First, let me apologize for not getting last week’s roundup up last week. I spent all last week having variations of this conversation and, as you might imagine, couldn’t look at a monitor without wanting to stab my eyes out. When I did bravely venture online, I couldn’t read two words without having my eye-stabbing plan validated by people who don’t know from history. All that by way of my first apology—my second will follow the links.* On with the show!
Nails wonders why the George Sodini case is being handled within the framework of realm of normative Freudian psychology instead of being treated as a hate crime when, as Alderson Warm-Fork points out, those Freudian dynamics aren’t about attachments to actual mothers and fathers. Reducing a lifetime of experiences to “a very antagonistic relationship with the mother,” as Dr. J. Reid Meloy does—and with a very ambiguous use of the definitive article “the,” no less—and then claiming that that relationship, above all others, led Mr. Sodini to stroll into a health club armed to the teeth points to the general disconnect between theory and practice.
Speaking of mother issues, Tyler Haney declares that he misses Sarah Connor, and while I agree with him, he’s wrong. He’s talking about the Sarah Connor from the Terminator films, and she was, I admit, a strongly presented and portrayed character—but she was no Sarah Connor. She strikes me as the inverse of a male action star, and as such, lacks the depth of the characterization of Sarah Connor, the eponymous star of The Sarah Connor Chronicles. The name gives away the game: television’s Sarah Connor is a survivor, a mother, a caretaker, and less the inversion than any male action stereotype than the rarest of televisual snowflakes—a flawed character convinced of her rightness in the face of a world in which and I should just write a post about my abiding love for the show and stop geeking out already. [The bad fanboy edited this paragraph. Thanks, julian.]
How about we talk about father, er, Father issues instead? Because a number of people are writing about the Man whose Father issues were so complicated Freud ran screaming back to monotheism: I speak, of course, of Jesus . . . and his disciples. SnowdropExplodes responds to Paul—who I will, just to spite Laura, refer to his by his first name alone—and his Epistle to the Ephesians. I’m a little uncomfortable with turning Paul into Saul, and then Saul into my Jewish relatives from Jersey, but I’ll pretend, for the moment, that my lapsed faith is the forgiving one and not the one where the Big Whatsit is all about the smiting.
But enough about smiting. How about we talk about things that make us want to smite stuff like, say, magazines that impose their own collective body issues onto their covers? If photography’s going to amount to little more than drawing in the future, we may as well just anoint Lois Lane a feminist icon, despite her penchant for getting in trouble being, as actual journalist Alyssa Rosenberg notes, “fairly troubling about her actual competence.”
EKSwitaj writes a too-brief post about the power and privilege any author takes when she “appropriates the identities of those who enact violence, those who misuse power [and] the voices of the victimized.” Of course, such is the case in every book that isn’t an autobiography: if we are not writing of a violence done by or upon our selves, we are imagining ourselves into a situation whose gravity we can understand, intellectually, but never truly feel. Framed like that, the appropriation seems illegitimate; but framed differently, say, as a matter of an author coming into sympathetic identification with someone other than herself in order to share that experience with her readers, and questions of authenticity become less pressing. Once members of the group whose suffering she appropriated see that she did so in good faith—that she is willing to be corrected, to sympathize more strongly, because more accurately—the “hell of a responsibility” EKSwitaj and every working author not surnamed Grisham claim when they write outside themselves becomes a more complicated commitment for those of us in the reading public to comprehend.
Coming Next Week (By Which I Mean, “Tomorrow”): More links, as well as a section devoted to the complexities of the Canter Semenya and another to feminist issues the world over.
*And here it is. I’m a little (ahem) talkier here this week than last because some of the email I’ve received since I started posting these roundups has been difficult to respond to: on the one hand, there are the people who are hurt because I linked to someone else’s post about Topic X; on the other, there are the people who, because I’ve abstained from offering my own detailed opinion about Topic Y, are angry because they assume my silence speaks volumes.
As to the first group, I want to say that I’m trying to rotate who I link to among the regulars, and am actively seeking out people I’ve not linked to before; but most importantly, I’m trying to link to posts which contribute something original to the discourse. If your post consists of 90 percent of something someone said elsewhere and a curt dismissal or endorsement, I’m not likely to link to it because most of the people here have read the source already.
As to the second group, I up and admit that having only done two of these, I’ve yet to strike a balance between presenting the links and explaining why I called attention to them. Too much editorializing, and I’m drawing attention to myself, not the links; not enough, and I risk alienating people whose voices I find unique and important. For the sole fact that I find Glenn Reynolds’s linktastic style as odious as his politics, I don’t want to go the way of bare links. (Heh.) Nor do I want to bury the links beneath a tumult of seemingly self-serving prose—I want to strike the happy medium of prose engaging enough to keep you reading until you click through all the links. At this point, though, I’m cycling between David Foster Wallace (today) and pure Irtnog (tomorrow). But I’m working on it!