As part of his Nerd Curious series, in which he goes back and explores artifacts of culture he missed in his youth, my friend and the AV Club’s television editor Todd VanDerWerff took a deep dive into Ray Bradbury’s short stories and emerges with what I think is one of the best summaries of what makes Bradbury’s work distinct, the element of nostalgia and emotional irrationality in decision-making, even in science fiction where we’re supposed to be enhanced–or at least, where rationality is supposed to rule:

In The Martian Chronicles, as happens so often in Bradbury’s work, people don’t look at the destruction of their world and run as far as they can from the mushroom clouds or the astronauts bearing chicken pox. Instead, they run toward them, trying in vain to preserve something that’s already gone. The Earthlings who have settled Mars decide to go back to Earth after nuclear war erupts there. That seems a very curious decision—wouldn’t those who had escaped such destruction by virtue of being so very far away count themselves lucky?—until it is situated in the context of Bradbury’s bibliography. The characters are haunted by memories of a past they can’t ever shake. In that context, their actions make perfect sense. They aren’t driven by practical sense; they’re driven by emotional sense, until both worlds are mostly dead and barren, a handful of survivors of two species straggling out a life on the margins.

You should really read the whole thing, which has too many big ideas to get into here. But I thought that was lovely and astute.

The trailer for the upcoming Civil War drama Copperhead conveniently doesn’t mention that the movement its titular characters were affiliated with wanted the Union to make a peace with the Confederacy that would allow for the preservation of slavery, and that it was naive enough to believe the Confederacy would come back to the Union on its own terms. But given the pop culture trope of the sympathetic or victimize Confederate, I’m not actually surprised that a Civil War setting is one of the few ways we could get a movie about people who have been dramatically marginalized in our political conversations and even in civil society: war resisters.

Right now, I’m reading Adam Hochschild’s To End All Wars, his terrific history of resistance to World War I. One of the things that’s striking about the book, particularly the section on the suffrage movement, is the reminders it offers that the things we do to people who have been designated enemies of the state now, Western countries did to their own citizens a century ago. Horrified by the forced feedings of hunger strikers at Guantanamo? The British government force-fed suffragettes, many of who it imprisoned for extended periods of time for civil disobedience. Angered by the treatment of people who oppose war as if they’re mentally ill or radical? Bertrand Russell lost his job at Trinity College for his pacifism and served time in jail under the Defence of the Realm Act, which among other things, forbid people from publishing writing that could cause alarm or “disaffection” among the British populace, and pacifist socialist Jean Jaurès was assassinated by a nationalist in France.

We’ve become very comfortable lionizing the risks soldiers take on the battlefield, in part because those celebrations feel like a way of paying back people who are willing to experience extreme danger and the trauma of killing other people on our behalf. But we’re still reluctant, apparently, to treat people who try and fail to keep us out of wars, or as was the case with many World War I activists, to point out the disparate impact of conscription along class lines, as if they’re reasonable, much less admirable. I’m not an absolute pacifist myself, but I do think that the courage to stand up against some conflicts is admirable, and the amount of it required is more considerable than we generally acknowledge, given the risk that you’ll be labeled treasonous or mentally ill. I just wish that instead of Copperhead, we were getting a biopic about Charlotte Despard, a wealthy British woman (and sister to British war leader John French) whose pacifism grew out of a range of social concerns, including her work on poverty and her suffragist activism–in other words, a movie that can put war resistance in its social context, rather than one that in its advertising is hiding the uncomfortable truth of the Copperheads’ acceptance of slavery.

In his writing here about the dearth of openly gay players on the active rosters of professional sports teams, Travis Waldron’s discussed a range of issues that have factored into the perception that athletics are a largely heterosexual pursuit. There’s the theory that the locker room is an unfriendly environment that’s been partially dispelled by straight allies like Chris Kluwe and Brendon Ayanbadejo. The persistent use of homophobic insults by fans suggests that the problem might be more in the stands than in players-only areas. And there’s the question of how being publicly out of the closet might affect a player’s negotiating power or sponsorship deals.

