Roy Miller's Blog, page 275
February 12, 2017
Worst Page Turner (Quarterfinal 3)
We're tearing through our quarterfinals as fast as we can, so it's already time to vote in round three to see which titles will go on to the semifinal and then on to the the final round.
Everyone will get three (3) votes. The top four will go on to the semifinals.
The poll itself is on the bottom left of the side menus, below the "About the Author."
The quarterfinals will only be up for a few days each. Vote quickly!
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Writing About Writing (And Occasionally Some Writing): A Long Overdue Post
I was going to do the picture of the moths flying out
of my wallet, but I thought it might be too ham handed.
Image description: Author in B&W photo
Rent went up this year, and by no small amount. My Covered California plan also doubled in price (and will probably go up again since the ACA is likely to be repealed or gutted). I haven't been to the dentist in nearly two years. I live in a room and maintain a shoestring budget so that I can keep writing as much as possible. And when my cat got sick two weeks ago (she seems fine now, by the way) it wiped me out for a good two months (and would have been more if not for some donor's generosity). The underpants gnomes have also recently raided my drawers (see what I did there?).
I know the world is a strange and scary place right now, but if there were ever a time to support the artists and entertainers you want to see survive and keep doing what you love rather than serving you your next cheeseburger or driving your next Lyft to the airport, that time is now. Doubly so for the ones that are scraping by on a wing and a prayer.
Folks, I pumped pretty hard to get support for my Kickstarter going and I know people got pretty sick of seeing so much of that, so I wasn't going to put another "pledge drive" post up for a while, but it's been several months and we're long overdue. Usually I do this about once a month and it keeps me from having that aggressive reminder at the end of every single article. ("Yo, if you like this, subscribe, sign up for e-mails, and drop some skrizzle in the hizzle!") I know we're all just trying to get paid for our work, but some approaches seem more obnoxious to me than others.
Still, I'm not going for the soft sell today. The one with the florid, almost purple, prose about how sensational donations are and how supporters lift me up where we belong and the eagles fly on the mountain high and shit. Nope. It's the hard sell this time. And the undeniable fact that artists have bills just like everyone else.
Would that we could eat own inspiration and pay our bills with exposure and "Likes." But landlords don't have fucking vision, man. They always want cash.
If you want to keep this blog cranking out content every day, keep it ad free, and maybe even get more "meaty" articles, then consider a few dollars to help me get my bills paid and keep me writing instead of driving uber, waiting tables, or teaching middle schoolers how to use flash cards instead of playing Dark Souls XXXVIII if they want good grades.
And on that note, I have created a Patreon! (https://www.patreon.com/user?u=3202389)
Patreon is a simple, easy way to give an artist a set amount of money each month. And on my Patreon, even $12 a year (just ONE FRICKEN DOLLAR A MONTH) will get you access to "The VIP Room" where I will ask folks their input on upcoming projects, run patrons-only polls, and you get to be a part of chats with other patrons.
Of course there are cooler rewards for bigger patron amounts as well. My selfie game is pretty dudical–or so I'm told.
Of course if you prefer a one time donation, the "Tip Jar" from Paypal is over on the left, and I can get you information for Venmo as well if you e-mail me at chris.brecheen@gmail.com
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Essays – The New York Times
In his fiction Elkin interested himself in vocation (a bail bondsman, a D.J., a franchiser, etc.), whereas his essays revolve around his own proclivities and peccadilloes, so the voice that sings from “Pieces of Soap” is entirely Elkin’s. “The secret to life,” he writes in “Acts of Scholarship,” “is to specialize,” and Elkin is nothing if not an expert on himself. Throughout the pieces here, he takes the reader deep into, for instance, the myriad problems arising from multiple sclerosis (a limp, a cane, a wheelchair, grab bars in the shower), which take up the greater part of the lengthy “An American in California,” ostensibly a travelogue. In “At the Academy Awards,” Elkin describes his “first celebrity,” which turns out to have been a general he saw during basic training in 1955. He finds endless ways to digress into autobiographical tangents, usually with some crying and kibitzing.
Elkin’s inimitable language is an exuberant blend of high allusions and colloquial registers, as bounce-and-pop as it is stop-and-go. His sentences can contain, on the same page, wonderful one-off puns (he refers to remainder shelves as “has bins”) and a stretch of boisterous brilliance — if a narrative begins, he notes, with “a couple holding hands,” it will “climax in some spectacle of outrageous sky’s-the-limit orgy of almost Busby Berkeley proportion, as choreographed as battle, as all Barnum’d and Bailey’d three-ring’d, combination lust.” But if he can inspire with his inventiveness, he also, as John Updike noted, “rarely knew when to stop.” This can grow exasperating at times and self-indulgent at others (the didactic description of the flamenco dancer in “Performance and Reality”). Such risky tendencies are common in the literarily dexterous — think of Joyce, Nabokov and Pynchon — but as at an elaborate buffet, if you can stomach the lesser parts, you’ll leave satisfied and completely stuffed.
Continue reading the main story
EAT, LIVE, LOVE, DIE
Selected Essays
By Betty Fussell
298 pp. Counterpoint, $28.
