The Common Crow Books and Biblio Kiada

 

I recently had a fascinating experience with a used book shop, Common Crow Books of Pittsburgh, PA, USA. I want to talk a little about that experience here and now. 

I don’t know how common the experience I had was and is. I would not be surprised, however, if it was and is more common than I and many others would think it is. After all, in the brave new used book world in the brave new digital age of bookselling the number of snake oil pedlars selling used books out there in cyberland has increased exponentially thanks to the internet and it is often aided and abetted by third parties on the internet like Biblio, a supposedly independent site enabling independent booksellers to peddle their wares. It was through Biblio that I bought the book from Common Crow Books.

In this brave new digital used bookselling age it is worth remembering that many of these book selling conmen and conwomen, of course, don’t give a crap about the books they sell. For many of them books are no more than a commodity to be bought and sold. Needless to say, many of these snake oil books sales people, many of whom seem genetically incapable of accurately describing the used books they have for sale, ultimately have the moral consciousness of a blueberry scone when it comes to selling books on the internet.

Despite this new used book selling reality in the brave new digital age I must confess that I did not expect to experience what I experienced from Common Crow Books and from Biblio. After all, Biblio has historically differentiated itself from Amazon, which it almost sees as the beast of the Book of Revelation, and itself, of course, as that which will save us from the beast of prophecy. It turns out, alas, that Biblio is really not that different from Skankizon as I learned when I bought a book through Biblio from Common Crow.

And this brings me back to my tale. As I mentioned I purchased an item from Common Crow Books through Biblio. I purchased it this last weekend. I found the item I wanted, clicked on the purchase button, and voila in a few seconds I had purchased the book at the price and the shipping charges listed by the seller using my credit card. 

A few days after this purchase I received an email from Common Crow saying they needed to charge me more money for shipping because the shipping cost had not been accurately calculated. I ignored the message assuming if it was a scam. I rightly assumed that I had already purchased the item at the cost of the book and accompanying shipping charges set by the seller and as a consequence had entered into a contract with that seller. The next day I received yet another missive about the book, this one from Biblio. It said that Common Crow needed more money for shipping. I learned, in other words, that this attempt to rewrite a contract was not a scam but the real deal

Now I don’t want to appear without sympathy or empathy, but I must note that I was rather shocked that a used bookseller who has his own webpage and who appears like someone who has been around the block a few times did not know the approximate shipping cost of the item I purchased and wanted to revise the contract we agreed to when I purchased the book at his or her price and at his or her shipping charges. Frankly and bluntly, my thought was that it is not my fault that the bookseller did not know how much the shipping charges were before we agreed to the contract for a specific item at a specific cost and a specific shipping charge. And I must say that I was shocked that the bookseller wanted to revise the contract after the fact and Biblio was more than willing to let him get away with this, something, by the way, I also experienced once when I bought a book in Amazon Marketplace, but them these booksellers are Biblio’s bottom line bread and butter. By the way, the bookseller on Amazon Marketplace who wanted to renegotiate our contract was from the Maritimes who likely had difficulties grasping the dollar to dollar exchange rate.

Needless to say I cancelled the item and I decided that in the future I will not purchase anything from Common Crow Books or through Biblio. In fact, I asked Biblio to close my account. I may also contact the Attorney General of New York state about the experience I had with both. That is something to reflect on for the future.

Caveat emptor.

Musings on the Theatrics of Donny Drumpf...

As cultural anthropologists have known for decades symbols are at the heart of human life. Humans have always given meaning to their lives and to the worlds in which they live those lives in. They give cultural meaning to their lives in the form of, for example, religious beliefs. They give economic meaning to their lives in the form, for instance, the theology and ideology of free enterprise. They give political meaning to their lives in the form of, for example, the belief that “democracy” is the greatest political system the world has ever seen, They give demographic meaning to their lives in the form, for instance, of rites of passage marking the transition from childhood to adulthood, rites of passage which have, of course, varied across time and space. And they give meaning to the places in which they live those lives in the form of, for example, beliefs in the exceptionalism of their nation, state, clan, or tribe.

Cultural symbols (sacred, mundane, profane) are at the heart not only of so-called traditional societies but of so-called complex modern and postmodern societies like that of the United States as the recent symbolic theatrics of American president Donald Trump point up. Trump and his ilk, including many White Nationalist American worshipping so-called Christians, like their women domestic and domesticated and their men leaders of men and women. They like their dudes to be dudes (John Waynes, Rambo’s, feudal knights) and their dudettes to be dudettes (helpmeets, damsels in distress) and they justify and rationalise it all by claiming and maintaining that such social and cultural constructions are god given and hence universal. The fetishisation of culture. 

