Back to School Cultural Dispatch
Like many millennials, I was an avid Livejournal-er in my youth. I chronicled my life on a weekly basis, sometimes to my detriment. In college, a few of us were reprimanded by the president of our band fraternity for unbrotherly like conduct for talking our interpersonal conflicts on our respective live journals. Yes I was in a band fraternity.
I tried to transition into more formal blogging after college, but could never keep it going. Social media tended to fill that particular sharing need.
But now, social media is miserable and I find less and less joy in it every year. So, I’m trying to get back into a more regular writing practice that doesn’t just require a full-length researched and refined post each time. Instead, I’m going to try to recap what I’m teaching, watching, and thinking about that week.
—
School started up again this week, a few days after I gave a talk at the Lady Laughs Philly Comedy Festival about the ways in which women and queer folks have been written out of the history of stand-up comedy. In the kick off to my Cinema History class, we touched on similar themes of historiography, archives, and the problem with the narrative around “firsts.”
This week, I’ve also been bingeing the very good podcast “Rebel Spirt” from journalist, comic, podcaster extraordinaire Akilah Hughes about her quest to get her Kentucky high school’s mascot changed from the Rebels to anything else. As to be expected, she runs up against appeals to “tradition,” despite the fact that Kentucky wasn’t a part of the Confederacy and that Confederate mascots were less about history and more about signally a rejection of school integration in the 1950s. All of this has made me think a lot about accepted histories and the use of history to justify current injustice.
In the talk I gave at the comedy fest, I talked about the various ways women were ignored and overlooked by gatekeepers and the press in their own time and how that erasure is now used to justify the fact that women are still treated as outsiders in comedy. If you want a great overview of the various ways women have been left specifically out of stand-up’s history check out Kriszta Pozsonyi’s excellent dissertation on the topic.
In a time in which the humanities, and history specifically, is being gutted, it’s so important for students (and all of us) to understand not just history itself, but how history is created and recreated.
Other things I covered this week: how to approach writing a speech (Public Speaking) and how to engage critically with texts (Media Theory). Happy first week of school!
Some things I’ve consumed this week:
Books
Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz
I loved Newitz’s Future of Another Timeline (a feminist time travel book), so I was excited when my new book club picked this for September.
It’s a quick novella about robots in San Francisco opening a noodle restaurant in post-apocalyptic San Francisco. It was cute, but I found myself being more resistant than I used to be pre-AI to empathizing with robots. The book talked about “robophobia” and bigoted humans complaining about “robots taking jobs,” which yes, functions as a metaphor for racism and xenophobia but comes across differently in an era when major companies are threatening to replace humans with robots.
Upon reading an interview with Newitz in the Chicago Review of Books, though, I tried to read it with more nuance. In response to a question about the book’s themes about authenticity (which, I did appreciate as a person obsessed with deconstructing authenticity in my work), Newitz said:
I wanted to tell a story about a group of people who basically could never be “authentic,” no matter what they did, so they had to build something.
That’s an interesting idea! And I loved what the book had to say about found family (good!) and recommendation algorithms (bad!). I still think it the book could do without the clunky xenophobia metaphors.
Wasp’s Nest by Kat Stoddard
A bisexual modern retelling of The Philadelphia Story with a whiff of Gilmore Girls. If you want to read a book that feels like watching a banter-y rom-com, this is a great end-of-summer read!
TV
A downer with an upper Furious + Game Changer
We’ve had in a habit in my house lately of watching a deeply upsetting show and chasing it with an episode of Dropout TV’s improv gameshow Game Changer.
Right now, that deeply upsetting show is Hulu’s 8-part series Furious about Catherine, a young woman who was sex-trafficked as a teenager and who is systematically killing the men who were involved. On the case is Alice, an FBI agent who also faced sexual abuse as a teenager and through the investigation has to reckon with her own trauma, her empathy, and the ways the system throws women to the wolves of wealthy white men.
The best part of the series is the relationship between Alice and her supervisor (I think? I don’t now how FBI jobs work exactly) Nora, both complicated and flawed characters trying to navigate working within an absolutely monstrous system It’s a compelling and deeply upsetting series with a stellar cast.
But, there is something that bothers me about it that I can’t quite put my finger on. It might be the same thing that bothered me about the final season of Broadchurch, also about sexual assault. In both series, nearly all of the men are awful. Which, is understandable in a story in which you’re trying to show how misogynistic our society is, especially our justice system. If there’s just one villain, it reinforces the “bad apples’ narrative rather than implicating everyone who benefits and reinforces it.
The problem, I think, is that by making every man in the show over-the-top awful, it doesn’t reckon with the ways in which mundane sexism plays out or how men can reinforce misogyny even if they’re mostly good people. It still lets audiences off the hook.
The other thing that bothers me about most thrillers and detective series about sexual assault is that even in showing how awful it is, the entertainment value will always supersede nuance and care for victims. Even though these are fictional stories, I still feel like a voyeur watching an entertainment company that’s part of an industry that famously abuses young women create a spectacle out of trauma.
I still want to see what happens in the finale, but I’m having complicated feelings about it.
On the other hand, I was wary of Dropout TV for awhile because I don’t really like improv (yeah, I’m a comedy scholar who hates improv. I study stand-up!) and the whole thing seemed a little twee. I still feel like that to some extent, but I really enjoy Game Changer and they do seem like a fun little company!
If you aren’t familiar, Dropout is a revised and reformed version of College Humor that is now a streaming only network that you can subscribe to via their app. They have a whole range improv-based shows, most of them game based. Many of them nerd culture based. Game Changer, their flagship series, is a gameshow in which the game changes each game and the contestants have to figure out the rules as they go. It’s consistently delightful.
Movies
Coyote Vs Acme
I went into this with fairly low expectations, and was pleasantly surprised with how consistently funny it was and how beautifully they integrated live-action with animation. The sight gags were top notch. A wonderful way to spend an afternoon. They even get in a perfectly executed Pepé Le Pew joke.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma
I really liked I Saw the TV Glow and I adore Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson (If you knew me in ninth grade at the height of my X-files obsession, you’d know just how much I love Gillian Anderson). So, I really wanted to love this.
I think I appreciated it more than I enjoyed it. To be fair, I hate slasher movies and spent most of my child and teenagerhood trying to avoid watching them. I think if I was a slasher-head, this might have hit more. The film scholar nerd parts certainly did. It has interesting things to say about the filmic gaze and queer desire, but it also has a truly awful fried chicken scene for those of us who hate the sounds of other people eating. I think I might have to see this one again to settle on my opinion.
—-
I’m about to make a sheet pan chicken and potatoes dinner and watch the second seasons premiers of both Adults and Dark Matter! See ya next week!