The opening essay of Fussell’s honest and evocative collection makes an argument for the relevance of food as an important literary subject. “Eating, like speaking,” she writes, “reconnects through the imagination what reason has learned to disconnect through the senses.” But there is another, darker side to studying sustenance: “We don’t like to be reminded that if dung were not caviar to the dung beetle, the earth would be covered” in excrement.
Such a beginning is understandable for Fussell, as it would be for any essayist — to stake a claim in one’s enterprise, to make it matter. Fortunately, the persuasion is unnecessary, as Fussell’s writing is so deeply felt and beautifully rendered that she makes every topic she chooses feel vital to the reader. In one sequence, considering images from photos to paintings to television, she describes the effects of seeing “the world through the adventurous camera eyes of The National Geographic, Look and Life,” then brings in the censored newspaper photos of World War II, which did not prepare her for the reality of, e.g., an image of her brother Bob “with his grinning Marine buddies at Tarawa and Guadalcanal, holding up the decapitated heads of Japs.” Contrasting two views of her brother — “freckled boy and grinning Marine” — she concludes, “There was danger in revelation.”
The whole collection is this great. Whether she’s writing about food, her primary matter (though this covers everything from mayonnaise to Jell-O), her complex family life or culinary superstars like M.F.K. Fisher and Alice Waters (who provides the introduction here), Fussell is a gifted essayist and a meditative thinker, as enriching and relevant as she makes her subjects.
Continue reading the main story
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Colson Whitehead on George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo
“…a luminous feat of generosity and humanism … The souls crowd around this uncanny child. As the cast grows, so does our perspective; the novel’s concerns expand, and we see this human business as an angel does, looking down. In the midst of the Civil War, saying farewell to one son foreshadows all those impending farewells to sons, the hundreds of thousands of those who will fall in the battlefields. The stakes grow, from our heavenly vantage, for we are talking about not just the ghostly residents of a few acres, but the citizens of a nation — in the graveyard’s slaves and slavers, drunkards and priests, soldiers of doomed regiments, suicides and virgins, are assembled a country. The wretched and the brave, and such is Saunders’s magnificent portraiture that readers will recognize in this wretchedness and bravery aspects of their own characters as well. He has gathered ‘sweet fools’ here, and we are counted among their number … The narrator is a curator, arranging disparate sources to assemble a linear story. It may take a few pages to get your footing, depending. The more limber won’t be bothered. We’ve had plenty of otherworldly choruses before, from Grover’s Corners to Spoon River, and with so many walking dead in the pop culture nowadays, why not a corresponding increase in the talking dead? Are the nonfiction excerpts — from presidential historians, Lincoln biographers, Civil War chroniclers — real or fake? Who cares? Keep going, read the novel, Google later … the war here is a crucible for a heroic American identity: fearful but unflagging; hopeful even in tragedy; staggering, however tentatively, toward a better world … events sometimes conspire to make a work of art, like a novel set in the past, supremely timely. In describing Lincoln’s call to action, Saunders provides an appeal for his limbo denizens — for citizens everywhere — to step up and join the cause.”
–Colson Whitehead, The New York Times Book Review, February 9, 2017
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Graphic Novels Had a Strong 2016, Though Comics Sales Slowed
It’s a confusing time right now in the broad comics and graphic novels marketplace. Last year saw big accolades and big sales for Rep. John Lewis’s bestselling March trilogy (Top Shelf), the first comics title to win a National Book Award and four ALA literary prizes. But 2017 opened to a disappointing announcement that the New York Times will discontinue its graphic novel and manga bestseller lists.
Still, NPD BookScan, which tracks print sales across about 85% of the book trade, reports that graphic novel sales in 2016 increased by 12% over the previous year. In fact, comics is one of only a few categories in adult fiction in which print sales were up.
Meanwhile, rumors have been circulating among retailers since the end of 2016 that sales in the direct market (that is, the comics shop market) have been stagnant at best and may be headed for a precipitous downturn in the new year. (The comics shop market is a network of about 2,000 retailers around the country stocked by Diamond Comics Distributors, the largest comics distributor in North America, which generally sells nonreturnable stock at wholesale prices to these stores.)
After taking a year off, PW has revived its annual comics retailer survey, an informal survey of comic book retailers and general bookstores across the U.S. The survey aims to get a better sense of what the market’s actual sell-through numbers are, particularly in the comics shop market, and to solicit feedback directly from working comics retailers.
This year we surveyed five stores: Secret Headquarters in L.A.; Forbidden Planet in New York; Challengers Comics in Chicago; Powell’s Books in Portland, Ore.; and the Strand Bookstore in New York. The first three are comics stores that rely on Diamond Comics Distributors for 25%–80% of their stock; the last two are general trade bookstores with large graphic novel sections.
Election Anxiety Plus Slow Holiday Equals Soft Sales
The three comics shops we contacted, along with Powell’s, reported that sales in fall 2016 were down from the year before. Most of these retailers attributed the drop to the anxiety-producing political climate surrounding the 2016 presidential election.
“I think sales were definitely affected,” says Dave Pifer, co-owner of Secret Headquarters. “They were down; everything was chilled out big time. And I think what’s interesting is that it was kind of across the board.”
Doug Chase, a graphic novel buyer at Powell’s, says that he “saw some nervousness on the part of customers in the months leading up to the presidential election.”