These socially and culturally constructed gender meanings along with political, economic, and geographic meanings and realities were evident in Trump’s and his mini-him J.D. Vance’s treatment of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelinsky at an oval office meeting before cameras at the White House last week. Trump and Vance gave their target demographic what they wanted, namely a manly man warrior king, the messiah of a resurgent American nation, berating the president of a foreign nation at war as if he were a supplicant child of a less powerful feudal estate of less status, a vassal. But then that is exactly what Zelinsky is. He is a vassal of a weaker feudal estate relative to the “beneficent" United States and its "gift giving” king and messiah, Donnie Trump.

As such this event points up the fact that power, the thing that really makes the world go round is often if not always at the heart of cultural meanings and theatrics. Trump was not only showing his groupies or devotees that he is indeed their king and messiah by standing up, as they see it, for poor downtrodden America and for poor downtrodden Americans, something, one presumes, his target audience found the spectacle reassuring even if it was, from a more objective point of view, rather like a school yard bully confronting the weaker members of school society but then Trump and Vance do seem to like their Social Darwinism and eugenics. He was also showing Zelinsky American power, showing the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, that things had perhaps changed, showing America’s once close allies that things had likely changed, and preparing the American people for likely changes in US foreign policy. This last seems to indicate that even the Trumpies, those elites at the top of the Tangholio cult, are, at the moment, not fully ready to jettison support of the Ukraine before preparing the ground with a narrative in which the president of the Ukraine is a bad, bad man who has no respect for the United States or its king-messiah, Donald Trump. For as demagogues and conmen like Trump have learned over the years the more manichean, good versus bad, a story is the more likely it is to sell to the lowest common denominator masses.

Given this it is important to recognise that Drumpf is not interested in real negotiations, in real compromises. He is interested in expressing, symbolically, his power and expressing America’s power. He wants thing his way. It is thus a waste of time trying to negotiate anything with a brick wall, which the self-righteous Trump is. He simply wants vassals to give obeisance to him and to the power of the United States, a superpower, a superempire. The stuff about fentanyl in relation to Canada is simply a hyperbolised smoke screen, a smoke screen to cover up what Trump and his minions are actually doing. Those who have to deal with this adolescent still in diapers and this now adolescent government in diapers must, therefore, look for other options. Canada, for instance, should probably consider reintegrating more strongly into the Commonwealth once again and increasing its political, economic, and cultural ties with Europe, including one of Canada’s mothers, Britain. After all, it is clear that you can no longer trust a nation like the United States that treats its friends, like Canada which has an economy that is legally and officially integrated with that of the US, like shit.

Another recent instance of the symbolics of Trumpian politics involves tariffs. Trump, of course, needs to show the faithful that he is actually trying to do what he told them he would do, make American great again. He is thus creating a narrative in which he is using tariffs to make American great again by bringing manufacturing back to the US and he has been able to achieve some successes in this thanks to supplicant sycophantic economic elites who have agreed to build new facilities in Texas though some might argue that such facilities are more needed in other places such as Ohio. He is trying to use tariffs in the same way the US did in the mid and late 19th century and in much of the twentieth century, to bring manufacturing to the US by making the prices of goods made elsewhere more expensive.

Whether this tariff plan will work in the long run is an open question. One has to ask whether tariffs on China and Mexico (those on Canada are another matter and are closely tied to power and the long standing American manifest destiny urge to annex that country) will work. Are these tariffs likely to make shipping goods from China or Mexico to the US so much more costly that cost conscious Americans looking for the cheapest prices and the best deal likely to switch to American goods even if they are American nationalists?

A fundamental problem here, of course, is that American wages are higher than those of China and Mexico something that will make American produced goods more expensive than goods produced in those countries prior to tariffs even with the additional shipping costs. One could, I suppose, cut American wages making them lower if not as low as China and Mexico hoping this will bring down the cost of goods (but will American economic elites want to cut their salaries and benefits too in order to accomplish this?). The problem will still remain, however. How will the American working class, poor, and middle class pay for the maintenance of their beloved and holy consumer lifestyles? Credit? I am sure American usurers are salivating over that scenario.

Of course, Trump could do other things such as raise taxes on corporations and wealthy American to subsidise the brave new American world he hopes to ressurect. He is, however, unlikely to do this given that that would be akin to foxes guarding the hen house. He has already said he wants to cut taxes and the reason he thinks he can (a rationalisation and justification of his class and status position) do this is because of downsizing at Trump, Inc., also known as the US government, and increased tariff revenues coming into Trump, Inc. Time, as always, will tell.

