books

Read Todd VanDerWerff On What Makes Ray Bradbury’s Science Fiction So Distinct And Wonderful

As part of his Nerd Curious series, in which he goes back and explores artifacts of culture he missed in his youth, my friend and the AV Club’s television editor Todd VanDerWerff took a deep dive into Ray Bradbury’s short stories and emerges with what I think is one of the best summaries of what makes Bradbury’s work distinct, the element of nostalgia and emotional irrationality in decision-making, even in science fiction where we’re supposed to be enhanced–or at least, where rationality is supposed to rule:

In The Martian Chronicles, as happens so often in Bradbury’s work, people don’t look at the destruction of their world and run as far as they can from the mushroom clouds or the astronauts bearing chicken pox. Instead, they run toward them, trying in vain to preserve something that’s already gone. The Earthlings who have settled Mars decide to go back to Earth after nuclear war erupts there. That seems a very curious decision—wouldn’t those who had escaped such destruction by virtue of being so very far away count themselves lucky?—until it is situated in the context of Bradbury’s bibliography. The characters are haunted by memories of a past they can’t ever shake. In that context, their actions make perfect sense. They aren’t driven by practical sense; they’re driven by emotional sense, until both worlds are mostly dead and barren, a handful of survivors of two species straggling out a life on the margins.

You should really read the whole thing, which has too many big ideas to get into here. But I thought that was lovely and astute.

‘Copperhead,’ ‘To End All Wars,’ And The Marginalization Of War Resisters And Pacifists

The trailer for the upcoming Civil War drama Copperhead conveniently doesn’t mention that the movement its titular characters were affiliated with wanted the Union to make a peace with the Confederacy that would allow for the preservation of slavery, and that it was naive enough to believe the Confederacy would come back to the Union on its own terms. But given the pop culture trope of the sympathetic or victimize Confederate, I’m not actually surprised that a Civil War setting is one of the few ways we could get a movie about people who have been dramatically marginalized in our political conversations and even in civil society: war resisters.

Right now, I’m reading Adam Hochschild’s To End All Wars, his terrific history of resistance to World War I. One of the things that’s striking about the book, particularly the section on the suffrage movement, is the reminders it offers that the things we do to people who have been designated enemies of the state now, Western countries did to their own citizens a century ago. Horrified by the forced feedings of hunger strikers at Guantanamo? The British government force-fed suffragettes, many of who it imprisoned for extended periods of time for civil disobedience. Angered by the treatment of people who oppose war as if they’re mentally ill or radical? Bertrand Russell lost his job at Trinity College for his pacifism and served time in jail under the Defence of the Realm Act, which among other things, forbid people from publishing writing that could cause alarm or “disaffection” among the British populace, and pacifist socialist Jean Jaurès was assassinated by a nationalist in France.

We’ve become very comfortable lionizing the risks soldiers take on the battlefield, in part because those celebrations feel like a way of paying back people who are willing to experience extreme danger and the trauma of killing other people on our behalf. But we’re still reluctant, apparently, to treat people who try and fail to keep us out of wars, or as was the case with many World War I activists, to point out the disparate impact of conscription along class lines, as if they’re reasonable, much less admirable. I’m not an absolute pacifist myself, but I do think that the courage to stand up against some conflicts is admirable, and the amount of it required is more considerable than we generally acknowledge, given the risk that you’ll be labeled treasonous or mentally ill. I just wish that instead of Copperhead, we were getting a biopic about Charlotte Despard, a wealthy British woman (and sister to British war leader John French) whose pacifism grew out of a range of social concerns, including her work on poverty and her suffragist activism–in other words, a movie that can put war resistance in its social context, rather than one that in its advertising is hiding the uncomfortable truth of the Copperheads’ acceptance of slavery.

Giants Pitcher Jeremy Affeldt On How Playing Major League Baseball Helped Him Overcome Homophobia

In his writing here about the dearth of openly gay players on the active rosters of professional sports teams, Travis Waldron’s discussed a range of issues that have factored into the perception that athletics are a largely heterosexual pursuit. There’s the theory that the locker room is an unfriendly environment that’s been partially dispelled by straight allies like Chris Kluwe and Brendon Ayanbadejo. The persistent use of homophobic insults by fans suggests that the problem might be more in the stands than in players-only areas. And there’s the question of how being publicly out of the closet might affect a player’s negotiating power or sponsorship deals.

But this week’s given us a different kind of story about homophobia in sports, that of Giants reliever Jeremy Affeldt. Raised in a conservative environment, playing professional baseball sent Affeldt to cities where he met actual gay people, and gave him experiences that broadened his horizons. In Cincinnati, a gay Starbucks employee welcomed Affeldt’s son. And as he came to know San Francisco, Affeldt also came to learn more about people who had previously frightened him so much that he literally hid from the public. As the AP reports:

The ex-military brat said Monday he was so uncomfortable in San Francisco that he would seclude himself. ”I didn’t leave my hotel room when we came to play the Giants or A’s. I didn’t want to go out or see anyone,” he said. ”There was a profession of being wrong. I’ve come to that from a deep angle. I’ll probably get a lot of flak from the church for it, but I believe I’m right.”…

”There’s a chapter in there of me coming to San Francisco and being hesitant because I had homophobia, and now I don’t,” he said. ”I see more San Francisco as a city of love and a city of passion and compassion. It’s unbelievable this city. To see that and to have my heart change as a city I didn’t ever want to come to, to a city that I’m so thankful I’m going to be part of for a long time, it talks about that. For me, it was an awesome deal.”

We normally think about sports in terms of their ability to give different kinds of people the opportunity to excel, and through that athletic success, to disprove stereotypes about, say, the masculinity of gay men, or the temperament of African-Americans. But sports also put us in the stands with people who are different from us, and take young men and women to places that they might never have been able to afford to go, or brave enough to go, on their own, and expose them to ideas and people they might otherwise have never encountered. Someone like Chris Kluwe might have come into the NFL a straight ally, but if Major League Baseball turned Affeldt into one, and specifically into someone who is publicly reconciling his Christian faith and his renunciation of homophobia, that speaks to the power of professional sports to change minds in a very different ways.

What Amazon’s Kindle Worlds Program Means For The Relationship Between Authors And Their Creations

Much has been made of the fact that E.L. James’ Fifty Shades of Grey, the erotic novel about a wealthy industrialist into BDSM and the young college graduate who falls for him, started out as Twilight fan fiction, and became a phenomenon once James changed the names. But she was hardly the first writer to hone her chops in fan fiction: Cassandra Clare, who started out in various fandoms, had a young adult fiction hit with her Mortal Instruments series, which has now spawned a movie adaptation with a $60 million budget. The Star Wars Expanded Universe is a professionalized version of fan fiction, giving authors space, within specific guidelines, to build out new stories and characters within a preexisting world. And given how many people have spent so many hours laboring over their keyboards for so many years, maybe the really surprising thing is that someone hasn’t figured out a way to monetize their work without changing the names or making them invent new stories before.

That changed yesterday, when Amazon announced its Kindle Worlds program, which is cleverly set up to benefit both the creators of original content and the people who write original stories set in the worlds invented by those creators and makes use of their characters. Authors of fan fiction published and sold through the Kindle Worlds program will be paid a royalty rate of 35 percent for works longer than 10,000 words, and 20 percent for short stories between 5,000 and 10,000 words. It’s not quite clear what percentage or flat fee the original creators of that licensed content will receive. But Amazon suggests that most of the pieces sold through the program will be priced in between $.99 and $3.99, though I can see those figures getting higher if Amazon gets its hands on some of the popular, book-length projects that have circulated in various fandoms for years.

Works can get rejected from the program–Amazon’s reserving the right to kick out submissions that provide a “poor customer experience,” and the guidelines for the program say it won’t accept pornographic material, which constitutes a significant percentage of fan fiction, work that uses racial slurs, employs excessive violence, or relies on heavily profane speech. And perhaps the biggest constraint right now is what fictional universes it’s possible for writers to work in. Kindle Worlds debuted with the rights to some of the content from Warner Bros. Television Group’s Alloy Entertainment, a notorious content factory, including Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars, and The Vampire Diaries.

