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I have, of course, signed up for DVD commentary. Anyone is always free to remix, podfic, analyze, or otherwise build on anything I’ve written. In fact, I adore that, and just want links! I’ve also been called on skanky race issues and told I promote heteronormativity, so I devoutly hope to survive further critical responses.
My current Dean song: Carry Me Home, by Marit Bergman. It’s almost happy!
In the Hunt: Unauthorized Essays on Supernatural, ed. Supernatural.tv: Okay, I’m clearly more forgiving because I’m still so in love with the show, but this collection is decent, with the kind of meta that approaches the cream of what you get on LJ. You won’t find much feminism or critical race analysis or anything like that—there are nods to the show’s expressions of homophobia and some authors admit that there might be something slightly problematic about the show’s terrible gender issues, but this collection shies away from criticism in the name of love.
I liked the essays about objects best—one on the role of the Impala, and the other on the role of the Impala, the Colt, and Ruby’s knife. They made me think about what I see as the key Impala moment, when Dean beats the shit out of it/her. That’s such a powerful moment, and those of us who like to anthropomorphize her have a hard time with it. (Here's the best I've seen done.) Dean's attack is (a) expressing self-hatred; (b) expressing his anger at his father (who gave him the car and the hunting life); (c) expressing his resentment that all he has in life is the hunt (the car is the only stable home he has, except it only works if it’s not stable, by definition, so that doesn’t work so well); (d) expressing his misogyny (we, like Dean, generally identify the car with a woman—he is attacking an object/person who cannot fight back and, we probably think, wouldn’t if she could; and of course he’s sorry after and fixes her up nice); (e) some even more complicated combination. Dean and his car concretize Dean’s issues with his father/masculinity as well as his issues with caretaking/femininity; I think that’s why to love Dean is also to love his baby.
Joanna Russ, Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans & Perverts: Published in 1985, this book of essays nonetheless engages with still ongoing debates, not least including “tone” and, separately, the uneasy relationship between sexual fantasy and political/cultural antipatriarchal work. She specifically discusses slash, both the ways in which it’s liberating and the ways in which it’s depressing in that women writers imagine freedom as male, as well as nonfandom-generated porn/erotica/call it what you will. Key quote: “The feminism I know began as politics, not rules for living. To call X a feminist issue did not then mean that there was a good way to do X and a bad way, and that we were trying to replace the bad way with the good way. X was a feminist issue because it was the locus of various social pressures (which it made visible) and those social pressures were what feminism was all about.” She strikes me as deeply, fundamentally sympathetic--trying to understand where various behaviors and positions, including male sexual fantasies, are coming from and how feminist theory ought to respond to them.
Dave Cullen, Columbine: Crosscutting back and forth in time, the book tells the story of the Columbine killers, the aftermath, and the day of the massacre itself. While it’s overlong, it debunks various myths that have become part of the public discourse: that the killers were loners, that they targeted jocks, that they were responding to bullying. Most shocking to me, actually, was the story of the coverup engaged in by county officials that started the day of the killings—the ringleader, Harris, had been reported to the police a number of times, and an officer had read his online diary talking about bombmaking and plans to kill and had even prepared a warrant to search his house, but the warrant was never executed for probably the same reasons that anything slips through the cracks. (The boys had earlier been arrested for burglarizing a car and had successfully completed probation; they were white boys from good families—the reports don’t say “white,” but you can bet it made a difference—and Harris in particular was good at feigning remorse; everyone thought he had a bright future.) After the massacre, county officials conspired to destroy all the evidence that the police had known of the potential danger, and continued to stonewall for years. Nobody was ever punished for that, either. I thought the back-and-forth structure didn’t work all that well and I would have liked more on the changes to SWAT team protocol made as a result—because the police didn’t understand what they were dealing with, they delayed over three hours in going in, which seems to have allowed at least one victim to bleed to death, while the killers were already dead by their own hands. Now they’re supposed to assess what kind of killer they’re dealing with, but I’d be very interested in what the diagnostic signs are.
Daniel J. Levitin, This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession: A fairly readable overview of the basics of music and what we know about the brain’s response to music. It’s best at making the points that (1) we are all experts at listening to music, even if the formal vocabulary escapes us, and (2) the modern separation of music from movement has distracted us from the deep connection between the two—music comes from the body as well as the brain. Near the end he gallops pretty fast through the supposed evolutionary benefits of music, though this evo-psych stuff always has a just-so flavor for me so that’s always going to be the part I think makes the least sense. (For example, did you know that you can explain the role of music in human evolution solely in terms of how it helped prehistoric men win prehistoric women’s affections, demonstrating males’ ability to perform the complex motions required to hunt successfully and their ability to cooperate with others? This is totally why women can’t sing or play instruments, and why some kinds of music are nonetheless gendered female in modern culture! Is that what people mean when they say “trufax”? To be fair, Levitin is only responsible for the first sentence of this aside, but that first sentence is—without the awareness that some musical bodies are getting left out of the story except as choosers—not an unfair summary of his coverage of the topic.)
