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Recently I was having a conversation with a student who wondered why we still have a canon. For those who aren’t familiar with the term, the “Canon” is what we call that collection of great literary works that are considered important, the type of thing that people should know.

In the late 20th century, particularly the 1980s, the academic world had a conflict often called the “Canon Wars,” essentially a debate over what gets included in the canon. It was during this time that we began to see more writings by women and minorities included in the Canon, and the phrase “Dead White Men” became an epithet. And although some of those dead white men got pushed out (I can’t recall the last time I saw Pilgrim’s Progress on a syllabus), and anthology offerings got more diverse in 1980’s-style diversity (with Pushkin ceasing to be Russian, and becoming Afro-Russian), the Canon mostly remained the same.

Partly the end of the Canon Wars was tacit recognition of demographics; literacy was historically the domain of those maligned dead white men in the West, so unsurprisingly they wrote most of what is worth reading (as well as most of what is not worth reading). In large part, though, the Canon Wars ended simply over exhaustion. Everyone was tired of talking about how contingent literary value is, and was ready to move on. Some people on both sides claimed victory, others on both sides declared the end of civilization, and the conversation moved to Cultural Marxism.

So why bring up the Canon again? My student seemed confused by the whole issue. She is young enough that the Canon Wars were over by the time she was born, and there has always been an internet. “Why do we have anthologies?” she wondered. “We can just look up any text we want any time we want online, right?”

I think the Canon matters for two reasons. The first is simply that not everything is available online (yet), and we should not be too confident in the permanence of online resources. Some things that were literally carved in stone are missing, and even when we have a complete text, we often can’t read it because the language is completely dead. Even being famous and widespread is not enough; Aristotle’s Treatise on Comedy is gone forever, despite the fact that it was written by freakin’ Aristotle and there were presumably a bazillion copies. We know it existed at one time, but we don’t know what it said.

For those who are convinced by that electronic resources will never die (ah, the arrogance of youth!), there is the second reason: You will die. You are mortal. You can’t read everything, so you have to choose what to read.

Consider this in the age of Netflix: When I was a child, we had three channels. We might have to choose between watching Hee Haw, The Lawrence Welk Show, and some game show. It was either that, playing outside, or Legos. Your choices were made for you.

Today, I might go weeks watching only documentaries, or independent films, or every episode of Fringe, but I can’t watch everything that’s offered to me. I can’t even watch 1% of what’s available to me. I have to make choices, and worse, I often have to make uninformed choices. Do I listen to the din of a dedicated fandom? Or perhaps let the AI choose for me?

Perhaps, in the age of the internet, the Canon has become even more important. It is the Rotten Tomatoes of books. Goodreads tells us what our friends are reading, but the canon tells us what people have been reading for decades, centuries, or even millennia. If I want to start reading Shakespeare, I could start in alphabetical order with All’s Well That Ends Well, or chronologically with A Comedy of Errors, but unless I’ve committed to binge-read all of Shakespeare, why not read the canonical greats, like Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, Midsummer Night’s Dream, or Henry IV, Part II? Sure, I might eventually get around to reading Titus Andronicus and Coriolanus (a personal favorite), but life is brief, so why not move on to writings by other authors? You can read Pride and Prejudice but skip Northanger Abbey, read Paradise Lost but skip Paradise Regained, read Fences but skip the rest of the Pittsburgh Cycle — or you can fall in love with an author and read deep into them.

For this generation, then, the Canon may no longer be “The Great Works As Handed Down From On High,” but rather “The Best Stuff, Not Just What’s Popular Today.” It’s the best thing ever to happen to binge readers. And, with the advent of social media, the binge reader joins in the project of Canon formation. The Canon wasn’t really democratized by the efforts of academics like me; it is being democratized by the unhindered love of readers.

School pictures — those annual photos taken by schools ostensibly for yearbooks — have turned into a relic from the past, a practice that seems to continue more from inertia than for any particular reason.

For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, school photos and yearbooks served a pretty important purpose: They provided a visual record of a child’s development, and acted as a way to build comradery and mutual identity for students. According to the OED, the term “year-book” was first used in this sense in 1910, to describe Barnard College’s The Mortarboard, but the practice of taking pictures and marketing them together in a book actually predates the American Civil War, and can be attributed to George Kendall Warren, a daguerreotypist who lived from 1824-1884 and started making “class books” from as early as 1858.

In the 20th century, yearbooks stopped being for colleges only, and became part of the elementary and secondary school landscape. Families that couldn’t afford to pay a professional photographer for a sitting could still get a chance for a picture of their child every year. Pictures were (and still are) offered in various sizes, from 8×10 to “wallet size,” so that they could be given to loved ones and carried about.  School pictures didn’t just provide a record of a school, they provided a record of a family.

Even when chemical film cameras became ubiquitous by the end of the 20th century, school photos still served that important function. In a large family like mine, sitting everyone down for individual portraits year after year would have been a Herculean task — but school pictures made sure that our classmates and families can look back and remember much more clearly.

