|
recent thought / activity
See the full list at LibraryThing
audio
|
representations of men
Someone I know recently posted a statistic (from a PhD study by an unnamed researcher at the University of Western Sydney) that claimed that "[m]en were predominately reported or portrayed in mass media as villains, aggressors, perverts and philanderers, with more than 75 per cent of all mass media representations of men and male identities showing men in one of these four ways." I counter-claimed that this could be empirically disproven by a casual glance at a newspaper, but it did get me wondering about the numbers. So I took a look at the front page of the New York Times website this morning. Here are links taken from that page that contain explicit reference to specific, individual men: [Thomas] Friedman: Moderates Exist [Ross] Douthat: Could defeat in court help Obama win? (2 men) [Mark] Bittman: Ads Aim at Kids Room for Debate: Is Paul Ryan Budget Viable? Guide: Challenges to Obama’s Health Care Law 2 Israeli Leaders [Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak] Make the Iran Issue Their Own (2 men) Tibetan Exiles Rally Around Delhi Self-Immolator [Jamphel Yeshi] Strength and Weakness in Campaign of Ron Paul Diner’s Journal: Don Draper and the Delicate Art of Restaurant Renovation Tebow, a Careful Evangelical JetBlue to Review Procedures After Pilot Meltdown: CEO [Dave Barger] US. Sen. [Scott] Brown Gets New National Guard Assignment [Mark] Zuckerberg in China, Let The Rumors Begin Assad Accepts Cease-Fire; Opponents Are Skeptical Passengers Restrain Captain [Clayton Osbon] After Crisis on JetBlue Flight Hilton Kramer, Art Critic and Champion of Tradition in Culture Wars, Dies at 84 Gingrich Is Cutting Staff to Shift Focus to Convention Group Led by Magic Johnson Wins Auction to Buy Dodgers for $2.15 Billion Climate Prophet [Mohamed Nasheed] in Hot Water Eric Lowen, Half of a Singing-Writing Duo, Dies at 60 Bert Sugar, Boxing Writer and Commentator, Is Dead at 75 ArtsBeat: Ask the 'Hunger Games' Director [Gary Ross] Your Questions Books of The Times: The Tracks of an Author’s, and a Reader’s, Tears [Reader= Dwight Garner] Books of The Times: Gentleman Who Finds Terrorism Amusing [Lionel Shriver] THE FIFTH DOWN: Scouting the Draft: Mississippi State's Fletcher Cox INDIA INK: India's Minister for Sanitation [Jairam Ramesh] Promises End to Open Defecation in a Decade Obama vs. [John] Boehner: Who Killed the Debt Deal? The Ethicist [Randy Cohen]: Calling All Carnivores LATITUDE: Jesus for Jews Theater Review: Volleys of Words From a Writer of No Brevity [David Foster Wallace] Eliminating the duplicate Obamas, I count 31 men here: politicians, writers, athletes, businessmen, filmmakers, religious leaders. Two are notable "philanderers" (Don Draper, Newt Gingrich) although neither of these articles "report[s] or portray[s]" these men as a philanderer. I'll act in a spirit of generosity and count Draper, but not Gingrich. Similarly, a few of these people could be considered "aggressors" depending on your outlook (Gingrich? Ron Paul? Emud Barak?) but, again, none of the articles focus explicitly on their "aggressor" nature, so my count there is zero. The JetBlue pilot behaved "erratically," not necessarily "aggressively," but again, in the spirit of fairness, I'll count him as a "villain." Whoever covers the "pervert" beat at the NYT must have had the day off, cause I don't see any here. Total count: 2, or 6.4% of 31. For contrast, by the way, here are links taken from that page that contain explicit reference to specific, individual women: Joan Nathan's Matzo Balls Killing of Iraqi Woman [Shaima Alawadi] Shakes Community Books of The Times: The Tracks of an Author’s, and a Reader’s, Tears [Author=Cheryl Strayed] T Magazine: Look of The Moment | January Jones Four women! One cook, one actress (noted here for her "look"), one victim of violence, and—thank God—one author, who shares space in her headline with a (male) reader. So, if you're going to talk to me about disparities in gender representation, let's start the conversation here. I will conclude by noting that there are a few big articles about the Supreme Court, which if I counted them as being articles about three women and six men would up the count of women in today's NYT to seven, up the count of men to thirty-seven, and reduce the percentile of men portrayed as "'villains, aggressors, perverts [or] philanderers" to 5.4%. Labels: feminism, media commentary
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
apocalypse, pain, and writing
From an interview with Nick Harkaway, whose The Gone-Away World is a book I still would like very much to read: "It's not really enough any more to say "this will destroy the world", because that's sort of a given. You have to show what that means, why it matters. You have to show pain. We all know about pain on some level. Apocalypse is a gag. Pain is real. Contemporary issues - albeit dressed up and taken sideways - they make you feel. You have a stake in the action. And without that sense of investiture, action is just noise. " Labels: advice, creative_process, writing
Thursday, February 02, 2012
the year in music: 2011
