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Showing posts from 2015

Matt Shepard Is a Friend of Mine

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A review by another Matt , Matt Zoller Seitz, convinced me to watch Matt Shepard Is a Friend of Mine , and I'm glad I did. I wasn't going to, but these sentences got me curious: "It is wrenching but never exploitive. It is impressively skeptical of the same mission that it takes on its shoulders: to make something positive from a senseless crime without diminishing its senselessness." What kept me from the film had been a fear of it being maudlin or superficial. I know the Shepard case well, I've seen The Laramie Project a couple of times, I've heard Judy Shepard speak about her son's murder. I didn't think more could, or even should, be made of it. The film proved me wrong. Matthew Shepard was only a year (and a couple months) older than me. He died a few days before my 23rd birthday. Despite the barrage of national (and international) news coverage, I didn't learn of his murder for a few weeks, because I was in the midst of my first year

Queers Destroy Fantasy!

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I was honored to be the nonfiction editor for a special issue of Fantasy magazine, part of the ever-growing Destroy series from Lightspeed, Nightmare, and Fantasy — this time, QUEERS DESTROY FANTASY! The editor-in-fabulousness/fiction editor was Christopher Barzak, the reprints editor was Liz Gorinsky, and the art editor was Henry Lien. Throughout this month, some pieces will be put online. So far, Austin Bunn's magnificent story "Ledge" is now available, as are our various editorial statements . More will be released later, but most of the pieces I commissioned are only available by purchasing the ebook [also available via Weightless ] or paperback . There are magnificent pieces by Mary Anne Mohanraj, merritt kopas, Keguro Macharia, Ekaterina Sedia, and Ellen Kushner, and only merritt's "Sleepover Manifesto" will be online. I owe huge thanks to all the contributors I worked with, to the other editors, to managing editor Wendy Wagner who did lo

Thinking Back with Our Foremothers: For Jane Marcus

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It is far too early to tear down the barricades. Dancing shoes will not do. We still need our heavy boots and mine detectors. —Jane Marcus, "Storming the Toolshed" 1. Seeking Refuge in Feminist Revolutions in Modernism Last week, I spent two days at the Modernist Studies Association conference in Boston. I hadn't really been sure that I was going to go. I hemmed and hawed. I'd missed the call for papers, so hadn't even had a chance to possibly get on a panel or into a seminar. Conferences bring out about 742 different social anxieties that make their home in my backbrain. I would only know one or maybe two people there. Should I really spend the money on conference fees for a conference I was highly ambivalent about? I hemmed. I hawed. In the end, though, I went, mostly because my advisor would be part of a seminar session honoring the late Jane Marcus , who had been her advisor. (I think of Marcus now as my grandadvisor, for multiple reasons, as will be

On Teaching Writing

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Jan Steen, School Class with a Sleeping Schoolmaster A writer recently wrote a blog post about how he's quitting teaching writing. I'm not going to link to it because though it made me want to write this post of my own, I'm not planning either to praise or disparage the post or its author, whom I don't know and whose work I haven't read (though I've heard good things about it). Reading the post, I was simply struck by how different his experience is from my own experience, and I wondered why, and I began to think about what I value in teaching writing, and why I've been doing it in one form or another — mostly to students without much background or interest in writing — for almost twenty years. I don't know where the quitting teacher works or the circumstances, other than that he was working as an adjunct professor, as I did for five years, and was teaching introductory level classes, as I continue to do now that I'm a PhD student. (And in som

Let's Do the Twist: How to Be Both by Ali Smith

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I've been meaning to catch up with Ali Smith's novels for a while now, having previously only read Hotel World , and so when it came time this summer to formulate reading lists for my PhD qualifying exams, I stuck How to Be Both on the fiction section for the Queer Studies list. (This also explains why I was writing about The Invaders recently...) How to Be Both turns out to be even more appropriate to my Queer Studies studies than I'd suspected from reading reviews, and it shows how the structures of fiction can be at least as provocative and productive as certain types of social and political philosophy. How to Be Both is generally a very readable, enjoyable book — in some ways deceptively so. In that, it reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut's best books, which manage to play with some complex ideas in light, entertaining ways. (Smith's novel would make a marvelous companion to Vonnegut's Mother Night in a course on the novel and history...) How to Be Both d