It makes sense that Kindle Worlds starts with content from Alloy, a publishing house with a highly-defined style where authors have been known to be assigned to projects cooked up because they seem likely to sell well, and to adapt well for film and television, as proved to be true for the three properties that are kicking off the Kindle Worlds universe. And while Amazon’s announcement of the program said that they’d be announcing many new licenses for fan fiction writers to work in, I would bet that it’ll be difficult for the program to get access to some of the properties that have inspired particularly lively fan fiction communities, like Harry Potter or the West Wing. It might make sense that Alloy’s authors, who are part of a profit-oriented program, don’t have much anxiety about other people playing in the universes that they built out. But authors who are more proprietary about their characters might be more twitchy about the prospect of other people getting paid to play in the worlds that they created. I can see someone like Charlaine Harris, who is ending her Southern Vampire series because she feels the universe is wrung out, and is under enormous and irrational pressure from fans to continue, wanting to definitively close off the world they created.

The question, then, will be whether standard author contracts make it easy for publishing houses to sign the works they publish over to Kindle Worlds, or whether this is a provision they’re going to have to negotiate as an addendum, and find standard language for in the future. And it’ll be interesting to see which authors decide they’re interested in participating and which hold out, in part as an indication of how proprietary authors feel about their creations. It could be very strange to see authors of original works get eclipsed by writers playing in the worlds other people have created as has, to a certain extent, been true with Fifty Shades of Grey.

What Baz Luhrmann’s ‘The Great Gatsby’ Got Right About Class And Social Anxiety

It’s taken me a couple of days to sort through my feelings about Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and not just because the cinematography during the many scenes in it set in automobiles made me carsick. It’s an enormously overstuffed movie, with party sequences that turn on my latent claustrophobia, a cacophonous soundtrack, and so many baubles it’s easy to feel like you’re watching a jewelry store—and there’s a great deal of Tiffany product placement in the movie, particularly of Daisy’s “string of pearls valued at three hundred and fifty thousand dollars” and a headpiece she wears to a party—rathe than a movie. But one thing that Luhrmann’s adaptation gets right, and that brings out one of my favorite performances by Leonardo DiCaprio in a long time, is the way Gatsby marries conspicuous consumption, subtle class-based knowledge, and social awkwardness.

One of the best scenes in the movie stems from a situation where Gatsby’s (DiCaprio) set up a situation that’s guaranteed to be awkward: he’s asked Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) to ask his old flame Daisy Buchanan (Carey Mulligan), now married to a wealthy boor named Tom (Joel Edgerton) to tea so he can just drop by and reconnect with her. It’s an attempt to be casual in a situation that requires deliberation and a direct approach, and it puts Nick, who is Daisy’s cousin, in an awful social position. As Jordan Baker (Elizabeth Debicki) puts it in Fitzgerald’s novel, “I think he half expected her to wander into one of his parties, some night, but she never did. Then he began asking people casually if they knew her, and I was the first one he found. it was that night he sent for me at his dance, and you should have heard the elaborate way he worked up to it. Of course I immediately suggested a luncheon in New York—and I thought he’d go mad.”

In the movie, Luhrmann’s delight in conspicuous consumption illustrates just how badly Gatsby is going about orchestrating this meeting. He has Nick’s small house landscaped overnight, then descends on it with a team of umbrella-toting butlers to jam it full of orchids and a multi-layer cake, as if he’s catering a society wedding rather than being invited to his friend’s home. The makeover is simultaneously an insult to Nick and the modest home he’s able to rent and a total sabotage of Gatsby’s attempt at casualness. He’s desperate to seem spontaneous, but he can’t relinquish control of the moment to achieve it, insistent that the moment be perfect, but completely out of things to say. Watching DiCaprio wander in and out of Nick’s house, into the rain and out of the rain, and then totally forget that he’s soaking wet and in a small living room that looks like a greenhouse is a scene as precisely bizarre as the moment demands. And it gets at one of the central reveals of the scene: how little Gatsby is actually thinking about Daisy, or what she might be feeling. The tableau he’s set up is all about him, and he’s shocked when Nick points out part of the reason he’s going wrong. “You’re just embarrased, that’s all,” Nick tells him. “Daisy’s embarrssed too.” “She’s embarrassed?” Gatsby wants to know. He’s assumed both that Daisy is so poised that she couldn’t possibly be rattled, and that his return to her life will be a source of uncomplicated joy. It never seems to have occurred to Gatsby that Daisy is not, in fact, a princess in a tower, and that there might be a reason she hasn’t come looking for him.

Then, there’s the fantastic scene towards the end of the movie and the novel, when Gatsby’s confrontation with Tom and with Daisy, who turns out to be on nobody’s side but her own, reaches its climax. Tom’s a grotesque, limited person, but he turns out to have a weapon available to him that cuts Gatsby deeply: the ability to point out the errors in the self-image he’s constructed. “An Oxford man!” Tom sneers at Gatsby in “Like hell he is! He wears a pink suit.” He hasn’t even needed the investigation he was making into Gatsby’s background—and no one really needed to fact-check Gatsby’s narrative—to get at what Tom has identified as a central truth. Gatsby lacks a certain innate sense of taste and decorum that would allow him to really pass. He’s rented a house in the wrong town, his parties are the wrong kinds of parties to lure Daisy out, and for his big moment, he’s picked a suit that demonstrates he doesn’t understand what’s important in Daisy’s life, security more than romance, and the right kinds of social signifiers rather than the compass of her heart.

Watching DiCaprio, I was reminded of nothing so much as the episodes that lead up to the conclusion of the third season of The Wire, and David Simon’s chronicle of the last days of drug-dealer-trying-to-go-legitimate Stringer Bell (Idris Elba). Watching Bell put on a suit to go meet with State Senator Clay Davis (Isiah Whitlock, Jr.), only to find himself shaken down again and again for bribes, or losing his cool when his contractors kept introducing new wrinkles that they blamed on everything from the permitting process to Baltimore’s ethnic politics, was agonizing, in part because it was a familiar dilemma writ large. When characters demonstrate a lack of understanding of social norms—or of when those norms are manipulated to mock or shake them down—it’s painful not just because it’s unpleasant to see someone we’ve invested in come to harm, but because we feel a little bit of revulsion, too, a desire to distance ourselves from the discomfort those characters are bringing upon themselves. Gatsby’s pursuit of the green light is hard to watch not because it’s impossible, but because he went about it wrong. And Stringer Bell’s dream of Baltimore is tragic because his downfall in pursuit of it was of his own making.

Call To Ban ‘Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl’ Prompts Sensible Response From Michigan School

In an impressive expansion of the term “pornographic,” a Northville, Michigan woman, Gail Horalek asked that Anne Frank: The Diary Of A Young Girl (The Definitive Edition) be removed from the school’s curriculum because: “It’s pretty graphic, and it’s pretty pornographic for seventh-grade boys and girls to be reading. It’s inappropriate for a teacher to be giving this material out to the kids when its really the parents’ job to give the students this information.” The passages that she’s dubbed “pornographic” are actually more anatomical, given that they discuss Frank attempting to learn more about her own body, than they are “designed to arouse lust,” the conventional meaning of pornographic.

But rather than quibble over the definition, in rendering a verdict on Horalek’s complaint, Robert Behnke, the assistant superintendent for Instructional Services in Northville, stood by the inclusion of the edition of the book in the seventh-grade curriculum on the grounds of its relevance to the unit on courage in which it was taught. And he reminded Horalek that existing school regulations mean she can get pretty much what she wanted. The full email he sent to parents, posted by one of them on a message board, reminds the community:

The committee also suggested the district take steps to further communicate information about the units of study within the middle school literature courses, and where possible, provide booklists to parents with the notation that reading selections can always be reviewed by parents prior to making a literature selection. As always, in the event that a concern surfaces during a unit and is brought to the teacher’s attention, adjustments can be made to move the student to another literature selection and/or an alternative assignments can be discussed.

A communication regarding the seventh grade English Language Arts units of study and booklists is being created and will be shared with parents in the near future. Communication on units of study and booklists from other grades also will be forthcoming.