Additionally, retailers say that the holiday buying season seemed to begin later in 2016 than it has in previous years. Some believe that customers’ holiday shopping habits are shifting.
Jeff Ayers, general manager of Forbidden Planet, says the timing of Hanukkah shifted holiday sales later at his store: “Having Hanukkah after Christmas really affects us. Sustained insanity for a month is what we’re looking for, not burning ourselves out at the end of month, and that’s what we did. But I’ll be happy next year when Hanukkah and Christmas are a bit more aligned.”
Patrick Brower, co-owner of Challengers Comics, along with most of the other retailers surveyed, says his store did well during the holidays: “As sales were trending down in the last third of 2016, it was reassuring to have solid holiday sales.” He notes that “the new normal for us is that holiday sales really don’t start until a week and a half before Christmas, as opposed to years ago when everything post-Thanksgiving was strong,” adding, “But this year [the holiday] was very solid.”
Indeed, Carson Moss, book buyer at the Strand says he had a very happy holiday season, noting that “comics were up 13% over the previous December.” Standout books at the Strand for the 2016 holidays included Black Panther, Vol. 1 by Ta-Nehisi Coates (Marvel), Paper Girls, Vol. 1 by Brian K. Vaughan (Image), and Yuge! 30 Years of Doonesbury on Trump by G.B. Trudeau (Andrews McMeel). Moss adds, “The second volume of Paper Girls, which released in December, has had a terrific start too.” (Paper Girls, Vol. 2, also did well at the Secret Headquarters during the holiday season, according to Pifer).
There was no single must-have gift book for the holiday season at the retailers we surveyed, but there were several graphic novels that were top sellers throughout 2016 and standout holiday gift selections. These bestselling graphic novels include Batman: The Killing Joke (deluxe edition) by Alan Moore and Brian Dolland (DC); Bitch Planet, Vol. 1 by Kelly Sue DeConnick (Image); Monstress, Vol. 1 by Marjorie Lui (Image); Paper Girls, Vol. 1; and the first six volumes of the Saga series by Brian K. Vaughn and Fiona Staples (Image).
In direct market comics stores, periodical comics (especially superhero comics) are the cornerstone product, though book collections sell increasingly well. The bestselling periodical comics across the three direct market stores in our survey included various single issues of Saga and Paper Girls; the first four issues of Marvel’s Black Panther (with issues #1 and #2 charting the highest); DC Rebirth #1 by Geoff Johns (DC); and Batman Rebirth #1 by Scott Snyder, Tom King, and Mikel Janin (DC).
But periodical comics are also an embattled format, as the popularity of trade paperback and hardcover releases grow among customers at comic book shops. At the Secret Headquarters, Pifer says that “single-issue monthly books by superhero publishers” are having the biggest drop in sales. Crowder also says that single-issue comic books are taking a dive in sales at Challengers.
Ayers says that sales of single-issue comic books are down at Forbidden Planet as well, but that the store’s biggest drop in sales was in its manga department. “We used to be one of the last bastions of the completist manga store,” he notes. “But [over] the last few years I’m not even giving space to the series that we’re just going to sell one [volume] of.”
Interestingly, manga sales are very strong at both of the general bookstores in our survey. Moss says that at the Strand, “manga showed double-digit growth [in 2016 over 2015].” And Chase says that at Powell’s, “we sell a lot of manga.”
Troubling Times in the Direct Market
Though the direct market retailers we surveyed had a number of operational complaints, specifically on order fulfillment and shipping costs, they were most concerned with cutting corners in order to survive in a market with low profit margins. With that in mind, Pifer says the Secret Headquarters is ordering less from Diamond, complaining of the expense, damages, and the delayed delivery of popular books.
In response to retailers concerns about order fulfillment, Roger Fletcher, v-p, sales and marketing at Diamond, says: “As the number of units we ship each week has increased, we are continuing to make investments in infrastructure to stay ahead of the curve. While we’re not perfect, our company-wide error rate is under 2% for shipments.”
Fletcher also confirmed that the distributor’s sales to direct market stores are basically flat: “Comic book and graphic novel unit sales in 2016 increased 0.3% over 2015.” But flat sales at the direct market sell-in level combined with the drop in single-issue sell-through to consumers points to a larger issue going on in the comics shop market at the moment.
“For the second year in a row the fourth quarter was really terrible,” says Ayers, who also blamed the election and postelection political anxiety—in addition to problems with some superhero product. “First of all, [there is the] crappy political climate—especially in New York City. Our constituency, as they say, is out fightin’ the fight, which is great, and then for our customers who are coming in, the product that’s coming in is absolutely [terrible].”
Joe Field—owner of Flying Colors Comics in Concord, Calif.; a former board member of ComicsPro, a comics retailers trade association; and cofounder of Free Comic Book Day, the annual national comics promotion—tweeted in early December a warning about the possibility of comic book shop closings. He also tells PW that he blames a soft comics market on the election year. Field says: “There’s been a lot of attention taken away from the market over the last several months. This happened in 2008, it happened in 2012. Starting in 1992, if you look at all the presidential years, most of them—six out of seven of them—were down years for the comics business.”
