August 20th, 2011 / 5:45 pm
Roundup

Saturday Afternoon Links Because Rain Threatens

Robert Lipsyte wrote for the New York Times that boys aren’t reading. The Rejectionist neatly sums up everything that’s troubling about Lipsyte’s piece.

At the Los Angeles Review of Books, Emily Green writes about how her work was plagiarized.

Anna Clark wrote a lovely essay about writing, necessity, heat, performing the role of writer and more.

That essay was inspired by this week’s Dear Sugar which is also well worth the read. That column is always worth reading.

White Readers Meet Black Authors has a list of fall releases including Percival Everett.

Maud Newton offers a really interesting take on how DFW has stylistically influenced the way we argue on the Internet, and not for the better.

Fuckscapes by Sean Kilpatrick is available for pre-order from Blue Square Press.

My favorite new Tumblr is Fashion It So which takes a close look at the beautiful fashions of Star Trek: TNG.

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37 Comments

  1. Frank Tas, the Raptor

      When I was in middle and high school, reading among boys was seen as “gay.” The big athletic kids were stupid, but because they were big and athletic, and they got the hot girls, they had the power to propagate this idea all across the male student body, so that most dudes, with their lack of interest in anything and their desire to be an alpha male, adopted this concept in hopes of emulating the cool athletes, keeping them away from reading, and anything cerebral, really.

      I think what really changed this mode of thought was when our entire class was required to read Catcher in the Rye in junior year. Boys became more acceptable of books around that time. It officially became permissible and straight. But I also think it had to do with boys maturing and realizing you don’t need to impress some asshole jock to become popular.

      Was I the only one whose school went through this? I’ve always wondered if my school was an exception.

      Anyway, from my experience, boys don’t read much because boys live grow up in social circles where “Might makes right,” and Might not backed with experience tends to be lazy and stupid.

      Also speaking of links: http://yooouuutuuube.com/v/?width=192&height=120&yt=bjmYee2ZfSk&flux=0&direction=rand.

  2. Scottmcclanahan

      I can’t wait for the Sean Kilpatrick.   What a great title.

  3. deadgod

      That Rejectionist piece and comment thread are great fun.  Anyone sheltered enough to think that Robert Lipsyte is a “misogynist” enabling “sociopaths” because he’s trying to reach the football team in terms he thinks they’ll understand–have I got some sweethearts for you to, um, date.

  4. deadgod

      The Green blogicle is quite good.  I don’t understand why she’s been unable to make either a legal or a (higher profile) media case for plagiarism; at least in her words, the case doesn’t seem that ambiguous or trivial.

      But the real story she’s nestled her personal disappointment in is much larger and more threatening than the un- or barely acknowledged use of her work that she’s angered by:

      As the Nevada Supreme Court struck down all the Vegas pipeline water awards in early 2010, the Sun was reduced to phoning me in Los Angeles to ask if I’d cover it.  The paper, owned by one of Southern Nevada’s leading property developers, no longer had an environment correspondent.  It still doesn’t, though this didn’t stop its editorial board from this summer once again endorsing the pipeline.

      Her point, that ‘the information age has come at the expense of newspapers making “redundant” their information gatherers’ (in Green’s pointed counterpoint), is or should be a far bigger scandal than, say, Rupie Moo’s spying on celebrity and politician cellphones. 

      Newspapers, even those corrupted by corporate ownership, have, for the 20th c., also harbored journalism independent of their owners’ interests – or, of course, had local competitors for attention who had different owners.  The patience needed to report and print (and read) stories like Green’s, had, for many decades, been there in the world of newspapers–but, one hears from all over, no more. 

      Will the crowd-sourcing of information on the internet provide the dissemination of fact that, say, Green’s reporting does?  It’s a complicated question, and crucial to whatever is ‘democratic’ about modern democracy.

  5. Aubrey Hirsch

      Hell yeah, TNG!

  6. BoomersMustDie

      Fun fact that maybe everyone knows… Robert Lipsyte is Sam Lipsyte’s dad

  7. Anonymous

      DFW sort of has a lot to answer for, in a way.