But this week’s given us a different kind of story about homophobia in sports, that of Giants reliever Jeremy Affeldt. Raised in a conservative environment, playing professional baseball sent Affeldt to cities where he met actual gay people, and gave him experiences that broadened his horizons. In Cincinnati, a gay Starbucks employee welcomed Affeldt’s son. And as he came to know San Francisco, Affeldt also came to learn more about people who had previously frightened him so much that he literally hid from the public. As the AP reports:

The ex-military brat said Monday he was so uncomfortable in San Francisco that he would seclude himself. ”I didn’t leave my hotel room when we came to play the Giants or A’s. I didn’t want to go out or see anyone,” he said. ”There was a profession of being wrong. I’ve come to that from a deep angle. I’ll probably get a lot of flak from the church for it, but I believe I’m right.”…

”There’s a chapter in there of me coming to San Francisco and being hesitant because I had homophobia, and now I don’t,” he said. ”I see more San Francisco as a city of love and a city of passion and compassion. It’s unbelievable this city. To see that and to have my heart change as a city I didn’t ever want to come to, to a city that I’m so thankful I’m going to be part of for a long time, it talks about that. For me, it was an awesome deal.”

We normally think about sports in terms of their ability to give different kinds of people the opportunity to excel, and through that athletic success, to disprove stereotypes about, say, the masculinity of gay men, or the temperament of African-Americans. But sports also put us in the stands with people who are different from us, and take young men and women to places that they might never have been able to afford to go, or brave enough to go, on their own, and expose them to ideas and people they might otherwise have never encountered. Someone like Chris Kluwe might have come into the NFL a straight ally, but if Major League Baseball turned Affeldt into one, and specifically into someone who is publicly reconciling his Christian faith and his renunciation of homophobia, that speaks to the power of professional sports to change minds in a very different ways.

Much has been made of the fact that E.L. James’ Fifty Shades of Grey, the erotic novel about a wealthy industrialist into BDSM and the young college graduate who falls for him, started out as Twilight fan fiction, and became a phenomenon once James changed the names. But she was hardly the first writer to hone her chops in fan fiction: Cassandra Clare, who started out in various fandoms, had a young adult fiction hit with her Mortal Instruments series, which has now spawned a movie adaptation with a $60 million budget. The Star Wars Expanded Universe is a professionalized version of fan fiction, giving authors space, within specific guidelines, to build out new stories and characters within a preexisting world. And given how many people have spent so many hours laboring over their keyboards for so many years, maybe the really surprising thing is that someone hasn’t figured out a way to monetize their work without changing the names or making them invent new stories before.

That changed yesterday, when Amazon announced its Kindle Worlds program, which is cleverly set up to benefit both the creators of original content and the people who write original stories set in the worlds invented by those creators and makes use of their characters. Authors of fan fiction published and sold through the Kindle Worlds program will be paid a royalty rate of 35 percent for works longer than 10,000 words, and 20 percent for short stories between 5,000 and 10,000 words. It’s not quite clear what percentage or flat fee the original creators of that licensed content will receive. But Amazon suggests that most of the pieces sold through the program will be priced in between $.99 and $3.99, though I can see those figures getting higher if Amazon gets its hands on some of the popular, book-length projects that have circulated in various fandoms for years.

Works can get rejected from the program–Amazon’s reserving the right to kick out submissions that provide a “poor customer experience,” and the guidelines for the program say it won’t accept pornographic material, which constitutes a significant percentage of fan fiction, work that uses racial slurs, employs excessive violence, or relies on heavily profane speech. And perhaps the biggest constraint right now is what fictional universes it’s possible for writers to work in. Kindle Worlds debuted with the rights to some of the content from Warner Bros. Television Group’s Alloy Entertainment, a notorious content factory, including Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars, and The Vampire Diaries.

