Reading Priestdaddy on Father's Day

I finished reading Patricia Lockwood's memoir Priestdaddy in June, the night before Father's Day. When I awoke the next morning, I realized that the book had shifted shape while I slept. A few scattered details now stood out for me from the rest, and once I allowed them to cluster, they began to look like a completely different story about fathers than the comical one I thought I'd been reading.

The Lights Keep Going On and Off

Donald Trump has been elected President of the United States, and we now know what it feels like to be in the Upside Down.

I'm referring to the alternate universe in the Netflix series Stranger Things into which the boy Will Byers is transported. Named to describe the underside of the board for the fantasy role-playing game Will and his friends play in his basement, the Upside Down is also a parallel dimension embedded within his own home and hometown of Hawkins, Indiana. After being abducted by an otherworldly creature set loose by the insidious experiments conducted by the scientists and bureaucrats who work at the Department of Energy compound in Hawkins, Will sends messages from the Upside Down to his mother through the electrical system of their tract house, through lights that flash on and off.

Why electricity? And why--of all possible government agencies on which to pin evil--the seemingly benign Department of Energy? My answer to these questions is that the neoliberal present we inhabit--whose own catastrophic end we may now be experiencing--began in many ways with the energy crisis of the 1970s, an era whose dimmed lights helped propel the political rise of Ronald Reagan and the economic rise of Donald Trump. 

Labor and Freedom in OITNB Season 3

The labor movement and the women's movement are woven together with astonishing sophistication and brilliance in season 3 of Orange Is the New Black. I'd like to say it's the most Marxist-feminist thing that has ever appeared on American television, except I'm not sure there's any actual competition in this category. The women's prison setting of OITNB has always allowed it to represent women's bodies in ways not seen elsewhere on television: an overwhelmingly female-majority cast, filled with an astonishing diversity of body types, all wearing formless prison scrubs and more tattoos than makeup. But season 3 takes this representation a step further by asking us to pay attention to these bodies as they work and to think about who owns the results of that labor, in all its (re)productive forms.

Reading like a Teenager and The Fault in Our Stars

It was my plan never to read The Fault in Our Stars, afraid that I would find it maudlin and contrived and unable to hide my cynical critique from the teenagers who populate my life and home and car. Teenagers love John Green's book, and they love it with an unreserved adulation, a wholeness of feeling, an uncritical embrace that seems by turns charmingly and irritatingly naive. It's also slightly surprising, especially in the light of media reports that the younger generation hardly reads anything much longer than a status update anymore, and as a result is in danger of losing the capacity for empathy that novelistic reading provides.

Game of Thrones in an Age of Greed

Read my analysis of the White Walkers, Native American windigo myths, and disability in Game of Thrones at Avidly.

The Wolf of Wall Street and Bodies-in-Greed

Over the past five years, the financial drama has emerged as a major subgenre. Films such as Margin Call (2011), Arbitrage (2012), and The International (2009)--together with their documentary counterparts like Too Big to Fail (2011), Inside Job (2010), and I.O.U.S.A. (2008)--expose for the American public the dangerous criminality of our post-regulatory economic environment. These films tell stories about great risks, baldfaced lies, gigantic profits, and precipitous falls. But the problem the genre repeatedly faces is how to explain (much less make exciting) arcane investment relations like credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligations, or naked shorts. White collar crime has all the visual and narrative appeal of an Excel spreadsheet, and hardly seems high-thrill movie material.

The new Martin Scorcese movie The Wolf of Wall Street solves this problem by deliberately replacing the cerebral with the corporeal. Jordan Belfort, the film's disreputable protagonist and unreliable narrator (played by Leonardo diCaprio), begins more than once to explain to the audience the financial details of his plots, only quickly to interrupt himself with a reminder that it doesn't matter how he made money, only that by making lots of it he was able to spend it on things that made him look and feel good--like helicopters, cocaine, or prostitutes.

Death and Substitution in Game of Thrones

I am probably the world's least likely Game of Thrones viewer. It took me five tries to get through the pilot episode, and I only succeeded the fifth time because my 13-year-old daughter agreed to watch it with me (turns out, she loves it). I imagine its ideal viewers to be the kind of folks who could play Dungeons and Dragons for months at a time, or who got lost in Lord of the Rings (a book I similarly failed to get more than 30 pages into, despite trying multiple times). Although I appreciate the genre's efforts at alternative worldmaking, I'm just not good at consuming what passes for fantasy--for me, it's too disconnected from history, and too exhausting to keep track of all the characters and plotlines.