  8. Huh

      Wow… that Rejectionist ‘article’ is really poorly written and argued. It doesn’t even address the issue. Was it linked as a joke? 

  9. Roxane

      It was a blog rant not an article. I thought it was just fine for what it was and it was written to address Lipsyte’s essay not the issue of boys reading. No, it wasn’t a joke link.

  10. Roxane

      That’s interesting. I loved reading as a kid and never felt any shame about it until junior high when I got teased for it because I would read in public like a total nerd. My brothers, who were soccer jocks, used to hide the fact that they read. I literally would catch them with a book and they’d pretend they weren’t reading.

  11. michael

      Jesus that Maud Newton piece was terrible. So many straw men in that article I felt like I was reading a fucking cornfield.

  12. deadgod

      Huh wrote “‘article'”, the scare quotes meaning ‘not really, but like’.  (Sometimes print-magazine articles are rants; ‘rant’ is a stylistic subcategory of “article”, in my experience.)  Scare quotes would have been unnecessary had blogicle, meaning ‘like an article, but on the internet’, been used.

      What the Rejectionist seems to me to be “address[ing]” is that

      the problem is a culture that raises boys to be sociopaths

      –a harsh view that I agree with a lot more than not.

      Huh might have felt that this issue had been “address[ed]” in the blogicle had Lipsyte’s point of view been more successfully elucidated as a “misogynistic” engineering of sociopathy, in contrast to his appearing, in the Rejectionist’s very account, to be an obvious proponent of non-sociopathic sensitivity in men – and one who’s grappling with what the Rejectionist does not:  how practically to get recalcitrantly anti-intellectual boys to put themselves behind other eyes by reading books.

  13. BoomersMustDie

      hahaha – so true, and what the fuck is she doing writing essays for the NYTimes? 

  14. deadgod

      That’s, like, – and I mean this in a certain very real sense – somewhat absolutely true, but–and this is a move that goes against the grain of the culturally but with the grain of the socially human fiber (1)–kind of a cruel thing to say of such a (let me exceed briefly the brief of my pinch-truncated perceptual framework) self-tormented person.

      (1)”Culture” being, for the moment, ‘what you fit into’ and “society” being, for the same moment, ‘what you adapt as you adapt yourself to it’–this distinction not to be belabored about its here-but-temporary user’s head and shoulders.

  15. Nicholas Liu

      We can argue over whether Lipsyte is or is not a misogynist and whether he’s enabling or trying to combat a culture of male sociopathy,

  16. Nicholas Liu

      but I don’t see what being “sheltered” has to do with it.

  17. deadgod

      [I’m guessing this second half goes with the first half in “Reply” to my Lipsyte/Rejectionist comment above.]

      “Sheltered” is a way of mocking the “misogyny”-criers-against-Lipsyte, who (I think) are diluting their contest with misogyny by opposing it where it’s plainly being opposed already.

      Does Lipsyte describe himself as pandering where he should be stern – leading with his back to the way forward, as it were?  Maybe.  Is calling him a ‘woman-hater’ and his efforts to communicate with boys ‘part of the reproduction of sociopathy’ helpful or even accurate?  I don’t think so; do you?

  18. c2k

      Duly footnoted.

  19. c2k

      Lipsyte’s is called an essay.

      Rejectionist’s is (perhaps) a blog rant.

      Newton’s is labeled a “RIFF”???

      This is a comment.

  20. Russ

      I definitely never felt like I was weird for being a boy who liked reading.  Kids at my school read or didn’t read, people didn’t really make fun of them.  Then again, I might have just been oblivious to the fact that reading wasn’t cool.  All I know is I lugged around books with me wherever I went pretty much as long as I can remember, and was never discreet about it.  It’s also possible there were enough things I got made fun of and picked on for that reading was the least of my social sins.  I was never exactly manly.

  21. Russ

      Thanks, Roxane!  I really enjoyed that Dear Sugar link.

  22. Jon Boulier

      With you on that one, buddy.  The biggest maize-like object in this entire essay being its crux:  Like, are you really going to say DFW started the lazy internet-talk phenomenon?  I can’t believe it was actually in the NYTimes.  I generally like Newton and her stuff, but it was just ridiculous.  As a bolted on note:  if anything, DFW is just another example, not the cause, of this phenomenon.