Whoops, hey, it's getting a little bit on the late side to be posting my "best albums of 2011," but what the heck. I found it tough to rank these, as each of them covers very different sonic ground, and so I'm opting for a straight alpha-by-artist list. But honestly I thought it a very fine year for music. Julianna Barwick, The Magic Place. I tweeted something mid-year about how when I open my secular megachurch I will invite Julianna Barwick to sing there every week. Her looped constructions are impossibly lovely, some of the most consoling and comforting sounds I've yet heard humans make. I loved her 2009 album Florine but had my doubts about whether she'd be able to expand her sound meaningfully on a new, longer album: never have I been so pleased to be proven wrong. James Blake, James Blake. One of two albums this year that aggressively disassembled and reassembled the popular song. (Blake's is the one that is wintry, quiet, introspective, narcissistic, and quintessentially British.) Required listening if you want to affirm that there's still life in the Song. The Field, Looping State of Mind. Bliss-out repetitive dance music. The weird wordless vocals, new to this album, add an important level of emotional resonance that I'm not sure the Field has ever reached before. And thus Axel Willner gets ever closer to producing music that's as crucial to the heart as, say, this. Not quite there yet, but it's within reach. Tim Hecker, Ravedeath, 1972. For around ten years now, abstract electronic musician Tim Hecker has been making music that skirted close to being excellent but never quite broke into that upper tier. But then this album came along, and I'm not alone in calling it Hecker's masterpiece. I'm not sure if it was the unusual circumstances of the recording (the base tracks for the album were captured from a pipe organ in an Icelandic church) or the help from producer Ben Frost (a quality abstract electronic musician in his own right). But it doesn't matter. This is the one. Bon Iver, Bon Iver. It took me a while to figure out what this album was doing, and I'm still not sure I endorse all its choices. But the key, for me, was to stop trying to figure out what Bon Iver was saying, or what he was singing about, and appreciate his voice as a textural element, in the same way that, say, one appreciates Liz Fraser's voice on those 1980s Cocteau Twins albums. This makes all the care and detail lavished on the album's other textural elements suddenly leap into focus, and you begin to think that maybe he's developing these little soundworlds as an attempt to establish himself as the true heir to 4AD-style art rock, instead of as a contemporary folk-inflected songwriter like, say, Sam Beam from Iron and Wine. Jacaszek, Glimmer. I once wrote that Treny, Jacaszek's 2008 album, sounded like "what house music would sound like if house music emerged from a pre-industrial Eastern European castle instead of from the dance floors of post-industrial Detroit." Needless to say, I was a big fan, and I worried that this follow-up wouldn't scratch the same itch. But it totally does. A fantastically crepuscular record. It uses a harpsichord. Plus it has the best cover art of the year. Minamo, Documental. Minamo albums have made my best-of-year roundups as long ago as 2002 and as recently as 2010; once I said that they made music that was in"maximum accordance with a very fine-grained model of my aesthetic tastes." With each new album they continue to modify their sound, and by now they've emerged as some of the most mature and confident practitioners of the gentle (and occasionally incredibly harsh) electroacoustic improvisational music I've loved for a decade now. (Honorable mention: Fourcolor's As Pleat, the 2010 solo release by Minamo's Keiichi Sugimoto, which has many of the same strengths.) Oneohtrix Point Never, Replica. Garbled constructions made from nostalgia-inducing shards; a great, stuttering, broken vision of the future. Difficult to take in large doses, but undeniably the work of either a visionary talent or a defective robotic anthropologist. tUnE-yArDs, W H O K I L L. One of two albums this year that aggressively disassembled and reassembled the popular song. (Garbus' is the one that is summery, loud, other-directed, political, and quintessentially American.) Required listening if you want to affirm that there's still life in the Song. Tuusanuuskat, Nääksää Nää Mun Kyyneleet. I don't know what's in the water over there, but for the last decade or so Finland's experimental music scene, loosely grouped around the influential Fonal label, has been producing some of the most uncharacterizable inventions, a kind of demented blend of noise, tribal rock, children's percussion, sing-along song, and whatever else they can jam into the mix. This album represents a collaboration between two of the key figures from that scene, Fonal label head Sami Sänpäkkilä (who records under the name Es) and Jan Anderzen, one of the art-damaged Kemialliset Ystävät crew. Difficult listening, yet every second is a clear manifestation of genius. Or maybe madness. Criminally overlooked. Labels: lists, music_commentary
Monday, January 09, 2012
exemplary sentences
"Quarrels, and the desolate cries of street hawkers, and the shouts of children chasing orange-peel over the cobbles, and at night loud singing and the sour reek of the refuse-carts, made up the atmosphere of the street." Labels: exemplary sentences
Friday, January 06, 2012
the year in reading: the new yorker