I Can Give You Anything But Love by Gary Indiana

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One reason I Can Give You Anything But Love is marvelous is that Gary Indiana plays the role of the Bitchy Queen with aplomb. It's the sort of thing he enjoys in the diaries of Richard Burton, who, he says, "cuts brilliantly through the grease in his desultory observations." The same could be said of Indiana, though we'd have to add that he's even better than Burton: "His self-involvement was hermetic and vaguely reptilian. ... He was boastful, stupid, pathetically narcissistic, and sad, but such a deluded asshole it was impossible to feel sorry for him. I liked how he liked how I looked looking at him, that was literally all we shared." "If the Tom of Finland types aren't stupid as boiled okra, they give that impression in conversation." "I made the mistake of ferrying a frowzy, unlovely couple named Joni and Hank to Ralphs several times, creating the false impression that I enjoyed their company. They described themselves

The Invaders by William Plomer

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I mentioned William Plomer in passing when discussing my summer research on Virginia Woolf. Thanks to the wonders of Interlibrary Loan, I was recently able to read his fourth, and perhaps least-read (which is saying something!) novel, The Invaders . It's an odd book, one that sometimes feels a bit under-cooked, with an ending that seems to me perfunctory, forced, and utterly unsatisfying. Yet there are also moments of real artistry and interest, and I've found myself thinking about it continuously since I finished it a week ago.   The Invaders is, among other things, a gay novel, but it doesn't get noted in even some of the most comprehensive studies of gay fiction, and Plomer deserves to be generally better known by scholars of queer literatures. He was not as talented or accomplished a fiction writer as many of his friends in the London literary scene, but his point of view was unique among them, because though he was mostly educated in England, his home until he

Anecdotes on Literary Popularity and Difficulty

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When interviewed by a reporter from the Wall Street Journal regarding Thomas Ligotti , Jeff VanderMeer was asked: "Can Ligotti’s work find a broader audience, such as with people who tend to read more pop horror such as Stephen King?" His response was, it seems to me, accurate: Ligotti tells a damn fine tale and a creepy one at that. You can find traditional chills to enjoy in his work or you can find more esoteric delights. I think his mastery of a sense of unease in the modern world, a sense of things not being quite what they’re portrayed to be, isn’t just relevant to our times but also very relatable. But he’s one of those writers who finds a broader audience because he changes your brain when you read him—like Roberto Bolano. I’d put him in that camp too—the Bolano of 2666 . That’s a rare feat these days. This reminded me of a few moments from past conversations I've had about the difficulty of modernist texts and their ability to find audiences. I have often

"Yes, We Really Do Want to Take Your Guns"

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"In other words, yes, we really do want to take your guns. Maybe not all of them. But a lot of them." —Josh Marshall, Talking Points Memo Okay. All I've got's an antique rifle that would likely explode if fired, so no big deal to me. I would love to live in a country with far, far fewer guns. One of the reasons I think the NRA should be considered complicit with murder is their careful collusion over the last few decades with gun manufacturers to keep a flooded market profitable by using every scare tactic they could imagine to encourage people to keep buying. (I've written about all this, and other aspects of gun culture, plenty of times before .) I'm quite comfortable around guns, since I grew up with them as an everyday object (everything from .22 pistols to fully-automatic machine guns), and I have many friends who are gun owners, even gun nuts . But though I sometimes find guns attractive, even fascinating, I don't like them and I wish there w

Collected Fiction by Leena Krohn

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The most peculiar property of language is its symbolic function. The writer exchanges meanings for marks, while the reader performs the opposite task. There are no meanings outside us, or if there are, we do not know them. Personal meanings are made with our own hands. Their preparation is a kind of alchemy. Everything that we call rationality demands imagination, and if we did not have the capacity to imagine, we could not even speak morality or conscience. —Leena Krohn, "Afterword: When the Viewer Vanishes" Ann and Jeff VanderMeer have done wonders for the availability of contemporary Finnish writing in English with their Cheeky Frawg press , and in December they will release their greatest book yet: Collected Fiction by Leena Krohn. [Update: Now available via Amazon and Book Depository .] I've been a passionate fan of Leena Krohn's work ever since I first read her book Tainaron ten years ago. I sought out the only other translation of her writings in E