      Definitely don’t run backwards in the dark through that article.  That’s all I can say.

  23. Jon B.

      With you on that one, buddy.  The biggest maize-like object in this entire essay being its crux:  Like, are you really going to say DFW started the lazy internet-talk phenomenon?  I can’t believe it was actually in the NYTimes.  I generally like Newton and her stuff, but it was just ridiculous.  As a bolted on note:  if anything, DFW is just another example, not the cause, of this phenomenon.

      Definitely don’t run backwards in the dark through that article.  That’s all I can say.

  24. Frank Tas, the Raptor

      Yeah, I get the feeling my school was kind of an exception. Or maybe because I played sports I had a skewed perspective on all of it.

  25. BoomersMustDie

      This really is a nicely curated set of article links, seriously, I rarely get this self-righteous! I read that LARB plagiarism one, and my goodness what the hell is she on about? The authoress seems bipolar

  26. c2k

      Regardless of what one might think of Newton’s piece, why all the surprise that the NY Times would publish half-baked riffs – in the magazine, or particularly re books or in the books section?

  27. Nicholas Liu

      I would have to read Lipsyte’s piece more carefully than I currently care to to answer that question to my satisfaction. I don’t have to, however, to make my point, which is that having a definition of “woman-hating” etc. that includes comments as severe/innocuous as Lipsyte’s has no necessary connection with “shelteredness” that I can see. I bet everyone you’re complaining about would readily agree that there are many many many people more virulently “woman-hating” than they believe Lipsyte to be; your insinuation that they are (or are striking the pose of) tender flowers who would be just shocked, SHOCKED by the misogynists you would bring to their attention is probably unfounded in fact.

  28. Nicholas Liu

      I would have to read Lipsyte’s piece more carefully than I currently care to to answer that question to my satisfaction. I don’t have to, however, to make my point, which is that having a definition of “woman-hating” etc. that includes comments as severe/innocuous as Lipsyte’s has no necessary connection with “shelteredness” that I can see. I bet everyone you’re complaining about would readily agree that there are many many many people more virulently “woman-hating” than they believe Lipsyte to be; your insinuation that they are (or are striking the pose of) tender flowers who would be just shocked, SHOCKED by the misogynists you would bring to their attention is probably unfounded in fact.

  29. Nicholas Liu

      “authoress”

      wow

  30. Nicholas Liu

      “authoress”

      wow

  31. deadgod

      Nicholas, you certainly would “have to read Lipsyte’s piece [at least a little] carefully” to defend any statement about “comments as severe[??]/innocuous as Lipsyte’s”–otherwise, what cause would you have for having a perspective on the reference at all?

      Having a “definition of ‘woman-hating’ etc. that includes comments as severe[??]/innocuous as Lipsyte’s” casts a net for woman-hating so wide and finely meshed as to suggest that the ‘fisher’ actually can’t tell “misogyny” from positions supportive of masculine sensitization to women’s perspectives – sensitivities which anti-misogynists don’t and (I think) shouldn’t take for granted.

      To me, that kind of inability – to distinguish a)  Lipsyte’s trying, what, to coax football players into reading books by writing a book about the tribulations of, well, football players from b)  the sociopathy of real hatred for women – that blurring of categorical discernment suggests inadequate exposure to the latter (which inadequation you call “probably unfounded in fact”). 

      –or, perhaps more insultingly, not being able to tell the one from the other is a symptom of:  hysteria.  –which frustrates me to be called to the point of . . .

  32. BoomersMustDie

      PROTIP: I’m trolling

  33. Nicholas Liu

      Where did I say I hadn’t read it “[at least a little] carefully”? I said I had not read it so carefully as to be able to answer your question to my satisfaction. I am not so easily satisfied.

