My Yuletide story was Earning the Light (Under the Dome (TV))--the show has a lot of good and a fair amount of bad. The good includes Julia Shumway and Dale “Barbie” Barbara—a disgraced journalist and the ex-military-man-turned-enforcer she’s sleeping with. Also, as it happens, he killed her husband, which isn’t even the key source of tension in the relationship. And while they have enough chemistry that I was happy to roll with that, in the story I wanted to dig around a little bit into how Julia might think about her own actions.
Thanks to![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
talitha78 for the lovely holiday card!
Glen Weldon, Superman: The Unauthorized Biography: A history of Superman’s popular incarnations, like a really extended book review/blog entry. I liked the gentle snark (foreshadowing so extensive “it’s technically fiveshadowing”) and the occasional observations about the nature of serial storytelling under copyright. “The corporate-owned continuous narrative is, after all, the enemy of storytelling. In fiction, characters are shaped by events and their reactions to them; they emerge irrevocably changed. Yet a character such as Superman resists change, and that essential resistance is aided and abetted by marketing departments, style sheets, and licensing contracts. Superman has evolved over the years, of course … but the nature of that evolution is a function of the culture that surrounds him, not something that grows out of his character.” He revisits this point when noting that for superheroes “death is not, as Shakespeare described it, ‘That undiscover’d country, from whose bourne no traveler returns.’ It’s Tijuana, and there’s a shuttle.”
Mark Oppenheimer, Wisenheimer: A Childhood Subject to Debate: Memoir by a high school and occasional college debater. After starting with prank telephone calls and other hijinks that would’ve gotten a poorer, darker kid sent to juvenile detention if not jail (he wrote a letter pretending to be another kid, accusing her father of abusing her), Oppenheimer got scared and ultimately ended up in debate, which gave him the opportunity to play with the words and rhetoric he so loved. I was hoping for a memoir of my kind of debate (policy), but Oppenheimer did parliamentary and thus looked down on policy debaters as we did on his kind. His descriptions of skating by on the most tenuous of knowledge of current events didn’t mesh with my recollections of spending hours each day on research. But chacun a son gout, I guess.
Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened: Slight but entertaining—I have to admit I was expecting more, based on the thickness of the book, but it’s just really big print. Brosh’s previously published explanations of depression, and how the problem appears very different to non-depressed people who try to solve that different problem, remain as good as I remember them when I read them for the first time. And the dogs are still hilarious, as are Brosh’s letters to her younger selves.
Matt Carmichael, BUYographics: How Demographic and Economic Changes Will Reinvent the Way Marketers Reach Consumers: Free LibraryThing Early Reviewer book. This is the first marketing book I’ve seen that’s about economic inequality. It’s refreshingly honest, in a “news for storage jars” sort of way: you can’t sell to a nation of mostly poorer people the way you could sell to a nation with less skewed income distributions. One example of the focus: “40 percent of kids are born into families wihtout a married father present…. It’s a societal problem that arguably needs some high-level attention…. For our purposes, it’s also a creative problem.” Also, on Millenials not being as emotionally connected to their cars as preceding generations were/are: “Marketers can’t change the economy…. They can’t suddenly make teens and Millenials dislike spending time on their phones. What good marketing can help change is the emotional connection between consumers and the products they consume.” Economic and political polarization is presented as a branding problem: markets are segmenting and shrinking. I was particularly depressed by the claim that right now, people don’t like to see ads with mixed ethnic groups because such ads don’t make them feel special/singled out, and so it’s better to create a focused ad for each of your target ethnic groups.
Relatedly and of possible interest, Carmichael also suggests that the NFL, one of the only remaining ways to reach mass audiences, has pivoted to having more “storylines” in a successful attempt to attract female audiences. “[T]he league is speaking to different groups in different ways. For women, this has involved generating narratives and developing the biographies of the players more—especially during the off-season draft and as the season kick-off nears.” Sadly, more people watch football on Sunday “than go to church or voted in the last general election.”
There’s a probably unintended continuity with Marxist analysis here: economic superstructure, he suggests, dictates tastes and aspirations. (I recently saw a Wal-Mart ad that only makes sense in an age of aristocrats and proles who are supposed to know their places—the speaker is wedged in a tiny airplane seat between two large people, and he tells the camera that he doesn’t expect “five-star treatment,” as if that’s now above his station. In the big 80s, a mass marketer would instead have promised five-star treatment for three-star prices, but now you’re not supposed to think you’re entitled to that. Not shocking for a company that holds a food drive instead of paying its employees enough to stay off of food stamps, but it is striking that the expressed ideology is now so up-front: its customers don't deserve any better, any more than employees do.)
