Sidetracks - August 20, 2012

[helloladies]

Sidetracks is a collaborative project featuring various essays, videos, reviews, or other Internet content that we want to share with each other. All past and current links for the Sidetracks project can be found in our Sidetracks tag.

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➝ Ugh. It's not often that I give up on a creator completely, but at this point I just can't see myself watching Girls or ever engaging with Lena Dunham's stuff.

➝ At Tor, Brit Mandelo calls Margo Lanagan's new short story collection, Cracklescape, " the sort of accomplishment that appears flawless and simple, nearly rustic, but is made up of a dazzling series of interlocking, microscopic parts". I wonder if they'll have it at the Edinburgh Book Festival bookshop, and I wonder if there's any chance at all I'll be able to resist gathering up all my loose change and buying a copy...

➝ And speaking of Tor, now I can actually read their Buffy rewatch posts! One of the clearest signs that I really, really love something is starting to feel that it's been in my life forever no matter how recently I discovered it. This post, on a couple of S3 episodes, gave me the warm fuzzies and made me feel all nostalgic, as if I'd grown up with Buffy instead of watching it for the first time less than two months ago. (PS: the first few commenters are totally right about Faith and the Mayor.)

➝ Shakesville on the racial makeup of the recent NPR Best Yound Adult Books list. Lots of great recommendations of YA by POC authors in the comments.

➝ Genevieve Valentine on Girl Wonder: Lawn Dogs, Hard Candy, and the Age of Innocence. I've actually never watched Hard Candy, but now I'm very curious. Anyone want to watch and discuss it with me? *looks around hopefully*

➝ The New Inquiry discusses the liminations of the term "literary".

➝ The Angry Black Woman writes about the "it's just a story!" argument and why it doesn't work. One of my favourite bits is about how this awareness need not limit our media consumption:

That is what I want you to do, media consumers: pay attention. You don’t have to deeply analyze everything and you don’t have to stop enjoying the things you love. Even if those things are problematic. Humans are capable of being nuanced creatures. You can find fault with a TV show or movie yet still have love for it, or parts of it.
This is how I maintain my love of Doctor Who and why I’ve seen The Avengers 4 times. There are major problems with both of those media entities, and I have no problem acknowledging and even poking at them. But I also let them fill me with squee.

Yep. Hooray for nuance.

➝ Michael Cobb on the rhetoric of singleness:

I have serious misgiv­ings about the miscasting of singleness as a terrible condition worth our pity and obfuscation. As anyone who has thought seriously about single life already knows, the problem of the single is not the actual, lived experience of people who find themselves alone as much as the feelings that deliberately foreclose our understanding of single­ness because singles are thought to be lonely—and loneliness, as we’re frequently reminded, has terrible consequences. To be blunt: I’m sick and tired of the single person being the avatar of the lonely crowd.

Amy and Jodie, I've seen you discuss the way singleness tends to be portrayed as a terrible affliction (especially for women) in the past, so I thought you might be interested in this piece. The book it's taken from, Single: Arguments for the Uncoupled, sounds like it could be really interesting. I love how Cobb links this kind of rhetoric with the larger political discourse towards the end of the article.

➝ You know who's an awesome ally? John Scalzi. I know there's a problem with him getting so much attention and praise for saying the same things women have been saying for years (and this is something he has acknowledged himself). But I only wish more people in his position used the messed up system that causes this kind of discrepancy so effectively.

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➝ foxcubb's post 'the battle hymn of the emotions' talks about how she sees the writing of Derek/Stiles fanfic at the moment. I am actually not reading any fic in this fandom except for renay's right now, because S2 is not available to me yet and I want to avoid spoilers, so I have no opinions on the ideas about the distinction being made between the written fic and the art that foxcubb has seen. I'm not offering this link up as a 'Yes - exactly!' type of link, it's just that sometimes it is interesting to hear people talk about anything to do with a program you love. I am pretty excited how much Teen Wolf fandom has exploded since S2.

➝ I promised you there would be no more links about the Olympics, but I am a huge liar so here have another! The New York Times went after Lolo Jones and Alyssa Rosenberg at Slate takes down their sexist approach which seems to focus a lot on the fact that Lolo degrades women by posing without many clothes on and has traded on a persona which the author finds lacking in consistency. Lolo was getting called out as anti-feminist, a fake, a money grabber and an athlete who didn't deserve to go to the Olympics, anything you can think of, because...well I guess because this dude was given a platform to rain hate down from. Slate does a great job of taking down the arguments in the original article.