I lost my fake ID, but you lost the motel key
How today has gone: the noises I just made on discovering a not completely empty bag of cough drops in the farthest corner of the counters in the kitchen are more traditionally associated with the lottery. Have some links.
1. I am delighted that![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sholio has made a gifset of Bill Maxwell from The Greatest American Hero (1981–83): "FBI agent and absolute weirdo."
2. Courtesy ofmoon_custafer: cogent thoughts on having feelings about problematic art. "And so if Harry Potter or BA or Voltron or whatever other problematic thing was your lifeline it's okay to be upset that it was yanked away from you by bigoted creators and racist corporations and bad writing. It's okay to mourn that thing, to miss the joy it brought you, to think back on the good memories you had of it, to not want to jump on the hate bandwagon, to be upset when people mock the people like you who cared about it."
3. Courtesy ofashlyme: Judith Bingham's Salt in the Blood (1995), a maritime ghost story for chorus and orchestra, full of chanteys and fragments of ships' logs. I want a libretto.
P.S. Courtesy of my father: "Meet the Sea Slugs That Chop Off Their Heads and Grow New Bodies." It should maybe come with a content warning for video, but personally I cannot resist statements like "Self-amputation, known as autotomy, isn't uncommon in the animal kingdom. Having the ability to jettison a body part, such as a tail, helps many animals avoid predation. However, no animal had ever been observed ditching its entire body."
1. I am delighted that
sholio has made a gifset of Bill Maxwell from The Greatest American Hero (1981–83): "FBI agent and absolute weirdo."2. Courtesy of
moon_custafer: cogent thoughts on having feelings about problematic art. "And so if Harry Potter or BA or Voltron or whatever other problematic thing was your lifeline it's okay to be upset that it was yanked away from you by bigoted creators and racist corporations and bad writing. It's okay to mourn that thing, to miss the joy it brought you, to think back on the good memories you had of it, to not want to jump on the hate bandwagon, to be upset when people mock the people like you who cared about it."3. Courtesy of
ashlyme: Judith Bingham's Salt in the Blood (1995), a maritime ghost story for chorus and orchestra, full of chanteys and fragments of ships' logs. I want a libretto.P.S. Courtesy of my father: "Meet the Sea Slugs That Chop Off Their Heads and Grow New Bodies." It should maybe come with a content warning for video, but personally I cannot resist statements like "Self-amputation, known as autotomy, isn't uncommon in the animal kingdom. Having the ability to jettison a body part, such as a tail, helps many animals avoid predation. However, no animal had ever been observed ditching its entire body."
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I can't help but suspect that some of the current . . . I'm not even sure what I want to call it. Charged atmosphere, maybe? With the implication of possible lightning strikes coming out of it? . . . around that kind of thing has to do with what you were railing against in this post. When the things you like aren't merely things you like, but statements on or components of your identity, then any problem in that thing or on the part of its creator feels much more like it contaminates you. At which point it becomes much more necessary for you to disavow it as firmly as possible, or at least to feel like you have to, lest you be judged by everybody else. But maybe the answer is to not treat these things like core parts of people's DNA, such that any appreciation for the text entails identification with and therefore support for the text in toto and the creator as well.
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I essentially agree with this entire comment, down to the static charges. I think the only distinction I would draw is that there are books, movies etc. that become core parts of a person's DNA and it's fair to discuss them with that level of importance, but that's different from expecting the person to be held to account for them.
(Your use of the term contamination is also spot-on, and I wish it were easier to remove the conversation from that framework. It is weird, weird Christian spillover from where I'm sitting.)