But most problems and complaints in the direct market—which specializes in, and depends on, sales of superhero comics from the Big Two—can be traced to whether retailers are unhappy or dissatisfied with the current state of comics published by Marvel and DC Entertainment. In recent years, Image Comics has mitigated any declines in Big Two periodical sales. At some stores, such as Chicago’s Challengers Comics, Image is on par with DC in sales of single-issue periodical comics and graphic novels. Brower breaks down sales at the store among the three publishers as follows: Marvel makes up 29%; DC 23%; and Image 23%.
Right now, Marvel periodical sales in the direct market are soft, Image sales don’t seem to be picking up the slack, and comics shop retailers are unhappy. Marvel tends to dominate the direct market in terms of number of units. But retailers are concerned that Marvel seems to be focused on making comics that will tie in to successful Marvel movie franchises, though the tactic doesn’t seem to be helping Marvel sell these comics titles.
Field says that in years past, “I could depend on ordering a Marvel first issue and knowing that I would be able to sell a minimum 35 copies, and if you added a popular character to it and creators, writers, and artists who have followings, you’d add more and more copies to the order to where that 35 could be 100 or 200 copies.” But, he notes, “Marvel has released a number of series over the past few months where we have not hit 10 copies sold of a first issue.”
Comics shop retailers are also concerned about the pricing of Marvel titles, which is comparatively high. Trade paperbacks start at $17.99 and periodical comics start at $4, and retailers say they are seeing readers gravitate to less costly titles.
At Forbidden Planet, Ayers says that in 2016, “in the third and even in the fourth quarter, Marvel came out with a ton of number ones [the first issues in series] that had a very limited audience.” He adds: “Why does everything have to be in a cycle for things in cinema? I’m sick of titles and characters that nobody gives a crap about.”
DC’s Rebirth periodical initiative is a 2016 effort to restore a number of plot and character elements the publisher had removed from many of its popular superhero series. The Rebirth initiative has been very popular and seems to have drawn some superhero readers back into stores, with most retailers reporting very strong sales for Rebirth #1 and other single issues in the line. Although some retailers noted a drop-off in sales after issue two, Forbidden Planet’s Ayers praises DC for making the series returnable, which is unusual for the direct market.
“With the softness we’re seeing on Marvel [and other publishers’] sales,” Field says, “there are fewer people coming to shops and fewer eyeballs for other comics at the same time.”
Kids’ Graphic Novels Grow Everywhere
General bookstores appear to have an easier time than the direct market, with sales spread across a wider range of publishers and particularly strong growth in children’s and YA comics. At the Strand, Moss says that “Marvel and DC make up 12% of sales, while 20% of sales are YA and children’s comics.”
At Powell’s, Chase says sales are “relatively flat compared to last year,” but he adds: “We continue to see amazing growth in all ages and young adult graphic novels. Young adult graphic novel sales have almost doubled over the last two years.” In fact, all the direct market retailers surveyed by PW are as bullish on kids’ and YA comics as they are bearish on Marvel single issues.
Ayers says that every year at Forbidden Planet, “all-ages books keeps growing and I never really see an end in sight.” He adds, “It’s not like I’m giving it more space, I’m just having more sales and that’s a good problem to have.”
According to the retailers surveyed, the comics and graphic novel market finished slightly up in 2016, and they’re waiting to see what will happen in 2017. Direct market retailers are worried about the ongoing drop in single-issue superhero comics sales and are looking for publishers to course correct toward markets and comics that show growth.
Field is preparing to attend the upcoming ComicsPro annual meeting this month in Memphis, Tenn. He says that despite the rumors and uncertainty in the direct market, he’s “still bullish on the market” He adds, “Having been through waves over the course of the last 20-plus years, it’s just another wave and those who are smart enough to be able to ride it will be healthier for doing it.”
A version of this article appeared in the 02/13/2017 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: Graphic Novels Rise, Periodicals Struggle in 2016
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February 11, 2017
Social Justice Bard vs. Milo the Troll
People like Milo Yiannopoulos know exactly how to avoid having their "Hail Hydra" moment on camera. But their entire self narrative of being JUST a troll or JUST a terrible asshole is contradicted by everything around them.
Without attempting to dictate at which point in the struggle against violent ideologies violence itself becomes acceptable or to enter the fray as to whether a University should host anything up to and including hate speech, let me just say that MiloYiannopoulos and the folks like him who know how to color just within the lines are ambassadors for their particular brand of bigoted ideology. They are the public facing spokespeople with the Mouth-of-Sauron smiles and smooth-voiced reason. They've worked very hard to find the most palatable way to present their ideas–particularly to a younger crowd who have fewer tools for hearing what's not being said.
And they're clever. There's no doubt about that.
Some of them, though I doubt highly this applies to Milo Yiannopoulos, may even hold their bigotry in a way that this society makes it possible to do: without ever forcing them to acknowledge their impact over their intention. Doing one shitty thing after another that demonstrably, measurably hurts people but believing that so long as they pinkie swear that they're really about equality, that's all that matters.