It makes sense that Kindle Worlds starts with content from Alloy, a publishing house with a highly-defined style where authors have been known to be assigned to projects cooked up because they seem likely to sell well, and to adapt well for film and television, as proved to be true for the three properties that are kicking off the Kindle Worlds universe. And while Amazon’s announcement of the program said that they’d be announcing many new licenses for fan fiction writers to work in, I would bet that it’ll be difficult for the program to get access to some of the properties that have inspired particularly lively fan fiction communities, like Harry Potter or the West Wing. It might make sense that Alloy’s authors, who are part of a profit-oriented program, don’t have much anxiety about other people playing in the universes that they built out. But authors who are more proprietary about their characters might be more twitchy about the prospect of other people getting paid to play in the worlds that they created. I can see someone like Charlaine Harris, who is ending her Southern Vampire series because she feels the universe is wrung out, and is under enormous and irrational pressure from fans to continue, wanting to definitively close off the world they created.

The question, then, will be whether standard author contracts make it easy for publishing houses to sign the works they publish over to Kindle Worlds, or whether this is a provision they’re going to have to negotiate as an addendum, and find standard language for in the future. And it’ll be interesting to see which authors decide they’re interested in participating and which hold out, in part as an indication of how proprietary authors feel about their creations. It could be very strange to see authors of original works get eclipsed by writers playing in the worlds other people have created as has, to a certain extent, been true with Fifty Shades of Grey.

When Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In was released earlier this year, I, to use the oft-repurposed and much-misunderstood lingo of Sandberg herself, leaned out. The book was the subject of a feminist furor, fueled by a quotation from an interview Sandberg gave for the documentary Makers that was unfairly truncated to suggest that she saw herself as some sort of social visionary, and the suggestion that readers form “Lean In Circles,” a sort of consciousness-raising-meets-corporate-boardroom series of study groups. The fray seemed unappealing, and besides, I’d reasoned, I was doing a decent job of leaning in, even if I haven’t yet complicated my work-life balance with marriage and children.

But last week, a good girlfriend suggested I give Lean In a try, and I finished it just as Anne Applebaum published a joint review of Sandberg’s book and Hanna Rosin’s The End Of Men in the New York Review of Books, situating Sandberg’s volume squarely in the tradition of business advice books. Applebaum seems disappointed, as she puts it, that “this is not a book that belongs on the shelf alongside Gloria Steinem and Susan Faludi. It belongs in the business section,” and maybe given some of the hype around Lean In, that’s fair. I’m more than willing to grant that the book has many of the flaws that have been ascribed to it, including a failure to extensively discuss the role of paid help in Sandberg’s work-life balance, the fact that the book is not particularly applicable to working-class women, and its cursory treatment of women in the Third World. But if you are a woman preparing to begin a white-collar job, or to level up from one to the next, Lean In is worth reading precisely as a business book, and not because it has definitive answers for every situation, but as a useful guide for thinking through situations where there is no clear or easy answer—particularly those where women face social obstacles particular to their gender.

Applebaum’s critique of Lean In as business advice—separate from her criticisms of Sandberg’s argument that women in business leadership will create a more supportive environment for the women coming up behind them—has three central tenets. First, that Sandberg’s advice appears contradictory, suggesting that women speak more at some times and less at others, or arguing for women to project confidence they don’t feel in some situations, while being emotionally honest in others. Second, she argues that Sandberg doesn’t provide enough specific detail about her childcare arrangements for other women to model. And finally, Applebaum suggests that Sandberg hasn’t given enough room to discuss factors like luck and her ability to get along with difficult men, like former Treasury Secretary and longtime Sandberg mentor Larry Summers. Those last two criticisms aren’t unreasonable, and it would be fascinating to read Sandberg’s advice for dealing with Summers, but it’s hard to see how knowing precisely how many nannies Sandberg hires would help those of us who don’t have her financial resources. And I think Sandberg would have no disagreement with Applebaum’s argument that:

In practice, a successful woman—like a successful man—must learn, early on, how much emotion to show and how much to conceal, depending on the circumstances. She must learn how much to speak and how much to keep silent, for that depends on the circumstances too. Above all, she must understand herself well enough to know which challenges are worth accepting and which—given her personal situation, her husband, her finances, her interests, her age—must be sensibly refused.

Read more

It’s taken me a couple of days to sort through my feelings about Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and not just because the cinematography during the many scenes in it set in automobiles made me carsick. It’s an enormously overstuffed movie, with party sequences that turn on my latent claustrophobia, a cacophonous soundtrack, and so many baubles it’s easy to feel like you’re watching a jewelry store—and there’s a great deal of Tiffany product placement in the movie, particularly of Daisy’s “string of pearls valued at three hundred and fifty thousand dollars” and a headpiece she wears to a party—rathe than a movie. But one thing that Luhrmann’s adaptation gets right, and that brings out one of my favorite performances by Leonardo DiCaprio in a long time, is the way Gatsby marries conspicuous consumption, subtle class-based knowledge, and social awkwardness.

One of the best scenes in the movie stems from a situation where Gatsby’s (DiCaprio) set up a situation that’s guaranteed to be awkward: he’s asked Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) to ask his old flame Daisy Buchanan (Carey Mulligan), now married to a wealthy boor named Tom (Joel Edgerton) to tea so he can just drop by and reconnect with her. It’s an attempt to be casual in a situation that requires deliberation and a direct approach, and it puts Nick, who is Daisy’s cousin, in an awful social position. As Jordan Baker (Elizabeth Debicki) puts it in Fitzgerald’s novel, “I think he half expected her to wander into one of his parties, some night, but she never did. Then he began asking people casually if they knew her, and I was the first one he found. it was that night he sent for me at his dance, and you should have heard the elaborate way he worked up to it. Of course I immediately suggested a luncheon in New York—and I thought he’d go mad.”

In the movie, Luhrmann’s delight in conspicuous consumption illustrates just how badly Gatsby is going about orchestrating this meeting. He has Nick’s small house landscaped overnight, then descends on it with a team of umbrella-toting butlers to jam it full of orchids and a multi-layer cake, as if he’s catering a society wedding rather than being invited to his friend’s home. The makeover is simultaneously an insult to Nick and the modest home he’s able to rent and a total sabotage of Gatsby’s attempt at casualness. He’s desperate to seem spontaneous, but he can’t relinquish control of the moment to achieve it, insistent that the moment be perfect, but completely out of things to say. Watching DiCaprio wander in and out of Nick’s house, into the rain and out of the rain, and then totally forget that he’s soaking wet and in a small living room that looks like a greenhouse is a scene as precisely bizarre as the moment demands. And it gets at one of the central reveals of the scene: how little Gatsby is actually thinking about Daisy, or what she might be feeling. The tableau he’s set up is all about him, and he’s shocked when Nick points out part of the reason he’s going wrong. “You’re just embarrased, that’s all,” Nick tells him. “Daisy’s embarrssed too.” “She’s embarrassed?” Gatsby wants to know. He’s assumed both that Daisy is so poised that she couldn’t possibly be rattled, and that his return to her life will be a source of uncomplicated joy. It never seems to have occurred to Gatsby that Daisy is not, in fact, a princess in a tower, and that there might be a reason she hasn’t come looking for him.
Read more

In an impressive expansion of the term “pornographic,” a Northville, Michigan woman, Gail Horalek asked that Anne Frank: The Diary Of A Young Girl (The Definitive Edition) be removed from the school’s curriculum because: “It’s pretty graphic, and it’s pretty pornographic for seventh-grade boys and girls to be reading. It’s inappropriate for a teacher to be giving this material out to the kids when its really the parents’ job to give the students this information.” The passages that she’s dubbed “pornographic” are actually more anatomical, given that they discuss Frank attempting to learn more about her own body, than they are “designed to arouse lust,” the conventional meaning of pornographic.

But rather than quibble over the definition, in rendering a verdict on Horalek’s complaint, Robert Behnke, the assistant superintendent for Instructional Services in Northville, stood by the inclusion of the edition of the book in the seventh-grade curriculum on the grounds of its relevance to the unit on courage in which it was taught. And he reminded Horalek that existing school regulations mean she can get pretty much what she wanted. The full email he sent to parents, posted by one of them on a message board, reminds the community:

The committee also suggested the district take steps to further communicate information about the units of study within the middle school literature courses, and where possible, provide booklists to parents with the notation that reading selections can always be reviewed by parents prior to making a literature selection. As always, in the event that a concern surfaces during a unit and is brought to the teacher’s attention, adjustments can be made to move the student to another literature selection and/or an alternative assignments can be discussed.

