Isegoria

From what I’ve read, Oliver Stone made a bad movie. But that’s not how he sees it. From Stone Surprised by Poor Response to Epic:

Director Oliver Stone said he was surprised by the critical reaction to his historical epic “Alexander” — and put the blame on the fundamentalist morality in some parts of the United States.
[...]
“From day one audiences didn’t show up,” he said. “They didn’t even read the reviews in the South because the media was using the words, `Alex the gay.’ As a result you can bet that they thought, `We’re not going to see a film about a military leader that has got something wrong with him.’”

I’m having trouble believing this. It looks like the Beatles wanted to do a Lord of the Rings movie back in the 1960′s, but Tolkien, who was still alive and still held the film rights, nixed the idea. From Beatles plan for Rings film:

Ex-Beatle Paul McCartney, who was to play the hero Frodo in the movie, told Jackson about the plans at the Academy Awards in Hollywood, the Post reported.

‘It was something John was driving and J.R.R. Tolkien still had the film rights at that stage but he didn’t like the idea of the Beatles doing it. So he killed it,’ Jackson told the newspaper.

George Harrison was to play the wise wizard Gandalf who advises the hobbit Frodo in his quest to destroy the evil golden ring at the center of the epic tale of good versus evil, one of the most popular books of the 20th century.

Ringo Starr was to play Frodo’s devoted sidekick Sam, while Lennon would take the part of the hobbit-like creature that tracks the heroes throughout the story, trying to get his hands on the powerful ring.

“There probably would’ve been some good songs coming off the album,” Jackson said of the Beatles’ plan.

Jesse Walker points out the Progress we’ve made when it comes to news:

I was in southern Mexico when the tsunami struck, with virtually no Internet access. On the other hand, my hotel had cable. It was the first time in a long while that I was largely dependent on CNN for information about a major breaking story.

It’s one thing to know intellectually the limitations of TV news. It’s another to see those limits so starkly after being used to the depth of the Net. Few things are as frustrating as watching something go by on that news scroll, wanting to click through for more information, and suddenly remembering that you can’t — that you’re stuck listening to what the newscasters want to tell you, even if it’s the exact same thing they told you 10 minutes before.

What was really astonishing was to remember that 14 years earlier, when the first Gulf War was underway, CNN was the amazing new innovation, not the dinosaur in the rear-view mirror.

Superheroes Minus Masks asserts that the secret identities superheroes protect are powerful metaphors. In the process, it gives a quick rundown of the popular device:

The Scarlet Pimpernel, a fop who secretly rescued innocent nobles from the guillotine in revolutionary France, popularized the hero with a hidden identity. He was created in 1903 by Baroness Emmuska Orczy. As a Hungarian aristocrat paying her way by writing romances for bourgeois English audiences, she knew a few things about masks and hidden agendas.

The Pimpernel spawned Zorro, the Shadow and the Lone Ranger. Then, in the 1930s, a Jewish mama’s boy from Cleveland named Jerry Siegel created a new kind of hero. Siegel’s father was killed by a robber when Jerry was in his teens, and soon Siegel conceived of a bulletproof crime fighter named Superman. He gave his hero a secret identity, but with a potent twist. The Pimpernel and his imitators were well-established adults who invented masked alter egos who could battle evil without jeopardizing their social positions. Superman came from another world, already superhuman, and learned to pass as an earthling. Superman was the reality, Clark Kent the invention.

In The Comfort Zone, Jonathan Franzen tells his own story of “growing up with Charlie Brown”:

Like most of the nation’s ten-year-olds, I had an intense, private relationship with Snoopy, the cartoon beagle. He was a solitary not-animal animal who lived among larger creatures of a different species, which was more or less my feeling in my own house. My brothers, who are nine and twelve years older than I, were less like siblings than like an extra, fun pair of quasi-parents. Although I had friends and was a Cub Scout in good standing, I spent a lot of time alone with talking animals. I was an obsessive rereader of A. A. Milne and the Narnia and Doctor Dolittle novels, and my involvement with my collection of stuffed animals was on the verge of becoming age-inappropriate.

This was in 1970:

In that unsettled season, as the so-called generation gap was rending the cultural landscape, Charles Schulz’s work was almost uniquely beloved. Fifty-five million Americans had seen “A Charlie Brown Christmas” the previous December, for a Nielsen share of better than fifty per cent. The musical “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown” was in its second sold-out year on Broadway. The astronauts of Apollo X, in their dress rehearsal for the first lunar landing, had christened their orbiter and landing vehicle Charlie Brown and Snoopy. Newspapers carrying “Peanuts” reached more than a hundred and fifty million readers, “Peanuts” collections were all over the best-seller lists, and if my own friends were any indication there was hardly a kid’s bedroom in America without a “Peanuts” wastebasket or “Peanuts” bedsheets or a “Peanuts” gift book. Schulz, by a luxurious margin, was the most famous living artist on the planet.

Schulz’s strip featured iconic characters reduced to big faces with simple, but expressive features:

Charles Schulz was the best comic-strip artist who ever lived. When “Peanuts” débuted, in October, 1950 (the same month Tom was born), the funny pages were full of musty holdovers from the thirties and forties. Even with the strip’s strongest precursors, George Herriman’s “Krazy Kat” and Elzie Segar’s “Popeye,” you were aware of the severe constraints under which newspaper comics operated. The faces of Herriman’s characters were too small to display more than rudimentary emotion, and so the burden of humor and sympathy came to rest on Herriman’s language; his work read more like comic fable than like funny drawing. Popeye’s face was proportionately larger than Krazy Kat’s, but he was such a florid caricature that much of Segar’s expressive budget was spent on nondiscretionary items, like Popeye’s distended jaw and oversized nose; these were good jokes, but the same jokes every time. The very first “Peanuts” strip, by contrast, was all white space and big funny faces. It invited you right in. The minor character Shermy was speaking in neat letters and clear diction: “Here comes ol’ Charlie Brown! Good ol’ Charlie Brown . . . Yes, sir! Good ol’ Charlie Brown . . . How I hate him!”