At Northville Public Schools we are proud of the partnerships we have forged with parents in the best interest of all students. Keeping in mind that families within the Northville community have varying perspectives, and that our students have varying levels of sensitivity and maturity — which are often best accommodated by their parents — the district strives to provide choices for parents and students where appropriate and possible when it comes to programming and courses. As a school district, we also encourage parents to use supplemental learning activities and books that reflect their own family’s values and perspectives to support reading and literature analysis taking place in the classroom.

If Horalek wants to be the person responsible for introducing her daughter to issues of sexuality, the Northville Public Schools give her every right to do so. If she’d Googled the book when her daughter’s syllabus came out, she would have found references to the removal of the Definitive Edition from the curriculum in the Culpeper County, Virginia school system on some of the same grounds she complained about. If she’d searched the text of the diary on either Google Books or through Amazon, she would have seen the passages that made her uncomfortable before her daughter even started reading the book. Maybe Horalek couldn’t have predicted what might have made her daughter uncomfortable in a classroom setting, but if she thinks there are certain subjects that should be reserved for parental instruction, there were any number of ways Horalek could have checked the book to see if it threw up red flags for her.

I’m not opposed to the idea that parents should play a role in their children’s education, or that parents have some sense of what makes their children comfortable or uncomfortable—though I don’t think that knowledge is complete. But it seems to serve the interests of the most people to give those parents and those children appropriate exits from the mainstream curriculum, and resources to help them supplement the curriculum they want to opt out of.

As Charlaine Harris Ends Her Sookie Stackhouse Series, An Illustration Of Fandom Gone Too Far

I’m fascinated by the extent to which fandom has become a source of identity categories, whether it’s people including the franchises that they’re attached to in their social media biographies, suggesting that loving Doctor Who, for example, is as important a thing for people to know about them as their place or category of work, or their status as a parent or spouse. But it’s clear that sometimes those attachments can become unproductive in their intensity, as Charlaine Harris, whose Southern Vampire novels became the basis for HBO’s series True Blood, found out when she decided it was time for her to focus on a new set of characters:

Many of her fans, however, aren’t close to satiated. Thousands of readers have written her and begged her to keep the story going. Some have taken to taunting Ms. Harris in emails and online forums, saying she’ll regret her decision. One fan threatened to commit suicide if the ending doesn’t meet her expectations.

“I’m very fortunate that people are so invested in the series,” Ms. Harris says. “At the same time, it can be a source of some anxiety to get emails that say, ‘If Sookie doesn’t end up with Eric, I’m going to kill myself.’ ”

The prickly dynamic between Ms. Harris and some of her followers highlights how hard it can be to kill a successful series. For the first time in years, Ms. Harris isn’t touring to promote the book. She doesn’t want to be berated by readers who hate the ending or want vampire spinoffs.

I’m fascinated by this sense of obligation, or by the sense that it’s appropriate to lobby creators not for substantive things like more diverse casting or more diverse writing staffs, but for certain plot points, like the development of romantic relationships between certain characters. As a critic, I’m always comfortable saying that I think one choice or another might be more effective. But the idea that someone owes something to me, whether it’s a certain event, or simply more of whatever it is that they’re producing, is very strange. It makes me wonder how fans relate in different ways to products and to the people who create them, as if the latter serves some sort of kind of grand design that governs the former, rather than being the deity of the particular universe they’ve created.

As Charlaine Harris Ends Her Sookie Stackhouse Series, An Illustration Of Fandom Gone Too Far

I’m fascinated by the extent to which fandom has become a source of identity categories, whether it’s people including the franchises that they’re attached to in their social media biographies, suggesting that loving Doctor Who, for example, is as important a thing for people to know about them as their place or category of work, or their status as a parent or spouse. But it’s clear that sometimes those attachments can become unproductive in their intensity, as Charlaine Harris, whose Southern Vampire novels became the basis for HBO’s series True Blood, found out when she decided it was time for her to focus on a new set of characters:

Many of her fans, however, aren’t close to satiated. Thousands of readers have written her and begged her to keep the story going. Some have taken to taunting Ms. Harris in emails and online forums, saying she’ll regret her decision. One fan threatened to commit suicide if the ending doesn’t meet her expectations.

“I’m very fortunate that people are so invested in the series,” Ms. Harris says. “At the same time, it can be a source of some anxiety to get emails that say, ‘If Sookie doesn’t end up with Eric, I’m going to kill myself.’ ”

The prickly dynamic between Ms. Harris and some of her followers highlights how hard it can be to kill a successful series. For the first time in years, Ms. Harris isn’t touring to promote the book. She doesn’t want to be berated by readers who hate the ending or want vampire spinoffs.

I’m fascinated by this sense of obligation, or by the sense that it’s appropriate to lobby creators not for substantive things like more diverse casting or more diverse writing staffs, but for certain plot points, like the development of romantic relationships between certain characters. As a critic, I’m always comfortable saying that I think one choice or another might be more effective. But the idea that someone owes something to me, whether it’s a certain event, or simply more of whatever it is that they’re producing, is very strange. It makes me wonder how fans relate in different ways to products and to the people who create them, as if the latter serves some sort of kind of grand design that governs the former, rather than being the deity of the particular universe they’ve created.

As Charlaine Harris Ends Her Sookie Stackhouse Series, An Illustration Of Fandom Gone Too Far

I’m fascinated by the extent to which fandom has become a source of identity categories, whether it’s people including the franchises that they’re attached to in their social media biographies, suggesting that loving Doctor Who, for example, is as important a thing for people to know about them as their place or category of work, or their status as a parent or spouse. But it’s clear that sometimes those attachments can become unproductive in their intensity, as Charlaine Harris, whose Southern Vampire novels became the basis for HBO’s series True Blood, found out when she decided it was time for her to focus on a new set of characters:

Many of her fans, however, aren’t close to satiated. Thousands of readers have written her and begged her to keep the story going. Some have taken to taunting Ms. Harris in emails and online forums, saying she’ll regret her decision. One fan threatened to commit suicide if the ending doesn’t meet her expectations.

“I’m very fortunate that people are so invested in the series,” Ms. Harris says. “At the same time, it can be a source of some anxiety to get emails that say, ‘If Sookie doesn’t end up with Eric, I’m going to kill myself.’ ”

The prickly dynamic between Ms. Harris and some of her followers highlights how hard it can be to kill a successful series. For the first time in years, Ms. Harris isn’t touring to promote the book. She doesn’t want to be berated by readers who hate the ending or want vampire spinoffs.

I’m fascinated by this sense of obligation, or by the sense that it’s appropriate to lobby creators not for substantive things like more diverse casting or more diverse writing staffs, but for certain plot points, like the development of romantic relationships between certain characters. As a critic, I’m always comfortable saying that I think one choice or another might be more effective. But the idea that someone owes something to me, whether it’s a certain event, or simply more of whatever it is that they’re producing, is very strange. It makes me wonder how fans relate in different ways to products and to the people who create them, as if the latter serves some sort of kind of grand design that governs the former, rather than being the deity of the particular universe they’ve created.

As Charlaine Harris Ends Her Sookie Stackhouse Series, An Illustration Of Fandom Gone Too Far

I’m fascinated by the extent to which fandom has become a source of identity categories, whether it’s people including the franchises that they’re attached to in their social media biographies, suggesting that loving Doctor Who, for example, is as important a thing for people to know about them as their place or category of work, or their status as a parent or spouse. But it’s clear that sometimes those attachments can become unproductive in their intensity, as Charlaine Harris, whose Southern Vampire novels became the basis for HBO’s series True Blood, found out when she decided it was time for her to focus on a new set of characters:

Many of her fans, however, aren’t close to satiated. Thousands of readers have written her and begged her to keep the story going. Some have taken to taunting Ms. Harris in emails and online forums, saying she’ll regret her decision. One fan threatened to commit suicide if the ending doesn’t meet her expectations.

“I’m very fortunate that people are so invested in the series,” Ms. Harris says. “At the same time, it can be a source of some anxiety to get emails that say, ‘If Sookie doesn’t end up with Eric, I’m going to kill myself.’ ”

The prickly dynamic between Ms. Harris and some of her followers highlights how hard it can be to kill a successful series. For the first time in years, Ms. Harris isn’t touring to promote the book. She doesn’t want to be berated by readers who hate the ending or want vampire spinoffs.

