The Coddling Of The American Mind (Trigger Warning Article In The Atlantic...)

I agree with her that fiction authors should be able to write about whatever they want and reviewers should not waste time dithering about whether writers have the proper quality and quantity of lived experience to be able to realize characters

her sombrero scandal metaphor of somebody dressing up as a stereotypical bavarian is dumb

In The Mandibles, I have one secondary character, Luella, who’s black. She’s married to a more central character, Douglas, the Mandible family’s 97-year-old patriarch. I reasoned that Douglas, a liberal New Yorker, would credibly have left his wife for a beautiful, stately African American because arm candy of color would reflect well on him in his circle, and keep his progressive kids’ objections to a minimum. But in the end the joke is on Douglas, because Luella suffers from early onset dementia, while his ex-wife, staunchly of sound mind, ends up running a charity for dementia research. As the novel reaches its climax and the family is reduced to the street, they’re obliged to put the addled, disoriented Luella on a leash, to keep her from wandering off.

was all set to accept the idea that authors should be able to write about the experiences of people from social groups other than their own, but now i have changed my mind

why does anyone take schriver seriously. she is a seriously bad writer.

wait, so this family actually wanders the streets with an african-american woman on a leash? yeesh, yeah, ban that plot. although i guess if it was some absurdist agit-prop play i could see it working....

i do kinda wish there were a punk/cool female novelist who could be the feminist answer to the fight club guy. a gross-out body horror punk lit kinda person. maybe there is someone out there like that and i haven't read them. i guess a.m. homes was kinda like that.

kathy acker maybe?

Acker otm

well yeah but i mean now.

Dodie Bellamy does a lot with abjection, but she's probably not chasing a wide audience the way Palahniuk tends to.

i got to read kathy acker when i was a kid but who do weird kids now get to read?

Sybil Lamb, too, but her audience is even smaller.
Xp

i'm thinking of a fictional equivalent of that german movie about the woman with the sore butt. that movie was completely insane. and better than fight club. i kinda hated fight club. can't think of the name of the movie now though...i saw it on netflix. and i don't know if a woman wrote it.

tt promises to be that person when she finishes her first novel

Wetlands!

i got to read kathy acker when i was a kid but who do weird kids now get to read?

Good question. Weird kid tumblr?

wait, a woman wrote the book! maybe she is the future:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlotte_Roche

shriver is so obviously a hack btw, beneath contempt

https://scdn.nflximg.net/images/4743/12184743.jpg

sounds like the writer of animorphs has a good gross-out body horror thing going on http://www.bogleech.com/animorphs.html

"And speaking of screaming, there's an ant that accidentally ends up morphing into a human in a later book, and when something with only the experiences of an ant finds itself with a relatively vast new sense of being in an incomprehensible new environment, screaming is all it can do."

the Wetlands author wrote another book that seems like it could be good too. and amazon led me to this which looks cool:

https://www.amazon.com/Unclean-Women-Girls-Alissa-Nutting/dp/0984213325/ref=pd_sim_14_3?ie=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=CT8M0WMJV3FNKFT8Y349

i'll start a thread on ILB or something though. don't need to clutter this thread up a ton.

Wetlands trailer looks great, surprised I haven't heard about this.

it's well worth watching and also completely excruciating! i loved it.

What's excruciating about it?

there are just scenes that are painful to watch.

there is one scene toward the end that i actually had to hide my eyes for. and yet it is not a horror movie.