Zombie Boy

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People often ask me, "What do you do to pass the time up there in New Hampshire?" Well, when we're not cavorting with moose, celebrating the glories of our granite, and generally living free before we die, some of us make silly movies. One that I was involved with is called Zombie Boy , which was written and directed by my friend Jamie Sharps . Against all odds, it now has distribution via MVD Media . It should be coming to various streaming platforms soon, and you can order the DVD from most of the places online where you'd order DVDs. ( Here's the Amazon link , for instance.) There are even rumors of it showing up in some brick-and-mortar stores. It's a spaghetti-western-style comic adventure involving people who've been zombified by a green serum. It's not a B movie, it's (intentionally) a Z movie. ("Z for zombie, yeah!" I hear somebody say...) We didn't have much money, and it took a couple years to get it all filmed a

Blood: Stories Now Available for Pre-Order

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You can now order my upcoming collection Blood: Stories from the publisher, Black Lawrence Press. The book will be released in January 2016, and BLP is offering it for a bit of a discount before the publication date (it's a big book — 100,000 words — so will retail for $18.95). Should you pre-order it? I don't know. Yes, of course, I would like you to. And if you're going to order it online, this is a good way to do it, because you'll get it pretty quickly and a larger percentage of your money will go to BLP, so you'll help a small publisher stay solvent. Once the book is published, you'll also be able to buy it from bookstores, and since I support people spending as much money as possible in local bookstores, that's a great way to get it as well. Actually, you should probably both pre-order it and buy it from bookstores, because why would you want only one copy? You need to be able to give them away to friends — or, if you don't like the book,

A Woolfian Summer

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The new school year has started, which means I've officially ended the work I did for a summer research fellowship from the University of New Hampshire Graduate School , although there are still a few loose ends I hope to finish in the coming days and weeks. I've alluded to that work previously, but since it's mostly finished, I thought it might be useful to chronicle some of it here, in case it is of interest to anyone else. (Parts of this are based on my official report, which is why it's a little formal.) I spent the summer studying the literary context of Virginia Woolf’s writings in the 1930s. The major result of this was that I developed a spreadsheet to chronicle her reading from 1930-1938 (the period during which she conceived and wrote her novel The Years and her book-length essay Three Guineas ), a tool which from the beginning I intended to share with other scholars and readers, and so created with Google Sheets so that it can easily be viewed, updated

Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson

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To make Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora make sense, I had to imagine a metafictional frame for it. The novel tells the story of a generation starship sent in the year 2545 from the Solar System to Tau Ceti. It begins toward the end of the journey, as the ship approaches its destination and eventually sends a landing party to a planet they name Aurora. The narrator, we quickly learn, is the ship's artificial intelligence system, which for various reasons is learning to tell stories, a process that, among other things, helps it sort through and make sense of details. This conceit furthers Robinson's interest in exposition, an interest apparent at least since the Mars trilogy and explicit in 2312 . As a writer, he seems most at home narrating scientific processes and describing the features of landscapes, which does not always lead to the most dynamic prose or storytelling, and he seems to have realized this and adjusted to make his writerly strengths into, if not his bo

"The Last Vanishing Man"

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Littleton Opera House, Littleton, NH c.1900, a location in the story I have a new story — my first (but not last) of this year — now available on the Conjunctions website— "The Last Vanishing Man" . This one's a bit of a departure for me, in that it is a serious story that will not, I'm told, make you want to kill yourself after you read it. In fact, one of my primary goals when writing it was to write something not entirely nihilistic. Various people have, over the years, gently suggested that perhaps I might try writing a ... well ... a nice story now and then. (I actually think I've only written one story that is not nice, "Patrimony" in Black Static last year . And maybe "On the Government of the Living" . Well, maybe "How Far to Englishman's Bay" , too. And— okay, I get it...) So "The Last Vanishing Man" is a story that has an (at least somewhat) uplifting ending, and the good people triumph, or at leas