 

Buying a Humidifier: Ron Goes Dreamzy

 

I had to buy a new humidifier recently as my old one went bung. A humidifier is essential in the apartment complex in which I live. It is an old house that has at least been around since the 1850s and whose heat is, as a consequence, old school. It was remodelled in the 1970s into five flats but its heat is still the old radiator heat which, as those who have lived with it know, dries out your flat in winter necessitating a humidifier particularly for people with sinus issues like myself. My sinuses, in fact, get so dry as I sleep with radiator heat and under blankets and in beds which make you hot that a humidifier is essential, along with periodic visits to Ear, Nose, and Throat medical specialists to counteract the additional stress radiators add to my already existing sinus problems (which my Father had as well).

I did some research online about what “tests” found the best humidifier to be. I ended up going with the Chinese made Dreamzy K30, the one with the copper ball (see below). It was pricy, even with it supposedly being on sale, and the shipping fee was substantial but I thought from the rating guides that it sounded interesting and sounded like the one for me.

When I got the humidifier I opened the box. Got it out. Read the instructions. Soaked the sticks which fit into a two pronged apparatus in the brass ball that create the mist, and filled the tank with tap water. Then I hooked it up. I noticed when I bought the item that it ran off of a very short usb chord so I made sure I had a plug that had a usb port in it in the power strip in my bedroom. I turned it on and voila…disappointment after a week and a half of use. Mist comes out of it as advertised but in much less amounts than I had hoped. It works but I had hoped it would work better.

As a senior I should say something about this humidifier and its use by seniors. Since you have to pick up the humidifier and take it to a tap to fill it it after detaching the top, which isn’t easy even for those without arthritis, it is very cumbersome for seniors to use. Probably best to avoid it altogether and seek other easier to use options.

Given the limited stream flow I may have to supplement my Dreamzy with another. On the other hand I may have to buy one with a more substantial mist flow entirely particularly since the mist flow in this one seems to get worse with use not better, and has just stopped entirely. I did try to contact the company via the email on the site I ordered from but it came back as undeliverable making me wonder if I was the victim of a scam. Perhaps i should contact the attorney general of New York state. Anyway, caveat emptor and definitely don’t believe the hype and don’t waste you money on this overhyped piece of crap.

The Books of My Life: Blood Relations

The post-World War II period in the West is interesting for a number of reasons. One of the changes that was evident in this era was a change in intellectual and academic attention to and response to “popular" culture.

One of the key texts in this changing attitude toward popular culture was Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America edited by Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White and published by probably the leading social science publisher of the immediate post-war era, The Free Press. Mass Culture brought together a host of intellectuals and academics interested in popular culture from varying sides of the political, ideological, and cultural spectrum. Some, both on the left and the intellectual as opposed to the populist right, decried and condemned popular culture—films, television, comic books, mass fiction, radio, advertising, and comic books—for its socialisation for mass conformity function and its lowest common denominator content. Others found much to praise in popular culture. Still others found mass culture or masscult a double edged sword, both praising it and damning it alternatively for a variety of reasons. 

By the time Mass Culture was published the popular culture revolution was in full swing. Many pop culture critics had already been singing the praises of European cinema from auteurs like Ingmar Bergman and Vittorio de Sica. Soon intellectual film critics associated with the French film journal Cahiers du Cinema and Postiff, the British film journal Movie, and critics like Andrew Sarris and Peter Bogdanovich, waxed poetically about those pantheon auteurs in Hollywood like Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, John Ford, and Howard Hawks who, they argued, had produced personalised art within the belly of the corporate beast, the commercialised and standardised Hollywood studio system.

This increasing intellectual interest in cinema eventually stimulated an increasing interest in film as a critical study and as a practical vocation even within the staid academy where talk of popular culture often cooled the cockles of the high art academic heart. By the 1970s there were even programmes in film at elite American research universities like the University of Iowa, the University of Wisconsin, Indiana University, USC, and UCLA and universities, elite and not, such as Queen’s, York, McGill, and Simon Fraser in Canada. Not surprisingly, the critical study of film as a historical and sociological phenomenon came late to many older elite institutions with strong boundary markers between high culture and popular culture like Toronto, Cambridge, and Oxford.

The revolution or revivification of a host of theoretical approaches such as Marxism, Semiology, Semiotics, Psychoanalysis and a sensitivity to the realities of economic, political, and cultural inequalities like gender and ethnicity (including race) in the post-World War II era and particularly from the mid-1960s on, had an impact on theoretical and methodological approaches to critical film studies in the academy as many of the younger generation and even some of the older turned away from an auteurism they saw as inherently romantic and anti-contextual in the economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic sense exchanging it for one or more of the elements above in sometimes shifting syncretistic or hybridic configurations, a movement reflected in Bill Nichols’s two volume edited collection Movies and Methods published by the University of California Press. From an emic point of view many in academic film studies believed that the study of film as a historical, social, and cultural phenomenon had come of theoretical and methodological age and, and in the process, had reached the level of theoretical and methodological sophistication sociology and cultural and social anthropology had and perhaps had even surpassed those disciplines in their level of theoretical and methodological sophistication.

