Warren Ellis, “How We Broadcast about Death”

Warren Ellis was writing recently while having NetFlix playing House in the background for noise (as one does). He recently meditated on what seeped through into his consciousness, and he offers a brief suggestion of what constitutes “America’s primary expression of horror fiction” through House as a “brutal Modernist hero.”

Trains

Warren Ellis started a new writing project, a side project really, he’s dubbed morning.computer. The most recent post, “Lowing,” contrasts British train horns with American horns. Where British train horns sound as if they herald some surging rush towards the future and progress, Ellis suggests, “American trains mourn”:

Gender Equality of Opportunity and Misleading Infographics

One of the first things I saw this morning after waking up was some shiny-looking infographic about “Why Women Don’t Make Less Than Men.” Now, I laugh out loud at this because I’m aware of the opinions of my many female colleagues, and I’m aware of their experiences. I’ve also read more about this topic than some infographic. As I look over this ‘graphic, I see someone’s trying to use shiny images, statistical manipulation, and sketchy notions of cultural commonplaces, expectations, and what I suspect are loaded survey questions to convince women that they aren’t being screwed in the workplace regarding pay and opportunities.

Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory

I’ve had the chance to read Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory recently, and I’ve written about Adorno and the Frankfurt School of post-Marxist political theorists here before. This book is one I wish I’d been directed to earlier, rather than picking it up now for “fun.” The book was published posthumously, assembled from various drafts, and this editorial process means Adorno never had the chance to revise and edit his work himself. The result is that the book can be tedious to read in many places. Furthermore, as I read the book, I felt Adorno was being a bit of a snob about what he considered “art,” with him addressing works by long dead famous white men from Europe.

Lazy Rhetoric through Shakespeare

I’ve occasionally seen people quote or “sorta-quote” (misquote but almost get it right) Shakespeare to make some point about something non-Shakespearean, and sometimes, these people are lucky enough to have me nearby to say, “Oh, but context.” For example, do not try to use a quote by Mark Antony to soften honest critique of the dead. Yes, the good may lie interred in people’s bones. However, Antony built up Julius Caesar as a secular saint to lead a coup and to manipulate the plebeians, the citizens of Rome, out of a republic and into becoming subjects of an empire.

Magic & Art

Magic has a long tradition as something that happens or features in art and literature. Indeed, magic and art have often been linked together. In The Tempest, Prospero is a magician, an authorial self-insert for Shakespeare, and a theatrical impresario and director, conjuring a wedding masque performance for his daughter and her fiancé. The antitheatricalists in England in the Renaissance saw theater in more diabolic terms. For example, Stephen Gosson associated occultism and theater, and Gosson situates both in terms of devilry. He connects attending theater to sitting “at the table of Idolators,” imbuing symbols and persons with fictive significance just as, arguably, magicians do. In turn, the dialogue and “Poetrie” in plays comes from “the deuill” using verse to most “wonderfully tickle the hearers[’] eares.” As Gosson argues, the devil uses “the eye[s]” of audiences to lure them in through “the beautie of the…Stages,” as well as entertainments like “maskes, vaunting, [and]…daunsing of gigges,” all with the intent of luring observers to the “vanetie of pleasure” and to become “carnally minded” and thus drawn from Christ. [1] From another perspective, magicians have often termed their magic the “Art”—and Prospero, Faustus, and even pulp mages like Elminster have done so.[2] Philip Sidney argued for art’s (poetry’s) power to correct and to improve upon a deficient nature and world in his Defense of Poesy, and magic certainly serves a similar function in fiction, at least.[3] My purpose in this post is to explore the significance of magic’s use in art, a purpose that emphasizes magic’s subversiveness and its emancipatory possibilities—in art and otherwise—from a personal and political perspective.

Liminality, Fairies, and Märchen

Hannibal as a Fairy Tale

This link comes via the Hannibal fandom out of Tumblr (which is not something I’m a part of–I haven’t seen Hannibal or the movies), but I found the definition of liminality one of the better quick ones I’ve seen in passing. The notes on fairies and Märchen are also short and sweet.

Fantasy, Imagined Communities, and Imaginary Places

I’m adapting to a new schedule, so posts have slowed down of late. But here are several thoughts on Alan Moore and Michael Moorcock, Fantasy & Post-War Culture I’ve been working on recently.

Alan Moore’s foreword to a recent Del Rey anthology of early Elric stories by Michael Moorcock—The Stealer of Souls—begins by framing fictional, decadent, fey Melniboné as a real culture that preceded post-war Britain. Melniboné is Elric’s empire that he destroys in the Elric Saga. Within Moorcock’s works, the Lords of Law and Chaos are the monstrous deities that lurk in the Higher Worlds and are often the foes against which Elric and others contend. Moore represents these Lords as British politicians, as the figures of authority that not only Elric but also the counterculture of the 1960s and ‘70s opposed. In a way, the notion reminds me of Gerald Scarfe’s animation of English authority in The Wall, and the Judge at the end of the film is very much something that Elric would have found in the realms of Chaos.

Our Online Emotional Lives and Why Those Are Probably Fine

EDIT: I began writing this post from one perspective, and it was something of a curmudgeonly perspective. This post becomes then more a meditation on the nature of our emotional lives in the age of Tumblr and Twitter, and although those media may include seemingly new ways of expressing and imagining our inner lives, those media are not significantly different from what’s come before.

I come from a time before the internet (*shakes his cane*), but I remember when it was taking off in the 1990s, and I was very much going along with it. I’m old enough to remember and to have used USENET, IRC, and even things like Gopher (not that there was ever much to Gopher). USENET “newsgroups” were basically global, public forums—kind of like reddit and its subreddits before there was a reddit—and IRC was public and private IM based on different servers and chat rooms. But I’ve also seen how discourse—the ways people talk about things—has shifted with the popularity of Twitter, Facebook, and even things like Tumblr and animated gifs.

Talking about Talking about Dylan Farrow and Woody Allen

How to Like Woody Allen on Facebook

Woody Allen’s Good Name

The first link is via FEMINIST HULK regarding the discussion about Dylan Farrow and Woody Allen going on presently, and the backlash against Farrow that’s been directed against her for daring to question Allen’s character and reputation. The second link also deals with that discussion (and linked by HULK in that link), pointing to “the limitations of legal metaphor” and of clinging to ideas like “innocent until proven guilty” outside of a court of law. Judging by the comments on the second link by Aaron Bady, my impression is that a lot of people think no one should say anything at all about what’s going on because, y’know, who knows who’s telling the truth, amiright?