Alice Sheldon at 100

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Alice Sheldon was born 100 years ago today, which means that in a certain sense, James Tiptree, Jr. is 100, because Sheldon wrote under that name. Yet James Tiptree, Jr. wasn't really born until 1968, when the first Tiptree story, "Birth of a Salesman", appeared in the March issue of Analog . Nonetheless, we can and should celebrate Sheldon's centenary. She's primarily remembered for Tiptree, of course, but as Julie Phillips so deftly showed in her biography , Sheldon's life was far more than just that byline. I've written about Tiptree a lot over the years, though nothing recently, as other work has taken me in other directions. In honor of Alice Sheldon's birthday, here are some of the things I've written in the past— In "The Stories That Predict Us" , I wrote about discovering Tiptree at an early age. I reviewed the selected Tiptree stories, Her Smoke Rose Up Forever , for SF Site in 2005 . (It's a joint review with th

New Website

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It was time I had a website under my own name, and not just this here Mumpsimus. After all, I am more than a mumpsimus! Or so I tell myself. Thus: matthewcheney.net ! Because my book of short stories is coming out in January, the focus of the site is my fiction more than anything else. At the moment, there's nothing there that isn't also here, aside from some pictures. But I'm sure I'll figure out something unique to host there in the coming weeks, months, years...

The Perils of Biopics: Life in Squares and Testament of Youth

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The universe has conspired to turn my research work this summer into mass culture — while I've been toiling away on a fellowship that has me investigating Virginia Woolf's reading in the 1930s and the literary culture of the decade, the mini-series Life in Squares ,  about the Bloomsbury group and Woolf's family, played on the BBC and the film Testament of Youth , based on Vera Brittain's 1933 memoir of her experiences during World War One, played in cinemas. I've now seen both and have mixed feelings about them, though I enjoyed watching each. Life in Squares  offers some good acting and excellent production design, though it never really adds up to much;  Testament of Youth  is powerful and well constructed, even as it falls into some clichés of the WWI movie genre, and it's well worth seeing for its lead performance.  The two productions got me thinking about what we want from biographical movies and tv shows, how we evaluate them, and how they're

Of Purpose, Audience, and Language Guides

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There are lots of reasons that the University of New Hampshire , where I'm currently working toward a Ph.D. in Literature , should be in the news. It's a great school, with oodles of marvelous faculty and students doing all sorts of interesting things. Like any large institution, it's got its problems (I personally think the English Department is underappreciated by the Powers That Be, and that the university as a whole is not paying nearly enough attention to the wonderful programs that don't fall under that godawful acronym-of-the-moment STEM , but of course I'm biased...) Whatever the problems, though, I've been very happy at the university, and I'm proud to be associated with it. But Donald Trump and Fox News or somebody discovered a guide to inclusive language gathering dust in a corner of the UNH website and decided that this was worth denouncing as loudly as possible, and from there it spread all over the world . The UNH administration, of cours

"Anti-Fragile" by Nick Mamatas

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As a little addendum to my post about the somewhat narrow aesthetics of Ben Marcus's New American Stories  anthology, let me point you to Nick Mamatas's "Anti-Fragile" , a story that does pretty much everything I was hoping to find somewhere in New American Stories  and didn't. On Twitter, I said: Had enough of shallow stories told in short sentences & bite-sized paragraphs? Feast on "Anti-Fragile" by @NMamatas http://t.co/R28zqR5l2f — Matthew Cheney (@melikhovo) July 27, 2015 And that about sums up my feelings. Well, also: I may be partial, as I am an avowed and longstanding lover of long sentences , and this story is a wonderfully skilled, thrillingly long sentence. It's well worth reading and thinking about.