They know full well that this gambit works on liberals. Liberals with their nuance and their empathy and....well liberal ideals about freedom and liberty and mistrust of authoritarianism are quite susceptible. (Not that any of these things are weaknesses, but they can be leveraged.) A fair number of moderates will always back someone who indignantly cries that the only thing they want is a fair shake in the marketplace of ideas, and maybe even wonders why no one will debate them. Intellectuals will rigorously look for smoking gun caliber proof, even though there isn't any. Pacifists will fall for the wounded men's soccer player routine that happens when these provocateurs successfully provoke their marks. Staunch free speech advocates will waver when they howl about free speech if they are stymied in any way (conflating a freedom to say most things without government interference with an entitlement to medium and venue for spewing hate speech in a breathtakingly sophist way). By keeping their worst harm at two degrees of separation, they continue to avoid the conflict that right now only "unhinged liberals" are challenging them about.
But it is very easy to see the ideology by working with the context clues, so I'm going to use my English degree to do a close reading of something that "the author" never comes out and says.
Notice what folks like M.Y. speak out against (equality movements mostly, but "the left" in general) and the way they heap on as many villainous adjectives ("profane, angry, bitter, lesbianic [in the case of feminism], truculent, horrible, evil, debased") as they can. Feminism, Black Lives Matter, trans activism, body positivity. Any movement that seeks to point out the systematic harm that exists in our society is automatically discredited completely with a few quick brushstrokes of massaged statistics and a liberal application of more vitriol. They trash all such movements whole cloth, never really sticking with any particular criticism long enough to have the cascade chain of their logical fallacies unpacked, and every erroneous moving part examined. Insisting that the world is perfectly equal already, they pounce on any iota of energy that is expended trying to examine inequality, and lump it into "identity politics," which they claim is the worst blight on society ever. ANY lived experience that is shared based on an identity marker is shot down as "the REAL bigotry." Cis het white men are held up as the real victims of every equality movement. Sure they don't come out and openly announce their bigotry. These folks (and M.Y. in particular) avoid confrontation by saying "I don't hate people of color/women/transgender folks/etc... I swear!" But what isn't being noticed is the subtext: "I just hate every single movement ever that seeks to address the problems that people of color or marginalized folks have to deal with specifically and I think they are evil and the real problem."
Notice how M.Y., and those like him, claim cyberbullying isn't even real. Even as they engage in absolutely ruthless examples of it.
Notice what their less-diplomatically-trained acolytes spew (wanton white supremacy and bigotry–including [ironically] some pretty virulent anti-gay bilge). The "alt right" is a horrid cesspool of white supremacy, misogyny, homophobia, trans-antagonism, fatphobia and every other bigotry you can think of. They hang out on message boards and fantasize about violent hate crimes they'd love to commit. (The same boards that Dylan Roof, Elliot Rodger, and Alexandre Bissonnette were on.) Do folks like Milo refuse to associate themselves with this? Do they walk away? Do they call out their own? Do they ban the worst of their ilk and try to clean up the quagmire of turpitude that has festered unchecked? Is there ANY water's edge for the anti semitism or Islamaphobia? No, of course not. His fans chant "cuck" at his engagements and gleefully perpetuate the most horrific bigotry imaginable.
Notice that neo-nazis show up to almost every event he goes to. Why would that be if his message was as innocuous as he claims? One of these white supremacists recently shot and critically injured a protester.
Notice that his events coincide with an uptick in hate crimes. Why would this be the case if his message was as innocent and equality-loving as he unerringly insists when pressed? Could it be that something about his subtext is emboldening to ideologies based on fear and loathing? Could it be the dog whistles?
Notice how radicalized young white men flock in throngs wherever he goes.
Notice that the only diversity at his events are the victims of his harassment and hate mongering. A group of marginalized folks who he shouts over to insist that he's doing no harm–no matter what they have to say about it.
Notice the publication that M.Y. works for. Breitbart news is casually runs articles about an ethno-state. Did M.Y., as the senior editor, refuse to run such a piece? Did he tamp down? Does the timbre of articles (something a senior editor has great control over) reflect a restraint or limit on what it will suggest about bigotry. Or does Breitbart actually represent a horrific glimpse at an ideology of white nationalism and rank bigotry?
Notice that the Southern Poverty Law Center tracks Y.M. by name for both his words and the institutions to which he lends his energy. Notice that the track the groups he associates with as hate groups, and points out their white supremacy, homophobia, transantagonism, and misogyny.
Notice that the words of M.Y. and those like him, even when they know better than to come straight out and say that they want an ethno-state or that they hate women, are classified regularly as hate speech.
Notice that he is an inspiration to white supremacists–including Richard Spencer.
Notice the icons they embrace like Pepe (an appropriated symbol white supremacy that is a bit less well known than the swastika) or triple parentheses around a name to denote a Jew or Jewish interests. Of course with faux innocence, M.Y. can just say he is being edgy, but he somehow chooses never to be edgy by wearing a feminism symbol or a t-shirt suggesting 9/11 was awesome. His "edgy" always goes one way: bigotry.