Thanks to
talitha78 for the lovely holiday card!Glen Weldon, Superman: The Unauthorized Biography: A history of Superman’s popular incarnations, like a really extended book review/blog entry. I liked the gentle snark (foreshadowing so extensive “it’s technically fiveshadowing”) and the occasional observations about the nature of serial storytelling under copyright. “The corporate-owned continuous narrative is, after all, the enemy of storytelling. In fiction, characters are shaped by events and their reactions to them; they emerge irrevocably changed. Yet a character such as Superman resists change, and that essential resistance is aided and abetted by marketing departments, style sheets, and licensing contracts. Superman has evolved over the years, of course … but the nature of that evolution is a function of the culture that surrounds him, not something that grows out of his character.” He revisits this point when noting that for superheroes “death is not, as Shakespeare described it, ‘That undiscover’d country, from whose bourne no traveler returns.’ It’s Tijuana, and there’s a shuttle.”
Mark Oppenheimer, Wisenheimer: A Childhood Subject to Debate: Memoir by a high school and occasional college debater. After starting with prank telephone calls and other hijinks that would’ve gotten a poorer, darker kid sent to juvenile detention if not jail (he wrote a letter pretending to be another kid, accusing her father of abusing her), Oppenheimer got scared and ultimately ended up in debate, which gave him the opportunity to play with the words and rhetoric he so loved. I was hoping for a memoir of my kind of debate (policy), but Oppenheimer did parliamentary and thus looked down on policy debaters as we did on his kind. His descriptions of skating by on the most tenuous of knowledge of current events didn’t mesh with my recollections of spending hours each day on research. But chacun a son gout, I guess.
Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened: Slight but entertaining—I have to admit I was expecting more, based on the thickness of the book, but it’s just really big print. Brosh’s previously published explanations of depression, and how the problem appears very different to non-depressed people who try to solve that different problem, remain as good as I remember them when I read them for the first time. And the dogs are still hilarious, as are Brosh’s letters to her younger selves.
Matt Carmichael, BUYographics: How Demographic and Economic Changes Will Reinvent the Way Marketers Reach Consumers: Free LibraryThing Early Reviewer book. This is the first marketing book I’ve seen that’s about economic inequality. It’s refreshingly honest, in a “news for storage jars” sort of way: you can’t sell to a nation of mostly poorer people the way you could sell to a nation with less skewed income distributions. One example of the focus: “40 percent of kids are born into families wihtout a married father present…. It’s a societal problem that arguably needs some high-level attention…. For our purposes, it’s also a creative problem.” Also, on Millenials not being as emotionally connected to their cars as preceding generations were/are: “Marketers can’t change the economy…. They can’t suddenly make teens and Millenials dislike spending time on their phones. What good marketing can help change is the emotional connection between consumers and the products they consume.” Economic and political polarization is presented as a branding problem: markets are segmenting and shrinking. I was particularly depressed by the claim that right now, people don’t like to see ads with mixed ethnic groups because such ads don’t make them feel special/singled out, and so it’s better to create a focused ad for each of your target ethnic groups.
Relatedly and of possible interest, Carmichael also suggests that the NFL, one of the only remaining ways to reach mass audiences, has pivoted to having more “storylines” in a successful attempt to attract female audiences. “[T]he league is speaking to different groups in different ways. For women, this has involved generating narratives and developing the biographies of the players more—especially during the off-season draft and as the season kick-off nears.” Sadly, more people watch football on Sunday “than go to church or voted in the last general election.”
There’s a probably unintended continuity with Marxist analysis here: economic superstructure, he suggests, dictates tastes and aspirations. (I recently saw a Wal-Mart ad that only makes sense in an age of aristocrats and proles who are supposed to know their places—the speaker is wedged in a tiny airplane seat between two large people, and he tells the camera that he doesn’t expect “five-star treatment,” as if that’s now above his station. In the big 80s, a mass marketer would instead have promised five-star treatment for three-star prices, but now you’re not supposed to think you’re entitled to that. Not shocking for a company that holds a food drive instead of paying its employees enough to stay off of food stamps, but it is striking that the expressed ideology is now so up-front: its customers don't deserve any better, any more than employees do.)