I’m fascinated by this sense of obligation, or by the sense that it’s appropriate to lobby creators not for substantive things like more diverse casting or more diverse writing staffs, but for certain plot points, like the development of romantic relationships between certain characters. As a critic, I’m always comfortable saying that I think one choice or another might be more effective. But the idea that someone owes something to me, whether it’s a certain event, or simply more of whatever it is that they’re producing, is very strange. It makes me wonder how fans relate in different ways to products and to the people who create them, as if the latter serves some sort of kind of grand design that governs the former, rather than being the deity of the particular universe they’ve created.

As Charlaine Harris Ends Her Sookie Stackhouse Series, An Illustration Of Fandom Gone Too Far

I’m fascinated by the extent to which fandom has become a source of identity categories, whether it’s people including the franchises that they’re attached to in their social media biographies, suggesting that loving Doctor Who, for example, is as important a thing for people to know about them as their place or category of work, or their status as a parent or spouse. But it’s clear that sometimes those attachments can become unproductive in their intensity, as Charlaine Harris, whose Southern Vampire novels became the basis for HBO’s series True Blood, found out when she decided it was time for her to focus on a new set of characters:

Many of her fans, however, aren’t close to satiated. Thousands of readers have written her and begged her to keep the story going. Some have taken to taunting Ms. Harris in emails and online forums, saying she’ll regret her decision. One fan threatened to commit suicide if the ending doesn’t meet her expectations.

“I’m very fortunate that people are so invested in the series,” Ms. Harris says. “At the same time, it can be a source of some anxiety to get emails that say, ‘If Sookie doesn’t end up with Eric, I’m going to kill myself.’ ”

The prickly dynamic between Ms. Harris and some of her followers highlights how hard it can be to kill a successful series. For the first time in years, Ms. Harris isn’t touring to promote the book. She doesn’t want to be berated by readers who hate the ending or want vampire spinoffs.

I’m fascinated by this sense of obligation, or by the sense that it’s appropriate to lobby creators not for substantive things like more diverse casting or more diverse writing staffs, but for certain plot points, like the development of romantic relationships between certain characters. As a critic, I’m always comfortable saying that I think one choice or another might be more effective. But the idea that someone owes something to me, whether it’s a certain event, or simply more of whatever it is that they’re producing, is very strange. It makes me wonder how fans relate in different ways to products and to the people who create them, as if the latter serves some sort of kind of grand design that governs the former, rather than being the deity of the particular universe they’ve created.

On Wikipedia, Men Who Write Books Are Just Novelists, While Women Who Do Are “Women Novelists”

In my favorite new illustration of the persistent belief that, when it comes to gender, male experience is considered general and unbiased while female experience is particular and annotated, novelist Amanda Filipacchi browsed through Wikipedia and found out that someone has been recategorizing entries on female American fiction writers so that they’re weeded out of the “American Novelists” category and ghettoized off in an “American Women Novelists” category—the “American Man Novelists” contains rather fewer entries. She writes in the New York Times:

I looked up a few female novelists. You can see the categories they’re in at the bottom of their pages. It appears that many female novelists, like Harper Lee, Anne Rice, Amy Tan, Donna Tartt and some 300 others, have been relegated to the ranks of “American Women Novelists” only, and no longer appear in the category “American Novelists.” If you look back in the “history” of these women’s pages, you can see that they used to appear in the category “American Novelists,” but that they were recently bumped down. Male novelists on Wikipedia, however — no matter how small or obscure they are — all get to be in the category “American Novelists.” It seems as though no one noticed.

I did more investigating and found other familiar names that had been switched from the “American Novelists” to the “American Women Novelists” category: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ayn Rand, Ann Beattie, Djuna Barnes, Emily Barton, Jennifer Belle, Aimee Bender, Amy Bloom, Judy Blume, Alice Adams, Louisa May Alcott, V. C. Andrews, Mary Higgins Clark — and, upsetting to me: myself.

I can see a world where it makes sense to categorize novels, though not novelists, by their subject matter. Some days, I want to read about male experiences and read through the eyes of a male main character, somedays I want to live in a woman’s world, and others I want to hang out with, I don’t know, a genetically-engineered fifteen-year-old girl. There’s a service to readers in a project like that.

But sorting out authors by gender, and sorting out only female authors by gender, is an attempt to create a differing assessment of male and female writers. Novel-writing is not an inherently male activity. And it’s not even one that started out male and to which women had to gain entry. Female fiction writers like Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville, Baroness d’Aulnoy, scandal writers like Anne-Marguerite Petit du Noyer, and playwright and novelist Aphra Behn were all there at the beginning. A female perspective in fiction is no more distinct and particular—or offputting to large number of readers—than a male one, and visions like Ernest Hemingway’s or Saul Bellow’s are deeply tied up in their gender, rather than reflective of some American baseline. It’s not more substantive to care about fishing or war than it is to care about love or domestic life. But to acknowledge that male and female perspectives are both equally particular and equally interesting would require acknowledging that they’re both, well, equal.

Remembering ‘From Mixed Up Files Of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler’ Author E.L. Konigsburg

I was sorry to read yesterday of the death of children’s and young adult author E.L. (short for Elaine Lobl ) Konigsburg. She’s best remembered for her 1967 novel—one of two published that year—From The Mixed Up Files Of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, about siblings who run away to live in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, memorably bathing in the fountain at the cafe, sleeping in an antique bed, and treating themselves to lunch at the Automat, a kind of restaurant I dreamed of eating at for years afterwards. But as much as the running away details of Mixed Up Files are memorable, much of what I love about both it and A Proud Taste For Scarlet and Miniver, Konigsburg’s less-read book about the life of Eleanor of Aquitaine, is the way both books gave girls and young women credit for intellectual curiosity, and trusted them to handle big emotions and ideas, like whether or not it matters that a piece of art is by Michaelangelo, or what it means to build a good marriage.

Claudia, the main character of Mixed Up Files, first earns our respect for the gift of logistics she applies to running away. She lifts train tickets, picks her younger brother as a runaway companion because he has managed to stash away a reasonable supply of travel money, and figures out a way to make sure the two of them don’t get caught by Met security guards (this is all in an age before pressure sensors and electric alarms). But what ultimately makes her admirable, and what wins her the respect of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, a wealthy art collector, is much more ephemeral. During Claudia’s time living in the museum, an overpoweringly beautiful statue of an angel goes on display, and becomes a phenomenon. Part of the curiosity is inspired by the fact that it’s not entirely clear whether the statue was produced by Michaelangelo. But Claudia becomes obsessed by the question, and she and her brother track down Mrs. Frankweiler in search of answers.

Once they do, the older delivers one of the most valuable lessons on education anyone could give to children. “I think you should learn, of course,” she tells Claudia, who doesn’t want to go back to school, feeling that her experience on her own has been more valuable than any education. “And some days you must learn a great deal. But you should also have days when you allow what is already in you to swell up inside of you until it touches everything. And you can feel it inside of you. If you never take time out to let that happen, then you just accumulate facts, and they begin to rattle around inside of you. You can make noise with them, but never really feel anything with them. It’s hollow.”

Claudia’s adventure, in other words, isn’t about breaking her free from her school and family and friends. It’s about learning what you do with a grade-school education, with intellectual curiosity, and with the drive to make a life for yourself that’s full of beauty and experience. She learns that she can stay hidden from museum guards, but also that she can see important things, and make herself seen by the people, like the wealthy and powerful Mrs. Frankweiler, she needs to listen to her. But Claudia also learns that there’s no point in having insights if you don’t have someone to share them with, or in seeing yourself as special if you hide yourself away rather than engaging with people, even if those people are your parents. It’s a story about finding your place within society, rather than expecting that there’s something better out there if you run away to find it.