My current Dean song: Carry Me Home, by Marit Bergman. It’s almost happy!
In the Hunt: Unauthorized Essays on Supernatural, ed. Supernatural.tv: Okay, I’m clearly more forgiving because I’m still so in love with the show, but this collection is decent, with the kind of meta that approaches the cream of what you get on LJ. You won’t find much feminism or critical race analysis or anything like that—there are nods to the show’s expressions of homophobia and some authors admit that there might be something slightly problematic about the show’s terrible gender issues, but this collection shies away from criticism in the name of love.
I liked the essays about objects best—one on the role of the Impala, and the other on the role of the Impala, the Colt, and Ruby’s knife. They made me think about what I see as the key Impala moment, when Dean beats the shit out of it/her. That’s such a powerful moment, and those of us who like to anthropomorphize her have a hard time with it. (Here's the best I've seen done.) Dean's attack is (a) expressing self-hatred; (b) expressing his anger at his father (who gave him the car and the hunting life); (c) expressing his resentment that all he has in life is the hunt (the car is the only stable home he has, except it only works if it’s not stable, by definition, so that doesn’t work so well); (d) expressing his misogyny (we, like Dean, generally identify the car with a woman—he is attacking an object/person who cannot fight back and, we probably think, wouldn’t if she could; and of course he’s sorry after and fixes her up nice); (e) some even more complicated combination. Dean and his car concretize Dean’s issues with his father/masculinity as well as his issues with caretaking/femininity; I think that’s why to love Dean is also to love his baby.
Joanna Russ, Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans & Perverts: Published in 1985, this book of essays nonetheless engages with still ongoing debates, not least including “tone” and, separately, the uneasy relationship between sexual fantasy and political/cultural antipatriarchal work. She specifically discusses slash, both the ways in which it’s liberating and the ways in which it’s depressing in that women writers imagine freedom as male, as well as nonfandom-generated porn/erotica/call it what you will. Key quote: “The feminism I know began as politics, not rules for living. To call X a feminist issue did not then mean that there was a good way to do X and a bad way, and that we were trying to replace the bad way with the good way. X was a feminist issue because it was the locus of various social pressures (which it made visible) and those social pressures were what feminism was all about.” She strikes me as deeply, fundamentally sympathetic--trying to understand where various behaviors and positions, including male sexual fantasies, are coming from and how feminist theory ought to respond to them.
Dave Cullen, Columbine: Crosscutting back and forth in time, the book tells the story of the Columbine killers, the aftermath, and the day of the massacre itself. While it’s overlong, it debunks various myths that have become part of the public discourse: that the killers were loners, that they targeted jocks, that they were responding to bullying. Most shocking to me, actually, was the story of the coverup engaged in by county officials that started the day of the killings—the ringleader, Harris, had been reported to the police a number of times, and an officer had read his online diary talking about bombmaking and plans to kill and had even prepared a warrant to search his house, but the warrant was never executed for probably the same reasons that anything slips through the cracks. (The boys had earlier been arrested for burglarizing a car and had successfully completed probation; they were white boys from good families—the reports don’t say “white,” but you can bet it made a difference—and Harris in particular was good at feigning remorse; everyone thought he had a bright future.) After the massacre, county officials conspired to destroy all the evidence that the police had known of the potential danger, and continued to stonewall for years. Nobody was ever punished for that, either. I thought the back-and-forth structure didn’t work all that well and I would have liked more on the changes to SWAT team protocol made as a result—because the police didn’t understand what they were dealing with, they delayed over three hours in going in, which seems to have allowed at least one victim to bleed to death, while the killers were already dead by their own hands. Now they’re supposed to assess what kind of killer they’re dealing with, but I’d be very interested in what the diagnostic signs are.
Daniel J. Levitin, This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession: A fairly readable overview of the basics of music and what we know about the brain’s response to music. It’s best at making the points that (1) we are all experts at listening to music, even if the formal vocabulary escapes us, and (2) the modern separation of music from movement has distracted us from the deep connection between the two—music comes from the body as well as the brain. Near the end he gallops pretty fast through the supposed evolutionary benefits of music, though this evo-psych stuff always has a just-so flavor for me so that’s always going to be the part I think makes the least sense. (For example, did you know that you can explain the role of music in human evolution solely in terms of how it helped prehistoric men win prehistoric women’s affections, demonstrating males’ ability to perform the complex motions required to hunt successfully and their ability to cooperate with others? This is totally why women can’t sing or play instruments, and why some kinds of music are nonetheless gendered female in modern culture! Is that what people mean when they say “trufax”? To be fair, Levitin is only responsible for the first sentence of this aside, but that first sentence is—without the awareness that some musical bodies are getting left out of the story except as choosers—not an unfair summary of his coverage of the topic.)
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