A communication regarding the seventh grade English Language Arts units of study and booklists is being created and will be shared with parents in the near future. Communication on units of study and booklists from other grades also will be forthcoming.

At Northville Public Schools we are proud of the partnerships we have forged with parents in the best interest of all students. Keeping in mind that families within the Northville community have varying perspectives, and that our students have varying levels of sensitivity and maturity — which are often best accommodated by their parents — the district strives to provide choices for parents and students where appropriate and possible when it comes to programming and courses. As a school district, we also encourage parents to use supplemental learning activities and books that reflect their own family’s values and perspectives to support reading and literature analysis taking place in the classroom.

If Horalek wants to be the person responsible for introducing her daughter to issues of sexuality, the Northville Public Schools give her every right to do so. If she’d Googled the book when her daughter’s syllabus came out, she would have found references to the removal of the Definitive Edition from the curriculum in the Culpeper County, Virginia school system on some of the same grounds she complained about. If she’d searched the text of the diary on either Google Books or through Amazon, she would have seen the passages that made her uncomfortable before her daughter even started reading the book. Maybe Horalek couldn’t have predicted what might have made her daughter uncomfortable in a classroom setting, but if she thinks there are certain subjects that should be reserved for parental instruction, there were any number of ways Horalek could have checked the book to see if it threw up red flags for her.

I’m not opposed to the idea that parents should play a role in their children’s education, or that parents have some sense of what makes their children comfortable or uncomfortable—though I don’t think that knowledge is complete. But it seems to serve the interests of the most people to give those parents and those children appropriate exits from the mainstream curriculum, and resources to help them supplement the curriculum they want to opt out of.

I’m fascinated by the extent to which fandom has become a source of identity categories, whether it’s people including the franchises that they’re attached to in their social media biographies, suggesting that loving Doctor Who, for example, is as important a thing for people to know about them as their place or category of work, or their status as a parent or spouse. But it’s clear that sometimes those attachments can become unproductive in their intensity, as Charlaine Harris, whose Southern Vampire novels became the basis for HBO’s series True Blood, found out when she decided it was time for her to focus on a new set of characters:

Many of her fans, however, aren’t close to satiated. Thousands of readers have written her and begged her to keep the story going. Some have taken to taunting Ms. Harris in emails and online forums, saying she’ll regret her decision. One fan threatened to commit suicide if the ending doesn’t meet her expectations.

“I’m very fortunate that people are so invested in the series,” Ms. Harris says. “At the same time, it can be a source of some anxiety to get emails that say, ‘If Sookie doesn’t end up with Eric, I’m going to kill myself.’ ”

The prickly dynamic between Ms. Harris and some of her followers highlights how hard it can be to kill a successful series. For the first time in years, Ms. Harris isn’t touring to promote the book. She doesn’t want to be berated by readers who hate the ending or want vampire spinoffs.

I’m fascinated by this sense of obligation, or by the sense that it’s appropriate to lobby creators not for substantive things like more diverse casting or more diverse writing staffs, but for certain plot points, like the development of romantic relationships between certain characters. As a critic, I’m always comfortable saying that I think one choice or another might be more effective. But the idea that someone owes something to me, whether it’s a certain event, or simply more of whatever it is that they’re producing, is very strange. It makes me wonder how fans relate in different ways to products and to the people who create them, as if the latter serves some sort of kind of grand design that governs the former, rather than being the deity of the particular universe they’ve created.