Similarly, A Proud Taste For Scarlet And Miniver is as much a subversion of fantasy conventions as Game of Thrones is, but with its lessons drawn straight from history, and aimed straight at a young adult audience. Told from multiple perspectives from heaven—a place that smart, interesting people have a tendency to need to earn their way into, and which involves hilarious culture clashes depending on when people get there—Eleanor’s life gets examined toughly, but compassionately, by everyone from her mother-in-law to the knight who protected her for years. Eleanor is revealed to be woman who loved the gaiety of court life and drove her first husband to a massacre, then proved unable to live with him after he became extremely pious in repentance, and who found initial happiness with her second husband, only to become alienated from him when she gets involved in the question of how to manage their sons together, and to see many of them die in ugly ways, often related to the battles they sought out as established ways to prove themselves heroic, worthy men.

Konigsburg trusts readers who might have showed up expecting a princess story to stay through an antihero tale. And she trusts children to handle ugly details like arrow wounds and burned-out cities that weren’t just an accidental byproduct of chivalric culture, but integral to it. Eleanor emerges as a smart, restless woman—somewhat like Claudia, in fact, particularly given her taste for beauty—who has to take moral responsibility for the damage she caused in life, but still is tremendously likable.

In a way, Konigsburg’s writing illustrates the tragedy of young adult fiction, particularly for girls. When you’re young, female characters get to be enormously complex, and are given a tremendous amount of agency—sometimes, they’re responsible for the fate of their entire societies or worlds. But as they age, women get diminished roles in almost all genres except romantic comedies, reduced to sidekicks for superheroes or wives who get in the way of antiheroes’ fun. We already have Claudia’s counterparts on film and television in girls like Sally Draper, Hermione Granger and Arya Stark. What we need more of is fully realized adult women with their own agendas like Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, more restlessly energetic Eleanors.

Barbara Kingsolver’s Latest Novel ‘Flight Behavior’ Shows Climate Change In Real Time

Reading the opening scene of Flight Behavior, one could easily believe they’d somehow become immersed in a bad country western song — something like “Third Rate Romance, Low Rent Rendezvous.”

Protagonist Dellarobia Turnbow is fleeing the white clapboard house that has been at once her home and her prison since she was seventeen, to hook up with a guy who probably drives a pick up and aims to do her bad, but she can’t help herself because “… the anticipation of him prickled her skin.” On her way, she is waylaid by an ethereal vision of a forest aflame.

If this sounds prosaic, it’s because it is. The book starts slow, and teeters to the brink of cliché, albeit sporting some of the best prose you’ll ever read. But that flaming forest hangs out there like a metaphor without a point of reference for a little too long, risking a reader who isn’t so much intrigued, as frustrated.

But that’s before Kingsolver works her alchemy. In Poisonwood Bible, Kingsolver proved she is a talented writer, capable of telling important and compelling stories in prose that flows with all the beauty, clarity and snap of a glacial stream. And though she takes her time in Flight Behavior, ultimately she delivers.

Climate change is the leitmotif of this novel. It is the driving force behind all that happens, and it is heralded by that flaming forest Dellarobia rushes through on her way to an assignation that never happens.

It turns out that the flames are Monarch butterflies, cast adrift by a combination of deforestation in their traditional breeding grounds in Mexico and a warming world.

Dellarobia is also adrift. She is the proverbial “smart girl” trapped by circumstance, and when Ovid Byron — a world class expert on Monarch butterflies — shows up on her property to study the monarchs, she begins a journey that will ultimately allow her to grow and escape her moorings. Ovid is attractive, serious, unattainable and therefore irresistible. To add fuel to this girl’s fire, he bonds with her son, the precocious Preston, in a way that none of her peers possibly could.

Ovid allows Kingsolver to dole out information on climate change in a way that is organic to the story. The tale he tells is told as a tragedy, in the sense that Alfred Lord Whithead put it: “The essence of tragedy lies in the remorseless working of things.” When Dellarobia tells Ovid “I don’t know how you get through the day, knowing what you know,” he eventually answers “For scientists, reality is not optional.”

Most novels built around climate change resort to narratives of dystopic futures, when the tragedy has already played out. Kingsolver immerses us in the tragedy as it unfolds in real-time. As a writer, this is a challenge — unwinding the slow motion destruction of the natural world by our species doesn’t lend itself to compelling narrative.

I struggled with this in my own novel, A Being Darkly Wise, which is also a contemporary tale centered on climate change. I’ll leave it to others to decide whether I succeeded or not, but Kingsolver definitely does.

Kingsolver embeds Dellarobia in a small town that is conservative, evangelical, emotionally stifling and in the midst of a near apocalyptic rainy season. In fact, all the seasons are askew. Winter is too warm, freak cold snaps appear when they shouldn’t — in short, it is experiencing climate change.

But the real genius of this novel is how Kingsolver intertwines the larger story of what is happening to the world, into the life of Dellarobia and her fellow townspeople. The struggles between faith and science, commerce and conscience, reverence and ennui are our struggles, the small triumphs and epic failures are our legacies.

One of the astounding things she accomplishes is to reveal why people fall for denier claptrap, and in the process, make them sympathetic. In fact, there isn’t a real antagonist in this story — another challenge for a writer, and another she takes on with skill and grace.

Those people, who seemed at first to be redneck caricatures, emerge as real people, and their desire to belong to the culture in which they find themselves is the force that makes them accept counterfactual denier talking points. Interestingly, recent research supports the idea that one’s peer group has more to do with whether one accepts climate science than education. At one point, after Ovid has gone through how grim the future looks as a result of global warming, Dellarobia says, “I’m not saying I don’t believe you, I’m saying I can’t.”

The author’s background in biology shows through. Her knowledge of the life cycle of the Monarch and the rhythms of the natural world is encyclopedic, and her skill as a writer allows her to showcase that knowledge in a way that interests and delights.

Kingsolver, who lives in the Appalachians that are the setting for this story, deals in shades of grey, and exhibits genuine sympathy and affection for all her rural characters. Dellarobia’s husband, Cub, isn’t a villain, he’s simply a gentle giant miscast as the mate of a smarter, more independent woman, who is with her only because she became pregnant. Her mother-in-law, Hester — the closest thing to an antagonist in the story, and an apparent paragon of piety and virtue — ends up having been trapped in her marriage in much the same way Dellarobia did. The minister of their church believes in stewardship of the Earth, not dominion over it. And just to keep things from becoming too sweet, Dellarobia’s best friend, Dovey, is a wisecracking rebel who sees the world through a cynic’s eyes.

Kingsolver evokes the claustrophobic world of rural Tennessee with equal grace and tolerance. It is a world Dellarobia begins to escape when she goes to work as a lab assistant for Ovid. The interaction between her and the more urban graduate students working with Ovid is as entertaining as it is evocative of how different their worlds are. At one point, Dellarobia resorts to telling one of the grad students who is amazed that she owns a sewing machine and is capable of actually using it, that it’s not “… like an atom smasher or anything.”

Kingsolver allows Dellarobia to transcend the limits of her environment. While her flame-red hair is obviously the same color as the Monarch, Kingsolver does not allow the Monarch much likelihood of doing the same.

She seems to be saying that we can still expect moments of grace and transcendence for individuals, but the world will not be so lucky.

Flight Behavior starts a little slow, but if you’re patient, you’ll be rewarded with a glimpse of people struggling to make a life in a world that is changing beneath their feet, told by one of the best contemporary writers out there.

John Atcheson, a former DOE and EPA official, is the Climate Progress book reviewer. He has his own book out available in paperback and Kindle from Amazon, A Being Darkly Wise: A Novel Of Survival.

From ‘Brassed Off’ To Adrian Mole, Considering Margaret Thatcher Through Popular Culture

Reading comedian and actor Russell Brand’s meditations on the late Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher on my return to the States this week was a delightful experience in and of itself—reading Brand on almost any subject is a pleasure. But it also reminded me just how much terrific popular culture Thatcher inspired, and the extent to which pop culture did real battle with her ideas.