Notice that M.Y., and those like him, rarely schedule debates with their peers (rather they schedule a few minutes of Q&A's with the mostly sycophants who endure their talks in places with young people who are less likely to understand how to critically think about these things.) They don't want their ideas appropriately challenged. They want to piss off college students and marginalized folks and claim THEY are the victims. When you can find them "debating," they are often shouting down their moderators, repeating a single point ad nauseum, and declaring fiat. ("That's simply not true. There is no wage gap! No economist in their right mind believes in the wage gap." In fact, many official bipartisan organizations staffed by an army of capable economists do demonstrate that the wage gap occurs when accounting for X factors like "choices" despite this poisoning of the well fallacy and the insular insistence otherwise.) His style of "debate" (if you can call it that) depends greatly on insults, interruptions, and abuse.
Notice–AND THIS IS KEY–what M.Y., and those like him, DO say. Outing trans folk in their college engagements. Teaching people how to out and report undocumented immigrants to "weed out illegals." (His words.) Calling fat people gross and calling for forced exercise centers. He endorsed "The Triggering" (an event intended to provoke PTSD reactions in as many as possible even if it involved transantagonism, pictures of rape or beheadings, or bigotry of any magnitute). He ordered his followers to go after Leslie Jones with some of the most racist filth imaginable. He wrote an article saying it should be legal to hunt any man with over 20% body fat with tranquilizer darts. He says that women's liberation was a mistake and women would be happier without labor saving devices that men were foolish to invent. He regularly uses slurs. He has said that "Behind every racist joke is a scientific fact." When he's on stage, he shows people by example how to literally harm marginalized folks and leaves his prey to be harassed. He probes the edges of what is socially considered absolutely unconscionable.
Notice the grant he set up available only to white men.
Notice M.Y.'s allies do when they are in power. Milo loves Trump. And he and Bannon have a strong connection through Breitbart. What are those operatives doing within days of being handed real power? Did they just stick to "edgy" jokes and dank memes because it was only ever about free speech and they weren't really racist? No. Rather they took all of six days to use Executive Orders to bypass congress in creating transparently racist laws that even conservative federal judges recognized as unconstitutionally biased.
The problem with looking at all of this, seeing that M.Y. (and those like him) talk like white nationalists, are followed by white nationalists, pal around with white nationalists, inspire white nationalists, attack people who aren't white nationalists, and behave like you would expect white nationalists to behave and then wondering if he's "really" a white nationalist just because he hasn't said so on the record is that it's beyond absurd. It is ludicrous. The level of incontrovertible proof being demanded gives him infinite licence to be as bigoted as he wants in deed as long as he doesn't come right out and say it. This idea that we have to know what is in people's heart of hearts is something any "spokesperson" for such a movement knows well how to exploit. M.Y. and those like him to hide in that shadow of plausible deniability and gaslight the world by convincing people that they aren't really seeing young white men being radicalized into neo-nazis right in front of their eyes. As long as he rolls his eyes and says that's ridiculous and of course he's all about equality, the growing numbers of them that appear wherever he goes won't matter.
Instead we could just look at who he's hurting, harassing, and bullying and it would be crystal clear along which lines his ideology tracks. As if we can't look at the racism, homophobia, transantagonism, and misogyny in the wake of his passing and instead need a beam into his soul of souls.
What white people have been doing for centuries when they are confronted by anything but a guy in a KKK hood being unmasked is to heap on this infinite doubt from the slightest ambiguity that goes beyond reasonable, beyond unreasonable, and into patently ridiculous. Instead look at the veritable Mt. Everest of evidence and the impact that marginalized groups are pointing out spreads outward like a blight from every place Milo's foot touches the ground.
He's a Hydra hailer. And so are those like him. Pinkie swear.
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Letters to the Editor – The New York Times
BERNARD F. DICK
TEANECK, N.J.
The writer is professor emeritus of communication and English at Fairleigh Dickinson University.
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To the Editor:
Bernard-Henri Lévy (By the Book, Jan. 1) cites Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America” as illuminating the current political situation in the United States. It is interesting to note that in a lengthy 2004 review published in The Atlantic, Clive James was somewhat dismissive of the work. He found that many of the plot points strained credibility.
Sadly we now know that Roth was remarkably, frighteningly prescient.
JON ELBAUM
TROY, N.Y.
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‘Bill Clinton’
To the Editor:
As the editor of the series in which Michael Tomasky’s “Bill Clinton” (Jan. 22) appears, I am grateful for Jim Kelly’s positive review. However, two matters need clarification.
Chiding Tomasky for criticizing Howell Raines’s and other Times writers’ attacks on Clinton over the Lewinsky scandal, Kelly says the book doesn’t mention that the paper rejected impeachment. But Tomasky allows that The Times “stopped short of demanding the president’s resignation,” which was well short of supporting impeachment.
Kelly then scolds Tomasky for omitting the press trashing of Lewinsky, which Kelly links to what he calls “an alleged campaign” by a Clinton aide to defame her. No responsible historian would credit allegations that even the House Republican impeachment managers ignored. Tomasky might have cited, for example, the Times columnist Maureen Dowd’s trashing of Lewinsky, but it would not have affected his argument.
SEAN WILENTZ
PRINCETON, N.J.
The writer is a professor of history at Princeton University.
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Giving Humboldt His Due
To the Editor:
Eric Foner’s review of “The Book That Changed America,” by Randall Fuller (Jan. 22), mentions Charles Darwin’s influence on Henry David Thoreau, specifically his “portrait of a ‘teeming, pulsating, natural world.’ ” In fact, both Darwin and Thoreau were strongly influenced by the German scientist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt.