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/10/the-most-popular-office-on-campus/504701/

As student enrollment increases and stigma subsides, the demand for counseling will presumably continue to rise. Blaming this crop of students for being less resilient will be a popular diatribe, but it shouldn’t be, Locke emphasized. In fact, it undermines a decade’s worth of work by counselors, psychologists, and student advocates who have strived to not only bring mental health to the forefront of public debate, but to reassure students that there is no shame in struggling—that experiencing mental distress is not a sign of weakness. “If anything,” Nguyen said, “this is what makes us stronger and makes us more resilient: the fact that I’m fighting for these resources.” The result of validating mental health in the culture of schools is that faculty, bystanders, and friends have intentionally led sufferers to the centers that promise to help them. “We need,” Locke said, “to follow through on that promise.”

http://www.thecollegefix.com/post/29616/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/my-halloween-email-led-to-a-campus-firestorm--and-a-troubling-lesson-about-self-censorship/2016/10/28/70e55732-9b97-11e6-a0ed-ab0774c1eaa5_story.html?postshare=4841477870473408&tid=ss_fb&utm_term=.19967b799d04

let's argue about this again

My feeling is that if some idiots want to dress up in racist costumes, feel free to ridicule them, criticize them, take their picture and shame them. It's the appeals for rule making and punishments by authorities that rub me the wrong way.

i think the kids were probably right to see in christakis' email a reactionary mindset hiding behind her liberal arguments -- cf. her mention of "absent fathers" in the wapo article -- but i still think their response to the email was over the top and even frightening. some professors are a bit conservative and don't "get it" -- doesn't mean they are demons

like, they should have been criticized -- i am pro arguing, even loudly and self-righteously -- but the whole looking for institutional redress for something that was worded in such an abstract way was really odd. it's interesting to me how quickly things changed: the activists i knew when i went to college in the late 00s would never think that someone should be punished formally for objecting to cultural appropriation theory. actually i remember some of them wearing appropriative costumes now that i think about it.

I can't be bothered to read the latest Here's a shot as being an old asshat about whatever it is:

Kids need to have their ass handed to them on an semi-arbitrary basis or they won't feel like their politics make a difference, and they won't have stories for how a fight went south for no reason that one time. A campus is a campus. Sloppy, lazy, stupid application of authority is half the point of a college administration's job.

Rub some dirt on it! Walk it off! When it matters, you'll remember how to fight. Grumble harrumph cough cough

A reminder, because it's nowhere in that self-rigteous article, that Erika Christakis held the position of Associate Master at Stillman College. It was really her job to create a good community for the students, and she failed at that miserably. Like, objectively failed. That's the job the students were protesting, not her as a professor (everything I've read about her academic writings sound absolutely horrid, though, lol)

When you use the word "objectively" in this context it loses all meaning. Objectively failing at that job would mean that students were physically harmed under her watch (which, AFAICT, didn't happen?). The fact that some (many?) students were unhappy with her is the very definition of subjectivity.

let's argue about this again

no

No, schwantz, she was also meant to foster a good community, and she caused such an uproar that she's still writing about it a year later. Do you think that's subjectively bad?

Yes Fred, any objective observer would agree with your fucking opinion

Fostering a good community doesn't (necessarily) mean "going along with whatever the mob demands." The fact that anyone disagrees with you means it's subjective.

That someone whose job it is to foster a good community shouldn't cause the biggest fight in years?

So communities shouldn't have arguments? You are ridiculous.

fred, vehement uproar and disagreement would be objective evidence of her failure to create a good community only if the success or failure of the entire community were solely and exclusively in her power to control, which, given the innate limitations of individuals to control the thoughts and actions of anyone other than themselves, is objectively impossible.

yep, no way to predict that acting like a giant tool would cause a mess. three dimensional chess man

somehow I am not convinced that your saying she "acting like a giant tool" should be considered as "objective evidence" of anything. it sounds suspiciously like an opinion.

i only read playboy for the objectivity

shockingly enough, all playboy has in it nowadays are the articles. it couldn't compete with the internet amateurs.

It's very far from being just the internet competition. It's difficult to imagine many people getting excited by most of what they've been doing for the last few decades.

feel like it doesn't really live up to its name anymore (for playboys)

i feel like a lot of these matters can be somewhat fairly described with the cliché "takes two to tango"--meaning someone does something dumb, people react in dumb ways, and the dumbness continues to increase exponentially until it swallows the sun (or at least inspires another hack article in the atlantic).