In addition to those forty books, I also read nearly every issue of the year's New Yorker crop. I made some notes about articles that I found particularly enjoyable or insightful; here are Atul Gawande, "The Hot Spotters" (on an alternate approach to health care) January 24, 2011 Lawrence Wright, "The Apostate" (in which film director Paul Haggis breaks from Scientology) Feb 14 & 21, 2011 Raffi Khatchadourian, "The Gulf War" (on the logistics of the response to the Deepwater Horizon disaster) March 14, 2011 Anthony Lane, "The Fun Factory" (on the workplace climate at Pixar) May 16, 2011 Kelefa Sanneh, "Where's Earl?" (on the mysterious disappearance of Odd Future's Earl Sweatshirt) May 23, 2011 John Colapinto, "Strange Fruit" (on how the acai berry became a craze) May 30, 2011 Rachel Aviv, "God Knows Where I Am" (on the difficulties encountered when schizophrenics reject their diagnoses) May 30, 2011 Seymour Hersh, "Iran and the Bomb" (in which doubt is cast about whether Iran was ever, in fact, trying to develop nuclear weapons) June 6, 2011 Aleksandar Hemon, "The Aquarium" (about the illness and death of his daughter) June 13 & 20, 2011 (subscribers or pay-for-access only) John Cassidy, "Mastering the Machine" (on a mysteriously successful hedge fund) July 25, 2011 Adam Gopnik, "Dog Story" (part personal essay about dogs, part survey of the current theories about how dogs became domesticated) Aug 8, 2011 Atul Gawande, "Personal Best" (on whether all professionals would benefit from coaching) October 3, 2011 Most of these aren't paywalled, so enjoy! Labels: lists
Thursday, January 05, 2012
the year in reading: 2011
New Year's Day! Time for list-making fun! One of the things I like to do each year is make a list reflecting back on my reading log, which I maintain through LibraryThing. (Previous years: 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004.) So! This year I read 40 books, my best run since 2008. The big shift of the year was that I read novels in full force, clocking in with what looks like 23 novels. (I haven't read 23 novels in a single year since I started keeping this book log!) I think part of my revivified interest in fiction came from working on a novel myself—when you're deeply concentrated on the million little problem-sets of a novel, everybody else's novels begin to look like different approaches to the same challenges, and thus are not only entertaining, but also pedagogically instructive. One other thing that helped: working on Instafiction.org, a "fiction curation" project which forced me to pay attention to good fiction from both the past and the present. Anyway, here are the novels, and here's what I thought. Masterpiece Beloved, by Toni Morrison Great Light In August by William Faulkner Very Good We Don't Live Here Anymore: Novellas by Andre Dubus Then We Came To The End by Joshua Ferris Spook Country by William Gibson How To Live Safely In A Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu Good With Reservations The Sense of An Ending by Julian Barnes Parable of The Sower by Octavia Butler Open City by Teju Cole Point Omega by Don DeLillo The Magicians by Lev Grossman The Friends Of Eddie Coyle by George V. Higgins Pym by Mat Johnson The Trial by Franz Kafka Eeeee Eee Eeee by Tao Lin The Ask by Sam Lipsyte Skippy Dies by Paul Murray Freedomland by Richard Price The Pale King by David Foster Wallace What else did I read in 2011? Nine works of nonfiction, including memoirs and polemics. Two of those were books about gaming—Jane McGonigal's Reality Is Broken and Tom Bissell's Extra Lives (which I also taught to my WR 150 students). Both are worth reading, although McGonigal's contained more food for thought. Two were chef memoirs—Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential and Gabrielle Hamilton's Blood, Bones, and Butter—neither one is a masterpiece for the ages, but both were fun to read. Gertrude Stein's Narration: Four Lectures and Zadie Smith's Changing My Mind both warrant mention here as well. Two books of poems: Juliana Spahr's Well Then There Now and Sawako Nakayasu's Texture Notes, both recommended. I also read five graphic novels or books of comics, of which Kate Beaton's Hark! A Vagrant was the clear standout. And finally, unclassifiable elsewhere is Mountain Man Dance Moves: The McSweeney's Book of Lists, which made me chuckle here and there but is noteworthy mainly as an example of how a bad book design can kill good content. Labels: book_commentary, lists
Sunday, January 01, 2012
weekly offering (dec 3-dec 16)
Game critic / journalist Tom Bissell on Skyrim "Year in Reading" lists from Dennis Cooper and Ben Marcus Somehow I missed this interesting-looking graphic novel from last year: Duncan the Wonder Dog (now only available digitally) New York magazine claims, perhaps dubiously, that e-books represent a new literary form Bracketology diagram for shitty aspects of the contemporary writing life Don't self-publish your book... ...design your own exercise program instead? US Census: half of all Americans are poor or low-income Bloomberg: Rich-poor divide widening in the developed world Maybe stickers are the future Boing Boing's annual gift guide Pitchfork's somewhat predictable Top 50 Albums of 2011 ...and their 20 worst album covers The worst films of 2011 (funny) The worst sounds in the world (distressing) Labels: linkfarms
Friday, December 16, 2011
| |||||||||||||||||||||||
|