I agree. I want more from fiction than some collectivized "Indian American" experience. This is why I don't do sensitivity reads. I feel like to the extent someone is bold and deviates from the collectivized vision of what a character is supposed to be, then that is the extent to which the book is attempting something. I want characters who are in some sense ideals, rather than types, no matter how truthfully the latter are drawn.
Agree about the universality and about Wallace as spiritual gen xer. I don’t particularly want to defend what Piskor was accused of *but* the end he chose has been the implicitly desired telos of that sort of online swarming behavior going back to something like the stalking of Chris chan by (fwiw in that case crypto-rw) anons in the oughts, and it’s interesting to see the responses to that being that made explicit.
Yes, because when a person's ability to work in their vocation and earn their livelihood in their profession is taken away forever in their early middle age on the basis of no judicial process—that would make just about anyone at any level of the insecure middle class (which is basically the whole of America) consider ending it. These small fields like comics are really vulnerable to these operations. Despite the stereotypes, bigger and more sophisticated fields like academe and publishing have weathered these events better, with figures like Diaz and Alexie, subject to similarly ambiguous charges that even if true shouldn't amount to an irrevocable sentence of total social death, able to come back.
Yes, again I certainly don’t want to defend what he was accused of (I’m always hearing a little Camille Paglia in my head saying things like “don’t you know what men are? Grow up! What do you expect?” when this stuff gets discussed, and I don’t want to echo her) but at the moment it does rather seem like there was a sense in which he was being made to answer for the unpunished sins of a mass of mostly dead comic artists and writers of yore who had behaved toward female fans in the (less than chivalric) way men of their generation and class often did. It’s a sad story all around.
Where Paglia seems persuasive to me is in her argument (very similar to T. Morrison's on the same topics in fact) that there used to be an informal and unspoken set of organic remedies for the various types and degrees of this kind of problem, which libs/leftists/modernity/etc. very blithely and cavalierly wiped out and replaced with the blunt, dead, cold, white hand of bureaucracy, now joined to the techno-mob. Ed was a creep in the DMs? He needed Jimmy or his dad to smack him upside the head and tell him to act like a man! (Yes, the old way was obviously imperfect. The new way is also imperfect, now also obviously so.)
Indeed, & it’s interesting how the earliest manifestations of something like cancel culture on the Internet (the aforementioned harassment of people like Chris Chan in the 2000s) is a kind of clear outgrowth of that: the old men correcting men thing metastasized into an early version of the logic you see today where being a bit weird and creepy on the Internet is grounds for systemic harassment campaigns etc. I don’t want to, but someone else should write something about that!
Because he never wrote a GAN (though I sometimes wonder if he left an attempt behind) James Alan McPherson is almost never mentioned alongside Ellison and Morrison, and that’s a pity (and passing strange, given his being the first African-American to win the Pulitzer). His story “Elbow Room” almost on its own should give him runner-up status.
You're not the first person to recommend him to me—I will definitely read "Elbow Room" at least! (A prejudice against those who only write short stories is maybe at work here...)
I agree. I want more from fiction than some collectivized "Indian American" experience. This is why I don't do sensitivity reads. I feel like to the extent someone is bold and deviates from the collectivized vision of what a character is supposed to be, then that is the extent to which the book is attempting something. I want characters who are in some sense ideals, rather than types, no matter how truthfully the latter are drawn.
"characters who are in some sense ideals"—yes, exactly what I'm looking for too.
Agree about the universality and about Wallace as spiritual gen xer. I don’t particularly want to defend what Piskor was accused of *but* the end he chose has been the implicitly desired telos of that sort of online swarming behavior going back to something like the stalking of Chris chan by (fwiw in that case crypto-rw) anons in the oughts, and it’s interesting to see the responses to that being that made explicit.
Yes, because when a person's ability to work in their vocation and earn their livelihood in their profession is taken away forever in their early middle age on the basis of no judicial process—that would make just about anyone at any level of the insecure middle class (which is basically the whole of America) consider ending it. These small fields like comics are really vulnerable to these operations. Despite the stereotypes, bigger and more sophisticated fields like academe and publishing have weathered these events better, with figures like Diaz and Alexie, subject to similarly ambiguous charges that even if true shouldn't amount to an irrevocable sentence of total social death, able to come back.
Yes, again I certainly don’t want to defend what he was accused of (I’m always hearing a little Camille Paglia in my head saying things like “don’t you know what men are? Grow up! What do you expect?” when this stuff gets discussed, and I don’t want to echo her) but at the moment it does rather seem like there was a sense in which he was being made to answer for the unpunished sins of a mass of mostly dead comic artists and writers of yore who had behaved toward female fans in the (less than chivalric) way men of their generation and class often did. It’s a sad story all around.
Where Paglia seems persuasive to me is in her argument (very similar to T. Morrison's on the same topics in fact) that there used to be an informal and unspoken set of organic remedies for the various types and degrees of this kind of problem, which libs/leftists/modernity/etc. very blithely and cavalierly wiped out and replaced with the blunt, dead, cold, white hand of bureaucracy, now joined to the techno-mob. Ed was a creep in the DMs? He needed Jimmy or his dad to smack him upside the head and tell him to act like a man! (Yes, the old way was obviously imperfect. The new way is also imperfect, now also obviously so.)
Indeed, & it’s interesting how the earliest manifestations of something like cancel culture on the Internet (the aforementioned harassment of people like Chris Chan in the 2000s) is a kind of clear outgrowth of that: the old men correcting men thing metastasized into an early version of the logic you see today where being a bit weird and creepy on the Internet is grounds for systemic harassment campaigns etc. I don’t want to, but someone else should write something about that!
Someone should! Sounds like a Default Friend topic. I only know some of the Chris Chan story, seems too unpleasant to explore fully.
Because he never wrote a GAN (though I sometimes wonder if he left an attempt behind) James Alan McPherson is almost never mentioned alongside Ellison and Morrison, and that’s a pity (and passing strange, given his being the first African-American to win the Pulitzer). His story “Elbow Room” almost on its own should give him runner-up status.
You're not the first person to recommend him to me—I will definitely read "Elbow Room" at least! (A prejudice against those who only write short stories is maybe at work here...)