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It also gets into the separation vs. non-separation of the artist and the art. The guy from Mumford and Sons may be a fascist, but does that make his music fascist? Maybe you don't want him to give him your money going forward, but it's okay to still listen to what you've already bought (and there's an argument I hadn't thought of before for why it's good to buy things and not just license the right to stream them). Or maybe you can't listen to that music anymore without thinking about his politics, and so you have to let it go. Finding out how skeevy Piers Anthony was came as no surprise at all because it frankly supplied an explanation for some things that had always bothered me, with increasing degrees of force, so in that case you could absolutely see the problems of the artist reflected in the problems of the art. Ergo, it was easy for me to say, "nope, never reading his stuff again, and divesting of the few pieces I still have right now" -- I didn't feel like playing curate's egg with the books I remembered as being not skeevy. But do I see JKR's transphobia in Harry Potter? Not really; there are things I absolutely criticize about her worldbuilding, largely from a standpoint of "I feel like you didn't actually think this through and the implications aren't great," but I don't get that same feel of "ick ick ick, there's slime all throughout this." Fred Clark (the blogger Slacktivist) talks about this in the context of theology and stuff like prominent American theologians who were slave-holders; is it really possible to separate their acceptance of slavery from their thoughts on ethics and justice and so forth? Probably not. But with fiction, the flaws of the artist might or might not relate to the flaws of the art. And with something like a TV show, where so many artists are involved, I'd hate to let the sins of one person negate all the effort and beauty the other people created.
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And the idea that there should be a correct response—or that there is—does a great deal of the damage.
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On the one hand "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone" should not be used as a reason to disregard the (sometimes extending to) horrific things people do. The fact that all people sin doesn't mean that all sins are equal. ON THE OTHER HAND, some people jump to condemnation as if there might be peerless, irreproachable people in the world.
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This was actually the big moment of "no" I had reading that post, which I think is otherwise sensible. There's a running, unexamined assumption throughout that post that obviously once you recognize some problematic element in the creator, you'll automatically abandon their work in shame and disgust, and I'm just like ... okay, no. Citation needed! I mean, it's a personal choice, obviously. In some cases, the author's unsavory traits are reflected in their work to an extent that's inescapable (Piers Anthony too, for me, or Dave Sim), or the creator's behavior crosses the line for you, personally, in a way that's impossible to get past. Some things, I will probably never bother with. (I never had an attachment to a Woody Allen movie, so I'm not going to start watching his movies now.) But I still think Winter's Tale is a beautiful mess of a book and have it cozily tucked on my shelf even though Mark Helprin is a notorious right-wing crank.
I also have a pretty strong reaction to the idea that ... okay, look, my first experiences with this particular sort of disillusionment was stuff like "this person raped kids" (Marion Zimmer Bradley), so I tend to have some problems with the idea that it is obvious and necessary to react with the same levels of horror and disgust to someone saying a bad thing on Twitter. There is a continuum here! Obviously this doesn't mean I think it's a problem for people to push back against Bad Things On Twitter or find themselves personally unable to enjoy a creator's works now that they know some unsavory things about their politics. But not all bad things are equally bad.
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Some things, I will probably never bother with.
Yes, the easy end of the wedge is where it's someone whose work I've never much bothered with. There are so many things to read and watch in the world, I'm perfectly happy to go enjoy something that doesn't come with so much baggage attached. (I had no idea about Helprin; I just watched the film of Winter's Tale the other week, which is my only knowledge of him or his work. "Beautiful mess" about summed it up.)
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Hahaha, yeah, I posted that without really thinking too much about it, and then was looking at that and going "... wait, wrong 1980s fantasy author!" I have those two closely associated in my head due to having encountered their books at about the same time.
(I had no idea about Helprin; I just watched the film of Winter's Tale the other week, which is my only knowledge of him or his work. "Beautiful mess" about summed it up.)
I haven't actually seen the movie, but absolutely love the book. It's one of those books that I read young and settled into my head and stayed there - it has gorgeous imagery, flying horses, beautiful tragedy ... and a COMPLETELY FUCKING BATSHIT plot. (To be fair I've avoided the movie due to being too attached to the book, and now I'm looking it up on Rotten Tomatoes and being amused by the reviews: "A fine book fights gallantly to escape from its straitjacket, but eventually lies down and allows itself to be trampled underfoot by bad ideas.")
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Just don't ask me how long it took to remember which books were written by Robin McKinley and which were written by Patricia McKillip.