By the 1980s and 1990s another pop culture form was trying to emulate the trajectory of film studies in academe and fighting for recognition from the guardians of higher education, television. Scholars such as Horace Newcomb, Thomas Schatz, John Fiske, John Tulloch, Robert Allen, Robert Thompson, David Marc, Christopher Anderson, Douglas Gomery, Jane Feuer, and others, including the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, were trying to bring respectability to the critical studies of television in the same way that Gomery, Schatz, Brian Henderson,  James Naremore, Andrew Tudor, Peter Wollen, Dudley Andrew, Umberto Eco,Jill Mulvay, David Bordwell, Rick Altman, and others had brought a certain if somewhat tenuous level of respectability to film in the academy. 

The study of television has had a more ambiguous and tenuous place in the academy in English, Communication, and Media Studies departments and faculties even than film studies. As with film—there has always been a fanboy and fangirl component to academic critical film studies—the development of interest in television was stimulated by television programmes themselves and particularly cult television series like Star Trek. Critical writers like David Gerrold published a book on the episode he wrote for Star Trek, "The Trouble with Tribbles", in 1974. Horace Newcomb edited the first edition of his critical reader on television, Television: The Critical View in 1976. Jane Feuer and her colleagues published their seminal collection of essays on MTM, Mary Tyler Moore Enterprises, which produced television hits, both popular and critical, like The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Rhoda, Lou Grant, Hill Street Blues, and St. Elsewhere in 1985. The personnel of Mary Tyler Moore Enterprises, by the way, would not only link American television of the 1970s and 1980s to the past, 1960s shows like the highly praised The Dick van Dyke Show and That Girl, but also to the future. Many critically praised shows of the 1990s, like NYPD Blue,  Cheers, and The Simpsons were created by alumni of MTM. By 1987 television studies had, with the publication of the first edition of Richard Allen’s edited collection Channels of Discourse, a book in which the smorgasbord of contemporary critical approaches to literature and film had been recapitulated and replicated in television studies, reached, at least from an emic point of view, adulthood. This did not mean, however, that television studies was seen by most in the academy as an adult worthy of inclusion in the humanities or social sciences curriculum.

The 1990s saw an explosion of writings in television studies mostly thanks to a cult show on the WB netlet, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. As I write no show, not even its nearest rival Star Trek, has stimulated the amount of academic attention as has Buffy. One of the first and the first essay on Buffy I read was that of noted cultural and social anthropologist David Graeber, “Rebel Without a God”, published in In These Times in 1998 within a year of when Buffy debuted on the late WB in 1997. More articles and books, now numbering in the several hundreds, academic conferences, and even an online journal on Buffy and Whedon Studies—Joss Whedon created Buffy— Slayage, followed—and can be found at listed at Whedonology: An Academic Whedon Studies Bibliography at the Association for Buffy Studies+, and shows little signs of abating.

In the world of publishing McFarland and Tauris, both independent academic publishers not associated with universities, have led the academic charge in Buffy and Whedon Studies and TV Studies in general. University presses, like Syracuse and Duke, have played a much less prominent role in Buffy Studies suggesting the tenuous position of Buffy and Whedon Studies in the contemporary academy and the attitudes that exist toward the study of television in the academy. 

Over the years I have read many of the McFarland and Tauris Whedon Studies books. The latest on my now read list is Jess Battis’s Blood Relations: Chosen Families in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005). Battis, now at the University of Regina, argues, to use an analogy from cultural anthropology, that chosen families, families of choice, is the key symbol or the key theme, the symbol or theme which all other symbols or themes in the Buffyverse, in the television shows Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel (and which are also central in Whedon’s short lived television series Firefly), revolve. According to Battis Buffy herself in Buffy, and Cordelia and Fred, in Angel, function as the chosen matriarchs of the Scooby Gang or Slayerettes and Angel Investigations or the Fang Gang respectively. The chosen father of Buffy is Giles. The chosen fathers of Angel are Angel himself and Wesley. The children of the Buffy chosen family include Willow and Xander and, if of less duration, Cordelia, Willow’s one time significant other, Oz, Xander’s one time significant other, Anya, Tara, Willow’s significant other until her death, and Dawn, Buffy’s made by the monks sister. The adult children of Angel include Gunn, Lorne, and Angel’s blood son Connor, none of whom Battis explores in the detail in which he explores Willow and Xander. Battis finds much to praise in his homiletics about the key symbol of chosen families in both shows, chosen families that reflect, Battis argues, the changing family dynamics of post-World War II America and Canada and which offer a loving and communitarian alternative to the West’s dominant nuclear families, particularly for outsiders, and finds much to condemn in his polemics about the chosen family key theme of the show, namely the absence of non-White ethnics and much in the way of class diversity in the characters of the show.

