The history of reading is littered with extreme emotions, especially during times of technological change. At the end of the eighteenth century, a period that witnessed a dramatic increase in the number of books, and one that has never since abated, writers began comparing reading to a “plague,” a “madness,” and a “flood” (as in the Biblical deluge). The Enlightenment German theologian, Johann Gottfried Hoche, even called reading the new “sodom.” On the other end of the spectrum, the Romantic essayist Leigh Hunt fantasized about marrying his books. The novelist Karl Immermann, author of the famed Adventures of Baron von Münchhausen, had this to say about himself as a child standing before his parents’ bookshelves: “The sheer sight of a book would set the afflicted child in a kind of quivering curiosity. The young creature lived and breathed only in print.” And we shouldn’t forget Edgar Allen Poe, whose murderous narrator of his short-story, “Berenice,” kills his cousin and then pours her teeth out on his desk – he was born in a library.Changes to the material landscape of reading elicit strong emotions. We may say, repeatedly, that the medium doesn’t matter, that only the words are important. But our reactions tell us something very different. The material nature of reading, our physical experience of those words, makes a difference in how we respond to them.
When readers were told that what they did with their kindles or tablets or screens wasn’t “reading,” they lashed out, much like the long history of readers before them. To say what reading is or is not is to impugn one of our most personal possessions.
In fact the MOOC is not a disruptive form but a fundamentally conservative one, flattening academic practice into the playing back of fixed lectures from a handful of professors recorded who-knows-how-long-ago under who-knows-which conditions. The MOOC is, in short, exactly how you’d structure higher education if you believed there was no future, if you believed you were living at the end of history and nothing was ever going to change. It’s in fact the interactive educational experience that is dynamic and radically adaptative, the interactive experience that has the power to disrupt the things both student and teacher think they know for sure.
Recognizing the continuity of evolution also makes clear the futility of selecting any particular time period for human harmony. Why would we be any more likely to feel out of sync than those who came before us? Did we really spend hundreds of thousands of years in stasis, perfectly adapted to our environments? When during the past did we attain this adaptation, and how did we know when to stop?If they had known about evolution, would our cave-dwelling forebears have felt nostalgia for the days before they were bipedal, when life was good and the trees were a comfort zone? Scavenging prey from more-formidable predators, similar to what modern hyenas do, is thought to have preceded, or at least accompanied, actual hunting in human history. Were, then, those early hunter-gatherers convinced that swiping a gazelle from the lion that caught it was superior to that newfangled business of running it down yourself? And why stop there? Why not long to be aquatic, since life arose in the sea? In some ways, our lungs are still ill suited to breathing air. For that matter, it might be nice to be unicellular: After all, cancer arises because our differentiated tissues run amok. Single cells don’t get cancer.
I think Jacobs is right when he argues that Watchmen’s characters are simplistically sketched and have backgrounds/origin stories based on the tritest sort of Freud. What I think Jacobs is missing is that Moore did this on purpose, because Moore hates comic book heroes and wants you to share his disgust with the form. In addition to telling a story about the human condition, Moore is telling a story about the condition of the medium within which he is working: its ossification, its absurdity, and its failures.Watchmen succeeds and endures, at least in part, because it’s a deconstruction (or outright rejection) of the ideas underpinning superheroes. Rorschach, like Batman, internalized his childhood traumas and focused that pain into an unrelenting drive to make the underworld pay. In Moore’s mind, Rorschach and Batman are psychopaths who have rejected society and wish to bend the world to their will. Moore simply follows that ideal to its logical conclusion, creating a hero who acts (or maybe reacts) without restraint and adheres slavishly to a moral code only he can decipher.
And yet, in spite of the Black Keys’ indie roots, the band’s victory had hardly anything to do with indie rock. Just as they sidestepped the entrenched orthodoxy of rock radio, the Black Keys also transcended the indie caste system. They were never underground stars; in the indie rock high school cafeteria, this band was the kid with the wispy mustache and acid-washed jean jacket. And conversely, the Black Keys were outspoken in their resentment of indie politics. They depicted themselves as small-town outsiders from flyover country diametrically opposed to the privileged insider-ism of indie’s fashionable New York City hub. And, in the end, the Black Keys wound up towering over those who had ignored them. This might be a little pat, but it rings true: The Black Keys’ successful rise plays like a shadow story of how ’00s indie failed rock and roll.
Mantel’s piece is about violation. It is about intrusion, spectacle, about a kind of eerie return of the sacrificial monarch who has to die so the land can live (or gossip, ogle, and sneer). It is about the treatment of female royals as clothes-horses, lust objects, virgin queens and perfect mothers, and about how we are encouraged to view them as surface. It is about our perverse relationship with the monarchy in a country which is supposedly a democracy and the emptiness of it. What it patently and emphatically is not is an assault on Kate Middleton – and the cry that it is comes not from Clarence House but from the very media outlets Mantel is chastising.
sketch from today
The emphasis on his royalty meant that [Richard II] cared deeply for ceremony and for spectacle. He enjoyed dressing up. On one occasion he wore a costume of white satin on which were hung cockle-shells and mussel-shells plated in silver; his doublet was adorned with orange trees embroidered in gold thread. He loved to preside at tournaments, but he was not so enthusiastic about true battles. One of his relatives, Thomas of Lancaster, declared at a later date that ‘he is too heavy in the arse, he only asks for drinking and eating, sleeping, dancing and leaping about’. The medieval texts often refer to ‘leaping about’ without explaining what is meant by it.
This month’s A Good Day to Die Hard is the fifth Die Hard movie. The night before it opened, it had a 10 percent critical rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a 98 percent “Want to See” rating from audiences, and that disparity kind of says it all.