According to Andrea Wulf’s fine biography (“The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World,” 2015) Darwin first encountered Humboldt’s writing, “Personal Narrative,” while a student at Cambridge and “modeled his own writing on Humboldt’s.”
Thoreau, too, was an avid reader of Humboldt’s books and, according to Wulf, “Humboldt’s name appeared regularly in Thoreau’s journals and notebooks.”
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It would be a shame to overlook the contributions of this lost hero of science once again.
PATIENCE KRAMER
WILMETTE, ILL.
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More on Thoreau’s Reading
To the Editor:
The probing review of Kevin Dann’s book on Henry Thoreau, “Expect Great Things” (Jan. 15), reminds us that Thoreau is held by many to be our “first environmental guru.”
Though she is not as well known and perhaps not as uniformly “transcendental,” I would suggest that Susan Fenimore Cooper also deserves to be considered among those writers who valued nature over scientism — surely as needed today as it was then. Her “Rural Hours,” which preceded “Walden” by four years, was known by, and may have influenced, Thoreau.
DAVID SOHMER SVAHN
DOYLESTOWN, PA.
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The Book Review wants to hear from readers. Letters for publication should include the writer’s name, address and telephone number. Please address them to books@nytimes or to The Editor, The New York Times Book Review, 620 Eighth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10018. Comments may also be posted on the Book Review’s Facebook page.
Letters may be edited for length and clarity. We regret that we are unable to acknowledge letters.
Information about subscriptions and submitting books for review may be found here .
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On Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem
“Both as a novelist and as a reporter and essayist, Joan Didion is one of the least celebrated and most talented writers of my own generation. Her first collection of nonfiction writing, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, brings together some of the finest magazine pieces published by anyone in this country in recent years. Now that Truman Capote has pronounced that such work may achieve the stature of ‘art,’ perhaps it is possible for this collection to be recognized as it should be: not as a better or worse example of what some people call ‘mere journalism,’ but as a rich display of some of the best prose written today in this country.
Though not as difficult to interpret as Susan Sontag, or as smoothly digestible as Theodore White, Miss Didion surely deserves a wide audience among those readers who may still be turned on by such qualities as grace, sophistication, nuance, irony and, as Miss Didion observed in another context, ‘what used to be called character.’
The author writes about the contemporary world– quite often the Western United States where she grew up and where she has returned after the writer’s almost obligatory boot-camp training in New York City– and though her own personality does not self-indulgently intrude itself on her subjects, it informs and illuminates them.
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“In her portraits of people, Miss Didion is not out to expose but to understand, and she shows us actors and millionaires, doomed brides and naïve acid-trippers, left-wing ideologues and snobs of the Hawaiian aristocracy in a way that makes them neither villainous nor glamorous, but alive and botched and often mournfully beautiful in the midst of their lives’ debris. Her portrayals remind me most of the line of a great poem of Robert Frost that says, speaking of us all, ‘Weep for what little things could make them glad.’
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“The title piece is about Haight-Ashbury, and conveys the complexity and the ‘atomization’ of the hippie scene not as the latest fashionable trend, but as a serious advanced stage of society in which things are truly ‘falling apart’ as in Yeats’s poem. Compare this piece with Time magazine’s hapless cover story on the hippies last year, and you will see why ‘group journalism’ is usually inferior to a single, talented writer using the ‘method’ explained by Miss Didion: ‘When I went to San Francisco in that cold late spring of 1967 I did not even know what I wanted to find out, and so I just stayed around a while, and made a few friends.’
That is how the best things are always done– a fact they won’t believe when you try to explain it at a writers conference. (They think you’re keeping a secret about how it’s really done.)
‘Goodbye to All That,’ an essay on the author’s years in New York, does for my generation’s love-hate affair with that capital what Fitzgerald’s essay ‘My Lost City’ did for the generation of the twenties. Speaking of her arrival in Manhattan fresh out of college, Miss Didion explains that during the first few days the only thing she did was ‘talk long distance to the boy I already knew I would never marry in the spring. I would stay in New York, I told him, just six months, and I could see the Brooklyn Bridge from my window. As it turned out the bridge was the Triborough and I stayed for eight years.’
If there are any readers who do not appreciate that last sentence, this reviewer is powerless to save them.”
–Dan Wakefield, The New York Times, June 21, 1968
Joan DidionSlouching Towards Bethlehem
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AWP 2017: A Political Book Fair
The AWP book fair, always the centerpiece of the conference experience, was as politically charged as this year's panels and protests. The fate of the National Endowment for the Arts was unsurprisingly on the minds of many at AWP, with the conference taking place only a couple of weeks after rumors started circulating that the Trump administration intends to slash the budget of the NEA. Many small and independent publishers and literary journals at AWP receive significant funding from the NEA and are rallying around the social media campaign #ThankYouNEA, through which attendees—including staff for Indiana Review, the Rumpus, Four Way Books, Nightboat Books, Graywolf Press, and many others—were photographed on the main book fair floor holding a whiteboard on which they'd written thank you messages to the NEA.