Though focused at least ostensibly on the symbol or theme of chosen families in the Buffyverse and limitedly in the Whedon verse, Battis’s book jumps around to other issues, including reflexive ruminations on postgraduate life in the staid and conventional university of today.  I was left with the feeling that without such padding the book, like so many books in film studies and television studies, would probably have made a better journal article than a monograph.

Beyond this structural issue I had a number of issues with Blood Relations, a book that is in someways Buffy meets sociology, but selective sociology. Like so many of those who engage in crystal ball textualism Battis, while briefly exploring quantitative data on Canadian and US families and far to limited in its utilisation of primary documentary material (mostly interviews of Whedon)—Battis’s analysis is grounded in the sola textura method, an exploration of the text alone, a kind of academic fundamentalist approach to texts. Whether one can discern everything one always wanted to know about a given text, including its economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographical contexts, is an open question, an open question in which I would answer that it is not possible to do that with any confidence given its lack of evidentiary checks and balances. This, in turn, means that one can compellingly argue that academic textual analysis is actually a form of situated reader response that tells us as much if not more about the reader, including his or her ideological persuasions, than the text itself.

Battis, like so many social and cultural constructionists—who got there before Foucault, by the way, as did social and cultural anthropologists like Franz Boas and Margaret Mead—does not grasp Buffy’s and Angel’s theodicy. Real evil exists in the Buffyverse along with shades of grey. And this is why the Scoobies and the Fang Gang fight not for god, not for country, not for any ethnic group, not for any particular gender, but for humanity. And at the end of Buffy that fight becomes much more democratic than it was under the gaze of the patriarchal and paternalist Watcher’s Council.

Battis does the now time warn cystal ball textualist representational song and dance. He calls for greater ethnic, gender, and class representation in ostensibly middle class texts like Buffy which is well and good but it ignores the “realites” of American television. British and even Canadian television, all of which seem to be more representational in these areas than US TV. The problem I have with these clarion calls is how far do we go in asking for representatonal representation in television shows? How about identity groups like the Amish, Christian fundamentalists, and Southern Baptists? Should they be represented in proportion to their populations on American TV? If so, how? An Amish remake of All in the Family perhaps? 

Battis misses some things. For example, Battis comments in a footnote that he has no idea what happened to Willow’s and Tara’s kitten, Miss Kitty Fantastico. Actually, Dawn explains what happened to Miss Kitty in the very last episode of Buffy. Speaking of Dawn, the introduction of Dawn into season five of Buffy adds a blood family dimension to a show emphasising chosen families making it more complicated it in the process, since Dawn, though she may be the key created by the monks to protect her from the hellgod Glory who wants to use her to go home, is literally blood kin to Buffy. 

Finally, while Battis makes a compelling case for the importance of chosen families in the work of Joss Whedon and in Buffy and Angel in particular—there are also chosen families of sorts in The Dick van Dyke Show, That Girl, and The Mary Tyler Moore Show—it is not the key symbol that gives meaning to  all the secondary symbols that circulate around it in the Buffyverse. The key symbol in Buffy, I would argue, is not chosen families but growing up, an existentialist portrayal of growing up with all its attendant joys and—this is a Whedon show after all—horrors and terrors. It is growing up that gives chosen families meaning in Buffy along with the increasing complexity of evil in the show, the problems associated with addictions, the problems associated with parental issues, and the decision to fight the good fight even if it is likely never to end the conflict once and for all. There is still a hellmouth in Cleveland after all.