In my favorite new illustration of the persistent belief that, when it comes to gender, male experience is considered general and unbiased while female experience is particular and annotated, novelist Amanda Filipacchi browsed through Wikipedia and found out that someone has been recategorizing entries on female American fiction writers so that they’re weeded out of the “American Novelists” category and ghettoized off in an “American Women Novelists” category—the “American Man Novelists” contains rather fewer entries. She writes in the New York Times:

I looked up a few female novelists. You can see the categories they’re in at the bottom of their pages. It appears that many female novelists, like Harper Lee, Anne Rice, Amy Tan, Donna Tartt and some 300 others, have been relegated to the ranks of “American Women Novelists” only, and no longer appear in the category “American Novelists.” If you look back in the “history” of these women’s pages, you can see that they used to appear in the category “American Novelists,” but that they were recently bumped down. Male novelists on Wikipedia, however — no matter how small or obscure they are — all get to be in the category “American Novelists.” It seems as though no one noticed.

I did more investigating and found other familiar names that had been switched from the “American Novelists” to the “American Women Novelists” category: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ayn Rand, Ann Beattie, Djuna Barnes, Emily Barton, Jennifer Belle, Aimee Bender, Amy Bloom, Judy Blume, Alice Adams, Louisa May Alcott, V. C. Andrews, Mary Higgins Clark — and, upsetting to me: myself.

I can see a world where it makes sense to categorize novels, though not novelists, by their subject matter. Some days, I want to read about male experiences and read through the eyes of a male main character, somedays I want to live in a woman’s world, and others I want to hang out with, I don’t know, a genetically-engineered fifteen-year-old girl. There’s a service to readers in a project like that.

But sorting out authors by gender, and sorting out only female authors by gender, is an attempt to create a differing assessment of male and female writers. Novel-writing is not an inherently male activity. And it’s not even one that started out male and to which women had to gain entry. Female fiction writers like Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville, Baroness d’Aulnoy, scandal writers like Anne-Marguerite Petit du Noyer, and playwright and novelist Aphra Behn were all there at the beginning. A female perspective in fiction is no more distinct and particular—or offputting to large number of readers—than a male one, and visions like Ernest Hemingway’s or Saul Bellow’s are deeply tied up in their gender, rather than reflective of some American baseline. It’s not more substantive to care about fishing or war than it is to care about love or domestic life. But to acknowledge that male and female perspectives are both equally particular and equally interesting would require acknowledging that they’re both, well, equal.

I was sorry to read yesterday of the death of children’s and young adult author E.L. (short for Elaine Lobl ) Konigsburg. She’s best remembered for her 1967 novel—one of two published that year—From The Mixed Up Files Of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, about siblings who run away to live in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, memorably bathing in the fountain at the cafe, sleeping in an antique bed, and treating themselves to lunch at the Automat, a kind of restaurant I dreamed of eating at for years afterwards. But as much as the running away details of Mixed Up Files are memorable, much of what I love about both it and A Proud Taste For Scarlet and Miniver, Konigsburg’s less-read book about the life of Eleanor of Aquitaine, is the way both books gave girls and young women credit for intellectual curiosity, and trusted them to handle big emotions and ideas, like whether or not it matters that a piece of art is by Michaelangelo, or what it means to build a good marriage.

Claudia, the main character of Mixed Up Files, first earns our respect for the gift of logistics she applies to running away. She lifts train tickets, picks her younger brother as a runaway companion because he has managed to stash away a reasonable supply of travel money, and figures out a way to make sure the two of them don’t get caught by Met security guards (this is all in an age before pressure sensors and electric alarms). But what ultimately makes her admirable, and what wins her the respect of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, a wealthy art collector, is much more ephemeral. During Claudia’s time living in the museum, an overpoweringly beautiful statue of an angel goes on display, and becomes a phenomenon. Part of the curiosity is inspired by the fact that it’s not entirely clear whether the statue was produced by Michaelangelo. But Claudia becomes obsessed by the question, and she and her brother track down Mrs. Frankweiler in search of answers.

Once they do, the older delivers one of the most valuable lessons on education anyone could give to children. “I think you should learn, of course,” she tells Claudia, who doesn’t want to go back to school, feeling that her experience on her own has been more valuable than any education. “And some days you must learn a great deal. But you should also have days when you allow what is already in you to swell up inside of you until it touches everything. And you can feel it inside of you. If you never take time out to let that happen, then you just accumulate facts, and they begin to rattle around inside of you. You can make noise with them, but never really feel anything with them. It’s hollow.”
Read more