C/D LENA DUNHAM (THE DEFINITIVE POLL)

Made the Amanda Palmer comparison before her book deal was finalized, but now I'm sure there will be stern lectures about how exactly she should and should not spend her new money.

she's going to invite fans to guest tweet while she's on her book tour

when romney marries neil gaiman the circle will be complete

Oh come the fuck on, whatever you might say about Lena Dunham, she is not oblivious to her privilege.

― Andrew Farrell, Monday, October 8, 2012 6:03 PM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ehhh. she recognizes her privilege in a pretty superficial way i think. this is what i meant before -- she doesnt get a free pass just because she recognizes she comes from a rich family and is self-involved. i think sometimes girls is pretty rigorous in its self critique and sometimes its a very perfunctory thing, a kind of "this is horrible behavior but i recognize that its horrible so who cares." which might as well be obliviousness

"oblivious" seems like kind of an absolute word to me, i dunno if you can be just pretty oblivious or practically oblivious

it is possible to be aware of certain privileges and oblivious to others

"self-aware"

http://imgc.allpostersimages.com/images/P-473-488-90/60/6006/3WGB100Z/posters/tom-cheney-look-it-s-not-you-it-s-me-o-k-new-yorker-cartoon.jpg

and sometimes its a very perfunctory thing, a kind of "this is horrible behavior but i recognize that its horrible so who cares." which might as well be obliviousness

that's the part that's REALISM!

i've said it once and i'll say it again: Lena Dunham is a genuinely rad individual, a person I used to share dinners and secret conversations and all sorts of other shit with. We still trade text messages with joeks in them.

That said, the process of writing a television show, much less one that is funny, has very little to do with being a good long-form essayist or memoirist. I mean, that piece in the New Yorker horrified me, not only because I knew everyone involved, but also because it just wasn't all that interesting even after stripping away that very personal knowledge.

The show, and Tiny Furniture, though, are great, and I am truly happy to count her as a friend. A very funny one, at that.

xp How publicly aware of her privilege does she need to be? I see the phrase "unacknowledged privilege" a lot now and the people who use it set the bar for acknowledgement pretty damn high. Mumford and Sons - they're oblivious to privilege. Dunham seems far from oblivious.

she needs to score at least a 7 on Stullman-Führbulgerr scale

actually i think the this-piece-available-to-subscribers abstract of the new yorker thing may be the damningest thing:

ABSTRACT: PERSONAL HISTORY about the writer’s college boyfriend. On August 17, 2010, the writer received an e-mail from her ex-boyfriend’s mother. Its subject heading was “Goodbye from Nancy and Bill,” and the message informed her that her ex-boyfriend’s parents were blocking her on Facebook. The writer was dumbfounded. She promptly unlinked her Twitter and Facebook accounts. The main result of Nancy’s Facebook rejection was to send the writer down memory lane in a pretty disconcerting way. The writer had met Noah, her ex-boyfriend, in her junior year at Oberlin. He had recently returned from six months in India and wore hemp cargo pants.

we really are overdue for a 'the strange bathos of new yorker article abstracts' thread

lmbo table

He had recently returned from six months in India and wore hemp cargo pants.

applause

xp How publicly aware of her privilege does she need to be? I see the phrase "unacknowledged privilege" a lot now and the people who use it set the bar for acknowledgement pretty damn high. Mumford and Sons - they're oblivious to privilege. Dunham seems far from oblivious.

― Get wolves (DL), Tuesday, October 9, 2012 5:54 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i think when youre writing semi-autobiographical narrative fiction you need to be pretty aware of yr privilege -- & when yr being bandied about as the voice of a generation or an Important Young Feminist Voice or whatever, that need is increased.

maybe 'not that kind of girl' will display the voice of a smarter, older, wiser lena dunham

...

i think he means LD doesn't project obliviousness about privilege in her art -- like the Girls pilot features her character being a spoiled brat who tells her parents she should be live on "only" $1100 a month. and you'd have to be kind of dumb to associate LD with the obliviousness of the character she played rather than the writer who made up the scene, which is knowingly played for laughs.

― some dude, Monday, 8 October 2012 23:37 (Yesterday) Permalink

I guess I haven't seen the show enough. When I watched Tiny Furniture, I honestly just could not tell whether I was actually expected to feel for a returning college student who found it "hard" to briefly not know what to do with herself while living in her parents' awesome NYC loft and working a boring but undemanding day job for a couple of weeks.

The show has a lot more awareness.

And the dramatic climax where she *realizes* she doesn't want to just be a day hostess or w/e was so groany (yeah no shit, your parents are famous artists and you went to an expensive private liberal arts college!), and again, if it was supposed to be poking fun at the angst of a person who has life easy, it was done in a very deadpan way.

i didnt think you were suposed to feel bad for her circumstance in tiny furniture, you were maybe supposed to feel bad for how embarrassing she was

you were supposed to feel embarrassed at how tiny the furniture was. I mean, who could be expected to sit in such a tiny chair?!