Jay Gatsby's Shirts

I think it was the shirt scene when my experience of watching Baz Luhrmann's film The Great Gatsby shifted. Daisy is on Gatsby's bed. He races up the stairs to a bedroom mezzanine where his innumerable shirts are stored and begins pulling them off the shelves, shouting out the names of the fine fabrics from which they're constructed (cotton! silk! muslin! linen!) while tossing them, in flutters and waves, down to her on the bed below. Daisy is showered by, wrapped up in, a pool of imported English shirts, turning and laughing and finally crying amidst these "beautiful shirts." The scene is an echo of several other shots in the film that feature impossibly long ceiling-to-floor drapes that subtract space from a room until someone finally shuts the door.

Welcome to Neverland, Inc.

Last week at a convention for Python programmers in Santa Clara, California, where I live and teach, an attendee named Adria Richards posted a tweet complaining about the "not cool" jokes being made by the men sitting behind her (something about sexualized forks and dongles, which I am the wrong kind of nerdy to get). Her tweet included a photo, presumably of the offending man, which soon led his employer to fire him. Since then, Richards herself has been fired, as well as becoming the sadly predictable object of misogynist venom. Welcome to Silicon Valley's high-tech business culture.

The Downton Abbey Guide to College Tuition

The word out from the Inside Higher Ed survey is that fully 70% of parents will restrict their child's choice of college based on cost. If there's one thing all parents can agree on, it's that college costs too much, and if my own experience is anything to judge by, precisely 100% of parents complain about it. But when your children reach SAT-taking age and the theoretical becomes the practical, the 30% complain in a completely different way than the 70%.

Hipsters, Steampunk, and Economic Nostalgia

Everyone, it seems, has become irritated by hipsters, the urban youth subculture whose members so desperately insist on distinguishing themselves from anything and everything popular or mainstream that they refuse even to lay claim to their own name. "I don't have a job, and I don't want one," says hipster style. "I will not be exploited!"

Great Covers of Bad 70s Songs

I consider it an accident of birth that I came to musical consciousness during the early 70s. And because my parents bought me a (red!) Radio Shack handheld transistor AM radio (it looked exactly like this, swear to god) when I was in fourth grade or so, that musical consciousness was moreover shaped largely by the popular songs playing on local southeast Florida stations.

It wasn't until 7th grade that we all discovered FM radio, and it wasn't until high school that we began to realize what utter crap most popular 70s music was. But by then, the damage was done. Vast portions of my brain had been deeply and indelibly marked by the sounds of Sonny and Cher, Tony DeFranco (remember "Heartbeat (It's a Lovebeat)"?), the Carpenters, and Bread, and by songs like "Kung Fu Fighting," "Disco Duck" (people, this actually became a #1 hit) and "Car Wash Song" (and I'm talking about the Rose Royce song, not the Jim Croce one, although the fact that there were two really popular songs about working at a car wash in the 70s should tell you all you need to know).

Mansplaining the Meltdown

The weirdest moment in HBO’s 2011 film Too Big to Fail is undoubtedly the one when Michele Davis, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury (played by Cynthia Nixon), suddenly announces that she doesn’t know how she’s going to explain the looming financial meltdown to the public. In response, three Treasury Department men protectively gather on chairs and sofas around her to patiently describe just how this shitstorm happened and what it means.

This might be a good moment to point out that Davis is the only woman in the entire film who isn’t a wife or a secretary. This might also be a good moment to point out that Davis’s job was to handle public relations for the Treasury department, meaning that her job description was to explain to the public what was going on in the economy. That she probably didn’t need to ask for help about how to do this, and that Paulson (played by William Hurt) was reportedly in the habit of asking her for such advice, rather than vice versa, is conveniently left out of the film. This is a textbook example of what has since come to be called mansplaining, the term coined to describe when men patronizingly explain things to women that they already understand, often better than the men attempting to explain it to them.