One particular place that portraits of Thatcher in pop culture congregated was in stories about teenagers and young adults, where she represented, as Brand suggested, a parental figure to be rebelled against, as well as a proponent of specific policies that characters found objectionable. In the anarchic sitcom The Young Ones, which began running in 1982, Rick, a bad poet who believes he writes for the people, threatens to bomb the UK if Thatcher “doesn’t do something to help the kids, by this afternoon,” and sees her as an enemy generally, despite the overall incoherence of his politics. In Sue Townsend’s Adrian Mole novels, the titular main character lives with Margaret Thatcher as both a scourge and as a rallying point, writing her into plays and poems with lines like “When you’re dressing in your blue, do you see the waiting queue? / Do you weep, Mrs. Thatcher, do you weep?” Her elocution lessons are, for Adrian, a sign of phoniness, her hair an object of nostalgia after John Major’s ascendance. It’s an awfully personal engagement with a political figure, a reaction that’s in part the result of a small nation being close to its leaders, and in part a response to policies that did affect teenagers and university students directly.

It wasn’t just novelists who took inspiration, and who were catalyzed by Thatcher’s policies. In a great, long piece by Aaron Lake Smith, he discusses in particular both the way that the Miners’ Strike influenced the punk band Chambawamba, and how British youth radicalism from the Thatcher era seeped into its partying culture, making underground techno parties an opportunity to invite clashes with the police:

The British Miners’ Strike, called in response to Thatcher union busting, was a decisive event in Chumbawamba’s political evolution. The group supported political bombings against South Africa’s corrupt racist leaders. This forced them to reexamine their pacifist stance. Diet and lifestyle became less important than solidarity with organized labor. The band recorded a three-track Miner’s benefit single, distributed pamphlets and food to worker’s families, and even started a theatre troupe to perform for the miner’s children…This was the first crack in what would soon become a fissure between Chumbawamba and the punk scene they were part of. No longer spouting the expected pacifist line, they were decried as “sell-outs.” Chumbawamba worked to incorporate themselves into their community in Leeds rather than to be punks standing apart from it. They chose to venture into uncomfortable situations with people who were different from them. As Chumbwamba became closer and closer with the miners, they distanced themselves from “the punks,” whom they increasingly viewed as petty, hardline, ineffective, and humorless.

Then, there’s the terrific romantic comedy Brassed Off, about the members of a brass band associated with a coal mine, based on the Grimethorpe Colliery Band, after the mine where they worked was closed as a result of policies initiated by Thatcher’s administration, as the Grimethorpe Colliery was in 1993. The main characters are former coal miner Andy (Ewan McGregor in an early star turn) and Gloria (Tara Fitzgerald), who has returned to town to research whether the mine could be made more profitable, and begins playing in the band—and reconnecting with Andy. The two of them wrestle with real issues as they commence a romantic relationship as adults, even though they’re attracted to each other. They have different political views, and different perspectives on how important the mine is to the social fabric of the town, given that Gloria is open to the prospect of shuttering it. Their coming around to the same conclusions politically is crucial to their coming around to the same conclusions about the viability of their relationship.

But the movie is also deeply engaged with one of Margaret Thatcher’s most-quoted arguments, the idea that “There is no such thing as society. There is living tapestry of men and women and people and the beauty of that tapestry and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves and each of us prepared to turn round and help by our own efforts those who are unfortunate.” The members of the miners’ band do the best they can to help each other through illness and severe depression, and they manage to keep the band going, giving back to a society that has made them redundant. But even though they have tremendous will to help each other, they have few of the resources that Thatcher suggests will fill the gap on issues like housing and employment. It’s hard for men and women to weave a tapestry that’s an alternative to a government-provided social safety net if they don’t have enough thread to clothe themselves.

Mark Tercek: The business case for nature

The value of nature is astonishing, when you stop and think about it. Marshes protect coastlands. Urban trees clean the air. Forests provide timber. Oceans give us seafood.  Snow-capped mountains store drinking water. Some might say nature is priceless.

Not Mark Tercek, the former investment banker at Goldman Sachs who became CEO of The Nature Conservancy in 2008. His new book, Nature’s Fortune: How Business and Society Thrive by Investing in Nature (Basic Books, 2013), argues that nature provides enormous economic benefits to society, business and consumers, and that, if we can figure out how to value and pay for those benefits, we can slow down and even reverse the degradation of nature that threatens our well-being.

It’s an important and potentially controversial argument, as Tercek acknowledges. While the 20th century conservation was all about protecting nature from people, Tercek and some of his allies in the environmental movement would like the future to be about protecting nature for people. If nothing else, he argues, recognizing the economic value of nature will expand the base of the environmentalist beyond the white, college-educated and relatively affluent folk, the backpackers and hikers and birdwatchers at its core.

In the introduction to Nature’s Fortune, Tercek writes:

Environmentalists generally believe in nature’s inherent value. That idea is the bedrock of the environmental movement. However, environmentalists cannot persuade everyone to think along the same lines. Focusing only on the innate wonders of nature risks alienating potential supporters and limits the environmental community’s ability to reach a broader audience and to mine sources of new ideas. The ‘Isn’t nature wonderful?’ argument can leave the impression that nature offers solely aesthetic benefits or, worse, that nature is a luxury good that only rich people or rich countries can afford. We need to get business, government and individuals to understand that nature is not only wonderful, it is also economically valuable. Indeed, nature is the fundamental underpinning to human well-being.

Allowing his “inner banker’ to run free, he says:

”concepts such as maximize returns, invest in your assets, manage your risks, diversify, and promote innovation are the common parlance of business and banking. These are rarely applied to nature, but they should be.

But how? That’s easier said that done. What makes Nature’s Fortune valuable– and I liked this book a lot — is that it acknowledges the complexity of such abstract notions as  ”natural capital” and “ecosystem services” and brings them down to earth, while recognizing that the argument for investing in nature is far from settled. (It’s also much better read than, say, the United Nations Millenium Ecosystem Assessment or the reports churned out by groups like The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB), which plow similar ground.) Tercek and his co-author, journalist Jonathan Adams, take readers to watersheds in the Andes, to floodplains in the Mississippi Delta, to a cooperative fishery in Morro Bay, California and to the city of Philadelphia to make a business case for conservation.

Some of their arguments are counterintuitive. Consider water. The UN in 2010 declared access to safe and cleaning water a “human right.” But does that mean water should be free? (We don’t pay for human rights like freedom of religion or speech.) No, says Tercek, who is nothing if not a pragmatist. To the contrary, he notes, free (or virtually free) water leads to waste, and exacerbates the risk that some rivers will run dry. “The price of water does not reflect its importance–a lapse that has hidden the risks of water shortages for decades,” he writes.

The good news is that once we agree that people should pay for water, opportunities to protect nature arise. Instead of “gray” infrastructure — dams and pipes — to deliver water, some governments and businesses are investing in “green” infrastructure, by protecting forests or paying farmers to use water more efficiently. In the Cauca Valley, near the Pacific coast of Colombia, Coca-Cola FEMSA, the largest independent Coke bottler in the world, is paying to protect forested hills far upstream from its bottling factory. “Not only does it cost less to protect the forests compared to the engineered alternative, the investment also produces a host of additional benefits,” Tercek writes.

The trouble is, “green” infrastructure is not necessarily cheaper than “gray.” The Nature Conservancy’s signature partnership, an alliance with Dow Chemical that is intended to help Dow incorporate the value of nature into its business strategy, point to some challenges. Scientists from TNC and Dow are working at a pilot site in Freeport, Texas, where Dow has extensive operations, to see whether the company can preserve its access to water in the Brazos River by investing in nature (marshes, payments to up-river farmers to conserve water), or whether it should reforest a nearby floodplains instead of curbing its own air pollution. Maybe a mix of “green” and “gray” infrastructure is needed. These are intriguing ideas, but TNC has to figure out how to value the green alternatives, which could turn out to be more expensive or less effective than building water treatment plants or installing conventional pollution controls.

As Tercek writes:

The testable hypothesis is that once businesses can quantify a broad range of services they depend on from nature, they will see a bottom-line payoff from investing in the natural assets that generate those services. If proven right, a straightforward business calculation will cause them to change their practices to favor nature. Those changes can ripple across entire industries.

We’ll see. The encouraging news is that Tercek and TNC are experimenting. That’s vital because, despite all the talk about “green business” and “corporate sustainability” that we’ve been hearing for close to a decade now, neither forward-thinking companies nor their environmentalist friends have been getting the job done.

As Tercek writes:

nearly every precious bit of nature–teeming coral reefs, sweeping grasslands, lush forests, the rich diversity of life itself–is in decline. Everything humanity should reduce–suburban sprawl, deforestation, overfishing, carbon emissions–has increased.

