s the link to PBS - check your local listings!
Greg Mitchell at Editor & Publisher has a great preview of Moyer’s main allegations here.
It is now clear to almost everyone – not just those who opposed the war from the start – that the US media performed almost no independent, responsible reporting in the months leading up to the start of the war in march 2003. Print and TV reporters offered virtually no images of killed or wounded civilians, asked no hard question of the war’s most avid proponents, and ignored evidence that could undermine the case for WMDs.
A snippet:
There’s much more in the article, and the show sounds like it will make for eye-opening, if painful, viewing.
It’d all be criminal if it wasn’t so sad. And vice versa.
I’ve been away from the blog for a little while, but here’s a bunch of things that will prove worth waiting for.
This NYTimes article by Alina Tugend about ‘crazy-busyness’ offers a handy list of reasons we over-schedule every second of our lives:
¶It is so easy with cellphones and BlackBerrys a touch away.
¶We’re afraid we’ll be left out if we slow down.
¶We avoid dealing with life’s really big issues — death, global warming, AIDS, terrorism — by running from task to task.
¶We do not know how not to be busy.
And on a different topic, we see that David Hicks, the Australian Gitmo detainee who had accused his American captors of torture, will be handed over to Australia officials as part of a plea deal. The deal requires him to agree to some strange conditions:
From the NT Times:
The sentencing followed a day of proceedings in the first case under a 2006 law that authorized military commissions to try some detainees designated as enemy combatants. Those proceedings included Mr. Hicks’s amplifying on his guilty plea, acknowledging that prosecutors had the evidence to prove that he had been a trainee of Al Qaeda who, armed with an AK-47, was prepared to fight Americans in the Afghanistan conflict of 2001.
David Kurtz at Talking Points Memo sums it up nicely:
