(1) PETALS TO THE METAL. At Young People Read Old SFF, curator James Davis Nicoll is a little worried:
My hit rate for this series so far has been… somewhat lower than I hoped. It’s not that I am going out of my way to find older SF stories that do not consistently appeal to younger people; it is just that I turn out to have a remarkable talent for finding older SF stories that do not consistently appeal to younger people.
So this time he pulled out one of the greatest short stories in the genre, Daniel Keyes’ “Flowers for Algernon”. Turns out his young audience wasn’t all that fired-up about it, either. Which reminds me of a favorite joke:
A dog food company once held a convention for its sales force. The president got up and said, “We have the greatest product in the world!” Everybody applauded. “We have the best sales people in the industry!” The cheered wildly. “So,” asked the president, “why aren’t we selling any dog food?” A little man in the back got up and shouted, “It’s the damn dogs, sir! They don’t like it!”
(2) DON’T STAND UNDERNEATH WHEN THEY FLY BY. The odds say that these things are supposed to crash in the ocean. Except when they don’t. “The Space Debris Problem: Dual Impact In Myanmar Shows What’s To Come”.
A mining facility in northern Myanmar became the crash site of a huge piece of space debris last Thursday. As the impact occurred, a smaller piece of debris with Chinese markings on it simultaneously destroyed the roof of a house in a nearby village. Fortunately, no one was injured in either incident.
The larger object is barrel-shaped and measures about 4.5 meters (15 ft) long, with a diameter barely over a meter. “The metal objects are assumed to be part of a satellite or the engine parts of a plane or missile,” a local news report said. The Chinese government is neither confirming nor denying whether both pieces of space junk came from the same object.
(3) FIGHT INTERNMENT. George Takei’s op-ed in the Washington Post reacts against talk about rounding up Muslims and reminds people of what happened when we interned the Japanese — “They interned my family. Don’t let them do it to Muslims”.
There is dangerous talk these days by those who have the ear of some at the highest levels of government. Earlier this week, Carl Higbie, an outspoken Trump surrogate and co-chair of Great America PAC, gave an interview with Megyn Kelly of Fox News. They were discussing the notion of a national Muslim registry, a controversial part of the Trump administration’s national security plans, when Higbie dropped a bombshell: “We did it during World War II with Japanese, which, you know, call it what you will,” he said. Was he really citing the Japanese American internment, Kelly wanted to know, as grounds for treating Muslims the same way today? Higbie responded that he wasn’t saying we should return to putting people in camps. But then he added, “There is precedent for it.”
Stop and consider these words. The internment was a dark chapter of American history, in which 120,000 people, including me and my family, lost our homes, our livelihoods, and our freedoms because we happened to look like the people who bombed Pearl Harbor. Higbie speaks of the internment in the abstract, as a “precedent” or a policy, ignoring the true human tragedy that occurred….
(4) THE FRANCHISE THAT LIVED. The BBC renders a verdict — “Film review: Is Fantastic Beasts a Rowling triumph?” Chip Hitchcock says, “tl;dr version: way too many characters for one movie. Rowling says it’s the first of five; sounds a bit like the opening episode ST:TNG, which spent most of its time setting up the main players.”
As exhilarating as all the new sights and sounds are, though, it’s soon apparent that Rowling et al are enjoying their relocation a little too much. A major flaw of the later Harry Potter films was that they crammed in so many characters and incidents from the ever-longer novels that they were baffling to anyone who didn’t know the books by heart. What’s slightly disappointing about Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is that, even though it isn’t adapted from a novel, it has a similar problem. Rowling’s superabundant imagination won’t let the story build up momentum: she keeps shoving minor characters and irrelevant details in its path.
(5) TODAY IN HISTORY
- November 18, 1928— Mickey Mouse appeared for the first time, with Walt Disney doing the voice of his soon-to-be-famous creation, in “Steamboat Willie,” the first fully synchronized sound cartoon produced.
- November 18, 1963 — Push-button telephones made their debut. John King Tarpinian was one of the early button-pushers:
I remember being at the County Fair and there was a display with kiosks. You used a rotary phone to dial your number then using a push-button phone you dialed a random phone number. The elapsed time was displayed and you saw how much faster the push-button phone was compared to the rotary.
- November 18, 1990 — Stephen King’s It premieres on TV.
(6) TRIVIAL TRIVIA. Actor Charles Bronson appeared in the 1953 horror classic House of Wax as Vincent Price’s assistant, Igor. Bronson is credited under his real name, Charles Buchinsky.
(7) ABOLISHING A EUPHEMISM. NPR’s Glen Weldon says “The Term ‘Graphic Novel’ Has Had A Good Run. We Don’t Need It Anymore”.
…And all the other, sillier, less meaningful stuff. Science fiction, or whatever.
Oy. OK. Lots to unpack here, and, to be fair, at lot of it’s our fault. Comics readers and creators, that is.
By the time the great cartoonist Will Eisner slapped the term “graphic novel” on his 1978 book, A Contract With God and Other Tenement Stories, the term had been percolating around comics fandom for years. Eisner, however, was a tireless advocate, and wanted people to appreciated that comics are a medium, not a genre. A medium dominated, then as now, by superheroes, but nevertheless a storytelling medium that could be used to tell an infinite number of stories in vastly different ways.
Which is why—
Um, OK. It looks like you’re ramping up. I’m gonna … I’m just gonna grab a seat then.
Fine, go ahead.
The reason Eisner latched onto the term “graphic novel” and ran with it is because … well, it was 1978. He needed to. Comics were considered, if they were considered at all, junk culture. Kid stuff that was beneath serious notice, if not beneath contempt….
Chip Hitchcock comments: “They use Gaiman’s less-colorful metaphor; when he spoke in NYC a decade or so back, he said someone who insisted he did ‘graphic novels’ made him feel like a streetwalker being told she was a lady of the night.”
(8) CHESTNUTS ROASTING. Annalee Newitz lists “All the science fiction and fantasy novels you need to make it through the winter” at Ars Technica.
Everfair, by Nisi Shawl
2016 was a good year for alternate histories, and Shawl’s thought experiment about 19th century colonialism in Everfair is no exception. In this alternate reality, Fabian socialists in Britain manage to team up with African-American missionaries to buy part of the Belgian Congo from King Leopold II, establishing the free African nation of Everfair. Based on an actual historical plan that never came to fruition, the novel imagines how Everfair would develop, changing the history of other colonized African nations as its population swells with American former slaves and liberated peoples of the Congo. Though there is a strong Utopian core to the novel, Shawl does not shy away from depicting thorny, internecine battles between different groups who have opposing definitions of freedom. Plus, we get to see how Everfair develops breathtaking new technologies. Shawl has done incredible research on the history of the Congo, and it shows. This is steampunk done right, with all the tarnish, sweat, and blood visible on the gears of the world’s great industrial technologies.
(9) AH, THAT EXPLAINS IT. I wondered why Vox Day kept using this as a figure for Trump. James McConnaughy makes the connection in “#NotMyGodEmperor: Why Are There So Many Actual Fascists in the Warhammer 40K Fandom?” at The Mary Sue.
That’s ridiculous, I told myself. There’s absolutely no way they could be genuinely identifying with the Imperium of Man or its fascist power structure. After all, the Imperium of Man is a parody of fascism, and not a particularly subtle one at that, since the game constantly talks about how much life sucks and how the authoritarianism causes more problems than it solves. They’d have to be blind to not see that Warhammer 40k is… kid…ding.
Oh. Oh no.
Let’s stop for a moment and talk about satire, because I like hard shifts like that. The problem with satire (or, more directly, the problem with writing satire) is that it has a goal, beyond simply being funny. Satire is pointed, it has a purpose, it is, to use a phrase I often dislike, saying something. More specifically, satire is saying something by taking something it wishes to criticize and blowing it up to absurd proportions.
And therein lies the problem: Satire is always walking the razor’s edge. By using the words and concepts of the thing you are satirizing, you are often giving voice to those words and concepts, and someone out there is going to agree with those words, not the actual point of your satire. That’s the basis of Poe’s Law: Without a blatant display of comedy, it is impossible to create a parody of extremism or fundamentalism that someone won’t mistake for the real thing.
(10) PLONK YOUR MAGIC TWANGER. The Financial Times has a regular feature about the one thing people take with them when they travel. Chris Hadfield explained in the November 12 issue why he always carries his guitar with him.
He explains that on his first trip to the Mir space station in 1995 he had a special guitar made by Wright Guitars where owner Rossco Wright “adapted one for me, cutting the neck in half and putting a locking piano hinge on it so it would fold and fit in the shuttle. I had to get approval from Nasa: from the highest level, the director of the space shuttle programme.”
“Just before the flight while I was in quarantine, I got a call from the payloads people saying that although Nasa had approved it, the Russians weren’t gonna let me take the guitar on to Mir because it hadn’t passed all the electromagnetic and flammability tests. So some people from Nasa came to my house, found my spare SoloEtte, did all the testing and passed the results to Russia. We launched–still without permission from the Russians–and I assembled the guitar on Mir, but we weren’t allowed to plug it in. Then,. as we were doing a press conference with Russian prime minister Victor Cheromydin, he said, ‘I understand you have a new guitar–play me a song.’ That sounded like permission, so we played a concert on Mir, and nothing caught fire or blew up.”
Hadfield says that the Larivee Parlour guitar Hadfield used to cover “Space Odyssey” in 2013 “was put there” in the International Space Station “for psychological support (along with books, movies, a harmonica and a couple of footballs” and has been in space since 2001.
(11) SPIGOT, RHYMES WITH… In October, Alexandra Erin created a satirical news feed on Medium called The Daily Spigot. She tells her Patreon supporters that she intended it to be daily, but that illness and the election interrupted her momentum; however, she has started writing new posts again. The latest is: “Trump Asking Every Business In Phone Book About Mexico Plans”
This reporter was allowed into Donald Trump’s private office to witness the real estate developer turned job saver in action.
“Hello, Triple A All-American Locksmiths?” he asked during a typical such call. “This is the President of the United States. That’s right,” he said, while an aide frantically mouthed the words “no, no, no” and another scrawled, “You have to stop saying that” on a piece of paper, which was then pushed across the desk to Trump, who frowned at it, signed it, then pushed it away.
“I’m just calling to see if you had any plans on moving your plant or any jobs to Mexico in, say, the next two months to four years? No? Great! Tremendous. Thanks a bunch. Make America great again!”
He then hung up the phone and said, “That’s another one for the Twitter.”
(12) GROWING UP GROOT. CinemaBlend poses some knotty questions in “How Groot Will Be Different In Guardians Of The Galaxy 2, According To Vin Diesel”.
While plugging his new movie Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk to Collider, Vin Diesel detoured into Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 territory, and noted how in the sequel, Groot will have a significantly more naive mindset compared to how he was as an adult. While it was generally assumed that Baby Groot would behave like a juvenile, Diesel statement confirms that the alien basically be a child, albeit one with extraordinary abilities. However, that mentality doesn’t necessarily mean he won’t remember what he was like before he was destroyed and regrown. At San Diego Comic-Con, Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige said Baby Groot will retain his memories, although director James Gunn later told a fan that as far as Baby Groot being the original Groot or a “son,” that situation is “complicated.”.
(13) NOT YOUR AVERAGE OBLATE SPHEROID. Astronomers claim to have discovered the roundest object ever measured in nature. Write this on your hand.
Kepler 11145123 is a distant, slowly rotating star that’s more than twice the size of the Sun.
Researchers were able to show that the difference between its radius as measured to the equator and the radius measured to the poles was just 3km.
“This makes Kepler 11145123 the roundest natural object ever measured,” said lead author Prof Laurent Gizon.
He added that it was “even more round than the Sun”.
(14) INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY IN THE SKY. Elon Musk’s latest: satellite internet: “SpaceX aims to launch internet from space”.
Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, announced last year that the service would be “larger than anything that has been talked about to date” adding that it would take about $10bn (£8bn) to get it off the ground.
The latest documents did not include costs.
It suggested that the first 800 satellites would be used to expand internet access in the US, including Puerto Rico and the US Virgin islands.
Each satellite, about the size of an average car, not including solar panels, would weigh 850 pounds (386kg), the firm said.
[Thanks to JJ, Todd, Martin Morse Wooster, Chip Hitchcock, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
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Ive just finished “The library of Mount Char”. Im very impressed! Its definitly in my Top 3 this year! Its very originell and very clever structured so that there are no boring parts. Its hard to compare it to anything – perhaps Gaimans “American Gods” come closest, but this is written from the persprective of the “insider”, not from a normal human stumbling into a different world.
From the back blurb I was a bit hesitant, because of the God.aspect I feared there would be philosophy about religion, but it has nothing of that, and its very not about Christianity.
Really entertaining. Oh and the characters are great, on par with Stephensons imho. Very, very pleasant surprise!
Re: “political” theatre. Lysistrata? (How would the contemporary target audience for that one react to an appearance by Pence or his boss?)
At someone’s rec here (Kendall, maybe?) I read Emma Newman’s “Between Two Thorns”. Liked it, am now reading book 2. Best aspect: I don’t think Our Heroine is going to be the focus of a romantic plot! What a relief.
Mr Dr Science read “The United States of Japan”, told me not to bother. He thought it was really sloppy and even Orientalist in its alternate history (“the Japanese are cool! They would totally build mecha given half a chance!), and then the editing fell apart in the last third, all kinds of SPAG errors.
I bought “Fluency” by Jennifer Foehner Wells, but haven’t been able to get into it so far: it seems too much like “Arrival” (which I’m seeing on Thanksgiving, so no spoilers!) but it’s hard for me to believe in the characters. And ugh, romance.
They wouldn’t give a fuck.
So to speak.
Has no one in the cast of Hamilton read Shakespeare’s line ,”The play’s the thing/Whereby we’ll touch the conscience of the king”? If they have faith in the implicit message of the play they don’t need to posture afterwards by scolding someone from the stage. In fact, they throw away their work.
The Hamilton cast’s statement to Pence was polite and respectful. Trump’s reply was a whiny demand that the cast of a political play give the VP-Elect a “safe space” instead of exercising their 1st Amendment rights.
And from the people who expend much energy denouncing “safe spaces”…
GMAFB.
@Mike
If you see someone influential, do you walk on by in the hope that the essential nobility of your position will shine through, or do you use your ability to actually talk to them?
@Steve Wright: “if someone told me a book was in trade paperback format, I wouldn’t necessarily know if it was comics or just print.”
That’s true. There isn’t any term that unambiguously means “a book that is in a convenient chunky book format with a spine that’s legible, and is a comic.” Maybe it would be nice to have one, but I was responding to Xtifr’s belief that “graphic novel” is already such a term, and my point was that it isn’t because it’s ambiguous, i.e. there’s at least one other unrelated meaning for it that’s still heavily used within the field.
(And, I might add, I’m not really in favor of everyone redefining it in Xtifr’s way because “novel” is a poor fit for this format-specific concept… but language is always really messy in this regard. For instance, if historical usage weren’t an issue at all, there’d be a perfect way to describe something that is a “comic” in medium, and a “book” in format: comic book. Unfortunately, that’s been a lost cause for the last 80 years or so since we in the US decided to call floppy comics that. And it actually made sense at the time, because when “comic books” started to be published, the previous standard format for comics in the US was a strip or a single page in a newspaper— so the new things, though still thin and floppy, were book-like compared to what came before.)
Anyway, indeed if you just say “trade paperback” it won’t be clear that it’s a comic (and as Darren says, there are also hardcovers), but again I was responding to Xtifr who seemed to be talking about situations where the comics part is already clear from context. And it remains true that people in the field of comics will generally use the existing publishing terms for specific book formats when they are talking about book formats, and will not usually use “graphic novel” for that.
(Darren: the problem with “omnibus” is that it means specifically “things that used to be published separately, which have now been brought together into a book or series of books.” A single stand-alone work originally created in one piece, like Blankets, is in no way an omnibus. Alec: The Years Have Pants is an omnibus, and it’s a single book. The Amazing Spider-Man Omnibus is an omnibus, but it’s many books; volume 3 of TASMO is… a volume, a book, whatever you want to call it; again, there just isn’t a perfect logical system for this. [It’d be somewhat unusual to call Watchmen an “omnibus” even though it was originally serialized, because it was a limited series that was always understood to be a single work. I’m sure someone has called it that, of course.] It’s also not usual to call a collection of previously serialized comics an “omnibus” while the series is still ongoing; as the word’s root implies, it normally means “we’ve collected all of this thing” rather than “here is the next chunk of it.” Again, as I said to Xtifr, you can use these words any way you like and not be committing a sin, but it remains the case that there’s neither a historical nor an informal consensus that those are the right words for the broader concept.)
This is somewhat easier in French, where “album” is a well-understood term that basically means “book-sized comic, regardless of whether it’s a stand-alone or part of a series.” But that’s still a little iffy because the “album” has had a very specific size and format for a long time, so now it’s still possible for people to disagree over whether, say, a book that’s 9cm by 9cm square and 300 pages long can be an album. But at least the literal meaning of the word doesn’t conflict with the desire to use it more broadly.
I’m sorry to have rambled on like this, but I am hoping never to find myself expressing any further opinions on the subject, so I just wanted to be clear.
When creating the U of Illinois’s first dedicated comics course, I called it “Graphic Narratives” to get it past the snobs on the curriculum committee at the college level. Then I got emails from students asking if it was a class on books with explicit sex and violence. Oy.
I am now taking my cues from Art Spiegelman and calling the class “Intro to Comics.”
@Eli: I never said the term was unambiguous. In fact, I was rather pointedly saying the opposite: it seems to have more than one meaning, so the idea that we should just get rid of the term seems odd, especially to those of us who are more familiar with the other meaning, and rarely encounter the “for-snobs” meaning.
I’m not trying to introduce a new meaning here. I’m saying that it seems to me that the term already has multiple meanings in common usage. I refuse to accept personal responsibility for all the people who may be using the term in ways you dislike. Even though I’m among that mass. 🙂
Mike Glyer — Please recall that “silence implies consent.”
I thought that the cast of Hamilton, a cast made up of all the wonderful diversity that is America, made a respectful plea to the VP-elect to understand the message of the play and be the leader of ALL of us, not just the minority that voted for him and his President-elect.
If only all of us had such a conduit to speak to power.
And the tweeted responses of the PE simply reinforces the concern that He Just Doesn’t Get It. A call for a ‘safe space’? Really? Wow, didn’t realize that he was a SJW.
The way things are shaping up, it will be more important than ever for us to be engaged with our government. Call, write, email, call, write, email, vote (REGISTER to vote), contribute to organizations you believe will push back against violations of the law and the Constitution.
Silence implies consent. We must not be silent.
(Missed the edit window by, literally, fractions of a second.)
And as long as we’re discussing misleading terms, let’s look at “comic” itself. How many “comic” books are actually comic? I mean, sure, Watchmen featured a character named “The Comedian”, but he wasn’t exactly a stand-up. 😉
@Xtifr: “I refuse to accept personal responsibility for all the people who may be using the term in ways you dislike. Even though I’m among that mass.”
Good grief, what on earth did I say that could’ve given you that impression? I mean, I see the smiley-face and all, but that’s still a bit snippy – I thought I had rather bent over backwards to avoid giving any offense. I’ll go away now.
Xtifr:
It’s used a lot.
People refer to them as TPBs, or trades, or call themselves trade-waiters if they wait for the book collection.
[I’m reminded of the time Marvel put out their first hardcover, and it was listed on the production schedule as a “hardcover TPB.” Not fan usage, but it still amuses me.]
Steve Wright:
You wouldn’t know if it was a cookbook or a book of photographs, if it was fiction or nonfiction, and lots of other things. It’s a format term, not a content term.
That’s what’s messed up about “graphic novel” — people try to use it as both, which is why we end up with the term applied to nonfiction, to story collections, to anthologies and more, as long as they’re book-format, and why it’s used to refer to stories intended as novelistic in structure and complexity, even while they’re still in serialized format.
“Novel” is not a format — you can publish a novel as a printed book, as a digital book, as a monthly serial, as part of a magazine, as part of an omnibus, etc.
Many people (including booksellers) use “graphic novel” to refer to any book-format comics, and many others use it to refer to content regardless of format. It’s muddy.
On the other hand, arguing about what things should logically be called is usually as pointless as the war against the term “sci-fi.” Words are defined by usage, and unless you can get the general public to use the word differently, the general usage will win.
I don’t much like the term “graphic novel,” because it’s so muddy — is the latest ASTRO CITY collection a graphic novel, even though it’s a story collection rather than a single, structured work of fiction? It’s not a novel. But if that’s what booksellers call it, what do I care?
I mostly use the term “comics” to refer to any comics, from collections of POGO to issues of AMAZING SPIDER-MAN to original trade paperbacks with a single self-contained work within. If I want to refer to the format, I’ll say it’s a hardcover, a trade paperback, or whatever.
It bugs me that there isn’t a format term for the standard-issue American comic-book format — “magazine” usually refers to 8.5X11″ magazine-format comics, and there’s resistance to “pamphlet” or “floppy” because they’re insulting (“floppy” intentionally so).
But I’m not willing to say that the bog-standard US format is a comic book and the other things aren’t. If it’s a book or magazine mostly full of comics, it’s a comic book, whether it has a square binding (like GIANT-SIZE AVENGERS #2), is a collection of comic strips (like FAMOUS FUNNIES #1), has a hardcover, a cardstock cover or a paper cover the same weight as the interior pages.
They’re all comic books.
Darren:
No, that’s another term that’ll confuse people, because in the comics business it’s usually (but not always) used to refer to an oversized and very substantial book collection that’s much longer than standard — a 200-page book isn’t an omnibus but a 700-page collection of something is.
And then there are the people who use it to refer to a full collection of some series, even if it’s not hugely long.
It’s a format term, it’s a content term, it’s a mess.
Xtifr:
How many novels are actually new?
How many films are on film any more? The “Criterion Collection of classic and contemporary films” comes on DVD and Blu-Ray these days.
It it still a television if you’re watching a DVD and thus not seeing at a great distance?
Words are disobedient things.
Mostly for Mike: Worldcon 75 announces Crystal Huff is standing down.
https://twitter.com/worldcon75/status/800084290482487296
Good point – just look how well that all worked out for Hamlet. I mean, imagine if Hamlet had just confronted Claudius in Act 1 Scene 1! Internalising his fear and grief and attempting to confront Claudius by not actually confronting him, was a definite big plus for the future of Denmark which all worked out great for everybody* by the end of the play.
*[where ‘everybody’ = ‘Norwegians’**]
**[Norwegians are cool]
@Mike Glyer
Perhaps you’re right, tactically. Having watched the videos though the cast peacefully, respectfully, and eloquently addressed themselves to the vice president-elect. We should be proud of the way they exercised their rights in what remains still a constitutional democracy.
Ninja’d by Mark https://twitter.com/crystalvisits/status/800083665577529345
The sequel to Ninefox Gambit, Raven Strategem, is finally up for pre-order at Amazon.
The sequel to Beth Cato’s Breath of Earth, Call of Fire, is also listed for anyone interested.
(Needless to say, I grabbed both.)
Peer Sylvester: Ive just finished “The library of Mount Char”. Im very impressed! Its definitly in my Top 3 this year! Its very originell and very clever structured so that there are no boring parts.
I loved that book too, and was sorry that it didn’t do better in the Hugo Novel category this year. I agree that it had the sophistication and subtlety of Stephenson at his best.
The American Gods comparison hadn’t occurred to me; good catch.
“Actually talk to them?” I guess my reply is going to sound like a paraphrase of the Argument Clinic sketch, but standing on stage lecturing somebody who’s gone out in the lobby is not a conversation. That’s just treating him as an object.
If my goal is to persuade somebody — move them in a different direction — I’m not going to try and do that in a hostile environment.
And because that’s how I approach these things, I tend to see what happened at Hamilton as a self-aggrandizing gesture in the safety of a sympathetic audience.
Considering that Hamilton actually is a message play that includes some of the expressed concerns, they might have stopped to think that Pence hears a lot of criticism, so maybe the dramatized message should be given its chance to sink in at a deeper level. Nothing would be lost by so doing — Pence is going to hear criticism every day.
And one last thought about this being an opportunity to address someone influential — wouldn’t you imagine that a lot of executives of major corporations, politicians, clergy, college presidents, musicians and artists have been in that audience on other nights. Were any of them ever given a personal appeal at the end of the play? Or was this just a unique opportunity to act out?
And the Twitter wags have had a field day with Pence:
Hamilton Boos Prompts Twitter Users To #NameAPenceMusical
While you were busy giving this superior reading of Shakespeare, shouldn’t you have corrected my quote — which should be “Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king”?
ETA: Still having trouble getting it right….
@Daniel Dern: “Since it’s been decades since I read RaR, could be. I’d started browsing Capek’s THE ABSOLUTE AT LARGE last week”
Ha! Thanks for mentioning that— it’s another tenuous connection that I think I may as well add to my foolhardy project of annotating Sladek. I’ve credited you.
Well, yes, it was a unique opportunity, because there is only ONE Vice President-Elect of these United States. I give Pence credit for sticking around: reports say that he listened from just outside the door. [He had to leave before the rest of the audience because that’s security protocol; he could have just kept going.]
Silence implies consent. We must not be silent. The campaign to normalize this is already beginning. It can’t be normalized. The newly elected President has incredible conflicts of interest that are already being reported, such as diplomats booking at his hotels to curry favor. His adult children will simultaneously be personal advisors and continue to run his businesses. No chance at all for conflicts of interest there.
His choices to begin filling out his cabinet tell us he wasn’t kidding about any of the things he said during his campaign. A man who was deemed too racist to be a Federal judge during the REAGAN administration will now be responsible for enforcing Civil Rights law, among other things.
Silence implies consent.
I prefer your version 😉
@Mike
You’re pretty close to the common argument that being stood on a stage, or in some other way having an audience greater than the “average” person, means you should keep quiet. I don’t see the logic of that. Given that you cover the political opinions of authors in the scroll when it’s topical, I don’t think you subscribe to that idea either.
I’d suggest that there’s a strong tradition in theatre of addressing the audience in extraordinary circumstances, which the current atmosphere certainly qualifies as. Given that it involved explicitly condemning booing Pence and was well-phrased, generalised, and respectful, I think it was well within the bounds of reasonable discourse
Additionally, given that Pence got cheers as well, I don’t think it’s necessarily a fully sympathetic audience. I don’t know who else they might have had in, but I suspect Pence was a unique combination of status, topicality, and already having been noticed by the audience.
@TechGrrl1972
“A man who was deemed too racist to be a Federal judge during the REAGAN administration will now be responsible for enforcing Civil Rights law, among other things.”
You are speaking of Senator Sessions. As US Attorney he convicted the head of the KKK of murder and the additional $7 million cash penalty bankrupted the Klan. The head Klansman was executed. As US Attorney he also filed cases to desegregate the schools and won those cases.
The only Republican to vote against Senator Sessions was Arlen Spector who later apologized and said he had made a terrible mistake.
Senator Sessions has made public statements and actual Senate votes for more than 20 years.
“Silence implies consent.” Yes, silence about a US Attorney who bankrupted the Klan, had its leader executed for murder, and who was subsequently elected to the US Senate for multiple terms would “imply consent” to his being slandered.
I’m guessing most of the 770s would be equally thrilled if actors in a play had hectored Joe Biden for Obama’s real or supposed faults before Obama even took office.
Today’s Meredith Moment:
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Rather than that common fallacy, what I was looking at is the speaker’s objective in making a statement to a playgoer from the stage after the play. If the person’s thought was to persuade Pence to do something or not do something, I think they made a mistake, because (in my opinion) that’s not an effective way to persuade anyone.
However, maybe the speaker is somebody who believes “Silence implies consent.” then the object wasn’t to persuade Pence about anything but to clarify the speaker’s self-identity for the benefit of the audience.
@airboy
Give me an example of a time when Obama or Biden have claimed criticism of them is illegitimate and we’ll talk
LOL! That shouldn’t take him long if he was reading the news during the campaign.
If the cast of a musical had said this to Joe Biden?
““We have a message for you, sir. We hope that you will hear us out. Vice President-elect [Biden], we welcome you, and we truly thank you for joining us here at [Some Musical]. We really do. We, sir, we are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents, or defend us and uphold our inalienable rights, sir. But we truly hope this show has inspired you to uphold our American values and to work on behalf of all of us, all of us. … We truly thank you for sharing this show — this wonderful American story told by a diverse group of men, women, of different colors, creeds, and orientations.”
That would have been a good thing, no? What possible grounds would I have for OBJECTING to the cast of a musical saying that to Joe Biden? I can see none.
It is reasonable to have fears about the commitment of such powerful figures in such a powerful government to protecting people and their rights. It is absolutely right to remind those in power that they should be cognisant of their responsibilities.
In the scenario you suggest, I would have applauded this hypothetical set of people for publicly stating this to Vice-President-Elect Joe Biden. I mean, that isn’t even a TRICKY issue to consider – and I’m not sure why you would think anybody but the worse kind of sycophant would have any kind of problem with people expressing that view to an elected official.
Perhaps you wanted to make a point about the people booing Pence rather than the behaviour of the cast. The cast behaviour was exemplary. appropriate and respectful.
Booing on the other hand. Well that was justified not on the grounds of whether one should remind people in high position of the responsibilities but is justified on the grounds that Pence is a git and Biden isn’t. I appreciate, though, that this assessment is subjective.
I think it is reasonable that their purpose was manifold. Attempting persuasion even when it may seem unlikely to succeed is a kind of ethical responsibility. I doubt they thought Pence was likely to start considering moderating his views as a consequence.
Hmm, I may borrow this line — it’s a more polished expression of one of the items in my mental list of reasons for Codes of Conduct.
I had a really good comment to make (possibly the best comment evar) and my phone ate it.
Mike, I’m confused: are you suggesting that Obama and Biden had claimed that criticizing them was illegitimate many times and that was documented in the news? Because I don’t remember any of that.
