Thanks but no thanks

At this point it feels unsporting to bring up anything related to xoJane, an online women's mag that Time Inc. shut down a decade ago after buying it at a fire sale price. But the Tempest Challenge recently floated back into my brain, so I need to vent. 

Speculative fiction writer K. Tempest Bradford issued a challenge to her readers, and I quote, “I Challenge You to Stop Reading White, Straight, Cis Male Authors for One Year”. Does cutting all meat out of your diet make you more pliable to stuff like this?

Another writer online soon defended the idea in the following terms:

It’s only a year

It doesn’t have to start and end on any particular date.

In the grand scheme of publishing, it’s extremely unlikely that a large enough group of people will be avoiding white straight cis male authors to ruin anyone’s career. If I don’t read a book by John Scalzi (or some relatively unknown white straight cis male) within a particular span, nothing says I can’t read it once the year is up. There are unlikely to be a ton of people doing it the exact same time as I, so White Guy will still sell pretty close to the same number of books within a given year as he would have otherwise.

These things are true as far as they go, but miss a couple of important points. For one thing, if you follow through with this kind of thing, it tends to overwrite the things you'd ordinarily look for in a book―writing you enjoy, a topic you're interested in―with matters like the race of the author, or whether they agree with their original birth certificate on what gender they are. This is, I assume, the whole point.

And you have to wonder if this actually helped any "diverse" writer. The "challenge to avoid books by whitey" has a quality of "eat your veggies." Would you really want to be the veggies everyone is supposed to eat? The truth is that voluntary return readers only become return readers out of love. It can't be forced.

Anyway, I just started reading Erasure, a 2001 novel by Percival Everett. Everett is  a seeming rarity in that he's a substantial literary writer of the 21st century, but he's also enjoyable to read. He doesn't need any more justification than that.

Ruins

When animator Don Bluth worked for Disney in the 1970s, he was struck by the fact that much about the studio’s 30s/40s hot streak had already been forgotten. It wasn’t just the spirit of those old movies that was missing, even basic techniques were falling through the sands of time.

The Nine Old Men were going gray. Walt himself had been dead for half a decade. Nobody was preserving the hard-won knowledge and craft of the studio’s RKO years. He would ask questions like “how did you do the rippling water in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves?” and be astonished that nobody could tell him. In some cases, even the technique’s inventors had forgotten!

Ever since the failure of Sleeping Beauty, Disney had been fighting a war against budget overruns. Animators were urged to cut costs, to reuse footage, to do more with less. The result was that old knowledge and techniques atrophied because there wasn’t the money to apply them. What doesn’t get used gets forgotten: and soon you’re doing less with less. Bluth had arrived in a dying place: its animators the caretakers of an ancient language they could no longer read. Almost like Plasmo himself, trying to reach the sky with old scraps of the past.

Disney is, of course, huger than huge. As a business, that is. They've certainly got a great number of revenue streams. At the same time, their cultural impact has been hollowed out. The movies and TV shows they release and that get any kind of attention are from acquired properties (Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, etc.) Did you know that they still make a "canon" animated feature every year? Maybe, maybe not, but if you're anything like me you'd be hard pressed to name a recent one. Did you know that they've spent the last decade or so making diminishing returns live action remakes of their classics from yesteryear? Yeah, that gets attention, but not necessarily the kind you want.

Apparently the downfall was a long time coming. When Bluth worked there, replacing all cel animation with CGI wasn't a plausible option. That doesn't mean that no one was thinking along those lines already. They finally made that move in the 21st century, after an anomalous traditional animation renaissance that lasted through much of the 80s and 90s. 

The larger point is true, of course. Collectively, it's easier to forget old methods of creation than it is to bring them back. Or to come up with new ones, for that matter. Something to keep in mind with the current push to stop doing pretty much everything. 

The post where I got the above, by the way, is the first time I've ever heard of Plasmo. Apparently it's just an Aussie thing. His cartoons sound charming, though.

A little goes a long way

There should be a pane of thick, darkened glass between idol and audience. To be accessible was to lose. The man who sits in a cafe all day, mumbling as he reads the papers: he’s accessible. A taxi driver is accessible. A star shouldn’t even be seen eating.

That's a quote by Chris O'Leary, in a post about David Bowie, a subject on which O'Leary has done a lot of very good writing. Specifically about Bowie's internet ventures of the late 1990s. But it has me thinking beyond that field.

A while ago I started seeing people―mainly girls and young women―talking about "feeling seen." As in, "Thank you, that really makes me feel seen." But is this always a good thing, and is it a rare thing? We live in a world of both extensive surveillance and voluntary (more-or-less) self-exposure on social media. Everyone's seen. Everyone's seen a lot.

There's something to be said for stars going the Greta Garbo route: making movies or records or whatever and retreating to a private realm the rest of the time, while your image floats through the world on posters and covers. For the rest of us, it's probably better to blend into the physical world, not trying to sell yourself. It's definitely better for children and teens. 

And it's probably not happening anytime soon. Still, worth trying.

Missing in action

There's something weird that I've noticed lately. Recently I was inside the Providence Public Library on 150 Empire St. for the first time since a renovation/reconstruction they did a few years ago. It's a big library for the city, and it's still pretty well stocked. But the rather extensive reference section I remember isn't where I remember it being. As far as I can tell, it's not anywhere else either.

Much the same thing happened in the Rochambeau branch where I usually go. Their entire reference section is now the Oxford English Dictionary.

Some of this is understandable. Britannica and other encyclopedia concerns no longer produce multivolume hardcover editions. But there used to be all sorts of books that didn't circulate, but that were on display to the general public, who could freely look at them. Not having that anymore feels like something vital has been discontinued.

Drop

It can be a creepy experience being in a modern tall building. By "tall" I mean five stories or more. Because the kind of modernism I mean, and one that's still pretty dominant in architecture, opposes all outer ornament. That includes ledges. If for any reason you go outside the window, there's nothing for you but a straight drop and "splat!" 

Of course these windows aren't supposed to open. Everyone is supposed to be inside, protected by all that stone, steel, and glass. Well, one hopes, anyway.

Where barley grows

 

What happened to Syd Barrett? The short answer is drugs and madness, I guess. LSD has been used to treat certain ailments, but is less than great in treating schizophrenia. In later life he laid low and stayed out of trouble, but seemed to have sealed off the part of his brain that had started Pink Floyd. 

Possibly necessary for self preservation, but sad nonetheless. He had been inspired. His gift carried him unsteadily through two solo albums, and as late as 1974 he created some interesting guitar demos, albeit not developed into anything. And of course there were early Floyd songs like "The Scarecrow", both eerie and touching.

Brillig

Alice had one adventure by falling down a rabbit hole. She then went on another by walking through a mirror. Were they the same place? Or two entirely distinct ones? Adaptations tend to smash characters and events from both books into one gestalt. But there are also sources that explain something called Looking-Glass Land. 

I'm not looking to settle this argument or even enter into it. Just pointing out that there's a reason for the ambiguity. Carroll knew it didn't matter. The word "worldbuilding" hadn't been coined yet. The idea that his fantasylands had to have consistent backstories would have been laughable to him. As it would be to most writers and readers of his time. 

RETVRN