(To be fair I've avoided the movie due to being too attached to the book, and now I'm looking it up on Rotten Tomatoes and being amused by the reviews: "A fine book fights gallantly to escape from its straitjacket, but eventually lies down and allows itself to be trampled underfoot by bad ideas.")
I rather suspect that any time your instinct says "I'm too attached to the book," you should listen to it, unless somebody who knows you well and whose judgment you trusts tells you that you'll like the adaptation.
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People who know me well and whose judgment I trust have told me all sorts of favorable things about Miyazaki's Howl's Moving Castle (2004), but I still don't think it's going to happen.
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As someone who really loves the book and has also seen the movie, I say stick to your guns on that. The movie was very beautiful and nothing whatsoever like the book.
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Same.
there's a lot worse out there than her.
I really would not try to construct a sliding scale of when it is considered reasonable to persist with art and when to nope out. Everyone's tolerances and vulnerabilities are different. I know you are not actually advocating any such gatekeeping, but even the rhetoric we have for discussing this subject is so volatile and loaded, I want to be clear.
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100% agreed. The only thing I'm pushing back against is the rhetoric that seems to want to reject the concept of scale entirely and treat all things as the same, all the time, for everyone, and always deserving of being cast into the outer darkness forever.
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I don't think anyone in this thread is in danger of making that argument, but it should indeed be stepped on firmly whenever encountered.
On the subject of being cast into the outer darkness forever: David Schraub, "N(R)IMBY." It's a blog, not a newspaper, so it should be accessible. "It's no answer to say that the person should do the work of repentance and redemption before they can make a claim to 'live their life' in any space—the work of repentance and redemption occurs in occupied space; it is impossible to do it from a place of social banishment."
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Oh, no -- at that point I'm just railing against the stuff the piece you linked to is railing against.
The N(R)IMBY thing . . . so, I have a non-theoretical example one step removed from my immediate vicinity. At one point my husband got a job application from a guy working at the same company in the tech industry equivalent of a menial position, who was wildly overqualified for his current job and trying to trade up to a better one. Turns out the guy had a felony conviction for assault against his girlfriend. The guy had served his sentence, gone to anger management, was in a stable relationship with somebody new, etc. etc. . . . and nobody would hire him for anything other than a menial position where he would basically never talk to anybody. Because why hire the guy with the problem in his past when you could hire the guy who didn't assault his girlfriend years ago? My husband chewed this over with me as well as with his boss and various other people at the company, and ultimately he made the decision to hire the guy, despite the conviction. And the guy turned out to be an excellent employee who never caused problems, because he genuinely had turned over a new leaf. He passed away last year from cancer, and his mother tearfully thanked my husband for having given her son the second chance that nobody else would.
Redemption can happen. The question of where it should be given a chance to happen . . . is not an easy one.
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I didn't think it was assumed as a universal reaction: I thought the post was directed at people who were feeling severed from art that had been important to them and intended to support them against the tide of the alternative. The line "and cast it aside if it comes to that" suggested to me that OP did not presuppose that the casting aside was inevitable.
But I still think Winter's Tale is a beautiful mess of a book and have it cozily tucked on my shelf even though Mark Helprin is a notorious right-wing crank.
I have never read Winter's Tale: I think I tried once and sort of bounced orthagonally off the fact that it wasn't either Peter S. Beagle or John Crowley. The one I can see if I turn my head is Ellis Island and Other Stories (1981); I have his A City in Winter (1996) and The Veil of Snows (1997) in storage somewhere.
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Ah, fair - I had read an implied "well, obviously you'll do THIS" in the post that is not necessarily actually there except in my head.
Winter's Tale is basically two and possibly three books with very different tones and styles jammed together. I have stronger feelings about some of its aspects than others, but it left an indelible stamp on my brain. He has a way of blending noirish elements with fairy tale elements that makes a particular kind of magic for me.
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This stuff is tricky and nuance on the internet is hard. (Nuance in real life is also hard. It's unfair.)
He has a way of blending noirish elements with fairy tale elements that makes a particular kind of magic for me.
Well, I may still bounce off it, but that description has succeeded in making the book of interest to me. Thank you.