I do remember (for the last 8 years) many instances of incredibly racist and disrespectful comments, photos and memes about President Obama and his family. The most recent by a minor official in West Virginia mentioning how glad she is that she won’t need to see any more news about the “ape in heels”, meaning Michelle Obama.
Could you clarify?
TechGrrl1972: That poisoning-the-well strategy isn’t working for you. It’s transparent that you aren’t asking me a question at all, just making a pre-emptive statement.
[entering file770 pedantic mode]
The dictionary definition of ‘slander’ says: a malicious, false, and defamatory statement or report
In law, ‘slander’ is “defamation by oral utterance rather than by writing, pictures, etc.”
So, first off, my statement was neither false nor defamatory. It was a simple statement of fact as to what happened when Jeff Sessions was put forward as a candidate for a Federal judgeship. It happened. The Judicial Committee voted down the recommendation and it never went to the full Senate.
And, secondly, in law, since my statement was in writing, it is not slander by that definition, either.
So, double fail.
Sorry you’re interpreting it that way, but I am genuinely confused as to your original point.
Mike: Pence was not the only audience for that (not at all offensively-framed) address–aside from the fact that it echoed Trump’s own election-night speech (particularly “I pledge to every citizen of our land that I will be president for all Americans, and this is so important to me”), it also signaled to the public inside and outside the theatre that there are promises to keep and decencies to be observed–and not just the often-mouthed pieties of acceptance speeches. In fact, it seems extremely unlikely that Mike Pence is going to change his mind about issues that he has supported for his entire public career. If anything has any effect on him, it’s going to be practical political machineries, which includes the presence and expression of countervailing opinion from the public and from other politicians and operatives who keep an eye on which way the wind is blowing. After all, if you see something, you should say something, right?
BTW, Hamlet didn’t write those “dozen or sixteen lines” extra lines to change Claudius’ mind but to confirm his suspicions about the king’s guilt–“if he but blench,/I know my course.” He even asks Horatio if he saw the same reaction. This is not the rhetoric of persuasion but more like the courtroom-drama tactic of getting the guilty party to betray himself.
Shorter version: 1) if someone’s unlikely to be persuaded by a sincere opinion does that reflect on them or the speaker?
2) If what’s required is many voices demonstrating their common agreement, then should individual voices be quiet, or should they speak in the hope that others will agree?
I’m glad it made sense because I wasn’t sure it did when I typed it.
Russell Letson: These close readings of Shakespeare (rather like those who insist there only be black-letter readings of the Constitution) to disqualify my comment about the Hamilton cast are disappointing coming from people who frequent a popular culture blog. The line has a specific application in Hamlet, sure, but a much wider application throughout our culture, sometimes closely paralleling the meaning in Hamlet, often used only as a tag about the power of the theater to confront hearers with truth.
“Comedy” and “comic” are other words whose meanings shift with time and with context… I mean, in ancient Greece, comedy and tragedy were two pretty much distinct theatrical traditions, each with its own rules and conventions within the overall realm of drama….
And then, for a while, “comedy” became, effectively, anything with a non-tragic ending – I’m reminded of Victor Borge’s way to tell the difference between tragedy and comedy in opera: “Look at the stage just before the final curtain falls. If anyone’s still standing, it was a comedy”.
Words in general are kittle cattle.
Pence wants to torture gay children until they crawl back into the closet and pretend they are straight. The corect place for him would be in prison for hate speech.
Having some very polite actors saying some stuff about rights to him is the least he deserves. And no, I think the train of reasoning with him passed a long time ago. This is about not normalizing his bigotry.
FYI, I’m not getting any updates. I finally came over to see how much I was missing since last time, and I’m several posts and lord knows how many comments behind. Woe is me.
[10] Ground Control to Major Error: Whoever you’re quoting says Hadfield covered “Space Odyssey” in 2013. It was “Space Oddity.”
Dawn Incognito
Disney gets credit for a lot of things they didn’t really do. I suspect it’s because they phrase true statements in a way that interviewers take differently. (“SNOW WHITE was the first fully cell-animated feature cartoon” becomes “SNOW WHITE was the first animated feature cartoon.) In this case, I’m not certain: Was this a Bouncing Ball cartoon with a synchronized sound track? I think there were silent ones in the series, where it was presumed the accompanist would play the music and the audience would sing to the ball.
Lis Carey
The Gops are spinning the Hamilton incident. In their telling, the cast booed Pence, rather than making the polite statement we’ve seen and asking the audience not to boo. Fresh alternate history.
Now to see how much I’ve missed on the previous pixel scroll.