*takes a sip of water from a glass*

i dont remember tiny furniture really being that angsty

btw the k funny thing abt how everyone on the show is a child of fame is dunhams mom is not actually any sort of art world star, i mean sure being a working artist is noteworthy, but almost no one complaining abt this had heard of her mom before and lena is way more famous than her now

well now, hold on, she had a show in japan

*shes big in japan

Anyone outside of New York will tell you that it's hard to know when New Yorkers have a certain "awareness" of their context. Work from Cassavetes to Allen to Spike Lee to Dunham is so specific to New York that it can show a kind of narcissistic obliviousness about the "priviledge" of being a native New Yorker that, with Dunham and Allen, gets confused with obliviousness to class and race.

the race-related criticism of dunham is also about statements she and writers on the show have made

I missed Dunham's statements but I remember that writer's tweet.

seemed like she basically said in that nyer fest interview that she was mortified by that writers tweet but didnt really want to start beef and that they already were not working for the show anymore anyway

shes never said anything quite as racist as the lesley arfin tweet, tho the whole episode where she put on a shawl and called herself a fundamentalist was a iffy at. but in particular im thinking of something like where she said it "never occurred to her" to add black characters, or whatever. that doesnt sound like someone fully aware of her own privilege!

plus the interview where she talked about how there going to be black characters who revealed that the problems of the girls characters were "white people problems." like she is really unfortunately tone-deaf about race, her self-awareness doesnt really seem to extend beyond a recognition that she is rich and lucky to go to a good school and stuff

she doesn't seem to have much creative ambition to go beyond where she started out in life, so not exactly a shocker if she hasn't worked to gain a broader prospective on humanity.

btw the k funny thing abt how everyone on the show is a child of fame is dunhams mom is not actually any sort of art world star, i mean sure being a working artist is noteworthy, but almost no one complaining abt this had heard of her mom before and lena is way more famous than her now

― lag∞n, Tuesday, October 9, 2012 10:08 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I guess. I knew who her dad (Carroll Dunham) was before I knew who she was, and my wife who is more art-savvy than me knew who both of them were. They're not household names on a Damien Hirst or Matthew Barney level, sure. I think it's less about being a child of fame than being born with the keys to a rarefied world.

sure but brian williams! david mamet! uh the drummer for bad company, some lady who photographs miniature furniture - its a super group not a tv show!

this doesn't sound like it "never occurred to her"

I am a half-Jew, half-WASP, and I wrote two Jews and two WASPs. Something I wanted to avoid was tokenism in casting ... Not that the experience of an African-American girl and a white girl are drastically different, but there has to be specificity to that experience that I wasn't able to speak to. I really wrote the show from a gut-level place, and each character was a piece of me or based on someone close to me. And only later did I realize that it was four white girls. As much as I can say it was an accident, it was only later as the criticism came out, I thought, "I hear this and I want to respond to it." And this is a hard issue to speak to because all I want to do is sound sensitive and not say anything that will horrify anyone or make them feel more isolated, but I did write something that was super-specific to my experience, and I always want to avoid rendering an experience I can't speak to accurately.

In an interview with HuffPost TV in April, Dunham expressed concern that "Girls" would be viewed as an example of "hashtag white people problems." She explained, "We really tried to be aware and bring in characters whose job it was to go 'Hashtag white people problems, guys.' I think that's really important to be aware of. Because it can seem really rarified. When I get a tweet from a girl who's like, 'I'd love to watch the show, but I wish there were more women of color.' You know what? I do, too, and if we have the opportunity to do a second season, I'll address that.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/07/lena-dunham-fresh-air-girls_n_1496780.html

she sounds totally self aware there

http://thinkprogress.org/alyssa/2012/09/13/844891/lena-dunham-junot-diaz/

if she doesn't have the experience, she shouldn't bother because it's prob going to be horrible.

how does dunham grow up in NYC and not know any POC is the real question

We really tried to be aware and bring in characters whose job it was to go 'Hashtag white people problems, guys.'

http://www.operationorange.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/nuclear_button_rz.jpg

In an interview with HuffPost TV in April, Dunham expressed concern that "Girls" would be viewed as an example of "hashtag white people problems." She explained, "We really tried to be aware and bring in characters whose job it was to go 'Hashtag white people problems, guys.'

this is not something a self-aware person says!!!

Because it can seem really rarified. When I get a tweet from a girl who's like, 'I'd love to watch the show, but I wish there were more women of color.' You know what? I do, too, and if we have the opportunity to do a second season, I'll address that.

duh max

i mean "it was an accident" is about the same as "never occurred to me." like she doesnt seem to even realize the show was entirely white until critics started talking about it

haha wait what? what did you prove

when lena dunham is saying that shes going to introduce characters of color to show white characters how petty their problems are, i cant say i really trust that shes not oblivious abt race