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This conversation has made me want to reread, so I'll probably make a post about that! It's been a while since the last time.
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For what it's worth at this particular historical moment, I've never heard any such stories.
(and there's an argument I hadn't thought of before for why it's good to buy things and not just license the right to stream them).
Yes: if you want to make a ritual sacrifice of that DVD, you can stake it out for the sun, and if you want to rewatch it without handing the director further dough, you can do that, too.
But with fiction, the flaws of the artist might or might not relate to the flaws of the art.
And even that's a variable factor, because sometimes it matters and sometimes it doesn't—sometimes the artist's flaws are visible in the art and you still want to interact with it, sometimes they aren't and you still don't. I didn't stop reading T.S. Eliot when I learned more about the anti-Semitism that surfaces whenever his poetry mentions Jews. I stalled out trying to come up with an example of the latter that isn't reductio ad Hitler's paintings, e.g. William Mayne, so I'll stick with Rowling and agree that I did not see Rowling's transphobia coming from her children's fiction and I am very firmly on Team Don't Give This Person Further Money Unless They Really Change Their Attitude and Do Some Teshuvah or Something and I don't yet know if her views have altered my ability to re-read Harry Potter, since I just went six years without re-reading Prydain and that had nothing to do with my very good opinion of Lloyd Alexander. It's so idiosyncratic.
And with something like a TV show, where so many artists are involved, I'd hate to let the sins of one person negate all the effort and beauty the other people created.
This reminds me of the literal—as in, the show was not renewed for a second season—cancellation of CBC's Trickster (2020) after the director's Indigenous identity was called into question, on which there has been some really interesting pushback pointing out that punishing the showrunner by pulling the show does no favors to all the Indigenous actors, writers, and crew who were employed and made visible by it and now are not; it's further marginalization for the sake of bad math. On the other hand, I know people for whom Joss Whedon has rendered his own canon unrevisitable. We're back to no one having a one-size-fits-all solution.
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This is a slightly different category of problem, but Robert Jordan's ideas of What Men Are Like and What Women Are Like kind of drove me up the wall, and those absolutely came through in his fiction. And yet, there are still things I admire about the Wheel of Time (alongside all the things that were bad for reasons absolutely unrelated to morality, like "dude, don't both abandon all attempt to figure out how long your series will be and stop making any attempt to pull your core cast back together periodically, because the result is an entirely predictable kudzu shoggoth of plot"), and I have a hankering to run a tabletop RPG in that setting where we won't be shackled by his ideas of characterization and I can file off a few of the more annoying points of setting. Why? Because a chance comment in a companion book years ago gave me an idea, and the idea is still shiny, flaws in the canon be damned.
I'll stick with Rowling and agree that I did not see Rowling's transphobia coming from her children's fiction and I am very firmly on Team Don't Give This Person Further Money Unless They Really Change Their Attitude and Do Some Teshuvah or Something and I don't yet know if her views have altered my ability to re-read Harry Potter, since I just went six years without re-reading Prydain and that had nothing to do with my very good opinion of Lloyd Alexander. It's so idiosyncratic.
I haven't felt a strong pull to re-read Harry Potter since it finished, so I suspect it will be easy for me to go on not re-reading it, not so much because Disavow the Transphobe in All Ways, but because there isn't enough draw to make it worth my while. But -- apropos of what I just said above -- I had a vague notion of running a tabletop RPG set at an American wizarding school of my own creation (hidden inside the Winchester Mystery House), and the impulse to do that has faded. The idea was never shiny enough, and now it would remind me of stuff I'd rather not be reminded of.
This reminds me of the literal—as in, the show was not renewed for a second season—cancellation of CBC's Trickster (2020) after the director's Indigenous identity was called into question
Wait, seriously? I just read the first book of that and was thinking of checking out the show. And yeah -- canceling the show because one person doesn't measure up feels rather like cutting off the nose to spite the face. (It wouldn't let me read the article, though, so I don't know if there's more going on there.)