The idea is not just to prod businesses and governments do less harm, but to find ways for them to restore what we’ve already lost.

Bloggingheads: ‘Game of Thrones’ And The Extent To Which TV Can Be Like Novels

The Week’s entertainment editor Scott Meslow was kind enough to sit down with me to record an episode of Bloggingheads that touched on two subjects dear to my heart: Game of Thrones and Mad Men:

In particular we talked about the idea that television can be a novel, an idea popularized during the heyday of shows like The Wire and The Sopranos. I absolutely agree that television shows can function like novels, in that they can tell long-arc stories, develop characters in a rich way, and play with large themes. But there are technological divides that separate what they can do. In a book, you can stay within the medium and flip back and forth if you don’t remember who a character is, or need to check back in on an event that happened previously. Increasingly, large books hold character guides and world maps. The entire universe of the story is there in a single volume. And that means you can throw an enormous amount of material at a reader. But in a television show, if the world gets big enough, you may need to venture outside of the medium to refresh yourself, whether you’re checking Wikipedia for a character name, switching disks to see an old scene, or skimming through Netflix to find the right moment. If you can’t remember something, you may have to break the spell.

And I wonder if Game of Thrones, which has pulled together an enormous number of characters in a book, may be reaching the limits of the extent to which a television show can act like a novel. Alan Sepinwall, whose review of the third season we discussed in this episode, noted in that piece that “On The Wire, for instance, characters frequently crossed paths, and when they didn’t, you could tell how one person’s actions were affecting someone else far away. On Boardwalk Empire, the narrative strands don’t always seem clearly tied together at first, but they inevitably come together in satisfying fashion by season’s end. Both Martin and Game of Thrones are playing a longer game than that.” And I think that long game poses challenges. It’s hard to remember the names of more than 200 characters you aren’t seeing every episode and as part of the same storylines, especially when you don’t see them written down, and especially when ten months pass in between the last time you’ve seen them and the next time you do. And as someone who obviously read the books before the show started, I wonder if it’s not just harder to remember these characters in the glut of information, but whether it’s hard to get attached.

Now, obviously Martin’s books have been released on a cycle that by the standards of television look leisurely. But they’re also able to give much more space to each character—sometimes for good, sometimes for ill—unconstrained by the production budgets, writing, production, and editing cycles, and standard length of a television episode that inevitably provide structure to the show. That means he writes a fair amount of digression and worldbuilding into the books, but also that he’s not bound by anything except how many pages his publishers can bind into a single volume, and even then, if he’s got to spill over into more volumes, they’re going to be nothing but happy. And those digressions, and the amount of time it takes to read the books, just give readers more hooks into the stories, the characters, and the settings. Sprawl, for good and ill, is a characteristic of books in a way that it never can be of television. I’m not saying that means the books are better than the show. But I do think that they expose some of the irreducible differences between reading and watching television once you reach a certain scope.

Maggie Gallagher, Rape Culture, And The Persistent Idea That Women Can Tame Men And Need To Fix Them

In a (not surprisingly) depressing post railing against equal marriage rights over at National Review, Maggie Gallagher, the founder of the misleadingly-named Institute for Marriage and Public Policy, quotes an anti-equality speaker who argues that “Only one creature has been known to calm men down into faithful and stable relationships since the dawn of time — a woman.” What makes that attitude so sad is the low estimation in which it holds men, an attitude reflected in the hysterically angry reaction to the idea that men can play a role in stopping sexual assault. To different degrees on the same spectrum, these views both agree that men are not particularly in control of themselves, and that if they are to be tamed into monogamy and consensual sex, women will have to do a sometimes enormous amount of work, at great expense to their own expectations and personal liberties, to bring about those outcomes.

These views are very sad, but part of what’s depressing about them is that they aren’t necessarily exceptionally marginal. The idea that it takes a woman to tame a man is at the core of an enormous amount of popular culture—particularly culture aimed at women.

One of the most prevalent arenas for the idea that men need to be tamed by good women, and one of the places where that trope has evolved most, is in romance novels. As I wrote at Slate last week, that genre’s evolved from its earlier reliance on character arcs in which the heroine would be seduced, ravished, or outright raped before winning over the heroine to one in which the rakish hero, whether he’s seducing opera singers in the Edwardian era or dating hotties in contemporary Cleveland, meets the woman who makes him realize that monogamy isn’t just socially acceptable—it will make him happier than he’s previously been tomcatting around. These men in contemporary romance novels are rarely as repulsive as their earlier counterparts, or as profligate as Gallagher and her ilk might make them out to be. But there’s still an air of condescension operating there: it seems to have never occurred to any of these otherwise smart, handsome, and professionally adept men that their own behavior might be causing their unhappiness. And often, rather than being truly responsible for their romantic and sexual choices, romance novel heroes are broken in a certain way that can only be fixed by the ministration of heroines whose value was previously overlooked: often they had cruel or absent parents, particularly fathers, who damaged their ability to connect, and rather than seeking out therapy or staring their own deficiencies straight in the face, its up to women to give them the love they were previously denied.

Romantic comedies often follow the same script, with women required to correct for behavior even less attractive behavior than womanizing. Gerard Butler played a grotesquely misogynist radio host (who of course really just suffers from a bad case of heartbreak) in The Ugly Truth, a role that NBC trotted out and then abandoned in its failed Dane Cook sitcom, Next Caller. Matthew McConaughey needed to be literally dragged out of his parents’ home by Sarah Jessica Parker in Failure to Launch in one of his many slacker romantic comedies. The profoundly strange The Invention of Lying even tried to make a virtue out of the manipulative dishonesty of Mark (Ricky Gervais). Maybe making men into utter messes who need to be revitalized by the love of good women is a way to introduce new obstacles to couples’ happiness as the kinds of social pressures that made it harder for couples to come together across class lines or in spite of the bad reputation of one party have melted away, something Chris Orr pointed to as a factor in the decline of the romantic comedy. But the degradation of romantic comedies from battles of complicated equals to stories about broken men who need to be rescued about women doesn’t just make for depressing, and even sometimes infuriating storytelling—it reinforces the larger version of the battle of the sexes Gallagher and her ilk promote, that rogues and slackers are in need of vaccination by good women.

This narrative is dismal on and off the page and screen because it builds disrespect and inequality into the narrative of both real and fictional relationships. To suggest that men are inherently hounds—or worse—and to make that the most salient part of their personalities reduces all of men’s good qualities in comparison to their venalities. To demand that women save or fix men makes us perpetual nags or mommies. Women should be repulsed by the relationships Gallagher is telling them to pursue, and men should be absolutely furious. I’d feel bad for Gallagher for promoting those tropes as traditional gender roles worth emulating, if milder presentations of that rotten product hadn’t already proved so effective.

On Losing Chinua Achebe, And The Importances Of Literature And Empathy For Studying History

When I woke up to the news this morning that Chinua Achebe had died earlier today in Boston, I was struck all over again by how strange and frustrating it is that his novel Things Fall Apart remains probably the only novel by an African writer that most people will ever read in their first thirteen years of education. It’s not that Things Fall Apart is a bad novel—it’s a very good one—or that it’s in some way crowding other African writers out of the American education system (which would only be true if there was some sort of quota, and I’m sure no one would admit to that). It’s that Achebe’s most famous novel is a reminder of what we lose out when the literature we read is limited to a narrow set of perspectives.

The thing that fiction does that’s powerful, and that can also make it dangerous, is that it gives us a perspective to sympathize with that, if we’re not careful, and in conjunction with the framing of the history we’re taught, can come to dominate our thinking on events. Scarlett O’Hara is a tremendous character—and I think there’s a compelling argument that Gone With The Wind makes the case that a capitalist free labor system produces both better economic results and more appealing humans than the slaveholding South—but she’d be an absolutely terrible lens through which to view the complexities of the Civil War. Sulking over socials does not principaled opposition to the Confederacy make.