Notes on the Aesthetics of New American Stories

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Ben Marcus's 2004 anthology The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories  is a wonderfully rich collection for a book of its type. I remember first reading it with all the excitement of discovery — even the stories I didn't like seemed somehow invigorating in the way they made me dislike them. I've used the book with a couple of classes I've taught, and I've recommended it to many people. I was overjoyed, then, when I heard that Marcus was doing a follow up, and I got it as soon as I could: New American Stories . I started reading immediately. Expectations can kill us. The primary emotion I felt while reading New American Stories  was disappointment. It's not that the stories are bad — they aren't — but that the book as a whole felt a bit narrow, a bit repetitive. I skipped around from story to story, dashing in search of surprise, but it was rare. I tried to isolate the source of my disappointment, of my lack of surprise: Was it the subject matter?

Advice

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Stephen Dixon: Good advice for writers: Write very hard, keep the prose lively and original, never sell out, never overexcuse yourself why you're not writing, never let a word of yours be edited unless you think the editing is helping that work, never despair about not being published, not being recognized, not getting that grant, not getting reviewed or the attention you think you deserve. In fact, never think you deserve anything. Be thankful you are able to write and enjoy writing. What I also wouldn't do is show my unpublished work to my friends. Let agents and editors see it — people who can get you published —and maybe your best friend or spouse, if not letting them see it causes friction in your relationship. To just write and not worry too much about the perfect phrase and the right grammar unless the wrong grammar confuses the line, and to become the characters, and to live through, on the page, the experiences you're writing about. To involve yourself totally

Gratis & Libre, or, Who Pays for Your Bandwidth?

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via Philip Taylor, Flickr In talking with Robin DeRosa about open educational resources (OER), a lot of my skepticism was focused on (and continues to be focused on) the question of who pays for it. If I'm not just skeptical but also cynical about a lot of the techno-utopian rhetoric that seems to fuel both the OER advocates and, even more so, people who associate themselves with the idea of Digital Humanities , it may be because I've been paying attention to what the internet has done to writers over the last couple decades. It's not all bad, by any means — this blog is one of example of that, I continue to try to write mainly for online venues so that my work can be relatively easily and broadly accessed, and I put most of my syllabi online. I can do that because I have other income and don't rely on this sort of writing to pay the bills. Thus, in my personal calculations, accessibility is more important than revenue. But that freedom to choose accessibility

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

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Wrenching . I don't know a better word for Hanya Yanagihara's novel  A Little Life , published earlier this year by Doubleday. Heart-wrenching , yes. But more than that. Not just the heart. The brain, the stomach, all the organs and muscles. It is a full-body-wrenching experience, this book. It's too early to say whether this is a Great Novel, whether it is a novel for the ages, a novel that will bear numerous re-readings and critical dissections and late-night litchat conversations; whether it will burn long or be a blip on the literary landscape. Who knows. It's not for me to say. What I can say, though, is that working through (sometimes rushing through) its 700 pages was one of the most powerful reading experiences of my life. There are passages and situations in this book that many readers will not want to live with, will not want in their minds' eyes, and I can sympathize with that. Yanagihara's own editor said , "I initially found A Littl

Return of the Sandman Meditations

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Boomtron just published my latest Sandman Meditation, this one on Chapter Two of The Wake . "Sandman Meditation?" you say. "That sounds ... vaguely familiar..." In July 2010, I started writing a series of short pieces called Sandman Meditations in which I proceeded through each issue of Neil Gaiman's Sandman comic and offered whatever thoughts happened to come to mind. The idea was Jay Tomio's, and at first the Meditations were published on his Gestalt Mash site, then later Boomtron . The basic concept was that we'd see what happened when somebody without much background in comics, who'd never read Sandman before, spent time reading through it all. I wrote 71 Meditations between July 2010 and June 2012, getting all the way up through the first installment of the last story in the regular series, The Wake . 75,000 words. And then stopped. I read Chapter 2 of The Wake and had nothing to say. I tried writing through the lack of words, but