The campaign was brought to AWP by Kelly Forsythe, director of publicity for Copper Canyon Press, and poets Ben Purkert and Corey Van Landingham, with the help of literary journal Bodega, which printed "#ThankYouNEA" on postcards for attendees to fill out at the booth and which will be mailed to Rep. Ken Calvert, chair of the Subcommittee on the Interior, Environment and Related Agencies, who oversees the budget of the NEA.
Politically focused publishers such as Verso and Haymarket reported experiencing significant foot traffic at the fair. John McDonald of Haymarket, who last attended the conference in Chicago in 2012, said there was "a notable difference" in terms of how politically-minded attendees who stopped by the booth were. McDonald said many people stopped by just to express their thanks. For Haymarket, hot-selling books included Rebecca Solnit's Men Explain Things To Me, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor's From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, and the anthology The BreakBeat Poets.
"There's a new sense of urgency," said Mandy Medley of Coffee House Press, noting that a number of conference attendees who came to the Coffee House booth brought up the topic of how publishers can continue to support diverse voices on a day-to-day basis. Medley noted that some of the Coffee House's big sellers included Camanchaca by Diego Zuniga, Fish in Exile by Vi Khi Nao, books by Brian Evenson books, and titles by Valeria Luiselli, who was in attendance for a conversation on Friday afternoon with author Alexander Chee (The Queen of the Night) and Lisa Lucas, executive director of the National Book Foundation.
At the Tin House booth, another attending author's book sold well: Morgan Parker's new poetry collection There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce. Thomas Ross of Tin House said that poetry always does well for the press at AWP, noting how last year Melissa Broder's Last Sext was a big seller for them.
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Writing About Writing (And Occasionally Some Writing): Happy 5th Birthday Blog!
Image description: cake in the shape of a 5 with five candles
covered with blue frosting and M&Ms
Blog is now five years old!
Five years I birthed this little word baby upon the world. I've learned a lot since then–especially about what not to do. (Ten to twenty page navel gazing posts about prescriptive grammar don't make for particularly good blog entries. Who knew?) Blog had an unexpectedly awesome January that really ended year four with some razzle dazzle.
Blog wants me to play Big Time (of course) and promise that we're going to hit 4 million page views this year. Not three million...FOUR million.
At least I can for sure do the first part.
State of the Blogion
Since I'm a huge fan of goals (especially well designed, well considered goals) I want to process my goals here at the outset of year five, and I thought for people who wonder how that happens might like to see my process more transparently. Just because I'm making about half my money from writing and have a big audience doesn't mean I don't work on the fundamentals and it definitely doesn't mean I have all my shit together.
[While goals like subscribers and page views are technically not fulfilling the second S of "SMARTS" goals, I find that I can influence them with some predictability when I'm doing all the right things that I can control.]
My goals from year four were hit and miss. Mostly miss. But I got a few. And I'm edging closer to the point where I can write full time, and pay my bills from it.
My readership is WAY up from the year before. Even before the sudden explosion of traffic from My Facebook Page, I hit my low end goal of averaging 1200 hits a day. But accounting for that, we blew the doors off the hinges like Angel in the opening sequence. (Did I just make an 18 year old pop-culture reference. Oh yeah.)
My follower/subscriber growth on everything but Facebook was lethargic. I have about 650 followers across various platforms (or social media where I share nothing but writing updates). That's basically up from 500 and was under the goal of 750 I was hoping for. My stretch goal was 1000, and I didn't come anywhere close to that amount.
I managed to keep blogging, every week day, despite cancer treatments, a ten year relationship ending (or changing, I guess), and moving...twice.
I wrote almost no fiction that wasn't my work in progress. That's a mixed result since I didn't split my fiction writing into WIP and "other." So technically I hit it, but I'm giving myself Fry eye.
I didn't do any writing for the other blogs I usually write for. Bad Chris! No biscuit.
I did okay with social media before the election. After I got really stuck for a few months watching the train wreck. It was.....not good.
I failed hard at writing more reviews of products and awesome lesser-known books.
I failed at cleaning up a post or tab every week.
I resumed "Season 2" but did not write an arc significant enough to wrap up at the end of 2016.
These are my 2017 ("The Year We Fought Back") Goals:
Currently I'm getting between 5000 and 10,000 pageviews a day. I'm not sure if that's a fluke yet or not, but I'll set a goal assuming that it's not, and give myself a little latitude if things shrink down no matter what I do. I will try to average 5k per day. Stretch goal of 10k per day.
Cleaning up an old post, menu, or tab at least every week.
Resuming Season 2 with some sort of plot post at least once a week.
900-1000 followers. (Or 250-350 more across all social media) Stretch goal 1500.
Predictable "meaty" entries twice a week. (Wed and Fri) and the stretch goal of another one on Thursday.
Personal update (with word count) on Mondays.
Restart VLOG posts once every two weeks.
Restart weekly Mailbox posts.
Writing for Ace of Geeks at least once a month each. Stretch goal of bi-weekly.
Fiction once a month. (Beyond book writing.) No flex goal.
Finish book a mere two months late (Nov 31st.) Flex goal: finish book on time (Sept 31st)
Re-find those limitations on social media.
One review each month. Flex goal of one fiction and one craft book each month.
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