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Did anyone else think, when Google announced it was adding underwater reefs to its maps in the same week that Apple got its own map app disastrously wrong, “now you’re just showing off”?
Genre, Reception, and Adapatation in the “Twilight” Series, ed. Anne Morey: A mixed bag of essays about gender, audience reception (both affirmational and anti-fannish, but not much on fan creations), and the differences between books and movies. Catherine Driscoll makes the excellent point that “feminizing the object of desire in girl culture is in no way equivalent to desexualizing it.” Matt Hills discusses how other fandoms reacted to/policed Twilight fans in gendered and depressing ways, while Twilight’s official productions often pathologized “ordinary” fans right back while insisting that Twilight fans were awesome. He suggests that official texts surrounding the movies served a pedagogical function: teaching fans what kinds of fannishness were appropriate. Sarah Wagenseller Goletz also focuses on anti-fans, noting that the reason that Meyer uses so many cliches and Mary Sue-isms (thus triggering revulsion among the anti-fans) is that they work, and then pointing out that
Timothy Noah, The Great Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It: Things I learned: FDR proposed that “no American citizen ought to have a net income, after he has paid his taxes, of more than $25,000.” Horatio Alger became a writer after being forced out of the pulpit for molesting a 13-year-old and a 15-year-old (both boys). Things I didn’t: corporate compensation is out of control (“[In the hiring of top executives,] the formalities of labor market research may be observed at the outset, but only in the same way the Geneva Conventions were observed at Abu Ghraib.”); immigration is not to blame for most of the growing inequality, nor is low-wage foreign competition; the decline of unions and the rise of corporate influence on politics have done much more to increase inequality; if you want to decrease inequality, vote for a Democrat.
Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan: As he did in his book on the Green Zone in Iraq, Chandrasekaran blisteringly reveals American arrogance, wastefulness, and infighting leading to incompetent planning and execution of the mission/s (because people disagreed about what the idea was) in Afghanistan. It’s hard to pick out the most awful part, but my candidate is the way that USAID repeatedly stopped projects to get Afghan farmers growing cotton—a cash crop that they really could have sold in-country in place of opium poppies—because Afghan cotton might someday, theoretically, compete with American cotton. Because that’s really much more important than cutting off the Taliban’s funding and providing Afghan farmers with a sustainable crop!
Genre, Reception, and Adapatation in the “Twilight” Series, ed. Anne Morey: A mixed bag of essays about gender, audience reception (both affirmational and anti-fannish, but not much on fan creations), and the differences between books and movies. Catherine Driscoll makes the excellent point that “feminizing the object of desire in girl culture is in no way equivalent to desexualizing it.” Matt Hills discusses how other fandoms reacted to/policed Twilight fans in gendered and depressing ways, while Twilight’s official productions often pathologized “ordinary” fans right back while insisting that Twilight fans were awesome. He suggests that official texts surrounding the movies served a pedagogical function: teaching fans what kinds of fannishness were appropriate. Sarah Wagenseller Goletz also focuses on anti-fans, noting that the reason that Meyer uses so many cliches and Mary Sue-isms (thus triggering revulsion among the anti-fans) is that they work, and then pointing out that
[b]ecause we know, for instance, that Meyer believes Bella constitutes a slate blank enough for readers to ‘easily step into her shoes,’ Meyer’s priileged classes instantly become visible by showing us what she thinks of as invisible. Unsurprisingly, they are traits about herself that we can assume she takes for granted: white, female, middle-class, heterosexual, America, Judeo-Christian, etc…. The fan, then, is the intended reader who either does not know or does not care what ideologies construct her, while the anti-fan is the intended reader who does know, and resists, but, because she will never be able to throw off completely that which constructs her, remains vulnerable to manipulation of the powerful triggers of those ideologies.I was particularly intrigued by her argument that Bella and Edward were so effective because Meyer split Mary Sue in two, “funnel[ing] each of Mary Sue’s two primary objectives—author insertion and wish-fulfillment—individually into Bella and Edward, respectively.” This makes Twilight the story of two sides of a single being “meeting and attempting to reunite into the whole character they were meant to be,” tapping into primal yearning for integration in readers as well.
Timothy Noah, The Great Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It: Things I learned: FDR proposed that “no American citizen ought to have a net income, after he has paid his taxes, of more than $25,000.” Horatio Alger became a writer after being forced out of the pulpit for molesting a 13-year-old and a 15-year-old (both boys). Things I didn’t: corporate compensation is out of control (“[In the hiring of top executives,] the formalities of labor market research may be observed at the outset, but only in the same way the Geneva Conventions were observed at Abu Ghraib.”); immigration is not to blame for most of the growing inequality, nor is low-wage foreign competition; the decline of unions and the rise of corporate influence on politics have done much more to increase inequality; if you want to decrease inequality, vote for a Democrat.
Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan: As he did in his book on the Green Zone in Iraq, Chandrasekaran blisteringly reveals American arrogance, wastefulness, and infighting leading to incompetent planning and execution of the mission/s (because people disagreed about what the idea was) in Afghanistan. It’s hard to pick out the most awful part, but my candidate is the way that USAID repeatedly stopped projects to get Afghan farmers growing cotton—a cash crop that they really could have sold in-country in place of opium poppies—because Afghan cotton might someday, theoretically, compete with American cotton. Because that’s really much more important than cutting off the Taliban’s funding and providing Afghan farmers with a sustainable crop!
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Interesting.
It’s hard to pick out the most awful part, but my candidate is the way that USAID repeatedly stopped projects to get Afghan farmers growing cotton—a cash crop that they really could have sold in-country in place of opium poppies—because Afghan cotton might someday, theoretically, compete with American cotton. Because that’s really much more important than cutting off the Taliban’s funding and providing Afghan farmers with a sustainable crop!
That is awful. More subtle than America's actions in, say, Nicaragua or Vietnam, but awful.