Wedding Days

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When the Supreme Court's decision  on marriage equality was announced, a friend who'd just heard a snippet of news texted me: "Is it true?" "Yes," I replied. "My mothers' marriage must now be recognized in all 50 states." This is true and wonderful. As others have pointed out, the ruling lets marriage just be marriage, without the modifiers that have dominated the discourse of the last fifteen years or so — it is no longer gay  marriage or same-sex  marriage or traditional  marriage, just marriage. (Although marriage between two people only. Polyamory is still mind-bending to the mainstream.) Inevitably, and immediately, there were countless thinkpieces written, plus plenty of grandstanding and righteous gnashing by people who disagreed with the Court's majority decision. Also, and just as inevitably, there were the  folks  who see marriage of any sort as a tool of neoliberalism and oppression. It really takes a special sort

What's in a Book

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I recently bought a miscellaneous set of Virginia Woolf books, a collection that seems to have been put together by a scholar or (in Woolfian parlance) a common reader during the 1960s and 1970s. The set included some volumes useful for my research purposes, as well as all four of the old Collected Essays  that I have long coveted because though they have been superceded by the six-volume Essays of Virginia Woolf , they are far more elegantly designed and produced (alas, copies in nice condition rarely seem to go up for sale at a price a normal person can afford, even on a splurge). At about $6 per book, it seemed like a deal I'd likely never see again. One of the joys of giving books a new home is that they sometimes share glimpses of their history. This is for me the primary impetus to own an old book. They become tools for imagination, not only through the words on their pages, but through their physical presence. I have lived with books my whole life, and have come to ima

The Dylanologists by David Kinney

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So when you ask some of your questions, you're asking them to a person who's long dead. You're asking them to a person that doesn't exist. But people make that mistake about me all the time.  —Bob Dylan, 2012 If you've ever spent any time around any sort of fan community, most of the people you meet in The Dylanologists  will be familiar types. There are the collectors, there are the hermeneuts, there are the true believers and the pilgrims. Some reviewers and readers have derided a lot of the people Kinney writes about as " crazy ", but one of the virtues of the book is that it humanizes its subjects and shows that plenty of people who are superfans are not A.J. Weberman . They seem a little passionate, sure, and if you're not especially interested in their passion they may seem a bit weird, but how different are they, really, from denizens of more culturally dominant fandoms — say, devoted sports fans? (Indeed, the term "fan" as we

Rhodesia and American Paramilitary Culture

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When the suspect in the  attack on the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in South Carolina was identified, the authorities circulated a photograph of him wearing a jacket adorned with the flags of apartheid-era South Africa and post- UDI   Rhodesia . The symbolism isn't subtle. Like the confederate flag that flies over the South Carolina capitol, these are flags of explicitly white supremacist governments. Rhodesia plays a particular role within right-wing American militia culture, linking anti-communism and white supremacy. The downfall of white Rhodesia has its own sort of lost cause mythic power not just for avowed white supremacists, but for the paramilitarist wing of gun culture generally.

Sense8

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It's possible that Sense8 , the new Netflix series from the Wachowskis, is the worst thing ever to happen to humanity. I don't know, because from the second episode it put its hooks into me so deeply that my critical, skeptical mind could not keep up. Certain elements of this show appealed to me so deeply that I was overwhelmed and had no ability to keep critical distance. Those elements were all related to a kind of queer ethic and queer vision, an approach to life that I've been a sucker for for decades, but have hardly ever seen expressed in a mainstream pop culture item. First, I should note that even in my soggy, sappy, besotted love affair with this show, I couldn't miss some of its more obvious weaknesses. The major one for me is its globalized Americanism, well critiqued by Claire Light at The Nerds of Color in a post I pretty much entirely agree with, especially regarding the lost opportunity of a truly global production — imagine if, instead of writing i

On Christopher Lee

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Over at Press Play, I have a brief text essay about and a video tribute to Christopher Lee , who died on June 7 at the age of 93. Here's the opening of the essay: Christopher Lee was the definitive working actor. His career was long, and he appeared in more films than any major performer in the English-speaking world — over 250. What distinguishes him, though, and should make him a role model for anyone seeking a life on stage or screen, is not that he worked so much but that he worked so well. He took that work seriously as both job and art, even in the lightest or most ridiculous roles, and he gave far better, more committed performances than many, if not most, of his films deserved. Read and view more at Press Play.