A historical note. It is, at my age, quite interesting to read a lot of crystal ball textualism that has been produced since its rise to hegemony after the 1970s. In a lot of what I have read and perused it sometimes seems that the successive young turks associated with crystal ball textualism are constantly reinventing the wheel and seem to have a limited knowledge of the history of social and cultural theory. For example, they often seem unaware that social and cultural constructionism has been around since Wilhelm Dilthey and Max Weber and that some of what Foucault asserts has parallels in earlier social and cultural constructionist literature. They far too often seem unaware of earlier attempts to meld social and cultural analysis with psychoanalysis. Cultural anthropologists, for instance, melded the study of culture, national character, and psychoanalysis back in the 1930s by looking at a host of “texts” including media texts. Cultural anthropologists have also been engaged in something else Battis muses on, whether some identity groups can really understand and grasp other identity groups. Cultural Anthropologists, for example, were reflecting on whether men can, when doing fieldwork, grasp women and whether some ethnics can grasp the “realities” of other ethnics since at least the 1970s, an era which also saw the increasing prominence of reflexive anthropology and reflexive ethnographers such as the authors of essays in Dell Hymes’s edited collection Reinventing Anthropology, James Clifford, Michael Fischer, and George Marcus. Of course, social and cultural anthropologists learned long ago that informants weren’t always generous with the truth, something that led to ethnographers to reflect on the practise of fieldwork and what one learned during fieldwork. As for the notion that humans perform, ethnographer Erving Goffman focused on human performativity practises long before those in English Studies faculties did as did Shakespeare.

The Books of My Life: The Aesthetics of Culture in Buffy the Vampire Slayer

 

I have said it before and I will probably say it again at some point: Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer is one of the best things I have ever seen, heard, or read. I love its gender bending, its genre blending, its seriality, its tonal blending, and its reflexivity and playfulness, none of which are admitedly novel since many of these techniques clearly go back to the Shakespeare if not before and to the BBC’s adaptations of classic novels as does the damaged man motif one finds in the series and in so many books, films, and television shows since their advent.

This—aesthetics—may be one of the reasons so many scholarly books by academics and intellectuals have been written about the show. Another reason is undoubtedly the fan boy and fan girl culture that has grown up around Buffy, a fanboy and fangirl culture that often centres around certain currently popular genres and its made into saints auteurs and which shows no signs of abating given DVD’s, streaming, and social media sites like YouTube where a host of younger viewers (and older) are watching and “reacting” to Buffy mostly in a way that foregrounds the variations in cultural capital different readers or watchers bring to the text.

Like the “reaction” videos on YouTube scholarly writing on Buffy also varies according to cultural capital acquired though none of it is as decontextualised as most reaction videos are. The books on Buffy by Gregory Stevenson and J. Michael Richardson and J. Douglas Rabb, which focus on philosophical issues and social ethical issues related to the Buffy text, are excellent and enlightening. So is the collection edited by Roz Kaveney on Buffy and Angel and the long essay on the show by Deborah Thomas in the first issue of the occasional and now sadly defunct and now lamented journal Close-Up. Others, like many of the essays in Fighting the Forces and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy are, in my opinion, comme ci comme ca, a little bit of this and a little bit of that. Some of these are, in other words, good while others are more mediocre, but then that is often the case with edited collections. Uneven monographs and books on Buffy may be but at least they are interesting and sometimes even enlightening, something again that makes scholarly analysis on Buffy very different from “reaction” videos, which often seem of to be of the lowest common denominator hey look at me react to this or that variety.

Matthew Pateman’s The Aesthetics of Culture in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Jefferson, NC, 2006) is one of those books on Buffy that is interesting even if, in my opinion, it is uneven. In part one of his book Pateman focuses on what he refers to as four aspects of the Buffy text: the knowledge level, the ethnic or identity level, the historical level, and the ethical level, all of which, Pateman argues, are central aspects of the Buffy and Angel texts or text. I was much more impressed by part two of the book where Pateman explores, using the fourth season episode “Restless" as his starting off point to explore involution—Pateman’s term—in the Buffy text. Involution, of course, is a fancy—you know how scholars like to use descriptive technical language that one can also argue is jargony—way of saying that Pateman explores inner textual and extra textual references in Buffy and to a lesser extent Angel, Buffy’s spin off, past, present, and future. 

The problem, in my opinion, with Pateman’s book is the same problem one finds in other books that largely eschew, save often in name only, broader economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic and importantly, documentary analysis beyond the text. To be fair, Pateman does touch on the production contexts of Buffy but ultimately, for my taste, in much too limited a fashion focusing instead on the cultural level, a somewhat odd cultural level since most of the context is actually internal to the text, something which I suppose is not surprising in a book that links culture and aesthetics and something that links crystal ball textual analysis like that of Pateman to interpretations of the Bible that decontextualise or wrongly contextualise that book.