      In any case, how justified it is to call Lipsyte’s comments misogynist has little to do with what I’m saying. One can have a very low threshold for “woman-hating”, just as one can be a(n unreasonable) misanthrope who thinks everyone in the world (other than oneself) is an asshole. Whence “sheltered”? You say that “that blurring of categorical discernment suggests inadequate exposure to the latter”. Well, it’s interesting to know what that “suggests” to you, but I should like to know the mechanism by which it is suggested.P.S. “[A]s severe/innocuous” does not suggest that a comment can be both severe or innocuous, or any such insensible thing. I was using it the way one might say “a person as tall as me” or “a person as short as me” and mean the same thing–a person of my height, be that a height you consider short or tall.

  34. deadgod

      What you said was that you hadn’t read the piece “carefully” enough to be “satisf[ied]” that you could tell whether calling Lipsyte a ‘woman-hater’ or not was helpful or accurate; even a cursory reading would have led at least to a point of view of that

      You also said that putting Lipsyte’s “comments” on a continuum of misogyny from severe to innocuous (innocuous misogyny?) has nothing to do with “‘shelteredness'”, in your interesting sight.  That is, you scruple to call that extensive a spectrum of explosive categorization – namely, of ‘woman-hater’ – clear in its connection to inexperience of the big, bad world.  That is a pretty easily “satisfied” skepticism!

      [I think you mean that a thing can ‘be’ contraries, in the sense that ‘to be’ is ‘to be perceived’ (or ‘predicated’).  Socrates’s point is that a person ‘is’ both tall and short, because these terms for extension are intrinsically relative (and can’t be made absolute).

      In any case, I wasn’t questioning the range of predication – as I’ve done in this “Reply” -, but rather, the sense that Lipsyte’s essay (or whatever it should be called) could reasonably be construed as “severe” in its misogyny, which I see now that you meant only as an abstract possibility.]

  35. Nicholas Liu

      A cursory reading–which I gave it–does not suffice, because misogyny is a complex and complicated concept that can describe a field of quite various positions. You seem to think it means “an opinion expressed by someone who hates women in general, consistent with that hatred”, and that a person either “is” or “is not” “a woman-hater”. This is not the sense in which most feminist critics use it. As someone who will admit to expressing and still holding (albeit not intentionally) misogynist attitudes myself, it is certainly not the sense in which I use and understand the word. Expanding the ambit of the discussion from accuracy (the basic question) to helpfulness further multiplies the degree of attention required. “Helpfulness” in itself is complex and complicated.

      And of course there can be an “innocuous” *level* of misogyny: zero or near zero. This is the level you are claiming for these comments, is it not? Re: “severe”/”innocuous”, “tall”/”short”, I think you are “correcting” me on a point I do not misapprehend. Socrates’ point is exactly the reason I constructed the phrase as I did–you are the one who seemed confused by it.

      I am dismayed that you feel the connection between a low threshold for misogyny and a low degree of exposure to misogyny to be so self-evident that you have no need to explain or justify your claim. I think that disagreement is itself proof that a claim is not self-evident, and that the usual burden of proof then applies. Skepticism towards an unsupported claim obtains by default; it does not require (nor admit, I’d say) “satisfaction”. If you cannot give good reasons for your belief, there is no need for me to disprove it.

      Perhaps you can show some necessary logical connection, in which case have at it. I’m all ears. If not, however, I think you would need to answer these two empirical (though perhaps impractical, given the circumstances) questions:

      1) Of the set of people who think Lipsyte’s piece is misogynistic, what proportion of them would agree that he is nonetheless in a low-to-moderate percentile of severity among misogynists? If it is high, then it seems unreasonable to assert that “shelteredness” is the main reason behind their opinion. “Shelteredness” only makes sense if their reason for applying that label is that they are unaware that worse misogynists exist. No?

      2) Of the set of people who think Lipsyte’s piece is misogynistic, how many of them have actually experienced behaviour which you would recognise as “authentically” misogynistic? I mean, how many of them have been raped, abused, treated unfavourably, and so on–i.e. how many of them can be empirically shown to not have been “sheltered” from the effects of misogyny.

      If you cannot answer these questions, I suggest you would be better off sticking to claims as to the accuracy of the label, rather than taking cheap shots at the supposed mental states of the people who would apply it.

  36. Nicholas Liu

      “protip”

      wow

  37. BoomersMustDie

      “”

      WOW