Some say that there are only seven — or maybe eight — Archetypal Stories:

1. Cinderella – Unrecognised virtue at last recognised. It’s the same story as the Tortoise and the Hare. Cinderella doesn’t have to be a girl, nor does it even have to be a love story. What is essential is that the good is despised, but is recognised in the end, something that we all want to believe.
2. Achilles – The Fatal Flaw, that is the groundwork for practically all classical tragedy, although it can be made comedy too, as in the old standard Aldwych farce. Lennox Robinson’s The Whiteheaded Boy is the Fatal Flaw In reverse.
3. Faust- The Debt that Must be Paid, the fate that catches up with all of us sooner or later. This is found in all its purity as the chase in O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones. And in a completely different mood, what else is the Cherry Orchard?
4. Tristan – that standard triangular plot of two women and one man, or two men and one woman. The Constant Nymph, or almost any French farce.
5. Circe – The Spider and the Fly. Othello. The Barretts of Wimpole Street, if you want to change the sex. And if you don’t believe me about Othello (the real plot of which is not the triangle and only incidentally jealousy) try casting it with a good Desdemona but a poor Iago.
6. Romeo and Juliet – Boy meets Girl, Boy loses Girl, Boy either finds or does not find Girl: it doesn’t matter which.
7. Orpheus – The Gift taken Away. This may take two forms: either the tragedy of the loss itself, as in Juno and the Paycock, or it may be about the search that follows the loss, as in Jason and the Golden Fleece.
8. The Hero Who Cannot Be Kept Down. The best example of this is that splendid play Harvey, made into a film with James Stewart.

Bryan Appleyard reviews the entire science fiction genre when he reviews The Invisible Man in New Statesman – Books:

Between 1895 and 1898, H G Wells wrote four science fiction masterpieces — The Time Machine, The Island of Dr Moreau, The Invisible Man and The War of the Worlds. Then, as now, SF was seen as not quite respectable by literary types. The vile George Bernard Shaw sneered at Wells, and even his own literary patron, W E Henley, told him: “You could also do better — far better & to begin with, you must begin by taking yourself more seriously.” In our day, Margaret Atwood has turned her nose up at SF, preferring to call the novels she writes “speculative fiction”, a truly toe-curling piece of petty snobbery.

The ratio of bad to good SF novels is about the same as that of bad to good literary novels, but, for some reason, SF is always judged by the output of its most inept practitioners. In truth, a form that has produced, among others, Stanislaw Lem, J G Ballard, the Strugatsky brothers and, above all, Herbert George Wells has nothing to apologise for.

I don’t know how you can fail to follow that paragraph with a description of Sturgeon’s Law:

Ninety percent of everything is crud.

It was originally stated as a defense (of sorts) of science fiction:

Sure, ninety percent of science fiction is crud. That’s because ninety percent of everything is crud.

Biology, Culture, and Persistent Literary Dystopias looks at a number of literary dystopias — Brave New World, 1984, We, A Handmaid’s Tale — and finds one central similarity:

Literary dystopias have this in common: They are imagined societies in which the deepest demands of human nature are either subverted, perverted, or simply made unattainable.

Michael Blowhard points to some images of replica Greek statues:

OK, so ancient Greek statues weren’t white. We know that. They were painted, or gold-leafed, or something. Very interesting. But what did they actually look like? Here’s the answer, or one possible answer anyway. And talk about gaudy! What I’m most reminded of is the decor in NYC pizza parlors.

A Philistine Screed on Philistinism opens with “a wry line, aimed at the funny bone of the elite”:

“No passion in the world,” H.G. Wells declared, “is equal to the passion to alter someone else’s draft.”

Another witty bit of intellectual condescension:

I remember one snobby professor who described the standards of his university to new faculty members with a practiced line.

“The admissions requirements of ____ University,” he liked to intone in comradely fashion, “can be found on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.”

Ostensibly, Carlin Romano is reviewing Frank Furedi’s Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone?: Confronting 21st Century Philistinism, but he has more to say on the topic of Philistines than on the lackluster text. I’d never heard of Hubbard’s The Philistine:

Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915), editor of The Philistine monthly magazine from 1895 to 1915. (At one point it boasted a circulation of more than 100,000 and published such writers as Rudyard Kipling and Stephen Crane.) A soap salesman and state-side admirer of William Morris who started the fabulously successful and semi-communal Roycrofters printing operation in Aurora, N.Y., Hubbard grew wealthy writing and publishing more than seven million, well, philistine words.

His aphorisms exuded middle-class, can-do common sense, apotheosized hard work and efficiency, and bristled at preachy promulgation or nit-picking by cultural mandarins. “The world is moving so fast these days,” Hubbard wrote, “that the man who says it can’t be done is generally interrupted by someone doing it.”

“A committee,” he observed, “is a thing which takes a week to do what one good man can do in an hour.” Some credit him with the immortal, “Life is just one damn thing after another.” Hubbard’s business credo proclaimed, “I believe that when I make a sale I make a friend.” Perhaps more tellingly, for the history of philistinism from Arnold to shop-to-drop America today, he asserted, “I believe in sunshine, fresh air, spinach, applesauce, laughter, buttermilk, babies, bombazine, and chiffon, always remembering that the greatest word in the English language is ‘Sufficiency.’”