Gettysburg, Monticello, Homeland

It's hard to decide whether Abraham Lincoln or Thomas Jefferson is generating more public discussion this week. Lincoln, of course, because of Lincoln, a film about the sixteenth president and the Civil War that has left historians and others debating its accuracy and wondering how it manages to leave black people out of the story altogether. And Jefferson because of Henry Wiencek's recently released book Master of the Mountain--which according to some misrepresents the third president as a monster and according to others doesn't go nearly far enough in acknowledging his monstrosity. In both cases, it's pretty clear that American audiences prefer to continue revering our past presidents as mythological political heroes, figures we can turn to for stories about American moral and ideological purity, bereft of any complicating details that might taint or compromise that fantasy.

But if you ask me, the most compelling readings of both Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson this week were on Showtime's television series Homeland. I'll admit to being a bit behind on my viewing of the series (and those who are keeping up may by now have little interest in my take on what happened several episodes ago), but the show seems to me to be offering a sustained reflection on why it's a mistake to fetishize America's political figures.

Binders Full of Trolls

If you’ve been on the internet at all today, you’ve been bombarded by two relentless story threads: Mitt Romney’s “binders full of women” and Michael Brutsch’s outing as Reddit’s notorious commenter Violentacrez. Question of the day: what do these two events have in common? Answer: troll politics.

Repetitive Debt Concussion Syndrome

In an effort to maintain some semblance of an exercise regimen, I try to run several times a week along the San Tomas Aquino Creek trail that starts a few blocks from my home and ends 5 miles or so later at the swamps and marshes of the Baylands. The trail is used at nearly every hour of the day by bicyclists and joggers, by families on weekends and by office workers at lunchtime, by parents pushing strollers and by high school cross-country teams. The creek alongside the trail is filled with tall grasses and ground squirrels, families of brown ducks, and a number of long-necked, white-plumed birds. But elements of the densely suburban and industrial landscape through which the trail winds also define the scenery: you pass beneath a series of busy roadways, including the six lanes of the 101 Freeway and the elevated tracks along which commuter trains periodically shriek; and an inverted shopping cart, backpack, or errant piece of discarded furniture sometimes shows up in the creek among the birds and grasses. All in all, though, the STAC trail is a pretty fabulous public works project: it promotes healthy living and exercise, family and neighborhood engagement, and is accessible to everyone at no cost.

About halfway down, the trail passes alongside what may well be its absolute antithesis: the construction site of the new 49ers stadium.

Gothic Murder Ballads

This week, I've decided to squander time by compiling a list of gothic murder ballads. I'm casting the net widely, and any musical genre and subgenre counts (though I'm partial to the epic storytelling of the ballad, and to the dark mood of the gothic).

Here, in no particular order, is the list so far (with thanks to friends and family who've sent suggestions):

How To Do Things With Numbers

Even if you leave the Lance Armstrong news out of it, this has been a tough week for the truth. Newsweek was caught lying, or at least allowing writer and Harvard professor Niall Ferguson to use numbers in the news magazine’s cover story in such a way to make it appear that President Obama has failed in ways that he actually hasn’t. Senate candidate (and poor excuse for a human being) Todd Akin was also caught lying, or at least repeating biological hogwash in order to make it appear that women's bodies work in a way they categorically do not. Even Emory University officials were caught lying, or at least misreporting data about admissions in order to make it appear that their incoming classes have more impressive scores and grades than they actually do. 

Breaking Bad’s Suburban Shock Doctrine

In season four of AMC's Breaking Bad, fast food store manager-drug kingpin Gus Fring smoothly offers a first and only piece of personal history in response to DEA agent Hank’s probing questions: there is no record of him in his home country of Chile because he escaped during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, whose regime kept notoriously bad records. This detail and Gus’s (real or invented) history is never mentioned again, and by the season finale, Gus is dead anyway. But this quick and easily dismissed reference to Pinochet’s Chile may just have everything to do with the entire plot and trajectory of the series—not so much in Gus’s story, however, as in Walt’s.

Fifty Shades of Grey: It's Financial BDSM

In all the press generated by the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy, three statements consistently recur: 1) the books are making a crapload of money; 2) the books are filled with crappy writing; and 3) these crappy books can only be making craploads of money because they’re about sex. The problem, though, is that the “sex sells” formula really doesn’t really explain the trilogy’s extraordinary, almost unbelievable, popularity. As others have observed, there is a surplus of similar erotica, much of it better written (at least if you believe the assessments of online romance fiction fans) and almost all of it cheaper (in fact, most of it completely free and anonymously available online). So what is it about this particular novel? Why Fifty Shades of Grey? And perhaps even more to the point, why now?