When it comes to Africa, stories like King Solomon’s Mines or Zulu, the classic movie about the battle of Rorke’s Drift, taken on their own, may not seem terribly consequential. But what’s important about Africa in King Solomon’s Mines is that it’s strange, and provides Alan Quartermain a space in which to have an adventure. In Zulu, the point of the story is that more British men received the Victoria Cross for their service in that fight, in which the British were dramatically outnumbered by Zulu warriors. Africa matters in that it’s a staging ground for European men to prove their greatness, or because it’s a place where clashes of civilization occur. But before those white men arrive to test themselves, or before guns are pitted against spears, Africa doesn’t get much attention in literature or in history classes, at least in ordinary middle and high schools. Literature ends up collaborating with accepted versions of history, not challenging it or complicating it.

Novels like Achebe’s reverse the vantage point, starting with the presumption that people like Okonkwo,, the protagonist of Things Fall Apart, are interesting and worthy subjects even before white people show up and identify them as souls worth saving or obstacles to wealth worth eliminating. Their value is as people, not as waystations on the road to colonization. Okonkwo is as easy to sympathize with as any man who feels shamed and angered by his father’s legacy. And there are stakes that matter other than white adventurers getting rich—one reason that all high school students should probably be required to read King Leopold’s Ghost, a striking testament to the brutality so-called Western Civilization is capable of—or the bravery and honor of English men who are working to expand their nation’s reach. But if you don’t know anything about, say, Igbo culture, or if the only pre-colonization African society you know about is Ancient Egypt, it’s harder to think to look for those stakes when you read chipper “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” stories about missionaries or get taught about the bravery of people who were, after all, invaders who were disrupting already-extant systems of government and local economies for their own gain.

To not know Okonkwo would be a double loss for a reader, who would miss out on both the pleasure and the pain of his company, and the opportunity to see missionaries as strange, rather than the people they came to convert. Similarly, Achebe’s A Man Of The People, a somewhat comic story of post-colonial corruption turned personal, fills in the blank space that’s often left in between colonialism and the modern era. How many students encounter African leaders other than Nelson Mandela in the course of their curriculums, much less get to see them as people with appetites and weaknesses, rather than simply as saints?

My sense is that one of the reasons Things Fall Apart has come to be the one piece of African literature that’s taught in high schools is that it’s deemed to be “like” Western literature. It was written in English rather than in Igbo because Achebe found it smoother to write in a unified language than in a collection of dialects. Okonkwo is like Hamlet, a man who’s unable to escape the impact his father had on him, and who ends up harming himself in his attempts to transcend his father’s legacy.

But Achebe’s legacy ought to be that there’s real value in seeking out literature that comes from places and traditions other than the Western canon precisely because they’re different. Rather than reaffirming the perspectives from which history’s taught us and deepening our comfort with what we already know, they expose the vast expanse of history, culture, and literature with which we’re unfamiliar. The point isn’t that Okonkwo is like us—it’s that we’re like him. And teaching Achebe alone among African authors shouldn’t be enough. He should be a reminder of how big the world of literature is, and how rewarding it is to explore, not as a colonist, but as a reader.

In defense of environmental extremism

David Brower and friends

The other night, I saw A Fierce Green Fire, a documentary history of the environmental movement, as part of the excellent DC Environmental Film Festival. The movie was OK, worth seeing, but not great, a bit PBS-like in its sweep.  By trying to cover a  lot, the filmmakers mostly skim the surface: Here’s Sierra Club  founder John Muir, there’s Rachel Carson and Silent Spring, remember when Jimmy Carter put a solar heater on the White House roof, say hello to Stewart Brand and Bill McKibben, meet Wangari Maathai, and let’s not overlook environmental justice and the Copenhagen climate talks, and wasn’t that Buckminster Fuller? Nor does the film look critically at environmentalism; it’s narrated by Robert Redford, Ashley Judd, Van Jones, Isabel Allende and Meryl Streep, which pretty much tells you all you need to know.

Having said that, the film, sometimes by design and sometimes inadvertently, manages to deliver a useful reminder about radicals and rabble-rousers: They are often the ones who drive change. Had Barry Goldwater been an environmentalist, he might have said that extremism in defense of the earth is no vice and that moderation, when it comes to climate change, is no virtue. The environmental movement’s heroes, at least in this telling, are David Brower and Lois Gibbs and Chico Mendes and Greenpeace, and not those who work inside the Beltway or travel to UN conferences. At the very least, grass-roots, bottom-up activism created the conditions that drove change in Washington.

Consider, for example, these stirring words from a presidential State of the Union address, which is (too) briefly excerpted in the movie:

Shall we make our peace with nature and begin to make reparations for the damage we have done to our air, to our land, and to our water?

Restoring nature to its natural state is a cause beyond party and beyond factions. It has become a common cause of all the people of this country. It is a cause of particular concern to young Americans, because they more than we will reap the grim consequences of our failure to act on programs which are needed now if we are to prevent disaster later.

Clean air, clean water, open spaces-these should once again be the birthright of every American. If we act now, they can be.

We still think of air as free. But clean air is not free, and neither is clean water. The price tag on pollution control is high. Through our years of past carelessness we incurred a debt to nature, and now that debt is being called…

As our cities and suburbs relentlessly expand, those priceless open spaces needed for recreation areas accessible to their people are swallowed up–often forever. Unless we preserve these spaces while they are still available, we will have none to preserve…

The automobile is our worst polluter of the air. Adequate control requires further advances in engine design and fuel composition. We shall intensify our research, set increasingly strict standards, and strengthen enforcement procedures-and we shall do it now.

We can no longer afford to consider air and water common property, free to be abused by anyone without regard to the consequences. Instead, we should begin now to treat them as scarce resources, which we are no more free to contaminate than we are free to throw garbage into our neighbor’s yard.

Yes, that was Richard Nixon in 1970, three months before the first Earth Day, when an estimated 20 million — 20 million! — people took to the streets on behalf of the planet. Nixon obviously couldn’t have known that Earth Day was coming that but he was a shrewd enough politician to sense that a movement was brewing, as was Gaylord Nelson, the U.S. Senator who came up with the idea for Earth Day. Nixon and Nelson and others in Congress deserve credit for the wave of early 1970s environmental regulation that followed but it was the 1960s-style uprising that demonstrated the urgent need for laws to regulate pollution. 

Lois Gibbs

Earlier, grass-roots efforts by David Brower and the Sierra Club to keep dams out of the Grand Canyon provoked a different reaction from Washington: The IRS said it would challenge the club’s tax-exempt status. Brower won the battle over dams, but he was then ousted from the Sierra Club, evidently because he was too uncomprising in his approach–the film doesn’t get into this, unfortunately. Later, the feminist and environmental movements came together at the toxic waste dump known as Love Canal where Lois Gibbs and other women organized homeowners and demanded that the government do something about a cluster of children being born with birth defects. The women actually held a couple of EPA officials hostage for an afternoon, and eventually President Carter went to Love Canal to thank them for their tireless advocacy.

In the film’s most powerful episode, A Fierce Green Fire chronicles Greenpeacc’s campaign to stop whale-hunting and seal-hunting, with a focus on the exploits of a contentious, profane agitator named Paul Watson. Why, he wonders at one point, are  Russian and Japanese fishing boats harpooning whales so that their oil can be used in the manufacturing of missiles? “We’re insane,” he laments. “We’re just totally insane.” Watson is too radical for Greenpeace  (which he later describes as “the Avon ladies of the environment movement”) and so, after being voted off its board, he forms the Sea Shepherd Society to carry on his crusade; he turns to violence against property, ramming and damaging whaling ships. It sounds extreme but the film suggests — and I don’t know the full story — that Watson and his allies helped bring about a global moratorium on commercial whale hunting in 1986.

What’s clear from all this is that the environmental movement needs activists of all stripes — pragmatic insiders like Fred Krupp and Mark Tercek, sure, who can work inside the Beltway or with Wall Street or Silicon Valley, but also those who are louder and less compromising, like Bill McKibben and Mike Brune and James Hansen (despite what you may have read in The New York Times). Yes, their rhetoric can go a step too far, but the movement needs more of their passion and determination. Politeness is to be admired in children, but it’s no way to build a movement.

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Photos courtesy of A Fierce Green Fire. The film is based on a 2003 book by journalist Philip Shabecoff, which I look forward to reading.