And now I'm thinking of a game I just backed on Kickstarter, Coyote and Crow, which is an AU Native American futuristic setting where colonialism never happened. The creators, who are all Native, just sent out an email addressing the pushback they've gotten which says that non-Native people shouldn't play the game (when the project explicitly says they hope all kinds of people will play it and have fun). This stuff gets so fraught, so fast.
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Thanks, you've woken up the part of my brain that remembers the gender dynamics in the Belgariad and the Mallorean.
(Actually, David and Leigh Eddings are relevant to this discussion because last summer I was part of a thread of people who had been cheerfully discussing their ironically or sincerely favorite bits of these deeply trashy epic fantasies when it was mentioned that the authors had been convicted of child abuse in the '70's and all of the air went out of everybody's rooms. It was sort of a combination Piers Anthony and Marion Zimmer Bradley. We were all reconciled to having formatively read books that in the light of adulthood were a bit or even a lot crap, but nobody was expecting the jail time.)
But -- apropos of what I just said above -- I had a vague notion of running a tabletop RPG set at an American wizarding school of my own creation (hidden inside the Winchester Mystery House), and the impulse to do that has faded. The idea was never shiny enough, and now it would remind me of stuff I'd rather not be reminded of.
I'm sorry. That would have been a good place to put a magic school. And explained a lot about the architecture.
Wait, seriously? I just read the first book of that and was thinking of checking out the show.
Seriously. I was waiting with great and legal patience for the show to turn up on one of the streaming services I have access to and it got lit-and-fig canceled instead. I believe you can still check out the show, but I don't believe there'll be any more of it, even under a different showrunner, and I am also unconvinced that was the best approach.
(It wouldn't let me read the article, though, so I don't know if there's more going on there.)
Oh, hell. I have no idea why. I don't even have a subscription to the Globe and Mail. I'll e-mail you the text.
This stuff gets so fraught, so fast.
It really does. And no one reads even the medium-sized print.
[edit] It occurred to me in conversation with
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Ahahahah -- sorry. I still have a weird fondness for those books because their snark is so close to my own, and for all their faults, they're still not as Smurfette-y as so many others, even today. I did not know that about the authors, though. I was unlikely to ever re-read those series now regardless, but the odds of it have gone down a bit more.
I'm sorry. That would have been a good place to put a magic school. And explained a lot about the architecture.
Inorite? Maybe someday I'll just write about some other kind of magic school there. (But I'd probably have to file off the Winchester House serial numbers as well as the Harry Potter ones, because I suspect there would be issues around that in a published book.)
It occurred to me in conversation with spatch this afternoon that I don't think it would solve the entire problem, but I certainly think it would help if people could decouple support from engagement.
Yes -- but capitalism blurs those lines. Plus there's the feeling of, if I have all too limited time to consume the many stories out there, do I want to engage with the thing whose problems I know about when I could instead be engaging with something that is at least theoretically better? The "at least theoretically" part acknowledges the flaws in that reasoning, but it doesn't mean the reasoning isn't still there. And it does hold some amount of water.
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Of course, but that's just another reason why we need libraries.
Plus there's the feeling of, if I have all too limited time to consume the many stories out there, do I want to engage with the thing whose problems I know about when I could instead be engaging with something that is at least theoretically better?
If you're the person making the decision to engage or not, yes, but I was thinking of it more in terms of community response—returning to the idea of art interpreted as signaling or branding, if you see someone on the subway reading what you consider a terribly problematic book, try not to assume it means that the person wholeheartedly agrees and endorses all the problems. To make it personal, I've got this icon that quotes the Dresden Dolls. It does not mean I co-sign every sketchy thing Amanda Palmer has ever done. And fortunately no one's ever come at me about it, but when Harlan Ellison died, it took me a very long time to put together a memorial post because the first thing that happened elsenet was I said that one of my most formative writers had died and all of a sudden people were piling receipts on me. The idea of good faith was part of the original post we're still tangentially discussing ("And if you're on the other side, if you see someone who is sad that a thing was ruined for them, maybe consider that they don't have malicious intent, that their ignorance was not on purpose"), so I am not proposing some kind of great innovation here, but the specificity seemed useful to me.
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