The problem with the crystal ball or donut hole textual approach is that something is missing at its heart, namely sound historical and contextual exegetical analysis. Most of the analysis in Pateman’s books lies on the hermeneutic level and as such, like other essays, monographs, and books in this genre whether focused on literary, filmic, and televisual, ends up being ahistorical if not, and paradoxically so given Pateman’s lip service to history, anti-historical. Examples: Pateman claims, in historical fashion, that modern enlightenment texts are grounded in apocalyptic and eschatological ideologies which are teleological in form. This is true as far as it goes. There is, however, another apocalyptic and eschatological ideological form that is cyclical in form in that the end times leads backwards to an Edenic or paradiscial future where time ends just as it does in the modern teleological form. Pateman, like others, asserts a non-essentialist essentialism when it comes to identity, an ideological strategy that leads him to criticise—Pateman working on a homiletic level backwards—the lack of attention of Buffy’s writers to Willow’s Jewishness or more accurately lack of it. It almost seems as if Pateman is unaware of the secular (a recent poll found that only 50% of American Jews believe in god, only 26% believe in the god of the Bible, that 19% believe there is no god, and that only 22% of American Jews say religion is important to them), and Reform, Polydox, Reconstructionist, and Conservative American Jewish communities. Pateman’s focus on good and evil and the increasing complexity of this in the Buffy text while interesting and valuable largely misses, save in fragments, the importance of existentialism in the work of Joss Whedon, something Whedon himself has commented on. Pateman plays the old straw man of romantic auteurism card missing, as is common in many postmodern writings on literature, films and television, that auteurism doesn’t have to be romantic. It can also, for example, be Marxist, grounded in economic, political, cultural, and demographic contexts and the author of film and televisual texts certainly can be understood, at least in the few cases where there are film and television authors, as akin to a conductor in a symphony orchestra or a general in the military. 

Like so many of a postmodernist bent Pateman’s ahistorical historicism grounded in cultural and ethical relativism, a relativism that often does not recognise the difference between these two forms of relativism, tends to often to impose cultural and ideological readings on the text rather than to discern readings exegetically and empirically from the text. Pateman, for instance, fails to realise that Buffy’s theodicy, Buffy's notion of evil, is not ethically relativist and that real evil is depicted as existing in the Buffyverse along with demons, monsters, vampires, etc., that do not fall in the evil category because they are not harmful to humanity, something Buffy tells Faith the Vampire Slayer in season three of the show. This ideologically determined misreading or malreading raises the question of whether postmodernist readings of texts that are not grounded in empirical exegesis, broad contextual exegesis, are a species of reader response which tell us as much if not more about the interpreter than about that being interpreted. I think they are and I think they do. Scholarly interpretations guided by cultural and ideological correctness may be of a higher quality than those of “reaction” videos by amateurs but they are like them in that they both are ultimately ideologically overdetermined.

There is much that is praise worthy in Pateman’s The Aesthetics of Culture in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. His exploration of echoes and foreshadowing in the Buffy text is encyclopaedic if not exhaustive, assuming the latter is possible in the first place given the richness and density of the Buffy text. This alone makes the book worthy of acquisition by those interested in contemporary literature, film, and television and in Joss Whedon and the Buffyverse.

I Just Wanted To Buy Canadian: The Indigo Kiada

 

I have experienced a lot of Sisyphean moments with new digital media in my life but nothing as Sisyphean as happened to me with the Canadian bookseller Indigo. I created an account at Indigo’s website. A verification was sent to my email. I put the verification number in and presto I had an account. I put five books in my shopping queue. Then I attempted to check out these five items that I had in my queue. It asked me to sign in. I signed in with the user id and password I had saved in my browser (you know the user id and password key) when I created the account. I, however, could not sign in and instead got the mantra of the digital age, namely, there is a problem with your user id and your password memo.

Annoyed I contacted Indigo chat and eventually had them cancel the account. I then started anew rinsing and repeating what happened earlier including placing five books in my queue. And when I went to check out guess what happened? Yup, I could not sign in in order to order the five books and have them forwarded to my address.

I contacted Indigo AGAIN. They said no such email existed though I had once again received a verification from Indigo via that email (digital cleansing?). They said they could fix this but I gave up not trusting that what could not be accomplished twice could be accomplished on the third try. I don’t like spending forty-five minutes doing Sisypheanish nothings again and again. Paradoxically and perhaps even ironically I continue to receive promotional emails on the email Indigo says does not exist.

The moral? Well there are several. Indigo lost a potential customer one who wished to avoid American owned skanks like Amazon. And I learned, once again, that the brave new digital world is a pain in the arse over and over again. Bah humbug.

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: The Quality of Mercy is Not Always Buffy Reactors

 

One of the things Jana Riess’s book What Would Buffy Do: The Vampire Slayer as Spiritual Guide, which I recently read, got me thinking about was how readers, in this case reactors to Joss Whedon’s television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer on Youtube, read Buffy’s existentialist social ethics. Specifically, it got me thinking about how Buffy YouTube reactors read and respond to Buffy’s emphasis on the need for mercy, forgiveness, and redemption, themes that are all at the heart of this television show.

