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Northern Sheol
May. 6th, 2008 11:06 amIt's not just that Johnny Vegas seems to have catastrophically misjudged the situation when he tried to redefine sexual assault as comedy; his timing sucked, because even had it come off as outrageous comedy rather than simple outrage, it could never have been as funny as a seal attempting to mate with a penguin.
One wonders whether the ghost of Dworkin would insist that the seal must have been reading p0rn, or that really this was about power rather than sex? Dworkin, incidentally, is among the topics on which Laura Kipnis' The Female Thing is mercilessly brilliant. Don't take that to mean Kipnis is one of those dreadful Mail-endorsed types repenting of feminism; she demolishes those quislings just as thoroughly as the 'wounded bird' school of feminism, but what she does best of all is anatomising how the Spectacle (although she never uses that word - call it global capitalism if you will, or the Thing - you know the one) has used feminism, just as it does everything else, to play the workers off against each other to the system's benefit. Not that she lets that take her off into the 'back to the village' territory where Greer among others seems to have got stuck; she is justly puzzled by the way in which feminism has often hymned Nature when in so many ways it was nature which dealt women a bad hand, and culture which has enabled such steps towards equality as have been managed, not least by building a world in which physical strength is no longer paramount, and sex need no longer entail all the risks and discomforts of pregnancy.
If the book has a flaw, it's that Kipnis doesn't have many answers, but simply by asking the right questions she's ahead of the game. Normally, even feminist books which have some great stuff in will end up spiralling off into facepalm territory at other points - hi there, Female Chauvinist Pigs. Whereas Kipnis is wall to wall 'Yes!' Constant 'You've hit the nail on the head!' Which nuance and smarts, inevitably, have meant an almost total lack of media storm compared to more high-concept, more obvious, less incisive alternatives. So it goes.
Doesn't it make you mad the way nobody has a real job? It's like everybody's scamming everybody else for scraps...everything breaks. No one remembers anything. The present is just a blank and all the time it feels like there's this great catastrophe impending...and the only thing that's holding it at bay is spit and lies. Do you feel that?
- Alex Cox, Waldo's Hawaiian Holiday (The "Quasi-Sequel" To Repo Man)
So far, most of the morning's strategy meeting had been devoted to coming up with a political logo. The pirates were very keen that it should reflect both the Captain's caring, inclusive side, but also his tough leadership qualities. After a lot of debate they had eventually decided on a picture of a bush baby holding a brick.
- Gideon Defoe, The Pirates! In An Adventure With Napoleon
Managed about 60 pages of Nicola Barker's Darkmans, which is 60 more than I'd read of most Booker-shortlisted works. It didn't seem to be wholly worthless, but fundamentally it was still coming across as a middlebrow Iain Sinclair. I'm sure if you've never read a book about the past bleeding into the present on London's edgelands as development tries to erase it, then it's very good. Personally, if I want that and I'm in the mood where Sinclair's too dense for me, I've got the pulpy vitality of Moorcock.
Of course, this left me with something of a quandary since I had those 800+ pages earmarked to see me through my week off, and none of the other options were quite right. I enjoyed Alan Campbell's Scar Night a lot, once I finally got round to it; it's His Dark Materials meets Perdido Street Station without seeming cynical about it. But it's too recently read for me to start the sequel just yet. Similarly, I need a little longer to recover from The Wire before I dive in to George Pelecanos. And yes, it was good of that Dalai Lama biography to turn up on the very day when I'd been wondering over my toast whether such a thing existed, but it's the fiction itch that needs scratching. So more or less at random, out of the stacks came Derek Raymond's The Crust On Its Uppers, and it's shaping up rather well. In a way it's a companion piece to Mad Men, set just as the sixties begin to swing, in an insular society of alpha males - but here it's London's gangland, the sort of place where Performance starts out. I'm just suprised Guy Ritchie or one of his imitators hasn't filmed it yet; sure, much of the effect is in the cant-heavy prose, but that never normally stops anyone.
One wonders whether the ghost of Dworkin would insist that the seal must have been reading p0rn, or that really this was about power rather than sex? Dworkin, incidentally, is among the topics on which Laura Kipnis' The Female Thing is mercilessly brilliant. Don't take that to mean Kipnis is one of those dreadful Mail-endorsed types repenting of feminism; she demolishes those quislings just as thoroughly as the 'wounded bird' school of feminism, but what she does best of all is anatomising how the Spectacle (although she never uses that word - call it global capitalism if you will, or the Thing - you know the one) has used feminism, just as it does everything else, to play the workers off against each other to the system's benefit. Not that she lets that take her off into the 'back to the village' territory where Greer among others seems to have got stuck; she is justly puzzled by the way in which feminism has often hymned Nature when in so many ways it was nature which dealt women a bad hand, and culture which has enabled such steps towards equality as have been managed, not least by building a world in which physical strength is no longer paramount, and sex need no longer entail all the risks and discomforts of pregnancy.
If the book has a flaw, it's that Kipnis doesn't have many answers, but simply by asking the right questions she's ahead of the game. Normally, even feminist books which have some great stuff in will end up spiralling off into facepalm territory at other points - hi there, Female Chauvinist Pigs. Whereas Kipnis is wall to wall 'Yes!' Constant 'You've hit the nail on the head!' Which nuance and smarts, inevitably, have meant an almost total lack of media storm compared to more high-concept, more obvious, less incisive alternatives. So it goes.
Doesn't it make you mad the way nobody has a real job? It's like everybody's scamming everybody else for scraps...everything breaks. No one remembers anything. The present is just a blank and all the time it feels like there's this great catastrophe impending...and the only thing that's holding it at bay is spit and lies. Do you feel that?
- Alex Cox, Waldo's Hawaiian Holiday (The "Quasi-Sequel" To Repo Man)
So far, most of the morning's strategy meeting had been devoted to coming up with a political logo. The pirates were very keen that it should reflect both the Captain's caring, inclusive side, but also his tough leadership qualities. After a lot of debate they had eventually decided on a picture of a bush baby holding a brick.
- Gideon Defoe, The Pirates! In An Adventure With Napoleon
Managed about 60 pages of Nicola Barker's Darkmans, which is 60 more than I'd read of most Booker-shortlisted works. It didn't seem to be wholly worthless, but fundamentally it was still coming across as a middlebrow Iain Sinclair. I'm sure if you've never read a book about the past bleeding into the present on London's edgelands as development tries to erase it, then it's very good. Personally, if I want that and I'm in the mood where Sinclair's too dense for me, I've got the pulpy vitality of Moorcock.
Of course, this left me with something of a quandary since I had those 800+ pages earmarked to see me through my week off, and none of the other options were quite right. I enjoyed Alan Campbell's Scar Night a lot, once I finally got round to it; it's His Dark Materials meets Perdido Street Station without seeming cynical about it. But it's too recently read for me to start the sequel just yet. Similarly, I need a little longer to recover from The Wire before I dive in to George Pelecanos. And yes, it was good of that Dalai Lama biography to turn up on the very day when I'd been wondering over my toast whether such a thing existed, but it's the fiction itch that needs scratching. So more or less at random, out of the stacks came Derek Raymond's The Crust On Its Uppers, and it's shaping up rather well. In a way it's a companion piece to Mad Men, set just as the sixties begin to swing, in an insular society of alpha males - but here it's London's gangland, the sort of place where Performance starts out. I'm just suprised Guy Ritchie or one of his imitators hasn't filmed it yet; sure, much of the effect is in the cant-heavy prose, but that never normally stops anyone.