But today, do those original purposes of school photos really make any sense? I have a semi-daily record of my children from social media, and don’t have any need to distribute pictures to my family and friends, since that is automated. Parents today anxieties today are that images of their children are too widely distributed. And does anyone really think that the Reunion Committee for the Class of 2015 is going to mine the yearbook for nostalgic images, rather than finding them on the internet?

School photos no longer mean what they used to. Today, they are the anti-selfie, one of the few antidotes to our cultural narcissism. The selfie (and its loathsome accoutrement, the “selfie-stick” has only one true challenger to its dominance — the school picture. You can try to look your best, but in the end, THAT picture is going to be the permanent institutional record of you, zits and all. We need school photos to keep us from becoming our own paparazzi.

I will close with an elementary school picture of myself. LOOK ON MY BANGS AND 70s GARB! LOOK UPON THEM AND DESPAIR!

Continue reading “Three-Minute Stick Figure St. Patrick”

Last night I went to see Jupiter Ascending with Captain Skyhawk and Kat Ninetails. We were literally the only three people in the theater, which allowed us to go full MST3K (or HDTGM, depending on your tastes).

Following standard internet protocol, here is the warning that spoilers are coming, but frankly, the movie makes so little sense that it’s practically unspoilable.  Just go ahead and read this and any other spoiler-filled review — it won’t matter.

I’m not going to get into everything that’s wrong with this movie, because that would take longer than the film itself. Suffice it to say that Sean Bean plays a half-man/half-bee character, Channing Tatum spends most of the film on space roller blades, and Mila Kunis both has an incestuous engagement and gets into bestiality, attempting to seduce a half-wolf character by saying, “I like dogs.” And none of these are even the craziest and stupidest parts of the movie.

If you want a review of how terrible this movie is, you have find lots of those online. Instead, I want to offer a different suggestion here: That this movie should be rebooted.

Unfortunately, Hollywood has a habit of remaking (and ruining) good films, rather than remaking bad films that could have been good. While there are some happy exceptions to this rule (The  1941 Maltese Falcon was the third film version of that book), the Nicholas Cage remake of The Wicker Man is more representative. Oh, and just to keep with our horrible bee-movie theme, here’s a short clip from The Wicker Man expressing how we felt watching Jupiter Ascending:

Here’s the counter-intuitive thing about Jupiter Ascending: It’s trying to do big things.  Although most of the practical effects are Fifth Elementesque, the non-action space scenes are truly beautiful.  Terry Gilliam makes a cameo in a bureaucracy montage scene (yes, bureaucracy plays a major role in the film) that pays homage to his own wonderful Brazil. It introduces interesting themes that never get fully explored, on topics such as transhumanism, cross-cultural identity, and the amorality of scientism.

Here’s an example: In the beginning, we find that Jupiter (the ostensible protagonist, who is so ill-constructed as a character that she defies description) is being taken advantage of by her cousin. He convinces her to sell her eggs to a fertility clinic so that he can buy a Roomba and a big-screen TV.  Somehow, he has convinced her that he should keep 2/3 of the split, though it is unclear as to why he should get any of this money, nor why she is so stupid as to agree to this when we know she is genetically predisposed to be one of the most ruthless capitalists in the universe.

This whole subplot seems like at one time it was supposed to be a comic parallel of the darker, larger plot: A relative is exploiting her, getting her to sell out her genetic heritage for his own gain. Her cousin Vladie and pseudo-son Balem Abrasax even have parallel speeches about the nature of capitalism. The problem is that those parallel themes never get fully exploited, and are in fact hard to see in the final cut of the film.

Lots of people have complained about how many characters are introduced in the film, then mysteriously disappear without a story arc. Jupiter has a best friend who is about to get engaged to a wealthy sort-of Olympic athlete, which presumably in one draft of the script of another was supposed to mean something? Sean Bean has a daughter who in no way advances the plot, coughs in a way that seems to big significant, then never appears again. We’ve got bounty hunters who start to get developed as characters, then suddenly fall off the edge of the movie.

This flaw, however, is exactly what makes the movie ideal for a reboot. It is a horrible movie, but it has many bits and pieces of a wonderful and important film. Kat Ninetails compared it to a ransom note: A weird message pasted together out of bits of other media in a way that makes the reader feel confused and threatened. It’s as if Dune, The Fifth Element, Anastasia, and Brazil were all blended together and forced down your throat. A reboot that picked a single theme and single visual style, stayed disciplined in that, and was competently acted, could not only be a great film, but the beginning of a great franchise.

Now, before we go, I offer you Captain Skyhawk’s Jupiter Ascending prequel fanfic, which I would like to note he wrote before seeing the film, and still manages to be a better version of the first act  of the movie.

EXT. SHOT SPACE

PRESENT
DAY

[Caine]

SPACE SHIPS ARE FLYING AROUND AND ZOOMING EVERYWHERE. SPACE IS A
BUSIER PLACE THAN WE IMAGINED.

Caine
I need to land on this planet to get the plot moving.