There is no doubt that when it comes to the social ethics of mercy, forgiveness, and redemption Buffy preaches the gospel that mercy is necessary, that forgiveness is divine, well as divine as humans can get, and that redemption is possible. There is also no doubt that in Buffy humans are frail and fallible and that they are often in need of mercy, forgiveness, and redemption. And there is no doubt that because of human frailty humans are not always saints, are often sinners, and that they need redemption for their various “sins” again and again. Episodes of Buffy like the superb “I Only Have Eyes for You” in season two, the excellent “Amends" in season three,  the superb “Something Blue in season four, the magnificent “There’s No Place like Home in season five, virtually every episode in season six, and Buffy’s sometimes abuse of power in several episodes in season seven make this abundantly clear. All of the protagonist-heroes of Buffy, in fact, including Buffy, Angel (who was described by one Buffy writer as one drink away from becoming Angelus, his evil double again), Willow, Xander, Giles, Faith, Anya, and Spike are in need of mercy, forgiveness, and redemption at some point or other in the series, often at several points in the series again and again.

It is also abundantly clear that in Buffy vengeance, the negation of mercy, forgiveness, and redemption, is not divine, metaphorically divine, in Buffy. The vengeance is a thing curse that the gypsy’s put on Angel because he has killed one of the beloved females of their tribe has disastrous consequences for everyone including the gypsy’s Jenny Calendar, Jana of the Kalderash people, and her Uncle Enyos to such an extent that it essentially karma that comes back to bite then in the proverbial arse. Vengeance, the metaphorically eye for an eye, Buffy tells us, results not in justice but in violence not only against the perpetrators of violence but also against those who seek vengeance upon the perpetrator of the initial act of violence and immorality. Buffy is not, in other words, your Tanakh or your Christians reinterpreting the Christian New Testament as the Tanakh kind of television show. Vengeance in Buffy makes those seeking vengeance blind to its violent consequences.

Despite this condemnation of vindictiveness, of the lack of forgiveness, and of vengeance in Buffy reactors like Nick (aka,Thor) Reacts, SofeReacts, the LexieCrowd, After Show Reacts, EvilQK, and all but one of The Normies, come to praise vengeance when it comes to the misogynous Warren Mears in “Villains". Warren, as those who have watched Buffy know, is one of the Trio of season six, one-third of the Troika of Warren, Jonathan, and Andrew, who accidentally kills Willow’s girlfriend Tara while trying to kill Buffy. As Willow gone dark (an iteration of VampWillow in season three) takes her revenge on Warren, seeks vengeance against Warren, they cheer Willow on (and look at those facial expressions as they do) urging her to murder Warren and revel in her torture of Warren (and the bullet Willow magically and slowly uses to rip apart his insides as she tortures him before murdering him) and her murder of him (though to be fair some are reflexive about the murder and disturbed when Willow skins Warren alive). The quality of these reactors to Warren is not, in other words, mercy. It is not forgiveness. It is not hoping for Warren’s possible future redemption (they don’t believe his apology and realisation he needs redemption), it is vengeance. It is an eye for an eye, a death for a death vengeance. Nick goes so far as to compare, in his reaction to the last episode of season six, Warren’s execution to the killing of a cockroach recalling in th process, at least for some of us, Nazi metaphors for Jews. Vengeance is vicariously ours these reactors seem to say. This is somewhat paradoxical given that while they seek vengeance against Warren they have repeatedly hoped for the redemption of others in the Buffyverse such as Faith and Spike (who they eventually forgive after his attempted rape of Buffy) not to mention the four original Scoobies. But then they liked if not loved those characters while they hated Warren.

Note: Three English reactors, Liam Duke, Liam Catterson, and Dakara are disturbed by Willow’s torture and murder of Warren and a bit more reflexive about the murder than the American reactors. Additionally,  the two Liam's make the connection between DarkWillow and VampWillow.

NoteL Another English reactor, Dakara, expressed her discontent with season six of Buffy with its darker arcs and DarkWillow character arc in her reaction video to “Villains". Many at the time of broadcast felt similarly. Of course, growing up—that which Joss Whedon, Buffy’s creator, and who wasn’t as involved with season six as with previous seasons, was primarily about before the season began—is not all sugar and spice and everything nice, which is what Buffy is trying to depict in season six. Unfortunately, many fan boys and girls don’t want their beloved characters to suffer or change that much. They like repetition (so does Hollywood). I think this is at least one of the reasons some were discomfited by season six and season four of Buffy.