CAINE LANDS ON THE PLANET.

INT. SHOT BUILDING
PUBLIC
BATHROOM
[Caine, Jupiter, Baron Harkonnen]

JUPITER IS CLEANING A TOILET. THIS IS HER JOB BEFORE SHE FINDS OUT SHE IS
QUEEN OF THE UNIVERSE.

Jupiter
I hate cleaning toilets. It stinks.

CAINE ENTERS THE ROOM

Caine
I have come to take you to outer space.

Jupiter
Who are you?

Caine
I am Channing… Caine. I am Caine.

CAINE AND JUPITER REPAIR TO LEAVE THE ROOM TO GO TO OUTER SPACE, BUT THE BARON HARKONNEN FLOATS INTO THE ROOM ON SUSPENSOR FIELDS AND BLOCKS THEIR PATH.

Baron Harkonnen
No! This is my story! You won’t steal it from me. (MANIACAL LAUGHTER)

Caine
Don’t worry, my queen I
shall defend you!

CAINE LEAPS IN BATTLE AND THE STORY BEGINS

A cry of dismay went out yesterday when Jon Stewart announced he would be leaving the Daily Show.  Social media was filled with distressed fans. His departure, though, is good news for Comedy Central and good news for comedy generally.*

A bit of history — back at the dawn of cable channels, 25 years ago, there were two competing television comedy channels: The Comedy Channel and Ha! These two channels really were trying to get a grip on how to do comedy in the era of cable, and so were a mix of stand-up clips, old classic TV (similar to Nick at Night), talk shows, and things like MST3K. They merged to create Comedy Central.

In pulling those two together, Comedy Central never quite hit a big audience, but produced cult classics (Dr. Katz and Kids in the Hall spring to mind). It wasn’t until about a decade ago that they seemed to develop the right chemistry, with South Park, Reno 911, Chappelle’s Show, and the Daily Show/Colbert Report. Of those, South Park and The Daily Show were old standbys that had slowly built and maintained an audience, while Chappelle’s Show was a cultural juggernaut that suddenly imploded after two seasons (and Comedy Central hasn’t ever found a true heir to Chappelle since).

Here’s the problem — Reno 911 eventually faded, and that left South Park and The Daily Show franchise not just carrying the channel, but sucking the air out of everything else. Because cartoons are inherently more expensive and difficult to make than talk shows, South Park took a lot of money, but not a lot of programming space. The Daily Show, however, has become a problem.

These types of shows are addictive to basic cable channels: They are dirt cheap to make, and because the topics they deal with are so ephemeral, people are forced to watch them, well, DAILY, thus getting eyeballs on your advertisers.  Why  experiment with an ambitious scripted show with an entourage cast when you can just slap out a Colbert Report or a Tosh 2.0 for next to nothing? These shows might not be great, but cheap-and-reliable mediocrity keeps the profit margins much higher than more expensive show. Look at what Comedy Central has been doing over the last decade, and it’s clear that their programming has grown stale, the only good things being departures from The Daily Show style.

Aside from the staleness of their programming, the problem with The Daily Show is that, despite its efforts to market itself as young and hip (bringing to mind Steve Buscemi on 30 Rock) it’s a show for old people. Don’t believe me? Try watching an old episode of The Daily Show, anything more than two months old. Since the political critique rarely rises above the level of snark, and the pop culture references are so ephemeral, it’s no longer funny and often makes no sense out of the context of the moment.  This isn’t a show for binge-watching young people to stream — it’s a show for the late 1990s. And while shows like this can probably find some niche, that niche is getting smaller and smaller. Two years after its cancelled, you won’t remember The Daily Show, and if you happen to find clips online, it will seem hopelessly dated, like Laugh-In. Ten years ago, my students all watched The Daily Show religiously. Today? Meh, maybe if someone posts a clip online that will disappear from their Facebook feed in a couple of days.

Of course, The Daily Show isn’t over. Heck, Jon Stewart wasn’t even the original host. But all those 30-somethings who still think they’re young and hip will find themselves scratching their heads at whomever the next host is, and grousing about how much funnier it was in the old days. Comedy Central will be forced to search for truly fresh programming — or embrace a role as one of the dying basic cable channels.

[Feature Image heartlessly stolen from Rolling Stone]

*In the interest of full disclosure, let me confess that I've never found Jon Stewart funny. Ever. When people post clips of him and shower them with great praise, I'm as puzzled as I am when people praise Friends, a show that was almost aggressive in its refusal to be amusing. Stewart seems to be able to take the most mediocre Tonight Show-style monologue and use his delivery to beat any humor our of it. He did the impossible -- he made me long for Jay Leno to deliver the same material. For the sake of this piece, though, I'm going to pretend that Jon Stewart isn't just funny, but is hilariously so. I'm going to pretend that Jon Stewart is the Funniest Man Ever to Live, the Voice of a Generation, a Revolution in Comedy, etc. Those who know me should be aware that this is merely a rhetorical position for the sake of this piece, and that I have not taken leave of my senses.